Judge — August 20, 1921 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

young girl, unnerved by the movies, gazed and fainted. What was it? A maniac at large with a safety- razor? An escaped giraffe devouring $95 French hats? A.,murmur. Two murmurs, sinister, sticky—the crowd began to thicken like fudge, bubble like home brew. It was soon a mob, yelling like boy scouts, pursuing— whom? It was Coralie Seabeam, calm as a fried oyster, walking down the Avenue. Opposite Tiffany’s the mob closed in on her. The traffic cops rushed in and fought like a Flatbush commuter in a crowded subway car. Then came the reserves—the clanging patrol wagon—and Coralie, bundled into a blanket to hide her shame, was driven to the police sta- tion, a dozen feverish reporters gal- loping in her wake. “Coralie Seabeam, you are accused /) of appearing on the public thorough- ‘ fares in cotton stockings. Are you guilty or not guilty?” The prosecution’s evidence was d—ing. There were scores of indig- nant citizens ready to swear that Coralie’s legs, swathed in fuzzy black, had been absolutely invisible. Sweet young debutantes, whom nothing in the world had ever been able to shock before, blushed as they took the stand to testify to the outrage. “Had this brazen hussy been cap- tured on the East Side,” thundered the District Attorney, “or kept to the cide streets, I might have been persuaded, on account of her youth— Drawn by Pave x. Wrecked Golfer—WELL, OUTSIDE OF EVERY- THING ELSE, THIS IS A MIGHTY POOR “LIE”! though against my better judgment —to ask that she be let off with a reprimand. But to flaunt and parade her shame on the aristocratic pave- ments of Fifth Avenue, embarras ing and mortifying the handsomest set of traffic cops in the world—such insolence and contumely demands the heaviest sentence the law allows!” Coralie’s counsel, however, made a strident fight. “THE CALL OF THE WILD.” 6 lt was proved by competent wit- nesses that the demand for silken hosiery was so gigantic that no shop could keep supplied. The Invisible Stocking Company, for instance, was selling 100,000 pairs a day. Coralie had stood for hours near their counters withcut being waited on, 1 crowded by factory girls, sweatshop workers and suburbanites. Dockmen at the Battery testified that immediately upon being released from Ellis Island, emigrants from Europe and the Near East jumped into taxicabs and hurried to buy gray sheersilk hose and low-necked shoes. Millions of bolts of striped silk manufactured for brick-layers’ and hod carriers’ shirts, was being ravelled out, bleached, re-dyed and ', rewoven into ladies’ stockings. Of the millions of would-be pur- chasers, therefore, some few must get left. Coralie was simply one of the unfortunates. True, she might indeed have gone on Fifth Avenue with bare legs. Ne one would have ever known the dif- ference, nowadays; but Coralie Sea- beam was an honest girl. She had promised her dying mother, more- over, to be decollete only in her Northern Hemisphere. And so Coralie Seabeam, although she had to serve ten days in the County Jail, had the satisfaction of seeing herself on the front page of every newspaper in New York. The pictures, it is true, didn’t always show her face, but the lower half of her was fairly recognizable. Her legs a Aa 2 comicbooks.com