This Week in History, 1906: The weird and wacky world of early 1900s newspaper stories and logos – Vancouver Sun
A ludicrous made-up story about a woman who swallowed a live chameleon, which then gave birth inside her, spread across North America
Newspapers from the late 1800s and early 1900s could be quite quirky. Staffs were small, so the papers often were filled out with weird little wire stories.
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A classic example ran in the Dec. 19, 1906 Vancouver World under the headline “Strange Death of a Comic Opera Actress.”
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The story was less than 100 words, but came with a second headline that really grabs a reader: “Swallowed a Live Chameleon and Gradually Sunk Until She Left the Stage.”
It was datelined Omaha, Nebraska.
“Two years ago Louise Douglas, whose real name was Mrs. Harry F. Lee, swallowed a (live) chameleon and received much advertising therefrom,” said the story.
“But soon afterwards she began failing and left the stage. She had been in a hospital in Omaha for more than a year.
“An hour before her death two little chameleons crawled from the woman’s mouth, and physicians say her body is alive with the little reptiles.”
Thanks to the wonders of Newspapers.com, where you can search digitized old newspapers, you can look the story up to dig up more details.
It ran all over the United States, from the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican to the Baltimore Sun, the Buffalo Evening News and the Los Angeles Times.
Most of the stories were dated Dec. 11. But on that day, there was no mention of Louise Douglas and her chameleons in the Omaha papers on Newspapers.com.
In the Dec. 14, 1906 Omaha Evening Herald, you find out why.
“Swallowing Lizard Fake,” read the headline.
“Mayor (James) Dahlman is rapidly becoming acquainted with the work of the festive ‘string fiend,’ which is the other name for the individual who sends to outside papers figments of his exuberant imagination at so much per figment,” said the Evening Herald.
“The mayor has an inquiry with an enclosed newspaper clipping from Harrisburg, Pa., asking for official confirmation or contradiction. The article carries the startling information that one Louise Douglas, who died a month ago at the county hospital, was in life a chameleon kindergarten, and that just before her death two of the reptiles crawled from her mouth, and that the attending physicians said that her body was alive with them.”
The letter had come from H.A. Surface, an “economic zoologist” in Harrisburg and “author of quite a pretentious work on the reptiles of Pennsylvania.”
Surface “has always maintained that it is impossible for a reptile to live in the human stomach” and found “the whole story ridiculous,” but wanted official confirmation from the mayor “to present to the doubting Thomases of the east.”
It turned out Douglas died in the hospital after a three-month fight with tuberculosis.
“One of the associates of the woman said she had once told her of eating a chameleon as an advertising freak,” the Evening Herald reported.
“The unimportant details, such as swallowing the animal alive and the prolific multiplication indulged in by the entombed captive” were added by an “industrious newspaper fakir” and printed in a “local evening sheet.”
The Associated Press picked it up, and the fake story spread around the continent. The Vancouver World ran the chameleon story eight days after it went on the wire, and five days after the Evening Herald had debunked it.
We noticed another quirk in the Vancouver World that week: the Woodward’s department store ads.
In the Dec. 17, 1906 World and the rival Daily Province, the goods being advertised were identical: “high class” coats “at much less than regular prices,” three-piece “parlour suites” for $33, and mantel clocks at “reduced” rates.
If you look closely, though, the Woodward’s logo is slightly different in each paper.
The logos in both papers feature “Woodward” written in white over a solid black background, curving over a white bottom that reads “Department Stores, Ltd. Cor. Hastings and Abbott Streets.”
But The World’s “Woodward” goes straight across the top, and curves at the bottom. The Province’s “Woodward” is curved at both the top and bottom, as is the “Department Stores” bit.
To confuse matters, The Province was using the same Woodward’s logo as The World in its 1905 ads. And both papers used the same logo in 1907.
jmackie@postmedia.com
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