Quote and Credit

Quote and Credit

CLICK TO ORDER OR PREVIEW JIM LINDERMAN BOOKS

Showing posts with label Detroit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Detroit. Show all posts

Art Brut from Detroit Michigan Sam Mackey

The little known work of Sam Mackey is shown here from several institutional collections. Mr. Macky was the grandfather of Tyree Guyton, creator of Heidelberg Project, a long standing (and constantly changing) folk art environment in Detroit. Mr. Guyton has said his grandfather was an inspriation on his own work. I am not sure how widely Sam Mackey's work has been publicly shown, if at all. Some 25 years ago I was fortunate to see of number of originals in New York courtesy of a friend who had the work sent to him for approval. Great work, and work which I believe is quite scarce. The art here is dated circa 1987 - 1992. Crayon and pencil on paper. Images of Sam Mackey work from the following sources: Knight Foundation The Wayne State University Collection For art and artists(blog) University of Michigan Museum of Art

Young Detroit American Commercial Photo Company Photographs collection Jim Linderman








A set of original 8 x 10 photographs taken by the American Commercial Photo Company of Detroit circa 1910-1930.  All come from a scrapbook (with several other images) found in central Michigan, and while unidentified for location, each is stamped by the photo company which was active in Detroit.  Unless it was a location assignment, these would show Detroit as a growing city before World War Two, when commerce worked and money was plentiful.
 

Other early photographs of Detroit by ACPD are HERE

Photographs of Early Detroit (?)  Circa 1910 - 1930 collection Jim Linderman

Books and Ebooks by Jim Linderman available HERE.

Vintage Graphic Art of Murder Manilia Paper Tobacco Labels from Uncle Daniel and Oren Scotten of Detroit.






Early tobacco printing "mock-ups" on manila paper for the Uncle Daniel company in Detroit, Michigan.  The engravings are fragile, as manila paper tends to eat itself.   It is usually given to children for drawings, but in this case it was used, apparently, to draw up snazzy graphics to market carcinogenic dried weeds to unsuspecting, ill-informed and trusting naives...not that Uncle Daniel knew, of course.  The tobacco companies didn't start obfuscating what their product did to people until much later.

Daniel was Daniel Scotten.  He was the uncle of Oren Scotten, a precocious young man who entered the tobacco business at sixteen years of age.  By the age of twenty-five, he owned the whole show.  The American Tobacco Company bought him out eventually, making young Oren a millionaire and major land owner in Detroit.   Scotten, who passed away in 1906, is now buried, it is fair to say, along with each and every single one of his customers. 

Mr. Scotten, who was not required to place warning labels on his lethal product, was a highly regarded businessman.  He was an Elk, the fire commissioner for a time, an art collector,  an avid hunter and although you won't see him reported as such, a murderer.  

Group of "Uncle Daniel" Tobacco labels on manila paper, circa 1900.  Collection Jim Linderman

A True Crime Tale by Jim Linderman


I am pleased to have the following article published in THE CHISELER this week! The Chiseler is a highly regarded web magazine edited by Daniel Riccuito. It is a site much worth following. Special thanks to Jarett Kobek, who inspired the story, having transcribed "The Oldest History of the World" book and the story from which I originally found the information I used for the story. I purchased the photograph above intending it as a post on the old-time-religion blog...imagine my surprise at learning what was in my hand.



FAITH HEALER LEFT HEADLESS: A True Crime Tale by Jim Linderman


In 1932, according to an AP wire story which ran in several newspapers, including places as far afield as Sarasota, Florida and Spokane, Washington, Robert Harris, a negro and leader of a religious order with a membership of “about 100 negroes in Detroit” confessed to the brutal murder of James Smith, also a negro. Harris admitted that “he crushed Smith’s head with the rear axle of an automobile, then stabbed him through the heart.” Robert Harris apparently dragged Smith to “an improvised altar” in his home to finished him off.


Detroit in the late 1920s and early 1930s had a problem with religious cults.

Three years earlier, on a July 4th weekend, not far from where Harris killed Smith, Paul “Benny” Evangelista, known as a “Divine Prophet” was murdered along with his wife and four children. With an axe. Few axe murders are not gruesome, but this one was particularly so. The entire Evangelista family was hacked to pieces. The bodies in bedclothes. The divine prophet’s head was severed from his torso and placed on a chair in the family living room.

Also “cruelly hacked” was Santina, the prophet’s wife and Jeanne (eight years old) Angelia (nine) Margaret (ten) and the three-year old son Mario. One account puts Mario’s age at eighteen months. In addition to the prophet’s head, one of the girl’s arms was severed. Police suspected that wound was the result of a “miscalculated blow” intended for Santina’s neck, as it too had been hacked but the head was left hanging by a thread. Leaving the house on St. Aubin avenue, in the Italian district of depression era Detroit, the fiend and pervert left a bloody trail for police which went nowhere.

Benny was downstairs in pieces when found by a neighbor, real estate broker Vincent Elias. A friend of the family, just a day earlier Elias had completed arrangements for the purchase of a farm near Marine City, MI for the Evangelistas. Elias opened the unlocked door, saw the head and without looking further ran for the police. The children and wife were found by authorities upstairs.

In an understatement, Wayne county coroner James Burgess called the murder “an unusual case.”

A week later the entire family was wheeled down rain-slicked Woodward Avenue, parade-style, each in a coffin of appropriate size. The public funeral was an opportunity for police to look for the killer in the crowd, but to no avail.

A relative of the Evangelista family living in Coraopolis told police they must have been murdered by members of a “Black Hand” organization.

Benny was Benjamino Evangelista, a Neapolitan immigrant who claimed to be an herb doctor and faith healer. In other words, a criminal and fraud using religious superstition and jargon to steal. Like all “faith healers” he bilked rubes out of savings like a carnival barker, but his tools were voodoo, false claims of health, black magic and superstition rather than sideshow swindles. He overcharged desperate people for “love potions” and promises of cures. He provided “readings” for ten dollars. For these things, it appears, he and his entire family were sent to a violent and blood-sticky end. Benny pissed off a client with an axe.

Prior to being murdered, Evangelista wrote an enormous, self-published book of religious ravings based loosely on the bible. It took him 20 years. “The Oldest History of the World: Discovered by Occult Science” It is unreadable, useless and no one bought it. In the fictional account three prophets travel to “Afra” in order to “see what the colored people were doing…” but all they were doing was eating their food uncooked.

The book has been hand-typed from one of the few existing copies and digitally reproduced by the extraordinary Jarett Kobek. http://kobek.com/

Kobek is a brilliant scholar and is most certainly, despite the extraordinary story of Divine Prophet, himself a better story than the people and events he writes about. He also provides the most complete bibliography of period articles about the crime, and details such as the characters in the book existed also as puppets in a shrine in the Evangelista basement.

The gruesome crime was still unsolved three years later when the “rear axle murderer” above, Robert Harris confessed. Briefly, The police thought the crime solved. So did the press. “Confession by King of Weird Cult clears up Detroit Murder” read one headline, but it was not to be. Harris didn’t do it.

Neither did Angelo Depoli, arrested the day of the murder with a blood covered curved knife used for chopping bananas in his barn. A year later the family dog was still being sought as a witness. Detroit police were so desperate to solve the crime they tried to pin it on a man who escaped from a lunatic asylum and was presumed killed by a freight train two years BEFORE the crime. They didn’t have much, but they did have a pair of bloody fingerprints from the door latch. They were figured prominently in the bulletin from Superintendent of Police James Sprott along with the reward of one thousand dollars which was distributed far and wide to no avail.

The case is as cold as wind from Windsor blowing across the Detroit River in December.

by Jim Linderman

Jim Linderman uses photographs and ephemera from his personal collection to tell true stories. He is author of the Grammy-nominated book / CD Take Me to the Water and the forthcoming Heroes of Vintage Sleaze. His daily blogs are DULL TOOL DIM BULB, VINTAGE SLEAZE, and old-time-religion. He has also self-published a number of books which are available from Blurb.com.




Original Press Photograph Wide World Photos 7/5/29 Collection Jim Linderman

Dull Tool Dim Bulb Books and Ebooks HERE