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Newsboy Funerals: Tales of Sorrow and Solidarity in Urban America
by
Vincent DiGirolamo
(Colgate University)
Wednesday, November 1, 2000, at 4:30 p.m.
Elmarion Room, Goddard-Daniels House
190 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts
PRÉCIS:
Most children in the United States were buried as members of a family or a
church, not a trade. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
scores of newsboys were publicly laid to rest by their fellow peddlers and
the charities that ministered to them. Reading these humble rituals as
stories that street children told about themselves, this paper shows why
newsies took up collections for flowers, caskets, and plaques for boys
they hardly knew or even "misused" in life; why they drafted letters of
sympathy, passed resolutions of condolence, and marched en masse in
funeral trains; why they sometimes dispensed with clergy and conducted
their own last rites; and why they feared burial in a potter's field more
than death itself. This paper suggests that although newsboy funerals were
sentimentalized in sermons, tracts, poems, and Tin Pan Alley tearjerkers,
they offer a rare glimpse into the social and emotional lives of
working-class children.
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