 |
| Firestarter |
1936 For the purposes of this post, we'll say that the Sacramento Bee's October 30 Superior California coverage was an extraordinarily unfortunate collection of stories intended to get readers in the Halloween mood.* That section includes a number of brief pieces on various murders, accidentals deaths, and near misses. Take, for example, the Guinda man who, in the span of three weeks, was bucked by a horse, kicked by another, and to cap it all off, ran his car into a bridge near Woodland after being blinded by a passing car's headlights. The poor guy lived.
Not exactly spooky, I know. But how about this: "INSANE BOY FIREBUG AT LARGE AFTER NAPA ESCAPE"?! Warren R. Cramer, arsonist, is on the loose after fleeing Napa State Hospital--and he's coming for you, the Bee seems to suggest. The escape was Cramer's second that year. After his first escape, 18-year-old Oaklander blandly commented, "My escape was a mistake." Or maybe his mistake was being found. It depends on your perspective, I guess. An earlier report in the Terril Record (an Iowa newspaper) claims Cramer was responsible for 20 fires in Denver, Colo., a "reign of terror" he launched because he enjoyed the wail of fire engine sirens.
* It was actually quite common for the paper to run scads of stories like these. News tended to be slow in the sticks and suburbs. This is slightly off-topic, but another frequent and baffling column filler was the announcement of a family's return to town after a long trip. These items would read something of like this: "Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Stanton of Curtis Oaks have returned from Lincoln Township, where Mrs. Stanton's brother succumbed to syphilis."
No comments:
Post a Comment