OLD NEWS: 1917 Arkansas newspaper reported on 2 women who fled hospital in night gowns

The Ralston-Purina Co. rebranded its animal feeds as “chow” in 1917, witness this ad from the Oct. 16, 1917, Arkansas Gazette.
The Ralston-Purina Co. rebranded its animal feeds as “chow” in 1917, witness this ad from the Oct. 16, 1917, Arkansas Gazette.

The Arkansas Gazette offered its readers heaped helpings of war news 100 years ago this week, with battle maps and reports of the first American casualties and prisoners of war in France.

Meanwhile ...

Wander About City in Nighties and Kimonos

Pansy Spangles and Pearl Hendricks, white women, fled from the City hospital last night clad only in their night gowns, over which each had thrown a kimono. Each, however, had secured a pair of shoes.

Thus airily garbed, they walked through dimly lighted portions of the city for four hours. They told the police that they kept warm by running at intervals.

They fetched up finally at the home of one Theodore Schlatter, a truck gardener who lived four miles east of Little Rock. They asked him for a lift to North Little Rock.

Schlatter refused to take any chances. He called the police.

The police had Schlatter drive the women toward town, where they were met by a police car, which took them the rest of the way to City Jail. The next day they would be returned to the hospital, where the county probation officer had sent them just that morning. "Evidently they did not take a fancy to the place," the Gazette quipped.

Which is not to suggest a dearth of serious reporting in the week of Nov. 5, 1917. Oh, no.

• In Washington, D.C., Alice Paul, the 90-pound chairman of the Woman's Party, announced she would starve herself to death unless her fellow jailed suffrage workers were given better food than the coarse salt pork and cabbage they had been fed 18 times in 18 days. She was serving a seven months' sentence for picketing the White House to demand the American woman's right to vote.

• In Chandler, Ariz., William Jennings Bryan, the politician, had lost the seat of his trousers to a wild bull that chased him through the desert.

• At Little Rock, the Board of Commerce announced a campaign to eradicate houseflies in the winter, when they might be sluggish and easier to sneak up on. And somebody was poisoning dogs.

• In North Little Rock, aldermen were considering an ordinance to replace the $25 weekly tax on clairvoyants with a $25 to $100 fine -- effectively a ban on clairvoyance.

Also, Pine Bluff had been "Hooverized." All the restaurant owners in town had agreed to observe every Tuesday as a meatless day and every Wednesday as a wheatless day. E.B. Wiles, the state hotel and restaurant inspector, planned to inspect them to see how much food they were saving each month under a plan suggested by Herbert Hoover, head of the U.S. Food Administration.

Later in the week, Hamp Williams, the federal food administrator for Arkansas, announced that starting Nov. 13, 1917, Tuesdays would be meatless and Wednesdays would be wheatless at all hotels and restaurants in the state. But that wouldn't excuse unwholesome menus:

"You will be expected on the meatless Tuesdays to serve poultry, fish and game of any kind, such as squirrel, duck, geese and turkey, etc., and on wheatless Wednesdays to serve corn bread, rye bread, bran bread, war bread, etc. We must not lose sight of the fact that these requests coming from the federal Food Administration should be received in the nature of a command from the government, which should be obeyed with the same promptness and the same spirit of patriotism that is rendered by a soldier who receives his orders in the trenches."

An ad for Purina Cow Chow caught my eye in the Nov. 6 edition:

Cow Chow Is a Real Feed and made by a real feed mill and not by a mill that runs their by-products in dairy feed. No oat hulls nor screenings (sweepings) in Cow Chow Dairy Feed. Cow Chow ingredients are C.S. meal, gluten feed from corn, brewers' dried grains, molasses, 10 percent pea green alfalfa hay, 1 percent salt, 24 percent protein. Cow Chow contains 133 quarts of real dairy feed. Guaranteed to increase milk flow or money refunded. Sold in checkerboard sacks only.

A little snooping through earlier editions assured me that this was indeed one of the earliest advertisements for Ralston Purina's Cow Chow, a brand name that first appeared in the Gazette on March 22 that year.

The International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 32. (St. James Press, 2000), which I found quoted online at company-histories.com, claims that Purina's entrepreneurial founder, William H. Danforth, decided to rename his animal feeds "chow" after he noticed soldiers apparently relishing the word during his stint as Young Men's Christian Association secretary for the Third Army Division while it was serving in France.

Back in St. Louis, the company's Chow Division, later part of Purina Mills, eventually produced Horse Chow, Dog Chow, Cat Chow, Rabbit Chow, Pig Chow, Mink Chow and even Purina Monkey Chow. That corporation is today part of K̶o̶c̶h̶ ̶I̶n̶d̶u̶s̶t̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶I̶n̶c̶.̶ Land O’Lakes Inc.*

Speaking of connections that unfold over time, in the Nov. 7 Gazette was this cavalierly headlined personal tragedy:

Any Little Girl Would Do For Roy, It Seems

When an embarrassed young man appears at the office of the county clerk and looks around rather wildly in search of someone in whom to confide, it is understood at once that he wishes to secure a marriage license. But yesterday a young man more agitated than usual appeared.

"Say," he said to a deputy clerk, "I'm in rather a funny position. Really, I'm in rather a tangle. The girl I secured a license to marry here Saturday went and married another man. Could I get the money I paid for the license?"

When he was told that it would be impossible, he said, "Well, then, could I substitute another girl's name?"

He was told he might.

The deputy clerk turned back to the Saturday marriage license record and found the following two marriage licenses: James H. Leslie, 24, Little Rock, and Miss Lilac Ellington, 18, Little Rock; Roy Beard, 21, Little Rock, and Miss Lila Ellington, 19, Little Rock.

"She's the same girl," said the disappointed young man, James H. Leslie. "I guess I ought to consider myself lucky," he said.

Leslie secured his license Saturday morning. Beard, who also probably considers himself lucky, obtained his license late Saturday afternoon.

Late yesterday afternoon Leslie had not returned with the substitute.

Ouch!

Jump ahead to Feb. 12, 1964, when one Roy Beard, Little Rock city collector since 1936, announced his retirement. Beard had joined the city in 1917 as a premise inspector for the health department. He and Lilac Ellington "Honey" Beard had two sons, Roy Jr. and William George.

She was 82 when she died in 1984; Roy lived to be 97, dying in 1999.

I don't know what became of the jilted James H. Leslie. Do you, Helpful Reader?

cstorey@arkansasonline.com

ActiveStyle on 11/06/2017

*CORRECTION: Purina Animal Nutrition LLC is a subsidiary of Land O’Lakes Inc. A previous version of this column had out-of-date information on the modern owner of the animal feed company.

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