Newspapers on Emil C. Pfeiffer as "Paul Jones," 1894-1902

Found 10-11 Oct 2026; quotations checked against the page images. In date order:

• Boston Globe, 13 Feb 1894 (clipping on Find a Grave): “STARTED NAKED. Paul Jones Now Clothed in Brown Paper. Left to Go Round World. Must Return in a Year With $5000.” “Paul Jones yesterday afternoon [12 Feb] made his naked start on a trip around the world, the conditions of his wager requiring that he shall show up in one year from date possessed of $5000 earned wholly on his way from Boston to Boston, via England, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, San Francisco and a few other intermediate points.” The scheme “originated one cold evening in the rooms of the Boston athletic association,” while talking of Phileas Fogg and George Francis Train.
• Pawtucket Tribune, 26 Feb 1894, p. 4 (page): “JONES IS A ‘FAKE.’ He Admitted the Fact After Being Locked Up in Springfield”: “his scheme was a ‘fake’ from beginning to end and that there was never a cent of wager placed.”
• Springfield Weekly Republican, 2 Mar 1894, p. 8 (page): “Paul acknowledged that his story of the pretended wager was a big ‘fake’.”
• Omaha Daily Bee, 23 Sept 1894 (clipping on Find a Grave): an advertisement of the W. R. Bennett Co., “PAUL JONES–BARE NAKED. That’s the Way He Started from Boston on February 1, 1894. On a Wager of Five Thousand Dollars.” He “arrived in Omaha yesterday” and would clerk in the store’s tea, coffee and spice department, exhibit “the famous ‘paper suit’” and give “a little lecture to the ladies.” “Mr. Jones is a journalist–a graduate from Harvard college and a delightful man to meet.”
• An undated advertisement of the Model Supply Store (clipping on Find a Grave; paper and place not given): “Paul Jones (The Famous Globe Trotter) will be at the Model Supply Store … and act for us as Special Salesman.” It quotes him: “I believe that a man, if he will but make up his mind within reason, can accomplish everything that he undertakes. And this is the one thing that my trip is teaching me.”
• Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 23 Jan 1895, p. 3, “Jones Is All Right” (page): a Boston Press Club officer, Hemenway, had wired the Seattle Elks, who wanted to enroll Jones, that “Jones is a fake and beat.” The paper’s Boston correspondent answered that he “made a wager at the Boston Press club” on 12 Feb 1894; from Tacoma came word that he was head waiter at a restaurant there and called Hemenway “a personal enemy.”
• Daily Bulletin (Honolulu), 2 Feb 1895, p. 3 (page): “Tramp Paul Jones,” the same Seattle story.
• Strand Magazine (London), June 1897: a photograph, “Paul Jones, in his paper-suit. From a photo. by Elmer Chickering, Boston” (posted to his Find a Grave memorial).
• Portsmouth Herald, 4 June 1898, reprinting the Manchester Union (item): Paul Jones in Manchester on 2-3 June 1898, eleven days before his wedding. “He registered here as E. C. Pfeiffer … To-day his hair is jet black, as is also his mustache,” and he was “now being a drummer and not traveling for notoriety but for a permanent salary.” It places the start of the 1894 trip at “the Boston Press club.”
• Portsmouth Herald, 6 June 1902 (item): “‘PAUL JONES’ AGAIN. This Time Arrested For Selling a Borrowed Directory.” “Emil Charles Pfeiffer, a Portsmouth born boy … was arrested in Boston on Thursday [5 June 1902] for petty larceny, which consisted in borrowing a directory in one office and selling it in another, repeating the trick a number of times.” He “has taught school in several places. For debt he has been in legal trouble several times.” No outcome is given.

The Globe has the bet made at the Boston Athletic Association; every later account has the Boston Press Club. No account found names a Masonic lodge. The Globe dates the naked start to the afternoon of 12 Feb 1894, the Omaha advertisement to 1 Feb. He was not a Harvard graduate: he left in his senior year (reports-harvard-class-1889-pfeiffer), where the class poem of 1898 has a stanza on the stunt. His passport application, sworn in Jackson County, Missouri, on 28 Sept 1894, six days after he reached Omaha, gives his trade as journalist and his return as about 1 Feb 1895 (passport-application-emil-pfeiffer-1894).