Americans’ New Year Casualties

Northern Advocate, 3 January 1939, Page 5

Americans’ New Year Casualties

(Received 1 p.m.) NEW YORK, January 1. One hundred and thirteen Americans were killed during the New Year celebrations, the majority of them in motor car accidents.! The proprietor’s wife and three children and one guest were burned when fire broke out during a party in a hotel at Rumford. Maine. The building was destroyed. n A miner ran amok and died from the effects of black damp when he was trapped in a corridor through fire breaking out in the shaft of a mine at Clinton, Indiana. Eighteen men were saved after 12 hours by rescuers who advanced behind a wall of pure air forced in under pressure. A dentist, Henry Steil, provided a very strange suicide. He entered a New York hotel filled with revellers, sat down, propped up his watch, and waited until 1938 ticked away, then fired a bullet through his heart on the stroke of midnight. Policemen snatched to safety a man who had climbed out on to the coping of a skyscraper. Several people died in “free for all fights, one of whom was 80 years old. Men and women participated. One hundred and forty-two people were sent to hospital in New York alone suffering from the effects of alcohol, and 40 men and three of the women are in a serious condition. The biggest robbery was a 100,000 dollars haul from a New York antique dealer. The articles stole:* included Marie Antoinette’s watch, and a miniature depicting George Washington’s mother, valued at 50,000 dollars.