Word: ransoming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sleeping off his midday bottle when his mother stepped into the house for a fresh diaper one afternoon last week. Fifteen minutes later, Beatrice Weinberger walked outside and found that 32-day-old Peter had been kidnaped. On the ground was a neatly written note demanding $2,000 ransom, to be placed near a neighbor's garage. Wrote the kidnaper: "I'm scared stiff. Do not notify the police until noon tomorrow or I'll be forced to kill the baby...
Manhattan's other major morning papers, the Herald, Tribune and Hearst's Daily Mirror, picked up the story. As clamoring rewrite men and reporters called Nassau County headquarters to check their tips, they were, asked by police to hold up the story until after the ransom deadline next day, in hope the kidnaper would collect the ransom and return the baby...
Next day the Long Island countryside swarmed with reporters, photographers and TV cameramen. Newsmen interviewed the Weinbergers' neighbors and the neighbors' children, besieged the parents with calls. At 10 a.m., when Weinberger placed the ransom at the nearby spot specified in the note, three newsmen were allowed to watch from a car. To no one's surprise, the kidnaper did not keep his date...
...Time for Sergeants. In Milwaukee, arrested for drunken driving, Archie Ransom gave police a handwriting specimen reading, "I love you; I love you," was fined $150 after he told the judge that he harbored no such affections for the cops: "I guess I must have been thinking of my wife; I love her very dearly...
...middle of the 12th century the lot of the Jews was growing hard. Several massacres occurred, sparked, in part, by the old slander that Jews murdered Christian children in their rituals. In 1210 King John threw all the Jews into jail and extorted a ransom for their liberation, and from then on the barons usually treated them as a herd of cattle for milking. Several times, England's Jews were "sold" by the King to British lords, who were then entitled to squeeze as much as they could from them. In 1290 Edward I gave...