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It is not clear when banana peels were first transformed from fruit casings, or the occasional prankster’s prop, into instruments of a peculiarly American brand of larceny. To be sure, the banana peelers of the 1920s were not the first to use the peels. One of the earliest recorded outbreaks of banana peeling for money actually dates from some thirty years earlier and involved not one but an entire family of fakers practiced in the peeler’s art.
The Freeman family of Chicago was made up of a father, a mother, and seven children, five of them girls. For a time, the Freemans had worked as song and dance artists in second-rate music halls in cities from New York to Chicago. But in the early 1890s the family, especially the women, began working full time faking accidents on steam trains and street railroads. The banana peel was the mainstay of their operation. In June 1894, Jennie Freeman, a teenager, claimed that she slipped on a banana peel that threw her off an Illinois Central train; in September of that same year, she blamed a banana peel for a fall on the Chicago City Railway. Shortly thereafter, a suspicious claims man checked his bureau’s regional index cards on the Freemans. Finding more than enough entries to confirm his hunches, he sent circulars around the country asking for additional information on the family. The replies came pouring in. From Boston there were reports of a banana peel fall by Jennie Freeman in May 1894. Later in September, that “same old banana peel story” was used by another Freeman daughter, a “handsome girl” named Fannie, who made a claim against the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad line. Fannie Freeman had also used the banana peel pretext a month earlier in a case against Boston’s West End Street Railway Company, in which she claimed partial paralysis and a lack of bladder control as the result of her fall. The banana peel, along with the Freeman girls’ theatrics, was usually worth a few hundred dollars in settlement money; sometimes the girls earned as much as $500 per fall.
The banana peeling Freemans might never have been caught had it not been for Fannie Freeman’s failed attempt at a $2,000 claim against the Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railway on Christmas Eve of 1894. Prior to this, Fannie usually got through the medical examinations with a credible feigning of paralysis. (“When I stuck pins into her legs and feet and touched them with my hands, she declared she could not feel any sensation,” a doctor reported to a Boston street railway company. “And I couldn’t surprise her into painful expression.“) But Fannie couldn’t keep up the act all the time. In Chicago, railroad detectives determined to put an end to the Freemans’ successful run, rented a room above the family’s apartment and fashioned a peephole through the plaster of the girl’s ceiling. “To see anything safely, it was necessary to crawl under the carpet so that no light penetrated from above,” the editors of Railway Surgeon magazine noted in 1895. “For five days and nights detectives and reporters for the (Chicago) Tribune watched the antics of the ‘paralyzed girl’,” the account continued.
“They have seen her take exercise by indulging in a hurdle race over all the chairs in the place; they have seen her dance more dances than some people ever heard of, and they have seen her manufacture cold feet and other symptoms of paralysis for the doctors. Most of the Rock Islands’ officials, detectives without end, and reporters and artists for the Tribune have looked through that hole.”
Assured of Fannie Freeman’s fakery, the Rock Island detectives sent in two more of their doctors to reexamine her. The doctors tested the girl’s muscles and reflexes and shoved needles into her flesh from feet to waist. Then one raised her leg in the air and Fannie, perhaps forgetting what she was supposed to do or, perhaps, improvising a new condition, left her leg in the air, astonishing everyone in the room. Minutes later, detectives eyeing the scene from the peephole above watched as the doctors left and mother Freeman burst into tears. She blamed Fannie for ruining everything, then she showed her daughter how a paralyzed leg should react to being raised in the air. “Mutual recriminations followed,” it was later written, “and the mother, finally losing her temper, grabbed Fann(ie) by the hair, dragged the poor ‘paralyzed’ thing out of bed and pounded her vigorously.”
© Copyright 1997 Alikim Media
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THE ABOVE EXCERPT FROM “ACCIDENTLY, ON PURPOSE” HAS BEEN REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR.