When the Circus Came to Town: Flemington New Jersey and the Lindbergh Kidnapping Trial

By James Davidson

Much has been written of the Lindbergh-Hauptmann Kidnapping Trial of 1934. This book examines what actually happened in the town of Flemington, New Jersey, a sleepy farm town that became, for a few months, the center of the universe. The first weekend of “The Trial of the Century,” the town saw 50,000 people arrive. Over 700 reporters were on hand as well as 150 photographers and countless sketch artists. Nellie’s Bar in the Union Hotel became a landmark for those who got to drink there while prostitutes roamed the streets, paying newsboys tips for “Johns.” Every famous news writer and commentator of the day was there – Adela Rogers St. Johns, Damon Runyon, Dorothy Kilgallen, Walter Winchell, Gabriel Heater, etc. This book examines what they wrote and what they said in their own words as well as colorful stories about each of them. Some of the most famous sketch artists and cartoonists of the times were also there and this book examines what they produced on a daily basis. Flemington, the trial and the times are shown in a light heretofore not described in other books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663241900

James Davidson

James Davidson lectures in ancient history and the classical languages at the University of Warwick. He was previously a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4191-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4190-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912472

iUniverse rev. date:  08/31/2022

023-jury%20leaving%20courthouse%20.jpg

(JURY LEAVING THE COURTHOUSE)

(AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

CONTENTS

Forward by Jay Langley

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Background to the Trial

Flemington - Getting Ready

The Union Hotel and Nellie’s Tap Room

The Last Day – The Last Night

The Jury Goes Home

Aftermath

The Press

Trial by Radio

The Cartoonists

Notable Quotes

Tidbits from Flemington

Endnotes

Bibliography

Suggested Reading List

Mame Pedrick’s Sunny Silver Pie Recipe

Kidnapping and Trial Chronology

FORWARD BY JAY LANGLEY

W hen you write for a local newspaper some stories start to own you, rather than the other way around. They live in your mind and in your files, and they jump out occasionally to hike across your headlines for some fresh air. They surface for anniversaries or reenactments, or when new theories make you rethink old facts.

In 1970, fresh out of college and writing for the Hunterdon County Democrat in Flemington, New Jersey, I learned about the world-famous Lindbergh baby’s disappearance on March 1, 1932, and the rambunctious kidnapping trial that followed in our old county courthouse, in January and February of 1935. For those six weeks, the eyes of the world were on Flemington. The press of the day called it The Trial of the Century. Joking around years later, we young reporters said most trials don’t take that long.

I didn’t know then that I’d fall in love with Catherine, the boss’s daughter, and that we’d still be here, in Flemington, fifty years later. Catherine’s grandfather, Howard Moreau, had covered the Lindbergh case and had earned national respect for thorough and responsible reporting- a hometown weekly editor holding his own against America’s top brand name reporters, broadcasters, and newsreel teams.

In 1970, I didn’t know that Anne Moreau Thomas, my future mother-in-law, had been stripped naked by police in 1932, during the search for the Lindbergh baby. At 22 months, she was the right age, just a month older than the missing boy. She had curly blonde hair like his, so the police officers wouldn’t leave until they’d seen her genitals, to prove she was a girl. Not quite three years later, little Anne wove through the trial crowds outside the courthouse, walking to and from her first year at school.

Our newsroom windows looked across Court Street at the old county courthouse, the jail behind it, and the park behind that. Nothing much had changed over the years. In warm weather jailers opened the windows and prisoners leaned on the thick stone sills, arms through the bars. Catherine remembers catcalls as she and her girlfriends walked the sidewalk to and from school, same path her mother had taken. Once, while I was a young reporter, prisoners decided to urinate through the bars onto the pavement below. Looking out our newsroom window, veteran reporter Jane Wyckoff chuckled at the sight, at least in my memory. Look at that, she said. The old park finally has a fountain.

For lunch on a slow day or a drink after work, we would stroll half a block to the Union Hotel, where reporters by the hundreds had flocked during the famous trial. Now and then, one of them would come back and visit – the courthouse, the hotel, our newsroom – moths to a flame. We had many Lindbergh visitors. Grad students for research, authors writing books. Mrs. Hauptmann and her attorney. Lindbergh grandchildren. And people who claimed they were the missing baby: Look, I’m not dead at all! And all grown up! It was a conspiracy!

To tell the truth, I’m not even sure that the kid ever died. I guess this puts me with all the other wackos. But if you’d been in our newsroom as person after person walked in and claimed to be the Lindbergh baby as an adult, you might have kept an open mind, too.

Most of them wanted to take off their shoes and show us their toes, because Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. was said to have malformed toes. They all had explanations for how they survived and why the other Lindberghs wouldn’t listen to them. To me the best pure story, the most far-fetched, was the Black woman from Trenton who said she was the baby, but that she’d been forced into skin pigmentation treatments and a sex-change operation to mask her identity. When I corresponded with Reeve Lindbergh about such people, I could almost hear her sigh on paper. Yes, she wrote, in the family we call them ‘The Pretenders.’

For a decade or more during my years as editor, as I was working to put out newspapers, my phone would ring and when I lifted the receiver a voice would boom in my ear: Charles Lindbergh here! He was so loud that it hurt – a guy from California who had changed his legal name and was calling me to update the local editor on his cause. We’d met when he came to tour the old Lindbergh house and I’d gone along – heck, a story is a story right? As we were coming back down from the second-floor nursey where the child was last seen on the evening of March 1, 1932, this guy paused, closed his eyes, and said slowly, Yes, I seem to remember coming down these stairs, carried by woman. I see the front door opening, and she hands me to a man. He paused, and then said, The man has a moustache. As if that clinched it.

My mentor on the news desk, Harry Anderson, was a gruff old guy with a heart of gold who was legendary among New Jersey newsmen. He’d covered the mob during Prohibition, the explosion of the Hindenburg, the sinking of the Andrea Doria, Newark race riots, and the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. (Rumor had it that Adela Rogers St. John, the famous Hearst reporter, developed quite a crush on young Harry.) He always said there was something amiss about the trial. He didn’t think Bruno Richard Hauptmann was innocent. No, Hauptmann was guilty – of something. But Harry was never sure what Hauptmann was guilty of. It might not have been kidnapping. It might have just been trying to embezzle the ransom money. But whatever Hauptmann did, Harry said, he didn’t work alone.

Alan Painter – a home-town boy who covered the trial for the Democrat and then had a long career as editor, publisher, newspaper owner, and president of the state association – echoed Harry Anderson’s view. Hauptmann was guilty, Alan said. Of something. And he didn’t work alone.

No wonder so many people revisit this case.

Sometimes the parade of Lindbergh theorists seemed endless, but we marched on. We wrote stories about them all, in addition to thousands of articles about actual, current local news. The Democrat was, after all, the paper of record in a busy county seat.

When Harry Kazman wrote a play from the trial transcript and produced it in the very same courtroom, we helped with publicity. Eventually we reproduced Democrat issues from January and February of 1935, dressed up local kids as newsboys, and hawked the reprints on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. In those early days of online commerce, we put together what USA Today called the single best website on the subject and sold our reprints to those still interested in the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Hauptmann trial on five continents.

In the spirit of boosterism, when Flemington’s downtown economy needed help, I editorialized that the Lindbergh kidnapping and trial would be the perfect theme around which to revitalize the borough, through historic tourism. Bring those wallets to town, I enthused, the more the better! I wrote that the trial raised so many issues about the law, the press, and society during the Great Depression that Flemington could fashion itself as a living museum of the period, a bit like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, or Plimoth Plantation for the Pilgrims. Serious scholars and day-trippers would both be welcome.

It was during this period, over lunch at the Union Hotel, that a native of Flemington took me to task. Dereck Williamson was a contemporary of my mother-in-law; they’d played together as kids. Like her, he’d struggled through the crowds outside the courthouse as he walked to and from school. Later he’d worked for the Democrat as a reporter and columnist, then moved on. I tried to excite him about Flemington offering more Lindbergh-era events, but Dereck shut me down.

Nobody who was here at the time wants what you’re suggesting, he said, or words to that effect. It was a terrible period in our history. Why do you keep bringing it up?

I was astonished. How could he not be interested in the local economy, or local history?

We’re still embarrassed by it, he said. It was a circus.

And there was something else. In Dereck’s words and those of others who wanted to bury the subject, I sensed an undercurrent of guilt.

Why?

Was defendant Bruno Hauptmann railroaded for the death of the Lindbergh baby? Many scholars and authors have said so. In talking to Dereck and others, was I observing some sort of collective PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) or survivors’ guilt? Some realization that what should have been a careful deliberation had become a feeding frenzy instead?

Last fall, when long-time Lindbergh expert Jim Davidson said he was writing a book about the Hauptmann trial’s effects on Flemington. I applauded his effort. He said it would be called When the Circus Came to Town.

Great title, I said. Terrific idea. I don’t think this topic has been covered properly in all these years. So many books, but none by a hometown boy. This should be interesting.

See if you agree with me.

Jay Langley, former editor, Hunterdon County Democrat newspapers

October, 2021, Flemington, N.J.

PROLOGUE

F rom an early age I was exposed to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and trial. My parents were originally from Trenton and in 1936 had just started dating. They attended a Hauptmann Execution Party at the Hotel Hildebrecht, which was right down the street from the New Jersey State Prison. My mother said they were dressed to the nines – she wore a peach satin evening gown with a white gardenia in her hair, and my father was in a white dinner jacket with black bowtie. An orchestra played the tunes of the day – Irving Berlin’s Cheek to Cheek and You’re the Top and they danced - until 8 p.m., when famed radio announcer Gabriel Heatter went live on the radio from the State Prison. After a very long 50 minute delay in which Heatter had to ad lib, the switch for the electric chair was pulled and my parents, as the other party-goers, gasped as the lights in the hotel, as well as most of Trenton dimmed. Then the people cheered.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the most hated man in America, was dead.

William Allen, who on May 12, 1932, found the corpse later identified as the Lindbergh baby, worked for my grandfather at W.G. Runkles Machinery Company in Trenton. I remember he was a tall lanky black man with a small mustache. I always saw him in coveralls and either smoking a small cigar or chewing Red Man Tobacco. After receiving $5000 of the Lindbergh reward money, he worked to put his six kids through college. He is buried very close to my parents in Ewing Cemetery outside of Trenton.

My parents married and moved to Flemington in 1940. I was born there seven years later. As a child learning about people around the town, I slowly came to understand that many of those around us had connections to The Trial of the Century.

Lloyd Fisher, Hauptmann’s Defense Attorney was my father’s attorney and I was in his office many times. He lived a few blocks away from us on Maple Avenue and I often watched him play tennis at the local tennis court that he helped build. After the trial he went on to become the Hunterdon County Prosecutor and later the head of the Hunterdon County Bar Association. He died of cancer at a very young 62. His funeral was one of the largest Flemington had seen.

Juror May Brelsford was a neighbor. She lived around the corner on Broad Street and was very active in local civic affairs. Her husband was our family’s electrician. Interestingly, at the trial her son was a news runner working the balcony section of the courthouse. We loved to Trick or Treat at her house because she always gave great candy.

Then there was Constable William Saunders, who was everywhere during the trial. When not working for the town, he was Lloyd Fisher’s personal driver whenever Fisher had to travel to Trenton to visit Hauptmann. He lived on Main Street over Van Pelt’s Pharmacy and was my school crossing guard. He was known around town as Bubblegum Bill because he would always throw bubble gum to kids as they crossed to the far side of the street.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue from our house were the houses of the Pederick’s and the Boyd’s. Both couples had managed the Union Hotel during the trial. Growing up