Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="MrNate, post: 1519390, member: 5515"]I tried in vain to find history on "Boston Athletic Sports"...nothing great so far, except this excerpt which clearly shows we've come a long way in our description of the mentally handicapped: From Walden Pond: A History (1883): The Prophetic Convention at which two converts were baptized in the lake at five P.M. At the Catholic Temperance Society picnic from St. Mary’s, Boston, “athletic sports” were featured. Unfortunately, nineteen-year-old deaf mute “Dummy” Roberts drowned, “and persistent efforts by varying expedients to recover the body failed,” including firing the town Thoreau’s Country cannon from the bank. A week later, on the day of the first of the six Poor Children’s events, a boy ran up from the water shouting, “I’ve found a dead man in the water!” “Dummy” bobbed near the bathhouse, his head resting on the sand. “A boat rowed by, an attendantof the grounds soon appeared, a cord was slipped around one leg of the body, and it was towed to a secluded spot, followed on shore by a crowd of nearly 100 children, and that was poor Dummy’s funeral cortege.”[/QUOTE]