These are the stories that made headlines 100 years ago

Imprisoned in an automobile, its nose stuck in the mud at the bottom of the Mohawk River 6 miles north of Schenectady, the bodies of two young people were discovered drowned in the car, which was two-thirds submerged in the water. The two victims were identified as Lucille Esterbrook, 18, of Alplaus, and Dick Dawson, 20, of Odell Street in Schenectady.

Esterbrook had just purchased the car the day before and was taking her first driving lesson, having hired Dawson to teach her. They set off around 7 p.m. Monday. When they hadn’t returned hours later, their parents contacted A.J. Cummings, the manager of the car company where the vehicle was bought, and told him the road they had taken.

The next morning, Cummings set out to trace their path and saw a gap broken through the highway fence. He looked into it and saw the crashed car down below. Marks indicated it had jumped 150 feet to the river. Tire trails on the road showed the car lost control, then crossed the highway several times before it left the road, dodged trees and plunged over the edge.

The bodies were recovered by the afternoon, but only after the automobile had been practically pulled apart in an effort to free them. They were taken in a boat to the Schenectady side of the river, then back to the Saratoga side, where the accident occurred.

The 5:30 a.m. “work” train of the Schenectady railway jumped the track on the Jordan Creek Bridge at Hilton Avenue in Ballston Spa and knocked a nearby shoe shop, run by Tomelo Caruso in a building owned by Elbert Wood, into the creek. No injuries were reported as the train was unoccupied except for the conductor, George Scott, and motorman, William Zulzer, but the empty store was destroyed. Damages were placed somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 (between $56,000 and $75,000 today).

The car was the second one out of Ballston Spa each morning and carried workmen to the General Electric plant in Schenectady. This time, as it was passing over the bridge, the rear wheels disengaged from the track at the switch, forcing the car against the shoe shop, which perched on the bank of the creek.

The business was a one-story frame structure with a brick front. After the accident, all that was left was the brick front, the rest in the creek, strapped into kindling wood. The car was quickly replaced on the track and returned to its original journey, arriving in Schenectady only slightly behind schedule.

Thieves entered the South Pearl Street store of Moe. M. Wyle, coal and feed dealer, during the night and made an unsuccessful attempt to open a safe in the store’s office. Patrolman George Gallagher, passing the building, thought things were not right inside the store and notified the station house before beginning to investigate. He immediately found the door locked.

Two more policemen and the store’s manager soon joined Gallagher, followed by the discovery of the still-locked safe. According to Wyle, the safe contained no money, and if the burglars had managed to open it, they would have found nothing of value inside. The safe had been hammered, and in the criminals’ haste to flee the scene after their failure, they left their break-in tools behind.

While police made no connection between the two incidents, they also reported another break-in near the same time at a Hudson Avenue poolroom, in which thieves entered a rear door, which had been left open. In this case, whoever had committed the crime made off with $40 (almost $750 today) in cash from the cash register and $10 worth of cigars.

Patrolmen W. F. Houghtaling and A. H. Schrives of Albany’s third police precinct were to have a hearing, most likely on Tuesday, before Commissioner of Public Safety James T. Keith, on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer. They had been on plainclothes duty for the fourth precinct and were suspended by that branch’s Captain Thomas Smith.

It was alleged that the two engaged in a fight with a third man the morning before in the office of the Paradise Taxi Company on Madison Avenue. The complainant, William Sill of Rensselaer, a driver for the cab company, alleged that he was punched by Schrives and hit with a blackjack by Houghtaling.

Sill told Police Chief Frank Lasch that he arrived back from a call around 2 a.m. to find the policeman lying on benches in the office. He claimed they started calling him names and when he objected, he was attacked by Schrives. He said he was “getting the better of the argument” when Houghtaling jumped in with the blackjack.

Schrives, a 13-year veteran, and Houghtaling, two years on the force, were supposed to have been on the watch for a petty thief who had been operating in the Pine Hills section. It was expected that Patrolman William Allen of the city’s fourth precinct, who was suspended for drunkenness while on special duty for the second precinct, would be tried at the same time as Houghtaling and Schrives.

Rensselaer County officials believed they were on the verge of smashing an automobile theft ring that had been active in the county for some time, thanks to the arrest by Undersheriff Edward Schulze and deputies James P. Golden, John Munton and Joel Holcomb of Marvin Sowalsky, 28, on a charge of grand larceny in connection with alleged car heists.

Sowalsky, of the hamlet of Taborton, had in his possession a Jewett car said to have been recently stolen and was stripping a second vehicle of the same make, also reported to have been illegally taken, when he was confronted by the lawmen at an abandoned barn just off a crossroad near another hamlet called Alps.

Sowalsky fled at the approach of the officers, one of whom fired off a gunshot in the air to scare the suspect, who immediately stopped in his tracks. The accused was taken before Judge W. LaFayette Vincent of East Nassau and the case was adjourned, pending further developments. As a result, Sowalsky was accompanied to the Troy jail, where he remained after having spent the rest of the day and overnight there.

The day saw developments in three notorious area crimes.

First, Albert Devine Sr., the man accused of killing his wife and then burying her under the porch of their Central Avenue home, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life at the Clinton Prison at Dannemora. Albany County Sheriff Claude C. Tibbitts said he would allow Devine to remain in Albany for as many of the ten days to which he was legally entitled until his daughter and mother arrived from Dunmore, Pa., to say their goodbyes.

In the case of the high school girl who killed herself after her alleged former boyfriend, an older GE engineer, was released from police custody, the girl’s aunt — who had pushed for the man’s arrest — publicly refuted his claims that her niece had been suicidal because of family issues the entire time he had known her. The aunt provided a letter supposedly written by the girl that said she was considering taking her life rather than testifying against the man whom she charged with her downfall.

And lastly, Mrs. Thomas Hurley, the woman who was severely beaten in the head with a hammer by her husband as she slept in their Clinton Avenue home two nights before, was not only still alive, shocking doctors at the Albany Hospital who were treating her, but she was aroused from her semi-coma to be interviewed by Assistant District Attorney John T. Delaney.

Mrs. Hurley could only remember one blow to the head and could not say who had administered it. Her husband, however, had already confessed to the crime. Hospital officials, though astounded by her condition, held only a slight chance she would recover from her fractured skull and other injuries.

Alfred Vanovertveldt, 22, of Lawrence, Mass., a senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, died at Samaritan Hospital of spinal meningitis superinduced by a head wound received about a month before, during baseball practice. He had been in the hospital for around three weeks before succumbing.

According to authorities at the college, Vanovertveldt had devoted most of his four years at RPI almost exclusively to his studies, but in his final semester, he decided to try athletics and joined the baseball team. He was injured in one of the team’s very first practices. No one could remember the circumstances regarding the incident because it didn’t seem serious at the time. It wasn’t until a week later that his health deteriorated and he was rushed to the hospital. Meningitis set in soon after.

The coroner had been notified of the case but had not yet investigated nor rendered a verdict. University officials continued to make assurances that there were no mysterious circumstances surrounding the student’s death and had happened exactly as reported. 

Vanovertveldt had been a member of both Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and Theta Nu Epsilon. His body was being planned for transport to his home in Lawrence, as his death had resulted in obituaries not just here and in his hometown but also in the New York Times.

Editor’s note: This entry includes a discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org. Helplines outside the U.S. can be found at iasp.info/suicidalthoughts.

George E. Spencer, a wealthy Chilean radio student at General Electric in Schenectady, whose release from police court on a serious charge was said to have led a 17-year-old high school girl to die by suicide on April 19, finally issued a public statement explaining his side of the issue. He denied all of the girl’s charges against him, said he was willing to appear before a grand jury to clear his name and planned on engaging a lawyer.

Spencer detailed the course of their relationship, saying it had been proper throughout, and disputed that his release had led her to drink carbolic acid. He also produced letters she had sent him, where she had previously told him repeatedly that she was thinking of taking her own life because of unhappy family relations.

The two had met in January at a church social, and a week later, he called on her at her aunt’s house, later taking her out to the theater and a dance. On the way home, she told him for the first time about her suicidal intentions. A few days later, he saw her again and she made the same statement, after having sent it in another letter to him that day. For three consecutive Mondays, he took her out, and then while he was away in New York on business, he received two more letters from her threatening suicide.

Spencer learned the girl had been telling her friends the two had been married in Amsterdam and she was now calling herself “Mrs. Spencer.” Next, she and her father called on him at his hotel, with the older man asking what his intentions were. He told both of them he would not marry her, and those were never his intentions. The following day, the two men met for lunch and the father requested he stop seeing his daughter.

He agreed but broke his promise on March 1 following an urgent phone call from the girl. Again, she told him of her unhappiness. She followed up the next day with a special delivery letter that so concerned Spencer that he brought it to the police station. He discussed the situation with a detective, who assured him he had nothing to worry about and sent him on his way. Less than a week before her death, they met in a restaurant and she informed him that her aunt was going to press charges against him. He was arrested the next day.

Several sections of the Capital Region were at or near flood levels, particularly those along the Hudson River, and predictions were that the situation was getting worse. In Albany, the riverbank was already at flood level, with experts saying within 24 hours it would reach a peak of 14 ½ feet, or 2-and-a-half feet above the flood stage. The greater part of Quay Street was already submerged.

The Hudson Navigation Company was able to conduct business as usual at its regular wharf, but the promise of higher waters the following day had the steamboat line planning to move operations to a new docking place below the Greenbush Bridge. As it was, the freight of the Central Hudson Steamboat Company had been moved to the higher docks of Hudson Navigation.

Farther north, the waters along Troy were 2 feet above flood stage and the streets closest to the river were already deluged. Merchants across the river in Watervliet, as well as others with property on Broadway, hurriedly moved merchandise and materials to higher ground designated as a safe zone by the city.

Water had reached the lawn of the Watervliet Arsenal and submerged the wood docks for nearly the length of the city. A telephone pole, said to be loosened by the water, fell without warning across Eighth Street. The freshet had resulted from recent heavy rains and mild weather, which melted snow in the Adirondacks.

Plans were revealed for a massive new Masonic temple to be built opposite West Capitol Park and the State Capitol on the corner of State and Eagle streets and backed by Maiden Lane (now Corning Place). The 14-story building was to begin construction in May 1927, cost around $2 million (more than $37 million today) and have an auditorium that would seat 4,000 people. 

The auditorium stage when completed would be the largest of its kind in this part of the country outside of the Hippodrome in New York City and would play host to conventions, operas, concerts, community sings and other similar events. Off the stage, there would be a host of dressing rooms, lounges and more usually found in the largest theaters.

A dining room on the temple’s 14th floor was designed to accommodate 1,000 and would feature a complete and state-of-the-art kitchen to rival the finest restaurants. In the building’s basement, there would be a set of bowling alleys, a Turkish bath, a gymnasium, a cafeteria and vault to preserve the local Masons’ valuable records. The finished building was to stand at a height of 183 feet, about 20 feet shorter than its neighbor to the north, Albany City Hall.

Ultimately, the plan was abandoned like many others during the building boom of the late-1920s, and the Masons decided to remain at their current location at Corning Place and Lodge Street, first built in 1895-96. That still-existing four-story building sits on the Masonry’s oldest continuously owned property in the United States.

Daylight saving time was coming to Albany, as almost all of the city’s churches, except for a few Catholic ones, were to be the first to adopt the new time beginning at 2 a.m. Sunday. Business and government entities in the city wouldn’t adopt the change until Monday, as would most other cities and towns in the region. Some municipalities were delaying the change for a short time, but by June 1, an “unbroken line” of daylight saving time was expected across the state, from New York City to Buffalo.

The entire states of Rhode Island and Massachusetts would make the change at the same time, while other states throughout the Northeast would observe it according to local options. In Connecticut, it was illegal for any public clock to display daylight saving time, but all business firms in the state’s biggest cities were planning to use it.

Confusion was expected among train and steamship schedules as there would be no universal rule. For instance, the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad was to remain on Eastern Standard Time but change its schedule to correspond with daylight saving time. Among steamship companies, the Cunard, White Star and United American lines would operate on the new time, and the United States line was to remain on the old one.

Albany Law School wanted to get in on the new education center being established along New Scotland Avenue in Albany, site of the former county farm. With the farm relocating to the old Shaker settlement near Loudonville, the spot where New Scotland and Holland avenues meet was already seeing massive development, joining the existing Albany Hospital (now Albany Medical Center) and the state laboratory.

Albany Medical College had previously announced plans to build its new home west of the hospital, as did the Albany College of Pharmacy at the southwest corner of the farm. The law school hoped to join them at the corner of the two roads. It was expected that the law school would obtain the property easily and would present its in-progress proposal to the board of governors within a few weeks, a plan that was also nearly certain of approval.

The current law school property on State Street was soon to give way to the new state office building, so the administration was searching for a temporary location while the new school was being built. The suggested option for classrooms and offices was the fellowship house of the First Presbyterian Church, also on State Street.

Twelve years after John Nabarowski, a Rensselaer tailor, left his family following a quarrel with his wife and never made contact with them again, his wife and daughter were in a Brooklyn courtroom trying to recover the $250 insurance policy on the dead man they had just positively identified as him and buried in the borough’s Most Holy Trinity Cemetery in February.

Mother and daughter had gone to New York after reading news accounts of a man killed there by a streetcar during a snowstorm because the description of the victim matched Nabarowski. At the same time, though, the wife of a man named Anthony Tamiela, a Brooklyn snow shoveler, enlisted the help of police because he had gone missing during the storm. They showed her photos of the man recently buried under the name Nabarowski and she said that it was actually her husband.

Mrs. Tamiela came to the courtroom and argued that Mrs. Nabarowski had claimed and buried her husband under the wrong name. Even the “conclusive” proof that the body showed evidence of a prior broken ankle was of no help because it turned out both men had sustained the same injury.

It was at this point that John Nabarowski walked into the courtroom. He, too, had seen the newspaper reports and wanted to investigate. He had been working as a tailor in Brooklyn. Neither his wife nor daughter recognized him, and it took much interrogation before they believed him.

Mrs. Nabarowski then dropped her suit and the reunited family left together. It was determined that Mrs. Tamiela could now claim her own husband’s policy worth $2,000 and the body would remain in its grave, with the name John Nabarowski removed and Anthony Tamiela being added in its place.

The three men captured after a holdup of the Hudson Falls National Bank in Hudson Falls in March, during which they locked the employees in the bank’s vault before making off with around $20,000, were indicted, arraigned and sentenced all in one afternoon in a Glens Falls courtroom.

A grand jury returned indictments of first-degree robbery against William Yarter and Robert McKeowan, both of Hudson Falls, and Harry Stein, of New York City. A fourth man involved in the crime was still at large. The trio was immediately arraigned and promptly pleaded guilty. Supreme Court Justice Christopher J. Heffernan then doled out severe sentences to the men, with Yarter getting 25 years at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, and McKeowan and Stein receiving terms of 10 to 20 years at the same prison.

Five young men had been seen driving up and down Main Street in front of the bank at around 10:30 a.m., before four of them went inside and brandished guns. After a woman delivering newspapers fainted when one of the men pointed a gun at her, she was placed in the vault with the employees. The men raced out to the waiting getaway car at the curb and took off, but three of them were captured and arrested about a mile from the bank, while the fourth disappeared. The fifth man, a Saratoga Springs taxi driver, told police during interrogations that he had been forced at gunpoint to be the quartet’s driver.

A 40-year-old Cohoes woman was discovered dead from an apparent suicide in her family’s former home, her head wrapped in an old cloak and her face in a basin filled with cotton soaked with chloroform. The woman had been under medical care since the previous summer after she suffered injuries in a car accident.

It had been stated that she grew “melancholy” in the Sunset Court home. She, her husband and their daughter had closed up the house in the fall and taken up residence in another part of the city, but mental health struggles often made her long for her previous home. Fearing she would return there, her husband had ordered that all doors and windows in the house be locked and secured so that she could not enter.

The cellar door was missed, however, and the woman made her way inside, grabbing the basin and six bottles of chloroform before heading upstairs to the clothes closet, where she was eventually found. Before pouring the contents of all six bottles onto the cotton, she scratched off their labels so it could not be determined where they had been purchased.

Her family became alarmed at her continued absence throughout the day and mounted a search, which led to the discovery of her body. Doctors were called, and after examining her, determined the cause of death to be suffocation.

The missing body of Troy Times Publisher John M. Francis — who drowned in Round Lake with William Wood, also of Troy, the previous Oct. 25 — was found about 50 feet down the outlet to the lake by Kenneth Dean of the namesake Saratoga County village.

Francis and Wood had been on a fall duck hunting trip when it was believed a sudden strong wind flipped over their boat and, laden down with heavy hunting clothes, big rubber waders and hefty rifles, the two men could not stay above water or make their way to shore. Wood’s body was found two days later within feet of land, but Francis’s was never recovered, despite more than six weeks of searching. The efforts were eventually called off as “hopeless,” but Francis’s widow vowed to try again in the spring, with a $500 reward attached.

Dean was out in his own boat this morning when he noticed several gulls resting on an object in the water. As he drew nearer, he saw it was the shoulders of a man. Dean attempted to drag the body onto his boat, but Francis’s feet were held fast by the mud. He rowed back to shore and called another man for help and the two later returned and, after a bit of a struggle, managed to free the body. They brought it back to town and arrangements were made for it to be transported to Troy in the afternoon. There was no information on whether Dean would be able to claim the reward.

Mumps, with 43 cases reported, led the list of communicable diseases in Albany, according to the weekly report of the bureau of health. A total of 101 cases of diseases were reported for the previous week in the city.

The rest were as follows: influenza, 15; bronchopneumonia, eight; tuberculosis, eight; lobar pneumonia, seven; chicken pox, six; German measles, five; diphtheria, three; whooping cough, three; measles, two; and scarlet fever, one. Forty-five births and 40 deaths were also reported to the registrar of vital statistics for the same time period. It was the first time in several weeks that births outnumbered deaths for Albany.

Meanwhile, parents in the city were overwhelmingly cooperating in the campaign to eradicate diphtheria among children of pre-school age, according to the city's health officer, Dr. James W. Wiltse. The first six weeks of the campaign saw a great number of children receiving inoculations for the bacterial infection, with nearly 100 given the previous week. Thousands more were expected to be inoculated in the coming weeks.

On the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the first railroad in New York state, as well as the first railroad in the country designed to be powered by locomotive — the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad — the event was commemorated with exercises in both Albany and Schenectady.

Two special trains steamed into Union Station in Albany in connection with the centennial celebration. The first was made up of ten cars from various trains, ranging from the “tiny but gaudy” DeWitt Clinton, the very first train to traverse the M & H tracks, to a massive new freight engine turned out from the Schenectady locomotive works for use on the New York Central, the successor to the M & H, and not yet in commission.

The second train, a deluxe special, brought guests of the New York Central, including company president P. R. Crowley. They were met at the station by Gov. Al Smith, Albany Mayor John Boyd Thacher II, and many other state and local officials. People were allowed to tour the nearly century-old DeWitt Clinton, while New York Central employees from Albany and their families wore period costumes to reenact the privileged guests who took part on that very first train journey once it finally opened in 1831.

At Steuben Street, Thacher unveiled a bronze tablet on the wall of Union Station marking the historical event, and addressed the crowd by praising the railroad, the men who created it and the ever-changing personnel and workers who kept it running for nearly 10 decades. He also talked about how it had transformed the entire region: “It is a far cry back to the little trading post, Fort Orange, where the merest handful of intrepid souls, strangers in a strange land, fought and toiled their way to found what has since become the great and splendid city of Albany.”

Irma Waite, of Glens Falls, filed an objection in Warren County Surrogate’s Court to the probate of the will of her mother, Fannie Washburn Kane, also of Glens Falls, and asked that a jury trial be held. Kane, who was white, left the entirety of her estate to a Black man named Charles Wright, with her daughter cut out completely.

The will stated that Wright had been of “material assistance” to Kane and that some payments on the property might not have been made without his help. The estate consisted of $1,800 (around $33,500 today) in real property and $400 (around $7,400) in personal property. Wright was also named executor of the estate. 

Waite, through her attorney, Andrew Smith, alleged that: the document was not the actual last will and testament of her mother; it had not been executed according to law; the deceased had not been of sound mind and therefore not competent to make out a will; and undue influence and fraud had been used to induce Kane to take these actions.

Wright was represented by prominent Glens Falls attorney and former president of the Washington County Bar Association, H. Prior King. Judge George S. Raley ordered that the case be sent to the supreme court in Lake George to be heard during the next trial term in May.  

Peter Lund was digging for a sewer line at his new home in North Troy, along with another man, when there was a cave-in of earth, completely burying him at the bottom of the 12-foot-deep ditch. His fellow worker was able to make it out of the slide of dirt and then quickly uncover Lund’s head to allow him to breathe.

Other men working throughout the neighborhood were alerted and for the next two-and-a-half hours they labored, as did Officer O’Neil of the city’s fourth precinct, to remove the earth trapping him and eventually extricating him. O’Neil transported him to Leonard Hospital. It appeared that one of Lund’s legs was broken, but this was not confirmed, nor was the extent of any other potential injuries.

At the same time and in the same city, new information came out about another Rensselaer County man who was allegedly buried, but with malicious intent. Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Leo — the daughter of Joseph Leo, missing in Hoosick Falls since 1922, and Rose Leo, one of the two people being accused of his disappearance — was being held in Troy as a material witness in the case against her mother and the woman’s alleged lover, Joseph Netti.

Joseph Leo had gone missing, followed a few days later by his house burning down. Years later, a man supposedly digging for worms at the site of the former home uncovered the bones of a still-unidentified man buried under what was the structure’s cellar.

The nearly four-year-old mystery of the disappearance of Joseph Leo in Hoosick Falls was close to being solved, with the district attorney’s office saying new evidence was uncovered that would lead to the arrest of Leo’s widow, Rose, and the couple’s then-boarder, Joseph Netti.

In 1922, the three lived together, with Joseph Leo reportedly jealous of the closeness between his wife and Netti. On June 9, Leo suddenly disappeared, and a few days later, the house burned down. Rose Leo collected insurance money from the fire, and she and Netti had continued to live together ever since.

Three years later, a man claiming to have been digging for worms discovered bones buried 3 feet deep at the site where the house once stood. The remains of the body unearthed were proven to have been those of a man killed by an axe, but Leo’s family claimed it didn’t physically match him. Police continued to investigate but could not identify the bones or find any other clues. The remains were eventually buried and the case was closed.

The district attorney now said the remains did belong to Leo, and he was having the body exhumed to prove it, despite the assertions of the missing man’s family. He refused to disclose what the new evidence was that led to these actions, how it had been obtained or who supplied it. He did say, though, that it definitively implicated Rose Leo and Joseph Netti, who were under constant surveillance.

Clara Smallcooke and her 16-year-old daughter, Gladys, of Glenwood Road in Menands, who were victims of the recent wreck of the Nellie Bly Express train in New Jersey, returned to their home, with the woman praising her daughter’s heroism for helping to save her life.

The pair had taken the first two seats on the right side of the train’s first car behind the engine and before long, the whole train suddenly began bumping along the rails. Smallcooke saw the roof and front of the car collapsing on Gladys, but then she became unconscious and when she woke up, she was in a pool of water.

She was pinned between her seat and the broken window, unable to escape through the opening. Her daughter, who was relatively safe in an improvised “room” created by the telescoping walls of the train, helped to keep her head above water. When rescuers arrived and tried to extricate Gladys first, she refused any assistance until they took care of her mother. The older woman was freed after much struggle and then her daughter followed. 

Smallcooke told reporters she didn’t realize how narrow an escape she and her daughter had experienced until she saw the dead body of a man who had been sitting directly across the aisle from them. 

The Rev. James E. Kelly, pastor of St. Theresa’s Church on New Scotland in Albany, was also on the train and received slight injuries in the crash. He had been on his way to Atlantic City for several days’ vacation and was expected to continue on to there to recuperate.

After the strangled body of well-known Amsterdam gambler Eugene Cooper was found over the weekend in an empty room of a two-story shack, the only clue uncovered during a whirlwind investigation conducted by police of four cities was a footprint in the mud outside the building. The size nine print faced outward from the shack’s rear door.

A man and a woman, whose names were being withheld by authorities, were being sought as the last people to be seen with Cooper. The woman had reportedly been living with the gambler for some time.

Members of the area underworld, normally tight-lipped with police, were thought to possibly be willing to divulge information due to Cooper being “one of them.” Irene Walsh, known in Albany as “Billy the Kid,” was Cooper’s housekeeper and told investigators he was always good to “her kind.”

Albany police said she was a drug addict and frequent visitor to the city’s resort section until recently, when she was arrested as a vagrant and urged to leave the city. Walsh and Edward Williams of Schenectady were brought in for questioning but later released after they were “picked dry” of any details they possessed about Cooper’s personal life. 

Police believed robbery was the motive for the Amsterdam man’s murder. Cooper was known for carrying large sums of money in his pockets and it was thought that he had at least $1,000 with him the night he died. He also normally wore two valuable diamond rings, but those, as well as any cash, were missing when police took charge of his lifeless body. His hands were bound with a towel, while another towel was tied tightly around his mouth and throat.

Moses Epstein, 21, a clerk at Jacob Epstein’s pharmacy on Washington Avenue, pleaded not guilty to a charge of attempted criminal assault when arraigned before Magistrate John J. Brady. He was released on $7,000 bail for a hearing on April 14.

The complaint was sworn out by Mrs. Harold Miller, 23, of Washington Avenue. In her statement, she said she entered the pharmacy the night before to buy a light bulb. Epstein told her he did not have the required size and showed her a different one, according to her. Miller asked to see it lit, so she followed him into the backroom, she said, and then he threw his arms around her and tried to assault her. She demanded that he release her, and he eventually did, but not before striking her, according to the report.

She immediately went to her mother’s house, where the older woman notified police. The department sent officers to Epstein’s residence and arrested him. It was then that the pharmacy clerk admitted to having been arrested the summer before for an alleged violation of the federal prohibition law for illegal possession of alcohol. At the time, federal agents dressed as high school students raided the drug store and seized some alleged liquor.

The term of Albany Mayor John Boyd Thacher II, currently filling the position of William S. Hackett after his death in March, would expire on Jan. 1, and Albany would be required to hold a special election to pick its next mayor. This was the ruling handed down in Troy by state Supreme Court Justice Gilbert V.D. Hasbrouck, effectively denying the Albany County Democratic Committee’s application for an injunction restraining the Board of Elections from listing the office of mayor for the election in November.

It also solidified Thacher’s term as temporary and not meant to last the entire term begun by Hackett’s election in 1925. During arguments held before Hasbrouck, Robert H. McCormic, attorney for the Albany County Republican organization, and Dennis S. Dawson, county attorney, both argued that the office of mayor was constitutional and that a special election had to be held.

Corporation Counsel Gilbert V. Schenck, along with Robert B. Whalen, attorney for the Albany County Democratic organization, took the opposing side, saying the position was not constitutional and Thacher should somehow be able to serve through 1930.

The action was initiated by the mayor himself in an attempt to clarify his current tenure and term after questions arose following his ascension to the mayor’s office by virtue of his previous position as president of the Common Council. Despite the legal arguments, the proceedings were a bipartisan effort to get a ruling and were expected to continue to the state Court of Appeals in order to have a definitive decision from the highest judicial authority.

After many years, much heated debate and countless opinions, work finally began on the long-ago announced project to give Albany a deeper canal and turn the city into an inland port destination on par with those around the world like Portland, Ore., Montreal, Hamburg, Antwerp, Canton, China and Manchester, England.

After Gov. Al Smith signed an act, he, along with the mayors of Albany and Rensselaer, and representatives of the port commission and the Deeper Hudson Committee, turned over ceremonial spadefuls of earth on Westerlo Island, kicking off the official beginning of development. Within a few years, the site would be the home of the Port of Albany terminal, a $6 million endeavor that was to include warehouses, elevators, cold storage plants, a terminal rail line and piers and slips for ocean-going vessels.

The event was preceded by a luncheon at the Ten Eyck Hotel, presided over by officials from the commission and committee, and featured speeches from Smith, Lt. Gov. Seymour Lowman, Albany Mayor John Boyd Thacher II, Col. John Slattery, who was the engineer in charge when the Deeper Hudson was authorized, port engineer Ernest P. Goodrich, and Assembly Speaker Joseph A. McGuinness.

Army engineers on July 1 would commence the actual work of dredging a 27-foot-deep, 30-mile-long channel from Albany to Hudson at an estimated cost of $11,200,000.

More than a month after the death of Albany Mayor William S. Hackett, city residents learned about a memorial song written in tribute to him by Frank Davis and Stephen Bolsclair titled “He Was Everybody’s Friend.”

During the funeral of Hackett, attendees Davis and Bolsclair watched the conduct and grief exhibited by the crowds and were inspired to create music in honor of the beloved late leader. They immediately left for Bolsclair’s house, and, within 15 minutes, the musicians had written both lyrics and music. A quick trip to meet New York City music publishers reportedly met with much interest and acclaim and the song was soon after made available to the public.

Through the courtesy of Davis, the song was set to debut on the upcoming Sunday after the morning services at St. Joseph’s Church, played by Chimer Kline. The following night, Davis himself would sing “He Was Everybody’s Friend” live on WHAZ radio station out of Troy.

A sampling of the song’s lyrics include: “The city mourns today a mayor who passed away; a friend to both the young and old — worth his weight in gold. He will never be forgotten, he was everybody’s friend; everybody idolized him, from the start until the end. Always smiling, always happy, always glad to help and lead. That’s why he won’t be forgotten; he was everybody’s friend.” 

Three Troy pedestrians were involved in separate accidents with automobiles, resulting in one woman being killed instantly, one man suffering a fractured skull with a slight chance of recovery, and boy being run down by a truck.

Sarah E. Gaston, 70, of Third Avenue in North Troy, was struck while crossing the street at Second Avenue and 116th Street by a car driven by John E. Jefferson, of Waterford. A passing motorist took her to Leonard Hospital, where the coroner examined her body and concluded she had died instantly from a broken neck.

After Jefferson, who reported the accident, and his three passengers were questioned by the police captain and the district attorney, they were released with no charges filed. Gaston lived in an apartment alone and remained a Jane Doe for several hours until the apartment building’s janitor came to the hospital and identified her.

Max Marinsky, 43, of River Street, was likewise hit while crossing the street at Liberty and Third streets. The car was owned by Wallace R. Faddis, of Deacon Avenue, but was being operated by his brother, William R. Faddis, of the same address. Marinsky was brought into the office of Dr. William J. Fleming near the scene of the incident, but Fleming quickly determined the man’s condition was very serious and called an ambulance to take him to the Troy Hospital.

Meanwhile, a youth named Thomas Pashkwick, of Second Street, incurred serious injuries to both legs from a truck driven by Joseph Bondi at Franklin and Monroe streets.

Walter Holland of Madison Avenue, 32, was near death at Memorial Hospital in Albany from second-degree burns over his entire body suffered in a morning fire at Morris Kaplan’s furniture store on South Pearl Street. Doctors held out little hope for his recovery.

Holland was employed as a porter at the store and was in the morning habit of cleaning the floor and making a fire in a small stove in the back of the business. When the fire showed signs of going out this morning, he picked up a small can, said by firemen later to have contained turpentine, and poured it in the stove. Instantly, a wall of flames erupted in the store and connected to the liquid, which had spilled on his clothes.

He ran into the street, fully engulfed and screaming in pain while calling for help. George D. Mayer of South Pearl Street and Michael Schmitz of Albany Street in Schenectady were both nearby and heard Holland’s anguished cries. They rushed to the scene, both throwing their overcoats on him to smother the flames. Schmitz received minor burns to his hands.

Fireman responded to an alarm and Holland was placed in Battalion Chief Maurice Kennah’s car and rushed to the hospital, with Mayer and Schmitz holding him down because the pain was so intense. In contrast to Holland’s ordeal, the fire only reached a few pieces of furniture within the store and was quickly extinguished, causing only minimal damage.

Six-year-old John Dziamba of Whitehall Street in Cohoes was saved from drowning in the Champlain Canal at the junction lock in that city by his 9-year-old brother, Peter. According to information from several other boys who had witnessed the event, as well as Peter, the younger boy had attempted to kick a stick floating in the canal and lost his balance, resulting in him falling into the stream. Following numerous unsuccessful attempts to reach John from the canal bank, and after he had submerged below the water’s surface for the second time, Peter jumped into the canal and brought his brother to safety.

Calls were sent to the fire department to respond with an artificial respiration device known as a pulmotor and to a nearby physician named Keough. By the time both calls were answered, the boy had already been revived. Keough ordered that both brothers be brought to their home to be treated, with steps being taken to make sure John did not develop pneumonia from exposure. Barring that possibility, the doctor said he had suffered no ill effects from the experience and would make a full recovery.

Cohoes Assemblyman Frederick Linen recently sponsored a measure that passed in the chamber and was expected to do the same in the Senate, calling for the immediate abandonment of that particular waterway. City officials had long contended that the canal in its present condition constituted an open sewer and was a menace to the safety of Cohoes' children. Industrial firms that relied on the canal for power argued its closure would hurt their business.

After being in a truck that recklessly threaded Albany traffic, endangering pedestrians and threatening other vehicles, a man who gave his name as Joseph Russell of Orange Street was arrested by federal agents in Watervliet following a long chase that culminated in him abandoning the truck and leaping down a 6-foot embankment. The driver of the truck escaped and was still at large.

The agents had been driving along Northern Boulevard toward Troy when they became suspicious of a truck coming the opposite way. The feds turned their car around to follow, which led the truck’s driver to hit the gas, and the chase was on. It continued onto Third Street, then Lark Street, Second Street, Ten Broeck Street, Livingston Avenue and Broadway, and continued there all the way to Watervliet, with numerous other motorists joining the pursuit.

Along the way, the truck ignored traffic regulations, passing trolleys on the right and left, and traveled on the wrong side of the road for most of the time. Once in Watervliet, the truck stopped so suddenly that the closely following agents’ car crashed into it and was badly damaged.

That’s when Russell jumped out and his accomplice took off. One of the agents quickly followed Russell down the embankment, nearly landing on top of him, before placing him under arrest. The agents’ initial hunch proved correct when the truck was found to be filled with illegal beer with an alcohol content not seen since pre-Prohibition days.

Former state trooper Joseph R. Cannon, 24, was sentenced in a Lake George court to an indeterminate time of 13 months to 10 years in the Elmira Reformatory for shooting Mrs. Peter W. Sanders Sr., of Chestertown, on the Riverside-Chestertown Road on Dec. 29. The county judge refused to grant a certificate of reasonable doubt as requested by Cannon’s lawyer, Harold W. Main, district attorney of Franklin County.

Sanders was shot on her way home with members of her family in her automobile. The defense tried to show that Cannon thought the vehicle was being driven by a bootlegger the police were pursuing, and that he fired at the car’s tires and not the occupants inside. The disgraced law officer would be eligible to be released on parole in 13 months if he maintained good behavior inside the correctional facility.

Indicted with him was another former trooper, William G. Dashley, as well as former Essex County constable, Hubert Holliwell. The trials of Dashley and Holliwell were to take place in the court’s June term.

Sanders’ son had been driving the car with his sisters as fellow passengers and failed to yield to the officers’ demands to stop, thinking it was a holdup. Seeing the buckshot wounds to his mother’s head and back, he raced her to a doctor and then to the Plattsburgh Hospital. At the time of the incident, it was rumored that the troopers had used a sawed-off shotgun, which was illegal.

The news story about two Albany teenagers eloping in the middle of the night to parts unknown, reported exclusively in the Times Union the day before, was responsible for thwarting the would-be husband and wife’s plans and returning them to their frantic parents, as police in three states were searching for them.

Walter Longleway, 16, and Margaret Fay, 15, neighbors on Winnie Street, took Longleway’s father’s car, loaded down with camping equipment and most of the groceries in both of their homes, heading for an uncle’s cottage in New Jersey where they would be married. They planned on making camp at various locations along the way. But the car only made it to Clarksville before breaking down.

They had the car towed to garage in Delmar and then somehow made it to the Cohoes home of Fay’s aunt and stayed the night. The next day, however, the aunt saw the story in the Times Union and got in contact with the girl’s mother, while Longleway confessed the entire plot.

The boy, who didn’t drive, had recently shown interest in learning all about how the car worked. His girlfriend had taken all of her spring clothes out of storage and hid them in her bedroom, explaining to her younger sisters that she was going to have them pressed. Walter did say that the details in the story about a different aunt seeing them walking down the street in Rensselaer were false; he said they were never in that city.

Missing from their adjoining homes on Winnie Street in Albany since 2 a.m. Sunday, when it was believed they eloped in a 1920 automobile with $30 and a complete camping outfit, Margaret Fay, 15, and Walter Longleway, 16, were now being sought by the police in three states. A love that had grown since childhood, as well as the effects of springtime, were given as the reasons for the elopement, though the parents of both teens refused to comment on the matter.

A report that the couple had been seen in Rensselaer led to a two-day scouring of the city, and now the search had widened, with law officers of New Jersey and New York being enlisted. Though 15, Fay was a seventh grader at St. Vincent de Paul’s School, while Longleway, described as “one of the most popular boys in the neighborhood,” attended Vincentian High School. Much of the information about the two youths’ disappearances was being withheld by police, as well as Longleway’s father, a designer in the state architect’s office.

Some details did manage to filter out, though, including: Walter Longleway had never before driven a car; the car itself, a Chevrolet sedan, was badly in need of repairs, according to witnesses; it might have broken down, leading to the pair abandoning it and taking the train to their destination; Fay’s aunt, a Rensselaer resident, saw the couple walking past the mills there; and most of Fay and Longleway’s neighbors on Winnie Street thought it was all just a “childish prank.”

The second day in the $50,000 “heart balm” lawsuit brought by Albany’s Esther Geraldine Bray against her alleged former fiancé, Ferdinand T. R. Jevons, of New York City, disappointed the few spectators in the courtroom who had hoped to hear the latter’s testimony, when the case came to an abrupt halt after Jevons had been sworn in and seated.

Before Jevons could answer any questions about the engagement that had begun in Atlantic City and ended soon after in Albany, Justice Pierce H. Russell called a 10-minute recess, after which he conferred with both sides’ lawyers in his chambers. During the interval, a fur-coated Bray chatted with a friend, and Jevons spoke with his brother and, later, his lawyer outside the courtroom.

All parties returned at noon, and Russell called a halt to the proceedings, saying an out-of-court settlement had been reached. Neither Bray nor Jevons nor their attorneys would comment on the amount of the settlement, but rumors circulated that Bray had agreed to $2,000. Bray had testified the day before that Jevons had contacted her in June of 1923 and told her the wedding was off because he had lost all his money in the stock market.

New information also came out about Bray’s past. The 25-year-old teacher admitted that she had also been known in and around Albany as Frieda Darling, even after her first marriage as a 15-year-old bride to Daniel Bray came to an end two years later in 1918, when he died in a car accident.

Charging that the defendant broke off their engagement and failed in his promise to marry her because he had been ruined in the stock market, Esther Geraldine Bray, 25, of Albany, gave testimony in Supreme Court here in her action against Ferdinand T. R. Jevons of New York City to recover $50,000 (around $923,000 today) for breach of promise. It was the first breach of promise case heard in an Albany court for many years, and there were spectators there to see it.

Bray testified she had met Jevons in Atlantic City in January 1923 and he had almost immediately asked her to marry him. She then accompanied him to his New York apartment because he allegedly told her his mother and sister would be there, but she found that they were alone when they arrived. In March of that same year, the couple registered as man and wife at a New York hotel, according to Bray.

She said she next accompanied him on an auto trip from New York to Albany in June, stopping in Phoenicia because the car needed repairs. Again, they registered in a hotel as a married couple.

The next day, Bray and Jevons continued on to her hometown of Albany, but once here, Jevons reportedly told her he had to immediately return to New York to make plans for the wedding. One more day later, he called her on the telephone and said the wedding was off because he had lost all his money investing in stocks.

Cars in Troy were responsible for injuries, death and damage over the weekend. Mary Margaret Dunn of 14th Street, who had been struck by an automobile the previous Tuesday on Pawling Avenue while walking home from a wake, died from head injuries early in the morning at Samaritan Hospital.

Her death had been entirely unexpected because at no point during her treatment had her condition been considered serious until she took a turn for the worse late Saturday night. Charles Schreiner of Poestenkill had been behind the wheel of the car that hit Dunn, but authorities had ruled the incident was an accident and that Schreiner was not guilty of criminal negligence.

Meanwhile, a different car was responsible for injuries to another Troy pedestrian on Saturday night. Taxi driver Michael O’Mears tried in vain to avoid hitting aged River Street resident Jacob Friedman by swerving his cab onto the sidewalk at Ferry and River streets, ultimately driving into the plate glass window of a café at 122 River St.

Not only did the vehicle end up running down Friedman, but the café window was shattered, as was the cab’s windshield, and a radiator inside the business was dislodged. A passenger in the taxi, James Hughes, suffered cuts from the flying glass, and the car’s front end was wrecked. The doctor attending Friedman did not consider the man’s condition serious but had ordered X-rays to see if there were any broken bones.

Two men were stabbed, another was hit over the head, a police officer was injured, and at least six people were arrested as a result of “an old-fashioned free-for-all fight” in a dance hall and drinking establishment at 137 Hamilton St. in Albany. Approximately 15 men and women participated in the melee, according to city police, who answered a riot call to the place.

Patrolman Michael McMahon suffered severe cuts to the forehead when he was thrown from the running board of a police car transporting some of the men arrested as it rounded a curve, then dragged several feet along the icy pavement. Tony Camera, 32, alleged owner of the dance hall, was in Memorial Hospital being treated for a serious head wound inflicted by a blunt instrument.

Meanwhile, patron Clarence “Packy” McCabe, 20, received several stab wounds between the shoulder blades, and boxer Jack “The Iron Man” Johnson, 38, incurred a knife wound to the left side of his head. Lawrence Reilly, 38, was arrested for intoxication and breach of the peace, while Johnson and McCabe were being held by police, along with Abe Johnson, 32, brother of “The Iron Man,” and waiter Ralph Coupe, 34. Camera was under police guard at the hospital.

The trouble reportedly began when a drunken Abe Johnson, with experience as a cabaret singer, interrupted the trio of Black musicians who were performing by walking to the center of the dance floor and declaring his intention to sing a ballad. As the Times Union put it: “Abe was always good on ballads, according to the reports, but he was not so good on this one.”

Forced back to his seat and told to be quiet, he lashed out at his treatment, blamed Camera, and, according to police, initiated the first blows that led to the ensuing chaos. The breach of peace charge against him was later superseded by one of second-degree assault. At the height of the rioting, Undersheriff William Hughes arrived and took a revolver away from Camera, who was leveling it and preparing to shoot.

It was announced that the Times Union would have its own radio station for one week beginning on Sunday, with area soloists, musicians, readers, orchestras and other performers being given the opportunity to go on air and “entertain the invisible audience of radio listeners.”

In cooperation with the management of the Majestic Theatre on South Pearl Street, programs would be broadcast each night directly from the theater stage. The station, officially known as WKBG, was a regularly government-licensed radio station. It was to be operated on a wavelength of 215 meters, with a normal broadcast range of 150 miles, but during the clearest of conditions, it had been known to reach listeners up to 1,000 miles away. The announcer was to be nationally known radio voice Sidney Shepard.

A test program was to be given to an in-theatre audience on Saturday night, but it would not be open to the public as the rest of the official shows would be. Beginning with the March 26 issue of the newspaper, the Times Union began running daily coupons that allowed aspiring radio stars to apply to “do their stuff” before the microphone.

Leaving behind a trail of signatures written in green ink, a thief said to be responsible for stealing $2,000 in jewelry by switching two identical trunks in Utica, the second one filled with worthless paper, was being sought in several cities throughout the Albany area. Police said the man followed a jewelry salesman to Utica, substituted his own piece of luggage for the salesman’s, then shipped the one containing valuables to the Hotel Ten Eyck in Albany.

From there it was sent to Union Station and then on to the Kenmore Hotel, where the thief allegedly opened it and made off with the jewels. It was also learned that New York Central police had been investigating very similar scams in at least a dozen cities throughout the East Coast for some time. Those crimes all involved stations of the Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania railroad systems. They could not yet say whether this latest incident was related, a copycat or a criminal coincidence.

The theft wasn’t discovered until the salesman opened the trunk in his hotel room in Utica and found only the paper. It was then that he recalled seeing a man with the same traveling case following him from city to city for the past five days.

Mrs. Walter M. Folts and her daughter, Caroline, were rescued from a fire that was believed to have been started by spontaneous combustion in a coal bin on the second floor of the John G. Myers Co. Annex building at 37 North Pearl St. in Albany. Folts shouted from her third-floor apartment window to a man on the street, who happened to be off-duty fireman Charles H. Kiernan. With assistance from fellow firefighter Captain William J. Rogers, they managed to help Folts and her daughter down to the street.

The fire was first discovered by Patrolman Samuel Harris, who called in an alarm, sending a good portion of Albany’s fire department to the scene, where the blaze was brought under control relatively quickly. Tarps were thrown over the men’s furnishings stock of the John G. Myers Co. store on the first floor, protecting it from the water streaming from the hoses. Damage to the building was estimated at just $1,500, but a full accounting of the store’s losses could not yet be calculated.

Other residents of the building who made it outside were chiropodist Dr. John H. Callahan, top-floor occupants Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Rosenfield, roomer Joseph Daley, and Dr. Abraham Milstein, a dentist operating on the second floor near the coal bin.

Albany police were searching for three missing people, whose disappearances might have been connected or coincidental. Viola Layton, 19, of Garden Alley, employed in the laundry of the Albany Hospital, went missing from her home two weeks earlier, and neither of her parents could offer any reason why.

But Plainclothesman John Murnane discovered what might have been a clue when he learned that a former employee of the hospital, who had a room in an Albany rooming house and owned a small car, was also missing. Adding to the mystery, another woman named Maude Davis, who roomed with the Laytons, had vanished around the same time. Mrs. Layton was said to be confined to her home with nervous prostration over the matter.

As the police department was already stretching itself thin investigating the three disappearances, another person in the city seemed to be gone without a trace. Leon Von Proog, a Dutch piano finisher at McClure & Dorwaldt’s music store on North Pearl Street, left his Hudson Avenue rooming house over the weekend, telling his landlady he was going out for a cup of coffee. He hadn’t been seen since.

Albany attorney Henry J. Crawford lost his $20,000 libel suit against socialite Mary Dunkin Van Rensselaer Johnston in Supreme Court when a jury returned to Justice Ellis J. Staley a verdict of no cause of action. Two telegrams, alleged to have been sent by Johnston, demanding that Crawford withdraw his “blackmail” action brought by Margaret Legg against her, formed the basis of the suit. Legg was awarded $10,000 by a jury the week before in her own action alleging slander, but Justice Nicholls reduced the verdict to $7,500.

Johnston was in court for the most recent session, but she did not testify. Thomas P. Powers, attorney for the defendant, did not call any witnesses. Crawford appeared as his own witness, asking himself questions and answering them while seated in the witness chair. The jury took only half an hour to deliberate on a verdict.

This was the third recent action against Johnston, the first having been brought by Mary Kenny, an Albany saleswoman at the Paris Cloak and Suit Shop on South Pearl Street, who was awarded $500 for slander.

Musician George C. Haupt, 23, of Beverly Avenue in Albany, acquitted three years before on a charge of murdering State Trooper Roy A. Donivan, was now being held in Troy on a burglary charge with fellow Albany resident George Harwood, 30, of Hudson Avenue, after they allegedly attempted to break into a garage owned by William J. Cunningham on Vanderheyden Street.

Haupt was also charged with violating the Sullivan Law, carrying a revolver without a permit. Harwood showed police a permit for his gun and Captain James N. Dempsey of the Albany Detective Bureau investigated, finding it had been legitimately issued a few years before by City Court Justice Daniel H. Prior.

The burglary attempt happened around 4 a.m. when patrolmen from the third precinct were going off duty, which meant approximately 10 officers were in the vicinity when the building’s alarm went off. Two patrolmen ran to the alley behind the garage and saw Haupt and Harwood, who tried to escape but stopped when the officers fired shots near them.

Inside the garage, the police found ammunition, a pinch bar, brace, bit and several other tools. A new Flint car valued at $2,800 (more than $51,000 today) was believed to have been the object of the crime.

The city of Cohoes began cracking down on its delinquent dog owners. City Judge Henry S. Kahn issued more than 500 summonses to pooch proprietors who had not yet secured required licenses for their canines. The summonses were given to city marshals, who were expected to start serving them on Monday morning. They were currently organizing the court orders according to street address to more easily facilitate the process at the beginning of the week.

The failure of Cohoes residents to obtain the proper licenses in 1925 had already resulted in an investigation by the state Department of Farms and Markets, the governmental body in charge of the licensing of dogs. Local police had subsequently conducted a census of all the dogs in the Spindle City, which showed the present number at 800. According to the records of City Clerk Francis M. Tessier, there had been approximately 300 licenses issued, leading Judge Kahn to release the summonses to fetch the remaining pet owners.

The Evangelist, a new Albany Catholic Diocese weekly newspaper, published its first issue, with its principal aim being to feature all the Catholic-related news of Albany and the Capital Region. The paper was an outgrowth of the monthly publication of the same name published for several years by Rev. Msgr. John F. Glavin, pastor of St. John’s Church in Rensselaer.

Bishop Edmund F. Gibbons recognized the hard work and growth of Glavin’s periodical and felt the area needed a more frequent news source for church activities. The circulation was already at 13,000 and the goal was to eventually have every Catholic family in the Albany Diocese on the subscription list.

The first issue’s front page contained a large photograph of Gibbons alongside a letter he had written to Rev. Joseph A. Dunney, editor of The Evangelist. In the letter, Gibbons congratulated Dunney for “his promotion of such an important enterprise.” Elsewhere in the paper, worldwide news of interest to Catholics was featured with bylined articles from church dignitaries.

The Times Union gave its review of its new “competition”: “It is a very attractive paper filled with a large variety of information entertainingly written and creditably presented.”

An early morning fire in Troy destroyed the W. P. Herbert & Company Women’s Apparel Store at 450-456 Fulton St., with damages estimated at more than $200,000 (approximately $3.7 million today). The cause was believed to be either an overheated iron left on an ironing board or defective electrical wires in the alteration department of the store, which was located on the first floor of the Herbert Building.

Occupants in the apartments located on the building’s third and fourth floors were awoken and assisted down ladders to safety. The Troy Fire Department was so quick on the scene that no one was injured or even overcome by smoke. They also managed to keep the flames confined to the store, though the apartments and a beauty parlor on the second floor suffered smoke and water damage.

Firefighters had anticipated a much worse outcome when they first arrived. At that time, they thought the entire building, as well other adjoining structures, would be fully consumed. Several hoses targeted streams of water on the smoldering remains of the store’s spring stock of women’s fashions for several hours. W. P. Herbert, owner of the building and president of the company, had just returned from wintering in the south a few days before the fire.

The Albany Board of Education seconded a proposal suggested by the Times Union to rename the school currently being built on Delaware after the late Mayor William S. Hackett. The popular politician, who had died two weeks prior from injuries suffered in a car accident in Cuba, had sponsored the school’s erection as part of his plan to provide Albany with a more modern educational system.

The board also resolved to make a formal request of the architect to carve the words “William S. Hackett Junior High School” in the stone above the structure’s front doors. The board would next act with C. Edward Jones, superintendent of schools, to press then-Mayor John Boyd Thacher II to work to achieve the same results at meetings of the Common Council and the municipal board of contract and supply.

The Times Union had published an editorial calling for the tribute just after Hackett’s body returned to Albany, and then ran a daily column listing the civic leaders, fraternal organizations and private citizens who publicly embraced the idea.

In his endorsement of the plan, Thacher said: “It would be such a memorial as most would appeal to Mayor Hackett himself. No phase of the manifold activities of government held his interest closer or gained more of his enthusiastic support than that of education and it would be most fitting and significant to have the city’s first junior high school named for the mayor whose personal efforts did so much to make it possible.”

Thieves entered the Hudson Falls National Bank early in the morning, held up the employees at gunpoint and escaped with $12,000 (more than $221,000 today) in currency. Police were holding De Forrest Williams, a Saratoga Springs taximan, who was alleged to have been the getaway driver for the crew.

He was taken into custody in Glens Falls shortly before noon while driving the automobile that figured in the robbery. He was brought to Hudson for further questioning. Williams told police he had been hired by four men the night before to drive them to Lake George the next day. They then allegedly threatened him with guns, tied him down in the back seat and took control of the vehicle.

The police investigation, which included interviews with several witnesses, also revealed that five men, all under the age of 25, were seen driving up and down Main Street around 10:30 a.m. and passing the bank each time before parking in front. Then three of the men got out of the car, one carrying a suitcase, and entered the bank.

Once inside, the armed criminals forced three bank employees into the vault and locked the door. Frances Morse, an employee of Harney’s Newsroom, was in the bank at the time delivering newspapers. One of the robbers pointed a gun at her, and she fainted, prompting one of the men to pick her up and place her in the same vault.

A chauffeur from Fort Edward was parked outside at the time and saw the men make their escape. He was able to provide police with the Jewett sedan’s license plate number. Bank employee Alberta Keyworth was at the post office at the time and returned to find the bank empty. After hearing cries coming from the vault, she opened it and released the prisoners.

Harry Whitman, a clerk at the E. V. Holt Distributing Company on Central Avenue in Albany, was seated on a chair in the rear of his workplace when a man emerged through a trapdoor in the floor from the cellar. Whitman assumed he was an ashman or a garbage collector, but the next minute the man attacked him, kicked him in the stomach and knocked him unconscious.

While the clerk was out cold, the assailant robbed him of $27 and ripped a gold watch from a chain attached to his vest. Patrolmen from the fifth precinct were eventually notified and quickly began an investigation, but they could not find either the bandit or any evidence at the crime scene.

Whitman described his attacker to police as a man about 35 years old, 5 feet 10 inches tall and about 100 pounds. He also had a scar on his chin and was dressed like a laborer.

A group of boys battled a fire at the Troy Catholic Male Orphan Asylum on Hanover Street and held it under control until the fire department arrived. The Rev. Brother Ignatius led the juvenile firefighters in their efforts, which continued unabated, despite the smoke clouds that enveloped them and sent them choking and gasping. They also later received praise from both the other brothers at the institution and the professional first responders.

The fire, whose origins remained unknown, was in a room off the chapel at the south end of the asylum on the first floor. Daniel Costello, a neighbor to the facility, noticed smoke issuing from a window of the building and caused an alarm to be sent in from nearby box 137. The flames consumed religious vestments, altar linen and other articles, as well as damaging the interior of the room. The loss was placed at $700, but it was covered by insurance.

The orphanage’s original building on Fifth Avenue was destroyed by fire in 1866 and rebuilt at the new location. In 1929, a more devastating fire occurred, causing $350,000 in damages. Fires broke out years later in 1972 and 1974, the latter of which raged for eight hours and led to the building being demolished.

Once a popular concert singer whose opera career was on the rise, Harriet Boyer was now doing evangelistic work at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Albany under the direction of Rev. Charles E. Neighbor. Just three years before, the soprano hailed as “the lark of the concert stage” was weighing offers from several leading music producers to sign a contract to perform major roles at the biggest opera stages and concert halls. Then her husband died and she abruptly retired. In 1925, several people tried to persuade her to take on the leading role in a revival of “The Merry Widow,” but she refused.

Recently, Neighbor, who was a relative of hers, suggested she join him in his evangelistic campaign at the church on State Street. The proposition appealed to her because it led to her current vocation, the head soloist at Neighbor’s regular evangelistic meetings. Attendees all agreed the church’s new singer possessed an extraordinary talent, but few recognized her as the still-renowned vocalist.

Boyer came from a musical family, both her parents having gained prominence in entertainment circles. Her late husband was similarly a successful figure in the music world. Boyer was also closely acquainted with the country’s latest singing sensation, 19-year-old lyric coloratura soprano Marion Talley, who the month before had become the youngest prima donna to debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Thomas Connors, 38, of North Manning Boulevard, was in Memorial Hospital in Albany with a .22 caliber bullet in his abdomen, allegedly shot accidentally by his friend while they were in Cleary’s bar on Ontario Street. His condition was unofficially regarded as favorable but could not be declared conclusively until surgeons probed for the slug.

Police were holding Edward Luft, 22, of Third Street, said to have been holding the gun when Connors was shot, and Robert Sheperdson, 23, also of Third Street, bartender at the establishment, who claimed ownership of the revolver. Shortly after midnight, the Fifth precinct station received a call from someone at the hospital, saying a man had been shot and brought in for treatment.

After racing to the hospital and questioning Connors, police then went to Cleary’s and found Luft and Sheperdson still there, where they placed them under arrest. All three men’s stories of what had unfolded matched. Sheperdson, from behind the bar, allegedly showed the two others a revolver he had found buried in the snow along Wolf Road in Colonie the week before. Luft asked to examine it and while handling it, it apparently discharged, sending a bullet into Connors, who was standing beside Luft. Connors absolved Luft and Sheperdson of any guilt, claiming it was all an unfortunate accident.

The 85-year-old aunt of a possible unsolved murder victim from January died suddenly in the victim's home in the Parker’s Corners section of Guilderland after taking a sip of wine. Mary Sitterly drank some wine before walking around her late nephew’s house. About 20 minutes later, she collapsed to the floor. After examining her body, the coroner determined the aged woman had died of natural causes, a ruptured heart, so the contents of her wine glass were never tested.

Her nephew, Charles T. Quackenbush, was found unconscious in his barnyard on New Year’s Day and died at Ellis Hospital the next day. Sitterly’s death renewed the suspicions that Quackenbush had met with foul play, especially after the news broke the week before his aunt's death that his widow had married Edward Johnson, a farm hand who had been questioned in her much older husband’s death.

Before that, rumors kept suspicions alive when it was learned that the wealthy Quackenbush had left much of it to his wife and sister. The marriage did seemingly violate a clause in his will that part of her share would be cut off if she ever remarried.

Albany said its final goodbye to former mayor William S. Hackett after his death in Cuba due to injuries suffered in a car accident. His body having been returned to the Capital City, private funeral services were held at his 541 Western Ave. home, attended by family, close friends, honorary pallbearers and his successor, Mayor John Boyd Thacher II.

Hackett’s bronze casket sat in the home’s spacious front room which was otherwise filled with floral tributes, including a massive cross of violets on top of the casket from Hackett’s nephew Sanford Baker and his wife, and a large pillow of lilies of the valley, violets, geraniums and orchids with a sash that read: “City of Troy to City of Albany,” sent by the former’s city officials. Another piece was from the late mayor’s close friend Frederick M. Lamb, who had been with him on the Havana vacation and stayed at his hospital bedside for the weeks before he died. The card attached read, simply, “Freddie.”

The hearse then transported Hackett’s body to the Emmanuel Baptist Church on State Street for the formal funeral rites, the sidewalks near his home lined with city residents, growing deeper and fuller as it got closer to the church. Business throughout the city ceased for the day. Gov. Al Smith was among the pallbearers who brought the casket inside, where the church’s minister recited poems that Hackett himself had read at a rally the previous fall. 

One began, “Be Strong! We are not here to play, to dream, to drift. We have hard work to do, and loads to lift.” At the same time, the chimes of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception several blocks away began to toll.

Approximately 40,000 people lined Broadway, State and Eagle streets in Albany hours before the train carrying the body of Mayor William S. Hackett arrived in town from New York City, after traveling from Havana, and then up the east coast from Key West, Fla. 

As the train crossed the Hudson River, Commissioner of Public Works Lester W. Herzog pulled aside one of the drawn shades. “There are crowds on the bridge,” he told the others on board escorting the beloved “Little Mayor” home, including Hackett’s grief-stricken close friend Frederick M. Lamb, his nephew Sanford Baker and his wife, all who were at his bedside when he died.

When the group stepped down from the train, they saw hundreds of people on the platform, ahead of thousands of others into the city and accompanied by an unbroken line of police and firemen to the funeral car. Once in the car, they were taken to receive the official tribute of New York State and Gov. Al Smith.

Finally, Hackett made his final trip to City Hall, where he was to lie in state in the rotunda surrounded by thousands of flowers. As soon as new Mayor John Boyd Thacher II ordered the doors open at 10 a.m., the crowd of around 150 Albany residents who had already gathered began streaming in to pay their respects to the fallen chief executive. By 1:15 p.m., the mourners had swelled to thousands and the solemn parade continued for hours, comprised of everyone from school children in groups to the oldest of city residents.  

Capt. Bessie Hastings, formerly of Troy, was burned to death at the Salvation Army home in Waycross, Ga., according to a telegram received by Capt. J. Barrett Mugford here from Maj. B. Rodder, chief divisional commander of the group’s southern district. She was 24 years old.

The wire did not give any details, so Mugford made a call to Waycross and learned Hastings’ dress had caught fire on an open grate in the home, after which she ran into the street with her clothes engulfed in flames. She died not long after in the hospital, but in a moment of consciousness, she expressed a desire to be buried in Troy, having lived there most of her life.

As a small child, she been taken in by Mugford and his wife, and when old enough, was sent to the Salvation Army Training School in New York City. She showed great aptitude for the organization’s service and ideals, quickly advancing in the ranks until she achieved the same rank as her foster father.

The Troy Salvation Army began in 1886, but after a few years shut down. In 1894, Mugford was recruited to reopen and reorganize the Troy branch, securing a spot on River Street. Years later, he and his wife welcomed Hastings into the family.

The late Mayor William S. Hackett received a sendoff befitting an American statesman in Havana, Cuba, after succumbing to injuries sustained in a car accident there the month before, including having the city’s flags lowered to half-staff. Scottish Rite Masons conducted funeral services at their chapel, with Havana Mayor Jose Marie de la Cuesta, members of the city council, a representative of President Gerardo Machado and many U.S. businessmen in attendance.

Prayers were said by the Rev. Harry Beal, an Albany native whose parents still lived on South Manning Boulevard. Beal was the dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Havana. Hackett’s friends, accompanied by Beal, then escorted Hackett’s body to a dock, where Major General Enoch H. Crowder, American Ambassador to Cuba, and other dignitaries waited.

The casket was loaded onto the steamer Cuba, where it would arrive in Key West, Florida, later in the day, along with Hackett’s friend Frederick Lamb, his nephew Sanford Baker and Baker’s wife. After arriving stateside, the entourage would be placed aboard the Havana Special train of the Atlantic Seaboard line, arriving in New York City Monday afternoon. They were expected to reach Albany later that night or the next morning.

John Boyd Thacher II was sworn in as mayor of Albany at 11:27 a.m. by Supreme Court Justice Pierce H. Russell in the chambers of Justice Ellis J. Staley in the County Court House. The swearing-in followed the death of William S. Hackett from injuries he sustained when he fell from a car while vacationing in Cuba.

Just two months before, Hackett had taken his third oath of office in the same spot, using the same bible, but at that time, the only witnesses were newspaper reporters and photographers. For Thacher’s swearing in, journalists were joined by several city officials and judges, but the occasion was somber and mostly silent, without the usual celebratory air. The strain of the past few weeks was evident on Thacher’s face.

A requiem of bells tolled from the tower at City Hall, ending right before Democratic State Committee Chairman Edwin Corning and Albany County Committee Chairman Edward J. O’Connell entered the new mayor’s office to greet him. Corning shook Thacher’s hand and said, “Well, Jack,” before all three lapsed into silence. Hackett’s body was due back in Albany from Havana on Tuesday, with a funeral the following day coordinated by the three men.

Adding to the pall that had fallen over the city, it was announced that Police Captain Samuel M. Keith died a mere five hours after Hackett. He had been ill for a few days after having recently returned to work following another brief illness.

The day began with Albany Mayor William S. Hackett’s condition in a Havana, Cuba, continuing to decline, with him remaining in a uremic coma, his temperature climbing to 104 and his pulse hovering at 135. Upon suggestions from his own doctors here in Albany, the physicians in the Cuban hospital performed a lumbar puncture and injected serum into his spine, but the procedures had no effect.

During the daily phone call between the hospital and city officials in Albany, including Acting Mayor John Boyd Thacher II, and Hackett’s doctors, a final prognosis of imminent death was relayed by Dr. William Laine.

“When will the end come, doctor,” asked Thacher.

“Between 12 and 20 hours,” Laine replied.

“There is no hope?”

“Absolutely none. We have done everything and failed.”

“You will call me when it happens?”

“Yes.”

Ultimately, the mayor’s weeks-long ordeal ended before that time range had passed; he died in the Anglo-American Hospital later that day on March 4, 1926. Dr. Jose Antonio Clark leaned over Hackett’s comatose body, straightened up and said to the three Albany natives and loved ones seated around his bedside, “Your mayor is dead.”

Again, Mayor William S. Hackett’s condition took a turn for the worse in a hospital in Havana, after recent improvements. The 57-year-old lapsed back into a coma and doctors returned to their original prognosis of his likely not having long to live.

The poison erysipelas, or skin infection, that was thought to be in check was now overcoming the mayor’s resistance, they believed. All of this information was communicated during another phone call between Hackett’s personal physician here in Albany, John S. McCormick, and the doctor in charge of his care in Cuba.

McCormick’s questioning led the team in Havana to admit they now thought Hackett might have a skull fracture at the base of his brain that wasn’t seen in the original X-rays. The infection was causing the coma, but it all might have started with a fracture. Weeks before, Hackett was on vacation in Havana when the touring car he was traveling in made a turn and the door he was leaning against gave way, hurling him to the pavement where his head struck the ground.

Just the night before this latest setback, acting Mayor John Boyd Thacher II had his own late night phone conversation with the doctors treating his boss and he was told “The mayor is coming along in good style. We are very much encouraged.”

Eleven separate fires on this day, one causing considerable damage, kept the Albany Fire Department extremely busy and the city’s residents on high alert. Fire Chief Michael J. Fleming said most of the minor ones were caused by defective chimneys due to soft coat.

The most damaging blaze was to the building at 73 North Pearl St. that housed the Walkover Shoe Shop and Louis Gold’s clothing store on the first floor, and R. Moran’s hair salon on the second. A second call was placed at the same address later in the day, but that turned out to be a false alarm. The damage to the Walkover shop alone would exceed $25,000, according to the firm’s president, John C. Haskell. He said the interior had been redecorated recently at a cost of $10,000 and that most of the stock had been destroyed.

A bakery at Delaware and Clinton streets received $2,000 in damages, possibly from a defective oven, but the owners said the shop would be back in operation the next morning. Firemen also responded to a small fire in a wardrobe at the Sacred Heart Church. It was quickly extinguished and services were not interrupted. A Central Avenue woman was slightly burned when the stove she was using suddenly exploded, spreading flames throughout the room. The damage was minimal, although the stove was destroyed.

The way that astronomers Ralph E. Wilson and Harry Raymond of the Dudley Observatory, then located on South Lake Avenue in Albany, found out they had successfully solved a problem that had been a stumbling block in astronomical research for 20 years was when a Times Union reporter showed them a cable the newspaper had received from Copenhagen, Denmark, announcing that the pair had won the gold medal of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences.

It was a three-year-long, worldwide competition for scientists of all fields. Learning of their win, Wilson and Raymond admitted to knowing no details about the award and were unaware the contest had been reaching its conclusion. The Albany astronomers had cleared up a long-standing obscurity in determining the direction the solar system, and specifically the Earth, was traveling through space.

While they received the news with what was described as “quiet satisfaction,” the observatory’s director was far more excited and vocal about the honor. Benjamin Boss, who held the position from 1912 to 1956, told the reporter, “It was a most difficult problem, exceedingly well done. It has harmonized a subject which has been in the air many years.”

Albany Mayor William S. Hackett again emerged from his coma and again had his condition modestly upgraded while recuperating from the effects of a car accident while vacationing in Cuba.

The information was relayed during an afternoon phone call between Hackett’s attending physician at the hospital in Havana, Dr. William Laine, and Acting Mayor John Boyd Thacher II in Albany’s City Hall. Thacher relayed to Laine questions asked by Dr. James W. Wiltse, city health officer, and Dr. Ed T. Delehanty, city epidemiologist. 

Laine told Thacher that the mayor had been roused from his coma by a team of doctors, after which he stated, “I feel much better.” The doctors here at home asked about anti-strep serums, wound infections and “interior treatments.” To the latter, Laine replied, “we are giving caffeine as a heart stimulant.”

Next, Thacher inquired about the possibility of a blood transfusion. Laine said, “we will resort to it this afternoon if you think well of it in Albany.” No mention was made as to who might be the blood donor, but it was common knowledge that Hackett’s friend, Frederick M. Lamb, had not left his bedside and already offered his help in any way possible.

This was another quick turnaround for the injured mayor, whose condition was judged to be “very bad” at just 8 a.m. the same day.

A thief or thieves wrapped a brick in a newspaper and hurled it through the front window of Adels-Loeb Jewelry Store at 76 North Pearl St. in the early morning hours, making a hole big enough to reach in and make off with some merchandise.

The sergeant at the second precinct received a call around 7 a.m. about the broken window and dispatched Patrolmen Frank Campbell, Peter Lowe and James Beresford to the scene. They arrived and examined the window but found only a few of the window’s display items missing. Thinking the thieves might return to finish the job, Lowe and Beresford went back to the station house while Campbell hid himself in the doorway of a cigar store at the corner of North Pearl and Columbia streets.

A few minutes later, two men came down the street and stopped at the broken window, looking around to see if anyone else was nearby. Then one of the men reached into the hole and grabbed a handful of watches. Campbell raced across the street and arrested both men. During questioning, though, it turns out the men were just passersby who took advantage of the situation when they came upon it.

Cornelius Toohey, the one who tried to steal the watches, was charged with robbery and burglary. His companion, Howard Greer, did not actively participate in the crime but was still charged with vagrancy for an indefinite sentence. The original person or people responsible remained at large.

Following the virtual death sentence given out the day before by attending physicians, the up-and-down condition of Albany Mayor William S. Hackett’s health continued, with hospital officials in Havana now saying the poisonous infection he had experienced was in check, his condition was improved and he stood “a fighting chance.”

Dr. William Laine in Cuba told Hackett’s personal physician here in Albany, John S. McCormick, via phone call, that the 57-year-old mayor had regained consciousness around 4 a.m. and whispered to doctors, “I feel fine,” before lapsing back into the coma he had been in since 10 a.m. the previous day. Laine also said his blood pressure had increased and his fever had lessened, but that “tonight will tell a big story.”

There was also news that renowned brain specialist Dr. Ferdinando de Soto had been brought onto the case of the victim whose head was injured in a car crash the week before. A second operation had been performed the night before on Hackett by Cuban doctors at the direction of other medical professionals from New York City over cable.

Albany’s Frederick M. Lamb, Hackett’s constant companion since he fell from a touring car to the pavement, was far less optimistic. In a separate call to the Times Union, he said, “The doctors say there is no hope. They do not regard the return to consciousness as a very encouraging sign. The doctors say they have done everything, and only a miracle will save the mayor.”

After repeated daily reports out of Havana, Cuba, detailing continued improvements and positive doctors’ exams, the Times Union’s banner headline read: MAYOR HACKETT DYING; ALL HOPE GIVEN UP AS HE SINKS INTO COMA.

Albany’s William S. Hackett suffered injuries after falling from a moving car a week before while vacationing on the Caribbean island. He was unconscious and in isolation for the next six hours, but upon waking, seemed to be on the road to recovery. All that changed, though, after a sudden downturn necessitated a morning operation, which led to serious complications and a rapid decline.

Frederick M. Lamb, Hackett’s friend, traveling companion and treasurer of Albany City Bank where Hackett was president, had been the only source of communication back home to friends, family and citizens in Albany. In the latest phone call to the Times Union, Lamb said, “The mayor is not expected to live. The doctors say there is no chance. The mayor became unconscious at 10 o’clock this morning.

"Dr. Laine says he will stay in this coma until death comes. His last words to me were: ‘I am pretty sick, Freddie, but I guess I will be all right.’ Then he seemed to go to sleep and he has been unconscious since.”

At the same time, John S. McCormick, Hackett’s personal physician, called Dr. William Laine to say he was coming to Havana. Laine reportedly told him, “It is no use. By the time you get here, the mayor will be dead.”

Ruth McNutt, 19, daughter of Mae McNutt of North Allen Street, was confined to her home suffering from bruises and shock after falling into an open manhole while skiing in the hills west of Brookline Avenue.

Three other young women — Helen Hynes and Marjorie Greenman, both of South Manning Boulevard, and Hilda J. Sarr of North Allen Street — were skiing and tobogganing on the hills and were returning to the top when they heard McNutt cry out and then disappear. They ran to the spot and found her standing below in the manhole in about a foot of water. A workman nearby rushed to her aid and succeeded in pulling her out.

The Albany Department of Public Works said it would make an investigation to see if any further danger existed. Several manhole covers throughout the city had recently been reported missing or stolen.

Former New York Supreme Court Justice, candidate for governor and Albany Democratic boss D-Cady Herrick died at his Washington Avenue home of pernicious anemia. The 79-year-old jurist had been unconscious for 24 hours prior to his death. His condition was regarded as grave since Friday night by attending physicians, and his overall health had been in decline since his wife, Orissa H. Salisbury Herrick, died almost a year before.

At his bedside when he died were his son, current Albany County District Attorney Charles J. Herrick, his two daughters, a son-in-law and a nephew. Herrick’s half-brother, former State Sen. Walter R. Herrick, arrived from New York City shortly after his death.

Judge Herrick was considered by his peers to be among the most learned and talented legal authorities in the state, as well as a foremost expert in municipal and constitutional law. Born in Esperance, Schoharie County, Herrick and his family moved to Albany when he was child, where he was educated at the Albany Classical Institute. Later, he studied law at a local law office. Following that, he attended Albany Law School and was a classmate of future U. S. President William McKinley.

Born and baptized as Cady Herrick, when he was a young boy, his father feared future bullies would call him “Katie,” so he added the “D” and a hyphen before it. Most people wrote the letter as an initial and believed it stood for another first name.

Pittsfield became the fifth Massachusetts city or town to curtail the activities of Anthony Bimba, a Lithuanian newspaper editor, lecturer, communist and radical political activist from Brooklyn, who was to go on trial the following week in Brockton, Mass., charged with blasphemy under a 229-year-old state “blue law” passed in the years following the Salem Witch Trials.

Bimba was speaking to 13 members of the American Lithuanian Literary Society when Pittsfield Police Chief John H. Sullivan and Captain John H. Hines entered the hall and halted the meeting. The police had granted a permit for the assembly, but Sullivan later said, “I never would have allowed it to take place had I known who was speaking.”

Bimba and his audience left the hall peaceably and no arrests were made. The only tension that arose was during a dispute over who was responsible for the hall rental fee.

Bimba’s notoriety had begun in late January while speaking to the Lithuanian American community at Lithuanian National Hall in Brockton. Prior to that, an anti-communist Lithuanian American had gone to the police there and alerted them to a potentially “illegal” situation, then joined the crowd of around 100 people at the speaking engagement.

The man allegedly baited Bimba with questions about controversial topics, leading the activist to make off-script responses that authorities claimed were anti-church – “There are still fools enough who believe in God. The priests tell us there is a soul. Why, I have a soul, but that sole is on my shoe.” – and, in at least one instance, seditious – “We do not believe in the ballot. We do not believe in any form of government but the Soviet form and we shall establish the Soviet form of government here.”

Although 1925 was one of the healthiest years on record for New York state, there were 735 known deaths from alcoholism, an increase of 700% since 1920, and there was no way of tallying how many other deaths were tied to alcohol. This was according to a report just made public by Dr. Matthias Nicoll Jr., state health commissioner.

Three-quarters of the alcoholic deaths happened in New York City, a fact trumpeted by many that upstate liquor was just as potent yet not as fatal as that served in the big city. Overall, the number of deaths increased by 110 over 1924. The report also suggested there might be fewer drinkers in the future, however, because the state birth rate for 1925 was lower than in each of the preceding six years.

In addition, the number of deaths for the year was only 200 greater than it was in 1905. The population of New York then, though, was less by 3,000,000 people. The report also showed the infant mortality rate at its lowest ever, with the number of stillbirths remaining consistent with the prior decade.

At the same time, deaths from diabetes were the third highest in 20 years. And statewide, the cases of reported diseases of all kinds dropped by nearly 70,000 compared to 1924’s totals. The report made clear this massive decrease was almost completely due to a decline in the volume of childhood diseases, like measles, whooping cough, diphtheria and scarlet fever.

Though he was still listed in critical condition, Albany Mayor William S. Hackett had improved considerably overnight, after having been thrown from a car while on vacation in Havana. He experienced a comfortable night’s sleep, woke to partake in a large breakfast and underwent an X-ray exam that showed he suffered no skull fracture when his head hit the pavement. Doctors believed he might have suffered a concussion, but that was not enough to derail a transfer from the emergency hospital where he was first taken to the Anglo-American Hospital in the Cuban capital.

Hackett’s traveling companion on the 10-day vacation, Frederick M. Lamb, assistant treasurer of the City Savings Bank in Albany, was relaying all information back to the mayor’s office and staff. He and former state Comptroller James W. Fleming of Troy remained the only people allowed to see Hackett outside of hospital staff. This did not please the scores of friends from Albany and the area who had arrived in Havana to visit the injured city executive.

Reportedly, Hackett was sitting in the front seat of an automobile being driven by Cuban race car driver Emiliana Soloranzo, along with a third man, when the tires hit a hole in the road and the vehicle swerved, forcing the mayor against the car door, which sprang open. Lamb declared that Hackett’s life had probably been saved because he was wearing a heavy felt hat. The 57-year-old mayor was not expected to return to Albany for two months.

Albany Mayor William S. Hackett was injured in an accident while on vacation in Havana, Cuba, after he fell from a car. The 57-year-old native of the city’s South End had taken the trip on the suggestion of his doctors and those close to him after they felt he needed a rest following his recent grueling re-election campaign.

While returning from a day at Oriental Park Racetrack with four friends, Hackett was traveling in an automobile along the Avenue Almendarez when the door he was leaning against sprang open, throwing him to the pavement. He received cuts and bruises to the head and was rendered unconscious.

Fellow Albany resident Frederick M. Lamb, a member of the party traveling with the 70th mayor, picked him up and rushed him to an emergency hospital. Lamb and James J. Fleming, former New York State Comptroller, were the only non-medical personnel allowed to see Hackett while he lay unconscious for several hours. By the next morning, doctors at the hospital announced Hackett had regained consciousness and declared him “out of danger.”

The otherwise healthy Hackett — evidenced by his recent passing of a physical exam for a $100,000 insurance policy — often complained of fatigue and, in discussing his upcoming trip with reporters at City Hall, said, “As soon as I get to Havana, I will hire an automobile and a chauffeur. We will spend most of the time riding around Havana and nearby places of interest.”

One day after Schenectady police were alerted to the bodies of a husband and wife, victims of an apparent murder-suicide, the murdered women’s mother defended her daughter and slammed the police for “casting aspersions” on her character. Anthony Kazda allegedly strangled his wife, Viola, and transported her body in the back of a car to his mother’s house, then back to his father-in-law’s home, where the couple lived, and went into the garage, hanging himself from the rafters.

Mrs. Raymond Proper denied the allegations that her daughter was killed by her always irrationally jealous husband because she left him for a five-week affair with another man. “My daughter left her husband to work in the General Electric Company and help him pay his debts,” Proper said. “He was heavily involved in debt and to aid him, she went to work, staying at the home of friends during that time.”

According to her, Kazda had recently asked Viola to come back to him and quit her job at GE. Her daughter did move back in with him, but refused to stop working. This led to continued violent fights between the couple, which culminated in the double tragedy, according to Proper. To suggest anything else, she said, was cruel and unjust to her daughter’s memory.

Police advanced a theory that Kazda had not originally planned on committing suicide after the murder, but that the heavy snowfall of Monday night had thwarted his escape and, in his fear, he decided to kill himself. The rope that ended the husband’s life was fastened at the other end to his wife’s wrist.

Just two days after legislative correspondent Reginald Wilson suddenly collapsed at Albany’s Union Station and died there minutes later, the area’s newspaper community suffered another tragic blow. Thomas S. Burke, sports editor of the Knickerbocker Press, died at the Albany Hospital, where he had been taken after being stricken at his Bleecker Place home sometime in the middle of the night.

Around 5 a.m., his mother, Susan Burke, found him unconscious on the bathroom floor and called a doctor, who ordered him transported to the hospital. He died before medical assistance could be properly given, however. After an autopsy was conducted by Dr. Raymond F. Kircher, Coroner John J. Skelly announced the cause of death as Bright’s disease, a now-outdated term that applied to kidney diseases, especially nephritis.

Burke’s family and colleagues said he had not felt well for several weeks, but that his condition never seemed serious. He said he felt much better by the weekend and returned to work, finishing at 1:30 a.m. Monday and arriving home by 2 a.m.

The Albany native, a veteran of the aviation corps during World War I, was said to be one of the best-known and most popular newspapermen in the region. Prior to his 12 years at the Knickerbocker Press, 10 of those as editor, he had held the same position at the Times Union.

He was survived by his mother and three brothers, Leo and Edmund, both of Albany, and the Rev. Father Harry Burke, a Catholic priest stationed in Rome, Italy. Father Burke would not be able to make it home until June.

Attending a Valentine’s Day wedding at the home of Bertha Cohen at 117 South Hawk St., Ida Cohen, 42, of Madison Avenue, slumped in her chair shortly after the ceremony, performed by Rabbi Albert N. Mandelbaum, and died before medical aid could arrive. Drs. Joseph R. Gingold and Louis S. Poskanzer came with an ambulance from Albany Memorial Hospital but were too late. Albany County Coroner John J. Skelly later pronounced the woman had died from natural causes.

Ida Cohen was seated with her husband, David, who ran a Madison Avenue tailor shop, and their six children, aged 7 to 23, while they listened to congratulatory telegrams being read by Herman Goldberg of Trenton, New Jersey, and the groom, Sol Ruben of Albany. After suddenly slumping, she then dropped to the floor in front of all the guests.

The bride’s father, also named David Cohen, though the bride’s family and the victim’s were not related, ordered the wedding festivities be stopped immediately. The tailor shop and Ida and David Cohen’s home on Madison Avenue were located on the block of Madison Avenue that is now the south end of the Empire State Plaza and entrance to the Concourse.

Reginald Wilson, state legislative correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune, died in Albany’s Union Station on his way to board a train for New York City. He was stricken with a hemorrhage while climbing the steps to the train shed. He was placed in a wheelchair and whisked to the waiting room to wait for an ambulance, but by the time it arrived from Memorial Hospital with a doctor on board, Wilson was already dead.

With him at the time were Lt. Gov. Seymour Lowman, William Lawby of the New York American, W. Axel Warn of the New York Times and several other New York correspondents. He had told his colleagues that he had not felt well recently, but he insisted on going to the State Capitol to do his work. They said Wilson had suffered two bouts of pneumonia over the past few years.

The 41-year-old native of Seaforth, Ontario, began his career as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune before coming to New York City in 1913. He worked first at the City News Association, then the Evening Sun, the Morning Sun, the Sun-Herald and finally the Herald-Tribune. He was survived by his wife, Queenie Southgate Wilson, who arrived in Albany with the Herald-Tribune city editor to bring her husband’s remains back for a funeral at the Toronto home of his father, Lt. Col. Alex Wilson.

After Gov. Al Smith returned to Albany and stepped off the train at the same station, he was told by one of his men of Wilson’s death. He said, “I was awfully sorry to hear of it. I really liked Wilson. We knew each other well. The newspapermen in Albany are losing an able newspaperman and a good companion.”

First responders became accident victims themselves in Troy when an ambulance owned by the city of Mechanicville, on its way to the Troy Hospital with an injured patient, and Pumper 2 of the Rankin Steamer House, on its way to a fire, collided on River Street.

The ambulance came from Mechanicville carrying Joseph Meehan, who suffered a fractured arm and shoulder on the job at the West Virginia Pulp Company plant in the Saratoga County city. In his second accident of the day, he escaped with just a shaking up and minor bruises. A nurse on board was rendered unconscious by the force of the collision, while the ambulance driver suffered a sprained arm. All members of the fire company on the pumper were unhurt.

A report by Fire Chief Cornelius Casey concluded that the fire apparatus was speeding north on River Street, while the ambulance proceeded south, also at a high rate of speed, despite it not being an emergency. Due to the damage done to the vehicle, the Samaritan Hospital’s own ambulance had to be called to convey the patient to the institution. As it turned out, the fire to which the pumper was responding was very minor.

The number of firemen injured fighting the blaze at the Calvary Baptist Church in Albany climbed from five to eight after three men reported injuries later that night. Hosemen William McTeague and Frederick Ebel visited Dr. Francis B. Maguire, fire department physician, hours after the fire had been put out.

McTeague was running to escape a falling wall when he was struck and knocked down by bricks. He told the doctor he felt a pain in his right side but continued to work. Falling bricks also landed on Ebel’s foot, but he, too, kept fighting the blaze. Maguire said both men were probably so numbed by the cold that they didn’t immediately realize the extent of their injuries. Fellow firefighter Edward T. Bridgeford was treated for cuts and bruises that same night. 

The two women believed to have perished in the rooming house next to the church when the fire spread were located alive, despite their roommate saying they never made it out of the building with her. Meanwhile, the pastor of the church, the Rev. J. G. Lauderbaugh, disputed the findings of Fire Chief Michael J. Fleming from the day before. Lauderbaugh did not believe the cause of the fire was an explosion of soft coal in the boiler room furnace.

Acting Albany Mayor John Boyd Thacher visited the injured firemen, as well as police officers recently hurt on the job, along with a contingent of city officials, including Fleming, Commissioner of Public Safety James T. Keith, Police Chief Frank Lasch and B.V. Fitzpatrick, the mayor’s secretary.

The edifice of the Calvary Baptist Church at State and High streets in Albany was completely destroyed in an early morning fire, and five firefighters were injured, four of them trapped beneath falling walls when the edifice collapsed. The fire caused damage to other buildings on the block, including an adjoining rooming house where two women were feared dead, trapped under the rubble.

Fire Chief Michael Fleming believed the fire was caused by an explosion of soft coal in the church’s boiler room. The loss was estimated at $250,000 (more than $4.5 million today).

Lt. James F. Flood of Engine Company 1 was the most seriously injured of the firefighters. He and his men were pulling a hose line through an alley from High Street to the south side of the church. As the water hit the wall, it crumbled and fell on the men. Four were quickly rescued from the mass of bricks and mortar and rushed to hospitals, but it took more than half an hour to find Flood, who, in addition to being buried, was also half-drowned in a pool of water from the hose that was trapped with him.

Esther Chelfont told police she believed her two roommates in the boarding house were either burned to death, had succumbed to smoke or were suffocated under rubble. She said they had been awoken by a policeman or fireman and tried to make their way to safety, but she saw one collapsing and the other trailing behind. She found her way outside and assumed they would soon follow, or someone would go inside to help them, but they never came out. Firemen later made a search of the building and found no bodies.

Just after Frank McGraw, 23, was in Albany Police Court answering a charge of having a slot machine at his Broadway establishment during a raid a few nights before, Chief of Police Frank Lasch announced the latest target of the city’s anti-gambling crusade: “punchboards.”

The game boards, pieces of wood with holes drilled into them and paper covering each hole, functioned as a type of lottery. In Albany, they were being used to award candy and other merchandise as prizes, with cigar and confectionery stores said to be among the worst offenders, as they were being used as “trade stimulators.” Police were instructed to make the rounds of stores and conduct arrests wherever the gambling devices were found.

“We intend to drive every form of gambling out of Albany,” Lasch declared. “We are getting wonderful cooperation from police court in the matter of heavy and speedy fines. The captains of precincts have been instructed to clean up and they are doing it.”

Mrs. Thomas Burke, 65, of Forbes Avenue in Rensselaer was in contact with the rest of the world for the first time since the previous Friday after being saved from her snowbound house through the efforts of her two nieces with snow shovels. The two young women toiled for half a day to dig out their aunt, who hadn’t been able to leave her home since the snowstorm began on Thursday, except for one trip to the store on Friday night through waist-high snow where a patrolman had to be sent for to guide her home.

When the older woman was found, she was weak from illness and lack of food, having eaten nothing while trapped except dry bread. The nieces, Gertrude and Bernice Flynn of Springfield, Mass., were visiting relatives in other parts of the city when they decided to stop in on Burke before heading home. As they approached the house, they saw it was surrounded by snow and assumed their aunt had left town, so they decided to leave as well, but then saw their aunt signaling them from a second-floor window.

The Flynn sisters contacted the city of Rensselaer to help clear a path and within a few hours, City Engineer Charles Wenz had a plow at work. It had only proceeded a few feet, however, when it stalled out. That’s when Gertrude and Bernice grabbed their shovels and rescued their aunt themselves. “If it had not been for my two girls, I don’t know how I would be today,” Burke later told reporters.

More than $3,500 worth of goods were stolen when thieves entered the Bristol Clothing Company store on South Pearl Street in Albany by means of a cellar window and carried away several fur coats and approximately 900 pairs of silk stockings. The burglary was discovered by cashier Annette Sheber the next morning when she tried to open the store for business. The contents of the store had been scattered throughout the place and goods were strewn across the floor.

After climbing through the cellar window, the thieves accessed the main floor through a trap door. The fur coats were taken from racks on the sales floor while the stockings were lifted from stock on shelves. Sheber told police the thieves overlooked several dollars’ worth of cash secured within the store, taken in from Saturday’s sales. Police later found 22 boxes of hosiery that had been dropped by the criminals in their haste to get away.

Included in the loot were five Hudson seal coats, several cloth coats and the hose. Sheber also reported that several silk robes belonging to Abe Greenberg, manager of the store, were missing from his traveling bag, which he left at the store. He was away in New York City on business and was informed of the robbery by telephone.

Col. William M. Acheson, chief state engineer, released a statement announcing that Albany would soon be one of the principal ports on a new water shipping route to be developed by the Ford Motor Company beginning in the summer.

Acheson said that the company, which recently opened a plant in Green Island, would be entering into the water trade business by building a large fleet of barges and tugboats to handle its own enormous shipments between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic seaboard. The barge fleet would operate out of Buffalo and supply Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Albany, New York City and the New Jersey assembly plant with material.

At the same time this news was made known, another major corporation proved Albany was being looked at widely by many concerns as a major business hub.

In a letter to Chamber of Commerce President Cornel S. Hawley, General Electric Chairman of the Board Owen D. Young wrote: “The City of Albany should not only be the eastern gateway of the commerce and trade of the state as Buffalo is in the west, but it should become a great industrial center as a result of its transportation facilities, both by land and water, and as a result of the great power development, both steam and hydro, in its immediate vicinity.”

Despite record snowfalls the day before — 16 inches in Albany, 18 inches in Troy — that hampered, and in many cases, immobilized transit, the Capital Region quickly recovered, with most streets cleared and buses and trolleys running on time or only slightly behind schedule.

This was due to the corps of city and county workers who toiled through the night with plows, trucks and tractors, as well as the eventual dying down of the high winds that had continued to create hazardous snow drifts. In addition, the United Traction Company aided the snow removal efforts with their own force of 250 men, as well as tractors and plows.

Albany residents woke to the surprise of streets being clean and manageable for their cars, but also free of any snowbanks on either side. Commissioner of Public Works Lester W. Herzog and Deputy Commissioner James J. Lennon, in rubber coats and boots, actively supervised the workers overnight and into the following day. Herzog estimated the overall cost to the city to be between $15,000 and $18,000 ($272,000 to $327,000 today).

One exception to these positive outcomes was the area of the Helderbergs, where residents were “literally imprisoned” by the tall drifts that completely blocked off roads in and out. Albany County crews promised to attack those roads as soon as they finished clearing the main routes to Delmar, Slingerlands, Cohoes, Colonie and Coeymans.

Public service facilities in the Albany area were crippled in the worst snowstorm of the year so far, with 20 inches on the ground in some places, particularly in the suburban districts. Extreme high winds whipped the storm into blizzard conditions and caused tall drifts to form in the rural areas.

The weather bureau forecasted that the snow would stop later in the day, but the winds would continue, causing more dangerous drifts. Already, most county highways were blocked by the snow piles. 

City and county workers, meanwhile, were working valiantly to keep the city’s business district and main roads clear, and plows were being utilized nonstop across the region. Seemingly opposite of the roads, trains coming into Albany were all between 20 and 30 minutes late, while suburban and outlying service was staying on schedule.

United Traction Company buses could not handle the deep snow and stalled out in both business and residential districts. Trolley cars picked up the slack and in several instances were filled to capacity and had to pass by many people waiting on corners. By afternoon, however, those same trolleys were used to pull the incapacitated buses out of the snow, and trolley schedules were thrown into disarray.

An announcement was made that the Albany police force would soon be equipped with .45 caliber revolvers, replacing their current .32 caliber guns, in accordance with the desire of Mayor William S. Hackett. The Times Union had previously advocated for this move, saying the police needed to be better armed.

“Practically every other branch of armed service has a larger caliber pistol than the Albany police,” Hackett said. “Time and again, the police have arrested criminals possessing .45 caliber guns. In warfare, a machine gun would not be used against heavy artillery. The principle applies to the police. For efficiency and safety, the police should have guns as effective as those of their adversaries.”

The mayor also said he did not think the officers should bear the burden of paying for their new guns, as was often the case. “Perhaps it can be arranged so the city will pay for the new pistols.”

Hackett also favored more frequent use of the police rifle range within the municipal building, with regular target practice days established. This recommendation, too, had been included in a Times Union editorial the day before.

Philip Henry Alexander, 68, was given a full military funeral in Saratoga Springs despite never having served in any branch of the military. Instead, he had worked 50 years as a cook for Company L, 195th Infantry, and the old Citizens’ Corps before it. At one time, he had been the orderly to James W. Lester, former acting commander of the National Guard of New York. Throughout his career, he was sought out by soldiers in the Company for his advice and traveled extensively with the group.

The entirety of Company L, as well as a large contingent of former members, turned out as escorts for Alexander’s funeral. The customary three-volley salute, usually reserved for services for veterans, was fired over his casket and a bugler played taps. Rev. Charles H. L. Ford officiated. He was the principal of St. Faith’s private school in Saratoga and acted in place of the rector of Bethesda Episcopal Church, of which Alexander was a member. Members of the Mount Lebanon Lodge of Masons were pallbearers.

It was revealed that Ellen Nash was being sued by her sister, Mary Keogh, accusing her of having undue influence on their unmarried sister, Nora Mack, when the latter made out her will, leaving $500,000 to Nash. They were all the sisters of well-known Albany resident Johnny Mack, owner of The White House at Steuben and James streets, who, when he died, left his fortune of $1,500,000 to be divided among his siblings.

Nash was the mother of famous film and stage actresses Mary and Florence Nash, of whom Johnny Mack was very fond, and he had sponsored their educations and helped them with their theatrical careers. Before his death, Mack had given a large amount of securities to Nash and Nora Mack, but they were returned to the estate after Keogh threatened suit.

Nora Mack’s newly revealed will would leave everything to her sister, Ellen Nash, and in the event of her death, to her daughters. Florence had already received a bequest of the contents of her uncle’s library.

“Nora and I were inseparable,” Ellen Nash said. “Whenever I was ill, she came to me. I went to her when she was ill. She was very fond of Florence and Mary and we all drew wills alike. Were I to have died before my sister, all of my estate would have gone to Nora, in trust for Florence and Mary.”

Albany’s changeable winter weather was responsible for the death of an 8-year-old boy, as well as seven people injured in various car accidents over the weekend. A thaw in temperatures melted ice and snow and then a sudden storm coated the streets with rain, which later froze over when it got cold again.

Edward Dudzinski of Third Street skated onto thin ice at Tivoli Lake when it gave way and he sank below the water’s surface. Lester Moore, 14, and another boy witnessed the incident and tried to save him with the aid of a tree limb, but the younger boy could not grab onto it. Police were called and with the use of planks and a grappling hook, they were able to recover Dudzinski’s body from where it was floating 10 feet below the surface and 15 feet from shore.

Among the accidents caused by ice-slicked roads, one resulted in a fractured skull for Walter McMillan, 15, who was with another boy in a car on the state road when they skidded and lost control of the car, which flipped over, trapping both youths inside. In another accident, Edward Prince, 23, suffered a probably broken leg when a westbound Albany Transit bus on Washington Avenue slid on the ice and collided with a milk wagon owned by the Borden Milk Company and driven by Prince. The force of the collision threw the wagon on top of Prince, who had been standing on the side step at the time.  

An attempted burglary by two men at the Detroit Supply Company on Central Avenue in Albany ended with one person dead and two wounded, including an Albany police officer.

Patrolman John J. Walsh, 29, single-handedly captured the two suspects, Alfred Dixon, 21, and Fletcher Overby, 22. A passing taxi driver, William Bailey, was hailed by Walsh, but as he stopped, he heard four gunshots ring out. He found Walsh with a gunshot wound, still holding Overby but Dixon was gone. The officer told the cabbie to take off after the fleeing criminal. Bailey followed him unarmed into a dark alley and was fired on twice before he got into a physical altercation with him. Dixon fired two more times, shed his overcoat and fled.

In the meantime, two other policemen, who had been riding the trolley to work, came upon Walsh and Overby, with the arresting officer telling his colleagues he was fine to manage his prisoner and that they should assist the civilian Bailey in pursuing Dixon. Soon after, Bailey returning down a different street than the two policemen, arrived to find Walsh now slumped in a doorway alone. He told Bailey that Overby had kicked him in the groin and escaped, something he also shouted to the two policemen who lost track of Dixon and come back.

The senior of the two, Sgt. Frank Magilton, ordered the other, Patrolman Campbell, to take off after Overby. Campbell narrowly avoided being shot by another officer who was coming toward the scene after hearing the original gunfire. Quickly, they teamed up and eventually met Magilton, and the three traced footsteps in the snow to a shed in a vacant lot under a viaduct near Northern Boulevard. Determining Overby was in the shed, Campbell crawled underneath the structure and shot into the floor, wounded Overby in the leg and then dragged him outside. Overby then identified Dixon by name and told the officers where he lived.

A search of the house on Third Street revealed Dixon stretched out on his bed, dead from bullets to his lungs, his arm dangling over the side, with Walsh’s police revolver below it on the floor. An autopsy later revealed that the wounds had been accidentally self-inflicted during his struggle in the alley with Bailey the taxi driver.  

— Times Union, Jan. 30, 1926

Abraham Van Vechten, a 55-year-old nightwatchman at the Barnet shoddy mill on Forbes Avenue in Rensselaer, was shot and killed by a lone robber, who then tried to crack open the office safe. The gunman laid in wait behind a machine, and as Van Vechten went to register at Box 2 of the telegraph watch system at 2 a.m., he shot him twice, killing him instantly.

Van Vechten’s failure to register at the alarm station, which was connected to the main office in Albany, prompted a Rensselaer police officer to head to the mill, along with a representative of the telegraph company. The patrolman saw a man running from the watchman’s building and fired his gun at him. The fugitive’s derby hat fell from his head, but he picked it up and kept fleeing. Another shot from the officer’s gun failed to stop him or slow him down.

The two investigators then discovered the murdered watchman’s body and contacted Albany police, who immediately began calling area hospitals in case the assailant was wounded and seeking medical treatment. The night detective division was also detailed to scour the city’s “resort” section for any trace of the killer. Meanwhile, the police advanced a theory that the suspect was left-handed, as his hiding place behind the machine would have made shooting with his right hand impossible.

Two men, seized in the State Capitol in Albany as “suspected maniacs” and both claiming to have business with Gov. Al Smith, were currently under observation in Pavilion F at the Albany Hospital. Edwin Kornfeld, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, and Joseph E. Sergio Cuevas each claimed New York City as their home.

Kornfeld had jumped the railing and forced his way into the executive offices just before the governor arrived, while Cuevas came to Albany seeking to bring impeachment proceedings against Smith in relation to the treatment of his sore toe. Cuevas also talked of a date with President Calvin Coolidge. He was witnessed wandering around the Capitol and visiting newspaper offices, uttering threats against those he felt opposed his efforts to obtain “justice.”

A dispatch from Winifred Gunley of New York, who lived at the same residence where Kornfeld roomed from the previous October up to a week before arriving here, said he seemed normal to her and that he told her he was writing a book about Benjamin Franklin. As a result of the two incidents, orders were issued to bar any suspicious persons from accessing the executive chamber or legislative quarters of the Capitol. It was the first time such an order was enacted since the war.

State troopers and Warren County police officers were searching for Francis Dodge, of Warrensburg, who was said to have held up and robbed William Hayes in his home in the same town, after having shot and wounded Adolphus Harrington.

Twenty-year-old Harrington was working for Hayes, who had been ill and confined to his bed for several days. After completing his chores on Monday night, the young man was preparing to retire when he heard a noise at the front door. He opened it and was confronted by Dodge. The second man then allegedly fired a gun at Harrington at point-blank range. Harrington fell to the floor, and Dodge stepped over him and headed toward Hayes’ sick room, according to reports.

Hayes told police he saw the gunman approaching and managed to close his bedroom door and push his bed against it, but Dodge forced open the door and knocked over a lamp, setting the bedding on fire. He then threatened Hayes with his gun and demanded money. The sick man gave him $200, after which he escaped in a car heading south. Hayes extinguished the fire and went to assist Harrington, who had been shot through his side, near his third rib. The wound was later believed to be non-life-threatening.

Dodge, around 23 years old, had a troubled youth after being orphaned very young and taken in by James Tyrrell, causing much trouble for his foster father and having several altercations with the law. He had just returned to Warrensburg in October after an enlistment in the Navy, stationed in Hawaii.

Desmond X. Holdridge, the 19-year-old world explorer and Albany native, sailed over the weekend from New York City to Trinidad, where he would soon set forth on a six-month trip into the interior of British Guiana (now Guyana).

The young sailor and two shipmates narrowly escaped death the previous summer during an exploration voyage to Ungava Bay, off the northern coast of Labrador in Canada. A five-day storm at sea led to the shipwreck of Holdridge’s 32-foot auxiliary schooner off Scatarie Island near Cape Breton. After being stranded, the three were picked up by a fishing schooner and taken to Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. Even with that experience, the teen stayed less than two months at his current home in Baltimore after returning, before he left for another adventure.

He was the son of Capt. Gerald O. Holdridge, who worked at the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company out of Baltimore, following a move there two years before. Before that, while in Albany, he was connected in some way with the U.S. Secret Service and the Justice Department. The elder Holdridge was also a critical witness in 1924 in the U.S. Senate investigation of Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty’s alleged involvement with the illegal public showing of Jack Dempsey fight films and a demand for 50 percent of the profits from the events.

Pasquale Cuoco, an assistant sergeant-at-arms in the state Senate in Albany, better known as “Patsy Griffo,” died as a result of a pistol wound he suffered the night before in New York City. He was found dying in Cooper Square by his brother, Anthony, who carried him to a taxicab. They sped to Bellevue Hospital, but Cuoco was pronounced dead on arrival.

Police believed Cuoco was shot in a disagreement over a card game. The room where the shooting was thought to have occurred was in the Democratic clubhouse in the Second Assembly District, where Cuoco was a prominent member. The clubhouse was supposed to be closed on Sundays, but police found cards, broken chairs and bullet marks there. Warren Locicero, a friend of Cuoco’s, and also known as “Larry Love,” was charged with the shooting after he showed up at a hospital seeking treatment for a bullet wound to the face.

Cuoco’s other brother, Albert, gained fame as a boxer known as “Kid Griffo.” After that, Cuoco unofficially adopted the same surname. In both New York and Albany, Cuoco became much better known as “Patsy Griffo,” with few people recognizing his real name. When his name came before Gov. Al Smith for appointment to the sergeant-at-arms position, the chief executive reportedly asked, “And who is Pasquale Cuoco?”

“That’s Patsy Griffo,” he was told.

“Oh,” said the governor. “Patsy Griffo. Of course, I know Patsy.”

Lowell Smith, the agent in charge of the Albany prohibition enforcement office, was being sought by Albany police on a warrant charging him with assault on Patrolman Ward Reside, assigned to special duty with the city’s detective bureau. The alleged assault was said to have happened in front of the main Albany post office at State Street and Broadway. 

According to reports, Smith kicked Reside from the running board of his automobile. Reside was not seriously injured. The policeman made a report of the incident to Police Chief Frank Lasch, who acknowledged that it was clearly a misunderstanding because the men did not know each other.

Reside, whose job entailed wearing plainclothes, said he was standing in the foyer of the post office waiting for a suspect when Smith approached him and said, “You better take a walk; you’ve been around here long enough.” Reside said he then showed the other man his badge and identified himself as a police officer. “Why, you’re only a tin cop,” was Smith’s alleged reply.

Then Reside informed Smith he was under arrest and the two walked to Smith’s car, where he was ordered to drive to the second precinct. This is when the supposed assault happened, with Smith kicking Reside off the running board and then driving off. Reside made inquiries and discovered Smith was the head dry agent for Albany. Representatives from the prohibition bureau were making efforts to have the matter dropped without court proceedings.

After 29 years of desperate searching, during which time she raised two children after being abandoned by her husband when the children were infants, Mrs. Philip Kirwin of Bridgeport, Conn., faced her long-lost husband in Schenectady Police Chief William H. Funston’s office.

The man was arrested as he walked out of the General Electric gate at 11 p.m. after his shift let out. He was on his way home to his Veeder Avenue residence, where his second wife, whom he had married in Schenectady 19 years prior, waited for him. A charge of bigamy was placed against him. His second wife, a native of Kingston, later confessed that she was the one who wrote the letter that tipped off her predecessor as to their mutual spouse’s whereabouts.

“Yes, yes! That’s him,” the first Mrs. Kirwin shouted when confronting Kirwin, who kept his head bowed. “Twenty-nine years! I thought you were dead, but you only ..." The visibly nervous Connecticut woman steadied herself on the arm of her daughter, Josephine Stuart, now 29 but just 8 months old when her father deserted her, her sister and her mother.

The legitimate Mrs. Kirwin told Funston her husband had left for work one day and never returned, while also clearing out their bank account of their entire savings of $400. She then told of her family’s decades-long struggles: penniless, she raised her two daughters; Josephine got married, had two children of her own and dealt with the death of her own husband; Kirwin’s other daughter died.

It was learned in Surrogate’s Court that Matthew Schwinn, a late Whitehall Road farmer and for years a garbage collector in the city of Albany, left an estate of $90,000 (more than $1.6 million today) when letters of administration were issued to his son Nicholas Schwinn, of North Pearl Street.

A 32½-acre farm located along Whitehall Road and in residential districts in Albany made up the bulk of the estate, while personal property, including cash on hand when he died, was estimated to total $10,000. The elder Schwinn left no will, but two other sons of the farmer/garbage collector, who lived on a different farm on Whitehall, and a daughter living in Ravena, were to share the estate equally with Nicholas.

Matthew Schwinn, the son of immigrants, came to Albany in his early youth and began working day and night, working as a garbageman, then, in his later years, building up his farm, working as a truck gardener with his sons, conducting a milk business and selling livestock. But it was his investment in real estate in the burgeoning Whitehall area that quickly built up his fortune.

Property values constantly increased, and in many cases, he saw his investments double. Similarly, his farm, directly opposite a section being constructed for residential neighborhoods, was sure to double in value in a short time, area realtors said.

Horatio G. Glen Jr., 32, a lawyer with offices on State Street in Schenectady, and the son of another prominent lawyer from the same city with the same name, was held in the Albany County penitentiary in default of $5,000 bail on a charge of second degree assault and driving while intoxicated. He was arraigned and pleaded not guilty but the judge ordered that his license be suspended and his license plates revoked.

According to the police report, Glen was driving down Grand Street in Albany around 2 a.m. when Patrolman Edward Flynn noticed him maneuvering strangely. The cop jumped onto the car’s running board and ordered Glen to drive to the second precinct. About a block later, though, the driver suddenly slowed the car down, opened his door and pushed Flynn to the street.

Glen then sped away, but a witness to the incident, Thomas Manning of Grand Street, hopped on the running board next. The Schenectady lawyer drove wildly all the way to his hometown, Manning clinging to the car the whole way. When they reached Schenectady, Manning pleaded to Glen to bring him back to Albany, which he then did.

As they crossed the border, Manning noticed two Albany policeman. He jumped off and notified them of what had happened and they took Glen into custody. One of the arresting officers was James Flynn, father of the officer injured when thrown to the ground by Glen.

A concerted effort to rid Albany of slot machines was announced by Police Chief Frank Lasch, with the added threat of heavy police court fines. “There won’t be a slot machine operating in Albany in 48 hours,” Lasch said following a conference with seven captains and Assistant Chief David Smurl.

It was later learned that Police Court Judge John J. Brady would impose fines of between $250 and $500 for slot machine convictions, in an effort to help police in their campaign. The full $500 fine and a year’s imprisonment could be invoked in the case of repeat offenders.

Lasch said the five precinct commanders would be personally responsible for cleaning up their own districts, while Assistant Chief Smurl, with his night squad, and Captain Dempsey of the detective bureau would operate in all of the precincts. It was said that the special new project of the police was in response to complaints from wives in the city, who claimed that their husbands spent a major portion of their wages each week at the machines, which are operated in soft drink parlors, poolrooms and saloons. Many believed that the drive was the first step in a general campaign against “proprietors of suspicious places.”

Mrs. Duncan Van Rensselaer Johnston, a prominent Albany society woman, was ordered to pay $1,000 to Mary F. Kenny, a clerk at the Paris Cloak and Suit Shop on South Pearl Street, according to a sealed verdict that was opened in Supreme Court. The verdict was on a charge of slander, but another charge of assault was thrown out by the jury.

Kenny had sued to recover for injuries suffered from an alleged verbal and physical attack by Johnston in the store. She claimed Johnston came in to complain about the lining in a coat she sold her, then proceeded to call her names and strike her. The case had just been given to the jury the day before at noon. In court, Troy defense attorney Thomas F. Powers asked Justice Joseph Rosch to set aside the verdict after it had been read, but the judge reserved a decision on the motion for two days.

Meanwhile, a look at the court calendar showed there were several other actions pending against Johnston. One of those was another charge of slander brought in 1925 by an usher at the Capitol Theatre in Albany, who sued her for $50,000.

In May of that same year, the usher’s lawyer, Henry J. Crawford, filed his own $20,000 slander lawsuit against the Capital City socialite, alleging that since the filing of the original lawsuit, he had been barraged by phone calls and telegrams, which he traced back to having come from Johnston’s home, accusing him of attempted blackmail and threatening to have him “run out of town.”

Nick Ferrara of Ballston Spa kidnapped his daughter, Josephine, 17, after she announced her marriage to Joseph Adrien, 24, on Sunday. The couple had gone to a Catholic church in Ballston Lake and returned to the home where she kept house for her father and brother, her mother being dead. Mr. and Mrs. Adrien had invited close friends to the house for a honeymoon party.

Ferrara became enraged and allegedly pulled a gun on his new son-in-law and the assembled crowd, while ordering his daughter upstairs. He was said to have threatened anyone who interfered and later took his daughter from the home and disappeared.

Josephine left a note behind saying she was going to New York City. The father and daughter were expected to be headed toward Albany to board a train to New York at 11:05 p.m. The new husband immediately notified the local chief of police, who then contacted his peers in all the municipalities in the Albany area, as well as New York.

New reports also alleged that Ferrara had been recently released from the prison in Dannemora after having served a sentence of several years for shooting two men in New York.

The next morning, however, Ferrara, his daughter and her husband all turned up together, with the former explaining his actions of the day before. He said he had been angry when he suddenly found out about the wedding and spirited his daughter away to other relatives. Upon learning that the couple had been properly and legally married, he relented and decided not to stand in their way.

After breaking into the Van Heusen-Charles Company Store on Broadway in Albany, armed and masked robbers knocked down, gagged, blindfolded and handcuffed a night watchman who was sweeping the floors, then proceeded to blow open the store’s safe, making off with more than $100,000 (over $1.8 million today) in jewelry, diamonds and cash.

Later, Peter B. Mayer, the watchman, was taken to the building’s basement and shackled to a steel post, where he was found at 6:55 a.m. the next day by store manager William M. Hughes. Police were called and a patrolman successfully sawed the chain of the handcuffs, freeing Mayer. They also began searching for a professional, out-of-town band of safecrackers, based on their skill in entering the store and breaking into the safe, as well as their use of expensive automobile robes to muffle the sound of the explosions.

Five men were being sought because Mayer said he had been rushed by two men before he was blindfolded, heard three voices while they were working on the safe and recalled them talking about two more waiting for them outside. Fingerprint experts were also called in to study prints found in and around the safe to see if they matched any already on file.

The store employed two watchmen every weeknight but only one on Saturdays and Sundays, suggesting the safecrackers knew the inner workings of the business. Store owner Charles M. Van Heusen told police he could not give an accurate accounting of the loss because the robbers also stole the price book, which was kept in the safe with the valuables.

Harry E. Von Staden, 37, confessed killer of his cellmate at the Albany County Jail on the morning of Dec. 9, was deemed insane and ordered committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane through an order issued by Judge Earl A. Gallup. Drs. W. Burgess Cornell and George S. Amsden were appointed by Gallup to examine Von Staden and afterward made the recommendation to the judge.

During the investigation of the jailhouse killing, Albany County District Attorney Charles J. Herrick had also discovered that the prisoner had previously been a patient in psychiatric hospitals in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Herrick was seeking a first-degree murder indictment against Von Staden, who unscrewed an iron bar from the leg of his bottom bunk in the middle of the night and repeatedly struck Abraham Traub, 22, in his top bunk as he slept, allegedly in retaliation for Traub slapping Von Staden across the face during an argument the night before. The assailant told Herrick his subconscious mind made him do it and since the incident had been acting “extremely eccentric and irrational.”

Von Staden’s transfer to the hospital was being held up by his need for new clothing, which was required to be ordered from the prison at Dannemora and shipped here. In the meantime, he remained a guest of the county jail, where his next-door neighbor was Albert Devine, the Albany man accused of killing his wife and burying her beneath the front porch.

The formation of a steering committee made up of prominent Albany citizens was the first step in the solution to the city’s growing traffic problem, according to a presentation W. Graham Cole, safety engineer of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, made to Mayor William S. Hackett and his cabinet.

Cole told city officials he would speak with the eventual committee and assist them in creating a larger group to study traffic control. He also talked at length about educational programs to promote care and caution in the streets, as well as quoted statistics compiled by the motor vehicle bureau.

“Twenty and five-tenths percent of Albany’s accidents in the 11 months occurred at crossings where there are no signals or traffic officers and but five-tenths of one percent occurred at the guarded crossings.” The engineer acknowledged that the unguarded crossings comprised a much greater portion of the city than those that had protection.

Cole made three other suggestions he thought Albany should adopt: an advertising campaign to acquaint residents with current safety rules; the application of safety education to regular schoolwork in public schools; and the establishment of a special school for drivers. Regarding the public school piece, he did not advocate for an entire course to be added to the curriculum, but instead that safety be the topic of assigned essays and woven into math problems.

New York Gov. Al Smith said when his current third term was up at the end of the year, he would be retiring from state politics and would like to go into business for himself in New York City. He pointed out that all his life he had been working for someone else, and most of that time for the state of New York, and that now it was time for him to be his own boss.

"I tell you, there is nothing like being in business for yourself," he said.

He had not yet figured out what business that might be, but planned to devote the fall months to determining what best suited him. The governor had been adamant over the past several months that he would not seek a fourth term under any circumstances, and while his friends and closest advisers believed that was his firm intention, they also thought pressure from state Democratic leaders would convince him otherwise.

Smith, 52, recalled how a friend had started out in business several years ago in New York City with a capital of $50 and now could retire comfortably if he wanted. When he was first elected governor in 1921, he left behind a job as president of the United States Trucking Corporation, which paid him $50,000 (almost $900,000 today) a year.

“In place of the $200,000 which I would have earned in the past four years, I got $40,000 from the state.” The salary of New York’s chief executive was then $10,000 a year.

Ultimately, his friends were correct and Smith ran for and won a fourth term in November. Two years later, he finally abandoned state politics and ran for president as the Democratic nominee. He lost to Republican Herbert Hoover in a landslide.

Celebrated stage actress Elizabeth Hines lived her first six years in Albany before her family moved to New York City, but she was about to take on a new continent. The 30-year-old just signed via cable with famed British theater impresario Charley Cochran to star in his latest production. She was scheduled to sail for England on Feb. 8.

Hines had reached the peak of her popularity playing the title role in George M. Cohan’s “Little Nellie Kelly,” and other Broadway musical comedies like “Oh, Boy” and “The O’Brien Girl.” The actress came by her talent naturally. Her father, Elliott T. Hines, was prominent in Albany’s musical circles until a few decades before when he took a position leading a choir in New York. Her mother, the former Anna Palmer, was an accomplished pianist well-known in Albany for her concert work and as a teacher.

Hines, herself, still had several friends and family members in the area and was a frequent visitor here. In addition to her Broadway work, she was also a Ziegfeld Girl in the Ziegfeld Follies.

Her future soon turned rocky, though. By June, the New York Times reported that Hines was returning to the New York stage after becoming dismayed by the reviews she received for Cochran’s revue, first in Manchester and then London. She also sued Ziegfeld in 1927 for breach of contract and damages after he replaced her as “Magnolia” in the seminal Broadway production of “Show Boat.”

It was reported that over the previous two months, between $250 and $300 worth of Army shoes had been stolen from the Watervliet Arsenal. Police there, aided by police from Albany and Troy, as well as state troopers stationed in Troy, had launched a quiet investigation into the matter.

Petty robberies were not uncommon at the arsenal, but a wholesale theft of this scope had never been seen before. Estimates put the number of missing shoes at between 50 and 60 pairs.

The latest development in the case was that several of the shoes were found being offered for sale in several secondhand shoe stores in Albany. The arsenal quartermaster and two Albany police detectives personally uncovered a cache of the boosted boots, et al., at a South Pearl Street establishment and recovered them. According to authorities, arrests were expected shortly, while officials promised a closer guard would be placed on Army supplies at the military ammunition facility.

Following the reports from Troy dentist Louis Lewis that his sister, Edna, had been deserted by her new husband and swindled out of $5,000 in cash and a $700 diamond ring — and he himself had been scammed by him the night before of $2,300 as an investment in fraudulent stocks — accusations were now made that the man was a serial bigamist.

Police from Connecticut and New York were searching for the man who called himself “Henry Davis” of Providence, R.I., when he married and then quickly abandoned Edna Lewis after a wedding in Brooklyn, even as a dressmaker from that New York City borough said the man’s description matched that of a man named Cove she claimed deserted her the previous May after taking $2,400.

Elizabeth Cove said the couple had been married for two months at the time and his “real” name was Eisner, Cove being one of a number of aliases he used. She took the money, her life savings, out of the bank to furnish a home and locked it in a dresser drawer before retiring for the night. In the morning, she discovered the drawer had been forced open and the money and her husband were gone.

Meanwhile, investigators learned about an Ulster County mother of six who claimed to be the divorced wife of Cove, as well as a woman in Rutherford, N.J., who lived with him as a married couple until May 1925. Police believed they might find several more instances of Davis/Cove victimizing single women with bank accounts.  

Two simultaneous raids took place over the weekend in Troy by city police and federal narcotic agents, resulting in the arrests of two men and the recovery of several hundred dollars’ worth of drugs, liquor and alleged stolen property. The men were Edward Masher of Fifth Avenue, on parole from Dannemora Prison, and Samuel Valenti of Third Street.

Both were set to face a judge in court on charges of receiving stolen property before being brought before United States Commissioner Clark Cipperly for violation of the Violation of the Harrison anti-narcotic act. There, Valenti would also be charged with possessing liquor.

Police smashed in the front and rear doors Masher’s home and were said to have found morphine and cocaine worth around $150 in a kitchen cabinet, as well as a desk clock, toilet sets, a camera, manicure set and a bronze statue, all recently stolen from the Van Heusen & Charles Store in Albany.

Morphine and cocaine, likewise, were discovered at Valenti’s home, along with a large number of stolen items, including six ivory toilet sets, seven clocks, two bronze statues and a rug taken from the R. C. Reynolds store, and three lamps, a carving set, three loaded revolvers and more. The raiding party at Valenti’s also seized 13 cases of alleged Scotch whiskey in the basement, leading to the additional charge against him.

The Capital Region, and the entire state, was in the grip of the most severe storm yet of the season, with snow continuing overnight after 5 inches had fallen in Albany during the day. Bus and trolley service was disrupted and one death was attributed to the weather.

Henry Guntrum, a 47-year-old D & H Railroad worker from Voorheesville, was cleaning the tracks near Slingerlands in the blinding snow when he was struck by an oncoming train. He was rushed by his section foreman to Union Station in Albany aboard the Altamont local. From there, he was taken by ambulance to the Albany Hospital, but just as he was brought into the operating room, he died from a fractured skull.

Despite other areas of New York having even greater snowfall than here, and the local transportation services being adversely impacted, trains were generally running on time, even if the visibility of both conductors and pedestrians was compromised.

Meanwhile, Albany’s Commissioner of Public Works Lester W. Herzog and the officials of the United Traction Company worked together to clear the city’s streets, Herzog’s operating 10 plows and the traction company adding two more. Herzog also had to remind city residents to deposit shoveled snow onto their lawns, or the space between the sidewalk and the curb, instead of throwing it into the street.

The expenditure of $2,525,000 (more than $46 million today) for state projects in Albany — including the new state office building, an addition to the State Teachers’ College (now the University at Albany) and the completion of the state health department laboratory — was assured by the announcement that Gov. Al Smith and the Republican leaders of the legislature had virtually reached an agreement on the allocation of the first $10,000,000 of the $100,000,000 bond issue for permanent public improvements.

The site for the huge office building was selected by the planning commission in 1925 and would be bounded by State, Hawk, Swan and Chestnut streets. The commission further recommended the park adjoining the Capitol to the west be left alone, and that a state museum be built later, one-half block west of the park, being bounded by State and Park streets and Washington Avenue. This would form a rectangle, the four points being the Capitol, the existing Education Building, the State Office Building and the museum, with the park in the center.

Construction of the State Office Building, years later renamed the Alfred E. Smith State Office Building, began in 1927 in a spot close to the originally designated location, was completed in 1930 and opened to the public in 1931. Ultimately, the State Museum remained in the Education Building until 1976, when it moved to the Cultural Education Center on Madison Avenue upon completion of the Empire State Plaza.

Two state troopers were under arrest and charged with first-degree assault, and a warrant was out for a deputy sheriff, following the shooting of Mrs. Peter Sanders of Chestertown on the State Road near Loon Lake on Dec. 29. The troopers allegedly fired on her automobile after it failed to halt on their orders.

Her son, who was driving, rushed her to a doctor and then the Plattsburgh Hospital, where she hovered near death for several days due to buckshot wounds to her head and back. Sanders’ two daughters were also passengers in the car.

An investigation into the incident was launched immediately and the troopers, W. G. Dashley and J. R. Cannon, both stationed in Malone, maintained they mistook the fleeing car for a bootlegger’s and opened fire to stop it. It was also alleged that the weapon used was a sawed-off shotgun, which troopers were forbidden from carrying.

According to Peter Sanders Jr., the lawmen appeared from out of the dark and demanded he stop driving, but the youth, fearing it was a holdup, stepped on the accelerator and sped past the three men on the road. One of them fired through the rear of the car, hitting Mrs. Sanders, who fell unconscious. Doctors expected her to eventually make a full recovery. The troopers and deputy would learn if they would stand trial pending the decision of a grand jury that was to start hearing evidence on Jan. 25.

Several people were scheduled to be questioned by the Albany County district attorney’s office as part of the investigation into the mysterious death over the weekend of Charles Quackenbush, 69, a wealthy farmer of Parker’s Corners in the town of Guilderland. Henry Habel, 55, an occupant of the farm next to Quackenbush’s, was being held as a witness, District Attorney Charles J. Herrick announced.

Quackenbush was found on the ground in front of his barn at noon on Friday, with a severe gash over his left eye and internal injuries that caused his death the next day at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady. A sum of money, said by his wife to have been $500, was missing from his hip pocket. Fifteen minutes after he was carried into the house on an improvised stretcher, someone noticed the garage near the barn where the farmer sometimes rested during the workday was on fire. It was destroyed.

Edward Johnson, an employee on the farm, believed his employer was attacked in the garage while he rested. Mrs. Quackenbush swore she saw Habel around the barnyard around 20 minutes before he ran up to the house to say her husband had a bad accident and requested a blanket. Habel was gone when she came back with the blanket. He returned to the house two days later, inquiring about Quackenbush’s condition, and was told he was dead.

One early theory suggested Quackenbush had been walking along a beam in the hayloft when he fell to the barn floor, accounting for his injuries, but that was disproved by the absence of bloodstains on the barn floor. However, bloody handprints were found on the door leading to the granary, as if someone had dragged a bloody glove across it.

Investigators now believed he had not been injured in the barn at all because two heavy barn doors that were very difficult to open were tightly closed when he was found. Finally, the initial thought that Quackenbush had been struck by a West Shore train that runs on tracks that cut through the property between the house and the barn was discounted because he was found on the opposite side of the barn.

Representatives from Troy, Albany, Hudson, Mechanicville and Amsterdam assured the Rensselaer Board of Trade that they would appear at a conference to be held in the latter city’s School 1 auditorium later in the month. The topic to be discussed was a proposal that the greater area be identified by some name other than the “Capitol District.”

The local Chamber of Commerce was to meet the next week, at which time the date of the conference would be set. The secretary of the chamber said he expected by that time he would have also heard from representatives of Watervliet, Cohoes, Schenectady, Catskill and other communities. All of these municipalities would join the group, the secretary believed, once the benefits of being organized under one comprehensive title were made clear.

Albany Chamber of Commerce head Roy S. Smith stated his group was behind “anything that would boost the section.” It was the Rensselaer board that first voiced opposition to the current “Capitol District,” saying it was more of a tribute to Albany than it was to the advantages of the area at large. They argued for a new title that would “mean something” to every community’s business interests. One suggestion floated was “Upper Hudson Cities Associated.”

The case of Albert Devine, the Central Avenue man who confessed to killing his wife with a hammer and burying her under the porch of their home, was now in the hands of the grand jury, which was sworn in on this day by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Rosch and went into session immediately. First Assistant District Attorney John T. Delaney, who had been conducting the case for the prosecution in police court, was to present the evidence to the jury, expecting it to only last one day.

There would be no defense presence in the courtroom and Devine was not scheduled to appear. The principal witness would be Albert “Billy” Devine Jr., son of the accused, to whom he allegedly divulged his crimes. District Attorney Charles J. Herrick’s plan was to go to trial by the end of February, charging Devine with first degree murder, which carried the death penalty.

He was set to argue that Devine and his wife had quarreled the night of her death after which he bludgeoned her to death with a hammer while she read the newspaper at a table, and that in the weeks after, he went out with several other women and had them back as guests in his home.

The defense would continue their claims that Mrs. Devine continually “nagged” her husband and drank to excess. It was unknown whether they would still say the couple had struggled over a gun leading to him shooting her first now that the autopsy revealed no bullet wounds in her body and a gun was not recovered.

Police in Albany received word on Saturday night that a man at 66 Jefferson St. was boasting about having committed a murder almost three-and-a-half years before in Elizabeth, N.J. A squad led by Assistant Chief Smurl and Captain James N. Dempsey of the detective bureau, with three others, went to the house, where a card game was in progress.

Patsy Lozarro was arrested and taken to the office of Police Chief Frank Lasch and grilled for several hours, where he allegedly confessed to quarreling with a friend named Charlie in 1922, and then on Aug. 18 of the same year, renewed the fight in front of a house on Spring Street in Elizabeth, where the friend was killed. Lozarro then fled to New York City and sent his wife, 9-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son to Albany.

After a year, when the notoriety of the murder had quieted down, he came here, where he had been living ever since. He had already been indicted by authorities in Elizabeth. Detectives from that city were expected in Albany within the next few days with extradition papers and an arrest warrant.

Before a testimonial dinner in his honor in New York City, recently appointed Commissioner of the New York State Athletic Commission James A. Farley rushed to Albany for a secret meeting with Gov. Al Smith. At the inauguration of Mayor James J. Walker in New York, Farley was approached by Smith’s “henchman” and notified him he was wanted immediately at the State Capitol.

It was a badly kept secret that Smith intended to offer Farley his choice of political positions, most notably, the chairmanship of the State Democratic Committee. His term as head of the Athletic Commission, which regulated boxing, wrestling and other unarmed combat exhibitions in the state, had expired with the new year, but some insiders suggested he would likely re-up for another term, as he had proved to be successful and popular at the job.

Years later, he did take on leadership roles of both the state and national Democratic Party, running Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, but in 1926, he chose to continue at the Athletic Commission until 1933.

Months after the meeting and testimonial dinner, Farley achieved arguably his most famous achievement while commissioner. Heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey had repeatedly dodged fighting Harry Wills, today viewed as one of the greatest boxers of his time and the most glaring victim of the “color line” that discriminated against Black boxers. 

Farley considered Wills the number one contender and the mandatory challenger for Dempsey and banned the titleholder from fighting Gene Tunney instead of Wills, threatened to revoke Madison Square Garden’s license if they ignored the ban and promised to resign from his position if Wills was not given the opportunity. Ultimately, a Wills-Dempsey match never materialized, and Dempsey did fight Tunney in September 1926. Dempsey lost.  

William Van Cott of Delmar rang in 1926 as a guest of the city of Albany after he was arrested for a New Year’s Eve robbery in the city, with his supposed method of criminality possibly connecting him to other thefts.

Van Cott allegedly pushed Mrs. Joseph Kueynski into the rear room of her store at 147 Livingston Ave. and robbed the cash register of $18 (around $333 today). He was later identified as the same man who allegedly entered the Lark Street silk shop owned by Lillian Warshaw, intending to rob her in the same manner, but was scared off before he could commit the crime.

Albany police also planned on getting Mrs. Cellu Koblin to positively identify Van Cott as the man who locked her in a room of her Lark Street dyeing and cleaning shop several days before while he stole $102 (almost $1,900 in 2025). The suspect was held in jail in default of $50,000 after pleading guilty to the charge made by Kueynski, while he waited for the action of the grand jury. He entered pleas of not guilty to the other charges and was set to have an examination on Jan. 5.