Word: arsenic
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...Arsenic and Old Lace (by Joseph Kesselring, produced by Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse) is absolutely top farce. A violently funny and batty murder play, it might be described, in the words of one of the cast, as what could be expected "if Strindberg had written Hellzapoppin...
...story concerns a family in which insanity not only runs but "fairly gallops." Two sweet Brooklyn spinsters (Josephine Hull & Jean Adair) have taken to putting lonely old men out of their loneliness with a compound of elderberry wine, arsenic, strychnine and cyanide, followed by Christian burial in the cellar. In these obsequies they have been assisted by a potty nephew (John Alexander) who regards himself as Teddy Roosevelt, the cellar as the Panama Canal, the bodies as yellow-fever victims, and the stairway to the second floor as San Juan Hill...
Playwright Joseph Kesselring, 39, got the idea for Arsenic and Old Lace by considering what would be the most unlikely thing his gentle grandmother might do. Born and raised in Manhattan, as a boy he sang at the Church of the Epiphany, went to Stuyvesant High School, taught at the Bethel Mennonite College in North Newton, Kans. He has acted on the road and in Chicago, has written pulp stories, vaudeville sketches, two Broadway flops. His press agent Richard Maney swears that Mr. Kesselring has recently lived on "herbs, wild berries and pemmican...
...first herds were brought by the Spaniards 300 years ago. But by 1906 cattle ticks had so ravaged the beasts that the Government banned the interstate shipment of southern cattle. In 1930, Florida ranchers had only 431,000 cattle, one-half the 1910 total. Then State-enforced "dipping" (in arsenic solution) started a comeback. The Florida Department of Agriculture now boasts of 1,400,000 head. But many Florida cattle are still underfed and mangy, bring only $20.90 a head (against a national average of $40.57, New Jersey high of $98.40). Dr. Shealy's solution: better grass...
...lungs, are soon blown away. More deadly are mustard and lewisite, which hang in wooded areas for days at a time. Against these, gas masks are only partial protection, for they attack men's bodies, produce ghastly burns. (Lewisite may also cause death from arsenic poisoning.) Helpers of the lethal gases are the sneeze, tear and vomiting gases. Used as harassing agents, they make men work in masks over long periods. Men who get a whiff of the harassing gases before they get on their masks, have to take them off, are then wide open to the killers that...