Calvin T. Cropper
son of councilman Thomas J. Cropper · 1887–1908
Twenty-one-year-old son of the Ocean City businessman Thomas J. Cropper. He shot himself at the family home on the night of Wednesday 12 August 1908, nine days after his father was elected to the City Council on W. Lee Carey's ticket, leaving a note that explained his act only in part. The two contemporary accounts disagree on why — one calls it a disappointed love affair, the other says family troubles had been preying on him for a month or more.
In the record (1)
1908 · 1908-08-12
Calvin T. Cropper, twenty-one, son of the newly elected councilman Thomas J. Cropper, shoots himself at home nine days after his father's election.
"Calvin Cropper, a young man twenty-one years of age, committed suicide at Ocean City Wednesday night by shooting himself with a 30-calibre revolver, the ball penetrating his brain and causing immediate death … During the evening he had been driving with the young lady, and returning to his home about eleven o'clock he retired to his room. Shortly afterwards the family were startled to hear a pistol shot ring out … He left a note explaining in part his act. The young man was the son of Mr. Thomas J. Cropper, of Ocean City." A longer dispatch datelined Ocean City, 14 August, ran the following week: he had gone driving with a young woman "who had been a chum of his since school days," told her he meant to kill himself, and "she only laughed at his threat"; his mother and brother were sitting on the porch when he passed them and locked himself in his room. Thomas J. Cropper had been elected to the City Council on Lee Carey's ticket nine days earlier. In November the Berlin column reported the little daughter of Samuel Massey — another of the new councilmen — ill with typhoid at Ocean City.
Source · checked 2026-08-06