HOLIDAY TRAGEDIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 January 1939, Page 5

HOLIDAY TRAGEDIES

MANY PERSONS KILLED IN U.S.A.

MOSTLY IN CAR ACCIDENTS.

DISORDERLY CELEBRATIONS IN NEW YORK.

By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright.

NEW YORK, January 1

The birth of the World’s Fair this year was the theme of New York’s New Year’s observance when 15,000,000 dollars were spent on noisy celebrations. Night clubs and hotels, despite a cover-charge of 15 dollars, were sold out.

Thirteen hundred police and 128 mounted police sought to maintain order in jammed Times Square and Broadway. One hundred and sixty-five detectives were assigned to escort to their homes bejewelled debutantes lest they might be attacked by thugs. One hundred and thirteen Americans were killed during celebrations, the majority through car accidents. The proprietor’s wife, his three children and one guest were burned to death when fire broke out during a party at a Rumford (Maine) hotel. The building was destroyed. A miner ran amuck and died from black damp when he was trapped in a corridor through fire breaking out in the shaft of a mine at Clinton (Indiana). Eighteen other miners were saved after 12 hours. Their rescuers advanced behind a wall of pure air forced in under pressure.

A dentist, Henry Steil, provided the strangest suicide. He entered a New York hotel filled with revellers, sat down and propped up his watch. He waited until 1938 had ticked away and fired a bullet through his heart on the stroke of midnight.

Police snatched to safety a man who had climbed out on the coping of a skyscraper. Several persons died in free-for-all fights, in one of which 80 men and women participated. In New York alone 142 persons were admitted to hospital suffering from alcoholism. Forty men and three women are in a serious condition.

The biggest robbery was a 100,000dollar haul from a New York antique dealer who lost Marie Antoinette s watch and a miniature of George Washington’s mother valued at 50,000 dollars. <