| Show TALL TALES TALE ab M As told to FRANK E HAGAN and ELMO SCOTT WATSON pat Scan lans triple play T HE grandfather of james E mcgrath of evanston ill was T D scanlan one of the pioneers who laid the first firs t transatlantic cable out of hearts content newfoundland he was also the father of jims uncle patrick scanlan pat scanlan and now were getting down to cases was one of the moat powerful swimmers and fishermen canada or new england has seen often he plunged into lakes and swam swain them with a surveyors chain in his bis mouth and while doing this pat always had time to select the likeliest fishing pools its ells finest fishing Is family history handed down to jim mcgrath it happened to in upper new york state and jim Is positive its ifa true because pat yelled so loudly it shook the mcgrath house down in brooklyn you see pat was fishing in this lake laka he had bad seen while nibbling a surveying chain it was near dusk and he was casting three hooks near the shore for fish lie sometimes in shallow water when its getting dark pat cast and hooked a trout ue he played the fish a short time then gave a determined jerk to establish who was boss As pat jerked he snared a muskrat on the second hook book that was too much so he whooped and threw the double catch high in air casting trout muskrat and line back toward the water with a mighty swoosh and when pat heaved the line toward the water he caught a humming bird on the third hook I 1 ile he always claimed it was the only unassisted triple play of that particular season the end of the philly loo IT T IS a well known fact that the philly loo bird Is extinct but accounts of the death of the last survivor vary larry flint a pennsylvania newspaper man says he saw the tragedy while visiting in wyoming the philly loo was ferociously fond of the holes in doughnuts ills his method of eating them was unique he backed up to them slipped his tall through them then flicked the appendage around in front and fed himself an old timer out there knowing of this peculiarity sought out the last surviving philly loo and laid several doughnut holes down in front of the bird in order to eat the hole the philly loo had to move his tall around into the proper juxtaposition this brought about his end but F r 1 F fuller of the rhame N D review has another version of the story ue lie says that he and another editor had the job of hunting down the last survivors of the race to serve at a banquet for some visiting newspaper men near a mountain in the cad bad lands they flushed a covey of the birds and started chasing them the philly loos began circling the mountains relates 11 clr fuller As they did so each bird grabbed the tall of the bird ahead and as they mounted upward and the circle narrowed they swallowed to take up the slack they kept circling and swallowing until unfit each bird had completely swallowed the bird ahead and they entirely tits disappeared from before our eyes all tuat that Is left are a few tracks circling the mountain that look just like those made by an automobile driven by a one armed driver ive never seen a philly loo bird since that time winner by a nose L LOTS of fellows who work in a metropolis were born in the great open spaces and invariably they retain theli their hankering for the hinterlands lewis W hunt city editor of the chicago dally daily news Is no exception and sometimes when the boys are having a chinning match he la Is unable to conceal his liking for the bad lands of montana Alon tana from whence he came so when a party from kansas asserted that in tits his country it became so ury dry it was necessary to run water from the well through a wringer and to throw gravel on the barn to delude the cows into thinking aking rain was I 1 falling allan so come out ont luke asserted himself its cold we relish in montana declaimed hunt one winter in my hosae home town the mercury sank so low that boiling hot coffee froze in a solid stream en route from pot to cup and that was the year he concluded that the man in our town with the longest nose froze his bis proboscis A friend recommended the only possible relief would won be to rub snow on it the long nosed man rubbed snow on the part of his bis nose he could reach and threw snowballs at the rest in nine blue days he was entirely recovered 0 western newspaper union |
