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It broke my heart. The poor poor girl. My grandparents still had that house when I was a kid. I know that upper floor apartment where Thelma lived. I can picture her on the porch with my grandparents and my dad. That makes it all especially vivid for me.

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Yeah. I wasn't aiming to make a political post, but I thought of that too.

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I haven't told my brother yet that there was truth to this story, although it wasn't quite the way he thought it went. (He thought it was my grandmother's elderly landlady at the other house who threw herself out a window.)

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I'm just thinking how differently people would react to this story today than they likely did in 1958 She was 15 years old. Dear God. Here are the clippings if you want to read the story.

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But no one was going to rescue poor Thelma. Not in 1958. It's pretty clear she was just an embarrassment to her family, and a salacious tidbit of news for the newspaper. Poor Thelma. I wonder what happened to her child. I may have to look that up too.

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What I have in my head is some married scumbqll inpregnated a. 13-year-old & her family pushed her into marrying someone else & whisked her out of state. In any case she must have been miserably unhappy as a15 year old with a 15-month-old. Maybe she hoped married scumball would rescue her

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The newspaper article was a teeny bit despicably salacious about it, hinting that it wasn't clear how long she had been married, and made a point that the man she wanted to contact was married to someone else. It also mentioned that the family had moved here from Alabama just a couple years before.

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If you did the math with those ages, Thelma was at best 14 and maybe even only 13 when she conceived her baby. Something about the story made me wonder if the "married man" She was trying to contact was the father of her baby, and not the boy she married (he was 20).

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So Thelma went to a hotel in downtown Niagara falls. She went to the top floor and managed to crawl out a window and get onto the roof, where she plunged to her death. I can only imagine my grandmother and grandfather and Dad's reaction to this. But my chief reaction is oh my God, poor Thelma.

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What I stumbled across were newspaper articles. In September 1958, a couple of days before my dad's 18th birthday, Thelma got into an argument with her husband and her mother. According to the newspaper, Thelma wanted to call some married guy who lived out of state. They wouldn't let her.

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In 1958, my grandparents owned a two-story house. They occupied the ground floor and they rented out the upper floor. Upstairs from them at that time lived a 15-year-old girl with her husband and her 15-month-old baby. And yes I have those ages correct. The girl's name was Thelma.

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So I figured my brother misunderstood something my dad said and forgot all about it. Until last night. I have a Newspaper .com subscription through Ancestry, so I decided to look up my grandmother's addresses to see if I could find anything to corroborate my brother. And holy crap.

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I was especially skeptical because my brother thought it happened in the house where my grandmother died, and my grandmother lived on the second floor of that two-story house, so it seemed especially unlikely. What, she was visiting my grandmother and suddenly decided to hurl herself out a window?

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Senator Ron Wyden @wyden.senate.gov · 17/07/2025

Storytime. After my dad died, my brother mentioned that dad had told him that the lady who lived upstairs from my grandmother jumped out of an upper story window to her death. That wasn't a story I'd ever heard from my dad or my grandmother, so I was a bit skeptical.

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Reposted by Gayton Gomez

New bombshell from my investigators on Epstein's sex trafficking operation: the Trump administration has an Epstein file detailing 4,725 wire transfers and almost $1.1 billion flowing through just one of his banks. Hundreds of millions more through others.

nytimes.com

This Democrat Won’t Let Go of the Jeffrey Epstein Case, Either

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/10/2026

Jesus, this thread. I'm ashamed to be an American.

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Reposted by Gayton Gomez

4/ Fernando Vasquez, an 18-year-old citizen, was on break from work when agents chased and handcuffed him, then put him in their truck. After realizing their mistake, the agents left the teen alone in the woods, with no way to get home. Then they threw his ID out of the truck.

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Reposted by Gayton Gomez

Abandoned America @abandonedamerica.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Opened in 1920 and closed in 1979, the Victory Theatre in Holyoke, MA has been abandoned for 47 long years. Once a palace of laughter and light, now it has sat in darkness longer than many people have been alive. Read more at www.abandonedamerica.us/the-victory-...

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THERE YOU GO AGAIN ALWAYS HARPING ON THE LINEAR PROGRESSION OF TIME

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Oh, I'm so sorry. I was really rooting for him. 💔

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In fairness it's extremely expensive to put on these productions. Supposedly ticket sales at the Met don't even cover half the costs of putting on a production. That's why it cost a small fortune to get a glass of wine there Singers, musicians, stagecrews etc., need to be paid too

Dudamel's version also features Jonas Kaufman, which I admit would be a draw if the tickets weren't so damn expensive, but I'm still going to take a full-on opera with sets because IMO that's part of the fun of an opera. Plus did I mention Quinn Kelsey? (I'm a Quinn Kelsey fan girl.)

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Looks like the Dudamel concert has more or less sold out, so I guess many classical music fans don't agree with my choice. But for my own part, even if the prices were equal, if I could only choose one, I would go to the Met. I'm just hoping the Dudamel concert doesn't hurt the Met's sales

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Yeah. And unfortunately timed (in the same month the Met is putting on its production of Tosca). I'll see Dudamel a few times at the Philharmonic at like a third the price of the Carnegie hall tickets, so unless I win a lottery, I think I'll give the Carnegie Hall Tosca a miss.

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I admit I briefly considered going to both, but the tickets for Dudamel's Tosca at Carnegie Hall start at $344 a ticket. (For less than half that, I have nice dress circle tickets to the Met to see a full-on production with great sets.)

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Andrew Deck @andrewdeck.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I love you, Dudamel, but if it's a choice between seeing a full-scale production of Tosca at the Met, especially one that includes my fave Quinn Kelsey, & you conducting a concert at Carnegie Hall featuring the music from Tosca, with tickets that start at twice the price, I'll be sticking to the Met

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Reposted by Gayton Gomez

ChatGPT is adding the signatures of real New Yorker cartoonists to its AI-generated images. So far, I've found the signatures of more than 15 contributors. "It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me." www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chat...

Left: A cartoon generated by ChatGPT and signed with Emily Flake’s signature that was posted to a Reddit forum in June. Right: A real Emily Flake cartoon published in The New Yorker on August 20, 2026 and licensed via The Cartoon Bank.

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Reposted by Gayton Gomez

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 05/10/2026

Holy shit.

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So. What's going on with the ballroom and the reflecting pool?

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Take a look at the Opera wire review I just posted. The production really sounds like a lot of fun!

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I mean, they set it at Coney Island. How can I not?

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Oh, to hell with it, I'm going to see Così fan tutte tomorrow night. (If it seems like I am going to an awfully large number of events lately, that's because I am.)

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Honestly, I don't care if they just do a landlord special and slop white paint over it, as long as we don't have to look at it.

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I may need to throw a saint-themed dinner party myself Still deciding on the main course, but perhaps St. Denis will provide inspiration

Dan Friedman @dfriedman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Reposted by Gayton Gomez

Past reporting on Walters and these planes: gillianbrockell.com/noems-luxury...; www.motherjones.com/politics/202...; www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...; www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hides-...

gillianbrockell.com

Noem’s luxury ‘deportation’ jet is the tip of the ICE-berg

Kristi Noem’s DHS has acquired at least nine new aircraft in recent weeks, with another one on the way. Half are luxury jets.

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Gayton Gomez @gpgomez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

They're allowed to dress. They just aren't allowed to dress well. That's a god-awful outfit in every way

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They had a few taxpayer dollars left over and they figured they may as well blow the whole wad

Gayton Gomez @gpgomez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Oh! If you can get to Chicago in mid-october, it looks like you don't need to register to see it! The article says "No registration is required to take part in the free, two-day Open House festival" And now I'm wondering if I can manage to get to Chicago

Gayton Gomez @gpgomez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It looks amazing. I would love to see it.