Oldfield's Expensive Tastes

This content was lifted from the Barney Oldfield scrapbook. Like most of the material from that source, the name of the newspaper that originally published it, as well as the date, was snipped from the clipping. The main article is very hard to read because the quality of the photocopy of this 100 year-plus newsprint article was poor. However, you can read almost every word if you have patience. I think the article has a lot of good information for anyone exploring Oldfield's life. It was printed sometime in the first half of the 1906 because the subject is Oldfield's involvement with the Broadway stage play, "The Vanderbilt Cup," starring then 17-year-old Elsie Janis. Interesting insights to Oldfield include that he was apparently caught up in the pretense of the entertainment world and was spending goodly sums of money on ostentatious accouterments such as a $1,000 seal skin coat and a $1,000 red-haired Irish terrier dog. Both these purchases would be amount to about $28,000 a piece in 2008 money.