Today -100: January 26, 1926: Of SOS’s, jazz, and doctors in drag

They keep trying to run international radio tests, keeping radio stations off the air during the tests, but twice now the tests have been screwed up by ships broadcasting SOS’s.

Rep. William Vaile (R-Colorado) introduces a bill to retaliate against foreign countries (i.e., Britain & France) that ban or restrict US jazz musicians by refusing them visas.

M.V. Mayfield, a doctor practicing in Mena, Arkansas for the last decade, is discovered during an illness to be a woman. She will later say that after she was born in Britain, her parents dressed her as a boy to protect property rights, and she just kept on. She’s 74? 78? The M.V. stood for Mary Victoria but she went by Victor. She will die in 1929 and be buried in male clothes. Evidently she was the inspiration for the 1933 German film “Viktor und Viktoria,” which Blake Edwards remade in 1982 with Julie Andrews in the title, um, roles.

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