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With Wide Open Eyes

With Wide Open Eyes image
Parent Issue
Day
12
Month
December
Year
1902
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

A Crazed Man is Trying to Live 44 Days

Says He Wins A Wager

To Build an Orphan's Home. Appeals to the Students Here for Help

Half crazed with liquor, S. W. Shockey, palmist, and phrenologist, earnestly pleaded for a national newsboys and bootblacks home before a crowd on Main street Saturday and in consequence of his freakishness, he was arrested for fear he might do some harm. He lately came from Jackson, where, it is said, he was arrested for disorderly conduct,  Shockey is tattooed as belonging to Company B, Regiment, U.S.A. His home is in Ada, Ohio and he came here to work with the students according to his own story, and secure money for his heroic enterprise of establishing an orphans' home. He claims and undoubtedly is the Dud Waddey who has written the sensational articles in the Police Gazette.

He writes to the O.N.W. Herald: After my canvass among three thousand students at Ann Arbor, I write you a line.

"I came with head high and prospects great; and I found the students in their rooms. I told some  of them their fortunes and I found that the expense!"

He claims to have walked from New York city to San Francisco, three thousand miles, for Dick Fox of the Police Gazette, who is, as he says, his sponsor.

He also claims to be winning a wager if he can stay awake for 44 day excepting 1 hour, his eyes to be closed every 24 hours for a moment. He says he says he had three doctors to follow him and see that he does not sleep, but that they have forsaken him, and that if he does a not sleep for a few days more he will win his wager. The wager is to be the endowment of an orphan home. He claims to have a backer in Prof. H. S Teker of O. N. U.

Shockey says he sleeps with his eyes open like a goose, but no one knows he is sleeping. It was a pitiful sight to see this wrecked specimen stretch out his hands in appeal to the officers who had arrested him and beg that they give him money for his visionary orphans' home.

Shockey started the following letter Saturday:

'Mrs. Catherine Rutledge, Ada, Ohio.

Dear Mother- You think I am crazy or am non-compos mentis. If I am I make no strides,"

And here the epistle ended. Shockey has a well shaped head, is medium height and always  carries a prayer book with him.