In 1917, after the United States entered World War I, Reuben Kelly, a member of the Masonic Lodge next door, arrested two alleged spies at gun point in the dining room of Atlantic House Hotel: playwright Eugene O'Neill (who had recently won a Pulitzer Prize) and his author friend Harold de Polo. Suspicions centered on a black box the men had carried out to the dunes near a government radio station in Truro. Rather than containing apparatus for signaling the Kaiser's forces, the box was found to contain a Smith Corona typewriter.