The strange case of Charles Williams, of Whitewater, Wis., is likely to become a cause for celebration among medical men, for it is one of the clearest cases of dual identity on record. The two personalities are Charles Williams, lawyer, justice, man of culture and personality, and the same man as a farm laborer.
The doctors, bringing Williams back from Merriville, Ind., where he was found after he had been missing for three days, are working to transform him once again to his true identity, that of the Whitewater court commissioner.
Mr. Williams was, while in college, a famous baseball pitcher, but in 1895, just after his graduation from the State University, disappeared while en route to Chicago to begin his life work as a lawyer. It was seven years before he was found, and he was then a farm laborer near Merriville, Ind.
He came back to Whitewater, and all went well for a dozen years. Last week Mr. Williams began to complain of headaches, and on Tuesday started for Janesville on some legal business. He disappeared exactly as he had twenty years ago. And the strange display of his dual personality was that he immediately went to Merriville, Ind., and tried to get work at the same farm where he was found after his first disappearance.
It took him three days to reach there, and as soon as he arrived, word was sent back to his home here, and relatives went after him. The doctors hope to restore his mind to the regular legal channels so strangely abandoned for the “call of the farm.”
War Hits Circus Men; Few Tent Shows on Road.
The circus has received two hard blows this year, and daddy, uncle, and auntie may not have many opportunities to take Johnny under the canvas to see acrobats, tigers, and such.
War was the first setback circus people experienced. Then came the foot-and-mouth disease among live stock. Each at first had an indirect result, but now the loss of foreign acrobats, animal trainers, and wild animals, together with the United States Bureau of Animal Industry prescribing narrow zones in which a circus can move for fear of carrying or contracting the foot-and-mouth disease, have caused lots of trouble for the three-ring showmen.
As evidence of this condition, A. L. Wilson, manager of a big tent and awning company of Kansas City, Mo., says that the demand for circus and concession tents has practically been suspended, and he does not expect it to[Pg 60] resume until the European War is ended and the United States government officials pronounce the country free of the foot-and-mouth disease.