January 2011

Jack Hughes was an outstanding passer of phony bills. A thoroughly honest-looking man, respectably bearded and always well dressed, he spent his working day going from store to store, making one small purchase at each, and paying for it with crisply persuasive counterfeit money.

If his currency ever was questioned and the police called, no case could be made; he never had more than one bad bill in his possession.

His working supply trailed along a full block behind him, in the form of a small boy whose pockets were stuffed with bogus cash. After each stop, he would sidle up and slip Hughes another bill.

But sometime in September, 1874, in Washington Heights, Illinois, something went very wrong. Hughes was arrested by Secret Service agents and indicted for passing five counterfeit bills. He had jumped bail and was being sought by every policeman in Chicago when he joined the plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln’s corpse.

Fitz W. Guerin, shown here in a moment of solemn whimsy, was a St. Louis photographer who ordinarily took his work very seriously. Born in Ireland in 1846, he joined the Union Army at fifteen, apprenticed himself to a photographer after the war, and then, until shortly before his death in 1903, made a good living photographing well-to-do citizens of his city. The crisp fidelity of his work was especially prized; one reporter said of his wedding portraits, “The rich lace on one of the dresses was so distinct that I could almost feel it, every figure, yea almost every thread, being as distinct as if I held the precious fabric in my hand.” But Guerin was not satisfied. Between sittings he lavished hours on more ambitious undertakings—crowded sentimental scenes usually built around the doings of children, as well as what then passed for bachelor art. He was an overreacher. The 350 mostly unpublished Guerin pictures at the Library of Congress are technically superb, but his set pieces, grand though each must have seemed in the planning, somehow never quite come off.

On the ninth of April the French explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, and his tiny flotilla of Frenchmen and Indians reached the end of their six-week journey down the Mississippi. La Salle and his companions slid their canoes onto the shore just above the spot where the great river broadened into the Gulf of Mexico, and there, while the Indians watched, mystified, they ceremoniously planted a cross and an ornate column bearing the arms of France and the name of their king, Louis XIV.

Early April found John Adams in Holland, lodged in a house “decent enough for any character in Europe to dine in with a republican citizen,” pressing with all his irritable skill for Dutch recognition of the United States of America. France had joined the new nation in the field, but the other European powers remained uncommitted.

Adams was not overly optimistic. He had written that it would be impossible to say which way the Dutch would go because “the constitution of government is so complicated and whimsical a thing, and the temper and character of the people so peculiar.” Besides, “They are afraid of everybody, afraid of France, afraid of America, England, Russia and the northern powers.”

But the parliament of the province of Friesland had voted to recognize the United States as early as February, and the burgomaster of Amsterdam assured Adams that the other powers would follow within six weeks.

He remains lodged in the national memory like a cyst, one of that pantheon of cheap thugs whom legend and wishful thinking have transformed into a parody of the Robin Hood myth. His name was Jesse James, and between 1866, when he and his gang robbed their first bank, and 1882, when his chips were cashed in for him, he so terrorized the state of Missouri that one governor was elected largely on the strength of his promise to rid the area of him.

The gates of the Atlanta penitentiary swung shut on Al Capone on May 4, putting an end to a career that had netted the king of gangsters some $60,000,000 a year. Convict No. 40,866 seemed philosophical during his train trip from Chicago: “I’ll make out wherever I am,” he said, though he thought the government hadn’t been “playing fair” when it hung an income tax evasion rap on him. As the train rolled south, Capone began mopping his brow and talking about the heat. “I can stand that, though,” he said. “But I’ll miss my beer.”

At Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a carver named Will E. Campbell made the prisoner a present of one of his celebrated hickory pipes. Though himself a cigar smoker, Capone was pleased: “That’s the first time anybody ever gave me anything.”

The “courtier” in his red coat and white cloak is undoubtedly a French officer belonging to a regiment of lancers. His strange hat is a czapka with a mortarboard top tufted with an aigrette. It was worn by lancers as late as World War I (the Prussian uhlans). British lancers were wearing czapkas at the Battle of Balaclava.

In regard to your “Postscripts” item in the August/September 1981 issue: The First Schwenkfelder Church stands at the corner of Thirtieth and Cumberland streets in Philadlephia.

When I was a boy my companion and I would play half-ball (a rubber pimpleball cut in half plus a broomstick for a bat), utilizing the churchyard as an outfield. Cumberland Street at that time was paved with rectangular-shaped cobblestones for the largely horse and wagon traffic. It has since been paved with asphalt.

My friend would stand on the church pavement and throw the ball across Cumberland Street. A hit ball that rolled to the curb was a single; if it hit the pavement it was a double; if it hit the ornamental fence it was a triple; and if it went over the fence it was a home run. The home run presented problems since we had to climb the fence to retrieve the ball. At that point old Reverend Heebner (of blessed memory) would come running out of the church to chase the juvenile trespassers.