Grocery's Ill Luck Led Newspaper To Cry Jinx

 In June 1947, under the Page One headline "When It Rains It Pours Here," The Daily Mail of Hagerstown declared a local grocery was jinxed:

Speaking of a jinx!

All the wrath of the spirits has been cast in one little store, located at 147 East avenue, according to recent signs. Mrs. Lewis Heine, wife of the owner of the grocery store, fell and broke an arm two weeks ago, and to top it off, cut off the end of her thumb in a slicing machine. Last week, an employe, Charles Bailey, fell out the back of the store truck, suffering lacerations about the arm and face. That same week, the storm broke out the plate glass window on the store front.

That same day another employe, John Miller, shut the door on his thumb and mashed it.

That such a commonplace set of mishaps neither merits front-page news coverage nor warrants supernatural explanation – “all the wrath of the spirits,” indeed! – is indicated by some of the other headlines on the same front page:

Floods Inundate Ohio, Pennsy Communities / 80 Families Forced To Quit Homes

Diphtheria Case Reported In City / 19-Year-Old Girl Stricken With Disease, Reports Health Department

Child Center Closes June 30 / 38 Children Of Working Mothers Now Enrolled at Agency

Police Probe Two Larcenies / Report Over $250 In Cash Taken In Breaking and Enterings

Woman’s Body Is Found In Barrel / Police Are Baffled By Discovery Made By Junk Dealer

Granted, that last was not a local story, but an Associated Press dispatch out of Philadelphia. Still, plenty of people clearly were having even worse luck than the shopkeepers at 147 East Avenue.

Nevertheless, the newspaper published an update about three weeks later, under the headline "Accident Jinx Continues To Haunt Store":

The accident jinx continues to haunt a little store at 147 East avenue.

Yesterday afternoon Lewis Heine, owner of the store, lacerated one of his fingers so badly while cutting bananas that he was taken to the Washington County Hospital where a number of stitches were required to close the wound. Last Friday his daughter, Beverly, was stricken with pink-eye and a cousin of the family while visiting fell under a merry-go-round at city park and lacerated a leg. John Miller, an employe of the store required services of a physician last week when he cut a finger while slicing meat. …

There follows a recount of the previously reported accidents. And that seems to have been the final word from the Hagerstown Daily Mail about the jinxed store.

Besides these two 1947 Daily Mail reports, a Newspapers.com search of Hagerstown papers turns up only benign mentions of 147 East Avenue: a couple of wedding announcements, a newborn baby, a few classified ads. Though a “practically new” soda fountain was for sale there in May 1955, the East End Market was still a going concern at that address in February 1956.

One wonders why the newspaper, having specified the grocery’s address and named its owners, their daughter and two of their employees, didn’t go ahead and name the store, too. Clearly, the editors weren’t otherwise shy about identifying the place. Maybe the store had no name, or at least no sign – or maybe its name was considered so obvious (“Heine’s Market,” for example) as not to need mentioning.

I like to think that the owners reported the jinx to the newspaper in the first place, in hopes of free publicity, and that the newspaper eventually caught on. After all, the bad luck seems to have carefully excluded the customers!

Worth noting is the similarity between the address 147 and the year 1947, when the jinx supposedly occurred. Dismissed as coincidence?

According to online tax records, 147 East Ave. in Hagerstown still exists, an apartment house owned by the Washington County Affordable Housing Commission. The primary structure was built in 1898, and a list of the bad luck suffered by everyone who ever lived there or worked there doubtless would fill a book. The same of course, is true of every other address on East Avenue, or in Hagerstown, or in Maryland, or ...

Sources:

“Accident Jinx Continues To Haunt Store.” The Daily Mail (Hagerstown, Md.), 27 June 1947. Accessed 6 Nov. 2021 via Newspapers.com.

Real Property Data Search. Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation. https://sdat.dat.maryland.gov/RealProperty/Pages/default.aspx. Accessed 6 Nov. 2021.

“When It Rains It Pours Here.” The Daily Mail (Hagerstown, Md.), 3 June 1947. Accessed 6 Nov. 2021 via Newspapers.com.