South Side High School - Totem Yearbook (Fort Wayne, IN)

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THE TOTEM the following day, to the amazement of the school, the leg of the culprit was discovered fast in the jaws of the trap. But that was the last word that has ever been revealed about the case. The authorities were silent and for a good reason. However, what nearly everyone failed to observe, and this is the vital clew to the whole thing, was that just shortly after Miss Ley obtained exhibit number one in the form of an ap- pendage of the fiend, Mr. R. Nelson Snider returned from a short absence. My dear readers, I shudder to repeat it, the man-Mr. Snider-had only one leg. For almost a week, nobody noticed this loss because Mr. Snider, with diabolical cleverness tucked the end of his empty pant leg in his pocket thus concealing the awkward appearance which would come from the leg flapping about. One day, in a violent bit of anger, Mr. Snider tried to kick one of the pupils, and thus removing his only means of support, he fell to the floor. Then the observant student saw that he had but one leg, and the news spread like the measles. It would be a waste of time for me to tell how Mr. Snider eluded all efforts to find him by shaving off his mustache and how thus disguised, he posed for several weeks as his own brother from Yoder. You are all familiar with these facts. What you do not know is the story of those exciting Clays during the time when Mr. Snider was being tried by the faculty. Several times Mr. Snider was lynched by outraged faculty members and once was found hanging by his necktie from the rafters in the gym. Having been left there several days as a glaring example of some- thing or other, Mr. Snider was highly indignant and demanded a trial by jury. By this time public indigna- tion had reached such a point that the parents re- fused to let their children come to school, so the fac- ulty decided that a speedy trial would be the best thing. After much heated discussion, they decided to choose their judge and jury by lot. Mr. Wilson was unanimously elected judge, but when it was discovered that he had pulled a little gerrymandering and assort- ed graft, he was deposed and conscripted for jury duty. After a recount Mr. Gilbert was chosen to fill the bench. The jury consisted of Mr. Heine, Miss Perkins, Miss Demaree, Miss Schmidt, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Voorhees, Miss Shoup, bliss Chapin, Miss Ley, Miss Oppelt, and Mr. Wilson. For our valuable information of the trial and par- ticularly of that famous jury session, we are indebted to Bob Stone, who hid himself in one of the file draw- ers, as all reporters were excluded. The trial was held in the library on March 21, and the following account is taken from Bob Stone's article which appeared in The Times that week: The courtroom Qlibraryj was opened to the gen- eral public at five o'c1ock on the morning of the trial. Even at that hour the line of people extended clear 117 around the school. When the bailiff, Mr. Murch, opened the doors, the mob closed in. Mr. Murch was never found. At eight, the judge and jury marched in and took their places, the jury occupying tables one and two. The beauty of the opening ceremony was marred when Mr. Makey and Mr. Wilson attempted to stage a communist demonstration. Mr. Wilson fired a bomb at the judge while Mr. Makey harangued the audience. And you, fellow citizens of these United States, are youse mugs gonna set here and tell me that youse kin permit the cancerous growth of capitalism eat into the heart of this fair country. It's appalling, disgust- ing, the way these lousy- Mr. Makey was floored by a volume of Toasts for Every Occasion, thrown with paralyzing accuracy by Mr. Gilbert, who recalls his baseball tactics from time to time. Miss Oppelt had brought her white rat, Caesar, :ind was showing it to the crowd when Mr. Heine came in. The rat must have smelled formaldehyde because he promptly made tracks for the judge's desk. Mr. Gilbert saw him, screamed, and then assumed an odd position on top of one of the book cases. The crowd held their ears while Wardo bellowed NaOH, KOH, CaOH,', and other caustic remarks. After these and other minor interruptions, the trial was officially opened. Miss Shoup undertook to defend Mr. Snider by attempting to show that this was just another of his insanity attacks. However, the sentiment of the crowd was against him as could be detected by the barrage of elderly vegetables and omelet fodder which cluttered up the fair countenance of the judge. Nlr. Murphy then took the floor and tried a new technique upon the unruly audience. He told several humorous anecdotes about his early life in Posey County, Illinois, but when he recounted the one about the panic of 1837 and about whiskey selling for ten cents a gallon, the crowd broke into cheers at the sound of the word whiskey. Mr. Heine began making a speech on the evils of drinking on an empty stom- ach while Mr. Voorhees interrupted him to explain the action of the yeast bacteria upon one's esophagus. After some effort, Mr. Gilbert succeeded in stopping an enthusiastic parade around the room. In Churmanyf, began Miss Schmidt, when the riot had subsided, mven a man vould do vot dat man did, ve used to by a wall stick him at and gif him de vorks. He vouldn't durst dare to do wot dat man do, I betcha. I ban tank ve-H Aw, so is your uncle Heine, came a cheerful chorus from the audience. Friends, Romans, and countrymenf' began Miss Oppelt, waving her arms after the manner of M. T. Cicero, All Gaul is quartered into three halves and I don't feel so well myself. Veni, Vidi, Viki, Bolshi- vicki, salve, skookum, how--1 Raspberriesl', bel- lowed Miss Chapin and Miss Demaree in unison.

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THE TOTEM of everything. There were too many depressions, too many periods of prosperity, too many laws. But it is useless to name everything. flu was not until the Crash of 3000 that numbers were reduced.j Cantor, the holy prophet, saw the danger of too- manynessg so he professed to be a lower numberist and preached the doctrine of the cutdownistic school. Tn this skit he tells that the jigsaw puzzle had 1000 pieces, a great number, and he infers that two weeks was too many days for a puzzle. He shows that catastrophe was the result of this intemperance in numbers. I-le infers that, if the puzzle had had fewer pieces and therefore larger pieces, his uncle would have seen whose picture it was and never have started and thus escaped the penalty of death. As a foot- note, let me say that it is due to the need of the appli- cation of Cantor's doctrine today, that he is consid- ered a living force at this very hour. Cantor's contemporaries are Munchausen, Wynn, Rogers, and Amos in' Andy. These men, although less forceful and prolific than Cantor, have written much good stuff and have at times hit just as true notes as Cantor himself. They all used the skit or the column fan early form of written skitj as a medium for their ideas concerning the problems of the day. They dealt with the German problem flVlunchausenl, the fire prevention problem fwynnl, the live stock situation lRogersj, and the race dilemma fAmos 'ni Andyl. Cantor, the contemporaries we have men- tioned, and Lewis and Shaw, two less read authors, make up the best of the writers of the Cantorian Age. The Strange Case of R. Nelson Snider I shrink in dread from the awful task which I am now called upon to perform. But my duty stands be- fore me, and I will not waver from the path of true justice. So on with the hideous work, and may heaven forgive me for what I am about to record. Since this annual is the chronicle of the past year, it is only fair to report herein the dark events as well as the happy. Like the little bird , it sees all and must tell all.-aw, go on with the story. There was but one occurrence during the past year which marred the otherwise happy course of events, and, fortunately, this has been kept a secret. I refer to the deplorable affair in the fall of last year, in which our unhappy principal, R. Nelson Snider, be- came implicated. As the details in this unusual case are not very widely known, T will give a history of it. During the basketball season last December, when the Booster Club was decorating the gym for the games, they were faced with a mystery to solve. They decorate the gym in the afternoon before a and when they returned that evening, they would game, would invariably find that the streamers of colored paper had been stripped from the posts and dumped in neat little piles in odd places around the school. The fiend who perpetrated these insane atrocities was clever enough to leave no trace of his identity on any of his work. The strange note in the whole affair was the peculiar selection of places which the vandal chose to deposit his spoils. He might take a notion to stuff them in the pipes of a drinking fountain only to have them suddenly pop loose in the face of an unwary teacher, releasing a month's accumulation of water. Or on other occasions the paper was located among the strings of the piano in the Greeley Room after an unusually tinny piano recital. One day Mrs. Larimore was besieged with a number of compliments that the noodles in the soup were more tender than usual, other people commented on the novelty of hav- ing noodles of different colors. There are still some of those unfortunates who occasionally cough up a paper wad after an unusually strong drink. The climax of these atrocities, however, came when Mr. Flint was found behind some file cases in the ofiice after a search of a week and a half. The poor man had been bound and gagged with the ribbons. In fact, so much paper had been stuffed into his mouth for so long a time that he has not been able to close his jaws since, thus accounting for that hungry appearance which some people have noticed. A reward of a dollar in cash was offered for the culprit dead or alive. A number of unfortunate stu- dents and teachers were killed because of this offer, but none of them really fitted the case. When Mr. Abbett and the school board came out one evening to investigate the scene of the crime, they mysterious- ly disappeared, only to be found the next day locked in the Totem office, suffocated by the lethal fumes of rubber cement. One after another the greatest detec- tives in the country had taken over the case, and each one had received the same ominous warning, a small piece of colored paper torn in the form of a skull. Twice the warning was unheeded, and on both occa- sions the bodies of the detectives were fished from the St. lVlary's River the following morning. T need not go into the details of the discovery of the culprit, for that part is well known. You have read in The Times Jim Savageas remarkable serial telling how the criminal was tracked down by Miss Ley, who noticed that bit by bit her colored paper was disappearing fthe maniac had formed a habit for the stuffj and who finally set a trap for him just in- side the door of the art room. You will remember that 116

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