Delivery has become such a universal obsession here lately it's easy to forget that the word also means things totally unrelated to why my Amazon purchases fail to arrive on my front porch.
So the meaning behind this headline from the Jan. 25, 1919, Arkansas Gazette did not at first come across:
Attempted Jail Delivery Blocked
Had prisoners tried to order a pizza?
One hundred years ago, "deliver," "delivery" and "deliverance" meant pretty much what they do today — plus one humorous usage special to penal institutions.
"Jail deliveries" were escapes.
Quick action by members of the Police Department prevented a wholesale delivery at police headquarters yesterday afternoon. Officers discovered a severed steel bar in the "run-around" for white prisoners and a loaded Colt's .32 caliber revolver in possession of six men who were at liberty in the run-around.
One of the men was being held in connection with a daylight robbery of the Bank of Bauxite. Others were suspected of holdups, or of murdering a man named Henry Cooper on the Sweet Home pike.
The officers say they will take any chance to gain their liberty and are old lawbreakers.
The run-around was the area around their cells, which seem to have been free-standing cages, perhaps with walls woven of iron straps like the cage in the Powhatan Jail at Powhatan State Park in Lawrence County. See that online in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. For sure, the cells had no windows.
It was customary, the Gazette said, to let the prisoners roam by day but lock them up after supper. Police surmised the men planned to rush Turnkey J.R. Smart when he came downstairs for their confinement routine, usually about 6 p.m.
According to the 2004 book Little Rock Police Department: History & Personnel, in 1919 the jail was in the basement on the north side of City Hall. The department was upstairs in what is now the City Board room, with offices for Chief Burl Rotenberry and his captain, detectives and desk sergeants along the hallway. Court was on the first floor.
The men sounded rowdy, which made Smart wary, and he asked other officers to go with him. They saw the severed bar in the window.
Immediately all prisoners were locked in one cell, and the blankets taken out and searched for saws. The search disclosed nothing, and the prisoners were searched.
One of the officers spotted the six-shooter lying on top of a cell. None of the prisoners would admit knowing anything about it. The police decided it had been handed through the window during the day.
They figured the men had first planned a window exit, but once they acquired the gun decided to lock Smart in a cell and escape using his keys.
By the next day, police still didn't have the saw, but detectives Moore and Prewitt had caught a black trusty, Percy Riggs, who admitted he took cash to carry notes for prisoners. He had one from one of the prisoners — to a woman.
This note read: "Send me down $15 immediately, as I have made plans to get out tonight."
No one cared to deliver poor Riggs, who was fined $25 and sentenced to 10 days in jail.
ESCAPE TO THE MOVIES
Let's imagine those prisoners had escaped. Could they have ducked into a movie theater to hide out, as the escapees Delmar and Everett do in O Brother Where Art Thou?
Put down the lash, Helpful Reader, yes, I know that movie is set in the 1930s. Work with me here.
In 1919 as now, motion pictures were displayed in dark rooms, the films projected against one sheet- or screen-covered wall. Some theaters had balconies and other nooks. But Little Rock and North Little Rock were not so populous 100 years ago: The odds of being recognized by a cashier would be significantly higher than they are today.
But, anyway, imagine Delmar and Everett slumped in flickering dark with tinny music tinkling (read the screenplay here). What was on the bill?
Lots of options — Borrowed Clothes at the Royal, For Freedom at the Palace, Houdini's The Master Mystery or Gibson's Daughter at the Gem (perfect ventilation), The Saleslady at the Kempner (excellent ventilation), The Cheat or The Poor Rich Man at the Crescent ... And there was Big Time vaudeville at the Majestic — Alla Moskova and Her Classic Dancers.
Two films would make melodramatic backdrops for a police raid: The Mortgaged Woman and Cannibals of the South Seas.
Costing 10 or 20 cents at the Crystal Theater at Eighth and Main streets, the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. 1918 production The Mortgaged Woman starred the prolific Dorothy Phillips (1889-1980) as Gloria Carter.
Carter's louse of a spouse — a forger — hands her over to the big businessman he has swindled — as assurance for his good behavior. She loved the businessman once upon a time but he dropped her. But she gets her revenge, making him fall in love with her.
Suppose your husband gave you as security to a former lover for $50,000 to escape going to prison and you later found him drinking wine with chorus girls.
What would you do?
Then her brother, who believes she's been ruined, arrives to avenge her honor on the businessman.
But she's still chaste. Also now she's in love with the businessman!
At the Royal Theater — 10 cents for children, 25 cents for adults — Cannibals was a 1918 documentary "photographed at the risk of the lives of Martin Johnson and his wife." It was "something different in the movie world" and "something you'll never forget."
If IMDB is correct, it would indeed be something easy to remember since it was either 4 or 16 minutes long. A plot summary conveys that Martin and Osa Johnson traveled 18,000 miles by schooner, whaleboat and native canoe to shoot footage of tribes previously unseen outside their native lands.
Another website, The Travel Film Archive, offers an 8-minute clip from the Johnsons' survey of the head-flattening people of Tommen Island, and their little dog, too. See this for yourself — no saw or revolver required — here. Or look it up on YouTube.
All that to tell you this: 100 years ago today, Frank Vichner, 8, of Pine Bluff, fell sleep in a theater and woke up alone in the dark at 1 a.m.
He began to scream, but it was some time before a policeman heard him, and released him.
Taken home by the policeman, the boy continued to tremble all night. His parents called a doctor in the morning.
Deliverance, failed again.
Email:
cstorey@arkansasonline.com
Style on 01/28/2019