Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Today -100: August 10, 1910: He took away my bread and meat



NYC Mayor William Jay Gaynor has been shot. Fatally, sort of: he will actually continue walking around, doing the mayor thing, for more than three years before a bullet fragment (which was not removed from his throat) kills him. Gaynor was posing for pictures aboard the ship he was due to sail to Europe on when he was shot: the picture above captures that moment. The person behind and to the left of Gaynor must be Street Cleaning Commissioner “Big Bill” Edwards, “of Princeton football fame,” all 350 pounds of him, who tackled the assassin, a fired employee of the Dock Department named J.J. Gallagher. “He took away my bread and meat, I had to do it,” said Gallagher, who will die of syphilis in 1913, several months before his victim’s belated death.

Among many other stories on the shooting, the NYT has the scoop that Mrs. Gaynor (who seems not to have been accompanying the mayor to Europe) had a premonition when she woke up today that something was wrong.

Gaynor is the only New York mayor ever assassinated, before or since.

(The NYT had an article on the Gaynor assassination yesterday. Thanks for the spoiler, dudes.)

Two strikebreakers hired by the Central Vermont Railroad who were arrested for rioting in Connecticut turn out to be sons of prominent Pennsylvania lawyers, one of them a D.A., who “went into strikebreaking for the sake of adventure”. Naturally they were released without trial.

No comments:

Post a Comment