Embracing a Telegraph Pole
A short comic sketch of a drunk man mistaking a telegraph pole for an assailant late at night.
NewsPipe summary
Burlington Weekly Free Press · February 18, 1876 · Page 1
1 min readA man going home the other night heard loud cries of distress, and upon investigating found an intoxicated individual embracing a telegraph pole, holding on to his ear with his thumb and forefinger, and yelling "let go" to his supposed assailant.
Was this worth reading?
This is how the site learns what to look for. Ratings move the weights behind the front page; notes go into the editorial brief that guides what gets pulled from the archives next.
Elsewhere in the archive
A Leap-Year Tragedy
Burlington Weekly Free Press · February 18, 1876 · Chicago, Illinois
A tongue-in-cheek melodrama, reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, mocking the era's leap-year courtship jokes with overwrought dialogue between reluctant lovers.
A Torch Canadian and a Toucher Spot: A Hermit of Forty Years
Burlington Weekly Free Press · February 18, 1876 · Perth, Canada
A strange human-interest account of a deranged young man who abandoned society decades earlier to live naked in the woods near Perth, Ontario, surviving the bitter Canadian winters unclothed.
A Correction From the Grave
Burlington Weekly Free Press · February 18, 1876 · Kilkenny, Ireland
A wry Kilkenny anecdote in which a man, reading his own obituary, writes to the editor politely correcting several errors — including the actual cause of his supposed death.
The Professor Locked in the Tool Closet
Burlington Weekly Free Press · February 18, 1876
A campus anecdote about an absent-minded professor who locked himself into the janitor's closet and only discovered the key in his own pocket hours later — a forgotten sliver of Victorian college humor.