20 years of Sideswipe
Stealing a march on them
Entries in a notebook carried by 37-year-old Iowa burglar Michael Sutton, arrested in the 1950s:
● Clothes express and accentuate a person’s personality and station in life. Wear good clothes in order to be inconspicuous. Live in best hotels, so I won’t be noticed going and coming at odd hours.
● Always carry the daily paper when on the prowl early in the evening — or a magazine. It looks like a person coming home from the office. Better still, carry a briefcase.
● Check to see if a town has an opera house or concerts on certain nights of the week. That’s where rich people congregate. Watch newspapers for names of people attending these.
● Believe just the opposite of what people say — especially men — and you will be right 90 per cent of the time.
● Leave phoney overcoat button at scene.
● Use sneeze powder to foil capture. Sold in novelty stores. Called Cachoo — $1 per bottle.
● Try to find out wealthy people’s birthdays. Chances are they have birthday parties downstairs. Then ransack the second-floor rooms.
● Dogs love the smell and taste of cinnamon.
● On the day a criminal decides he is smarter than the police, he moves that much closer to the moment of his capture. Don’t belong to the egocentric class of criminals. Thieves who are so egotistical as to think that they can’t be caught are the ones who get caught. (From Dennis Potter and Kevin B Kinnee, Preliminary Criminal Investigations, 2015)
Inventing the coffee break
The coffee break was technically invented by defence plants during World War II because if their workers didn’t stay alert, planes fell apart and stuff. What other industries’ workers were doing during their breaks is anyone’s guess but it didn’t become widespread and wasn’t even called a “coffee break” until it reached the ears of the Pan American Coffee Bureau in 1952 when they launched their “Give Yourself a Coffee-Break” campaign to take advantage of the opportunity to sell more coffee. By the end of the year, 80 per cent of employers polled had instituted coffee breaks.