In one of those chains of circumstance which cause editors to lie awake late at night gnashing their teeth in frustration, proper credit was omitted from a sidebar in our June, 1977, issue. The sidebar in question was ”… But the patient died,” which accompanied Spencer Klaw’s article on Thomsonian medicine, “Belly-MyGrizzle.” The information in the sidebar was in fact derived from “A Patient Boiled Alive,” by Wesley E. Herwig, an article that appeared in the Fall, 1976, issue of Vermont History. Mr. Herwig, understandably, did his own gnashing of teeth, and we extend our apologies to him and to Vermont History for the oversight.
HERPETOLOGICAL NOTES FROMARIZONA
Glancing through the Summer, 1977, issue of La Reata, the quarterly newsletter of the Arizona Historical Society, we encountered the rather startling photograph below. After making inquiries, we learned that it was taken sometime in the late 1920's by a staff photographer for the Albert Buehman studio in Tucson, and now reposes among the nearly 200,000 photographs in the Society’s Albert Buehman Memorial Collection.
The picture, it appears, was taken to advertise the sterling virtues of the Hobart meat grinder, which is shown administering a weekly feeding to a rattlesnake, perhaps a denizen of one of Arizona’s tourist-attracting snake farms. We do not know what was ground up and pumped into the snake, but then we also do not know why this would have been considered an important function of the Hobart meat grinder. However, the photo probably attracted would-be buyers in the 1920's, as it attracted us, and that was all that mattered.
The same issue of La Reata, dwelling further on reptilian matters, provided the following folk prescription for a cure for asthma: “You get a rattlesnake. You kill it before it has been made mad, for if it is mad then all the poison goes through its body.… Then you take one inch of the rattlesnake body and you boil it in four glasses of water until one glass is boiled off. Then you let it cool and you drink one glass in the morning, one at noon and one at night. You must not use any salt. You do this every day.” Ill
FUNNY HATS AND REAL GUNS
Those who remember Thomas J.Fleming’s “The Policeman’s Lot,” which we published in February, 1970, may recall that the author quoted from a then-recent issue of a newsmagazine to the effect that “the average cop feels that he is unappreciated or even actively disliked by the public he serves.” In the article, Fleming went on to note, among other things, that just such a sense of alienation has always been the policeman’s lot, by the very nature of his job.
Undoubtedly, that will continue to be the case for years to come—although possibly not for all policemen everywhere. In Seattle’s Pioneer Square district, for example, six patrolmen and one sergeant have been decked out in turn-of-thecentury uniforms; three of them are seen—below right—with Candice Leach, executive secretary of the Pioneer Square Association. The Seattle “Pioneer Squad” was the idea of Mayor Wes Uhlman and Chief of Police Robert L. Hanson. It was formed in 1975, and the policemen march along in their 1910 uniforms from Memorial Day to Labor Day each year.
Robert Pisor, press secretary to Detroit’s mayor, Coleman A. Young, was inspired by Seattle’s example, and so in the summer of 1977 Detroit’s Washington Boulevard section got its own contingent of bobby-helmeted policemen. They are seen below, posing on one of the oldfashioned trolleys that now rattle through the city’s downtown district—another gesture to the past.
The idea in both cases is to try to bridge the gap between the policemen and the citizens they serve and protect, the theory being that the vintage uniforms will reduce the authoritarian image and make the officers appear more human and approachable. On the other hand, officials of both cities are quick to point out that these policemen are not curious revivals of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops. They mean real business. The billy clubs they sport are real and quite as utilitarian as they were seventy years ago. So are the weapons they wear at their hips—real guns, which shoot real bullets.
GEARING UP FOR NUMBER THREE
When the last fireworks had faded, the VV last parade had ended, the last watermelon had been eaten, and the last echoes of the last speech had died out in the county fairgrounds of the land, most Bicentennial committees of 1976 heaved sighs of relief and closed up shop, with never a thought for the morrow.
Not so the Bicentennial committee of Wyoming, Pennsylvania. Finding itself with $63 left in its Bicentennial account at the end of the year’s festivities, this admirable body persuaded a local bank to contribute another $100, then put the money into a special TVtcentennial account. Bank officials calculate that at today’s interest rates the $163 deposited this year will be worth about $100,000 by 2076, which ought to be enough to finance a couple of truly nifty paradesassuming that inflation rates have not eaten it alive by then.
HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD, JOSE MANUEL MIGUEL XAVIER GONZALES, OR JOSE MARIA MARTIN, OR JOSE MANIAH, OR JOSE MARIA MARTINEZ, OR …
Our “Postscripts” feature “Of Cruel and Unusual Death Sentences” in the October, 1977, issue called forth an unusual run of mail from readers. The item had to do with an 1881 death sentence passed down by an anonymous (we assumed) judge on the luckless José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, a sentence that combined eloquence and racist venom in about equal portions. At the end of the feature, we wondered if any of our readers could enlighten us as to the origins of this singular example of jurisprudential excess.
They could indeed. While the name of the defendant has come down to us variously as José Maria Martin, José Maniah, and José Maria Martinez, most of our respondents agreed that he was a Mexican sheepherder who had killed a local cowboy in New Mexico over a disputed card game. Some recounted the legend that the accused later escaped jail and died some years afterward when he fell off a horse. Almost all attributed the death sentence itself to the infamous Judge Isaac ("Hanging Judge") Parker, a jurist, it was said, who would string up a man quite as cheerfullv as he would kill flies. And as often.
Others disagreed, and from the evidence supplied us, they appear to have made a good case. Among these particularly diligent readers was Harry L. Bigbee, of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “This entire matter, in my opinion,” he writes, “is a distorted, fictionalized version of an actual sentence imposed by Judge Kirby Benedict in about 1864 in Taos, New Mexico.” He then goes on to cite several contemporary sources, including a version of the death sentence that appeared in an 1864 letter to the editor of the Santa Fe Weekly New Mexican. The recipient in this case was one José Maria Martin, but in most other respects the language of the sentence is nearly identical to that attributed to Judge Parker. Consider this passage, for example: “José Maria Martin, it is now the springtime, in a little while the grass will be springing up green in these beautiful valleys, and on these broad mesas and mountain sides, flowers will be blooming; birds will be singing their sweet carols, and nature will be putting on her most gorgeous and her most attractive robes, and life will be pleasant. .. but none of this for you, José Maria Martin.”
Another reader, George Johnson of Wausau, Wisconsin, pointed out that Judge Benedict was an old acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, as well as a’ twofisted drinker whose alcoholic didos sometimes got out of hand. This apparently did not upset Lincoln, who resisted all demands that Benedict be removed from office. “We have been friends for thirty years,” Lincoln reportedly said in 1863. “He may imbibe to excess, but Benedict drunk knows more law than all the others on the bench in New Mexico sober.” In any case, drunk or sober, it seems clear that Kirby Benedict was the poet on the bench.
