APPLE-SELLER’S DEATH

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 December 1934, Page 2

APPLE-SELLER’S DEATH

LADY FOR A DAY. For five years Ellen McCarthy eked cut a. precarious living selling apples just off the corner of Broadway and Forty-fifth Street. Then on September 5. 1933, fortune smiled on her. For twenty-four hours she basked in every known luxury. A three-room suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, a limousine with a chauffeur, new clothes, choice food, -and entertainment. It was part of a publicity stunt for a motion picture that told of an apple seller who for twenty-four hours, no longer, was- allowed everything her heart desired. When the day was done, the humble little woman, who was just past 70, received 25 dollars (about £5), and the clothes that went with the part. The next day she went back to the apple stand. Six months later she stopped selling apples and moved with her husband, 'Thomas McCarthy, a year younger than she, to a furnished room at 203 Eighth* Avenue, where they subsisted on home relief. Recently their bodies lay in the morgue, victims of accidental gas poisoning. A day or two before the couple had stayed in their squalid room. The husband had tried to light the tiny gas radiator —several burnt matches near the heater indicated that. The opening was set back and his unsteady hand could not quite reach it.

The gas soon filled the small room that contained only a bed and a dresser. About 9 p.m. Jacob Kolody, owner of a store under the tenement, smelled the gas. He called policemen and they found the couple dead. In the dresser they found a ragged black net evening gown, the sole item from “Apple Annie’s” day of glory still in her possession. Not a picture or other memento of her brief moment in the- public eye was found. A neighbour said the new clothes that had gone with her twenty-four-hour job had been given l to a friend in distress, who in a more prosperous time had bought an apple each day from Apple Annie and paid a quarter for it. A fur scarf had /been bartered for whisky. A representative of Columbia Pictures, Inc., who sponsored Apple Annie’s twenty-four-hour jaunt, claimed the bodies of the couple at the morgue and arranged to liold a funeral service for them. :