Word: ironing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...necktie party closed two major U. S. kidnapping cases last week. In his cell in the South Dakota State Penitentiary at Sioux Falls, wistful-looking Verne Sankey, arrested week before in a Chicago barber's chair, made a noose of two cravats and hanged himself to an iron cross beam. Next day he was to have pleaded guilty to the kidnapping in 1932 of Haskell Bohn of St. Paul (ransom: $12,000) and in 1933 of Charles Boettcher II of Denver (ransom: $60,000), whom he hid on his Dakota turkey ranch. Next day Sankey's accomplice, Gordon...
Several months back Crocodile editors got the Soviet high command's unofficial permission to put to the jocular test the knowledge and alertness of high Soviet bureaucrats. They invented a fanciful Academy of Plans for Transcosmic Sciences and a subsidiary Trust for the Exploitation of Meteoric Iron. But they needed that high sign of Soviet officialdom, a rubber stamp. So they advertised that they had lost their rubber stamp and promptly a bureaucrat gave them permission to have one made...
Under the sign of their rubber stamp Crocodile editors began to write the heads of Soviet iron-using trusts that a great meteorite, rich in iron, aluminum and even platinum, was due to drop soon near a non-existent city in Kazakstan. They intended, they said, to be on the spot. Their Trust was open for iron orders. Man after head man swallowed the bait, wrote back for details which the editors gleefully supplied as their sole stock-in-trade. Finally even the great Scrap Iron Trust gave them an order on the Trust's Kazakstan representative...
...clues by signing their letters with the name of a famed Soviet comic character, "O. Bender," and with "William Tell, Trust Secretary." To soften the hardships of their Kazakstan expedition, they got special rates on extra food, phonographs, records, banjos and guitars. Then they asked the Scrap Iron Trust for 10,000 rubles for the expedition. The Trust passed them on to Constantine Maltsev, Assistant Commissar for Education. He, for one, did not bite, did not laugh. Instead he called the OGPU. One editor, arrested on a charge of trying to obtain money under false pretenses, was quickly released...
Sing Sing's lecture room, a long, bare hall set off by iron wickets from its library, was packed last week when fat, jolly Professor Neilsen walked in without a guard. He found his listeners most interested in aviation and weather forecasting. He had to translate "cyclonic and anticyclonic disturbances" into "fair and foul weather,' but went away with the opinion that 20 or 30 of his listeners had "very high college intelligence." Said he: "There was no difference in talking to them and in talking to a group of college freshmen...