It Happened in 1924...

The WCTU celebrated its golden anniversary . . . William Z. Foster and Benjamin Gitlow ran for President and Vice-President on the Communist ticket, polling 33,361 votes . . . Lou Gehrig led the minor leagues in batting . . . Charles H. Levermore of Brooklyn won $50,000 in a contest for the best essay on how to prevent war william z foster. . . Lenin died . . . The clothing Abe Lincoln had on when he was assassinated was sold at auction for $6,500 . . . The Committee of Fourteen said it was worried about all the secret vice in New York . . . Woodrow Wilson died . . . Prohibition agents and bootleggers fought a pistol battle in the capital and Senator Frank L. Greene of Vermont was seriously wounded by a stray bullet . . .

The Lutherans voted to drop the word "Hell" from the Apostle's Creed and use the word "Hades" . . . A Negro farm laborer was whipped to death in Marshall, Texas, for swearing at his employer . . . The Presbyterian Church in the United States (Southern) declared that it could not believe in evolution . . . Edward S. Cooney and his wife Celia, "the bobbed-hair bandit," drew ten to twenty years in prison .. Peggy Hopkins Joyce took a fourth husband, Count Costa Morner of Sweden.

andrew a mellonPresident Coolidge denounced the Senate's inquiry into the tax returns of corporations in which Secretary of the Treasury Mellon had a financial interest . . . The Prince of Wales, visiting the States, played squash and joined in a fox hunt on Long Island . . . William H. Anderson, former superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League in New York, lost his appeal from a forgery conviction. An American automobile crossed the Sinai desert between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba in four hours. It took the Israelites forty years to cover the same 130 miles in their Exodus from Egypt . . .

Al Jolson and Raymond Hitchcock had breakfast with the President at the White House and made him laugh . . . Mrs. Harding died . . . RCA sent the first news pictures across the Atlantic by wirelessdolan and o'connell . . . Jimmy O'Connell and Cozy Dolan, outfielder and coach on the Giants, offered Philadelphia shortstop Heinie Sand $500 to throw the game the Giants needed to clinch the pennant. Commissioner Landis found them guilty of the bribe attempt. The Giants won the game . . . Victor Herbert died . . . The Methodist Episcopal General Conference lifted the church's ban on dancing and theater-going . . . Ford made his ten-millionth car and paid an income tax of $2,467,946 . . . Lew Dockstader, the Minstrel Man, died at sixty-eight . . . Americans in East Coast cities heard the first broadcast from the British Isles . . . The heavy turnover in stocks 18,OOO,OOO shares in the tenvictor herbert days after Calvin Coolidge's election worried some Wall Street observers . . . The New York Evening Graphic advised its male readers, "Don't Try to Reform a Gold Digger" ("If you have fallen in love with her, you have truly sunk far below the depths to which Lucifer sank") . . . The Graphic's lovelorn column advised an inquiring reader to spurn an adventurer bearing pretty baubles: "Of all the gifts that can be offered to a woman," the Graphic said, "love is the most precious."

fred and adeleIn the theater, Judith Anderson appeared in The Cobra . . . Lady Diana Manners played the Madonna and Rosamond Pinchot the nun in The Miracle . . . The Marx Brothers starred in I'll Say She Is, Alfred Lunt, Leslie Howard and Margalo Gilmore in Outward Bound and Helen Hayes was in Dancing Mothers . . . Fred Astaire and his sister Adele danced to George Gershwin's music in Lady, Be Good.

edna ferberOn the silent screen, the box-office names included Rod La Rocque, Jack Holt, Hoot Gibson, Thomas Meighan, Agnes Ayres, the Bennett sisters, Richard Dix, Harry Carey, Gloria Swanson, Ben Lyon, and George O'Brien.

Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, a book of short stories, came out, but the people were descending on the stores for such items as Edna Ferber's So Big, Zane Grey's The Call of the Canyon, Percy Marks' The Plastic Age and Rafael Sabatini's Mistress Wilding. In non-fiction, the best-seller was Lulu Hunt Peters' Diet and Health (yes, even then). It was followed by Fannie Farmer's cook book and, still up there, Emily Post's bible of etiquette. The crossword puzzle books swept the land that year, too, putting Simon & Schuster on the publishing map and straining American eyes and dictionaries almost beyond endurance.