Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

The following morning word of the disappearance or kidnapping had been flashed to surrounding towns and many came to aid in the search. A committee was formed of forty men familiar with the surrounding terrain. These men labored all the thirteenth and all the fourteenth. On the fifteenth of May a much larger committee undertook the work and the surrounding mountains were searched foot after foot. This work took several days. Then a cordon was thrown all about, whose members worked slowly inward, covering all the ground as they came to a center at Greeley. This maneuver also failed to yield hail or trail of the child. At last the weary and foot-sore hunters gave it up.

The search was now begun in a more methodical way. The State constabulary took charge of a systematic review of the ground. Ponds were drained, culverts blown up, wells cleaned out, the dead leaves of the preceding autumn raked out of hollows or from the depths of quarries—all in vain.

Meantime, the mayor and director of public safety in Jersey City, appealed to by the distracted parents, began the official quest. Descriptions of the boy were broadcast. He was four years old, blond, with blue eyes, had good teeth, a double crown or cowlick in his hair, weighed about thirty-five pounds, and wore new shoes, tan overalls with a pink trimming, but no hat. Every town and hamlet in the United States, Canada, and the West Indies was sooner or later placarded with the picture and description of the boy. The film distributors were prevailed upon to assist in the search and, for the first notable occasion, at least, the movies were used to search for a missing person, more than ten thousand theaters having shown Jimmie Glass’ lineaments and flashed his description.

A few years later the radio broadcasting stations spread through the air the story of his disappearance and the particulars of his description.

To understand the drama of the hunt for Jimmie Glass, one must, however, begin with events closely following his vanishment and try to trace their succession through more than eight years. When once the idea of kidnapping had been formed the neighbors whose interest in the affair was partly sympathetic but more morbid, sat about shaking their heads and sagely talking of Charlie Ross. No doubt there would be a demand for ransom in a few days. When the few days had passed without the receipt of any request for money, the wiseacres shook their heads more gravely and opined that the kidnappers had taken the boy to some safe and distant place, whence word would be slow in coming. But time gave the soft quietus to all these speculations. Except for an obvious extortion letter received the following year, no ransom demand ever came to the Glasses or any one connected with the case.

Therefore, since neither the living boy nor his dead body could be found, and since there seemed to be no sustenance for the idea of kidnapping for ransom, the theorists were forced into another position, one full of the ripe color of centuries.

On the day Jimmie Glass had vanished, a traveling carnival show had been at Lackawaxen, and with it had toured a band of Gypsy fortune tellers. Later on, Mr. John Bentley, the director of public safety in Jersey City, and Captain Rooney of the Jersey City police, found that these Gypsies, two or three men and one woman, known sometimes as Cruze and sometimes as Costello, had suddenly left the carnival show. It could be traced, but not they. But the mere fact that there had been Gypsies in the neighborhood was enough to give fresh life to the old fable. Gypsies stole children to bring luck to the tribe. Ergo, they had taken Jimmie Glass, and the way to find him was to run these nomads to earth and force them to give up the child.

Besides, a woman promptly appeared who told Captain Rooney that she had seen a swart man and woman in an automobile on the day of the kidnapping, not far from Greeley, struggling with a fair-haired boy.

Now the Gypsy baiting was on. Captain Rooney and many other officers engaged in a systematic investigation of Gypsy camps wherever they were found, following the nomads south in the winter and north again with the sun. Again and again fair-haired children were found about the smoky fires of these mysterious caravaners, with the result that Mrs. Glass, now fairly set out upon her travels in quest for her son, visited one tribe after another, but without finding the much-sought Jimmie.

The discovery of blond or blondish children in Tzigane encampments always stirred the finders and the public to the same emotions, to the indignant belief that such children must have been stolen. All this is part of the befuddlement concerning the Romany people and the American Gypsies in especial. No one knows just what the original Gypsies were or whence they came. The only hint is contained in the fact that their language contains strong Aryan and Sanscrit connections and suggestions. They appeared in Eastern Europe, probably in the thirteenth century and in France somewhat later, being there mistaken for Egyptians, whence the name Gypsy. The original stocks were certainly dark skinned, black haired, and black or brown eyed. But several Gypsy clans appeared in England all of five hundred years ago and there soon began to mix and marry with other vagabonds not of Tzigane blood. In the course of the generations the English Gypsy came to be anything but a swart Asiatic. Tall, straight, dark men, with piercing eyes and the more or less typical Gypsy facial characteristics appeared among them, but these usually occur in cases where there has been marriage with strains from the Continent, from Hungary and Roumania. For instance, Richard Burton, the great traveler and anthropologist, was half Gypsy, and one of the first scholars of the last century.