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Benedict Arnold’s Treason Unmasked to Washington—in Arnold’s Own House

George Washington learned about Benedict Arnold’s treason while staying at Benedict Arnold’s house near West Point. He wondered why Arnold, his best battlefield commander, wasn’t there. As he was getting ready for dinner, Alexander Hamilton brought him the news.

Arnold had vanished moments before Washington rode up to the sprawling mansion along the Hudson River. He had received a letter telling him that Washington knew, or would soon know, that the jig was up. The Americans had arrested a suspicious person with incriminating evidence in Arnold’s handwriting, the letter said.

Benedict Arnold

Arnold had received the dispatch over breakfast with two of Washington’s aides. They had gone to Arnold’s house ahead of the rest of the commander-in-chief’s entourage. Arnold had excused himself and gone somewhere on urgent business–to the fort, he told them.

They never saw him again.

Benedict Arnold’s Treason

Benedict Arnold’s treason stemmed from a web of motives. They included a desire to avenge his honor, a measure of greed, painful and crippling battle wounds and the influence of his Loyalist wife.

By the time Washington showed up at his house, he had already given the British information about planned American troop movements.

He was born Jan. 14, 1741 in Norwich, Conn., into a once-prominent New England family. His great-grandfather, also Benedict Arnold, had served as governor of Rhode Island. His great-great-grandfather, William Arnold, had established King’s Chapel in Boston. Benedict Arnold spent his boyhood in affluence, but his alcoholic father then squandered all his money.

His father’s failure meant Arnold couldn’t attend Yale, and it also gave him a thirst for money and honor. He succeeded at merchant shipping and privateering, only to lose practically everything in the patriot cause. When he turned traitor he demanded £20,000 for his services.

Col. Benedict Arnold, before his promotion to general

He had served the cause valiantly, capturing Fort Ticonderoga, leading the expedition to Quebec, stopping a British invasion at the Battle of Valcour Island. Arnold had also helped drive the British from Connecticut and led American forces to victory at Saratoga.

His men loved him. Congress did not, passing him over for promotion in favor of junior—and less heroic — men. His nemesis, Gen. Horatio Gates, hadn’t even mentioned Arnold’s name in his report about the Battle of Saratoga.

Love of Money

Arnold’s love of money got him into trouble. While he recovered from severe wounds at Saratoga (add photo of boot), Washington appointed him military governor of Philadelphia. The British had recently evacuated, and he fell in love with 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, from a prominent Loyalist family. They married April 8, 1779.

Peggy Shippen Arnold

Peggy liked to live large, as did her husband, and they led an ostentatious lifestyle. Arnold engaged in war profiteering, which led to his court martial. Though acquitted on several counts, the court recommended a reprimand for several minor transgression. Washington sent him a letter chastising him as gently as he could, but Arnold — crippled, bitter and married to a Loyalist — had already put out feelers to the British.

Rationale

Benedict Arnold’s treason resulted from patriotic motive, or so he told himself—and, later, Washington. The war in 1780 wasn’t going well. Congress dithered and failed to provide for the Continental Army, which suffered from poor morale. Currency inflation started spinning out of control. The alliance with France hadn’t produced any victories. Then in May came the worst defeat of the war when Gen. Benjamin Lincoln and his 10,000 troops surrendered unconditionally in Charleston, S.C. Washington despaired.

George Washington, 1776

The British had also made overtures for peace, giving the Americans almost everything they wanted except for independence.

Arnold wasn’t the only one who considered changing sides. Charles Lee, captured by the British, shared with them a plan to defeat the Continental Army.

And Ethan Allen negotiated with the British on behalf of Vermont for a separate peace. He wanted to protect his extensive land holdings and the British offered to recognize Vermont as an independent state, part of the British Empire.

Had some things gone differently, perhaps Benedict Arnold’s treason wouldn’t have happened. He wanted a naval command. He had plenty of experience at sea, and he felt his wounds made him unfit for battle on land. But Washington didn’t see it that way.

West Point

He ended up finagling command of West Point, a key American position on the Hudson River. Upon his arrival on August 25, Arnold began to dismantle the fort’s defenses. He didn’t make needed repairs and he sent two cannons away, ostensibly to get refurbished. Then he sent 500 men off to cut wood and another 200 north to guard Fishkill, N.Y.

The Beverly Robinson house.

The Arnolds – Benedict, Peggy and baby Edward – moved into a house two miles down the Hudson from the fort and on the other side. The house had belonged to wealthy Loyalist Col. Beverly Robinson, who helped Arnold change sides.

Arnold had been begging the British for a meeting with their spymaster, Maj. John Andre. The first attempt failed. Then in late September Andre sailed up the Hudson on the sloop of war HMS Vulture. On the evening of September 21, Arnold sent two men in a boat to pick up Andre. They didn’t want to do it, but Arnold threatened to arrest them. They rowed out, picked up Andre and took him to shore, where Arnold waited with another horse. The two men talked at the Joshua Smith house in Haverstraw, N.Y. Meanwhile, Continental troops spied the Vulture and began bombarding the vessel, forcing it to move downriver.

John Andre

The Vulture’s departure stranded Andre. So Arnold gave him civilian clothes, a letter of transit under the assumed name John Anderson and intelligence about West Point. Andre’s superior officer, Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, had expressly told him not to do those three things.

Caught Out

Arnold returned to his headquarters on the banks of the Hudson. Two days later, he sat down to breakfast with Capt. Samuel Shaw and Maj. James McHenry.

They had been traveling with Washington and arrived in advance of the general’s expected visit that day. Washington had told them to go on ahead while he inspected redoubts along the way. But his entourage — including Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette – stayed with Washington.

Arnold invited Shaw and McHenry to have breakfast with him while Peggy stayed upstairs with the baby. Then Lt. Solomon Allen arrived with a message for Arnold from Continental Army Col. John Jameson.

West Point from Phillipstown, 1831

Jameson wrote he found incriminating papers in the stocking of a suspicious person claiming to be John Anderson. He had sent the papers to Washington. Arnold realized they had captured Andre – “John Anderson” – and he would soon be unmasked.

As Arnold read the message he showed a moment of distress but quickly regained his composure. He excused himself and went outside to tell his servant to get a horse and alert his bargemen. Then he went upstairs to tell his wife he had to leave immediately to join the British. She fainted on the bed. Just then one of Washington’s light horsemen knocked on the bedroom door and told him Washington would arrive momentarily.

Col. John Jameson

Arnold then told his breakfast companions he had to go across the river to the fort to prepare for Washington’s visit. His horse didn’t await him, so he took the messenger’s horse. He galloped down to the river, where oarsmen waited to take him up the river to the fort. Or so they presumed.

Arnold ordered them downriver instead, offering them two gallons of rum each if they would row with all their might. When they approached the Vulture, he held up a white handkerchief. Arnold and the oarsmen boarded the vessel, and Arnold told them they were now prisoners. The men protested, but they were paroled when they arrived in New York.

Washington Finds Out

Moments after Arnold left, Washington rode up to the house. Told Arnold had gone to the fort, he ate a quick breakfast and went to the fort with Knox and Lafayette. Hamilton stayed behind in case any dispatches arrived. They agreed to meet back at the house for dinner, scheduled for 4 p.m.

Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox

Washington expected a military salute when he approached the fort, but none came. Mystified, he was approached by the fort’s commandant, Col. John Lamb, who apologized for the inadequate reception. He hadn’t known Washington was coming.

Washington then asked to see Arnold. Lamb said he hadn’t showed up in two days. Washington then proceeded to inspect the fort, all the while asking about Arnold’s whereabouts.

When Washington, Knox and Lafayette returned to the Robinson house, they expected Mr. and Mrs. Arnold to greet them. But he had disappeared and she was still upstairs, indisposed. Washington went to his room to prepare for dinner when Hamilton handed him a sheaf of dispatches.

Washington then read the news of Arnold’s betrayal. He asked Hamilton and Lafayette to join him. “Arnold has betrayed us,” he said. “Whom can we trust now??

Theatre

Washington ordered Hamilton to gather some men to intercept Arnold downriver. Then Arnold’s aide, Lt. Col. Richard Varick, came to Washington’s room and told him Mrs. Arnold seemed to have gone mad.

Washington then went to see Peggy, who he had known since girlhood. Peggy Shippen Arnold put on quite a show for him, thrashing, crying and raving deliriously. She convinced Washington, and for many years historians, that she knew nothing of Benedict Arnold’s treason. Her feigned madness gave her husband more time to escape.

Washington believed Benedict Arnold’s treason had unhinged his wife. He let her alone for dinner, and told no one else of Arnold’s treason. “Mrs. Arnold is sick and General Arnold is away,” Washington said. “We must therefore take our dinner without them.”

They barely touched their meal. Arnold’s aides, Lt. Col. Richard Varick and Maj. David Franks, had figured out Benedict Arnold’s treason. They knew they were under suspicion and covertly watched Washington to suss out what he knew. Washington and his officers did the same to them. “Never was there a more melancholy dinner,” Lafayette said years later. “The General was silent and reserved, and none of us spoke of what we were thinking about.”

After dinner, Washington asked Varick to stop outside. He told him about Benedict Arnold’s treason. Then he said he had no reason to suspect him or Franks, but they must consider themselves under arrest.

Peggy Shippen

Peggy had flirted with Andre during the British occupation of Philadelphia. Within a month of her marriage, Arnold corresponded with Andre. Later, evidence of Peggy’s involvement in Benedict Arnold’s treason came to light. The British had paid her £350 for handling secret letters.

The President’s House, Philadelphia, where Arnold lived as military general

Washington received a letter from Arnold, telling him Peggy didn’t know he’d turned traitor, and asking him to grant her safe passage to her family in Philadelphia. Washington gave her a choice: She could join her husband in New York or her family in Philadelphia. She chose Philadelphia.

At the same time, Washington intended to punish Benedict Arnold. He organized an attempt to track him down in New York, one that nearly succeeded. Had Arnold been captured, he would have been summarily hanged.

Aftermath

Andre went to the gallows on Oct. 2. A court martial exonerated Franks and Varick.

The British gave Arnold the rank of brigadier general, and he led his forces on destructive rampages through Virginia and Connecticut. Peggy eventually joined him in New York. After Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, the Arnold family left for London.

A few years later, Arnold returned to North America, settling in Canada to speculate in land and start a merchant shipping business. The family then returned to London, where Benedict Arnold died in 1801 at the age of 60. Peggy died three years later at the age of 44.

In 1781, American agents a letter that said the British had paid only £5,000 for Benedict Arnold’s treason, not the £20,000 he had demanded. Franklin wrote to Lafayette, calling it “a miserable bargain especially when one considers the quantity of infamy he has acquired to himself and entailed on his family.”

With thanks to Benedict Arnold: How The Traitor Was Unmasked by James Thomas Flexner, American Heritage, 1967; The Life and Treason of Benedict Arnold by Jared Sparks, 1851. This story updated in 2023.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation. The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast. People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month. “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.

This story updated in 2022.

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When Connecticut Went in for Comic Book Burning

On Feb. 26, 1955, a small group led by Mrs. Charles B. Gilbert of Norwich, Conn., posed for a photographer in front of a pickup truck filled with comic books. Two cute kids tossed more books into the back of the truck. The caption said the smiling Mrs. Gilbert planned a dramatic comic book burning in her hometown.

The photo made it into the New York press, where it stoked outrage among civil libertarians. The American Civil Liberties Union and the American Book Publishing Council objected.

But to no avail.

After World War II, baby boomers devoured billions of comic books that told thrilling tales of superheroes, crime fighters and hideous supernatural creatures. The cheap, colorful publications posed as much of a threat as dope dealers and Communists–at least in the minds of educational, religious and political authorities.

Germans burn books in 1933.

And so just a few short years after the defeat of the Germans, who notoriously burned books they disliked, Americans began putting matches to Batman and Johnny Thunder.

The 10-Cent Plague

The gentle comic strips of the 1920s — Winnie Winkle, Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley — were joined in the 1930s by super heroes, crime fighters, ghouls and war heroes.

In 1938, Superman made his debut in Action Comics, ushering in what some called the Golden Age of Comic Books.

Superman in 1940

Others called it the Ten-Cent Plague.

Superman spawned such crime-fighting superheroes as Batman, Captain Marvel and the sexy Wonder Woman. Superheroes and other comic book characters employed hundreds of artists, writers, letterers and colorists, as well as press operators, truck drivers and newsstand operators.

From the late 1930s until at least the late 1950s, at least five dozen publishers churned out millions of comic books. From 1943 to 1945, they produced a billion comic books, and in 1947 sold 60 million a month. The next year, people bought between 80 million and 100 million comic books a month.

Romance, Adventure and Horror

Nearly all comic book publishers had headquarters in Manhattan, but two located in Connecticut.

Plastic Man was a big hit for Quality Comics

A high-living entrepreneur named Busy Arnold moved his Quality Comics publishing company from Manhattan to Stamford, Conn., in 1940. Arnold lived in Greenwich and stashed his girlfriends at 10 Park Ave. in Manhattan. Arnold had hits with Plastic Man and Spirit, a crime fighter who wore a suit and fedora and possessed supernatural powers.

In Derby, Conn., Charlton Comics began publishing romance comics in 1948 with Sweethearts, then adding titles like Teen Confessions, Romantic Secrets and My Secret Life.

One of Roy Lichtenstein’s best known works, “Drowning Girl,” came from “Run for Love!” in Secret Hearts.

Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy preceded Superman by seven years, but the police detective also played a role in the evolution of comic books. Stories about bringing violent criminals to justice inspired a wave of crime comics such as Web of Evil, Justice Traps the Guilty, Shock SuspenStories and Murder, Morphine and Me.

Titles like Tales From the Crypt added to the gore and introduced villainous characters like man-eating lizards and killer puppets. A U.S. Senate subcommittee would later single out EC Comics for its gruesome illustrations of horror and crime stories.

Lash LaRue

In addition to romance, superheroes and crime, comic books offered western heroes like The Lone Ranger and Lash Larue, jungle tales featuring Tarzan and Jane and sci-fi adventures starring Buck Rogers.

The Ten-Cent Plague

What delighted juvenile readers horrified adults—especially educators, clerics and Sterling North. North, an author and literary editor for the Chicago Daily news, wrote a column titled “A National Disgrace.” In the column, appearing on May 8, 1940, he scathingly denounced comic books.

North called them ‘sadistic drivel’ and ‘a poisonous mushroom growth of the last two years.’ He charged their publishers with guilt for “a cultural slaughter of the innocents.”

The column was read widely and reprinted so many times the newspaper’s printer couldn’t keep up with orders.

‘Sadistic drivel’

Anti-Comic Crusaders

North’s column touched a nationwide anti-comics campaign that spread beyond America’s borders. Educators picked up the gauntlet. Two years after North’s column, an educator named Franklyn M. Brantley wrote that these ‘small insidious, colorful magazines’ ruined children’s moral fiber.

“On practically every page of every one of them can be found such themes as mayhem, playing up a voluptuous scantily clad siren, shady victories, weird and impossible settings, bribery, machine gunning, kidnapping,” he wrote. Brantley called comic books a plague that takes millions of dollars from children’s pockets. And he predicted they would leave behind ‘horrible desolation, grief and putrefaction.’

Slaughtering innocents

Religious and educational authorities along with anti-communists like J. Edgar Hoover joined in the fray. They denounced comics as ruining students’ scholastic performance and turning them into juvenile delinquents.

Even children’s book author Robert McCloskey piled on in 1943 when he had his Homer Price character turn his back on lurid comic books in the corner drugstore.

The First Comic Book Burning

A German-born psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham rallied the opposition to comic books. Wertham treated juvenile delinquents in a Harlem clinic, and he noticed the children all read comic books. That convinced him comic books caused juvenile delinquency. And so in 1948 he began to speak out against comic books in magazine interviews and at academic symposiums.

Fredric Wertham thought comic books caused juvenile delinquency

That same year, children, egged on by their parents, teachers and priests, began comic book burning. They started in Spencer, W. Va., with a 25-foot-high bonfire covered by the Associated Press. That inspired students in St. Patrick’s parochial school In Binghamton, N.Y., to collect 2,000 objectionable comic books in a house-to-house canvass. They then burned them in the school yard. Another comic book burning followed in Rumson, N.J., in Cape Girardeau, Mo., in Chicago and Vancouver, Canada.

Censorship

At least 50 cities and towns banned comic books outright. In Boston, the Watch and Ward Society and the Holy Name Society quietly removed hundreds of titles from booksellers’ shelves. New Britain’s city council instructed the police to ‘prohibit the display and sales of magazines and comic books pertinent to crime or sex and all other publications of an obscene nature.’ Hartford’s city council passed a “Clean Up the Newsstands” resolution urging magazine vendors to stop selling comics with themes of immorality and crime.

Then in 1954, Wertham published a book called Seduction of the Innocent. He argued that comic books caused juvenile delinquency because children mimicked the villains in them.

Cover of a Batman comic

Wertham also trashed romance comics for their ‘false sentiments,’ ‘cheapness’ and ‘titillation.’ He accused comic book makers of including hidden sexual themes, such as a gay Batman and Robin. Wertham even saw lewd pictures of naked people concealed in the bark of trees. He didn’t like Phantom Lady because of her sexy outfit, while he called Wonder Woman a lesbian. Superman, he said, was an un-American fascist.

Government Censure

On April 21-22 and June 4, 1954, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held televised hearings in New York City. The subject: comic books. The panel introduced Seduction of the Innocent as evidence, and called Wertham as a witness. “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry,” Wertham said.

In good taste, for a horror comic

William Gaines, publisher of EC Comics, also appeared as a witness. Gaines had been threatened with criminal proceedings by the Massachusetts attorney general for a satirical comic-book version of The Night Before Christmas.

Senators questioned Gaines about a cover depicting a severed head and a story about a vampire couple who adopt a child to fatten him up so they can drink his blood. (The child, as it happens, was a werewolf who ate his adoptive parents.) Gaines asked the subcommittee, “What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do?”

The senators, though, got the upper hand, badgering Gaines to admit that a severed head showed ‘good taste…for a horror comic.’

More Comic Book Burning

In the first half of 1955, American Legion Auxiliary chapters around the country launched Operation Book Swap. Children traded in their comic books for a ‘clean’ hardback. The national headquarters of the auxiliary reported the disposal of ‘hundreds of thousands of objectionable comic books.’

Mrs. Charles Gilbert, the former national Auxiliary president, gathered 5,000 comic books to burn. AP ran a photo of two cute kids dumping their comic books as Mrs. Gilbert and her friends looked on approvingly. (See it here.)

“John Chiangi and Lisa Drobnes add their comic book collection in the back of a pickup truck at Norwich, Conn., Feb. 26, 1955. The New York Post got hold of the story and ran a headline, Legion Auxiliary Sets Comic Book Burning. The scheduled bonfires provoked controversy, and Mrs. Charles Gilbert called off the comic book burning.

The auxiliary carted off the comic books to the dump instead. “There are overtones to book burning that aren’t good,” she said.

Damage Done by Comic Book Burning

But the damage had been done. The comic book industry decided to avoid further legal trouble by censoring itself. In 1954, the Comic Books Association of America formed to develop a code of ethics and standards for the industry.

Publishers had to show police officers, judges and other government authorities in a positive light. The code banned werewolves, vampires, ghouls and zombies. And good always had to triumph over evil.

Judgment Day. Critics didn’t like images of black astronauts, either.

The head of the Comics Code Authority, Judge Charles Murphy, even demanded that William Gaines’ EC Comics alter an illustration in an anti-racist story, called Judgment Day, because it depicted a black astronaut. Gaines refused and Murphy backed down. Gaines then decided to leave the industry.

MAD’s message: “Buy this magazine.”

For Gaines, the opposition to comic books turned into a blessing in disguise. Gaines transformed his MAD publication from a comic book into a magazine, which avoided the Comics Code Authority. At its peak, MAD had 2 million subscribers and a reputation as the bible of its generation.

Others didn’t fare so well. By 1956, Quality Comics shut its doors in Stamford. David Hajdu, in his book The Ten-Cent Plague, listed 896 artists and writers who never again worked in comics after the purge.

End Notes

Image of Tales from the Crypt cover By http://www.comics.org/issue/8950/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24573662; Drowning Girl By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5673384. Cover of MAD By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1649511. Nazi book burning by By Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597 / Georg Pahl / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5415527. Superman By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61391113. red Wertham By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58115514. Judgment Day, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5885935. Crime Suspenstories By “Crime SuspenStories #22” at The Grand Comics Database. Retrieved June 12, 2008., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17904260. Wertham reading a comic book By http://oafcon2009.blogspot.com/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27989840.

With thanks to A Crisis of Innocence, online exhibit by the Ryerson University Library and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu. This story last updated in 2022.

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When Cleveland Belonged to Connecticut

The City of Cleveland and nearly all of Northeastern Ohio once belonged to Connecticut. The land, 3.5 million acres of it, was called the Western Reserve.

It’s why a university in Cleveland is called Case Western Reserve. Towns in Northeastern Ohio have Connecticut names like Norwich, Saybrook, New London, Litchfield, Mansfield and Plymouth. Some of those towns even have New England-style commons and white meetinghouses.

Cleveland-area schoolchildren, at least the ones paying attention, know well the story of Connecticut pioneer Moses Cleaveland. He brought 50 men and women to the shores of Lake Erie in 1796. Less well known is how Connecticut got the land in the first place.

Colonial Imperialism

Moses Cleaveland

For a small colony, Connecticut had big ambitions. It wanted to own parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and much of America’s western frontier – all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

So in 1662, Connecticut’s governor John Winthrop the Younger went to England with the draft of a charter extending the colony’s lands and political rights. He intended to present it to King Charles II and ask for his approval and royal signature.

He had a little problem, though. Connecticut’s Puritans had supported Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. Cromwell deposed Charles’ father, King Charles I. A panel of 59 commissioners – ‘king killers’ – sat in judgment of Charles and signed his death warrant. He was beheaded in 1649. Eleven years later, Charles II returned to the throne and sought revenge on the men who ordered his father’s execution. He had Cromwell’s body dug up and his head cut off for display outside the palace.

Three king killers fled to America, where they found refuge in New Haven. Because of that, Winthrop knew Charles had attitude about Connecticut.

When Winthrop arrived in England, he got an audience with the King. At the start of the interview, Winthrop showed him ‘a rich, massive gold finger-ring.’ The King’s father had given it to his own father, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop, ‘as a mark of honor for valuable political services.’ The gesture moved Charle to tears.

So Charles granted Connecticut a charter extending its north and south boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. No one really knew how much land that meant. That was the same charter hidden in the Charter Oak when Gov. Edmund Andros tried to seize it.

Western Reserve

In Ohio, the Western Reserve was a 120-mile strip of land from Lake Erie to a line just south of what is now Akron and Youngstown.

At the western end of the Reserve, 500,000 acres were set aside for people whose homes were burned by British troops during the American Revolution. The land was called the Firelands and the Sufferers’ Lands. Most of the fire victims sold their claims to land speculators. Few ever settled in the Firelands.

After the American Revolution, Connecticut gave up some of its land to the federal government in exchange for its war debt, but it hung on to the Western Reserve.

Map of the Western Reserve

Meanwhile, prominent and wealthy men formed the Connecticut Land Company to buy the Western Reserve and divide it into lots.

Most of them came from the Town of Suffield, which once belonged to Massachusetts. The speculators included:

Peleg Sanford, the grandson of Anne Hutchinson and later governor of the Colony of Rhode Island.
Pierpont Edwards, the son of minister Jonathan Edwards, uncle of Aaron Burr and ancestor of J. P. Morgan.
Aaron Olmsted, a sea captain who made his fortune in the China trade.
Moses Cleaveland, an able and energetic lawyer and surveyor who had served in the American Revolution.

Sometime around 1795, Connecticut sold the Western Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company for $1,200,000. Cleaveland was sent to survey the land into townships and negotiate with the Indians who lived there.

Becoming Cleveland

Cleveland Skyline

Moses Cleaveland brought a surveying party of 50 with him. Some traveled on horseback, some by boats. The arrived at the mouth of Conneaut Creek and Lake Erie on July 4, 1796.

The group then celebrated its arrival in what would become Cleveland with toasts to the president of the United States, the state of New Connecticut and the Connecticut Land Company.

Then they wished the ‘Port of Independence and the 50 sons and daughters who have entered it this day be successful and prosperous.”

“May these 50 sons and daughters multiply in 16 years 16 times 50,” they toasted. And they wished every person ‘have his bowsprit trimmed and ready to enter every port that opens.”

They then gave three cheers, drank several pails of grog and went to bed.

Cleaveland Becomes Cleveland

On July 22, Cleaveland landed at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. He climbed the bank and saw a beautiful plain that looked like a good place for a city. So he paced out a 10-acre town common that is now Public Square. His followers called the place Cleaveland.

Moses Cleaveland then returned to Connecticut and died there some years later. He never returned to the Western Reserve.

There are several stories about how Cleaveland became Cleveland. One says a newspaper editor in 1830 discovered that ‘Cleaveland’ was too long for a headline, so he left out the ‘a.’ Another is that Cleaveland’s surveyors spelled it Cleveland on the original map.

In 1800, Connecticut finally gave up its sovereignty over the Western Reserve. Ohio then became a state in 1803.

Map: CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1290884. Photo of Cleveland: By No machine-readable author provided. Avogadro94~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1061960

This story was updated in 2022.

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How the Polish Immigrants Came to New England

Before Polish immigrants arrived in New England they had already made it to the Jamestown colony in Virginia as craftsmen.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant, at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the centuries Polish immigrants came to New England in waves, the first from 1870 to 1914, the second after World War II and the third following Polish independence in 1989. By 1900, 9.3 percent of Polish immigrants in the United States lived in New England. That number increased to 10.9 percent in 1930. Only the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states attracted more Polish immigrants.

Today, Massachusetts and Connecticut rank 10^th and 11^th in total population of people with Polish ancestry. Connecticut has the third densest population of Polish-Americans in the country, with 8.85 percent, behind Wisconsin and Michigan.

Poles have been soldiers and journalists, farmers and factory workers, priests and rabbis, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski were heroes of the American Revolution. Igor Sikorsky, who had Russian and Polish parentage, built a helicopter factory in Connecticut. Martha Stewart, nee Kostyra, built a business empire.

Some of New England’s most prominent politicians have Polish ancestry: Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, the late U.S. Secretary of State Ed Muskie and U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Red Sox icon Carl Yasztremski grew up on a potato farm and spoke fluent Polish, while the New England Patriots’ former stars Stephen Gostowksi and Rob Gronkowski claim Polish ancestors. Paul Newman was part Polish; so is Steven Tyler, Aerosmith vocalist.

The 1st Wave of Polish Immigrants

Philip Sowa. Photo couresty Library of Congress.

Philip Sowa. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Most Polish-Americans are descended from the first wave of immigrants, when an estimated 1.5 million fled poverty and starvation in Germany, Russia and Galicia. People called them the za chlebem, or ‘for bread’ immigrants, because most had neither money nor land. A large number were Jewish, escaping persecution.

They came to New England to work in the factories, primarily textile mills. They came in family groups and settled in neighborhoods with large Slavic populations. In Lawrence, Mass., for example, Polish immigrants arrived en masse at the turn of the 20^th century.

Around 1912, Michael and Jadwiga Narkiewicz emigrated from Wilno, Poland, and settled in Westminster, Vt., where they ran a dairy farm. Then the paper mills came to Bellows Falls, and the Narkiewiczs followed.

Polish-American Club, Bellows Falls, Vt.

In 1903, 600 Polish immigrants lived in Lawrence, Mass. That number more than tripled in seven years, to 2,100. They mostly worked in woolen and worsted goods manufacturing. Two years later, Polish women working at the Everett Mill shut down their looms and started the Bread and Roses strike.

The Mills

When strikes in New Bedford’s cotton mills in 1894 and 1898 caused many workers to leave, Polish workers replaced them, though not as strike breakers. By 1910 several thousand Poles worked in the New Bedford mills — and they were still arriving.

Polish immigrants had large families, and the children often went to work in factories at a young age. Social reformer Lewis Hine photographed 14-year-old Philip Sowa at the Shoe Mill in Fall River, Mass., where he had applied to be a doffer. “Liked to go to school,” Hine noted in a caption to the 1916 photograph.

Another crusading photographer, unknown, photographed the overcrowded home of cotton mill workers in the Olneyville section of Providence. “Eight persons live in these three small rooms, three of them are boarders,” noted the photographer. “Inner bed-rooms are 9 x 8 feet, the largest room 12 x 12 feet. 23 Chaffee Street, Polish People. Property owned by the mill.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Thousands of Poles came to Massachusetts to work in mills in Springfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. Many saved their earnings from factory work and bought cheap, abandoned farms in the Connecticut River Valley. They moved into old colonial homes and transformed the land viewed as useless into thriving onion and tobacco farms.

A Cold Welcome

They weren’t always welcome. A novel published in 1913, called The Invaders, described how people of English ancestry reacted to the newcomers. So did a 1933 article in New England Magazine titled The Pole In The Land Of The Puritan:

In the smiling country along the Connecticut river and included within Massachusetts, there was three decades ago possibly the most distinctive survival of early New England Puritan life. The first Poles came in the early eighties; many of them were attracted by glowing reports of returning Jews, who told of a land of boundless freedom and countless dollars. Soon the descendents of the Pynchons and the Chapins were marvelling at the expressionless Slavic faces, which looked as if flattened against a board at birth; at stunted figures that bespoke grinding toil; at the masculine forms of the women, that told of field-work beside brother and husband and domestic animal. To-day the Polish tide, swelled by continuous immigration and prolific births, is steadily rising in this old Yankee community. The Massachusetts section of the valley is the home of twelve to fifteen thousand of these aliens.

Catholics and Jews

Many of the Polish farmers were Jewish and settled on abandoned farms in Connecticut with the help of Jewish relief societies. Many Jewish families who fled persecution in Poland dreamed of owning a small farm. They ended up, though, in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side.

Those who made it out of the tenements tended to settle on Connecticut farms near other Jewish farmers, in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam and Newtown.

A Polish immigrant couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, on their tobacco farm near Windsor Locks, Conn.

Many other Polish immigrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1889, Fr. Franciszek Chalupka founded a Polish-American parish in Webster, Mass., the first in New England. The parishioners of St. Joseph Parish raised money to pay for his seminary tuition. He later founded St. Stanislaus Parish in Chicopee.

Poles and other immigrant groups suffered high unemployment after the 1893 financial panic. Father Chalupka visited wealthy people door-to-door asking for money to buy food and coal. He is remembered today for saving the Polish immigrants of Chicopee.

The 2nd Wave

World War II created the second wave of Polish immigrants who escaped ethnic cleansing by Germany and Russia. Many Poles died in German concentration camps or Russian massacres. The Soviet government also deported millions of Poles to Siberia and other remote regions of the empire.

Between World War II and 1968, 140,000 Poles came to the United States. Poles escaping repression in Europe came from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Most, however, left their home for political rather than economic reasons. A good percentage belonged to the middle- and upper-middle-classes in Poland.

The bulk of the second wave of Polish immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1952. Some were former soldiers, some were relatives of Poles already living here and some arrived under the Displaced Persons Act.

When they arrived in the United States, they tended to seek white-collar and professional jobs.

Today there are 78 Polish-American parishes in New England, mostly in the Springfield-Hartford-Worcester area, but also in Boston, Fall River, and Manchester, N.H. Three dozen Roman Catholic churches in New England offer Mass in Polish.

New Britain’s Little Poland

Many of New England’s Polish neighborhoods have disappeared as Poles assimilated quickly. Not so New Britain’s Little Poland, a thriving ethnic community in central Connecticut. The neighborhood retained its Polish character since it started in 1890. The third wave of immigrants came to New Britain after Polish independence in 1989.

Polish-Americans from nearby towns in Connecticut bolster Little Poland’s population of 30,000. They can spend a day doing business completely in Polish, shopping, buying an airline ticket, getting a home loan, taking dance or driving lessons and ordering dinner. On weekends, thousands attend Mass at Sacred Heart Church.

On the last Sunday in April, Little Poland is thronged with visitors to the Little Poland Festival on Broad Street. It features crafts vendors from around New England, food and a live stage with folk dancing and live bands.

This story about Polish immigrants was updated in 2023.

Image: Polish and American flag By Elevatorrailfan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41217488.

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Boston Marathon Trivia, or Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About the Big Race

Like so many New England sports traditions, the Boston Marathon is surrounded by lore and legend.

Boston Marathon, circa 1930. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

What Bostonian doesn’t know about Heartbreak Hill, Johnny Kelley and Rosie Ruiz?

But a few things can escape a fan’s attention, especially when the event has hosted hundreds of thousands of runners since it started in 1897. Here are seven things you may not know about the big race:

1. Boston Marathon Entry Fee

Tarzan Brown wouldn’t have run the 1939 Boston Marathon if someone hadn’t given him a dollar. The chronically unemployed runner showed up in Hopkinton without the $1 entrance fee. Walter Brown, who fired the starting gun, gave the Narragansett the dollar. Tarzan Brown won the race.

Tarzan Brown running the 1939 Boston Marathon. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

The eccentric, mercurial Brown had won the race before, in 1936. He dominated the sport of long-distance running in America along with John A. Kelley and Les Pawson throughout the 1930s.

Between races he worked as a stonemason and a shell fisherman, but sometimes had to sell his trophies and medals to feed his wife and four children. He died in 1975 when a van hit him outside a tavern.

Today the entry fee is $225 for U.S. residents, $235 for those who live outside the United States.

2. Two Johnny Kelleys

There were two Johnny Kelleys, Johnny Kelley the Elder and John J. Kelley the Younger. Johnny Kelley the Younger, born in Norwich, Conn., in 1930, won the Boston Marathon in 1957. He became a successful running coach at Fitch High School in Groton, Conn., where he coached the 1968 Boston Marathon winter, Amby Burfoot.

Johnny Kelley the Younger

Burfoot roomed with Bill Rodgers, four-time Marathon winner, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Rodgers, born in Hartford, invited runner Greg Meyer to move to Boston, where Meyer won the Marathon in 1983.

Johnny Kelley the Elder, born in 1907, won the marathon in 1935 and 1945, came in second seven times and ran the race 61 times. He ran his last full marathon in 1992 at the age of 84. For the next two years he ran the last seven miles.

Johnny Kelley the Elder in 1996

A statue of Johnny Kelley the Elder stands near Newton City Hall near Heartbreak Hill, so named because of something he did in 1936. He overtook Tarzan Brown on the hill, and gave him a conciliatory pat on the shoulder as he passed him. That aggravated Brown, who then speeded up and beat Kelley. Hence the name “Heartbreak Hill.”

At 65, 19 years before his last marathon, Johnny Kelley said, “For me, the race these days is to try to beat the girls to the finish and to wave to all my old friends along the course.”

3. Winningest Boston Marathon Runner

Clarence DeMar won seven Boston Marathons despite a five-year layoff on his doctor’s advice. He won more of the men’s open division than any other runner. DeMar won in 1911, 1922-24, 1927-28 and 1930.

His doctor detected a slight heart murmur and advised him to stop running because, he believed, running weakened the heart.

Clarence DeMar

DeMar’s doctor wasn’t alone in believing that running was dangerous. For many years the marathon required a pre-race physical, and doctors decided whether runners were fit to race. In 1958, three runners declared unfit finished in the top 10. Medical science has advanced since then.

One competitor has won more races than DeMar, though: Ernst van Dyk has won 10 times in the wheelchair division.

Ernst van Dyk

4. The Prizes Got Better

Prize money wasn’t awarded until 1986, due to the sponsorship of John Hancock Financial Services. But over the past 20 years, runners have received more than $20 million. Winners of the open division get $150,000, and competitors who set a course record in both the open and wheelchair divisions will receive $50,000 bonuses.

5. A Small Broad

Roberta ‘Bobbi’ Gibb was the first woman to run the entire Boston Marathon. She was a spiritualist who discovered inner peace while running up to 40 miles a day. In 1966 she put on a black bathing suit and her brother’s big Bermuda shorts and hid in the bushes near the start. She finished in three hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds, ahead of two-thirds of the runners.

Bobbi Gibb

The crowd cheered her wildly along the way, but not everyone approved. Celtics coach Red Auerbach was perplexed. “I can’t get guys to run around the floor and a small broad goes out there and runs a marathon,” Auerbach said. “I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

And for those who don’t know about Rosie Ruiz, she was proclaimed the winner of the female category until it turned out she’d jumped into the race midway. Race organizers grew suspicious because she didn’t have especially muscular legs, hadn’t sweated much and explained her unusually fast time by saying she woke up with a lot of energy that morning.

6. Choice Epithets

The Boston Marathon for many years was run by two old friends, Will Cloney, a sportswriter, and Jock Semple, a trainer for the Celtics and Bruins. Semple had a penchant for physically attacking non-serious runners. In 1959 he chased a runner wearing a clown mask, tackled him from behind and beat him until police pulled him off.

Jock Semple

“He hurls not only his body at them, but also a rather choice array of epithets,” Cloney said. “Jock’s method of attack is apt to vary.” In 1967, before women could run officially, Kathrine Switzer evaded Semple’s radar by entering under “K. V. Switzer.” When he discovered a woman running the marathon, he tried to rip her number off. “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers,” he shouted, according to Switzer. Her boyfriend shoved Semple out of the way, but photos of Semple grabbing Switzer’s numbers made world news. He and Switzer later became friends.

In a 1968 Sports Illustrated interview, he complained about the runners he didn’t like. “These screwballs! These weirdies!” he said. “These MIT boys! These Tufts characters! These Harvard guys! They write me askin’ should they put on spiked shoes for the marathon!”

7. One Beer, One Cigar

Gerard Cote, the “fabulous Frenchman,” wouldn’t talk to reporters immediately after winning the race in 1948. He told them, “Gentlemens, gentlemens! One beer! One cigar! Then we talk about the race, eh!” He won three other Boston Marathons, in 1940, 1943 and 1944.

Gerard Cote winning the 1940 Boston Marathon

BONUS ITEM: Thanks to reader Don Mathesen, we’re adding “The Run for the Hoses.” One hour before the noon start in 1976, the temperature reached an unseasonable 100 degrees. Race fans sprayed water from garden hoses on the runners to cool them off. Jack Fultz, a Georgetown University graduate student, first crossed the finish line — sopping wet — that year.

This story about the Boston Marathon was updated in 2023.

Image: Bobbi Gibb By HCAM (Hopkinton Community Access and Media, Inc.) – HCAM News Focus: 26.2 Foundation Hosts Bobbi Gibb at approximately 50:30, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73403151. Ernst van Dyk By Gr5 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32311476. Jock Semple By unknown – Original publication: unknownImmediate source: http://www.carlyjyll.com/2018/05/the-first-women-to-finish-boston_2.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63615160. Johnny Kelley in 1996 By unknown – Original publication: unknownImmediate source: https://archive.boston.com/sports/specials/obituaries/kelley/kelley_pictures?pg=9, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68969198. Boston Marathon at the halfway mark, By Anonymous – [1], CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25296916

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