The Role a Brassiere Played in a Notorious Robbery

In Miami, Florida in 1941, Marie Ore had big dreams of a middle-class life with a big beautiful house, a beautiful car, and pearls.   Instead, she had to work for a pittance at the Southern Bell Phone Company rolling money that came in from the payphones and was counted by machines and rolled.  But Marie was ambitious. 

One day Marie who didn't make enough to cover the bare necessities didn't have any money to buy lunch.  So she thought about it and realized that Southern Bell didn't know how much was coming in until they placed it in the machines.  What she was thinking of doing was dangerous as there were guards.  But she nicked two coins in her hand and slid them into her brassiere--a place no manager would dream of looking.

When she got away with it that day she did it the next day and the day after that.  Then she talked to her sister-in-law Rita and her friends and they formed a system: One for home; One for the company.  They would place the coins in their brassieres.  Now back then these brassieres were cone-shaped and huge and could carry a lot of coins without being seen.  During their breaks, they would transfer the money to their purses in the ladies room.

Soon these women were making $150 a day and Marie bought herself those pearls.  A year past before trouble happened.  Marie came home to find Rita distraught.  She believed that someone had stolen $150 and had called the police. Marie was furious with her because this would mean the police would find the coins and put two and two together, which they did and arrest them for theft. 

This was a nightmare for Southern Bell who lost nearly $100,000 and the way in which they lost it was scandalous.   The women were ordered to pay back the money and serve a year in prison, but the public outcry caused the governor to step in and make its probation.  He said after all this was a job that would tempt even the most honest of people.  And so this is how a brassieres came to play an important role in one of Florida's most notorious robberies of the century.   

A Curious Incident of Prostitution During the Civil War

Nashville, Tennessee in the 1860s was a bustling place that held a dirty little secret.  Smokey Row. Where the prostitutes lived.  In February of 1862 when Major General Willam Rosencranz drove out the Confederates he brought in an army of 30,000 soldiers--and customers.  The prostitutes went from 200 to 1,500 nearly overnight.

With more prostitutes came more venereal diseases.  Some of them were quite painful. Some of them--like gonorrhea and syphilis were quite deadly. Hundreds of soldiers were coming down with gonorrhea and syphilis and seeking help at the hospital.  But the health crisis wasn't enough to stop others from visiting the brothels.

Rosencrantz realized that he had to do something before he lost too many men to hold down the city and lost it to the Confederates.  So he sought counsel from his aide Lieutenant Colonol George Spaulding who told him to round up the prostitutes and put them on a ship and sends them away. So he did. He put them on the ship Idaho and told the Captain to drop them off in Louisville, Kentucky.

Soon the ship had returned to Nashville with the prostitutes.  Seems that Louisville didn't want them either.  So Rosencranz turned once again to Spaulding who came up with an even more daring plan for the prostitutes.  He would make them pay a $5 licensing fee and require them to renew it weekly with a health inspection showing that they didn't have any venereal diseases in order to keep working.  The money that they collected from the licensing fee went toward building a facility to treat the women when the did get sick with silver nitrate, the prevailing treatment for those diseases at the time, but certainly no cure.  When the war ended, so did the legalization of prostitution. 

Moon People: Real or Myth?

Going back to the 13th century you can find statues, two feet wide and three feet tall made of stone with large eyes called Moon People.  Back 200 years before Columbus set foot on American soil in the Bahamas, the Cherokee migrated from the Great Lakes to Southern Appalachia looking for something better. Better land, good weather, and good soil.  They built permanent wooden buildings around the area.

Soon they encountered strange beings in the area, unlike anything the Cherokee have seen before.  They had white skin and unusually large pale eyes.  They seemed to be from another planet.   They lived in a stone settlement on mounds surrounded by walls. As time went by the relationship between the two people became hostile and the two went into battle against each other with the Cherokee winning and the Moon People moving out.  To warn future generations about these bad people, the Cherokee carved rock creatures to remind them what they looked like.  As the centuries passed they came to be regarded as a myth.  They became something you tell the children to frighten them. Be good or the Moon People will get you.  But on a dark night, some people claimed they could still see them.

In the 1980s, in Indiana, historian Dana Olsen is interested in ancient stories and folklore.  He spends his time trying to understand where the stories come from--what the origins of the stories are.   One day while hiking he comes across a stone fort built on a mound with walls that looks like structures built in the 12th century in Wales. 

There is an old Welsh legend around 1170 of a Prince Madoc who sailed west with ten ships and hoped to find new territory to explore.  He never returned to Wales and it was believed that his ships wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean.  Olsen becomes convinced that the Welsh are the Moon People the Cherokee described so long ago.  The Welsh had round pale eyes and white skin and were very hairy causing them to look like something the Cherokee had never seen before.  You can find these forts across the South from North Carolina to Alabama which is where the Cherokee lived.  So are the Moon People figments of the Cherokee imagination or were they Welsh people who lived there from long ago and discovered America before Columbus.  You decide.   

The Brave Florence Betty Smith

On December 8, 1941, the Japanese navy invaded the U.S. Territory, the Philippines.  Military bases that had been there since the 1880s were overrun and taken over.  In Manila, a woman, Florence Betty Smith, whose husband was killed during the attack decides to avenge her husband.  She joins a group of Filipino and American resistance fighters.  This band of civilians hopes to launch a guerilla-style campaign of attacks on the Japanese installations and drive them from the island.

But first, they must overcome an obstacle.  They need fuel to make the trucks go to drive all over the island and bring in supplies by boat.  The Japanese have blocked access to it.   Without the fuel, the resistance was over before it began.  Smith gets a job as a typist for the Japanese writing gas vouchers.  She secretly writes extra ones and gives them to the resistance who would sabotage supply lines and smuggle goods to prisoners of war.

She is able to do this job for a while, but one day she is caught and the Japanese throw her into a 2 X 4-foot cell and give her gruel once a day to eat.  They tortured her endlessly to get information on the resistance.  The rebels drain the Japanese military resources so that when the Americans come back to retake the island in February of 1945 they have an easier job of it.

Smith is found still in her cell, emaciated but still alive.  She moves to the United States and in 1947 is awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given.  She married again and had children with her new husband and went on to live a peaceful life.  This brave woman really stood up to the Japanese not only by helping the resistance but also by not saying anything under torture.  We owe her a debt of gratitude. 

The Miracle of Flight 9

230 feet long with a wingspan of 195 feet and white with a red stripe, the Boeing 747 was one hell of a plane.  On June 24, 1982, a British Airways Flight 9, the City of Edinburgh, on the route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Perth, Australia had on board 263 souls.  Captain Eric Moody had been flying for years and had loads of experience, which he would need.

For the first ninety minutes of the flight, everything was fine.  They were 2,000 miles from their destination.  But once they began to cross the Indian Ocean things started to go wrong. Smoke started to leak into the cockpit.  The Captain begins to check the instruments to figure out what was going on but soon he is having trouble reading them in the smoke.

A warning light flashes indicating that an engine is down, but the Captain isn't too worried because he has three other engines.  But soon, one by one, each engine goes down.  There's no way they can make it to Perth and the nearest airport is in Jakarta, Indonesia 150 miles away.  The only way to get there is by gliding and coasting nine miles for a drop of 3,000 miles of altitude loss.

But this will only get them 104 miles before they'll have to land.  As they drop below 34,000 feet their only hope is to get one engine going.  As they reached 12,000 feet one of the engines comes alive and begins working.  Minutes later Moody lands in Indonesia.

It turns out that Mount Galunggung had erupted and the ash rose 40,000 feet in the air from the eruption had gotten into the engines.  It was dark out since it was a night flight so the Captain didn't see any of this.  The City of  Edinburgh was renamed the City of Elgin and was cleaned and refitted to fly again.  Captain Moody received an award for his heroics.  And one of the passengers, Betty Tootell married fellow passenger James Ferguson who was in the seat in front of her.  Tootell wrote a book about their experiences called All Four Engines Have Failed.  This flight was a miracle of a Captain who flew the plane through a disaster safely onto the ground.     

Jeanette Rankin: A Hero For Women

Jeanette Rankin was interested in architecture and furniture design.  But those careers weren't open to women then, so when she left the University of Montana with a degree in biology she did work as a teacher, seamstress, and social worker.  Having raised six younger siblings left her with marriage, not on the mind, never mind the many proposals.

At age thirty she fought to get women the right to vote in Montana. Four years later in 1914, they did.  Then she decided to try for a seat for herself--in Congress.   No one thought she had a chance. A woman in Congress?  But her sisters helped with the campaign and her well connected and wealthy brother Wellington was her manager and trusted advisor.  She beat seven men, by 6,000 votes or more to win her seat as a Republican representing Montana.

In Washington, she couldn't let petty problems such as a lack of women's restrooms or a man hitting on her get in her way. So she sat next to the oldest men there to avoid any improper behavior.  She became one of fifty-one unpopular Congressmen who voted against World War I. On her sixth day in office she had found her passion. Pacifism.

She didn't believe she could win her seat back in a Democratically controlled section of the state that had been drawn up and told she now represented so she ran for Senate.  She narrowly came in second place for the Republican Primary but was accused of taking bribes by them.  So she got good and pissed off enough to run for Senate in the national election as a third-party ticket just to prove her honesty.  She came in third but made her point.

She decided to continue her fight for World Peace.  Then at the ripe old age of sixty, she won a seat in Congress again.  When Franklin went to Congress a second time she beat three men to do it and demanded they declare war on Japan they voted 388-1. The one was Rankin who said, "As a woman I can't go to war and I refuse to send someone else."  She was the only person to vote "No" against both World Wars.  It cost her her career in politics.

She spent the rest of her life traveling around lecturing on world peace and visiting India where she fell in love with Gandhi.  She lived cheaply in rural Georgia and made friends of the children of the neighborhood with whom she shared the stories of her life.  In 1968 she led a march on Washington of five thousand women dressed in black against the Vietnam War.  She died peacefully at age ninety-two still thinking of a third term.  She is best known for being the woman who introduced the Nineteenth Amendment in Congress and battled hard for it to be passed and then ratified and put into law on August 18, 1920.

Stonewall: 50 Years Later

In 1969 homosexuality was illegal in all states except Illinois.  That summer the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village often. You had to have identification ready but if you were smart it was false.  You also would run from the police.  This was a time of the Civil Rights movement. The Women's Movement.  The Anti-War Movement.  People were standing up to the cops and the homosexuals were running from the cops.  On June 28, 1969, the cops ran from them.

The 1960s were a dark time for homosexuals. The medical authorities said that it was a mental defect or a kind of psychopathy.  They believed that people talked you into becoming homosexuals and "turned you".  They also believed they could turn you back into a heterosexual by aversive conditioning where they showed you pornographic pictures and gave you electric shocks.  They also sterilized you, castrated you, and sometimes even lobotomized you.  Just to make you a heterosexual and "fix|" you. One place, known as the Dachau of institutes drowned you, in essence, waterboarding the patient. You were supposed to marry and have kids.  Not be with your own kind.

While people of color were protected by laws, gays were not.  If the cops caught a homosexual with another homosexual doing anything "wrong" their names and addresses would be published in the newspaper.  If you were a teacher the school board would know and fire you. You would not be able to practice law with a criminal record or be a doctor. Hell, you wouldn't even be able to be a beautician because that required a license and to have that you needed a clean criminal record. 

Greenwich Village was an openly gay place to be and you could go where you wanted to go.  The Stonewall Inn was just one of many bars that catered to homosexuals in the area.  Christopher Street was the street where gays could hang out with each other and just be. It was theirs.  And the Stonewall was on that street.  As their visibility increased so did the people's need to terrorize them. Shop windows were smashed. You could be beaten. Have your head smashed into a toilet.  Wind up in wheelchairs. They were being hunted.

When the World's Fair came to New York City in 1964 the mayor pushed for a campaign to clean up the "weirdness" or the homosexuals away from the city.  In New York, there were many laws that gays could be charged with. One was the 1845 law of masquerading which was dressing in more than three items of clothing from a gender not your own.  The cops would dress in drag and try to get men to hit on them and sometimes they dressed in plain clothes. Entrapment was a reality. The cops would hide behind the walls of the urinals of the subway station to try to catch people having sex.  They arrested 300-500 for crimes against nature and 3,000--5,000 for solicitation or loitering a year in New York City.  Gay people were not powerful politically and there were a series of escalating skirmishes. Eventually, something was going to blow.

In a gay bar when the light came on you knew to stop what you were doing and separate.  The Stonewall didn't have a liquor license and were raided by the cops regularly.  The Mafia owned the jukeboxes. They owned the cigarette machines. They owned the watered-down liquor.  They decided to go ahead and own the gay bars too and make some money.  The Mafia paid off the cops.  The Stonewall was a down at the heels kind of place that street kids, designers, and boxers went to.  The bar was a toilet but it was a refuge from the streets.  First, you go to the door and a small window opens up and the guy at the door decides whether or not you get to come in.  In the front part of the bar was where the "regular" gays were and toward the back where the jukebox was, you could find the drag queens such as Mary Queen of the Scotch, Conga Woman, Captain Faggot, and Miss Twiggy.   You could see a show there and find love.

What was so good about the Stonewall was that you could slow dance there. Because you couldn't show affection out on the street.  Heterosexuals had so many outlets. Such as lover's lanes, hotels, motels, and drive-ins.  Gays were told they had no right to any of that. With the exception of some mob owned bars to meet in they had nothing.  The only other thing they had were these meat trucks that when they weren't' being used to haul meat were being rented out to gays to meet in to have sex in.  And they still got raided.  And when the police arrested you they sometimes used billy clubs on you and beat you.

The Mattachine Society was the first Gay Rights Organization.  They talked with the mayor and finally got them to stop with the entrapment.  However, Mayor John Lindsey wanted to get reelected in 1969 and in June he started his campaign to clean up the streets of the "weirdos".  They raided The Checkerboard, a very popular gay bar a week before they raided Stonewall.  There was also vigilantism.  Straights were using walkie talkies to gather their forces together against the gays.  Gays were being shot, strangled, thrown in the river, being blackmailed and losing employment.

It was a perfect storm that night on June 28, 1969. The Stonewall had been raided that previous Tuesday night.  Raids generally took place on a weeknight early in the evening so it wasn't too crowded and the mafia paid them off and didn't lose too much business.  But that night it was unusual because it was jam-packed and neither the mob nor the sixth precinct had been alerted that there was going to be a raid.  There were only six cops because they felt they had the nearby precinct for backup if need be.  They turned the lights out and started asking for IDs.  Outside people are asking "What's going on?|" People come out of the Stonewall with their arms raised in the V is for Victory sign.  More people start to show up and to congregate.

A rather tough lesbian was fighting the cops and not going quietly and the more she fought the more they beat her.  This caused more people to gather and grow alarmed.  People started shouting "Pigs" and "Cops" and throwing pennies for copper or that is what they were worth.  They were calling the cops names and grabbing their buts and telling them how good looking they were.  The cops barricaded themselves with some of the gays inside the Stonewall along with two members of the Village Voice newspaper.  Things were being thrown against the plywood covered window and incendiary devices were being thrown inside, but the cops took the fire extinguisher from the wall and put them out.

One of the drag queens, Miss New Orleans, grabbed a parking meter from the ground and was helped by others to pound it into the door of the Stonewall.  By this time there were several thousand outside compared to the six cops standing inside.  The cops radio signal kept cutting out so they couldn't get a message to the precinct.  The head cop, as Howard Smith the editor of the Village Voice recalls it he went to every single man and said his name and said if you fire before I say to you will be walking the beat at Statton Island for the rest of your life.  That cop believed that the first shot that was fired meant that all the shots would be fired and people would be killed and it would make things worse.  They did find a secret way out.

The cops did arrive with tactical gear.  They marched down Christopher Street pushing the gays in front of them.  The gays pushed back. And then they circled around the street and came at the police from behind.  They chased the cops around the blocks for hours.  Gays were supposed to be weak and here they were picking things up and throwing them and coming at the cops not afraid anymore.  The drag queens were doing Rockette kicklines and singing.  They went into the Stonewall with baseball bats and destroyed it beating it to death.  They lit trashcans on fire and slashed police cars tires.  They were mad as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore.

The next day the Stonewall opened up for business and it wasn't just the gays who showed up but the Black Panthers and Anti-War Movement people eager to fight the police.  And while some still got a nightstick to the head it wasn't as many and they fought back.  The cops broke open the tear gas in front of the Stonewall.  There were more anger and more fight the second night. They had found their voice.  There was no going back into the closet.  "It really should have been called an Uprising. They were objecting to how they were being treated. That's more of an Uprising than a Riot," Howard Smith said of the time.

They decided they couldn't just let it go like that. That they needed something to mark the occasion and someone suggested a march.  And thus was born the first Gay Pride March.  Of course, there were bomb threats and people had threatened to shoot them so at first, it was more of a run than a march, but after a while, more and more people joined in and over 2,000 people marched in that first parade that was a parade for everyone.  And every year in cities across the globe they have a Gay Pride March to mark the occasion of The Stonewall Inn's Uprising.

After fifty years a lot has changed in America for gays.  They are no longer barred from work. They can adopt a child. They can even marry. They have come so far and it has taken so long and so much blood, sweat and tears to do so.  The people of Stonewall were brave to finally stand up and say "NO MORE!" to laws that prohibited them from being who they were.  To laws that kept them from being with who they wanted to be with.  To laws that said that there was something wrong with them.  I for one am glad they did.  As a bisexual, they were standing up for me.  And I am grateful.