Old 880

Recently Youtube has been serving up videos that are kind of boring, same old stuff.  So I went into my vvideo.txt file and found a 1950 movie on Archive called: Mr. 880:

https://archive.org/details/mister-880-1950

While watching the credits at the start I noticed that the story was based on a New Yorker article by St. Clair McKelway.  Actually it's a three parter, August 27, 1949, September 3, 1949 and September 10, 1949:

As might be expected of the New Yorker, it's an interesting read - I don't think I've ever heard of a person with the first name: St. Clair (or Saint Clair ?).  McKelway wrote quite a few articles for the New Yorker and seemed to specialize in crime.  I'll have to read some of his other articles.

Mr. 880 is a good movie - well worth viewing.  It follows the case as presented in the magazine pretty faithfully although the Secret Service man played by Burt Lancaster and the love interest played by Dorothy McGuire are absent from the article.  Edmund Gwenn plays Mr. 880, the counterfeiter of $1 bills with his patented, charming little old guy persona.  The annoying thing is that he is continually presented as 73 years old, an old OLD man - hey I'm 70, back off you young tyrants !  :)

a cartoon embedded in the first part of the article -signal reporting in 1949

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm