Stanley Doble
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They used 'boys' the way we use 'guys'. There was even a song, See What The Boys In The Back Room Will Have, even though the youngest 'boy' would have to be of drinking age.
LizzieMaine wrote: "A cake eater is an effette young man who sits languidly around a woman's parlor eating cake and admiring the crease in his trousers while all the real men are out wrestling bears or something. While it wasn't quite the same thing as calling a man a pansy or a nance, it did have a definite edge of dismissing the target as un-masculine."
That's rather similar to a term that used to be used among the officer class in the British Army. A "Poodle Faker" was an officer who was thought to be over-attentive to women. Not exactly a ladies' man or gigolo, but someone who enjoyed ladies company socially in preference to games and sport. (Sport meaning hunting, shooting, and fishing.) I think the term gradually fell by the wayside after Indian Independence in 1947.
Speaking of bowling-alley "pin boys" here's a shot of several of them at work in a bowling alley in Brooklyn in 1910 -- they weren't just "boys," they were little boys seven or eight years old. This photo was taken at 1 AM, according to the caption on the back, which also notes that "Boss kept several younger boys out of the picture." The Gerry Society didn't much care about working-class boys, it seems.
Although mechanical pinsetting machines became popular in the twenties, they still had to be loaded with pins by a pin boy, so the occupation of "pin boy" continued to exist well into the fifties when automatic pinsetters became common. By that point, though, the law had finally caught up with the industry, and pin boys had to be at least sixteen years old in most states.
The thing I would wonder about with DNA is this -- suppose a garment is found at a crime scene, supposedly belonging to the criminal, and DNA is found on it. But the criminal, let's say, bought that garment at the Goodwill store that morning. Whose DNA is on it -- his, or the original owner's?
I always found that a real flaw in detective fiction -- the assumption that every suspect was the first and only owner of every incriminating bit of evidence. I'd read about Ellery Queen tracking down a killer by the initials stamped on a hatband or the label in an overcoat, but I'd always wonder why he didn't consider the possiblity that those items had been purchased by the criminal from a second-hand store. I'd think you could run into the same sort of situation with DNA evidence.
A friend of ours went through something similar several years ago. He used his 1970s-era van as a trade-in to cover part of the down payment on a new pickup truck at a local dealership. Six months later he was contacted by the U.S. Border Patrol, and the agent asked him a number of questions about that van. Once it had been confirmed that he was no longer the legal owner, the agent told him that the vehicle had been confiscated and impounded as evidence because someone tried to use it to smuggle people across the Mexico/California border into the U.S., and the paper trail showed he was still the owner. Subsequent investigation revealed that the dealership had sold the vehicle to a local scrap yard for the value of it's viable parts, and that none of the proper documentation had been filed after that point.Reminds me of a story about a friend of mine. About 20 years ago he sold his by then junked up 81 Monte Carlo for a few hundred bucks. About four months later the FBI showed up on his doorstep. Seems the purchaser had never bothered to register the vehicle, and it had turned up in a scrapyard a state over with a body in the trunk. Fortunately he had kept a copy of the bill of sale for tax purposes, but wow, talk about a situation to find yourself in.
And consider also that certain "modern" forensic evidence is not nearly as reliable as a prosecutor might wish us to believe.
I'm reminded of the arson investigator in Texas who never saw a suspicious fire he didn't determine was arson. His findings played a role in the murder conviction of Cameron Todd Willingham, who maintained his innocence of killing his daughters in an arson and refused to cop a plea that would have spared his life.
The New Yorker ran a great piece on this case a few years back. The takeaway was that arson investigations can be as much art as science, and in this case the findings certainly appeared tailored to suit the prosecution's narrative.
It brought to mind the sorts of fictions perpetrated by real estate appraisers a few years back, which played a major role in the market collapse. An experienced real estate agent of my acquaintance told me that he just told the appraisers what number he needed and that was the number he got.