Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 96, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1913 — OUTLAW TO START LIFE ANEW [ARTICLE]

OUTLAW TO START LIFE ANEW

Abe Buzzard Was Evangelist During Day and Btole Poultry at Night.

Phlladelpia.—Forty-one of his aixtyone years having been spent behind prison bars. Abe Buzzard, the notorious outlaw evangelist, was released from the Eastern penitentiary recent ly. Speaking of his Jekyl and Hyde parser, Buzzard says: "The world owed me a good living and I collected the debt the best that I knew how. I was not used right the time I was first arrested, and had I not been blamed for crimes I never committed, I would never have resorted to the life that I hare led. “I am converted now and realize that it does not pay to think that you are going to get away with the kind of stuff that I used to pull I'm going to shake the dust of Pennsylvania from my feet and go to the Pacific coast. I’ve learned to be a cobbler and I'm going into the shoe business out west, where no one will know me, and where I will have a chance to start life over again." Buzzard began stealing at the age of fifteen, when he and three brothers organized a gang to raid farms la the Welch mountains. When twenty he began serving a ten-year term in Lancaster county. He broke out of jail and was recaptured several months later. After serving several other sentences he was released from Cherry Hil! in 1901. Then it was he professed reformation and began preaching. He. did his evangelistic work during

the day and stole poultry at night In the course of a few months he stole 1,800 chickens and 7,500 turkeys from the farmers in and about Reading and Lancaster.