100 years ago
The Albany Police Department received a letter from a woman in the Midwest, pleading for them to help find her son, whose last known location was Albany more than two years before. In December 1922, a tugboat en route from Philadelphia to Buffalo was icebound in Albany.
John Douglas Coffey, one of the crew members who had sailed around the world for many years, wrote a letter to his mother in Ely, Minn. He told her his wanderings had come to an end, and he would be returning home as soon as possible, but the freezing of the boat would strand him in Albany for several weeks or perhaps all winter. He promised to write regularly, however, that was the last his mother heard from him…