Fat Tuesday

A thoughtless pre-Lenten frolic on a Shrove Tuesday morning one hundred years ago in old New Orleans. Through the gumbo mud, the open ditches, along the plank sidewalks, under the street lanterns, paraded seven drunken students, back from their schools in France. As they whirled past the colonial guard station, a startled guardsman gave pursuit to the celebrators, chased them pell-mell down into the Old Quarter, by the Place D'Armes, past the St. Louis Cathedral, along streets lined with white houses embroidered with iron balconies.

On they went in and out to the waterfront, past the already world-famed Absinthe House, to the levees where thousands of one-way flat boats, manned by grizzly "Kaintucks" lay at anchor. New Orleans was the richest city in the Americas and rivaled New York as a port. Bushy-whiskered rivermen were resentfully discussing that "outrageous sale of Louisiana to the United States." The boys disappeared in the bales piled high on the wharf. The suspicious guardsman peered about for a while, looked out over the muddy Mississippi and the waving grasses back in the impenetrable swamps, spat, returned to his post at the ale house, where he took up once more his duty with his cherie.

Those boys were the sons and grandsons of the wild companions of old Jean Baptiste Lemoyne de Bienville, who came to the Mississippi in 1718 to found a city-- New Orleans. One hundred years later it had grown into a town of 40,000, half of whom were slaves, where all spoke French.

A century later, on the same day, Shrove Tuesday--a week ago--half a million people crowded into the town to participate in Mardi Gras (fat Tuesday) with the definite purpose in mind of having a good time. Out of that picturesque escapade a hundred years ago has emerged the serious business of celebrating its anniversary. Pink-cheeked Iowans with Happy Hooligan hat complexes are frantically chased through the crowds by corpulent wives arrayed as Madame Gump.

Calm Louisianians, oddly, get themselves mixed up in it too. There are hundreds of parties, many of which are not noted by the society column of the Times-Picayune.

But there should be no mistaking the ponderous esteem in which the city's gentility hold Mardi Gras. To receive the precious envelope with a little number in one corner is to be touched by Fortune for some girls and not to receive it is vexatious humiliation to others, for only those who have the little numbers may dance with Maskers. The old aristocracy does not forget the relative importance of the various clubs: Comus, the oldest, Atlanteans, Momus, Twelfth Night, Mystics, a score of others, nor does it become too freely intrigued with street processionals.

There is the queen. This year she was Miss Mildred Brown.

There are parades, pageants, street mummery. There is Rex, the king, who rides along the rolling streets with his crown cocked on one ear.

Half a million people. Fat Tuesday. Negroes leading mule-drawn floats. Descendants of Acadians munching tac-tac (pop corn), beignets (doughnuts). Prankish youths in cowboy costumes smacking maidens on their fulsome, laughing lips. Public feasts. Electric bulbs. Bacchanalia Motorcycle policemen. Passenger agents. Twelfth Night Revelers. Heebie-Jeebies. Comus, Momus, Mystics. Proteus. More floats. Bourbon Street bounders. Swirling crowds tumbling over one another like waves as they surge through the streets, seeking favors from the nobility aboard the floats. Torches. Band music. "No Parking Along Parade Route." Revelry. Bootleggers. Streaming champagne bottles. Girls. Fat Tuesday. The mystery of night in New Orleans. Dancing, dancing, dancing. Fat Tuesday.

New Orleans, the one city in the U. S. with a sensuous background, puts on the show year after year. As the last whoops of one carnival die out in the warm spring breezes off the Gulf, diligent managers are promoting the program for the ensuing year. They call in artists, discuss costumes and motifs; they plan and plot, calculate. The show must go on! It is a mint. Then there is the tradition which must not be overlooked.

The tradition of old New Orleans, the old days. Again there are the shouts of glee of the carousing students as they flee away to the boat landings. Again there are the boomings of curfew cannon warning sailors, slaves and soldiers off the dreamy streets. Again the fortifications of the town ring with the shots of Jean and Pierre Lafitte as the two pirates bombard the village in the dead still night.

Spouse

In Paris, one Gaston Orpholan, billiardist, climbed to the second platform of the Eiffel Tower and shouted at the city that his wife would not let him play billiards. Therefore he was going to jump to his death. For five hours policemen begged him not to do so; he demanded that his wife come. She did. Then he jumped.

Sleeper

In Le Havre, France, one Joseph Eggermaier, Czechoslovak, tired, raw-footed, hid in a life boat of the French Liner Paris. He had walked the 600 miles from Liege, Belgium; now he would sneak a free eight-hour ride to Plymouth, England. He settled himself and yawned . . . salt air was making him sleepy. . . . He awoke 24 hours later, beyond the ship's stop at Plymouth; was perforce carried to Manhattan, where last week immigration officers turned him back to France.

Lion

In Utica, N. Y., vaudeville patrons watched one Louis Furtell's lion act; thrilled as one lion batted the man about the stage, like a big, shaggy kitten mauling a woolen doll around a nursery. Fine actor that lion tamer . . . acted as though he were hurt. Last week Actor Furtell died of his wounds.

Tigress

Near Tashkent, Russian Turkestan, a tigress, famished, sneaked into a farmhouse, devoured two peasants.

Boar

At Lynxville, Wis., one Percy Eagon of La Crosse, was up a tree. A razorback boar (male hog) had chased him there. The boar was almost as big as a cow. From snout to tail it measured 8 ft. 8 in.; weighed 850 to 900 lb.; had tusks 10 in. long. Two years ago the man first sighted the beast. Last week he caught it unawares and managed to shoot it.

Pig

Near Butterfield, Minn., Farmgirl Annie Kroeker, scared, yelled for her father to come dig at their eight-months-old straw stack. While she had been jumping up and down on it, she had heard weak swinish squeals. Maybe their missing Duroc-Jersey pig had made them. He had. Reduced from 225 Ib. to 50 lb., one side worn raw by contact with the soil, one ear rubbed to a stub--he had lived the months under tons of straw.

Wolf

Near Armada, Ark., one George Sohm, 8, returning home from his first grade class, came upon a great grey timber wolf; it snarled. George caught up a stone and carefully battered the wolf's head until it went insensible. Then the boy slit the wolf's throat, just as he had seen the butchers kill sheep. He could do this because the wolf, in jumping over a high wire fence had caught its hind legs in the upper meshes and was hanging head down.

Catfish

In Montevideo, Uruguay, 78 summer bathers ran bleeding from the beach. Their legs had been nipped by a school of sleek catfish that had glided into the shallows.

Butterfly

At Winnipeg, Man., Colonel Thomas Combs, Salvation Army secretary, unfolded a newspaper sent him from Honolulu, 4,000 miles away. Out fluttered a blue and white butterfly accidentally wrapped in the paper. It fluttered about the room a while, seemed unharmed by its precarious journey.

Again Charlie

One Charles Dewitt, finding that he had a few minutes to spare, dropped into Police Headquarters in New York City last week and admitted that he was the long lost Charlie Ross. Policemen quizzed the man and almost immediately felt that he had exaggerated his importance.

Charlie Ross, the original nonpareil, is a national hero eclipsed in popularity only by Jesse James albeit their distinctions are divergent. Every year someone claims to be Charlie; few claim to be Jesse.

Fifty-three years ago golden-haired Charlie, a mere stripling of four, accepted along with his brother an offer of a stranger to go buggy riding. This was near Germantown. He never came back.

Some time after the mysterious disappearance, two men were shot housebreaking. Their names were William Mosher and Joseph Douglas. Mr. Mosher died immediately. Mr. Douglas expired whispering: "WE STOLE CHARLIE ROSS!"

Years later a certain Charlie McChristy was arrested for a petty crime and divulged in the third degree chamber that he was the son of Mrs. McChristy who was the widow of Bill Mosher, and he remembered having been hidden in the New York Juvenile Orphan Asylum at an early age. That was all he knew.

Last summer a relative of Charlie's visiting in Shelby, N. C., discovered a man who had the Ross-family features of face and mind. He told of being brought South as a boy of 4, and old Dr. Gaffney's son thought at the time that he resembled the lithographs of the missing child but never reported the matter because of the ominous Reconstruction terrors.

These two, of hundreds, including the famed Brewster Ross and William van Hodge aspirants, have made out the most likely cases. But always the Ross family repudiates, always the Ross fortune retreats without another heir.

Charlie Ross is gone.

Candidate Charlie Dewitt left the police station last week puzzled. He had told a good story, he thought.

Grey Ghost

Originally it was a lifeboat on a yacht belonging to Novelist Zane Grey. They put masts on it and called it a yawl, the Grey Ghost. Fishermen Eli Kelly and James McKinley sailed it out in December and were crippled by a storm. Before the Grey Ghost drifted ashore on Santa Catalina Island, Fishermen McKinley was dead and Fisherman Kelly was, by agreement, a cannibal, still alive but half-crazed (TIME, Jan. 3, 10). Fisherman George McShallis of San Pedro, Calif., salvaged the Grey Ghost and sailed to San Clemente to ply his trade.

Last fortnight Fisherman McShallis lay at death's vestibule, from exposure, broken leg and bloodpoisoning. When he regained speech he told how the Grey Ghost had broken its mooring, leaving him on San Clemente beach. He had tried to scale a cliff, but had fallen into a cactus pit. Rescuers found him, a moaning skeleton propped on its elbow, after eight days.