# The two boys who had been arrested together in 1910 had diverged sharply by 1918: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/02/23/the-two-boys-who-had-been-arrested-together-in-1910-had-diverged-sharply-by-1918-video/
- Published: 2018-02-23T10:36:31+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**An argument between two men devolved into a shooting near a New Orleans playground
a century ago this month. A stray bullet struck a child at play, but the injury 
to his toe was not serious.**

The incident was undoubtedly disturbing to the law-abiding public, but it was otherwise
unremarkable during a particularly violent period in the city’s history save for
one fact: The accused gunman was an apparent acquaintance of future jazz great Louis
Armstrong, having been arrested eight years earlier with him while they were digging
through the rubble of a burned building.

The shooting suspect was Willie Telfry, who lived either at 433 S. Franklin St. (
according to The Times-Picayune) or 533 S. Rampart St. (according to the Item) in
1918. In the incident at around 9 p.m. on Valentine’s Day of that year, Telfry, 
whose nickname was Red Cap, got into a fight over money with a man named Tom Mobile,
AKA Baltimore Tom, near the old Poydras Market, one of Armstrong’s neighborhood 
haunts.

Armstrong wrote in his 1952 autobiography of shopping at the market, of busking 
outside the nearby Maylie’s restaurant as a child and of playing music at a honky
tonk –“one of the toughest joints in the world” — at Saratoga and Poydras streets,
the intersection where the 1918 shooting took place.

At some point during the argument between Red Cap and Baltimore Tom on Feb. 14, 
1918, Telfry pulled out a gun and, according to the Daily States, “began to bombard
his companion of the municipal nomenclature.”

Baltimore Tom was not injured, but one bullet ricocheted off the pavement and hit
a 12-year-old playing in the park. The child, Anthony Cipriano, was sent to Charity
Hospital.

“It felt like the ground had exploded,” Cipriano told a reporter in a bedside interview
published in the next day’s Picayune. “I didn’t know at first I had been hit, but
I looked down at my toe and saw a hole in it. Then it began to hurt.”

Whether Telfry was booked in the shooting is not immediately clear; press reports
at the time said that police knew his identity and where he lived, but that he had
escaped in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

Telfry is among the many ancillary figures in Armstrong’s childhood about whom little
research has been done. Some of them, like the drummer Black Benny and prostitute
Mary Jack the Bear, have achieved a degree of infamy, mostly because of Armstrong’s
own work in chronicling his upbringing.

Others are less well known. But filling in the details of their lives paints a fuller
picture of Armstrong’s early years in New Orleans and offers further evidence that
the difficult upbringing he later described was not exaggerated.

Armstrong’s life began to change for the better after he spent time at a New Orleans
reformatory known as the Colored Waifs Home. But things turned out different for
Telfry, who served time with Armstrong in the same institution after their arrest
in 1910. Armstrong became a working musician before the end of the decade, while
Telfry continued to have run-ins with the law.

Armstrong and Telfry had been sent to the Waifs Home for a short stay in October
and November of 1910. They had landed there after being arrested on Oct. 21, 1910,
along with four other boys in New Orleans’ Chinatown while reportedly trying to 
salvage brass from a burned building. Telfry was 12 years old at the time, according
to documents from the Waifs Home (in which he is identified as “Delphery”), and 
Armstrong was 9. Contemporary press reports indicate they were released from custody
around Nov. 7, 1910.

Armstrong was returned to the home after a now-famous incident in which he fired
a gun into the air on New Year’s Eve in 1912. He would spend the next year and a
half at the institution, first learning the bugle, he wrote in his autobiography,
and later playing cornet in the home’s band that marched in parades and played at
concert venues around New Orleans.

Telfry is not known to have been a musician, and the exact nature of his relationship
with Armstrong is not clear, beyond the fact that they lived close to one another
and were arrested as alleged criminal accomplices as children in 1910. Whether white
children would have been arrested on similar criminal charges seems unlikely, but
during this period black residents, especially those in the city’s poorer neighborhoods,
were often victims of racial profiling and police misconduct.

Armstrong is not believed to have ever publicly acknowledged the 1910 arrest or 
made a direct reference to Telfry.

What is clear, though, is that the fortunes of the two boys who had been arrested
together in 1910 had diverged sharply by 1918.

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