GUNMEN'S GRIM HUMOUR

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 7, 8 July 1935, Page 8

GUNMEN'S GRIM HUMOUR

Things have come lo a pretty pass, even in America, when gunmen invade the sanctity of the links and hold up golfers in the course of a peaceful Saturday game. Yet this is what actually happened, so a New York cable message tells us today, at the Ridgewood Country Club, New Jersey, where five players, enjoying a quiet round, "were just preparing to drive from the eighth tee when three masked bandits armed with pistols appeared from some bushes along the fairway and held them up." One can imagine the feelings of the golfers; not consternation— not even an earthquake would produce that in a hard-boiled American golfer—but just sheer disgust that such an intrusion should be possible to put a man off his swing. What they said when the bandits "frisked" them, to the tune of 200 dollars, for four out of the five, is not reported. Considerately enough, the bandits instructed the five caddies to turn their backs on the whole proceedings for fear, doubtless, that they might be shocked.

So far, one might say, a typically American scene—hold-up, hands up, part up—a sequence established in American tradition as normally innocuous to person, if not to purse, like a European duel, if carried out according to the rules. But the fifth man, who may have, been a visitor to these United States, perhaps, from the very birthplace of golf, spoilt it all by throwing his wallet, "containing 75 dollars," into the high grass in an attempt at salvage. And then bang went, not "saxpence," but an irate bafndil's pistol, and the man who wanted a "new' deal" is wounded in the leg for his pains and incapacitated for the rest of the round. Still he might have saved his money, for it is not stated that the bandits stayed to search for it in the long grass. What strikes one is the amount of loose cash these golfers carried. It would loom large in New Zealand currency, "plus exchange." Things cannot, after all, be as bad as they say in U.S.A. '.After this tragt-comedy of the golf

course, if further evidence were required of the grim humour of the American gunman, there is the affair at the Alvin Theatre, also recorded today in a New York cable. Four gunmen "bound and gagged, the watchman, blew open the safe,'and escaped with 15,000 dollars, representing holiday receipts" for ihe famous Fourth of July. And the title of the piece? "Everything Goes." So it does, so it did! The gunmen saw to it.