About four weeks ago a stranger appeared at Mrs. Mattie Harmon’s, a widow, and after looking at her eyes told her she would paralyzed in her head unless she bought glasses from him and a treatment which he would furnish from his eye hospital in Charlotte. Said he was Dr. Walker of Charlotte and was a Mason, and did convincer her son O.J. Harman that he knew something of Masonry, and on the strength of this he sold her some glasses and the treatment to be furnished from Charlotte in a week.
Tuesday of this week as Dr. A.W. Dula of Lenoir and W.J. Horton of Ferrell, Pa., were passing Vilas, Mrs. Harman waved them down and told them of her trouble and how to useless the glasses were and asked Dr. Dula to fit her, and told of others that he had charged as much as $40 and as Mrs. Harman was a widow and her husband a Mason he only charged her $30.
Dr. Dula has telegraphed the chief of police in Charlotte about his man and is setting the law in shape to catch him, who is evidently the same kind of man who came through here two years ago and got as high as $500 from some for miraculous treatment and glasses which never came. A warrant has been sworn out for this man, and Dr. Dula says that the N.C. Optometric Society will pay a reward of $25 for information as to the whereabouts so that he may be convicted for swindling. It is likely that the name given was a fictious one as no such Dr. Walker is registered in the Clerk’s office here as required by law, but his methods of course will be the same anywhere. Mrs. Harman say she was about five feet 10 inches tall, weight about 190, dark hair and eyes, clear complexion with sandy mustache and had a foreign accent. His companion was decidedly foreign, dark and smaller.
From the front page of the Watauga Democrat, Boone, N.C., Thursday, July 17, 1924
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