A KKK For Blacks, and other gems from old newspapers

Still working on Ogden's vibrant and fascinating history of trunk murders at Union Station, but while doing so I came across some fun little stories.

As you may have noticed, newspapers today are lucky to have three or four stories in a page. This morning's Standard-Examiner front has just four,  very typical.

Back in the 1920s, and into the 70s, you could expect to find a dozen stories, at least. Pages were larger, pictures were smaller, people apparently had the patience to read a lot more, but there was also a very practical layout reason.

You've heard the New York "Times" slogan, "All the news that's fit to print" lampooned as "All the news that fits." That latter was often true.

Type used to be laid out in large columns of lead type. If there was more type than would fit in the space allowed, the typesetter would find a convenient end of  sentence near the bottom of the story, chop off the rest of the type and that would be that.

The excess type went into what was romantically called the "Hellbox," on the floor nearby, to be remelted and used again. This is why, as a cub reporter, I was told to never, ever, put anything important at the bottom of my stories, the famous "inverted pyramid" style of news writing.

But what if a story was too short, leaving a gap?

The typesetter had two options. One was to insert small sheets of lead between lines of the story to make the story longer. The other, if the gap was long enough, was to plug the hole with a very small story. For this purpose he had several trays of small stories, already set in type with headlines, ready to go.

As you wander through old newspapers you find these at the bottom of the page. They are charmingly random and timeless, but also surprisingly informative. Reading them is like finding prizes scattered around the paper.

Consider this one, from March of 1924. Apparently the KKK was worried about a rival organization, The "Loyal Legion of Lincoln" formed by black people. Somehow "the LLL" just doesn't roll off the tongue easily, and a fiery "L" instead of a cross?

I did some digging. The Google thingy found a reference in a book called "African Americans and the Color Line in Ohio 1915-1930" that refers to this interesting blurb.

Apparently it was not blacks, but whites, forming the league, although the group was supposedly for blacks. Does that make any sense?  Considering the attitude of KKK folk to blacks, not really. Says the book:

"Ohio Klansmen even presumed to create a separate black branch of the Klan in 1924. Youngstown Klan officials, through a black agent, Paul Russell, organized the Loyal Legion of Lincoln, which was intended to be a national organization headquartered in Youngstown. The Loyal Legion shortly became defunct when Grand Scorpion Russell apparently absconded with funds collected from white Klansmen to finance the organization."

Sounds to me as if Grand Scorpion Russell pulled a neat scam. I hope he ran far -- lynchings of blacks were common news in the 20s.

From the "Some Things Never Change" Department comes this squib, also from 1924, saying that reading the Bible shall be mandatory in all Kentucky schools.

I see outraged Facebook posts daily about people being told they must join a church before they are allowed to immigrate, or Arizona's Religious Freedom Restoration Act that apparently protects religious folks right to force others to listen to their prayers and so on.

The ACLU gets involved in a lot of these (click)  because, in forcing one religion's "freedom," they end up denying another's. Muslims are getting a lot of grief in that regard these days.

But this is nothing new. Religious fundamentalism was far more pervasive in public policy in the first half of the last century. Government led prayer was common.  The 1920s saw (click) the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.

So Kentucky threatening teachers if they didn't read the Bible in 1924 was pretty normal then and, sadly, still going on today in some form or other.

Finally, this fun blurb that just screams for a mystery or romance novel treatment.

Think about it: A lowly stenographer, bored out of her skull listening to continuous drivel from locally elected lawmakers, dreams of escape, glamor, the glitter of Hollywood!

I've sat through the Utah Legislature, a gang of idiots who I am sure are no brighter, or entertaining, than their Illinois counterparts of any decade. More than once I dreamed of escape. Can you imaging a stenographer's lot, getting writer's cramp taking all that bumpf down?

So one day in 1916 she disappears, heading across the American west to chase her dream.

Times are tough, but she works her way, learning to act, or dance, or sing, or something. Finally she's good enough for the cabarets of a small, tough, border town. She saves up a small stake, moves to LA, and makes her move, telling the local paper "Here I am!"

Did she make it? The normally very helpful Internet Movie Database (www.Imdb.com)  finds nothing with her name, which may or may not mean anything. I bet a lot of actors never got their names recorded back in those early days.

I like to think she found, if not fame, at least happiness. Anything, even singing in a bar in Tijuana, would be better that sitting through a state legislature's drivel.