the reporters had driven him away from half-a-dozen positions, he steeled himself to brazen out the newspaper persecution.  This occurred when he started his electroplating establishment—­in Oakland, on Telegraph Avenue.  It was a small shop, employing three men and two boys.  Gluck himself worked long hours.  Night after night, as Policeman Carew testified on the stand, he did not leave the shop till one and two in the morning.  It was during this period that he perfected the improved ignition device for gas-engines, the royalties from which ultimately made him wealthy.

He started his electroplating establishment early in the spring of 1928, and it was in the same year that he formed the disastrous love attachment for Irene Tackley.  Now it is not to be imagined that an extraordinary creature such as Emil Gluck could be any other than an extraordinary lover.  In addition to his genius, his loneliness, and his morbidness, it must be taken into consideration that he knew nothing about women.  Whatever tides of desire flooded his being, he was unschooled in the conventional expression of them; while his excessive timidity was bound to make his love-making unusual.  Irene Tackley was a rather pretty young woman, but shallow and light-headed.  At the time she worked in a small candy store across the street from Gluck’s shop.  He used to come in and drink ice-cream sodas and lemon-squashes, and stare at her.  It seems the girl did not care for him, and merely played with him.  He was “queer,” she said; and at another time she called him a crank when describing how he sat at the counter and peered at her through his spectacles, blushing and stammering when she took notice of him, and often leaving the shop in precipitate confusion.

Gluck made her the most amazing presents—­a silver tea-service, a diamond ring, a set of furs, opera-glasses, a ponderous History of the World in many volumes, and a motor-cycle all silver-plated in his own shop.  Enters now the girl’s lover, putting his foot down, showing great anger, compelling her to return Gluck’s strange assortment of presents.  This man, William Sherbourne, was a gross and stolid creature, a heavy-jawed man of the working class who had become a successful building-contractor in a small way.  Gluck did not understand.  He tried to get an explanation, attempting to speak with the girl when she went home from work in the evening.  She complained to Sherbourne, and one night he gave Gluck a beating.  It was a very severe beating, for it is on the records of the Red Cross Emergency Hospital that Gluck was treated there that night and was unable to leave the hospital for a week.