NEW YORK – The fighting element among whites and blacks in the vicinity of 136th Street and Fifth Avenue lined up according to the racial prejudices again today, this time to settle a baseball dispute. And when the argument was ended, 50 persons required medical treatment; and of that number, two may die before the morning.

Probably 5,000 persons took part in the fight, but the 300 policemen who dispersed the mob after everyone was fought out, got only nine prisoners. Of these, two were women.

The trouble started at a ballgame where a white man and a colored man had made a wager, and, subsequently, quarreled over the settlement. The sight of a white man and a colored man fighting started a general row.

50 years ago, 1957

Unless the Public Health Service has misread all the signs, the United States cannot escape the largest epidemic of respiratory illness since the great influenza outbreak of 1918.

The sickness expected to affect as many as 60 million Americans this coming winter is called Asiatic flu, since it first showed up in eastern Asia last year. Already, it has reached the Pacific Coast, with many thousands of cases recorded in San Diego, Calif., to which it was brought by personnel of U.S. fleet units serving in Asiatic waters.

To cope with the outbreak, drug manufacturers have already devised an effective vaccine. Eventually, it is hoped to manufacture 60 million doses, enough to protect as many victims as the disease will probably claim.

25 years ago, 1982

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