"Trouble & Tragedy"

Pulling up his car in Bonnieres, France, last week, Fulford Patrick Hardy. 22. Ontario socialite, suddenly cracked his mother over the head with the automobile crank, and drove off shouting "I've gone crazy! I've gone crazy!" Such at least was Mrs. Hardy's recollection of what happened before she collapsed. "I can't think why he did it," she added later. "He was such a good cheery boy about the house."

Several hours later Fulford Patrick Hardy turned up at the police station with his face scratched, all the buttons torn off his vest and a long story. He said that some Frenchmen had struck his mother, kidnapped him, turned him loose. His father, Senator Arthur Charles Hardy of Ontario, heard the news just before his steamer landed at Cherbourg, sped to the rescue with a high-powered French lawyer. Fulford Hardy had been clapped into jail. Mrs. Hardy, not seriously injured, tearfully inquired if he had a comfortable cell, if she might send him his pajamas. Two inspectors hurried out from Paris to take charge of the case and Bonnieres' Police Commissioner washed his hands of the business muttering "Ah, mon Dieu, ces Americains!"

A mystery it was, particularly when bloodstains and a bullet hole were found in the roof of the car, but Ottawa citizens took the matter as just one more incident in the lively annals of the Hardy family. Fulford Patrick Hardy's maternal grandfather was the Senator Fulford whose great fortune was derived from "Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People." His elder sister Mary married the heir to another successful nostrum, "Dr. Rogers' Fruitatives."

Backed by Pink Pills & Fruitatives, Father Arthur Hardy, already a social leader of Ottawa, was appointed Speaker of the Canadian Senate by Liberal Premier William Lyon MacKenzie King. This position he filled with apparent success despite his almost total deafness. Not long ago Daughter Mary mistook poison for Fruitatives in her medicine closet and died. Last January Son Fulford Patrick Hardy eloped with a 16-year-old Toronto school girl, and after a wild ride from Toronto to Detroit to Toledo to Crown Point, Ind., finally got married. They separated soon after.

Worried, deaf Senator Hardy received reporters in Paris last week. "Trouble and tragedy seem to stalk in my household," said he.

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