It Happened in 1927 . . .

joe lapchickisadora duncanThe Senior Council at Princeton quit because the trustees banned automobiles on the campus . . . Richard Barthelmess and Mary Hay were divorced . . . Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional government that ruled Russia for a little while before the October Revolution of 1917, settled in New York . . . President Coolidge warned that the foundations of government and society would collapse if the people didn't pay more attention to the scriptures . . . In professional basketball, they had to break up the Original Celtics&#151Joe Lapchick, Nat Holman, Dutch Dehnert, Pete Barry and Davey Banks&#151because nobody could beat them . . . The first demonstration of television took place. Walter S. Gifford, president of A.T.&T., in New York, and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, in Washington, talked on the telephone and watched themselves on a two-and-a-half-inch screen . . . Lisbeth A. (Lizzie) Borden, acquitted in 1892 in the celebrated ax murder of her father and stepmother, died in Fall River, Massachusetts . . . Ruth Elder crashed into the sea on a flight to Paris with George Haldeman . . . Miniature golf was very big . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson entered San Marcos College in Texas to get his teaching degree . . . Yehudi Menuhin, eleven, made his violin debut at New York's Mecca Temple . . . Upton Sinclair's Oil was banned in Boston because it contained a reference to birth control. The book dealt with the exploitation of the California oil fields . . . Fanny Brice divorced Nicky Arnstein . . . Isadora Duncan, the dancer, died in Nice when her scarf tangled in the wheel of a fast-moving sports

car and dragged her out, breaking her neck.

henry fordcoolidgeAaron Sapiro, Chicago attorney, filed a $1,000,000 libel suit against Henry Ford because Ford's Dearborn Independent linked him to an alleged Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the nation's agricultural interests. The case ended in a mistrial. Ford then issued an apology to the Jewish people for everything the Independent had said about them since 1920 and for republishingthe fake Protocols of Zion. Ford also agreed to withdraw from circulation the book, The International Jew. Sapiro dropped his suit . . . President Coolidge, speaking at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in October, noted with satisfaction that America's wealthy men were devoting their riches to the spread of democracy and the development of the liberal arts . . . In her book, The President's Daughter, Nan Britton claimed to have had

a seven-year love affair with Warren Harding which produced a daughter.

bessie smithtommy amourOn the Prohibition front: The Supreme Court held that bootleggers had to file income tax returns and could not plead self-incrimination to escape this responsibility. A similar ruling was applied to bookmakers fourteen years later but the Supreme Court threw it out in 1968 on the grounds that it violated the bookies' Constitutional rights . . . Canada knocked out its Dry law after ten years . . . Medical Examiner Norris said that New York speakeasies outnumbered the old saloons . . . New York's Committee of Fourteen said the speakeasies were worse because the saloons at least barred women . . . Tommy Armour won the U.S. Open and picked up $500, plus $100 in play-off money and $100 from the host club, Oakmont (Pa). Orville Moody got $30,000 out of the $200,000 prize pool when he won it in 1969 and figured on a million on the side in endorsements . . . Bessie Smith, 43, the great blues singer from Chattanooga, Tenn., was at her peak when she was badly injured in an automobile crash in Mississippi on Sept. 26, 1937. She died from blood loss before an ambulance could get her to a hospital in Clarksdale.

bela lugosiOn the Great White Way, the brave author and producers of a rather intimate epic called The Virgin Man all drew ten-day workhouse sentences. The members of the cast were simply told to go and sin no more . . . On the nicer levels, Alfred Lunt and Edward G. Robinson in The Brothers Karamazov, Katharine Cornell in The Letter, Jeanne Eagels and Leslie Howard in Her Cardboard Lover, Bela Lugosi in Dracula, Otto Kruger in The Royal Family, Ruth Gordon in Saturday's Children, Minnie Maddern in Ghosts, Ed Wynn in Manhattan Mary and Eddie Cantor in the Follies.

the jazz singerOn the silver screen, Gary Cooper, college-bred son of a Montana judge, got his first lead in Arizona Bound (made in Nevada). The break came none too soon. Cooper had been falling off horses for ten dollars a day for three years. The lanky Cooper went from Arizona Bound to a multimillion-dollar career before cancer killed him in 1961 at the age of sixty . . . Norma Talmadge and Gilbert Roland appeared in Camille, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were in Flesh and the Devil, Clara Bow, Richard Arlen flesh and the deviland Buddy Rogers in the war film, Wings, Joan Crawford in The Taxi-Dancer, Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh, Joseph Schildkraut, H.B. Warner and William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy) in DeMille's The King of Kings, and Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky in The Night of Love, and Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer . . . A comedian, Bert Lahr, made his debut in Harry Delmar's Revels and got very poor notices.