A brazen daylight robbery in Fairfield, Connecticut dominates the front page as three armed gunmen made off with a staggering $10,750 from druggist John E. Boyle. The bandits initially emptied his cash register, but their real windfall came when one casually searched Boyle's pockets and discovered $10,000 in $500 bills — money the druggist had been carrying around since selling ten shore cottages at Fairfield Beach the week before. Boyle had intended to deposit the cash in a New York bank but was delayed by the Christmas rush. The robbers escaped in a green touring car with Connecticut plates, heading toward Bridgeport. Elsewhere, the deadly toll of Prohibition-era alcohol poisoning continues to mount. In Des Moines, Sherman Dougherty, whose 30-day sentence for intoxication had been commuted on Christmas Eve so he could enjoy the holiday with family, died after drinking poison liquor. Meanwhile, New York reported 11 deaths from bad booze over the Christmas weekend, with 73 others hospitalized for alcoholism — more than 1924 and 1925 combined.

These stories capture America's complicated relationship with crime and law during the Roaring Twenties. The Fairfield robbery represents the era's rising organized crime, emboldened by Prohibition's lawlessness, while the poison liquor deaths show Prohibition's deadly unintended consequences. Dr. Charles Norris blamed bootleggers who were "so rushed" they wouldn't properly purify redistilled alcohol. The casual mention of $10,000 in cash from selling beach cottages also reflects the 1920s real estate boom, as Americans with new prosperity invested in vacation properties and speculative ventures that would soon come crashing down.

• The New Britain Herald boasted an average daily circulation of 13,938 for the week ending December 24th — impressive for a small Connecticut city paper
• High school basketball players were caught in a eligibility scandal when Captain Marion Zaleski and Albert Havlick were forced to choose between their school team and the Burritt A.C. amateur team after a complaint from rival South Manchester High
• Charles Edward Andruss, who died at age 79, had worked for the Stanley Works for 47 years — meaning he started there in 1879, witnessing nearly half a century of American industrial growth
• In France, 35 mothers in the tiny village of Bavinchove received medals for having a total of 242 children — nearly 7 children each — to counter charges of 'race suicide' against the French

• Those $500 bills the Fairfield druggist was carrying? They're worth about $8,500 each in today's money, meaning he was casually walking around with roughly $143,000 in cash
• The Stanley Works, where veteran employee Charles Andruss worked for 47 years, was already a major tool manufacturer by 1926 — the company still exists today as Stanley Black & Decker
• Fred Edel, suspected in the Meriden murder case, claimed he was 'broke' at 6 p.m. but lost $52 in a card game after midnight — that's equivalent to losing about $885 in a single night today
• The poison liquor crisis was so severe that Chicago's health commissioner estimated $10 million worth of dangerous bootleg alcohol was distributed as Christmas gifts in that city alone
• Edgar Forrester, the Harvard-educated con man who became a minister 'to please his mother,' was targeting other clergy with bad checks — exploiting the very trust that made religious communities vulnerable during Prohibition