OCTOBER 22, 1935-Flower Peddler Arrested; Pyle Convinced System’s All Wrong
THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS — TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1935
Flower Peddler Arrested; Pyle Convinced System’s All Wrong
By ERNIE PYLE
For about seven blocks yesterday, I happened to be walking alongside of a very fine example of what is known as our “system.”
I picked up the example around Dupont Circle. At first I didn’t know what it was. There was a brand new Ford sedan, with “Police Department” painted on the side, and two very disinterested policemen in the front seat.
The car wasn’t making any noise at all, and was going down the street so slowly I could walk right along beside it.
There was also a colored boy pushing his two-wheeled flower cart, blazing like an autumn hillside with its bright colors, and the sun shining down so joyfully on it. He was walking along at a good clip, looking straight ahead without any expression at all.
I didn’t connect the two until I had walked for a block or so beside them, and then I realized they were together.
The flower-cart Negro was keeping ahead of the police car, and the police car was herding the flower-cart Negro. I realized then that the colored man had done something terrible, and they were taking him to the station house.
So I kept alongside, trying to think what I should do. Should I go over and tell the policemen I was a taxpayer, and didn’t like that business at all, and they must let him go? Or should I go on down to the station house and try to get him out? Or should I just go away and forget about it? So I kept walking along, thinking.
We met a lot of people on that long walk to the station house. Colored people and white people. Everybody would stop to look, and stand for a minute, and then laugh and walk on. It seemed to me the colored people were even more amused than the white. People would look knowingly at the policemen, and the police would smile back, sort of bored like.
The colored fellow had to push pretty hard to get his heavy cart up the little hill on 20th between L and K streets. He couldn’t go very fast.
Traffic got to piling up behind, a bus tried to get around, and kept honking. The colored fellow looked around at it. As he did so, he got his cart too close and rammed it into the bumper of a parked car. The handle flew out of his hands and the cart up-ended with a big thump, spilling flower cans all over the asphalt. The water ran out of the cans and back down the street.
The police car stopped and waited, very patiently. A little crowd gathered round to share in the entertainment. Everybody thought it was funny except the colored fellow and me.
He picked up his flowers, bunch by bunch, and put them back in the water buckets. I would like to say he put them back sadly, or that he threw them back in a rage, but all he really did was just put them back. And then he got behind and started pushing again.
Finally they got to No. 3 Station House. He wheeled his cart up in the yard, and they took him inside. That’s the last I saw of him.
The police report said his name was Douglas Weems of 124 Virginia-av sw, that he was charged with “parking longer than necessary to make a sale.” He had only $1.20 and since the collateral was $5, they parked him behind the bars and left his flower-cart parked out front.
It’s easy for us citizens to get out of the whole thing by getting awfully mad at the cops. But that doesn’t work. I talked with one of the cops, and found he wasn’t getting any special pleasure out of capturing the Dupont Circle Enemy No. 1. In fact he admitted, himself, that it seemed like a damn shame.
You could get mad at the florists, who sic the cops onto these transient flower sellers. But that doesn’t work either. For the florists have to make a living.
The final step, then, is to get mad at ourselves for letting things get into such a mess as this. But even that won’t work. For getting mad doesn’t help any, unless we do something about it, and do you know anybody who knows what to do?
Last night I slept just as well as ever, but I don’t know whether Douglas Weems slept any at all or not. And a week from now I probably wouldn’t know who Douglas Weems is, if you walked up and asked me. Neither would you. That’s the hell of it.
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