The Legal Reserve Building · 1935–1943

Burgled the morning Houston read about Pearl Harbor

Dec 8, 1941

From the source

TWO SAFES CRACKED BY YEGGS IN WEEK END

The story beneath the headline, known from the re-typeset copy shown below, reports two safes cracked in the offices at 1102 Harvard over the weekend of December 6 and 7: $25 taken from the 111th Engineers’ safe, and $316 and a check from the safe of Truck Drivers and Helpers Union No. 367. Only the safe of the Teamsters’ Joint Council No. 58 resisted.

Houston Chronicle, December 8, 1941 (known from a re-typeset copy; no scan of the page is held).

“Yegg” is safecracker slang out of the hobo argot of the 1900s, already antique by 1941, kept alive by crime-column writers who liked the sound of it. These particular yeggs chose the worst weekend in American history to seek publicity: between their work and the press run, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. While Congress heard “a date which will live in infamy,” Houston also read about $341 missing from a Heights corner.

The real value of the clipping is the tenant census inside it. Six years after the Masons left, the foreclosed temple was housing the office of the 111th Engineers, whose Houston company had entered federal service in November 1940 on its way to Salerno, and the headquarters of the Teamsters’ Joint Council No. 58, whose president gave the building as his own address. An Army office and a union hall, one roof, one burglary.

The building’s answer to December 1941 was the same as its answer to everything: it kept every tenant and carried on.

The source

Re-typeset text of a newspaper report headed Two Safes Cracked By Yeggs in Week End, about safes cracked in offices at 1102 Harvard.
A re-typeset copy of the Houston Chronicle’s report of Dec. 8, 1941, “Two Safes Cracked By Yeggs in Week End.” It is not an image of the newspaper page, and no scan of the page is held.

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