"Gropes"? "GROPES"??????

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As many of you know, I love going through old newspapers. It's much more fun to do online, when you can do a keyword search, than it was in the older days of going through microfilm reels in the library. I've done both, and the online way can't be beat. It is quite interesting, aside from the obvious historical perspectives to read news "as it happened" (frequently inaccurately, too: I'm working on a "top ten list" of favorite "fake news" things I've found), to see headlines that would make you laugh out loud or get a lawyer in today's world. Such is the case of one headline I found while following a gee-how-did-I-even-find-this-rabbit-hole-to-fall-down trail regarding 20s and 30s "torch singer" Libby Holman. From some of the things I can find, it's best to describe her as a tabloid magazine's dream and a press agent's nightmare. Even in today's world, where news of Hugh Grant getting caught in a car with a hooker didn't even get a shrug, Libby Holman would be considered scandalous. In 1932 she was arrested for the murder of her 20-year-old husband, Z. Smith Reynolds, heir to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company fortune. (The junior Reynolds wasn't exactly a saint, having already been married and divorced by that tender age.) Long story short: charges were dropped, she remarried, then that husband died right after filing for divorce from her, and eventually Holman took her own life by carbon monoxide poisoning. But back to the headline: on August 5, 1932, the Oakland Tribune ran a rather lengthy article about the murder and Holman's arrest. I don't know what the headline writer was thinking of when he came up with this one: LONG ARM OF LAW GROPES FOR LIBBY REYNOLDS "Gropes"? "GROPES"????? Seriously??? Try that today! Here's a recording of Libby Holman singing the famous "House of the Rising Sun," about the time that the man that most people associate with the song (Eric Burdon of the Animals) was born: