Word: hippogriff
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...serpent to give his story-loving friend, the late Col. William D'Alton Mann, longtime publisher of the defunct Town Topics, "something to talk about." Said Artist Watrous: "I got a cedar log and fashioned one end of it into my idea of a sea monster or hippogriff. I made a big mouth, a couple of ears, like the ears of an ass, four big teeth . . . and for eyes I inserted in the sockets of the monster two telegraph pole insulators of green glass. . . . I painted the head in yellow and black stripes . . . the mouth red . . . the ears blue...
...anchored the horrific hippogriff close to the path which Col. Mann's boat would have to take. . . . [When the boat passed near by] I released the monster. It came up nobly. . . . Mr. Davies [Acton Davies, onetime dramatic critic of the New York Sun] who had a rather high pitched voice, uttered a scream that must have been heard as far as Burlington, Vt. Mrs. Bates [mother of Actress Blanche Bates], a very intrepid lady of Milesian extraction, stood on the seat in the boat and beat the water with her parasol. . . . Colonel Mann shouted, 'Good God, what...
Thereafter Mr. Watrous showed his hippogriff elsewhere in Lake George. "Within a few days, you couldn't see a Negro [servant] within a mile of the lake shore." He ceased exhibiting it when, one day, he "released the monster just as a pair of newlyweds came along in a canoe. With one glance at the vision and utterly ignoring his bride, the young man leaped into the lake, struck out for shore. . . . When he sought to make up . . . she refused to speak...