A Little History In and Around Buffalo, NY

  from Buffalo Evening News  HANGED HERSELF FROM TRANSOM OF HER DOOR.  Katie Klotz, Patient in Insane Asylum, Takes Her Life While the Attendant is Absent.  Katie Klotz, 32 years old, patient at the Buffalo State Hospital, committed suicided at 3:30 o'clock yesterday after noon by hanging herself on the transom of the door of her room. Her attendant had been away from her only 10 minutes and four physicians worked over her more than an hour to restore her, but without avail. The suicide was most deliberate.  All the circumstances indicated that the woman, who was unmarried and who had been living with her sister, Mrs. L. Morton at 68 East Huron Street until June 16 last, when she was admitted to the hospital, had placed the deed with the cunning often displayed by insane people. She suffered from acute melancholia and often tore her clothing from her body and scratched herself on the face and arms.  To avoid this the physicians place a muff on her hands whi...

as published in the New York Herald Mrs. Stella Hodge Admits Killing Man in Warren, PA., in January.  ACCIDENT, SHE SAYS.  Pretty Widow Tells of Night Drive and Fear the Allowed Innocent Man's Conviction.  {Special Dispatch to the Herald.} PHILADELPHIA, PA, Thursday. - At the expense of the own good name Mrs. Stella Hodge, a pretty widow, whose home is in Warren, PA, has by her confession placed herself in the shadow of the gallows to save an innocent man already convicted of murder in connection with a crime for which she declares she alone is responsible.  The death of Emil Amann, at Warren, on the night of January 27, the conviction of John M. Andrews, Superintendent of the Water Works of the city, for the crime, and the confession of Mrs./ Hodge today furnish one of the strongest examples of the fallacy of circumstantial evidence in the history of criminal jurisprudence.  Mrs. Hodge was arrested yesterday in Atlantic City, admitted the shooting to a detectiv...

as published from Olean Times Hearld in 1973. By Mike Abdo This a story Chuck Ward or Chuck Pollock should be doing, something that is right up their talented literay alley. . . but they were only "So High" when it happened.   It's a story that Bob Daviex can't do because he wasn't traveling in this circle...so, it's one that I'll have to tell.   Not that it's a chore - far from it, considering the memories - but there will have to be a number of read-it-between - the -lines areas for you and, of necessity only a few will be named.   It's the Jack Hord story ... the story of Jack Hord as I know him from the mid 1930s and on. The complete Jack Hord story would require a number of other chronicles who could travel back further, to the Prohibition era, to World War I and before that.    JACK HORD - the fellow that an old boss of mine, John Morton, use to call "Jason" and "the Lord of the Manor" - came to the end of life's ...

As published in the Buffalo Evening News:  FEARING ASYLUM, WOMAN KILLS SELF.  Mrs. Susan Schroeder Drinks Carbolic Acid When She Sees Buffalo Hospital Attendant.  Mrs. Susan Schroeder, 43 years old, of 432 Hickory street, died at the German hospital late yesterday afternoon after draining a bottle of carbolic acid in the parlor of her home when she caught sight of an attendant from the Buffalo State Hospital who had been summoned to take her to the institution, Medical Examiner Earl G Danser immediately turned her body over to the family after issuing a certificate of death by suicide. A husband and daughter survive. Some years ago Mrs. Schroeder was a patient at the asylum, but after two years' treatment she was released as cured and has lived with her husband and family ever since. Three weeks ago it was found that Mrs. Schroeder was acting strangely and her condition became so alarming yesterday that it was decided to send her to the hospital again.

As publish in the Buffalo Courier Express State Hospital Conditions Dangerous, Union Declares Overcrowding of Patients, Manpower Lack Charged at Meeting to Seek Pay Increase Appalling conditions at the Buffalo State Hospital, the result of overcrowding and a lack of sufficient manpower, were charged last night as the State Hospital Local of the State, County and Municipal Works of America, CIO, met to demand immediate action for adjustment of employee wage scales. At an open meeting attended by legislators and labor and civic representatives, Andrew T Cummings, local president, declared the institution is such that "describing it as dangerous is treating the subject lightly." Says Staff Dwindling  Because organized appeals during the last two years have not "even begun to bring a solution, or bring wages up to living standards for those employed here," Cummings said the hospital lacks 150 employees on its staff while the number of patients is 550 beyond ...

as published in the Duluth Evening Herald.  IS MAN OF MYSTERY Middle-Aged Man Who Is of Interest to Physicians. Making Bread and Pastry In Buffalo Stat Hospital.  Buffalo, NY, Sat. 6. - In the bakery of the Buffalo State Hospital is a middle-aged man who is ever a subject of interest to the physicians. He is usually active and goes about his work of making bread and pastry as intelligently as any expert professional baker who is credited with being rational. At times there appears upon his face and in his eyes, as he is bending over the kneading-board, or carrying pans to or from the ovens, an expression of abstraction, a faraway look as if his mind were straying back into a hazy past in search of something almost or quite gone from memory. Three months have elapsed since this man was found lying unconscious on a carriageway in Delaware Park, the supposed victim of footpad. Through the finding of a baker's union due-book, not far from where he lay - a discovery mad...

as published in the Buffalo Evening News  'NEW VISTAS' FOUND IN RELIEVING PAIN BY BRAIN SURGERY By Ed Kelly  Dr. Walter Freeman, of Washington, the neurologist who first introduced the controversial brain surgery known as pre-frontal lobotomy into the United States, declared Monday Evening that the operation has opened "new vistas" in the relief of excruciating pain which accompanies aumerous physical ailmets. The same psychosurgial method which Dr. Freeman said has been successful in restoring many mental cases to usefulness in society is being used to remove "the fear of pain which is often as great as the pain itself" in patients suffering from cancer, phantom limb, neuralgia of the face, causalgia and conditions developed by amputees. The 51-year-old president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and professor of neurology at George Washington University, paused here, en route to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to address more than...