The Legal Reserve Building · 1935–1943
Burgled the morning Houston read about Pearl Harbor
Dec 8, 1941
From the source
TWO SAFES CRACKED BY YEGGS IN WEEK END
The story beneath the headline, shown in the restored clipping below, reports two safes cracked in the building’s offices over the weekend of December 6 and 7: $25 taken from the 111th Engineers’ office, $316 from the truck drivers’ union. The Teamsters’ own safe resisted the attack.
Houston Chronicle, December 8, 1941 (clipping digitally restored, shown below).
“Yegg” is safecracker slang out of the hobo argot of the 1900s, already antique by 1941, kept alive by crime-column writers who liked the sound of it. These particular yeggs chose the worst weekend in American history to seek publicity: between their work and the press run, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. While Congress heard “a date which will live in infamy,” Houston also read about $341 missing from a Heights corner.
The real value of the clipping is the tenant census inside it. Six years after the Masons left, the foreclosed temple was housing the office of the 111th Engineers, whose Houston company had entered federal service the previous November on its way to Salerno, and the headquarters of the Teamsters’ Joint Council No. 58, whose president gave the building as his own address. An Army office and a union hall, one roof, one burglary.
The Defense Guard kept drilling in the Engineers’ place through the war. The building’s answer to December 1941 was the same as its answer to everything: it kept every tenant and carried on.
The source
