The Midnight Concertina Menace
A fed-up Seattle editor threatens to take a shot at an unwanted suitor serenading a neighbor with an off-key concertina.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
We wish to give notice, and it may be considered official and final, to the young man who puts himself to the trouble to walk from the barrel factory to the neighborhood where we are supposed to live in peace and comfort, that if he persists in the course that he has been following for the last week, he will become the central attraction at a first-class funeral. It has been his custom the past week to settle himself opposite our place of abode, and a block from the residence of some simple-minded girl that he calls 'his,' and grind out a broken concertina: 'I'm waiting, my darling, for thee.' You will wait for your darling one of those fine evenings just long enough to give us time to draw a bead on you with a double-barreled shot gun, and then you will be gathered to your fathers.
“You will wait for your darling one of those fine evenings just long enough to give us time to draw a bead on you with a double-barreled shot gun.”
This 1880 dispatch perfectly captures the eternal friction of dense urban living—the struggle between a lovestruck romantic and a neighbor desperate for a quiet night's sleep. While we might handle 'noisy neighbor' complaints with mediation or noise ordinances today rather than threats of a double-barreled shotgun, the annoyance of an unrequested soundtrack to one's evening remains a quintessential Seattle experience.
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