"One man, one night, one dollar" (Expense account claim)

Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 98. 

 

Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “Women in Early American Anthropology.” In June Helm, ed., Pioneers of American Anthropology: The Uses of Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 234n53.

“Stirling substantiated another incident first mentioned to me by Fenton: once when Stevenson was asked to itemize an expense account, she filed under informants’ fees, ‘One man, one night, one dollar.’”

[Matthew W. Stirling, former director of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE); William M. Fenton of the New York State Museum.]

"I Shall Undress Punctually...in This Window" (1898 Business Sign)

"You're a Liar," Hillsboro [OH] News-Herald, 14 July 1898. A laundress’s business sign, painted across two window panes, suggests something salacious after one of the panes is broken: “I shall undress punctually…in this window.”

 

“Attracted Desired Attention,” Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner [Prescott, AZ], 13 July 1898. Typically, the business sign is said to have been painted on shutters, as in this example.

"A Startling Sign-Board," The Strand Magazine [London], vol. 16, no. 96, January 1899, p. 720. Are these photos a case of ostension?

Most American newspaper reports from 1898-99 state that 7 o’clock is when the laundress will strip down, but other times occur in some later variants.

[5:00] “An Old Catch Illustrated,” The Sketch [London], 9 February 1910, p. 159. 

 [5:00] The Magic Wand [London], August 1912.

  

[7:30] “The Sign Was Divided,” Decorah [IA] Public Opinion, 9 June 1909.

[9:00] “Did She Do It,” The Leavenworth [WA] Echo, 6 March 1908.

For six examples of this type of columnar acrostic, see Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature, etc. (1875), 64, 66-9. (There are multiple editions of this work, updated or abridged.)

I haven’t been able to find any forms of this legend that feature an entirely different set of words on a sign, although the possibility that such variants exist can’t be excluded. Below is my humble attempt to come up with such a sign.