Tuesday, August 29, 1916

A 50 year old woman is killed two miles outside Saratoga Springs when she mistakenly walks into the path of a southbound trolley car, The Saratogian reports.

Mrs. Edward Purcell, a Brooklyn resident, has been spending the summer with two sisters and her son at Mrs. Charles Harris’s boarding house on Ballston Avenue. She is “a few hundred yards” away from the Harris place after taking the trolley from Saratoga Springs, where she’d been shopping, to Leonard’s Crossing.

“Upon alighting from the cars she started to walk on down the track which is a short cut to the Harris place,” a reporter writes, “She was walking between the trolley and the Delaware & Hudson tracks and had gone only about two or three hundred feet when the Schenectady car overtook her.

“Had she continued the same way, she probably would not have been injured, but in her confusion she stepped directly into the path of the on-coming car, when it was only about ten feet away.”

Purcell is killed instantly. An autopsy determines the cause of death to be a compound fracture of the skull.

POETRY CORNER. Today’s editorial page features a poem by Dr. Joseph Brown Cooke of Cooperstown, a former Saratoga resident and the son of Joseph G. Cooke, who “for many years [was] a prominent resident of this city.”

Dr. Cooke’s poem has already appeared in the New York Herald and several other papers across the country. “Some Other Mother’s Boy” is a satire of the popular antiwar song, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Here’s a representative verse:

Some other mother’s boy can be a soldier,

Not my own little tootsywootsy pet!

Don’t talk to me of what I owe my country;

Some other mother’s boy will pay the debt.

It isn’t fair to ask so much of my boy

When other mothers’ boys have blood to shed; My boy is too polite; He really couldn’t fight! Some other mother’s boy can be a soldier!

The poem goes on for two more verses in the same vein.

WHAT’S HAPPENING. Tonight at the Broadway Theatre, Joseph L. Kernan presents “A Three Act Musical Surprise Awakening Memories of Your Childhood Days” as J.C. Mack stars with “50 Others, Mostly Girls” in Mother Goose, or: The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. This “Laughing Musical Tonic for Young and Old” boasts two railroad cars of scenery, costumes and effects. Ticket prices range from 25 cents to a dollar for this special live attraction. At the Broadway Palace, Pauline Fredrick stars in the Paramount picture Audrey.

– Kevin Gilbert