B’KLYN GALS SEEK LEAP YEAR COWBOYS (1912)
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The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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“Come on boys; don your riding chaps, brush up your sombrero and dig out your rusty six-shooter and look-like a moving picture hero!”
So started the article in the Sacramento Bee in April of 1912 about two Brooklyn sisters who were looking far afield for long-distance leap year affairs.
Alma and Lou Bahn of 546 Washington Avenue, a boarding house between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue known as The Berwick, were taking this leap year business seriously, it seemed, and the men of the borough of Brooklyn, it seemed, could not hold down the sisters’ adventuresome spirits.
“They want to correspond with you and perhaps the corresponding may lead to love and to the altar,” continued the Bee story.
“The girls apparently realize that California is overrun with cowboys and that some of them are so dare devil and roguish that they buy their chewing gum in cigar stores,” continued the Bee. “Therefore, they ask for the names of several in order that they can each pick out a ‘nice’ cowboy and not a Black Bart the second or a California Jesse James.
“The Brooklyn belles do not give their ages, but their pictures indicate that they are, or were, young. That they are not idle flirts seeking to catch some unsuspecting and tenderhearted “Terror of the Plains” or “Scourge of the Sioux” and then give him the merry “ha ha,” is indicated by their sending their photographs along with the first letter.”
Soon after the Postmaster delivered the letters to the Sacramento Bee, this story was published and Alma and Lou began to receive letters “from old men and young men and boys” as well as “several from women” – several hundred communications arrived at the boarding house in total. It was enough to “cause gossip all over the boarding house,” and “of course, (their) two husbands learned all about it.”
And when the Post Office Department learned about it, the agency opened up an investigation.
WHO WAS REALLY BEHIND THE JOKE?
The names signed to the letter were fictitious. The young women whose pictures were published on the Pacific Coasts were Anna Goezer and Lulu Bahr, who were married at the time and living with their husbands in the Washington Avenue boarding house.
Bahr, who was 18 years old at the time was a niece of Goezer, who was 26. Goezer, when the story broke back home in Brooklyn, wanted it “distinctly understood that it was not she who wrote the letter to the Sacaramento Postmaster.”
Bahr readily admitted the scheme was her doing. She told a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter that she “did it for a joke.
“She did not, however, reckon with all the consequences, such as the receipt of letters and postal cards by the score – or the investigation by the Postal Department.
WHAT TYPE OF PROPOSALS DID BAHR RECEIVE?
“Some of the cowboys wrote nice letters and some didn’t. Some sent their pictures. One wrote that he had seen the moving pictures which portrayed Western cowboy life, and that they amused him immensely, and that really there wasn’t much difference between the cowboys of the West, whom he called ranch hands, and the farmers of the East.”
“One correspondent, a woman, wrote that the girls had better come West, where, she assured them, they could make more money in a minute than in a month in the East.”
Both Bahr and Goezer said that all the letters were in their husbands’ possession and that they weren’t very angry about it.
Thus ended the search for Leap Year cowboys.
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