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Show - Who? I A '.' I By Louise M. Comslock CASEY JONES 'Come, all you rounders. If you want hear The story told bout a brave engineer; Casey Jones was the roi-nder's name: On a six-eight wheeler he won his fame." A S CASEY JONES, whose heroic death in a railroad collision near Vaughan, Miss., in 1900, has been celebrated cele-brated in a long ballad boasting some six or eight different and variously quotable quot-able versions, John Luther Jones, hailing hail-ing from Cayce (pronounced Casey), Tenn., has gained a unique sort of immortality. im-mortality. He is a popular hero of the day when railroading knew a glamor lost in the modern transportation transpor-tation system, a giant of a man, swarthy, black headed, notable as a teetotaler and a habitual and melodious melodi-ous whistler. In 1900 Jones was engineer on the old Illinois Central "Cannonball" running run-ning south from Jackson, Miss. One night Jo Lewis, one of Casey's buddies, bud-dies, was too ill to answer the call from the roundhouse to take out his train, and Casey, just In from a long run, .offered to "double out" for him. The train was an "expedite" freight, run as fast as a passenger train. What went wrong nobody knows. But the crash was sudden and complete, and Casey, though he saved the life of his fireman Slim, was himself killed. A negro wiper named Wallace Saunders poured out his grief for the accident in the original version of the song. A professional song writer, playing the showhouse In Jackson, picked it up In the railroad yards, polished it off and gave it to the world in its present form. CALIFORNIA JOE ILIERO of more than one dime novel thriller, nevertheless there once was a real "California Joe." Gen. George A. Custer, for whom he once served as chief of scouts, writes of him in "My Life on the Plains" as follows. "He was known by the euphonious euphon-ious title of 'California Joe'; no other name seemed ever to have been given him and no other name ever seemed necessary." But Custer was wrong, for Joe's other and real name was Moses E. Milner. He was born In Kentucky in 182!), ran away from home at the age of fourteen to seek adventure in the West and during the next twenty-five years found plenty of it as a prospector and miner in California, Montana and in the Black Hills of South Dakota; as an Indian fighter and as a scout and guide for army officers during the Indian In-dian wars in the sixties and seventies. Milner got his name of California Joe thus: One day in 1862 when he was riding into Virginia City, Mont., some inquisitive strangers asked him where he was from. Milner, who was an inveterate Joker, replied "From California, where most of the gold is." Next they asked him his name and Milner, resenting their curiosity, told them It was Joe. "All right" they replied, "We'll just call you California Joe, if you are from that state." And that was the name he bore to the day of his death in 1S76 when he was assassinated as-sassinated by an enemy near Fort Robinson, Neb. THE BLOOMER X7"ITH the prevailing tendency to- ' ward slender figures and closely fitted garments, the bloomer has today lost much of its former standing as a woman's undergarment. But its influence, influ-ence, and certainly its original spirit L amply carried out today in many feminine costumes, from lounging pajamas pa-jamas to riding breeches and one-piece bathing suits, all bespeaking the emancipation eman-cipation of woman, to further which Mrs. Amelia Bloomer some eighty years ago bestowed upon this piece of wearing apparel her good name. In the day when legs were still limbs, Mrs. Bloomer startled the community com-munity at Lowell, Mass., by appearing one day in full trousers gathered in at the ankles, worn under a skirt shockingly abbreviated to a point midway mid-way between ankles and knee. In vain did the valiant crusader point out that the costume was more decent than the customary layers of petticoats, and certainly more sanitary than skirts which dragged in the street. In vain did she argue woman's right to dress comfortably in her little publication, The Lily. The New York Tribune made editorial comment on Bloomer-ism, Bloomer-ism, Bloomerites and Bloomers, the entire en-tire country took up the controversy, eager feminists here and there adopted Bloomerism and dropped It under a deluge of criticism, and Mrs. Bloomer's Bloom-er's name became irrevocably attached to the garment she fostered. In 1S05 Mrs. Bloomer herself abandoned aban-doned the costume, because, she explained, ex-plained, of the embarrassing havoc a .high wind played with the short skirt I (. 1832. Western Newspaper Union.) |