New Britain's safecrackers—"yeggs" in the parlance of 1927—made a bold Labor Day weekend spree, smashing open safes at two auto dealerships with nothing but garage tools and nerve. At the Automotive Sales and Service Corp. on Elm Street, burglars knocked off safe combinations on both the ground and upper floors, stealing $300. Meanwhile, across town at Swift Ferguson Auto Sales on Stanley Street, another $75 vanished in what police believe was a coordinated operation. Investigators suspect the same crew hit similar targets on East Main Street weeks earlier, suggesting a professional outfit casing their targets in advance. But the burglaries weren't the only crime spree that holiday: vandals caused roughly $1,000 in damages at the National Biscuit Company plant, smashing boxes of crackers and cookies and destroying anything moveable—likely boys on a destructive lark. Across Connecticut, the state's labor federation convened in Middletown demanding a five-day work week, arguing that modern machinery and production speedups had made longer hours obsolete.

September 1927 captures America at a peculiar inflection point—the Roaring Twenties' prosperity was generating bold theft and labor unrest in equal measure. The safe-cracking spree reflects the era's booming commercial activity and mobile criminal networks that followed wealth. Meanwhile, organized labor's push for a five-day week was radical for its time; most factory workers still toiled six or seven days. The prohibition era's criminal underworld was metastasizing just as legitimate business exploded. These stories—petty crime, labor activism, economic anxiety—ran parallel to the stock market's record-smashing rally visible on the same page, where industrial shares hit all-time highs. It's a snapshot of American inequality and social tension bubbling beneath the Jazz Age's glittering surface.

• The most sensational case buried on the page: Leonard Cline, a novelist awaiting trial for murder in Mansfield, completed an entire novel while jailed awaiting trial for allegedly shooting Wilfred Irwin—and somehow secured a copyright. He literally wrote a book behind bars while the courts assembled 100 jurors for his case.
• A heart-stopping detail in the fireworks disaster: 32 aerial bombs exploded in a crowd at an Italian celebration in South Norwalk, killing 9-year-old Julius Popp and wounding others so badly that Paul Losu lost an entire leg—yet the manufacturers were merely charged with manslaughter, not felony charges.
• The Lou Gehrig-Babe Ruth home run race was neck-and-neck: Gehrig just hit his 45th homer to take a one-run lead over Ruth in what would become baseball's most famous rivalry. This single sentence buried in the sports section captured a pivotal moment in baseball history.
• Wayne B. Wheeler's death came just three weeks after his wife burned to death in a cottage fire—and her father dropped dead witnessing the tragedy. The Anti-Saloon League's most powerful figure literally died of a broken heart during Prohibition's brightest moment.
• An 'alienation of affections' lawsuit for $15,000 (roughly $275,000 today) was filed against Yale D. Bishop, an Elm City Hotel man, for taking another man's wife out as his companion—a legal action that sounds absurdly quaint but was taken seriously in Connecticut courts.

• Wayne B. Wheeler, whose death dominates the front page, was THE most powerful dry crusader in America—so respected that even his bitter enemy, Senator Edwards of New Jersey who fought him relentlessly on Prohibition, said of his death: 'I love and respect a fighter whether he agrees with me or not.' Wheeler had orchestrated every piece of federal prohibition legislation since 1913, making him arguably more powerful than many members of Congress.
• The stock market rally mentioned in the 'In Record Jump' story—where 40 individual issues hit new highs and industrial averages reached all-time peaks—was riding a three-year-long bull market that had created unprecedented wealth and fueled the very safe-cracking spree reported above. This boom would reach its absolute zenith exactly two years later in September 1929, days before the market's catastrophic collapse.
• Leonard Cline's trial for murder was expected to draw 'more than 20 newspapermen' to Rockville—an astonishing number that reflects how celebrity crimes dominated the 1920s press landscape, rivaling Lindbergh's transatlantic flight in public fascination.
• Lou Gehrig's 45th home run that day would end the season with 47 total—still one of the great single-season power performances of the 1920s. Ruth finished with 60 homers that same year in 1927, the season that defined both their legacies.
• The Anti-Saloon League, Wheeler's organization, had just won the greatest legislative victory imaginable with the 18th Amendment, yet the page's other crime stories—the professional safe-crackers, the fireworks disaster, the hit-and-run deaths—hint at the era's underlying chaos that Prohibition would ultimately fail to solve.