When the Circus Came to Town

James Davidson

Description

Never before told tales of the craziness that went on in the Flemington courtroom and in the town during the Trial of the Century-The 1934 Lindbergh Trial
Much has been written of the Lindbergh-Hauptmann Kidnapping Trial of 1934. This book examines what actually happened in the town of Flemington, New Jersey, a sleepy farm town that became, for a few months, the center of the universe. The first weekend of “The Trial of the Century,” the town saw 50,000 people arrive. Over 700 reporters were on hand as well as 150 photographers and countless sketch artists. Nellie’s Bar in the Union Hotel became a landmark for those who got to drink there while prostitutes roamed the streets, paying newsboys tips for “Johns.” Every famous news writer and commentator of the day was there – Adela Rogers St. Johns, Damon Runyon, Dorothy Kilgallen, Walter Winchell, Gabriel Heater, etc. This book examines what they wrote and what they said in their own words as well as colorful stories about each of them. Some of the most famous sketch artists and cartoonists of the times were also there and this book examines what they produced on a daily basis. Flemington, the trial and the times are shown in a light heretofore not described in other books.

Sujets

• True Crime
• Lindbergh
• Flemington
• Bruno Hauptmann
• Charles Lindbergh

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 14 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663241900
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

WHEN THE CIRCUS CAME TO TOWN
JAMES DAVIDSON
Flemington New Jersey and the Lindbergh Kidnapping Trial
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
WHEN THE CIRCUS CAME TO TOWN
FLEMINGTON NEW JERSEY AND THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING TRIAL
 
Copyright © 2022 James Davidson.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
 
iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4191-7 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4190-0 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912472
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date:  08/31/2022

(JURY LEAVING THE COURTHOUSE)
(AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
CONTENTS
Forward by Jay Langley
Prologue
Acknowledgements
Background to the Trial
 
Flemington - Getting Ready
The Union Hotel and Nellie’s Tap Room
The Last Day – The Last Night
The Jury Goes Home
Aftermath
The Press
Trial by Radio
The Cartoonists
Notable Quotes
Tidbits from Flemington
 
Endnotes
Bibliography
Suggested Reading List
Mame Pedrick’s Sunny Silver Pie Recipe
Kidnapping and Trial Chronology
FORWARD BY JAY LANGLEY
W hen you write for a local newspaper some stories start to own you, rather than the other way around. They live in your mind and in your files, and they jump out occasionally to hike across your headlines for some fresh air. They surface for anniversaries or reenactments, or when new theories make you rethink old facts.
In 1970, fresh out of college and writing for the Hunterdon County Democrat in Flemington, New Jersey, I learned about the world-famous Lindbergh baby’s disappearance on March 1, 1932, and the rambunctious kidnapping trial that followed in our old county courthouse, in January and February of 1935. For those six weeks, the eyes of the world were on Flemington. The press of the day called it “The Trial of the Century.” Joking around years later, we young reporters said most trials don’t take that long.
I didn’t know then that I’d fall in love with Catherine, the boss’s daughter, and that we’d still be here, in Flemington, fifty years later. Catherine’s grandfather, Howard Moreau, had covered the Lindbergh case and had earned national respect for thorough and responsible reporting- a hometown weekly editor holding his own against America’s top brand name reporters, broadcasters, and newsreel teams.
In 1970, I didn’t know that Anne Moreau Thomas, my future mother-in-law, had been stripped naked by police in 1932, during the search for the Lindbergh baby. At 22 months, she was the right age, just a month older than the missing boy. She had curly blonde hair like his, so the police officers wouldn’t leave until they’d seen her genitals, to prove she was a girl. Not quite three years later, little Anne wove through the trial crowds outside the courthouse, walking to and from her first year at school.
Our newsroom windows looked across Court Street at the old county courthouse, the jail behind it, and the park behind that. Nothing much had changed over the years. In warm weather jailers opened the windows and prisoners leaned on the thick stone sills, arms through the bars. Catherine remembers catcalls as she and her girlfriends walked the sidewalk to and from school, same path her mother had taken. Once, while I was a young reporter, prisoners decided to urinate through the bars onto the pavement below. Looking out our newsroom window, veteran reporter Jane Wyckoff chuckled at the sight, at least in my memory. “Look at that,” she said. “The old park finally has a fountain.”
For lunch on a slow day or a drink after work, we would stroll half a block to the Union Hotel, where reporters by the hundreds had flocked during the famous trial. Now and then, one of them would come back and visit – the courthouse, the hotel, our newsroom – moths to a flame. We had many Lindbergh visitors. Grad students for research, authors writing books. Mrs. Hauptmann and her attorney. Lindbergh grandchildren. And people who claimed they were the missing baby: “Look, I’m not dead at all! And all grown up! It was a conspiracy!”
To tell the truth, I’m not even sure that the kid ever died. I guess this puts me with all the other wackos. But if you’d been in our newsroom as person after person walked in and claimed to be the Lindbergh baby as an adult, you might have kept an open mind, too.
Most of them wanted to take off their shoes and show us their toes, because Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. was said to have malformed toes. They all had explanations for how they survived and why the other Lindberghs wouldn’t listen to them. To me the best pure story, the most far-fetched, was the Black woman from Trenton who said she was the baby, but that she’d been forced into skin pigmentation treatments and a sex-change operation to mask her identity. When I corresponded with Reeve Lindbergh about such people, I could almost hear her sigh on paper. “Yes,” she wrote, “in the family we call them ‘The Pretenders.’”
For a decade or more during my years as editor, as I was working to put out newspapers, my phone would ring and when I lifted the receiver a voice would boom in my ear: “Charles Lindbergh here!” He was so loud that it hurt – a guy from California who had changed his legal name and was calling me to update the local editor on his cause. We’d met when he came to tour the old Lindbergh house and I’d gone along – heck, a story is a story right? As we were coming back down from the second-floor nursey where the child was last seen on the evening of March 1, 1932, this guy paused, closed his eyes, and said slowly, “Yes, I seem to remember coming down these stairs, carried by woman. I see the front door opening, and she hands me to a man.” He paused, and then said, “The man has a moustache.” As if that clinched it.
My mentor on the news desk, Harry Anderson, was a gruff old guy with a heart of gold who was legendary among New Jersey newsmen. He’d covered the mob during Prohibition, the explosion of the Hindenburg, the sinking of the Andrea Doria, Newark race riots, and the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. (Rumor had it that Adela Rogers St. John, the famous Hearst reporter, developed quite a crush on young Harry.) He always said there was something amiss about the trial. He didn’t think Bruno Richard Hauptmann was innocent. No, Hauptmann was guilty – “of something.” But Harry was never sure what Hauptmann was guilty of. It might not have been kidnapping. It might have just been trying to embezzle the ransom money. But whatever Hauptmann did, Harry said, he didn’t work alone.
Alan Painter – a home-town boy who covered the trial for the Democrat and then had a long career as editor, publisher, newspaper owner, and president of the state association – echoed Harry Anderson’s view. Hauptmann was guilty, Alan said. Of something. And he didn’t work alone.
No wonder so many people revisit this case.
Sometimes the parade of Lindbergh theorists seemed endless, but we marched on. We wrote stories about them all, in addition to thousands of articles about actual, current local news. The Democrat was, after all, the paper of record in a busy county seat.
When Harry Kazman wrote a play from the trial transcript and produced it in the very same courtroom, we helped with publicity. Eventually we reproduced Democrat issues from January and February of 1935, dressed up local kids as newsboys, and hawked the reprints on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. In those early days of online commerce, we put together what USA Today called the single best website on the subject and sold our reprints to those still interested in the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Hauptmann trial on five continents.
In the spirit of boosterism, when Flemington’s downtown economy needed help, I editorialized that the Lindbergh kidnapping and trial would be the perfect theme around which to revitalize the borough, through historic tourism. Bring those wallets to town, I enthused, the more the better! I wrote that the trial raised so many issues about the law, the press, and society during the Great Depression that Flemington could fashion itself as a living museum of the period, a bit like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, or Plimoth Plantation for the Pilgrims. Serious scholars and day-trippers would both be welcome.
It was during this period, over lunch at the Union Hotel, that a native of Flemington took me to task. Dereck Williamson was a contemporary of my mother-in-law; they’d played together as kids. Like her, he’d struggled through the crowds outside the courthouse as he walked to and from school. Later he’d worked for the Democrat as a reporter and columnist, then moved on. I tried to excite him about Flemington offering more Lindbergh-era events, but Dereck shut me down.
“Nobody who was here at the time wants what you’re suggesting,” he said, or words to that effect. “It was a terrible period in our history. Why do you keep bringi