Straight Edge Door & Window

09/27/2023

Beautiful morning hanging with my cousin.

01/20/2023

This is Rube Waddell, an American baseball player (from the early 1900s) whose life story bewilders me to no end.

In the middle of a game, Waddell would disappear to chase fire trucks. He was easily distracted, so opposing fans would bring puppies to the game which would have Waddell running over to play with them.

American sportswriter and baseball historian Lee Allen wrote that in 1903, Waddell was "sleeping in a firehouse at Camden, New Jersey, and ended it tending bar in a saloon in Wheeling, West Virginia. In between those events, he won 22 games for the Philadelphia Athletics, [...] toured the nation in a melodrama called The Stain of Guilt, courted, married, and became separated from May Wynne Skinner of Lynn, Massachusetts, saved a woman from drowning, accidentally shot a friend through the hand, and was bitten by a lion."

It should be noted that Waddell was incapable of memorizing his lines for his part in The Stain of Guilt, so he was allowed to improvise his lines in every show. The play went on to critical acclaim.

In 1905, Waddell shared a room with baseball catcher Ossee Schreckengost who refused to continue sharing the room unless there was a clause in Waddell’s contract that forbade him from eating crackers in bed. It should be noted that it was common for players to share the same bed in hotel rooms while on the road. That same year, he missed the World Series after injuring his shoulder while trying to destroy a straw hat.

He did however, went on to win a Triple Crown in pitching. If the Cy Young award had existed during this time, Waddell would have won it over Cy Young himself.

He died of tuberculosis at the age of 37 on April Fool’s Day, 1914.

12/29/2022

Chris Watson is this a distant cousin of yours ?

☞Today in Old-West History -- On today’s date 153 years ago, Christmas Day, Saturday, December 25, 1869, notorious sixteen-year-old outlaw John Wesley Hardin (1853-1895), the son of a Methodist preacher, was playing cards at the town of Towash in Hill County, Texas, & had won many hands when a town tough, Jim Bradley, a big loser, suddenly je**ed forth a knife & threatened: “You win another hand & I cut out your liver, Kid.” Hardin was unarmed at the time & politely excused himself. He went to his room & strapped on two six-guns.

☞That night, Hardin stepped into the main street of Towash wearing his two revolvers. Down the street stood Jim Bradley, who also wore a gun & had been looking for Hardin. Hardin walked toward Bradley who cursed him & then fired a shot in Hardin’s direction, the bullet missing its mark. Hardin’s hands flashed across his chest & his two six-guns were suddenly in his hands, both firing at the same instant. The two bullets found their marks, one striking Bradley in the head, the second smashing into the gunman’s chest. He crumpled to the street dead.

☞The Christmas-Day Towash gunfight was witnessed by a dozen or more people who quickly spread the word that John Wesley Hardin was “The Fastest Gun in the West.”

☞Note: The town of Towash was located on Towash Creek about fifteen miles west of the town of Hillsboro in extreme west-central Hill County. Towash was becoming a ghost town by the Mid-20th Century, & met its ultimate demise when it was inundated by the waters of Lake Whitney, a flood-control reservoir that was impounded on the Brazos River in 1951.

☞The famous 1871 studio photograph of John Wesley Hardin is from the Hardin-family photograph album of Mamie Mae Hardin Simmons (1898-1986), who is a first cousin, twice-removed to John Wesley Hardin.