I was looking for an obituary for a patron when I came across this news story, which is so hilarious and awfully tragic at the same time that I just had to share it. (The only possible explanations we could come up with: everybody was drunk all the time in 1937, or everybody in 1937 was a Keystone Kop.)
TRAGEDY MARKS YULETIDE FETE
Parachute Fails Santa Claus High Over Harbor of Boston Wednesday
Boston, Dec. 22 - (AP) - High over Boston airport, a brightly-costumed Santa Claus tonight stepped from a circling plane and, suspended by a wind-caught parachute, dropped and disappeared into dusk-blanketed Boston harbor as a Christmas party of children looked on horrified.
An hour after he fell, coast guard, army, navy and harbor police craft, searching the murky waters as pursuit planes dropped flares, had failed to find any trace o the parachute jumper, 35-year-old Harold Kramer.
Soon after the search started, an army plane, taxing to a landing, and a police automobile, rushing underwater searchlights to the scene, crashed, sending Sft. Edward J. Seiboldt, Boston police ballistics expert, to a hospital critically injured. Less seriously injured was his assistant, Patrolman John Clorin.
Almost simultaneously, a small boat in which two enlisted army men, Richard Miller and Earl Jordan, were searching for the parachute jumper, capsized. Coast guardsmen pulled the men, half-drowned, from the frigid water. They, too, went to the hospital.
The accidents came at the climax of a party for children of members of an army air corps detachment at the East Boston airport.
Jumping up and down with glee, the children eagerly awaited the descent for Kris Kringle from the air when:
“Private Kramer stepped out of the plane,” reported Capt. Richard E. Cobb, commanding officer of the detachment and pilot of the ship. "His 'chute opened. We were about 1,500 feet above the airport. There was a 40-mile an hour wind blowing.
“The wind caught the parachute. Kramer landed in the water about 150 to 200 feet from the airport. He struggled to free himself from the parachute.”
Cobb landed his plane, seized a cork life preserver, took off again, and dropped the preserver at the spot where the parachute had made a light splotch against the water.
“I don’t know whether he got it,” Cobb said, “but he seemed to be above water then.”
Kramer, an enlisted man and a veteran parachute jumper, is married and has one child.
And 100-odd children, the cheeks of some of them wet with tears, straggled home.
“Won’t Santa,” sobbed one little girl, “won’t Santa come now.”
