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comedy

Arsenic and Old Lace: Not Funny to the Man Who Brought a Serial Killer to Justice

On Jan. 10, 1941, Hartford State’s Attorney Hugh Alcorn attended the opening night of the Broadway play, Arsenic and Old Lace. The audience laughed uproariously at the dark comedy about two elderly spinsters who poison lonely old men with arsenic-laced elderberry wine. The New York Times drama critic wrote that it was ‘so funny none of us will ever forget it.’

Hugh Alcorn didn’t find it funny. Not in the least.

First edition cover of Arsenic and Old Lace

As the prosecutor for Hartford County, Alcorn spent years trying to bring to justice Amy Archer-Gilligan, the subject of Arsenic and Old Lace. She had posed as a caring Christian woman while uncaringly murdering as many as 20 people.

And now Amy Archer-Gilligan, notorious serial killer, whiled away her days at the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane in Middletown. There she kept up the pious Christian routine, praying in her chair with a Bible in her lap, wearing a black dress trimmed with lace. Her victims, who had all died horrible deaths, moldered in their graves.

What was funny about that?

Arsenic and Old Lace Prosecutor

Hugh Alcorn was born in 1872 in Suffield, Conn., to Irish parents who had immigrated as children to the United States in 1838. His father served in the Civil War, suffering as a POW in the notorious Andersonville Prison. That left him with an addiction to drink, which led to his death by drowning.

Hugh Alcorn

Hugh Alcorn compensated for his father’s inadequacies, studying at the Connecticut Literary Institution (now Suffield Academy) and then reading for the law at the Hartford firm of Case, Bryant and Case. He married, had three sons, ran for the state Legislature and won twice. He built a lovely Colonial Revival house in Suffield. In 1908, the Connecticut Superior Court appointed him state’s attorney for Hartford County. Over his next 34 years in the job, he won a reputation as a tough but fair prosecutor.

In 1914, a woman named Nellie Pierce came to see him and described her suspicions about her brother’s death. Franklin Andrews had been living at the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids in Windsor, Conn. He had seemed in fine health just before he died suddenly of a gastric ailment.

Franklin Andrews

Franklin Andrews, a robust 60-year-old, had paid the proprietress—Amy Archer-Gilligan–$1,000 to take care of him for the rest of his life. Pierce had just seen her brother a few days before Archer-Gilligan called her to say he’d taken ill. Pierce wanted to see him, but Archer-Gilligan suggested she wait.

Amy Archer-Gilligan, the serial killer depicted as two crazy spinsters in Arsenic and Old Lace

A few hours after the call, Franklin Andrews died an agonizing death. An undertaker immediately whisked his body away for embalming. When Nellie saw her brother’s body, she was surprised at how well he looked. And then she, her sister and her brother went through his things. They discovered a letter from Archer-Gilligan pressing him for a loan of $500. Andrews had given her the money, and Nellie Pierce demanded it back, according to the Hartford Courant.

She got the money, and she went to see Hugh Alcorn. Alcorn was also visited by his friend, Courant editor Clifton Sherman. Sherman gave him evidence that something was seriously amiss at the Archer Home.

Archer Home for Elderly

The Archer Home was a large brick house at 37 Prospect St. outside downtown Windsor. Alcorn’s investigation revealed that Amy Archer and her husband James had bought it in 1907 after running a similar convalescent home in Newington, Conn.

The site of the Arsenic and Old Lace murders on Prospect Street in Windsor has been broken up into apartments. Image courtesy Google Maps.

James Archer died suddenly of a previously undiagnosed kidney ailment on Feb. 2, 1910. He left Amy, then 36, with their 13-year-old daughter, Mary. Conveniently, Amy had taken out an insurance policy on James just weeks before he died. She would thus be able to keep the Prospect Street house.

As many as 20 residents – she called them ‘inmates’ – lived in the house at any one time. They could pay from $7 to $25 a week, or a flat fee of $1,000 for the rest of their lives. The house doctor, Howard King, later said Amy sometimes herded the inmates together into crowded rooms and let them fend for themselves.

Neighbors on Prospect Street had noticed an unusually large number of deaths in the home. The undertaker always arrived in the dead of night to take away the latest body.

St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church today. Image courtesy Google Maps.

What was going on? Amy was a tiny, pious widow who always carried a Bible and gave generously to St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church. She said she had the bodies removed from the house quickly because she didn’t want to upset the other inmates. But why so many bodies?

Michael Gilligan

In 1913, Amy had married Michael Gilligan, a healthy and hearty widower with a handful of adult children and a hefty savings account. He died on Feb. 10, 1914, just months after their marriage, and he willed his entire estate to her.

Amy Archer-Gilligan covered her tracks cleverly, but not cleverly enough. Michael Gilligan had a friend, Carl Goslee, who wrote obituaries as a freelancer for the Courant. He had written a lot of obituaries about the inmates of the Archer home. Between 1907 and 1916, 60 residents died at the home, 48 within the last five years.

Goslee took his suspicions to Clifton Sherman, his editor, who sent him and another reporter to bring back the death certificates of all who died at the Archer Home.

The obituary writer also went to the W.H. Mason Drugstore (in 2020, the Broad Street Barber and Siam Corner Thai Kitchen). There he learned Amy and her inmates had bought huge amounts of arsenic. Amy claimed she needed the poison for a serious rat problem at the home.

The H.H. Mason Drugstore today. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Alcorn’s Investigation

In 1914, the Connecticut State Police was only 11 years old and murder investigation hadn’t developed into the science it is today. That, at least, is one explanation for why it took nearly two years for state police to arrest Amy Archer-Gilligan for the murder of Franklin Andrews.

Toward the end of 1914, an undercover state police officer named Zola Bennett moved into the home pretending to be a wealthy widow. Bennett learned how Amy bilked her residents, either borrowing money from them or asking them to turn over their estates to her in return for lifetime care.

The state police carefully gathered more evidence over the next year.

By May 9, 1916, “We became certain that something was wrong,” Alcorn told newspaper reporters.

“Then we exhumed the bodies and were convinced that it was a case of cool, calculated premeditated murder of inmates of the home,” he said.

Buried Bodies

Alcorn had ordered Michael Gilligan exhumed, and the coroner found arsenic in his body. Though undertakers used arsenic in the embalming process, that couldn’t explain the enormous amount of arsenic in his stomach.

Alcorn also ordered investigators to dig up Franklin Andrews. He wanted it done secretly because he feared Archer-Gilligan would destroy evidence if she knew how close the investigation was coming.

The Courant reported the “eerie tale” began “in a cemetery toolhouse in Cheshire on a spring night in 1916, where Dr. Arthur J. Wolff and a small group of assistants performed an autopsy by the light of a lantern and ‘two pocket electric flashlights’ on the exhumed remains of Franklin Andrews.

Hillside Cemetery in Cheshire, Conn., where Franklin Andrews was buried (twice). Image courtesy Google Maps.

The former Franklin Andrews, dead two years, rested on a plank placed on two barrels.

Nellie Pierce had joined them, and watched as the doctor determined her brother had died of arsenic poisoning. His death certificate claimed he had died of a gastric ulcer. Howard King, Amy’s house doctor and Windsor’s medical examiner, had certified Andrews’ death.

Alcorn ordered three other autopsies. In the end, he decided to charge Amy Archer-Gilligan with five counts of first-degree murder. Police, though, believed she killed at least 20 inmates by giving them elderberry wine laced with arsenic.

One victim, Charles Smith, had withdrawn his life savings, more than $3,000, and given it to her before he died at 87. Another, Alice Gowdy, had paid $500 to move into Franklin Andrews’ room just a few days after his death. She died the same way he did six months later.

Investigators also determined Amy Archer-Gilligan had forged Michael Gilligan’s will leaving everything to her.

Arsenic and Old Lace Arrest

On May 18, 1916, Hugh Alcorn and state police officers – including Zola Bennett, who had since moved out – visited Amy Archer-Gilligan at the home.

Under questioning, she insisted on her innocence.

“I am a poor, hard-working woman and I can’t understand why I am persecuted as I have been during the last few years,” the Courant reported she told police. “This is a Christian work and one that is very trying as we have to put up with lots of things on account of the peculiarities of the old people.”

The police carried away papers and bottles with labels on them, the Courant reported. More than a year later, on June 19, 1917, her month-long trial began. Alcorn, who led the prosecution, brought in medical experts to testify that her victims died of poison, and they had ingested it while alive.

It took a jury 15 minutes to find Amy Archer-Gilligan guilty.

Mary Archer at the time of the Arsenic and Old Lace trial

The judge sentenced her to death by hanging. But she appealed, and received a new trial in 1919. Her daughter Mary testified to her mother’s innocence, revealing that she had an addiction to morphine.

During the trial, Amy kept repeating the same phrase, “I want to go home.” Then, finally, she made a plea. She’d admit to guilt on one count of second-degree murder. Hugh Alcorn accepted the bargain, and she went to the Wethersfield State Prison, supposedly for life.

In 1924, officials declared her temporarily insane and sent her to the state insane asylum in Middletown, Conn. Her medical records are sealed, and so the only clue to her mental state are reports that she played funeral music on the piano when no one had died.

The insane asylum in Middletown, Conn.

Her temporary insanity lasted 38 years, and she died there on April 23, 1962.

The Rest of the Story

Hugh Alcorn continued prosecuting criminals, 15,000 during his career, to be exact. Meanwhile, a playwright named Joseph Kesserling asked Alcorn to help him write a play about the Amy Archer-Gilligan murders. Alcorn gave him access to court documents.

Kesselring had the good fortune to win the sponsorship of talented producers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, according to Gregory William Mank in The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema. Mank called the original version, titled Bodies in the Basement, a tasteless mess, ‘almost Springtime for Hitler-style awful’ and devoid of humor.

Lindsay and Crouse quietly rewrote the play, turning Amy into two maiden aunts, giving Kesselring credit and renaming it Arsenic and Old Lace. They did, though, share royalties with Kesserling.

The audience loved the black humor, with lines such as, “Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.” Or, “One of our gentlemen found time to say ‘How delicious!’ before he died.”

It ran for 1,400 shows. Hugh Alcorn, of course, didn’t find it funny. He retired the next year, and died in 1955 at the age of 82.

One son, Hugh Meade Alcorn, served as Republican leader of the Connecticut General Assembly in the 1940s and chairman of the Republican National Committee in the late 1950s. Another son, Howard Wells Alcorn, served as Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court. A third son, Robert Hayden Alcorn, wrote a number of books, including No Bugles for Spies and a history of Suffield, Conn.

In 1944 Frank Capra turned the play into the film classic starring Cary Grant.

Images: Arsenic and Old Lace cover, By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia

With thanks to Devil’s Rooming House: The True Story of America’s Deadliest Female Serial Killer By M. William Phelps and Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Connecticut History by Ray Bendici. This story was updated in 2023.

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Rhode Island’s Little Annapolis: The PT Boat Training Center at Melville

During World War II, Rhode Island residents could hear the roar of PT boat engines from Narragansett Bay all day and see tracer bullets fired over the ocean at night.

They could watch the PT boats racing around either in formation or practicing maneuvers. Perhaps Richard Nixon saw them from the Quonset Point Naval air station while he trained there in 1942. Perhaps George H.W. Bush had an aerial view of the little boats while training at the Charlestown Naval Air Station. And maybe they caught a glimpse of John F. Kennedy racing around the bay, leaving a rooster tail in his wake.

Birth of the PT Boat

The Navy had recognized early in the war that it needed small, high-speed, heavily armed gunboats to use among the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific. From that insight came the Patrol Torpedo boat, known as the PT boat. You may have seen PT boats in motion pictures such as They Were Expendable and PT 109 or the comedy TV show, McHale’s Navy.

Nearly all of the 14,000 PT boat officers and men trained at the small navy base on Narragansett Bay in the village of Melville, a part of Portsmouth, R.I. The Navy didn’t just train its men there, but developed PT boat policies and tactics as well.

Not many histories of these small bases have been written. Melville, however, graduated a disproportionate number of extremely successful men. In addition to a president of the Unite States, Melville graduated a U.S. Supreme Court justice, three movie stars, five U.S. ambassadors, four NFL coaches, six top corporate executives and a U.S. attorney general – to name a few.

This is their story.

Devil Boats

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

PT boat logo

The base was formally known as the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center (MTBSTC). The Japanese called them Devil Boats, and the Navy fondly called them the Mosquito Fleet, after their logo. The Secretary of the Navy signed an order establishing the PT boat fleet on Feb. 17, 1942.

In the beginning, a Massachusetts firm began construction on the small base. But then the Navy largely turned it over to the Rhode Island companies of Gilbane, Coleman and Collins. When all was said and done, there would be 59 buildings and 150 Quonset Huts (a Rhode Island invention). These buildings and huts would house classrooms, mess halls, warehouses, machine shops, living quarters and more — everything you’d find in a large Navy base.

The builders literally built a boat basin for the PT boats out of a swamp. It was staffed full time by 57 officers and 280 enlisted men. Motorists could see it from the Mt. Hope Bridge, which connects Bristol and Portsmouth.

Alongside the PT boat training unit was the Motor Torpedo Boat Repair Training Unit (MTBRTU). This unit had a staff of 30 officers and 950 enlisted men. Here they trained on maintaining the three 1500-horsepower Packard engines on a PT boat either in dock or the field. On the other side of the base was the Naval Fuel and Net Depot – a good location because those Packard engines gobbled up huge amounts of high-octane fuel.

Melville also had the advantage of having the Navy’s Newport Torpedo Station on Goat Island down the road from it. The torpedo station could provide training duds, sometimes live, for the torpedo boats to practice with. It also supplied experimental torpedoes to try out and a seven-mile torpedo range running north from the torpedo station up Narragansett Bay toward Prudence Island.

Mount Hope Bridge

Specht Tech

The Navy organized the PT boats into 44 squadrons, generally comprised of 12 boats. All told, the Navy commissioned over 650 PT boats by the end of the war.

The men nicknamed the squadrons ‘RON’, from the last three letters of ‘squadron,’ and added their number. RON 4 began operations at the Newport Navy Base on Jan. 13, 1942. It later moved to the crowded Melville base and remained in operation for the duration of the war. RON 4 patrolled the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts coastline. Thus Narragansett Bay provided a safe haven for training and experimentation.

Lt. William C. Specht, soon promoted to lieutenant commander, was tapped to serve as Melville’s first commander in March 1942. He also ran the repair and fuel depots. Specht oversaw the construction of the base as well as the development of its curriculum. Navy men assigned to the course at Melville joked they attended “Specht Tech.”

Lt. jg. John F. Kennedy in PT 109

Plenty Tough

The PT boats were built mostly by the Higgins Company in New Orleans and the ELCO Company, a division of Electric Boat, the submarine builder. They had to measure at least 77 feet long in order to carry and launch Mark 8 torpedoes. They also carried twin 50-caliber machine guns. Some of the PT boats had 20 mm cannons.

The crewmen did their gunnery training at the Anti-Aircraft Center at Price’s Neck on Newport’s Ocean Drive. George Donovan, now 92, remembers them practicing at night. Along with his brother and cousins, he watched from his grandmother’s bedroom window, which faced Ocean Drive. They were fascinated and mesmerized watching countless tracer bullets fired out over the ocean at practice targets towed by small airplanes. These trainees used live ammunition, and occasionally they strayed off target and accidently shot down the tow plane.

The men trained in their PT boats on Narragansett Bay and in the ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, 10 miles south of Newport. People said the rooster tail and the roar of the engines was most impressive the first time you heard and saw them. These boats could travel between 40-45 miles an hour at full throttle and were physically demanding to operate. So demanding they sometimes said that “PT” meant the men had to be ‘plenty tough.’

A PT boat underway near Midway

Accidents Happen

Occasionally, things went wrong.

Whenever the torpedo station was going to launch a test torpedo along its seven-mile range off Gould Island, it blew a very loud warning whistle. But one day in 1942 the commander of PT 122 did not hear the whistle, understandable over the roar of three Packard engines. He strayed into the test range and was nearly sunk by a test torpedo.

On another occasion that same year, PT 59 launched a torpedo in error. It traveled an estimated seven miles and struck the cargo ship USS Capella, anchored off Jamestown, and it began to sink. The quick-thinking skipper used his powerful engines to push the Capella to shallow water and thus save her from sinking. She was later repaired and put back into service. However, the entire incident was kept secret until the 1970’s.

Then in 1943, another PT boat launched a torpedo that went off course and sank a freighter anchored off the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

And while patrolling Rhode Island coastal waters, PT 200 struck an unknown submerged object and sank.

Melville Today

Soon after the end of World War II, the Navy decommissioned the Melville Training Center and dismantled it. All that remains today are a couple of buildings and a plaque to commemorate what once was there. A busy marina operates in the PT boat cove.

When I was a youngster in the early 1960s, my friends and I used to play on an abandoned PT boat, which had been stripped of its armament and beached on the shore of what is now Hanley’s Beach, on Jacobs Point along the river in Warren, R.I. It had apparently crashed into something submerged because it had a large hole in its hull. We could enter the PT boat through the hole and play around, imagining what once might have taken place aboard her.

According to the Warren Preservation Society, what remained of the PT boat burned to the ground about 1970. All that’s left is some iron from what once must have been her engines.

Today there are precious few PT boats remaining, perhaps 10 in the world. Two fully restored boats can be seen on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. If you want to experience what they were really like, take a trip to New Orleans and the National WW II Museum where they have fully restored the PT 305 to fully operating condition. You can even take a 45-minute ride on it in Lake Ponchartrain.

As noted previously, about 14,000 people went through the Melville Training Station out of about 12 million men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. What seems to me remarkable, and far out of proportion to its size, is the number notable men who served there.

The PT boat in Battleship Cove

Melville Alumni

Here is an incomplete listing:

Anthony Akers, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand

Paul Austin, Chairman of the Board, Coca Cola

Howard Baker, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, chief of staff to President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan

William C. Battle, President of Field Crest Mills, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Charles A. Black, husband of Shirley Temple and aquaculture pioneer

John D. Bulkeley, Navy Vice Admiral and one of the most decorated men in military history, including the Medal of Honor; skippered PT boat that took Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines

Michael Burke, CBS Sports executive and President of the New York Yankees

John Clagett, author of 19 books

Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American football player, Notre Dame 1941; college football coach`

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., part of the invasion of Southern France, organized the Beach Jumpers, movie actor

Paul B. (Red) Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy, author

John Harllee, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission

Michael J. Holovak, All-American football player, Boston College, 1942; college football coach and NFL team executive

John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

Joe Kuharich, college football coach and head coach NFL teams

Elgar Laux, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corp.

Walter Lemm, head coach Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals

Henry Loeb, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

Carl Maddox, Athletic Director, Louisiana State University

Clinton McClain, player, New York Giants

Torbert MacDonald, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts

John N. Mitchell, U.S. Attorney General

Robert Montgomery, actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild

James Madden Newberry, founder of PT Boats, Inc.

Jack B. Olson, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas

Paul T. Rennell, Vice President, Pan American World Airways

Don Rickles, actor and comedian

Raymond P. Shafer, Governor of Pennsylvania

Preston L. Sutphen, Sr., President of Electric Boat, builder of PT boats

Harold Thorkilsen, President and CEO, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Malcolm Troon, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Soviet Union

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, millionaire

George Vanderbilt, millionaire

Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

End Notes

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, passed away in 2020. He published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Images: PT Boat at Battleship Cove By Wikimaster97commons – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3846572; John F. Kennedy in PT 109 courtesy the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. This story was updated in 2023.

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Elton John Sings The Praises of 19th-C Quackery Queen, Lydia Pinkham

In 1968, a song about a quack medicine became a No. 1 hit in the U.K. nearly a century after Lydia E. Pinkham began mass-marketing the stuff in Massachusetts.

Lydia E. PInkham

For years, Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, made of alcohol and herbs, was one of the best known patent medicines of the 19^th century.

But because it was aimed at curing female complaints, it became the subject of ribald drinking songs. Then in 1968, a British comedy trio called The Scaffold updated the song into a commercial hit, Lily the Pink.

Paul McCartney’s brother belonged to the trio that sang Lily the Pink, Jack Bruce played bass on the song, and Elton John and Graham Nash sang backup vocals.

You can hear the trio, called The Scaffold, sing Lily the Pink here, and you can actually buy Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound at Walmart.

Lydia E. Pinkham

Patent medicines flourished in the 1890s, before the government finally cracked down and regulated them. Often they included alcohol, opiates and a little something to create a bitter, medicinal flavor.

Of all the 19^th century patent medicines, Lydia E. Pinkham’s alcohol-and-herb Vegetable Compound was perhaps the best known.

Lydia E. Pinkham advertising card

Supposedly the Vegetable Compound relieved menstrual and menopausal symptoms, but its success was due as much to the shrewd marketing of Lydia E. Pinkham as it was to its effectiveness. Her kindly face peered out from every package, and she printed booklets of advice for women. She used advertising slogans such as, “A wife can blame herself if she loses love by getting “middle age” skin!” and “Are YOU just a plaything of nature?”

Lydia E. Pinkham was born in Lynn, Mass., on Feb. 9, 1819, to a well-to-do family. She married Isaac Pinkham, a shoe manufacturer, in 1843, but the Panic of 1873 destroyed his business. Lydia E. Pinkham began selling her homemade remedy to survive, inviting customers to write to her and ask questions about the facts of life. Today, historians credit Lydia E. Pinkham for discussing women’s troubles more forthrightly than just about anyone else in her day.

Rude, Crude, Funny

But those forthright discussions made her a target for rugby players, who pride themselves on being rude, crude and funny. They often sang a version of the Ballad of Lydia Pinkham while changing after matches. One version includes these lyrics:

Let us sing (let us sing) of Lydia Pinkham
The benefactress of the human race.
She invented a vegetable compound,
And now all papers print her face…

Oh Mrs. Murphy (Oh Mrs. Murphy)
Was perturbed because she couldn’t seem to pee
Till she took some of Lydia’s compound
And now they run a pipeline to the sea!

Its popularity as a drinking song also stems from its sale as a 40 proof beverage during Prohibition. During World War II The Ballad of Lydia, Pinkham was the unofficial regimental song of the Royal Tank Corps during World War II.

The Scaffold

By 1968, The Scaffold sanitized the song, calling it Lily the Pink. They recorded it in Abbey Road studios, using Ringo Starr’s drum. They included a line about ‘Jennifer Eccles and her terrible freckles’ as an homage to a hit by Graham Nash’s former band, the Hollies, which had a hit called Jennifer Eccles.

Tim Rice, lyricist for Evita, joined Nash and Elton John, then known as Reginald Dwight, on backup vocals.

After the song topped the charts, the Irish Rovers recorded a version of Lily the Pink, which reached the Top 30 in the United States.

Disfiguring Pages

Lydia E. Pinkham wasn’t just mocked by rugby players and British songsters. The medical profession criticized her too. In 1915, the Pennsylvania Medical Journal praised The Village Record, a Westchester newspaper, for refusing to carry patent medicine advertisements. “We wish we could say the same of all the papers published in the county,” wrote the Journal. “The unattractive portrait of Lydia Pinkham continues to disfigure their pages and the nauseating accounts of the symptoms for the relief of which her medicine is advised make very poor reading for young and old.”

Lydia E. Pinkham by then was gone, having died on May 17, 1883 at the age of 64. Her house in Lynn was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. Her daughter founded the Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic in Salem, Mass. to provide health services to young mothers and their children. Designated Site 9 of the Salem Women’s Heritage Trail, it is still in operation.

Image of Elton John By Ernst Vikne – originally posted to Flickr as Elton John in Norway, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7113376. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Outrageous Comical Brown Comes to Town

If you live in a New England town with town hall, a school, a church or an opera house, chances are good it was visited at least once by the outrageous showman William B. Brown, better known as Comical Brown.

Comical Brown

Born in 1833 in Lancaster, Mass., into a Quaker family, as a child he prepared to become a shoemaker. But at 16 his musical talent took him in a different direction. He began performing small concerts on the violin to help support his blind father. It set the direction for the next 45 years of his life.

At first he took small parts in minstrel shows and regularly performed in the stage play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the book of the same name. By the mid-1860s, however, he hit the road as a headliner. An advance man would work the towns on Brown’s calendar, appearing a few days in advance to plaster the town with fliers and newspaper notices for “That Comical Brown!” show.

His act consisted of a number of humorous monologues in which he took the role of cranky, old Yankee or warm-hearted Irishman. He joked with the crowd while spinning yarns and songs designed to draw laughs or groans. Mixed in, he played the violin and turned the stage over to other members of his small troop.

His other acts included Frank Hayden, boy soprano; E.A. Marsh, contralto, singing the Star Spangled Banner; or a trained dog act featuring Scottie and Prince Charlie doing tricks.

As Brown traveled from town to town, he updated his material each year or two so it was fresh whenever he rolled into town. He brought the fun of the vaudeville stage to the small towns of New England and beyond for a remarkable 45 years.

Comical Brown Makes ‘Em Laugh

In 1885 Brown compiled some of his best material and published it as Comical Brown’s Songster – equal parts cornball observations and slyly racy songs. Male/female relationships, man’s personal foibles, the temperance society and other timely topics were staples of his comedy. This number, Of Course It’s No Business of Mine, surely raised the rafters when he belted it out:

Now, for instance, at Mrs. Montgomery’s,
Every afternoon, just about three,
When her husband is out at his business,
A gent with moustache comes to tea.

He stays till half-past eight o’clock,
For the husband don’t get home till nine;
Now I’d like to know what he does there!
But then it’s no business of mine.

Across the way lives dear Miss Baxter,
A nice, dashing, handsome young girl;
Who, for the last twelve months or so,
Has been flirting with Mr. Fitz-Furl;

They say she is going to be married,
Well, I must say I think it is time;
For, if she’s not married, she’d ought to be,
But then it’s no business of mine.

I met Lucy Bell t’other evening,
With her nephew going out for a walk,
And, of course, as soon as she saw me,
She stopped and began a long talk

All about her dear little nephew,
Who she said was between eight and nine,
But some say it isn’t her nephew,
But then it’s no business of mine.

At Mrs. Fitz-Snooks’, round the corner,
Last evening I heard such a din,
And found that she’d not paid her rent,
So the Sheriff they quickly brought in.

I don’t know what she does with her money,
Though her nose always redly does shine,
I think that she spends it for brandy,
But of course it’s no business of mine.

Comical Brown Hits a Sour Note

Contralto E.A. Marsh costumed for The Daughter of the Regiment. (Library of Congress)

The indignities of the comedy circuit were many. The show had to go on each night in a new town, regardless of weather. Comical Brown’s critics suggested there was good reason he never played the same venue two nights in a row: because once the audience heard his act they would warn their neighbors not to bother.

One particularly joyless stop came in Charlton, Mass. where Brown was forced to play in a church rather than the town hall, which had burned. He churned out his music and jokes to a stone-faced audience, whose members were too intimidated by the church sexton glaring from the rear of the church to even crack a smile.

Over the years, Comical Brown moved around New England, living in Somerville, Mass. and Rutland and Barre in Vermont. As he grew older there were hints that he was slipping, though he was still much loved. The Saint Johnsbury Caledonian reported in 1891, “Comical Brown played to a large audience at the Opera House Thanksgiving night. Everybody was kept in good humor and though Brown is not as good as he used to be, he still makes folks laugh.”

Comical Brown’s career finally ended in 1893. At the age of 60 he was found unconscious at a Boston train station, possibly headed for his next concert. He died at the nearby hospital leaving behind a widow and two daughters. His death was reported as far away as California.

The Afterlife

The Comical Brown act lived on for more than a decade after Brown’s death in the form of the “Comical Brown Concert and Comedy Company.” It was also “billed as Comical Brown’s Old Show with a replacement cast.” Finally, his act became synonymous with outdated, stale jokes. Into the 1920s, if someone told a particularly unfunny, old joke, the proper response was, “That’s a great one. I think I remember Comical Brown using it.”

In 1909 Brown’s career was eulogized by Broadway playwright Stanley Rosenfeld in the comedy-drama The Barnstormer, about the star of one-man show traveling to backwoods towns in the waning days of his career. It was not a hit.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places New England Films Were Shot

New England films number in the hundreds since the turn of the last century, partly because the region provides such rich material for stories and characters set against quaint fishing villages, Gilded Age resorts and prep school campuses.

Familiar themes appear again and again in those settings. The theme of the salty sea captain fighting a sea monster inspired films from Moby Dick through Jaws. Family secrets inspired Eugene O’Neill’s fictional Ah Wilderness in 1906 as well as Peyton Place.

Local characters populate many New England films: the rustic Yankee in The Trouble With Harry, the stalwart fisherman in Jaws and the outsider struggling to assimilatein A Separate Peace.

Here, then, are six New England films, each shot on location in at least one of the New England States. If you know of other New England films worth mentioning, please share in the comments section.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Paul Zindel about an eccentric, unhappy middle-aged widow, Beatrice Hunsdorfer, and her teen-aged daughters, Ruth, an epileptic doomed to repeat her mother’s mistakes and Matilda, who is quiet, ambitious and intelligent.

Joanne Woodward played the lead, her husband Paul Newman directed and their daughter Nell Potts (who later ran Newman’s Organics) played Matilda. Roberta Wallach, Eli Wallach’s daughter, played Ruth.

Though the story took place on Staten Island, the film was shot in Bridgeport, Conn., because it was only 17 minutes from Paul Newman’s home in Westport, Conn. The set was constructed inside an abandoned Hungarian church, and scenes were shot at Warren Harding High School.

Warren Harding High School

Joanne Woodward immersed herself in the role, and later admitted to taking her angry, humorless persona home with her. One night Paul Newman arrived at a friend’s house carrying his clothes in a shopping bag. “I’d like to occupy your spare room,” he said. “If I spend another night in bed with Beatrice Hunsdorfer, one of us will not be on the set tomorrow.”

Peyton Place

Camden, Maine

Peyton Place was based on New Hampshire writer Grace Metalious’ best selling novel of the same name. It told the story of sordid secrets – adultery, sexual abuse, murder and hypocrisy – hidden behind New England’s closed doors.

Producers looked long and hard for a New England location. Vermont and New Hampshire rejected them because of the racy content. So they turned to the Maine towns of Skowhegan, Waterville and Wiscasset. Ultimately they chose Camden, where the public library wouldn’t put Peyton Place on its shelves.

Scene from Peyton Place

The 1957 film, which starred Lana Turner, was shot mostly in Camden, Maine, with some exteriors filmed in Belfast and Rockland (also Lake Placid, N.Y.). About 500 local people appeared in the film as extras, though some ended up on the cutting room floor.

The film premiered in Camden two days before everyone else saw it. Peyton Place didn’t do well at the box office for the first four months. Then, Lana Turner’s daughter killed her mother’s mobster lover, Johnny Stompanato. It became the second-highest grossing film of 1958.

Peyton Place received nine Oscar nominations, including four for supporting performances.

Back then Camden was mostly a working-class town that attracted some well-to-do tourists. Today it’s a wealthy tourist town, though it still looks much the way it did when the film was shot.

Jaws

Menemsha

The 1975 horror film, Jaws was a classic summer blockbuster and a watershed in the American movie industry. It featured a simple premise — the hunt for a man-eating shark that terrorized beachgoers.

The most successful of New England films – and in box office history at the time — it set a precedent as an action and adventure films released during the summer in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily.

Jaws was filmed in Massachusetts, mostly in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard, as well as in Falmouth. The film features the American Legion Memorial Bridge between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown. Now it’s referred to as the “Jaws bridge.” (Click here for a map of the Martha’s Vineyard filming locations.)

Jaws won many awards, including three Academy Awards, despite an inauspicious start. “”We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark,” said Richard Dreyfuss, one of the film’s stars.

In 2001, Congress voted to include Jaws in the National Film Archive as “culturally significant.” The author, Peter Benchley, later felt guilty about unfairly maligning the Great White Shark, a creature generally uninterested in eating human beings.

A Separate Peace

Phillps Exeter

Producers didn’t have to look too hard to find a setting for the movie A Separate Peace, based on the novel by the same name written by John Knowles. Knowles based his bittersweet coming-of-age story on his time at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. So in 1972 when the filmmakers were adapting the story to the screen and needed a locale for “Devon Academy,” they brought the story back to Exeter.

Sharp-eyed viewers will also notice Newfields, N.H., and Salisbury Beach, Mass. in some of the backgrounds.

The film, about the rivalry between two school chums during the World War II era, received mixed reviews. But fans in New England enjoyed seeing the familiar locations highlighted. Phillips Exeter still maintains a photo essay that shows where scenes from the film were shot.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day

Anita O’Day at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958

One of the great concert documentaries, Jazz on a Summer’s Day captures many of America’s greatest jazz musicians performing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. Filmed in Freebody Park, where the festival took place, it includes shots of the audience, the city and the America’s Cup race, then in progress.

The film was shot by fashion photographer Bert Stern and won praise for its lush, color-drenched luminosity and breezy feel. Headliner Louis Armstrong sings Rocking Chair with Jack Teagarden, Dinah Washington swings to All of Me, Ray Charles belts out I Got A Woman and Chuck Berry does the duck walk to Sweet Little Sixteen.

The star of the film, though, is Anita O’Day, who sings Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two in white gloves and enormous feathered hat. (Watch her here.)

Trouble With Harry

Craftsbury Common

Just about all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films are classics, and The Trouble With Harry is no exception.

The trouble with Harry in the film is that he was dead. Hitchcock’ filmed his 1955 dark comedy starring John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine filmed in the Vermont towns of Morrisville, Barre and Craftsbury Commons.

The crew arrived in Craftsbury on September 27, 1954 to film outdoor shots of fall foliage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any, so they glued leaves on trees.

The Trouble With Harry was nominated for three awards, including BAFTA, Directors’ Guild and Satellite for “Outstanding Classic DVD” in 2005.

Images: Camden, Maine, made by Robert Swanson. Original uploader was Ryssby at en.wikipedia – Transfered from en.wikipedia Transfer was stated to be made by User:Blast., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3185574. Menemsha By User:Elkman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Menemsha.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1350749. This story was updated in 2022.

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Elias Howe, Sewing Machine Inventor, Gets a Little Help From the Beatles

Why the Beatles dedicated a film to Elias Howe is a bit of a mystery, but some of the more preposterous explanations actually tell us something about the life of the sewing machine inventor.

In 1965, the Beatles starred in a musical comedy called Help! The film ends with a credit:

This film is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Mr. Elias Howe, who, in 1846, invented the sewing machine.

Image from the 1965 film, Help.

The most probable explanation is that it was just absurdist British humor.

Other explanations help explain Howe’s struggles inventing the machine and getting credit for it.

Elias Howe

First, a little about Elias Howe. He was born July 9, 1819, in Spencer, Mass., at a time when nearly everyone sewed by hand. Women made clothing, shirts, sheets and towels, and men knew how to repair a shirt.

Elias Howe

At 16 he apprenticed in a factory in Lowell, Mass., but he lost his job in the Panic of 1837. Howe then found work in Boston in a machinist’s shop, and he began tinkering with a mechanical sewing machine.

Over the previous century, others had gotten patents for mechanical sewing devices, or at least designed working models. A French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, invented one in 1829. He found some partners and opened a factory to mass produce uniforms for the French Army. His competitors had other ideas. Two hundred French tailors rioted, ransacked the factory and threw the sewing machines out the windows.

Cannibal Dream

A dream gave Elias Howe the inspiration for his invention of the sewing machine. He dreamt that cannibals surrounded him and prepared to cook him as they waved spears. When he awoke, he remembered the spears, which had holes in the shaft and moved up and down.

He invented the machine in 1845 and got a patent for it from New Hartford, Conn., in 1846. His innovation was the lock stitch, which uses one needle with a thread that goes up and down, picking up a thread from a bobbin or shuttle on the other side of the fabric.

Which brings us to the Beatles’ movie: In it, Ringo is surrounded by cult members preparing to sacrifice him. It’s been suggested that Howe’s dream inspired the scene. That is probably a stretch.

Isaac Singer

Perhaps even more of a stretch was suggested by Sherry Ann White in a book about John Lennon. It has to do with Isaac Singer.

Elias Howe couldn’t interest anyone in his machine in the United States, so he went to England. He came home broke to Cambridge, Mass., and went to work as a journeyman machinist.

But he found Isaac Singer selling a sewing machine using his lock-stitch mechanism. Howe took Singer to court, mortgaging his father’s farm to pay lawyers.

The case set off the great sewing machine war of the mid-19^th century, with sewing machine makers suing each other over patent infringement on different parts of the invention.

Elias Howe’s sewing machine

Howe won his case in 1854 and Isaac Singer had to pay him $15,000, about $400,000 in today’s money.

Isaac Singer had a business partner named Edward Clark, who developed the Dakota apartment building. That’s where the Beatles reference comes in: John Lennon moved to the Dakota Apartments in 1973.

“Did John know about his sewing machine message and the building of the Dakota eight years before he moved into the Dakota?” wrote White. “I believe he did.”

We said it was a stretch.

You’re a Rich Man

Two years after winning his case, Elias Howe joined with Isaac Singer and others to pool their patents and sell sewing machines around the world.

Howe received $5 for every machine sold in the United States and $1 for every machine sold overseas. That added up to $2 million, or about $400 million today.

He donated some of his wealth to buy equipment for the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army during the Civil War. Howe enlisted in the regiment as a private, though he was 42 years old and in ill health. He served out his time as regimental postmaster, carrying messages back and forth.

After the war, Elias Howe built a sewing machine factory in Bridgeport, Conn. He died in 1867 of gout and a massive blood clot. A statue of him now stands in Bridgeport’s Seaside Park, created from his regiment’s training ground.

This story about Elias Howe was updated in 2023.

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