Brendan  2005-07-21 15:33  History   

In 1895, three young men of fine repute and upstanding sensibility found themselves entranced by Edison's mysterious box, the kinetoscope.

Twice weekly William Cohen, Archibald St. John, and Patrick McGonnegal broke from the confines of Columbia University (where the men were reading for Law degrees) and pushed through the bustling streets to 1155 Broadway. Paying their twopence, the men would stride through the crowd, looking for open moving-picture boxes, or as Thomas Alvin Edison called them, kinetoscopes. Cohen, St. John, and McGonnegal kept their habit throughout their tenure at Columbia, recruiting several other young men into joining them in the smoky kineto-parlours.

Prof. Lincoln

When the trustees of Columbia University learned of the twice-weekly outing, however, there was hell to pay. It was McGonnegal who, in the night before their meeting with Whitley Wilson, Dean of Students, intuited the plan that would save them all. The kineto-fans raced across the quandrangle at two a.m., running hell-bent for the faculty residence. Once there, they awoke English professor Dr. Harold Lincoln.

The next morning, when Dean Wilson questioned them about their
unauthorized excursions to Broadway, St. John calmly explained that the trips to the kineto-parlour were not mere flights of fancy, but active meetings of Columbia's newest student organization, The Society for the Appreciation of Common Moving Pictures. Cohen then calmly presented the flabbergasted Dean Wilson with the official charter of the group, ratified (though spuriously back-dated) by Dr. Lincoln. (While some prurient minds speculate that Dr. Lincoln's help was gained by the young mens' knowledge of Dr. Lincoln's frequent trips to Times Square for more participatory entertainment, this document will endorse no such speculations.)

Archibald St. John and Patrick McGonnegal await William Cohen in the SftAoCMP office, 1895

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