Out of print: The Baltimore Sun of September 1940

Second in a series

This sampling from my stash of old Baltimore newspapers comes from the Sun of Labor Day weekend, 1940, bringing news of a fatal plane crash in Virginia, with a U.S. senator (and suspected Nazi sympathizer) among the victims; Nazi Germany bombing England; a tropical storm hitting Maryland and flooding Baltimore streets; a young man arrested for not standing during the National Anthem at a boxing match; couples getting married at record pace ahead of the first peacetime draft in U.S. history; a bath house disaster in Atlantic City; a story of a pilot who landed on Loch Raven Reservoir north of Baltimore. There are some ads — you could purchase a $25 radio by paying just 50 cents a week at Hecht Bros. — and, as always we end with a cartoon, this one a regular Sunday feature called Room and Board by Gene Ahern.

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The front page: Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19, flying from Washington to Detroit with a stopover in Pittsburgh, crashed near Lovettsville, Virginia during an intense thunderstorm. Numerous witnesses reported seeing a large flash of light shortly before it nosed over and crashed in an alfalfa field. The Civil Aeronautics Board concluded that the probable cause was a lightning strike. U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen, Republican of Minnesota, was among the 21 passengers and four crew members killed. At the time of the crash, the FBI was investigating Lundeen’s ties to a German agent working in the U.S. to spread pro-Nazi and antisemitic propaganda. An FBI agent was among the crash victims. The Sun dispatched a reporter to cover the story and I cite for praise here some of the detail and quotes the un-bylined correspondent dispatched on deadline.

The Sun’s practice, and that of other newspapers, was to report the race of individuals in crime stories — when then the suspect was a person of color. The practice continued into the 1960s and early 1970s. I got to The Evening Sun in 1976, and the practice had stopped by then. … The story at right reports a surge in marriage licences in Baltimore in anticipation of the apporaching military draft. The 1940 marriage boom occurred because married men were, at the time, exempt from the draft.

When a fact makes a great punchline, why mention it in the lede? Make sure you read this story (below) about crack aviator Fred Williamson to the end.

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