Word: owney
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...wistful little cur with a happy wag to his tail wandered into the Albany, N. Y. post office and made himself at home. Amused clerks promptly adopted him, named him Owney, fed him from their own lunches, let him sleep on mail sacks. Feeling safe wherever there was mail, Owney took to climbing onto trains with it and traveling off to other cities, always returning, however, to Albany. The Albany clerks eventually bought him a collar, stamped on it a request that post office clerks elsewhere attach to it the names of the offices Owney visited. When the collar became...
...returning from a trip to Alaska, Owney trotted up the gangplank of the steamship Victoria, bound for Japan. There, the Emperor decorated him with a medal. Owney continued around the world by way of the Suez Canal and the Azores. All along the way he was met by bigwigs who awarded him medals. In Manhattan he remained only a few hours before he was whisked onto a westbound mail car. When he arrived in Tacoma, Wash., Owney had traveled round the world in 132 days. So in San Francisco, when he somehow got into a bench show with a houseful...
...grew older, Owney became irritable and testy. The Post Office Department frowned on him. But in spite of official displeasure Owney's friends, the clerks, kept him traveling. Owney came to the end of his journeys in Toledo. He bit a post-office clerk, and on June 12, 1897, he was shot. But such was Owney's fame that he was stuffed and placed in a glass case in the Smithsonian Institution. For 40 years Owney sat in his niche in the Smithsonian, awaiting a successor. It is now fairly certain there will never be another quite like...
...Volstead Act shut down on the U. S. (Jan. 16, 1920), omnireminiscent Observer Walker takes a quick stroll through the 13 ensuing years, cocking a never-reverent eye at Manhattan's speakeasies, Prohibition agents, cops, racketeers, hostesses, parsons, suckers, "clip-joint" proprietors, colyumists. Some of his headliners: "Owney" Madden, Walter Winchell, Jimmy Walker, Barney Gallant, the late John Roach Straton, "Legs" Diamond, "Texas" Guinan, Larry Fay, Florence Mills. Some of the things he recalls: That the Prohibition raids instigated by Mabel Walker Willebrandt in New York cost the Government "at least $75,000," brought in $8,400 in cash...
Author Walker devotes a chapter to Manhattan's No. 1 Racketeer, Owen Victor ("Owney") Madden, who under Prohibition "became, in many respects, the most important man in New York. . . . In many ways he had more sense than Capone. He was a better business man. He saw what too much publicity was doing for Capone." (Released from his latest term at Sing Sing last July, Owney Madden is now at large.) Of another Walker, Manhattan's ex-Mayor James John, he says: "If he had wanted to study, he could have led the class"; quotes Jimmy's definition...