Gathering old newspaper stories (to put to use as writing prompts, &c).
My collection thus far:— They were hanging upside down like three bats, their frozen heads dangling in the icy air, ice-encrusted uniforms still cladding their mummified bodies, glued to a wall of ice. They were soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian empire who died in battle on 3 September 1918; 12,000ft up in the Italian Alps.
— NEW YORK, Sept 11, 1948. A flight of a thousand birds migrating from Canada crashed into the Empire State Building. For hours—from midnight until dawn—the birds cracked into the side of the world’s tallest building, and dropped by the droves to the pavements far below. Hard-boiled city workers, customarily indifferent, formed silent crowds watching with horror as the feathered creatures rained into Fifth Ave.
Laborers on the grave-yard shift stopped to pick up birds gasping for life. Some threw down their lunch boxes and rushed to call the ASPCA. Others gave wounded birds the shelter of their clothing. They tried to revive them.
Joseph Pagnaccio, of Brooklyn, was driving along Fifth Ave. when he was caught in a shower of falling birds.
“I was driving along about 3a.m. when my headlights picked up these falling objects and I heard these thuds and thumps on the hood and roof of my cab,” he said. “I stopped and got out, and these birds were falling all around me. I couldn’t believe it.
“I picked up a few and turned them over in my hands before I could convince myself they were birds. They seemed to come down from everywhere, all around me.”— A soft blue-white diamond has been found at the Jagersfontein mine. The famous Hope diamond is only 44 carats, but it is so beautifully blue it might have been compounded from an Italian sky.
— BUTTERFLY SWARM HIDES MOUNTAIN. California, June 18, 1927. Butterflies, described as “thick as the flakes in a blinding snowstorm,” obscured the view at the base on the lower slopes of Mount Shasta yesterday. One tourist reported the butterflies were “so thick he couldn’t see two feet ahead.”
— “As soon as the evening bombardment began, the nightingales could be heard singing loudly above the tremendous noise of the guns.” — Rev. Wilfred Hill, a military chaplain stationed in Italy during WWII.
MITFORD: