| OCR Text |
Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Why Imagine Your Own Plots? Real Life Offers Them Gratis I By BILLY ROSE In Battle Creek, Michigan, on July 30, 1949, a Mrs. Zilpha Perske asked her husband for a hundred dollars, and when he wanted want-ed to know what it was for she refused to tell him. One word led to a thousand others, and finally the hysterical housewife ran into the bedroom, took a rifle from the closet and shot herself. Mrs. Perske hung on for two days, and during that time her husband not only gave his blood to keep her going but persuaded friends to do the same. A few minutes before she died, he learned what she had wanted the hundred dollars for to surprise him on his birthday with a new hunting rifle. One night in the Spring of 1924, in the middle of the Illinois flat-lands, flat-lands, the engi neer and fireman pf a fast mail train found themselves them-selves looking into in-to the barrels of a couple of guns. The men behind the guns told them to stop the train and back it up to a crossing they had just Billy Rose passed. At the crossing, four men wearing wear-ing gas masks stepped out of a sp-dan.Aftor sp-dan.Aftor shooting the glass out of the mail-car window, they tossed a tear bomb inside, and when the mail clerks came out the bandits went in. When they drove off, they took with them 60 bags of registered regis-tered mail which contained two million mil-lion dollars in cash, jewels and negotiable ne-gotiable securities. The case was assigned to Bill Fahy, the post office department's ace inspector, and in a matter of hours, road blocks were set up, suspects sus-pects were being questioned, and detectives from New York to San Francisco were on a 24-hour shift. Two days alter this historic heist, one of the army oj dicks working on the case got a phone call from an underworld character char-acter who offered to give him the name of the man who had masterminded the stick-up. His motive for squealing, he said, was revenge, and when his yarn was checked the man he named was arrested and convicted, and most of the two million recouped. The thief, as corny and contrived as it may seem, was Inspector Bill Fahy, and when he planned the hold-up, he was certain he'd get away with it because he knew he'd be assigned to track himself down. The thing he didn't figure on was the resentment of ,the underworld because he was muscling in on its racket. ON AN EARLY morning broadcast broad-cast out of Berlin a few weeks ago, Bill Downs of CBS relayed the following: fol-lowing: Shortly after the war, a German Hausfrau wag notified that her soldier sol-dier husband had died In a Russian prison camp. After the usual formalities, for-malities, the Berlin authorities issued is-sued a certificate of death, and a few months later the woman remarried., re-married., . Last month she was Informed by the commandant of the prison camp that her husband was alive and would arrive by train on a certain date. The woman showed husband No. 2 the notice, and the couple decided that the sensible thing was for the three of them to sit down at a table and talk the matter out. When the train pulled in a few days later, however, husband No. 1 didn't gel off. The Russian officer of-ficer in charge informed the wife . that the excitement of the homecoming home-coming had been too much for the ex-prisoner, and he bad died of a heart attach the night before. When the woman got back to her flat, she found her second husband had committed suicide. A note explained ex-plained that, under the circumstances, circum-stances, it was the only decent i thing to do. |
