Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 78, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1914 — Alligator in Gas Heater; Porter Breaks Record [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Alligator in Gas Heater; Porter Breaks Record

ATLANTA, GA. —And the puzzling thing about it is, How did it manage to get there? It’s an alligator, an honest-to-goodness alligator, a baby thing with tail and head and jaws like a lizard, and they found it in a barber shop.

The shop is operated by L. M. Brady. Tom Echols, who shines shoes while lie isn’t sweeping out, went back to light the instantaneous heater for a customer who was going to take a bath, and as the gas flared up something leaped from the tank, sprawled upon the floor and commenced kicking about. Echols,, who is black and superstitious as well as easily frightened, darted for the street He made the distance in time that amounted to just a.

little bit less than nothing, screaming and striking terror to the souls of a half dozen customers and fully that many barbers. Upon investigation Brady discovered an alligator crawling forlornly be neath the gas tank. It measured about six inches in length, and was the size of an overgrown north Georgia lizard. It was the “hellbejjder”~size, 4G~use -a scientific term, and can be carried in the hand or pocket with safety. How the thing managed to get into the Marietta street barber shop is a scientific mystery. Some say the sun absorbed it with an amount of water from the flow of the Nile, away over there in Egypt, carried it in the clouds until it became a burden, then dropped it into a north Georgia stream, from whence it flowed into larger streams which carried it into the Howell mill reservoir of the city, from which it was sucked into the water mains of Atlanta, later being deposited into a feed pipe of the barber shop, which carried it into the instantaneous heater tank.