As for the question of why Ronald Pepper was known as “The Copper Enchiridion,” a byname given him by the newspaperman, radio commentator, and playwright Jules Hanford, we need only look to Hanford himself, who explained the sobriquet in the stage notes to his epic tragedy River Days, Ruined Nights (which ran, sadly, for only a month before the death of two of the play’s principals, the veteran actress Geraldine Grant and the rising leading man John Pippo, in a single-car wreck that the detective handling the case, Fred Furness, would not allow others to refer to as an “accident” in his presence, so certain was he that the automobile had been mechanically tampered with, the operators drugged, or the right and proper course of the vehicle otherwise doomed via malicious intervention, a belief that he pursued from the day he was called to the scene and a dying Grant croaked out two mystifying words, “Off Station”—a phrase that consumed Furness to the point that he had it tattooed on his bicep as a reminder to never give up searching for the true cause of the crash—to the day that he, Furness, was forced into retirement and moved to Phoenix with his wife Ellen and the couple’s live-in assistant, Lucy, who was rumored to be Ellen’s lover, and who, after Furness’s own death the following year from tuberculosis, moved with Ellen to a luxury condominium in Chandler, where she began to pursue the career she had set aside when she first came to work for the Furness family, pastry-making, with a specific focus on the deceptively simple but in fact immensely challenging cake, Baumkuchen).
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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