used to be stationed, telling them
what I'd done, what I thought I might be able to do, and asking them
for an opportunity to give them a demonstration. In return, I asked
for a steady government job in a warm climate. Until I could arrange a
certain demonstration, I went on, I could understand they might think
me a crank, so I wouldn't at present sign my name. I suggested they
pay close attention through the week of the fifth through the twelfth
to the various press association dispatches, and I would arrange
later, in my next letter, for a more personal show if they wanted to
take it any further.

* * * * *

The fifth fell on a Saturday. Bright and early I was up to ride the
bus downtown, changing to the Woodward line, ending up at Ferndale,
all the time concentrating furiously and holding my breath as much as
I dared. On the way back home I tried to work it a little differently.
Probably no one else on the streetcar beside myself noticed there
wasn't a single passenger car, truck or bus that passed us. Every car,
as we sailed by, stalled and every traffic light we passed either
turned three colors or blinked out completely. Most of the moving cars
made it to the curb on their momentum. The others stayed where they
were. When I got off in front of the City Hall, filthy old hulk that
it is, the streetcar stayed immobile at the safety zone, it was a new
PCC car, and the insulation poured smoke from under the wheels.
Naturally there wasn't any moving traffic in back of it, or in front.
I saw to that. Then I just strolled around Cadillac Square, bollixing
up everything that occurred to me, from trucks to busses to traffic
lights. You never saw such a verminous tangled mess in all your life.
When the patrol wagons began to scream into the Square loaded with
reinforcements for the helpless purple single cop at the Michigan
intersection I let them get as far as the center of the street before
I pinned them down. Even when I saw it later in the newsreels I
couldn't believe it. Even Mack Sennett could have done no better.

I had to walk all the way out Gratiot to St. Antoine before I could
find transportation home that wasn't walled off by screaming horns and
haggard foot-patrolmen, and when I got off at my corner all Gratiot
and Harper behind me was as clogged as Woodward. I even knocked out
every red neon sign within two blocks of a traffic light. That one
might keep a few pedestrians alive