The front page leads with devastating news from Buffalo, where thirty people have died from wood alcohol poisoning, presumably sold at soft drink stands during Prohibition. Police have arrested two dealers, one on a homicide charge, and closed twenty soft drink parlors as they hunt for distributor James Volker. Acting prohibition administrator Leo Regan warns that 80% of liquor being sold in Buffalo as gin contains poison. Meanwhile, Texas celebrates as work begins on the Southern Pacific railroad extension from Falfurrias to the Lower Rio Grande Valley, ending a twenty-year delay. The Harris Construction Company of El Paso and Houston won the contract, with trains expected to reach Edinburg by November 1st. In Wyoming, Governor Nellie Tayloe Ross—wearing black mourning clothes for her late husband—welcomes 25 governors to the twelfth annual conference of state executives in Cheyenne, making her the nation's first female governor.

This front page captures America in 1926 at a crossroads between progress and peril. The deadly wood alcohol epidemic in Buffalo represents Prohibition's unintended consequences—when legal alcohol disappeared, desperate drinkers turned to poisonous substitutes that killed them. Meanwhile, the Southern Pacific's arrival in South Texas signals the continued westward expansion of American infrastructure, connecting remote border communities to national commerce. Governor Ross's presence at the governors' conference reflects women's growing political participation just six years after gaining the vote, even as she literally wears the mourning clothes that brought her to power after her husband's death.

• Radio station KWWG (278 meters) offered an eclectic Monday night lineup: Spanish songs by Miss Carlotta Villareal at 8:30, followed by the 'Hula Hula boys of KWWG playing Hawaiian music' at 6 PM Tuesday
• The newspaper ran a correction admitting they printed the wrong photo—showing House Speaker Lee Satterwhite instead of Lieutenant Governor Barry Miller because 'Herald editors had not seen either of the men'
• A Samson Windmill ad boasted their product 'with Hyatt Roller Bearings require oiling once a year'—the same Hyatt bearings company that would later become part of General Motors
• The paper tracked detailed river conditions, reporting flood stages down to tenths of feet at seven locations from Del Rio to Brownsville, showing how crucial river levels were to valley agriculture

• Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham's last surviving son mentioned in the death notice, was actually present at three presidential assassinations—his father's, Garfield's, and McKinley's, earning him the nickname 'Presidential Angel of Death'
• Governor Nellie Tayloe Ross, hosting the governors' conference, would become the first woman to head a federal agency when FDR appointed her Director of the U.S. Mint in 1933—a position she'd hold for 20 years
• The Southern Pacific railroad extension starting construction had originally aimed for Brownsville twenty years earlier but was 'blocked'—likely due to the Mexican Revolution making the border too dangerous for major infrastructure investment
• That wood alcohol epidemic killed people on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border because bootleggers were smuggling the poison liquor from Buffalo to Ontario, showing how Prohibition created an international criminal network
• The radio programming schedule reveals 1926 as the dawn of broadcasting—KWWG was just two years old, part of the explosion from 30 radio stations nationwide in 1922 to over 500 by 1926