Grinnell in 20th-Century Fiction

Some of you will know that I enjoy reading mysteries and police procedurals. In many ways, the investigations of police and private eyes call to mind the research behind historical study, so my interest in these books is not hard to understand. Because there is a surprisingly large number of these books out there, I find myself sometimes discovering authors whose work I had never before known about. One such discovery was Stuart Kaminsky (1934-2009), who taught film studies at Northwestern University and Florida State University. Along with screenplays and academic studies devoted to film, Kaminsky published numerous mysteries, including one series that starred a Russian policeman, Porfiry Rostnikov—in fact, that's how I first encountered Kaminsky, having received a recommendation from a Russian historian friend. Kaminsky created another series based on a Florida private investigator, Lew Fonesca, and yet another that focused upon a Hollywood investigator, Toby Peters.

The Telegraph December 2, 2009

What brings me to talk about Stuart Kaminsky on this blog? Well, this winter, while reading The Last Dark Place, a 2004 entry in yet another series that Kaminsky authored (this one centered on a Chicago police detective, Abe Lieberman), I was surprised to encounter a reference to Grinnell. Interviewing Tony Imperioli, a suspect, Detective Lieberman asks,

"They go to college, your kids?"

"Boys graduated. Tony Junior's a lawyer. Gene's a computer something. Adrienne, she is studying literature at Grinnell. Ever heard of it?"  

"Good school," said Lieberman.

"They say."

I wondered whether this was a one-off thing, but soon found two more references in books from the Lew Fonesca series. In Denial (2005) one reads about someone who wore "an extra-large gray Grinnell College T-shirt," and in Midnight Pass (2003) the reader meets a girl who just graduated from high school "and is going to go to Grinnell." Devil on My Doorstep (1998), one of the Rockford Files, introduces someone who wears a "sweat suit with GRINNELL COLLEGE in green letters"; turns out that he "taught at Grinnell for more than twenty-five years."

OK—one reference, maybe even two references, could be an accident—a mention by a neighbor or something overheard on an airplane. But Kaminsky clearly thought of Grinnell in a more focused way that did not seem accidental. What did Stuart Kaminsky have to do with Grinnell and how did the name keep popping up in his fiction?

Sounded like an interesting question, and, always game for a search, I began the quest. Searching college sources seemed the best bet, so I ran searches through the college special collections archive, thinking that maybe Stuart might have attended Grinnell.  No luck, so I searched the college website (did he visit to give a lecture?), catalogs (might he have taught here?)—but I could find no reference to Stuart Kaminsky—none!

Not long ago the entire set of the college newspaper, the Scarlet and Black, was made available and searchable on-line, so ran "Stuart Kaminsky" through it—again with no luck. Now I was pretty certain that he had never been a student, had never visited to give a lecture or teach a course. But a second thought occurred to me: might he have had a child or sibling attend Grinnell? I knew from reading some on-line biographies that he had had several children from three marriages, so I searched the S&B another time, using only the family name. And there I found reference to a certain Lucy Kaminsky. In a September, 1999 article about the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Grinnell, the newspaper took several quotes from Lucy Kaminsky, identifying her as a first-year college student who was also a McDonald's enthusiast.

Scarlet and Black September 3, 1999

Could Lucy be related to Stuart Kaminsky? His New York Times obituary mentions that Kaminsky was survived by a daughter named Lucy, one of three children from his first marriage, so I searched the college alumni database. Sure enough, there was a Lucy Kaminsky, here identified as a philosophy major from the class of 2000. Colleagues in the college's Philosophy department confirmed for me that Lucy had been a philosophy major and had graduated in 2000. But so far as memory served, neither had ever heard from her any mention of Stuart Kaminsky.

Well?  What the heck? I sent her an email, explaining how I had come across references to Grinnell in the works of Stuart Kaminsky, and asking whether, perchance, she was his daughter? No reply. Too bad. I am pretty well-persuaded that Lucy, who was attending Grinnell when that name first shows up in Kaminsky's mysteries, was indeed the source of the references that reverberated through Kaminsky mysteries for several years after she left college. Confirmation, however, will have to await some other evidence.

###

The whole experience got me thinking about whether Grinnell might have featured in other works of fiction. Grinnellians often talk about Prominent Among the Mourners, a roman a clef that allegedly uses Grinnell College as its backdrop and college professors and town residents as models for the plot. But that wasn't what I was looking for: I wanted to find works of fiction that use Grinnell—straight out!

Into this quandary stepped Dorrie Lalonde, who oversees the local history collection at Drake Community Library. Did I know, she asked, about Robert Heinlein's 1951 sci-fi novel Puppet Masters? I did not, so Dorrie explained to me that in this book Grinnell, Iowa plays host to the landing of the first space ship of aliens. Naturally, I immediately sought out a copy of the book, looking forward to imagining Grinnell infested with aliens whom the novel characterizes as "slugs."

Book cover of original edition (1951)

In fact, Grinnell makes only a brief appearance early in the plot; the development of the story wanders far and wide, but makes no further use of our jewel of the prairie once the "slugs" have landed. Still, how in the world did 1950s Grinnell end up having a part in this other-wordly plot? So far as I can tell, Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988) never visited Grinnell, never lived in Grinnell, and therefore never had any direct contact with Grinnell.

However, when I reapplied the methodology outlined above, I learned that a certain J. Clare Heinlein (1912-2000) had attended Grinnell College, graduating with the class of 1934. Clare, as he preferred to be called, was a younger brother to Robert, the fifth of seven children born to Rex and Bam (Lyle) Heinlein. Raised in Kansas City, like his brother, Clare attended Central High School there (as his brother had), then Kansas City Junior College for two years before entering Grinnell College in the fall of 1932. A philosophy major (political science minor) who lived in Dibble Hall both his junior and senior years, Heinlein was apparently a very good student, if not deeply involved in campus activities. Just prior to graduation, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and Clare's college yearbook entry mentions his participation in Merrill Debate his junior year. Although Clare went on to a very successful life that included law school, service in the U.S. Army, and culminated at the University of Cincinnati where he taught political science for more than thirty years, for a short time he served as his brother's agent, and perhaps in that role suggested Grinnell as a landing site for the puppet masters.

J. Clare Heinlein (1934 Grinnell College Cyclone)

###

As it happens, however, Heinlein was not the first to plant Grinnell in a science fiction plot. Ray Bradbury's 1950 novel, The Martian Chronicles, also references Grinnell. A chapter titled "April 2000: The Third Expedition" (first published as a short story in 1948) describes a space ship landing on Mars, though the world that greeted the space travelers was far from the usual understanding of the Red Planet.

"The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood a tall brown Victorian house...all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old porch swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth...At the summit of the house was a cupola with diamond leaded-glass windows and a dunce-cap roof!...Around the rocker in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them."

The three crewmen debate whether to get out of their space ship and explore, but Captain Black opposed the move. When Lustig, the navigator, objects, noting that "it's a good, quiet green town a lot like the old-fashioned one I was born in," Black asks when he was born. "Nineteen-fifty, sir." Black then asks the same of Hinkston, the archeologist on-board. "Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks like home to me."

Book cover for the first edition of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950)

When the men finally venture out, they meet a woman who tells them that they have actually arrived not on Mars, but at "Green Bluff, Illinois" (apparently a reference to Bradbury's childhood home in Waugekan, Illinois). Furthermore, the woman reports that the year is nineteen twenty-six, providing the crew with the realization that, rather than a trip into outer space, they have traveled backward in time, neatly complicating all their understandings.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury)

A few years after The Martian Chronicles Bradbury found another occasion to insert Grinnell into his fiction. Dandelion Wine (1st published in 1957), usually thought to be at least partly autobiographical, includes a small segment about Douglas Spaulding, who was felled by a terrible fever in the middle of a hot summer. His parents placed his cot outside, hoping that the overnight cooling might somehow help the boy. Into this moonlit, summer night "down the street...came the horse pulling the wagon and the wagon riding the lean body of Mr. Jonas...." who talks to the feverish boy, telling him that he is leaving for him two bottles which he should "drink with [his] nose. Tilt the bottles, uncork them, and let what is in them go right down into your head."

Jonas then reads the label on the first bottle:

"Green Dusk for Dreaming Brand Pure Northern Air...Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April, 1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one day in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring."

Of course, Douglas revives, reminding us that here, as in The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury associates Grinnell with the bucolic world, with healthful and calming forces. But where did he get this idea? How did he come to know of Grinnell?

I admit that I have no answer to this question, although I have searched the usual sources. I could find no reference to Bradbury or his immediate family, nor could I find any mention of his most trusted friends and colleagues—people like Charles Addams, Ray Harryhausen, and Gene Roddenberry.

At this point, therefore, I am stumped, and have no idea how Bradbury came to know of Grinnell, Iowa, so I would be eager to hear from any readers who have ideas about the source of this borrowing. Likewise, if you know of more occasions in which Grinnell makes at least a token appearance in works of fiction, do please let me know!

The Wendell Phillips Pew in the Old Stone Church

Last fall, after a gathering at the Drake Community Library at which Edith Renfrow shared some of her memories of growing up in Grinnell, Larry German approached me, and asked if I knew anything about a pew in Grinnell's Old Stone Church that had been reserved especially for African Americans. His question surprised me; knowing the strongly abolitionist sentiments of J. B. Grinnell and the early Grinnell community, I could not conceive of what sounded like segregation inside the walls of Grinnell's founding Congregationalist church. But Larry told me that he had helped empty out the old church prior to its 1951 demolition, and that he himself had carried out of the church a pew whose end supports contained inscriptions that reserved the pew for African Americans. I knew nothing about any such pew, and wondered how such a thing could have come about.

1951 demolition of Grinnell's Old Stone Church (courtesy Digital Grinnell)

Having begun to investigate the question, I quickly discovered that histories of Grinnell's Congregational Church admit that the Old Stone Church had indeed included what was known as the "Wendell Phillips Pew." The 1955 centennial history of the church, for example, acknowledged the Phillips pew, "which was endowed by the great abolitionist and preacher on condition that it be ever free to members of the colored race. The pew was marked at each end with a silver plate." But where are those plates? And how did the Stone Church come to have a pew reserved for the town's African Americans?

###

Perhaps it's best to start with Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), an activist whose causes included woman's suffrage, the rights of native Americans, and especially abolitionism. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard University, Phillips began his career as a lawyer, but was soon won over to the anti-slavery cause of which he became a chief spokesperson. An indefatigable traveler, Phillips seems to have met nearly everyone of note in nineteenth-century America; one of those contacts was J. B. Grinnell, with whom Phillips regularly exchanged correspondence and who was responsible for bringing Phillips to Grinnell. 

Phillips evidently first visited Grinnell in 1860 when the fledgling community was still struggling. To help support the endeavor, Phillips loaned the local Congregational society $300. In December, 1877 Phillips returned to Grinnell, delivering three addresses (including one at the College) over a long weekend. By this time, interest on the original loan had enlarged the sum outstanding to more than $700. According to L. F. Parker's 1907 history of the Grinnell Congregational Church, Phillips used one of his 1877 addresses to announce "that he would surrender all that claim on one condition, viz. that the seat now numbered '109' and '91' [in the then-new Stone Church] should be set apart as one to which colored people should always be entitled if they should wish to occupy it. It was to be theirs exclusively if they should so choose that instead of any other, but they were not to be excluded from any place in the house." A story in the May 29th Grinnell Independent gave a slightly different reading: in exchange for having forgiven the loan, Phillips "was given the privilege of selecting a pew in the new church, which he did, choosing pew 109, north middle aisle, to be free for all without regard to race, color or condition."

Mathew Brady daguerrotype of Wendell Phillips (ca. 1850) (Library of Congress)

Already in 1877 someone had raised the idea of making "a fitting memorial of this generous deed of one whose whole life has been full of benevolence," but apparently no formal action on this sentiment took place before the 1904 annual meeting of the church. Congregational Church records report that at that meeting "The trustees of the church were made a committee to put the name of Wendell Phillips on the pew that had been selected by the great abolitionist during his life for the special use of the colored people."

Undated photograph of the interior of Old Stone Church (Courtesy of Grinnell College Special Collections)

I have said before in this blog that our preoccupation with the present often makes it difficult to understand a past that was in fact very different from our own experience; the Phillips pew nicely illustrates the point. The narrative above, for example, seems to point, confusingly, to a segregationist seating policy in a church whose founders were profoundly abolitionist. In the nineteenth century, however, it was common practice for churches to "rent" pews to parishioners, in that way generating income to cover costs of maintaining the facility. Just a few months prior to Phillips's 1877 visit, for instance, the Grinnell Herald reported that "at the renting of the seats of the Congregational Church, Monday evening, the sittings went of[f] like hot cakes at prices considerably in advance of previous years. The rentals will probably reach nearly $3000," the paper concluded. The following May the newspaper reported again that "bidding for choice [of seats in the Congregational Church] was lively and seats to the amount of more than $2200 were taken before the close of sale." In this context, then, Phillips's donation provided Grinnell's Congregationalist African Americans with a pew without their having to rent one, if they so chose. Put another way, the donation privileged Grinnell's African Americans, sparing them the cost of renting a pew.

But what happened to the silver plates on which Phillips's name had been inscribed and which had been attached to the pew Phillips had chosen? As the church history reported, when the Old Stone Church came down in 1951, the silver plates were donated to the Grinnell Historical Museum, an institution that had then only recently been founded and which had no physical home of its own. For a time donated articles were stored upstairs in the College's Goodnow Hall, but in 1954 the Grinnell Historical Museum began to occupy the rooms above Cunningham's Drug Store on 4th Avenue. Many of the original donations were transferred from Goodnow Hall to the new museum home over the course of the summer. At 3 PM October 8, 1954 the Museum held its formal opening for the season, but disaster was just around the corner. As the Grinnell Herald-Register of October 11 reported, "Eleven hours [after the opening], every tapestry, chair, picture, bed, table and hundreds of other prized articles had been destroyed or were in the process of being destroyed" by a fire that had begun overnight in the upper stories of the building. Before firemen could subdue the blaze, the roof had burned out and most of the second and third floors had been destroyed, finally collapsing through the floor onto the drug store below. The entire building was judged a loss and abandoned, later to be replaced by the one-story structure that now occupies the space immediately to the west of Merchants National Bank.

Grinnell Herald-Register front page, October 11, 1954

Although at the time of the fire many museum records and some articles had not yet been delivered to the new facilities, almost everything then housed in the 4th Avenue location was lost to the inferno. An August 26 newspaper article introducing the museum had itemized numerous prized acquisitions, including the "leaded glass window from the west door of the old Congregational Church," but did not mention the Wendell Phillips pew plates. Did they share the fate of other museum artifacts? None of the news reports provided a list of items known to have been destroyed by the fire, nor did they enumerate articles spared, so the fate of the Phillips pew plates cannot be learned from press reports of the blaze.

Examination of current museum records also reveals no trace of the plates; so far as I could find, not even a photograph of the plates survives, so that it seems likely that, unless the silver plates merited space in a bank safety deposit box (in which the museum did store some records and valuables), the plates were destroyed by the 1954 fire. But of course that is only an inference; perhaps the plates may one day surface among items so far not inventoried in the Museum collection. Or perhaps someone at the scene of the fire found the plates and, knowing their significance, saved them.

In that case, at some point in the future we may retell the story of how Wendell Phillips came to Grinnell, and endowed a pew in the Old Stone Church for the use of African Americans.

When the Nobel Laureate came to Grinnell...

In 1985 Grinnell College hosted Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), distinguished poet and prose writer who had won (among many other honors) the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. Milosz was invited to present the Thursday morning Scholars' Convocation, and also to take part in a couple of informal sessions with students and faculty. Since at that time I taught a survey course on the history of modern eastern Europe, I was asked to introduce Milosz at convocation. It was my only time ever to shake hands with a Nobel laureate, and I am sure that I, blinded by the sun of fame, overdid the introduction. Nevertheless, it was a rare occasion, and one that remains fixed in my memory. What I did not realize then was how that visit would echo back upon Grinnell, and become fixed in a small corner of that great writer's opus.

Czeslaw Milosz (from a 2011 Lithuanian stamp)

 ###

The convocation was, predictably, packed. With the rise of the Solidarity labor movement in the 1970s and the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland, things Polish had come to occupy a large place in the news. Milosz, who had at one time served the post-war Polish government but whose Captive Mind (1953) had dissected the lure and moral failure of Stalinist communism, was therefore not only a gifted poet, but also something of a lightning rod on Poland's failed post-war history. Naturally, therefore, many came to hear him, as much for his political as for his literary views.

In those days Scholars' Convocation almost always convened in Herrick Chapel—a grand auditorium, but perhaps not the best site for non-religious, academic discussions. Speakers stood behind the chancel-like podium, and those who introduced them sat on a small pew behind the podium, off slightly to the side, permitting a view only of the speaker's back. The audience, meanwhile, assembled in wooden pews better intended for early twentieth-century sermons than late twentieth-century lectures. They were obliged to look up to the speaker, whose podium stood on a platform a few feet above the auditorium floor.

Because my own education had focused upon Russia, rather than upon eastern Europe, my mental map of eastern Europe's several languages, changing borders and political systems was not all that firmly established. Most of what I knew of eastern Europe had come from the course I taught, but it was only a survey in which I usually learned at least as much as my students.  I was, therefore, nervous about the introduction I had to make, and so I typed out the whole thing, anxious not to make a bad impression. I do not now recall exactly what I said, but I am certain that it was too long, too detailed, too officious. Finally, however, I yielded the podium to Milosz and sat down.

Undated picture of Grinnell House from when it was the official residence of the Grinnell College President

Milosz had arrived in Grinnell on Wednesday, and had overnighted at Grinnell House where a large dinner was held in his honor. Neither that night nor next day did the poet seem worried about the talk he was to give Thursday morning. No doubt he had done this sort of thing many times, dropping in on College X to give a talk—any talk—and he had no doubt gotten used to ad-libbing, living mainly off his reputation and general knowledge. I wondered what he might say at Grinnell, but as I took my seat on the platform behind him, I readily perceived that he intended to wing it. Although he carried his briefcase up to the podium, plunking it down at his feet, he placed no notes or papers on the podium. After thanking Grinnell for the invitation (and the no doubt generous honorarium), Milosz began to speak...ex tempore. What Milosz said in those first minutes I have now forgotten; I imagine that he spoke off the cuff about circumstances in Poland. What I recall clearly is that, after a few minutes and having exhausted whatever thoughts he had on the subject, he fell silent. More than a half-hour of the convocation period remained, but silence prevailed in Herrick Chapel. A panic seized me: what should I do if Milosz sat down? I supposed that Nobel laureates can do whatever they please, but that did not help assistant professor Kaiser!

Undated photograph of Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) (http://zspherbert.trzebiatow.pl/)

Luckily, Milosz did not sit down; instead, bending down behind the podium (so that those in the audience lost sight of him), he began to rummage through his brief case. After what seemed like a very long time (but was, I suppose, only a minute or two), he stood again at the podium with a book in his hand, and began to speak about another poet, Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998). And this is what I remember from that morning's talk, because until that moment I knew nothing about Herbert, who, Milosz told us, had recently published Report From the Besieged City and Other Poems (in Polish). Reading from the text, then interrupting himself to comment, Milosz emphasized the importance of this work, whose title guaranteed that readers would associate it with martial-law Poland. But Herbert clearly had a much longer Polish perspective in view:

...the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns
nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination
Goths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor regiments of the Transfiguration
who can count them...

Milosz carried on this public reading and commentary spontaneously, without any outline or notes—occasionally flipping through pages in search of something specific. I remember him referencing Mr. Cogito, that "everyman" whom Herbert had first introduced in poetry a decade earlier and whose moral compass Herbert—and Milosz after him—endorsed. It was remarkable, and one of the more informative talks I heard in all my years at Grinnell.

My memory is fuzzy about how the convocation ended; I have the impression that at some point Milosz simply stopped, rather than concluded. Students rushed off to lunch, the chapel emptied, and Milosz himself soon departed, our encounter with literary greatness having passed into memory. My nervousness faded, and, as Poland subsequently emerged from that dark night that martial law had brought about, I forgot about Mr. Cogito and the besieged city.

Until one day some years later (I think it must have been around the change of the millennium) a poet friend of mine—Dr. Alex Moffett—told me about a letter he had received from yet another poet (John Mole, Magdalene College, Cambridge University) who, on reading a 1985 Milosz poem ("A Portrait With a Cat"), had found a mysterious reference to Grinnell, and had written Alex to inquire what the referents were.

A little girl looks at a book with a picture of a cat

Who wears a fluffy collar and has a green velvet frock.

Her lips, very red, are half opened in a sweet reverie.

This takes place in 1910 or 1912, the painting bears no date...

I contemplate the painting in Grinnell, Iowa...

I could recall no such painting, but I guessed that it must have hung in Grinnell House when Milosz stayed there during his 1985 visit. Always attracted by a little mystery, I started to inquire. Milosz had reported the artist's name, Marjorie C. Murphy, so I had a clue, and soon learned that Marjorie Connor Murphy (1888-1980) had lived in Santa Barbara, CA where she had painted and taught painting. More to the point, after the death of her husband, John Frederic Murphy (1887-1957, graduated Grinnell College 1910), she had donated to Grinnell College a collection of Piranesi prints, at the time valued at about $60,000. Packaged with the Piranesi prints was an unspecified number of her own paintings, including, it seemed, the picture that had so attracted Milosz's attention that he had immortalized it in a poem.

Untitled painting of Marjorie Connor Murphy (1888-1980) (image courtesy of Grinnell College Special Collections and Archive)

But when I inquired, I learned that this particular painting was no longer part of the college art collection. Perhaps because the painting, having hung in an unprotected environment and menaced daily by daylight and the elements, had faded or suffered other damage, it had been de-accessioned at some point after Milosz's visit. A slide of the painting remained, however, and I was able to have it copied, entrusted it to Alex, who in turn sent it on to John Mole in England.

###

So, twenty years after his visit to Grinnell, a brief echo of that visit reverberated across the Atlantic Ocean. Milosz himself never returned to Grinnell, and after his 2004 death was buried in Krakow's Skalka church. Alex Moffett, too, soon went to his eternal reward, hoping there to rejoin his wife, Virginia, who had died in 1997. Marjorie Murphy's painting of the little girl with the book of a green-frocked cat has never resurfaced, and presumably never will. But the little girl and her cat survive in a poem whose genesis depended upon the visit to Grinnell of a Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Dancing with Wolves...

In recent years Iowans have been surprised to discover in their urban and suburban communities increasing numbers of wild and dangerous animals. Perhaps most shocking have been the encounters with mountain lions: in 2011 in Iowa City; in 2012 in Des Moines; in 2013 in Sioux County, near Sioux City; and again that same year in Altoona.The Iowa Department of Natural Resources reports that between 1995 and 2013 there were thirteen confirmed sightings (along with numerous unconfirmed reports). Meanwhile, sightings of black bears, once native to Iowa, have also been on the rise, as a cluster of 2014 reports indicates. In the age of easy video recording, one can easily locate videos of black bears in people's back yards. And in 2014, for the first time in decades, a wolf was sighted in Iowa, a hunter in Buchanan county having shot an animal he mistook for a coyote. A few months later an almost identical scenario played out, and another wolf was confirmed dead in Iowa (Jones County). Almost certainly these wolves had wandered into northeast Iowa from either Minnesota or Wisconsin where gray wolves have long been established, but their appearance in Iowa provoked considerable surprise, since wolves had practically disappeared in Iowa, the last sightings having been almost seventy-five years ago.

2014 Iowa Department of Natural Resources map of wolf sightings

Having read these stories, I fell to wondering about early Grinnell and what its residents' experience with wild predators had been. As regular readers of this blog might recall, one reason I gave for offering these bite-size pieces of history was the conviction that we require some assistance to realize that things were not always the same as they are now. The story of Iowa's experience with wolves nicely illustrates the point, and effectively brings Grinnell into that story.

####

In a 1940 article published in Iowa Journal of History and Politics (reprinted in 1960 in The Palimpsest), William J. Petersen brought together an enormous collection of reports on "Wolves in Iowa." Many were the early Iowa diarists and reporters who claimed "the howling of wolves made night hideous," and the animals' frequent presence obliged settlers to devise strategies by which to protect themselves and preserve their supplies. Petersen cited a Marshall County woman who, in the middle of the nineteenth century and without a basement, suspended smoked hams and shoulders from the outside eaves of her cabin. The dangling meats taunted the wolves, who gathered around the cabin at night and "practice[d] 'light gymnastics there in rows, leaping up to reach the coveted plunder.'" Other reports make clear that the wolves were no joke, and that at least occasionally they took not only dogs and other animals, but also people who found themselves beset by packs of hungry animals.

In this context the settlers first undertook their own solutions to the problem, organizing "circular wolf hunts" with the help of dogs and horses, trapping wolves within the circle and dispatching the animals. Gradually government inserted itself into this problem, with counties issuing bounties for wolves. Once Iowa had become a state, legislators attempted to regularize bounty practice. In 1856 J. B. Grinnell introduced a bill to "protect the wool growers from the destruction of wolves," but that bill failed. Two years later, on the initiative of a legislator from Delaware County, a new bill "allowing a Bounty upon the scalps of certain Animals" successfully passed the legislature and was signed into law. The measure provided bounties of $1.50 for several animals and $3.00 for the "large species of Wolves known as the Timber Wolf." Controversy immediately ensued, in part because treasuries were insufficient to keep up with the claims, with the result that the bounty was lowered to $1.00 until 1892, when the State Sheep-Breeders and Wool-Growers Association campaigned for a $5.00 bounty for an adult wolf and $2.00 for a wolf cub.

Here again the city of Grinnell played a part in the story. Petersen quotes an 1892 complaint of A. J. Blakely of Grinnell, who argued for the elimination of what he called the "trifling and unequal bounties" against the wolf and the establishment instead of a "State bounty of $20 for the scalps of old wolves and $5 for the young ones." Why? Because, said Blakely, "real wolves, large wolves prowl over the Iowa farms in increasing numbers, seeking what they may devour." Blakely, who had withstood Pickett's charge at Gettysburg in 1863, was someone to believe.

Readers of the Grinnell Herald will have encountered stories of wolf predation in the immediate neighborhood. An 1891 newspaper snippet reported rather casually on a successful kill by Mr. Edward Lincoln, who found a wolf at work among the turkeys on his farm in Washington Township near Oak Grove. According to the newspaper, the wolf was only one of many who victimized livestock that year.

Grinnell Herald 20 June 1891

Wolves were apparently so usual that even college students took time out from their books to take part in hunts. An 1891 issue of The Unit, a publication that reported on college and alumni activities, listed, along with more prosaic notices of new books, sickness and injuries, new classes, and the dissolution of a club, an occasion that drew "several of the boys" into a wolf hunt.

The Unit, vol. 2 (1891):158

Certainly the Iowa sheep-farmer had reason to worry, even if legislators did not grant his wished-for change in the law. Time overcame government resistance, however, and by 1913 a $20 bounty was established. Still, the wolves refused to go away, continuing to attack sheep and other livestock. Petersen reports that between 1913 and 1919 the state paid out almost $150,000 on wolf bounties, most of which came from rural sites. All the same, even city folk in this era encountered wolves; Petersen cites a case from Keokuk where in February, 1915 a wolf was spotted in a vacant lot on Fifth Street, between Bank and Times streets; later the wolf was caught trying to raid a chicken coop.

In the early twentieth century wolf bounties were being claimed at such a rate that in 1919 the payout was reduced to ten dollars. Still government treasuries continued to hemorrhage at an astonishing rate—by Petersen's count, another $150,000 between 1920 and 1932. In 1933 the wolf bounty was reduced ($5) once again, but claims continued, the largest payouts coming in counties along the Missouri River.

In central Iowa, however, bounty payments fell off steeply in these years. According to Petersen's calculations, in the twenty years after 1918, Jasper County paid out some $1800 and Tama County $1605; Mahaska County, on the other hand, in that same period paid only $270 in wolf bounties, Marshall $645, and Poweshiek just $568. Poweshiek County Financial Reports, which Dorrie Lalonde kindly investigated for me, document the diminishing claims on wolf bounties: $56 in 1923, $60 in 1926, and only $10 in 1929. Wolves were obviously in retreat.

###

In other words, as today we witness the faint revival of wolves and other predators who once were common in central Iowa, we can better understand how different a world of fauna our ancestors encountered. We might argue about whether all the efforts to extirpate these animals was wise, but what cannot be contested is how different a world it was. If, therefore, you happen to spot a wolf or bear in your backyard, try to think about our Grinnell predecessors and the world in which they lived with these animals.

"Suffer the little children..."

The death of an infant or young child still happens with sufficient frequency to remind us of the poignancy of life too soon extinguished. But in the last years of the nineteenth and first years of the twentieth century, when science had only just begun to grasp the causes of serious illness, infant and childhood mortality was even more common, leaving behind a trail of sadness and family disruption. Evidence of childhood death is easily found in Grinnell:  Babyland, situated along the southern edge of Hazelwood Cemetery, is home to numerous infant and child burials; elsewhere in the cemetery one finds plenty more gravestones remembering children, their memorials usually positioned among the graves of parents and siblings. All deaths of children bring the same piercing sorrow, but especially sad are the several gravestones that recall children who died in Grinnell, but whose families then moved on, creating new lives and new memories elsewhere. In this post we'll look at a few of these more lonesome child graves and tell their stories.

Gravestone of Mabel Ruth Lambirth (1912-1918), Hazelwood Cemetery (2015 photograph)

In West Hazelwood there stands a fairly plain stone onto which are etched both the image of a lamb and an inscription devoted to Ruth Lambirth, who died in 1918 at the age of five. The gravestone communicates nothing about the circumstances of the little girl's early demise, but the official record identified cause of death as influenza, a pestilence that swept across the Plains in 1918. This was the same illness—sometimes called the "Spanish Flu"—that burned through Chicago that autumn, carrying off the biological mother of the twins whom B. J. and Mabel Ricker adopted that year. As with others infected by the virus, Mabel Ruth went quickly: the death certificate reported that Dr. P. E. Somers had first treated her on November 4; six days later she was dead.

Notice (including mistaken family name) from Grinnell Herald, November 12, 1918

Although Iowa's encounter with influenza was not so virulent as Chicago's, records kept by the Iowa State Board of Health prove that 1918 was an especially deadly year for Iowans who contracted the flu. About twenty percent of all Iowa deaths that year were attributed to flu—more than three times as many as cancer deaths. By contrast, the next year influenza deaths dropped significantly, accounting for fewer than half as many deaths as cancer whose mortality held steady.

Ruth's death, therefore, was not an isolated case, but merely one of many that made the year 1918 stand out for families touched by the virus. At the same time, Ruth's encounter with the flu was different: state records reveal that October had been by far the most dangerous month, during which almost 43,000 cases of flu were reported across Iowa. By contrast, in November state authorities counted only thirteen cases of influenza, one of which killed Ruth Lambirth.

Data on Diseases in Iowa, Second Half of 1918, Report of the State Board of Health for the Biennial Period Ending June 30, 1920 (Des Moines: State of Iowa, 1921), p. 19.

Perhaps her parents did not at first realize that their daughter's death had come after the murderous wave had subsided. But if they did, that realization could only have deepened their sadness.

However much the family mourned Ruth's death, her lonely gravestone points to an important postscript: if elsewhere in Hazelwood one meets whole families metaphorically gathered together in adjacent graves, Ruth's stone stands alone, her family having survived the flu and moved on, abandoning her and her memorial. Who were these people, and where did they go?

The Lambirths, as it turns out, moved a great deal in their lifetimes. Joseph Elmer Lambirth, Ruth's father, was born in 1884 in Metcalf County, KY where young Elmer, as he was casually known, grew up. In 1909 he married Lillie Davis of Center, KY, and the following year the couple welcomed their first child, Roland. By 1911 the family was settled in Illinois where Elmer rented farmland and where in 1912 a second child arrived: Mabel Ruth, whom the family called by her middle name. Within a few years, the Lambirths moved again, this time settling in Iowa. No later than 1916 they were living in Poweshiek County where Elmer rented a farm in Chester township from John and Zella Matzen. The Lambirths continued to work this farm after the Matzens sold it to B. J. Ricker in 1920, and remained Ricker's tenants until 1923, when they decided to move again, this time to a farm in Jackson Township (near Montezuma) where federal census officials found them still in 1930. In the meantime, a third child—Lucille—was born.

B. J. Ricker farm, Chester Township, 1921 Atlas of Poweshiek County

In January, 1931, however, the Lambirths confronted tragedy once again when Elmer's brother, Virgil, and his sister-in-law, Laura, were murdered by a man who had worked for both Elmer and Virgil on their farms. According to the Montezuma newspaper, Clarence Brewer arrived at the farm six-and-a-half miles southeast of Montezuma, shot Virgil twice in the forehead, entered the house and shot Mrs. Lambirth (who lingered a while before she, too, died), then turned the gun on himself. Elmer was called to the scene soon after the shootings, but could offer no explanation for the murders. All that he and Lillie could do was to welcome their orphaned nephew Ralph into their home where the 1940 census found him on the Mahaska County farm to which Elmer had moved some years earlier.

Montezuma Republican January 22, 1931

Elmer continued to live near Barnes City until he fell ill, and entered hospital in Oskaloosa in October, 1965, dying a few days later. Lillie Lambirth lived another fifteen years, and died at age 90 in the Grinnell hospital. Her obituary remembered her living children and her nephew, Ralph, and noted that her husband and one daughter, Ruth, had preceded her in death.

Gravestone of Lillie and Elmer Lambirth, Barnes City cemetery

However, despite the fact that Ruth's body lay in Grinnell, neither Lillie, who died just a few blocks from Hazelwood, nor Elmer was buried at Hazelwood with their little girl who had died so many years before. Ruth's gravestone was destined to stand among graves of people she never knew.

***

Although influenza dominated childhood mortality in 1918, other diseases were more deadly to an earlier generation of children. For some time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was diphtheria that struck down more children than any other illness.  Often misdiagnosed as membranous croup because of the thick mucus visible in the victim's throat, diphtheria in that era was poorly understood, its causative agent having only been identified in 1882. The deadly swath that diphtheria cut through Iowa's young population and the low level of public understanding of the disease help explain why the 1891 report of the Iowa Board of Health devoted so much attention to it. According to data published that year, in the 1890s Iowa suffered more than 3,000 cases of diphtheria annually, over 600 of them resulting in death. One of those 1891 deaths came to the family of Newton Cessna.

Gravestone for Olive Ruby Cessna (1885-1891), Hazelwood Cemetery (2015 photo)

Newton William Cessna was born in Bedford County, Pennsylvania in 1857, but with his family moved to Scott County, Iowa the following year. Raised as a farmer, Cessna himself farmed for some years, tilling 160 acres in section 33 of Chester township, north of Grinnell. In 1882 he married a Muscatine woman, Nancy Skiles, and the couple had three children: Myrtle Pearl, born November, 1884; Olive Ruby, December, 1886; and Maude Opal, November, 1887.

Section 33, Chester Township, 1896 Atlas of Poweshiek County

Tragedy arrived at the Cessna family suddenly and unexpectedly in late June, 1891 when Ruby (as they called their second daughter) abruptly took ill, her condition quickly deteriorating; within a week the little girl was dead. The Grinnell Herald briefly took note of Ruby's death, providing few details and extending condolences to the family.

Grinnell Herald July 3, 1891

For unknown reasons, Ruby's death did not enter the official register until 1894, but Poweshiek county death records report that Ruby, age 5 and one-half, had died of diphtheria July 1st, that she had been ill only one week, and had been victimized by what her doctor—E. B. Wiley of Grinnell—called "blood poison," evidently alluding to the toxins generated by diphtheria. Her parents buried her beneath a log-like gravestone, adorned with a dove.

Nothing survives to explain how the Cessna family dealt with Ruby's death. Perhaps Newton and Nancy Cessna, like some other parents of their era, anticipated the fragility of their children's well-being by delaying the naming  of  newborns. The 1885 Iowa census reveals that the first-born Cessna daughter (later known as Pearl), born November 15, 1884, was still unnamed when the census official inventoried the family early in January, almost two months later. The record for Ruby's own birth in December, 1886, shows a similar reluctance to assign a name: the document identifies her only by gender and surname. So perhaps the Cessnas were alert to the dangers of childhood illness.

"Iowa, County Births, 1880-1935," database, Family Search (http://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XVHZ-DRW)

As is now well-known, diphtheria is very contagious, so quarantine is essential, but this precaution  was poorly practiced in nineteenth-century rural Iowa. Poweshiek County death records, for example, report that Charles P. Case, age 1 year, 10 months, died of diphtheria September 12, 1880; three days later his older brother, Henry W., just a few days short of four years old and undoubtedly infected by his younger brother, also succumbed to diphtheria, delivering a one-two gut punch to their parents, who had to bury two children in the same week.

The parents of Ruby Cessna did not confront the same terror as was visited upon the Case family. That first-born daughter, Pearl, and her younger sister, Maude, both survived the dangers of diphtheria and other childhood maladies. Nevertheless, their dad, who had been reasonably successful as a farmer, by 1895 decided to move into Grinnell, and the family soon thereafter took up residence at 921 Summer Street. Newton Cessna became meat manager for Grinnell Provision Company, and, to judge by his report to the 1915 census officials, he did very well, earning over $4000 in 1914. But Nancy Cessna was not well, and in 1917 the family—including the two unmarried daughters, both of whom were teachers in their late twenties—moved to California where they hoped the climate would be kinder to Mrs. Cessna. For some years the senior Cessnas lived near Pearl, who in 1921 had married Francis Kellogg, a fellow high school teacher in Eureka. Later, the elder Cessnas moved to Pasadena, close to their other daughter, Maude, who had married Chauncey Traver, a doctor at the Patton State Hospital for the Insane.

And so Newton and Nancy Cessna lived out their lives in California, as did their daughters. Years after having left behind the grave of Ruby Cessna in Hazelwood Cemetery, Nancy died in California, and was interred at Mountain View Cemetery, Altadina, CA in 1934; her husband lived well into his nineties before his 1952 death when he was buried by his wife. Ruby's grave remained far away.

Gravestone of Newton and Nancy Cessna, Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California

Despite everything that had followed Ruby's 1891 death, the Cessna daughters did not forget Grinnell. A small item in an October, 1956 issue of the Grinnell Herald Register reported that Pearl Cessna Kellogg and Maude Cessna Traver had recently donated to the Grinnell Historical Museum their mother's wedding dress, several girls' dresses, and a child's book published around 1890. No doubt each of the three Cessna girls, including Ruby, had worn these dresses and had perhaps also handled this book; perhaps as girls growing up in Grinnell, they had tried on their mother's wedding dress, imagining their own futures. Now these legacies provide only mute, indirect testimony to the family's life here and to Ruby Cessna's early death.

***

If the influenza epidemic of 1918 passed quickly, diphtheria did not depart Grinnell quickly or quietly. As the first waves of the twentieth century washed over central Iowa, the disease continued to inflict loss upon Grinnell families. That history is not visible in the gravestone assigned to Lester Arnold Learned, who, the Grinnell Herald reported in its October 12, 1906 issue, had died from diphtheria. The gravestone, decorated with a small lamb at rest, recalls the boy who died that October, just short of his seventh birthday. An epigraph below the date of death quotes from the W. A. Ogden hymn: "I am Jesus' little lamb, Happy all day long I am." An inscription above the lamb reads, "Our Little Brother."

Gravestone for Lester Arnold Learned (1899-1906), Hazelwood Cemetery

Lester's mother, Lorena Shoffner, had been born in nearby Kellogg, but for reasons unknown had made her way to Miles City, Montana, where she met Grant Learned. The couple married in 1882, and soon began to welcome children to their Montana home: two daughters were born before Lester's 1899 birth, after which a third daughter arrived in 1903. In these years, Miles City could boast a population of fewer than 1000, but the town was a well-known destination for cattle drives, and the beef industry was crucial to the local economy.

What brought Grant and Lorena Learned to Iowa is unknown; perhaps they came east because of Lorena's family in Kellogg, but the 1905 Iowa census has them living not in Kellogg, but in Grinnell at 1138 Elm Street. In Montana Grant had been known as a "stockman," so he probably pursued similar work around Grinnell, but neither the 1905 nor 1908 city directories recalls him, and by 1909 he was back in Miles City, Montana.

Notice from the Grinnell Herald, October 12, 1906

The brief sojourn in Grinnell—arriving no earlier than 1903 and remaining no longer than 1908—offers little evidence of how the family dealt with Lester's 1906 death, but the family's return to Montana seems to have been accompanied by considerable domestic trouble. The 1910 census found Lorena and her three remaining children back in Miles City; the census-taker described Lorena as "widow," but I could find no confirmation of Grant's death. Furthermore, when Lorena remarried in 1912, the marriage certificate reported her as "married and divorced." What does this conflicting evidence mean? Had the death of Lester played some part in moving the family back to Montana and perhaps also in breaking up the marriage?

Unless Lorena or her husband left behind some explanation, we will never know the answer to these questions. Like the Lambirths and Cessnas, the Learned family continued their itineracy after Grinnell, which ended up constituting only a brief chapter in lives for the most part lived out elsewhere. Consequently, the gravestone of Lester Learned, like those of Ruth Lambirth and Ruby Cessna, occupies a lonely spot in Hazelwood cemetery, comforted by the presence of no other member of the family. Parents and surviving children had moved on, leaving Grinnell and its memories visible only in the rear-view mirror.

The Greek Who Never Went Home....

Most of the immigrants who lived in Grinnell early in the twentieth century had come either from Canada or from western and northern Europe. But as the railroads prospered and Grinnell added some industries that required more labor, the migrant influx changed, reflecting the changes taking place all across the country as increasing numbers of US-bound immigrants came from the Mediterranean and Mexico. Consequently, for example, most of the men who worked in Grinnell as section hands for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad were Mexican. But the May 17, 1910 issue of the Grinnell Herald carried the sad news about a section hand who was not Mexican, and who was seriously injured.  The paper reported that Socrates Perras (the paper spelled it Perees), a Greek, was working on the tracks, and, having stepped out of the way of a passing freight train, had inadvertently stepped between two cars that were being switched on the next track. He was knocked down and thrown under the cars, his chest crushed and his back broken. Evidently still conscious, Perras was rushed to hospital where he soon died, far from his Greek home and family. The story of how Grinnell responded to this tragedy is often confusing, but simultaneously revealing about the town's encounter with an unfamiliar culture.

Grinnell Herald May 17, 1910, p. 1

***

Socrates Perras had arrived at Ellis Island in early May, 1907 aboard the S.S. Roma, which had sailed out of Naples in late April with a full complement of immigrants, many of whom were Greek. Responding to officials who compiled the passenger list, Perras gave his age then as 30, but his death record reports his age as 47, meaning that he was born around 1863, and therefore must have been 44 or so when he immigrated.  Perhaps he thought that providing officials a younger age would help him find work in America, or perhaps the immigration official misheard him—we'll never know.

The ship's manifesto reported the man's home as "St. Dimitri," or Agios Demetrios; as you might expect, toponyms like that are legion in Greece, so it is hard to say with confidence exactly where Perras originated. He traveled to America with two other men from St. Dimitri, and all claimed to be headed to Chicago, intending to stay with their friend, Gust Macris, and with Perras's uncle, Panogliotis Factoris (?), both of whom were said to be living at 1320 Portland Avenue, Chicago. No such address survives in today's Chicago, but Perras and friends might have confused Chicago with Chicago Heights, which was a destination for many immigrants around 1900 and which today still has a 1320 Portland Avenue. In fact, the 1910 US census did find a Gust Macris living at 1312 Portland Avenue, Chicago Heights, immediately next door to 1320 (where the census registered another group of Greek immigrants), so this is certainly where Perras was headed.

S. S. Roma (undated photograph)

How he ended up in Grinnell is unknown, but it seems likely that Perras acquired the railroad job in Chicago, where the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad had offices at the LaSalle Street Station. At the time of his death, Perras had probably only recently reached Grinnell, because his name does not appear in the 1910 Grinnell census nor in the 1910 city directory. Moreover, at the time of the accident, the Grinnell Herald admitted that the dead man was "little known," with the result that no pallbearers could be found—not even among railroad employees, several of whom had been called to testify at the inquest that investigated the accident.  Therefore, several businessmen (the grocer W. T. Moyle , the shoe company man, C. J. Card, the dentist, Dr. A. J. Brock, and three others) "dropped their work long enough" to serve at the "simple funeral."

Lasalle Street Station (ca. 1904), Chicago, Home of Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (photo courtesy of http://rrshs.org/)

The funeral was indeed simple. Although two local clergymen—Rev. G. E. White (a Congregational missionary in Turkey but back in Grinnell for the funeral of his father), and Rev. Elias Handy, pastor of the Methodist Church—volunteered to conduct services, "their friendly offers were declined," the paper reported (in a maddeningly perfect example of why the passive voice is obfuscating). Certainly the dead man did not decline the offer, but who did is left unsaid.

The stated reason for declining the help of the volunteer clergy is also confusing: the newspaper explained the situation by saying that the "dead man was a Catholic, and Catholic services, if any, were required." "For this reason," the report concluded, "burial was made without religious service."

St. Columbanus Catholic Church, Main Street and Washington Avenue (photo ca. 1913)

However, if Perras was a Catholic, he could certainly have obtained a Catholic burial. Although Catholics had yet to gain a strong foothold in Grinnell (only about 5% of the town's population then identified as Catholic), a Catholic parish had existed in Grinnell for almost thirty years by the time that Perras suffered his accident; in 1910 the Rev. James Curtin was priest, and had been priest at St. Columbanus since 1897. So, although  there might have been some difficulty in reaching the priest, the problem could not have been so great as to deprive a dead Catholic of a proper burial.

Almost certainly, however, Perras was not Catholic, but rather Greek Orthodox, and there were no Orthodox priests in Grinnell—a circumstance that might truly have caused a difficulty for arranging funeral rites. In 1910 Greeks were practically unknown in Grinnell, although within a few years, a small clutch of Greeks had taken up residence in town. The 1915 Iowa census, for example, found Peter Staffanou, a Greek immigrant and co-owner of a confectionary at 825 4th Avenue (later known as Candyland); with his brother Theodore and his candy store co-owner, James Joris (another Greek), Staffanou lived at 927 West Street. Two more Greeks, Peter Marcopolos and Tom Koserar, operated a shoe-shine in town in 1915, but none of these men (all but Koserar were still single in 1915) lived in 1910 Grinnell. Staffanou, for example, told the census-taker that he had arrived in the US in 1910, but had been in Iowa only two years, meaning that he had arrived in 1913. At the time of Perras's death, therefore, Grinnell still had not made much acquaintance with Greeks.

But there was at least one Greek in 1910 Grinnell: Charles Plagakis, whom the newspaper mentioned as having given evidence at the inquest. Born in Greece in the 1880s, Plagakis had entered the United States in 1909 and found his way to Grinnell where, according to the 1910 US census, he was working as a salesman in some place called "candy kitchen"—probably what later became Staffanou's Candyland. In January 1910 in Perry, Iowa Plagakis had married a Greek girl, Stella Lonebesi, who had immigrated from Greece at about the same time as her new husband; the pair, along with a boarder who was apparently Charles's brother, James, resided at 828 Main Street in 1910.

Plagakis later left Grinnell, settling in Chicago. But in 1910 he appears to have played a central role in assisting Grinnell authorities with the death of Socrates Perras, perhaps explaining in his best English that Perras was "Catholic," and therefore not eligible to be buried by Protestant pastors. Mediation in behalf of an unknown countryman could only go so far,  however: Plagakis did not volunteer as a pallbearer, for example, nor, apparently, was he in a position to underwrite burial costs.

In any event, Perras was buried two days after the accident in Hazelwood Cemetery, not in potter's field, where the unknown and impoverished were usually put to rest, but rather on the slope that bends down to Arbor Lake. Did someone buy him a grave plot, one wonders? If so, evidently not much money changed hands, because no gravestone was erected in the man's memory.

Grave marker (?) of Socrates Perras, Hazelwood Cemetery

Visitors to this part of the cemetery today can find numerous grave markers spilling down the hill, along with a small cement slab, sunken now a bit below grade, half-way down the incline. Like some other gravestones of the era, the cement marker was modest both in cost and appearance. Nevertheless, many of these same cement markers reveal a simple identification of the deceased—a name and date imprinted on the cement before it hardened. The marker over the plot in which Socrates Perras was buried, however, remains anonymous, and no doubt escapes the notice of all but the most curious.

Modest cement gravestone for "infant son of J. F. Ferson, Dec 26 (?), 1921" (2015 photograph)

Cemetery records indicate that as many as ten bodies are buried in this fifteen-by-twenty plot, but only two markers identify those interred there—one recalls Alexander Kline, who died in November, 1909, and the other remembers Merrill James Quire, an infant who died in July, 1910; the rest, some buried before Perras, others afterward, are not remembered by any marker whatsoever. Why Perras ended up with this unlikely collection of the unremembered dead is unclear.

In this way the story of Socrates Perras's brief sojourn in Grinnell came to an end. Only a staccato epilogue played out later that summer in Chicago: in early August the Cook County Probate Court appointed John F. Devine to collect and administer the property left behind by Perras, who had died intestate. Devine reported that he had gathered "property and effects [belonging to Perras] in said County, the value of which does not exceed the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars ($10,000)." It seems unlikely that Perras had accumulated so enormous a sum in his brief time in America, so perhaps the number employed was chosen arbitrarily. However, as other Cook County intestate declarations indicate, it could have been a much smaller sum ($500, for example, in some other cases), so Perras evidently had accumulated a large treasury, even if the total was not so stupendous as $10,000.

What Devine did with the money I could not determine, although one may hope that the funds found their way back to St. Dimitri and the widow and six children that Perras had left behind. Sadly, none of that surplus was available to fund a gravestone in Hazelwood, where Socrates Perras still slumbers anonymously, far from his native Greece.