When my family moved into our home in Boston a few years ago, the previous homeowner left us a gift. Hanging on the wall just inside the front door was a framed front page from the Boston Post, a newspaper that ceased publication in 1956. During a renovation project, the newspaper had been found under the floorboards.
The paper was like a time capsule. Its articles and ads capture a particular moment in time that’s both ordinary and extraordinary.
It was published exactly 100 years ago, on April 21, 1926.
You can read a more legible version of the front page, from the Boston Public Library archives, here. An inside page with the continuation of several front page articles, is online here.
Below are some of the stories featured on that 100-year-old front page.
‘Duchess of York Mother of Girl’
Remarkably, in announcing a royal birth, The Boston Post accurately predicted some historic and monarchical twists.
That baby would later be known as Queen Elizabeth II.
“A baby daughter, who may some day rule the British empire, was born early Wednesday morning to the Duke and Duchess of York,” the article begins.
Elizabeth’s uncle, King Edward VII, abdicated the throne in 1936 so that he could marry Wallis Simpson. He couldn’t legally marry her without stepping down because she was divorced. That handed the crown to Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, until his death and her coronation in 1952.
“All England will join in the rejoicing Wednesday when news of the baby's arrival spreads, for a birth in the royal family always is greeted with acclaim,” the Boston Post read in her heavily sexist birth announcement. “Of course, the rejoicing would be greater if the baby was a boy. The little girl's chances of becoming Queen of England and Empress of India and all the other things that go with the crown of the British Empire are slight, but she is now the third human being in direct line of accession."
50 years after her birth was announced on the front page of the Boston Post, Queen Elizabeth would visit Boston as part of the bicentennial celebration.
“If Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and other patriots could have known that one day, a British monarch would stand beneath the balcony of the Old State House, from which the Declaration of Independence was first read to the people of Boston, and be greeted by the mayor and others in such kind and generous words, well, I think the would have been extremely surprised,” the Queen said in front of a Boston crowd in 1976.
‘El structures bill favored’
100 years ago, the Massachusetts state house debated removing a hulking structure from the streets of Boston that many today don’t know was ever there.
An elevated subway, known simply as the “el,” helped people get around the city quickly. But as this Boston Post story highlighted, not everyone was a fan of the big, ugly structures.
“It was a matter of convenience for people moving north of downtown into downtown and vice versa,”said transit historian Steven Beaucher, author of the book, “Boston in Transit, Mapping the History of Public Transportation in the Hub,” and owner of store WardMaps and MBTA gifts in Cambridge. ”But if you lived right along it, not everyone was supportive of it.”
The elevated railway carried heavy rail cars, similar to the cars on the T today, he said.
“These are a story or two in the air,” said. “And imagine if there’s only limited stops. That was a new concept. So from Roxbury to downtown is maybe a half dozen stops, and then another half dozen from downtown up to Charlestown … as opposed to a streetcar that’s stopping every block along the way. So it saved people time. It saved people money. And it also kept the city growing.”
The proposal to tear the structures down was ahead of its time. The el was just 25 years old in 1926, and wouldn’t be torn down until 1971.
For some neighborhoods that had been served by those elevated railways, Beaucher said, no equivalent rapid transit service has been put in their place.
“To this day, still, the community in Roxbury is not as well-served by Silver Line buses as they were,” Beaucher said. “They used to have a one-ticket ride on a rapid transit train. Same thing with Charlestown, on the other side.”
‘Braves open up with their jinx’
In a city obsessed with the Red Sox, it can be easy to forget that Boston once also hosted a National League team.
On this date 100 years ago, the Boston Braves were kicking off the season with their home opener at Braves Field, which was at the spot we now know as Boston University’s Nickerson Field.
Bob Brady, president of the Boston Braves Historical Association, says turnout at the game reflected the team’s recent poor performance.
“10,000 people showed up. Braves Field sat well over forty thousand,” Brady said. “Back in that day, people actually got dressed up to go to opening day. If they took public transportation and they took the streetcar line coming out of Park Street up Commonwealth Avenue, they would have taken a trolley that swung into Braves Field from Babcock Street.”
Nine years later, the 1935 Braves were considered among baseball’s worst teams, Brady said, finishing in last place with a 38-115 record. Incredibly, Babe Ruth was on that team for his final 28 games as an active player. After that disastrous season, the team briefly changed their name to the “Bees,” before switching back to the “Braves” in 1940.
It was tough to be in the shadow of the Red Sox.
“The Boston Braves were always the second team,” Brady said. “The make-or-break pretty much was in 1948 when they won the National League pennant. Had they played the Boston Red Sox in a city world series and defeated the Red Sox, the tide may have turned. But it wasn’t to be. The Red Sox didn’t win their playoff game. The Braves faced the Cleveland Indians. They lost to the Cleveland Indians. And the opportunity to confront and compete with the Red Sox was lost.”
The Braves moved to Milwaukee abruptly in 1953, and then to Atlanta 13 years later, where they still are today.
‘Check by Radio Is Honored’
There are actually two different technological breakthroughs detailed in this story. The first, getting top billing in the headline, is the use of radio technology to transfer money across the ocean.
Secondly, buried a few paragraphs down, is the first-ever image sent by radio — a handwritten note from the U.S. ambassador to Britain to his high school alma mater, St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire.
The technological advance of both messages is stunning, when you consider that Marconi’s first two-way transatlantic radio transmission to Europe from Wellfleet on Cape Cod was just 23 years earlier, in 1903. That Marconi message was in simple Morse Code.
“This is an extraordinary moment in history where we are connecting through wireless,” Suffolk University historian Robert Allsion said. “And what else can we do with this? Well, we can broadcast Red Sox games and Braves games. We can connect in ways that is had been impossible, you know, even 20 years earlier. It would have been thought crazy that you could do something like this. And today we take it for granted.”
At St. Paul’s School in Concord, a copy of that note from Ambassador Alanson Houghton to the school’s rector, Samuel Smith Drury, is framed and hanging on the wall of the school’s archives.
“”This is the first message reproduced by wireless across the Atlantic,” Houghton wrote. “May I send it to you and to the school with my best wishes.”
Deanna Parsi, the archivist of St. Paul’s Shool, says Drury wasn’t the rector of the school when Houghton attended it, although they certainly knew each other. It’s not fully known why, when he could have sent the historic note to anyone, Houghton chose to send it to the rector of his high school alma mater.
“I guess the answer to that is lost to time,” Parsi said. “However, I do know that, especially in the earliest days of the school, the St. Paul’s alum were very close to the school. They kept close ties.”
‘Wets Have Fiery Duel With Drys’
1926 finds the contemporary readers of this Boston Post about half way through Prohibition. And the illegality of alcohol is being hotly debated.
“Stormy scenes and some startling revelations regarding dry law enforcement marked the sessions today of the Senate prohibition committee,” the story reads.
“At this time, 1926, it’s six years into prohibition, and people were starting to realize it wasn’t working out exactly the way they thought it would,” said Stephanie Schorow, author of several books on Boston history. “In fact, there was beginning to be a huge pushback against prohibition. Because what you saw was the growth of organized crime to support people’s habits in terms of liquor.”
Schorow said it’s estimated that Boston had 4,000 speakeasies during this period, compared to 1,000 bars before Prohibition.
Some “drys” were extremely bothered by their drinking and law breaking neighbors, including a
Quincy man named Delcevare King, who.held a contest to come up with a word for these people breaking the law.
“Dozens of people, maybe hundreds, sent in words for this contest, and I think the winner got some money,” Schorow said. “The winning word was scofflaw. That’s where that word came from.”
Some Harvard students had their own contest to come up wih a derogatory word for drys, Schorow added. The winning word was “spigot bigot.”
Prohibition would be repealed in 1933, seven years after this publication, with the passage of 21st Amendment.
AD: ‘Waldron’s 7-11’
Among the businesses advertising on the front page of the Boston Post was a night club called Waldron’s 7-11 Casino, located in Scully Square.
That location may not be familiar to many in Boston these days, since the square was later torn down to make space for what is now Government Center.
Writer David Kruh, who wrote a book about Scully Square, says before it was demolished, the square looked similar to the narrow roads and alleys still in Boston’s North End.
“That was what Scully Square was, only instead of residences, it was nightclubs, burlesque houses. Boxing gyms, tattoo parlors, dentists, photographers, bowling alleys,” Kruh said. “It was the place where you went to have a good time.”
The ad for Waldon’s 7-11 describes a midnight show of an “All-Colored Burlesque”
“The idea that they would advertise all colored reviews reflects the fact that in many theaters, you had minstrel shows which were performed by white men and women who would blacken up their faces and do these shows basically mimicking black performers,” Kruh said. “And this ad, I found really interesting that they went out of their way to make sure that you knew that these were actually ‘colored’ performers, as black people were then known, or described.”
That’s the thing about looking back at a newspaper from 100 years ago. In addition to the interesting historical items, the reminders of our shameful chapters are right there on the front page, too.
‘3 die in submarine explosion’
The era was a particularly dangerous one for those working on submarines.
“Three members of the crew of 40 men on the submarine S-49, sister ship of the ill-fated S-51, which was sunk last September with a loss of 33 lives, died tonight in the Submarine Base Hospital from injuries received when a battery exploded today,” the article reads.
Battery explosions like this were not a new problem, says Meghan Rathbun, managing director and curator at the Submarine Force Museum in Groton and New London, Connecticut. The explosion on this submarine was caused by a buildup of hydrogen gas, which had happened several times before, and would happen again.
Near the end of World War I, the U.S. ordered the development of dozens of new submarines, Rathbun said. But as that war ended, the U.S. signed the Washington Naval Treaty, limiting battleship construction.
“We continue to build the submarines that have been ordered. However, the funding to operate them and the funding to retrofit them and to fix any safety problems or any engineering problems that came up in their design process was really scaled back, Rathbun said. “The money just wasn’t there to fix a lot of these problems. One of these problems happened to be the batteries.”
That changed starting in 1954, with the commissioning of the first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus. Rathbun said in addition to other benefits of nuclear submarines, they did not have the same problems with battery explosions.
‘Dragnet is out for armed boys’
The lead story that day was a manhunt for two 17-year-olds, who were alleged to have shot and killed Boston Police Patrolman Frank Comeau. “Two boys, known to be formidably armed, for whom the police of Dedham, Boston and other places searched all day yesterday, have eluded detection so far. They are wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Patrolman Frank J. Comeau of Boston, concerning which young Stanley Toothaker of 12 Bartlett Terrace, Roxbury, has made what he claims is a complete confession.”
The teenagers would later be captured, and about two months later, one of them, Albert Deshon was found guilty of manslaughter. The other two were acquitted.
The death of Patrolman Comeau would have a devastating impact on his family. But his example would be an inspiration for a grandchild he never met. Annie Corcoran, whose mother was just two years old when Comeau died, would go on to serve in the Boston Police Department for more than 30 years.
Stanley Toothaker, who was in custody as this news story was written, had told police that he, Albert Deshon and Robert Sambursky had been breaking into houses and stealing valuables. He said on [date], the three were sitting in a stolen vehicle that had stalled out when Patrolman Comeau approached them, asking whose car it was, and for a license.
When Comeau then told them they were under arrest, Toothaker told police that one of them pulled a gun, there was a struggle, and Comeau was shot.
Comeau’s granddaughter, Annie Comeau, has a photo of him that she said was very important to her grandmother.
“She kept it always right in front of her,” Corcoran said, showing off the framed photo. “If we were in the parlor, she had it on the television. And then at night, she took it to her bedroom with her.”
Corcoran said she’s always ask about the shot. As a child, his hat and uniform were intriguing.
“So it would only come out in little bits and pieces that he was a policeman,” she said. “He was very proud to be a policeman. He was so happy the day he became a policeman. He loved his job. That’s all you get out of her.”
When she’d ask where her grandfather was, her grandmother would just say he was in heaven.
“My mom was three when her dad died, and my auntie was one,” Corcoran said. “And I believe the widow’s pension was $14 a month after she lost her husband. And they lived in a triple-decker in Dorchester. She couldn’t pay the rent and keep food on the table with two babies, so she took in laundry from the neighbors. And I never saw anybody work harder in my life.”
The stories of her grandfather inspired Corcoran.
“I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool to have a job that you loved and that you were proud to do?’”
When she said she was joining the Boston Police, her grandmother cried.
“And my Nana never cried,” Corcoran remembered. “And she said, ‘you have to promise me you’ll never stop a car.’ And I said, ‘why do I never stop a car?’”
“Because that’s what killed your grandfather,” Corcoran remembers her grandmother replying.
Corcoran said she lied to her grandmother that day.
In fact, in her years as a Boston Police officer, her job involved stopping cars all the time. She’s now retired from the Boston Police Department, after almost 32 years of service.
‘Dog Falls 50 feet into mud, unhurt’
While it may seem like the story of a dog rescued from a hole and given a bath, accompanied by an adorable photo, takes up a surprising amount of space on this front page, some things don’t actually change all that much. Just last month, when a lab named Tessie fell into a sinkhole in Falmouth, the rescue made international headlines, and was even covered by GBH’s own The Curiosity Desk.
Printed alongside some pretty bleak and even tragic news items, everybody needs a little something to cheer them up. And what could be better than a dog, returned home safely, and given a bath?
AD: ‘Father John’s Medicine’
The smallest ad on the Post’s front page is this one, for Father John’s Medicine. It was made by a company in Lowell, Massachusetts, and named after a real priest, Father John O’Brien. O’Brien was said to have gotten better from an illness after having taken this medicine, and then recommended it to sick people he visited in his duties as a priest. People started visiting the pharmacy, asking for “Father John’s medicine,” and it eventually turned into a business.
Father John’s Medicine was an example of what’s known of as “patent medicine,” although the company that made it would dispute that, said Carisa Kolias, archivist at the Center for Lowell History at UMass Lowell, which holds a collection of the company’s information.
“Most patent medicines would have things like cocaine, heroin, and other strong drugs in them, including alcohol,” Kolias said. “And Father John’s medicine is really different in that it’s one of the only patent medicines that had none of those things in them. They actually always would make a point to say that they were free of alcohol and dangerous drugs.”
The medicine is made up mostly of cod liver oil, and has a licorice flavor. It’s no longer made in Lowell, but you can still buy Father John’s Medicine today.
