THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Washington, DC, U.S.A.

5 July 1927

(page 3)

Ruth Spends Holiday Reading Love Story

OSSINING, N. Y., July 5.—“And I never saw a man who looked so wistfully on the day.”

The Fourth of July dawned in the Sing Sing death house, and a woman described by a thousand American newspapers as an icy blonde read a love story magazine, while her erstwhile lover, in his separate cell, thumbed a Bible and looked with dazed eyes at the stone walls around him.

One day follows another with little to marl it from its fellows nowadays in the lives of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray. Drab days, with nothing but memories behind, and only death ahead.

But they told them it was the Fourth of July in the death house, and Judd Gray looked up from his Bible and went out to play ball. Because one must celebrate the Fourth of July, even in the death house.

A Strange Reality, Indeed

It seemed strange, thinking of the firecrackers and torpedoes, the skyrockets and confetti, the hawkers at Coney Island and the children all dressed in their Sunday clothes—the joy and red soda pop, the laughter and sunburn that was outside. All that was very far away now. The only reality was the prison of gray stone, and the gray men within it.

“Who,” asked Judd Gray of an attendant—“Who would have thought a year ago that I would ever spend the Fourth of July in a place like this!”

Last Fourth of July, probably the mild little man who took pride in being a good corset salesman, a good husband, a good father, and a good Sunday school superintendent, shaved with extra care, put on a freshly pressed suit, and went to the beach with his wife and little girl.

Or perhaps they decided to see a movie. Or maybe just stay ay home and read the Sunday papers. At any rate, drama and tragedy and death were only things on the stage then; life was safe and perhaps rather a bore.

Fate Marks Out Queer Paths

Certain the rather timid little man who has never really had time to do anything wicked, or even dashing, didn't dream as he whistled over his shaving and picked out a holiday tie that on the next Fourth of July he would sit in the death house at Sing Sing.

Things have a way of seeming unimportant in the death house, however, and so Judd Gray only sighed briefly as he meditated on his state, and turned his attention to the chicken dinner that was set before him.

They observe holidays at Sing Sing.

And even a man who is soon to die must remember that it is the Fourth of July.

In another cell, a similar dinner was set before Ruth Snyder, who looked with interested eyes on the tray, and said something about the weather.

“It's nice,” said Mrs. Snyder, “that we're having a little sunlight—.” Just as she said it probably at her bridge table or her dinner party a year ago, when she was to the world just a capable housewife and a pleasant neighbor, who maybe liked to have a good time once in a while.

They gave them a radio program, too, after dinner, so that they might properly celebrate the Fourth of July, and then Ruth Snyder went back to her love stories and Judd Gray to his Bible.

And dancing before the eyes of the little corset salesman, obscuring the text of the good book, were six lines of verse once written by Aleister Crowley, about some man just like Judd Gray:

“Thus I was tangled in some house of hell,

Giving mine own soul's beauty up to lust,

Hoping to build some hope impregnable

Against my love: instead the deep disgust

Of my own beasthood crushed it into dust

And left my manhood twisted in her spell.”