No. 540
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
November 30, 2021

Her Striped Stockings.

November 30, 2021
...
...

Soapy Smith STAR NotebookPage 24 - Original copy1884Courtesy of Geri Murphy(Click image to enlarge) oapy Smith's "STAR" notebook page 24, 1882 and 1884, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland. Steamer Ancon. This post is on page 24, the last of the "STAR" notebook pages I have been deciphering and publishing for the last two years, since July 24, 2023. The page is two separate notes dated 1882
More...
Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 9/17/2025
Stop by this week as we explore what happened the week before the murders, Emma and Lizzie’s getaway to Fairhaven and New Bedford, and new imagery which will help to tell the story. The pears are almost ripe, August 4th is coming fast, and thoughts begin to turn to that house on Second Street once again. Follow us at https://www.facebook.com/lizziebordenwarpsandwefts/ !
More...
Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 7/26/2025
Via Newspapers.comSome author--I can’t recall who he or she was--once wrote that it made no sense that ghosts were always seen fully clothed.  Shouldn’t they all be naked?  That writer would be pleased with the following news item from the “Springfield News Sun,” August 22, 1999:BAGHDAD, Iraq - Ghost stories are pretty common around the old Iraqi city of Haditha. Still, when the ghosts
More...
Strange Company - 9/17/2025
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
More...
Executed Today - 11/13/2020
One Week Only! The Bloody Century Half Price!
More...
Murder By Gaslight - 9/16/2025
Deep roots anchor P.J. Clarke’s, the restaurant and bar occupying a Civil War–era brick building with its top two floors sheered off at Third Avenue and 55th Street. Converted into a tavern in 1884 when Irish laborers held a large presence in the developing neighborhood, the building was bought by Irish immigrant Patrick “Paddy” J. […]
More...
Ephemeral New York - 9/15/2025
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
More...
Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
The “Prisoners’ March.” | Illicit Distilleries.

Her Striped Stockings.

Striped-Stockings

The other day a groceryman at Vallejo, Cal., gave a large party, at which the daughter of the carriage painter who lived next door created a decided sensation. It was not that she was more handsomely attired than the other ladies present, but that when she gyrated in the "dance of death" she was observed to display the only pair of pink silk stockings in the room. She left the house for a few minutes at the expiration of the dance, and in the next waltz exhibited a pair of light blue dittoes. An hour later her crushed and exasperated female friends beheld' these supplemented by further hose of a delicate chocolate shade. And so it went on, until her miserable rivals determined to follow her the next time she disappeared. They traced her to her father's paint-shop in the backyard, where she was discovered brush in hand and about ornamenting her nether extremities with a final artistic coat of light salmon. The exulting spies rushed back with the damaging news, but it was too late. The men were all too tight to understand, the music had gone home and the lights were being put out. Thus it is that fraud and duplicity triumph, honest simplicity walks around with a darn on its calf and a hole in its heel.

 

Illustrated Police News, November 3, 1877.