Today’s September 26, the day FBI agents became known as G-Men. it was all thanks to Machine Gun Kelly, who surrendered by yelling “Don’t shoot, G-Men” when they raided his hideout in Memphis.
It didn’t really happen that way, though. The official reports from the raid itself said that Kelly was found standing in a corner of the living room with his hands up, and he never said anything. The other myth about Machine Gun Kelly has to do with the machine gun. In reality he was a small time bootlegger during prohibition and never used a gun at all; he didn’t like them. He served a three year sentence in Leavenworth prison, was a model prisoner, and released in 1930.
After he got out of prison, Kelly married Kathryn Thorne, who was a more experienced criminal than he was. The machine gun was her idea — she bought it for him (I guess anybody could just buy a machine gun in the 1930s) and got him to practice until he was at least skilled enough not to hurt himself with the thing. Then she did whatever she could to spread the idea that Kelly was a dangerous, big-time criminal. In reality, he definitely wasn’t “big-time”, and there’s no evidence he was particularly dangerous either. He never used his machine gun, and apparently never hurt anybody. He just loaded booze into the trunk of his car and tried to evade the revenue agents.
Then the Kellys came up with their first (and only) big caper: they kidnapped a wealthy oil company executive and demanded $200,000 ransom, which would be about $4 million now. They got their ransom, and released the hostage (Charles Urschel). Urschel, however, had taken pains to memorize as much as he could hear while they kept him blindfolded and, in a clever move, tried to touch as many things as he could in order to leave fingerprints. The clues were enough to track the Kellys down, and Machine Gun spent the rest of his life in prison. Where, once again, he was a model prisoner, never bothered anybody, and got a different nickname from the inmates. They called him Pop Gun Kelly because he told such exaggerated stories.
Machine Gun Kelly was a product of effective public relations; it was only thanks to messaging by his wife that he got to be front-page news. That is, except on the day he was captured. By coincidence, that was the same day that ten prisoners — who turned out to be the entire John Dillinger gang — escaped from prison.
Dillinger, unlike Kelly, was a real gangster. That is, he had a gang and they didn’t stop at bootlegging; they robbed banks. Twenty-four banks in all, along with, oddly enough, four police stations. He escaped from jail twice, and was involved in quite a few gun battles. He got a lot of press too, and was even described as a kind of Robin Hood figure. He got to be so well-known that J. Edgar Hoover used him as the leading story in his campaign to create the FBI as an independent agency, which happened in 1935.
Hoover and the FBI liked public relations too; Hoover reportedly loved front-page stories about his agents’ exploits, not to mention his own. But he kept some things much more hidden, including his reported work in the presidential campaign of 1960. That’s the campaign that featured the first-ever televised debate, between Nixon and Kennedy, and it happened on September 26.
A few years after that, the biggest story on September 26 was the first supersonic airliner flight when the Concorde crossed the Atlantic in 1973. Then in 2008, September 26 was the day of a much shorter and slower flight — Yves Rossy used a jetpack he’d designed to fly across the English channel. It was slower than the Concorde, but not exactly “slow” — Rossy’s jetpack has wings and goes 120mph. That’s a problem when your landing gear happens to be your legs, so to get back down, he turned off his jet engine and used a parachute. He’s also flown his jetpack over the Grand Canyon.
Rossy tried to jet across the Strait of Gibraltar to become the first to fly a jetpack between continents, but the wind was too strong and he had to parachute into the water instead. But on September 26, 1983, wind and water were central to a success, when the Australia II sailboat won the America’s Cup. It was the first loss by the New York Yacht Club in 132 years.
136 years ago today it was 1888. Jack the Ripper was murdering people in London. Joseph Fincher patented Tiddly-Winks. The Washington Monument opened to visitors for the first time. Bertha Benz, Karl Benz’ wife, borrowed the car he’d invented without telling Karl, and drove it 40 miles on the world’s first automobile road trip. She took her kids along. And 1888 was the year that touch typing appeared, when a court stenographer from Utah — who was supposedly the world’s only touch-typist at the time — won a typing-speed contest with another stenographer.
And remember aviation-related September 26 events? Well, the same year that the New York Yacht Club first took home the America’s Cup, Thomas Sopwith (of the Sopwith Camel biplane of WWI) was born, and so was Ernst Heinkel. Heinkel invented the turbojet engine and the first jet airplane of any type. It was the He 178, which led directly to Messerschmitt ME 262, the first jet fighter. It debuted in WWII and was even produced after the war as a Czech fighter plane. Jet fighter pilots wear g-suits because jet fighters operate at high speeds, high stress, high altitude, and make a tremendous racket — so if anybody yells “don’t shoot, g-men” I’m sure the g-suit men can’t hear it.
