Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 303, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1919 — SUN TURNED, SAVED EARTH, IS PROF. PORTA’S ALIBI. [ARTICLE]

SUN TURNED, SAVED EARTH, IS PROF. PORTA’S ALIBI.

,Prof. Albert F. Porta, San Francisco meterologist, from whose deductions on a planet configuration the prophecy of the world coming to an end Wednesday was said to have sprung, reported. Wednesday night that the prognostications of the world’s demise were greatly exaggerated. The rotation of the sun, preventing a pull of the planetary phalanx of any one place of Old Sol’s anatomy for any considerable length of time, would prevent likewise the formation of any sun spot, Profeshor Porta said. It was the sun spot that he feared. “Heavy electro-magnetic energies produced by. the tension of the planets on the sun would produce a huge spot, which would in turn cause the cataclysm, but which event is prevented by the sun’s rotation,” Professor Porta said. He added that Mt. Lasson is due for an eruption within three days. In previous statements Professor Porta had admitted the possibility of disturbances in and on the earth as a result of the “pull exerted by the lined up planets.” Professor Porta’s prediction was the cause of many amusing happenings throughout the country, some of which are related below: Down at Champaign, 111., Arthur Baumgartner, a painter, was a believer. At midnight he left his home —and his clothes —and perambulated into the center of town costumed in a heavenly suggestive nightie. The' police beat the angels to him. Now the doctors are examining his mmd. , . , In Indianapolis, a whistle m a railroad roundhouse got out of order —broke on the open rather than the closed throttle. When the whistle had shrieked for minutes other whistle operators throughout the city began to pull their -cords. It is traditional in the profession , o f thistle blowers that a prolonged blast means something is happening and requires every member of the craft to join in. With the entire city crazy with noise, Indianapolis promptly died and went where it thought it ought to go. Those who were physically able prostrated themselves consciously and begged for just one more chance to love their neighbors as themselves. Others became prostrated through pain—or fancy-—un-consciousness. . Charles Johnson, a farmer in Mennonite, 0., arrived -in Cleveland early yesterday with a ticket for a reserved seat to view the end of

the world. He couldn’t find the address of the grand stand,'so appealed for police direction. He had purchased the ticket for sls, he mentioned. In Miami, Okla., several zinc and lead mines were forced to close down. The canny miners were determined to be on the surface when doomsday cracked, within more convenient reaching distance of heaven, they explained, than underground and within sliding distance of hades. 1 New York City waited anxiously. Scientists had laughed in print and out at the Porta prophecy, but there were those in plenty who took every precaution of playing safe. Midnight missions did a thriving and all-night business. Conversions ’were accomplished by the wholesale. Gentlemen who have been making both eftds meet by jimmying windows or blowing safes stood up in hundreds of church establishments, .confessed their sins and pledged ' themselves to go straight—at least until the planetary conjunction had been safely put into the past.