TODAY’S FROZEN MOMENT - this shot which has come to be titled “Almost” was taken at exactly 1:52pm on Thursday, November 7th, 1918.

105th Anniversary - On November 7th, 1918, word started to get out that the Germans had surrendered and that an armistice had been signed. While this was false and wouldn’t happen for a few more days, the very good news spread anyway, and like wildfire. Here on Wall Street, people rejoiced at the end of World War One. How this premature bit of news got started was that an Amerrican admiral, Henry Wilson, told a UPI reporter friend, Roy Howard, that he had received a phone call from a friend employed in the American Embassy that the hostilities were over. Howard, thinking he had been given the greatest scoop of all time, leaped without doing journalistic due diligence of getting at least one more solid source, and forged the signature of his UPI foreign editor, transmitting his big story immediately. Wall Street was the first to hear it, as is oddly often the case. Trading was stopped and the classic shredded ticker tape readied.

Later, the New York Times called Howard and UPI’s reporting of this, "the most flagrant and culpable act of public deception.” (Would that they were as scathing nowadays about false info) As we all know now, the war wasn’t really over for four more days, the treaty being signed in the eleventh hour of the seventh hour the eleventh day, 1918. It is said that over 3000 boys were killed on the morning of that last day, before the armistice was finally signed.

The photographer here was W.J. Drummond

[Mary Elaine LeBey]