American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum Read Free Book Online

mulled it over. A car race in a film was one thing. A film consisting of only a car race was decidedly another. D.W. wanted his movies to tell stories. The narrative could be suspenseful, heartwrenching, or politically instructive, but above all it must tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He would schematize these elements on paper for each scenario, and he would not begin shooting until the outline was clear in his mind. A self-contained narrative was the fulfillment of what D.W. believed movies should be all about.
    D.W., of course, was shrewd enough to understand the journalistic potentials in the medium. He often talked about how the movie camera could be used to report on significant events. He anticipated the day when theaters would show newsreels. He simply didn’t want to be part of it.
    D.W. was adamant. He told Marvin he did not want to film the 1910 Vanderbilt Cup race. Anyway, he explained to his boss, there was no need for him to make a movie. The race will get plenty of play in all the newspapers.
     
    D.W. was right. Six New York papers sent their reporters to Long Island to cover the race, and at least twice that number represented newspapers from around the country. The Los Angeles Times had even dispatched a reporter across the continent to witness the event.
    At 12:30 A.M. on the morning of October 1, 1910, an anxious Times editor dictated a telegraph message to be sent to his race correspondent waiting in Mineola, Long Island. It was three hours later in the East, and the mechanics would already have begun fueling the cars.
    “Send us a good account of the race,” the editor instructed. “At the crack of the pistol, begin sending the actual scenes on the track.”
    Cy Sawyer was the night-shift telegraph operator, thirty-four years old, and fluent in Morse code. He quickly tapped the message in dots and dashes to New York.
    At one A.M. Sawyer began sending a new message. On the opposite side of the continent, the New York operator started transcribing—when abruptly the line clicked, then fell silent. The connection between the country’s two coasts had been broken.
    TS, the New York operator, tapped anxiously, keying in the call letters for “Times Station,” the code for the Los Angeles Times.
    There was no response, and he continued to tap TS, TS. It was very frustrating. What if the line were still out at the start of the race?
    At last the New York operator got a reply. It was from the chief of the Los Angeles Western Union office.
    POOR OLD SAWYER WILL ANSWER NO MORE CALLS , it read. TS had been destroyed.

SEVEN
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    T HERE WERE A series of explosions, six in all, and they erupted in a rapid, booming, and terrifying succession. The first occurred at seven minutes after one A.M. , and the noise was tremendous. A sixfloor wing of the stone Times Building was thrown free of its foundation as if shoved by a malicious force. In the next horrifying moments, the building’s south wall, the Broadway Street side, cracked. Deep fissures gouged the plaster, spread rapidly up the wall; and then all at once the entire south wall cascaded to the ground. Bricks and stone tumbled in a loud, crashing free fall. As the wall collapsed, five new explosions—sudden, deep, and intense—pounded through what remained of the two-winged structure. And fire raged.
    The second-floor composing room burned like kindling. The wooden floor buckled, cracked, and then gave way. Huge linotype machines, heavy as railroad cars, rained down on the office floor below, smashed through the planks, and continued their descent until they landed with a tremendous thud on the basement gas mains. Rivers of gas gushed out, coursing in all directions, feeding flames and causing them to burn with a new intensity.
    A firestorm shot up from the basement. Columns of intense red heat pierced floorboards, ignited ink barrels, and devoured huge rolls of newsprint paper. In less than four minutes the