The Roaring '20s inspired devil-may-care nationwide fads – flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, swimming-pool endurance floating. But contract bridge? The Puritans didn’t call playing cards “the Devil’s tickets” for nothing. Indeed, in The Devil's Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age, Gary M. Pomerantz recounts the 1929 shooting of Jack Bennett, who, over a bridge table, slapped his wife, Myrtle, a few times. She got a gun and shot him, then was acquitted, O.J. Simpson style, in a Kansas City murder trial that featured a frantic press and a curious public. In chronicling this tale, Pomerantz introduces an ensemble of 1920s characters, including Ely Culbertson, who helped popularize bridge from a social pastime into a cultural movement, and a theatrical defense attorney, former U.S. Senator James A. Reed, who defended Myrtle. As promoted by Culbertson, bridge provided a zone of equality between men and women, “a way to defuse the petty inhibitions and tensions of daily married life." And as long as both partners have guns, that zone of equality is maintained, if not perhaps the ideal way to defuse tensions.
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