Brief Excerpt from We Were Interrupted, 1920s Scandals

In the mid-1920s Burton Rascoe returned from Paris and began writing a column about life in New York that was syndicated by Editors Features Service. “I roamed the streets, kept my eyes peeled; investigated,” Rascoe wrote, but while he familiarized himself with every tiny slice of New York life, the bigger events weren’t his bread and butter. Readers in 1947 would have immediately been familiar with all of these items, but most of us today probably get a little lost beyond the Hauptman trial and Valentino’s funeral! I’ve added some links to help translate.

But I had no more intimacy with some of the more sensational occurrences in New York during the twenties than had any resident of Shawnee, Oklahoma, or Fulton, Kentucky, who read the daily newspapers. The Snyder-Gray and Hall-Mills murder cases, the Hauptmann trial, the Kip Rhinelander scandal, the “Peaches” and “Daddy” Browning escapades, and the hysteria occasioned by Valentino’s funeral, were spot news events, handled by the wire services; I was as remote from them as I was from Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, where Floyd Collins was caught in a narrow fissure and penned there until his death, while the world awaited his fate, or from Nome, Alaska, to which the half-breed Malamute, Balto, won immortal fame in the annals of dog lore when he led the team which carried Gunnar Kasson and his sledload of diphtheria anti-toxins to the beleaguered plague victims of the frozen North.