Mystery of Lost Aviator Paul Redfern Has Links to Toledo.

A crowd of thousands gather to see Redfern’s Stinson Detroiter prior to his departure from Sea Island. (Redfern Family Collection)

It will be 97 years this summer since the world last heard from Paul Rinaldo Redfern. The dashing young aviator was trying to make history as the first pilot ever to fly nonstop from the North America to South America. Tragically, he did make history, but not the kind he was seeking. Paul Redfern and his Stinson single engine plane vanished into the fog of mystery after he departed an airport in Brunswick Georgia that summer morning of 1927, leaving a behind him, a cheering crowd of well wishers and his worried bride from Toledo. In days to come, the only signs of him came from some reports that Redfern had indeed made it across the Carribean Sea and was spotted just off the coast of Venezuala when he flew low over some Norwegian fishing boats, and dropped some notes, while on a heading towards the mainland. What happened after that brief sighting? Over the next weeks, months and decades, his fate would become the subject of mystery, conjecture, hoaxes, sightings, hope and intrigue. Some say he made it to land, only to crash in the jungle and was severely injured, then taken captive by aboriginal natives in the rainforest. Some say they found pieces of his aircraft, and pieces of his clothing. Others claim there were reports of him taking a wife among the native tribes and having a child. In the end. No one knows for sure. His fate remains as mysterious as other ambition seeking aviators of the day who dared to defy the odds, only to become the stuff of legends.

Who was Paul Redfern and what was his connection to Toledo? To answer the first part of the question; Redfern was a dreamer. An ambitious dreamer. Son of a preacher and educator. His full name was Paul Rinaldo Redfern. Born in 1902 to Blanche and Dr. Frederick Redfern. While raised for part of his life in New York and Ohio, he spent his teenage years in in South Carolina where his father was a dean at  Benedict College. His mother taught English at Benedict. As a child, Paul would show great promise and intellect. He was said to be musical prodigy, his father wrote of him:

At an early age, Paul showed a strong mechanical inclination. His fascination with the violin led him to create one from a cigar box and a single string. He displayed exceptional musical ability by playing any tune that interested him. His unique technique involved holding the cigar-box fiddle between his knees and the staff against his shoulder. By age eleven, his exceptional playing caught the attention of the Idaho press, which featured his achievement and published his picture in a playing position.

Gertrude Hillbrand Redfern, his love from Toledo.

But Paul also had an keen mind for mechanics. He had so much natural talent in the understanding of the science and mechanics of aviation, that as a teenager, he built several small planes and gliders. At 16 years of age, he was asked by the U.S. Army to be a production inspector for their aircraft plant in New Jersey. He stayed with them until 1919. After the World War was over, he returned to South Carolina and finished high school. He build several more airplanes and after he graduated from high school, Paul acquired and flew a Curtiss Jenny JN-4 and a Dehavilland DH-4. It was then he began to realize his boyhood dream of making a living in the cockpit of an airplane. Operating out of the airport in Columbia, South Carolina, Paul started performing acrobatic stunts at county fairs, and became an “aerial advertising artist.” In addition to being a barnstormer, later he would work for the U.S. Customs office in spotting illegal whiskey stills from the air during prohibition. He also began to pioneer the first commercial flights, taking passengers to points North. Canada, New York and Ohio . It is not documented as what took him to Toledo, but by 1925, he had taken up residence in the Glass Cityand likely spent some time with other famous members of this pioneer flying fraternity in Toledo, such as Lincoln Beachey and the great Roy Knabenshue. It is in Toledo where he also flew promotional flights for numerous products, including a cigar company working for cigar salesman, Charles Hillebrand. Redfern’s job was to drop packages of the cigar samples around the city. As the story goes, Hillbrand and his wife invited the young fier over to their home for dinner and that’s when he met their daughter Gertrude. He fell in love at first sight with the pretty auburn haired 20 year old. The attraction was mutual. It didn’t take long for the two of them to begin a relationship and soon, they were married ny January of 1925. They lived for awhile in Toledo, but Paul was offered a job in Georgia and they moved from Toledo to Savannah where he got his job with U.S. customs as a flying revenue agent, finding illegal stills from the air.

Redfern and his wife Gertrude pose with the biplane he built after high school. (Redfern Family Collection)

Redfern obviously loved challenges and with the arrogance of youth, he jumped at the chance to accept a challenge to become the first pilot to fly solo from North to South American, non stop. The year was 1927. Lindberg had just made history flying from the US to Paris. Redfern wanted to break that distance record for a solo flight and this would be that opportunity. It would be a 4600 mile flight and would require at least two-days of being fully awake at the controls. The City of Brunswick Georgia said they would pay 25,000 to the first pilot who could achieve the feat and fly from their nearby airport on Sea Island Beach. It was the same amout that Charles Lindberg had earned just, a few months before. Redfern was certain he could do the same and more.

Barriers to Reaching Brazil

On Wednesday morning, August 25, 1927, Paul Redfern and his wife Gertrude appeared at Sea Island to greet the thousands of well wishers, photographers and reporters who gathered to see him this attempt to set a new long distance flight record. His green and yellow Stinson SM-1 Detroiter monoplane that he purchased from his friend Eddie Stinson in Detroit had been christened “Port of Brunswick”. The signs around the airport exclaimed “Brazil or Bust”.

The arduous journey by air would take him over the Atlantic Ocean and the Carribean and then over the tangled and dangerous jungles of the Amazon rainforest before reaching his destination of Rio De Janeiro. No shortages of hazards were involved.

His marathon flight to Rio de Janeiro would cover 4600 miles, over miles of untamed and hostile jungles and mountains of Brazil.

The daunting itinerary provoked many questions. Could the plane stay aloft for those long hours of operations? Could Redfern stay awake? Even Lindberg admitted that he kept falling asleep on his transAtlantic flight to Paris. If he did crash in the jungle, would he survive? Or would he fall victim to the dangerous animals reptiles, and the hostile natives who inhabited the remote area? Redfern did bring some guns and a rifle with them for that possibility. He even packed some fishing gear and flares. He was undeterred and determined to break Lindberg’s distance record. If he did, he would eclipse that record by a thousand miles. And like Lindberg, in these early days of aviation, there was radio or altimeter or other modern avionics to help navigate. All he had was a compass and a map and a dream. And hopefully enough fuel.

He tried to allay the fears of friends and fears by saying he thought if he should have to crash land in the jungle he could still survive and someday emerge and not to give up on him “if you don’t hear from me maybe for weeks or months”.

Paul Redfern, Bound for Brazil

Paul’s take off from the beach airport in Georgia was officially recorded 12:46 p.m. He taxied the airplane down the beach and then as wife watched with a cheerful smile, the Stinson Detroiter slowly lifted above the horizon and then turned towards the sea on its way to South America. The crowd watched intensely as the planee droned over the water and out of sight. It was written by one reporter that his new Toledo bride, Gertrude Redfern watched tearfully and collapsed into the arms of a friend. Reality was upon her. Her beloved husband, Paul Redfern, was out of her embrace and out of her sight and she didn’t know if she would ever see him again.

The cheerful smile fell from her face and she couldn’t hold back her emotion and sobs. Paul soared over the Atlantic Ocean, heading southeast at 85 miles an hour. He managed to survive the first night in the air and the next morning off the coast of South America he saw a ship below him in the ocean. It was the Norwegian tramp steamer Christian Krohg. He dropped his altitude and descended to the ship and threw package with a note asking for directions to South America. The steamer captain pointed the bow Westward. According to this account, Redfern apparently had succeeded in traversing the miles over the ocean. Then later that day, Lee Dennison, an American engineer, reported seeing his plane, The Port of Brunswick, flying over Venezuela’s Ciudad Bolivar Plaza. But it was not a jubilant sighting. He said the plane was “trailing a thin wisp of black smoke.” If that indeed was Redfern plane, it was the last time it was seen.

Paul Redfern Vanishes

As Redfern was to wing his way south to Rio De Janeiro, hundreds of Brazilians were ready to great him at the airport and carry him into the city. Those in the waiting crowd were Washington Luis, President of Brazil, and Clara Bow, silent movie star. His plan was to drop some flares over the town of Macapa to signal whether or would make it to Rio or try to land at at the alternate site of Pernambuco. It would depend on weather and fuel supply.

As the hours dragged on, however, there were no flares sighted. No flares, nor any sign from the intrepid flier as thousands of people scanned the skies. watching and waiting. With no sighting that third evening, it was apparent that he either had run out of fuel and crashed, or had been forced to make a landing along a 2,500 mile route that stretched from the jungles of the Amazon to the mountains. Over the next days, the world was on edge awaiting some word from Redfern that he was okay. His wife, Gertrude was thrilled with the early story that he had been seen over Venezuela and believed at that time that her husband was safe, wherever, he may be.

Searching for Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick

The long days though would turn to long weeks, and the hope would turn to resignation that Redfern’s fate was dubious at best. Over the next ten years, Paul’s family, including his wife, all traveled to the remote area of Brazil in search expeditions to see if they could find some shred of evidence or a clue to provide more information of his whereabouts and whether he was dead or alive. Every now and then, this void of information was filled by bush pilots or missionaries who would come forward with stories that he was seen alive. That he had crash landed and stranded in the jungle. In 1932, an American engineer named Charles Hasler made headline when he claimed that Indian natives were holding an American pilot whose legs had been broken, but the information was so limited that no expedition was organized.

In 1935, another story emerged of a “white man who came out of the sky, had both legs broken, and lived in an Indian village”. Similar accounts surfaced from jungle inhabitants in remote villages. Rescue and search parties formed, but after weeks of exploration, nothing was ever found. Rumors persisted.

The Searches Continue and Hope Lingers

Pilot Art Williams (second from left) led a search in Brazil for Redfern nine years after he disappeared. (Courtesy of the Paul Rinaldo Redfern Aviation Society of Columbia, S.C.)

Pilot Art Williams, in British Guiana, reported that in early 1936, that he passed over an Indian village in Brazil and that the Indians fled into the jungle but he saw “a lone white man standing in the open and waving frantically to the plane.” Williams said he later took a friend and they went back to the area with a small boat in an effort, but says when they finaly got to the village, a heavily armed tribe of Indians met them and they narrowly escaped with their lives.

Another expedition was launched the next year in February 1936, when an American Legion Post in the Panama Canal Zone put together an attempt to find Redfern. CBSNews correspondent James A. Ryan also accompanied the expedition. To pay the trip, the group issued five thousand “Redfern Rescue” stamp covers that had postmarked from Dutch Guiana to sell to stamp collectors. One customer, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who bought two of the “Redfern Rescue” covers.

The search effort not only failed but ended in disaster and one man emerged from the jugle to report they found trace of Redfern and that CBS correspondent James Ryan had drowned when his canoe tipped over in a river. 

Wife and Family Suffer From Cruel Hoax

There were more than a dozen search efforts made to find the lost pilot, but none to cold a cruel and the one in 1936 that fanned new hope that Redfern may indeed be alive and living as “white god” among a tribe of natives. It turned out to be nothing more than a despicable hoax.

Alfred Harred, a freelance reporter said he and the former pilot Art William actually found Redfern on in area on the Brazilain border with French Guiana. They said Redfern was living with a tribe of nude Indians and was hobbling around on crutches. His airplane was still hanging in the branches of a big tree.

He says Paul Redfern told them that when he crashed the plane, his legs and arms were broken, but eventually healed and married an Indian woman. He says they had a son. Harred claims that he and Art Williams were chased away from the village because the tribe thought they were going to take Paul redfern away. They fled under the threat of poison arrows and violence. This fantastic story as related by Alfred Harred were spread quickly around the world, it fell apart like a cheap suit in the rain. When reporters tried to contact Art Williams, he denied everything saying he never met Redfern and never met Alred Harred who would eventually admit it was all fiction.

The Final Rescue and Search Attempt

Amelia Earhart

By the fall of 1937, there was yet another massive search effort underway to find yet another missing aviator.   The object of this search: Amelia Earhart who vanished in her Lockheed Model 10 Electra in July of that year. As the world trained its attention on a remote island in the south Pacific where her plane was last heard from on a round the world attempt, the Redfern story seemed to fall to the margins. The world’s press was not as interested it seemed and Redfern’s fate was fading from the newsprint.

That however did not deter Paul Redfern’s family in their quest to get some answers. Ten years had passed but they wanted to try one more time to find their son and Gertrude’s husband. In 1937, they requested New York explorer Theodore J. Waldeck to lead an expedition from British Guiana. This attempt was risky and deadly. The expedition became marooned at a place called Devil’s Hole on the remote Cuyuni River . One of the men on the trip, Dr. Frederick Fox of New York, contracted jungle fever and died. He was buried on site as the others kept travelling until April 27, 1938. On that day, Theodore Waldeck reported that he had found the wreckage of the Port of New Brunswick in Venezuela. He says he could prove that Paul Redfern was in fact dead, but for some reason he never did. So as far as many were concerned, the young aviator’s fate was still unknown. His parents never gave up hoping that someday he might walk out the jungle and walk back into their lives.

His wife Gertrude also held on to hope for many years, but finally, after she too had gone to South America on one of the many expeditions, she also became more convinced that his fate was tragic, and decided it was best to move on with her life, as best she could. While living and working in Detroit, she petitioned a Michigan court to have her husband declared legally deceased. They had no children, and Gertrude never remarried. The Toledo native lived the balance of her life as a single widow and and died in 1981.

.The story of Paul and Gertrude Redfern is hardly recorded in Toledo. More so in Redfern’s South Carolina. At the time, as the drama was unfolding, the Toledo papers heavily covered this local-interest real life adventure mystery. But news stories do have a limited “shelf life”, even one as compelling as this. When Gertrude Redfern passed away in 1981, there was no significant story in the Blade’s obituary, but just a mere mention of the fact of her dead pilot husband’s disappearnce in South America. The story had lost its luster with each passing decade along with the generations of Toledoans who might have followed its many twists and turns.

But Redfern’s tale has been given some new lift in recent years. The world it seems loves a good mystery and this is surely one of them. Will we ever really know what happened? And could there have been a seed of truth in all the reports that he in fact did crash and survived. There are many who still believe the end of the Redfern tale did not end with a fatal plane crash. And that he may have survived. There are others who think he may have veered far off course and the searchers were all loooking in the wrong place. Whatever and wherever his fate, Redfern’s name is now a legend. At Rio de Janiero, there is even a street named for him. Back at home, in South Carolina, his high school in Columbia bears a plaque and a sign in his memory, as does the airfield in Brunswick, Georgia. In South Carolina there is a group called the Paul Rinaldo Redfern Aviation Society. The group reportedly meets every August 25th, at exactly 12:46 p.m., the exact time that Redfern’s Stinson Detroiter, called the “Port of Brunswick” crawled down the runway, lifted into the blue and disappeared over the horizon on that summer morning in 1927. At that appointed time they hold a ceremony and they raise a glass, maybe more, to this one-time Toledo aviation pioneer, wherever he may be.

Paul Redfern and his Father Frederick Redfern in front of the Stinson Detroiter that took him to eternity

Remembering Forest Park

The Forgotten Gem of Genoa

This is a seldom seen aerial photo of Forest Park in its heyday. The road in the foreground is Woodville Road and off to the right is Reiman Road. The wooden roller coaster is clearly visible along Reiman Road. _{Photo Courtesy of Genoa Historical Society}

  It wasn’t the biggest amusement park in Toledo area history, but it may have been the best. And least that’s how many people from the area thought of it. It was known as Forest Park, opening on Woodville Road, near Genoa , sometime in the mid-1920’s.  The park, like many of that prohibition -roaring 20’s era was a promise of good times and fun.  One of several such parks around Toledo competing for the attention of those who wanted to a spend a few hours riding the rides, playing the games, dancing to the bands, or maybe lacing up some roller skates to take a few laps around the wooden rink. Forest Park offered a full menu of these features and much more, for several decades, from the 1920’s through the 1940’s. It was “the place to be” every summer, spring and fall, and even in the winter months. The land for the park, at Woodville and Reiman Roads, also known as Hickory Corners, was purchased by businessman Carl Uthoff in the mid-1920’s. Although the exact date of opening day has been lost to time, early Genoa Gazette articles show it was up and running by 1925.

Within a few years, it was it drawing record crowds, and on some days, those crowds were measured in the thousands. Pretty impressive for a park that was miles from the big city population of Toledo.  But one of the reasons it prospered was its convenient location along busy state highway(Woodville Road), and adjacent to that roadway, in the 1920 and 30’s, the Lakeshore Electric Interurban train ran several times a day. The stop at Forest Park made the trip from Toledo a short and easy ride for fun seekers from the city, or in the other direction from Fremont or Woodville. And once they arrived, there was a full spectrum of fun things that was boast worthy.

Below is a panel of photos from Margaret Fintel’s family photo album. They show photos of her grand parents Stephen and Peg Huntzinger and her mother, Peggy, astride the carousel animals from the historic Dentzel carousel that is now proudly operating in Burlington North Carolina.

Suprisely, there is not much written about “Bob’s Coaster” or the “Speedway” wooden coaster(below) that was a premier attraction at the park. Speculating from the aerial photo, it was a large and impressive structure and appeared to take riders as high as 50 feet or more at the top before the cars raced down the other side. The builders and the designers appear to be lost to time and the fog of the past. If anyone knows more about its construction and its eventual demise, this writer and others would be grateful to hear from you.

The Speedway Coaster

The park not only had a roller coaster,(The Speedway as it was called), but a (now historic)Dentzel carousel merry-go-round, A Hersell Carousel, dodg-em-cars, a miniature-train ride and even a Ferris wheel. For those seeking more traditional thrills, bowling alley, a movie screen, and a variety of circus acts and performers, including the dare-devils on the high wires and trapeze.

One of the high wire acts that were regularly featured at Forest Park over the decades

Conspicuous at on the highway side of the park was a popular restaurant and a large indoor large roller rink, while a few feet away there was a dance hall with a beautiful marble floor where couples could dance the night away. Owners Carl Uthoff and partner Bill Stanger always booked some top notch dance bands and singers to croon for the crowd and the young lovers.

The outdoor dance floor(right) that was built in the 1920’s. Later an indoor venue was built.

Forest Park was so popular, and packed with amusements, it was a fierce competitor with other parks in the area at the time, including Willow Beach at Point Place or Locust Point near Oak Harbor, or Walbridge Park in Toledo.

It seemed like every year, Carl Uthoff and buisness partner Bill Stanger added new and better offering for the public to enjoy. The midway offered a penny-pitch stand, a shooting gallery, an archery range and Madam Farray, the fortune teller, would tell you for a quarter what the future held. It’s not certain though if she ever foretold the future of Forest Park. If she had, she might have envisioned its eventual demise by the end of the late 1940’s. Times change, and after World War Two, Americans were seeking their entertainment in other ways. The arrival of television kept lots of folks glued to their black and white screens in the comfort of their living rooms. By the late 1940’s, the popularity of the big bands of the 20’s were falling from grace and no longer in vogue. Even the once popular Interurban trains were out of step with the times and the trains were shut down and the tracks taken out. In short, Toledo area families, like many across the nation, had found new opportunities and options for family getaways.

If that wasn’t enough, on many nights, there were fireworks to keep the crowd’s attention . If people wanted to stay the night, on the other side of Woodville road were 25 cottages that could be rented for $1 per night.

One of many game sof chance along the midway at the park

The $1 a night cottages on the other side of Woodville Road. Some remnants remain.

Forest Park, like many of these pleasure parks of that era were aging. The once popular wooden roller coaster was condemned and other buildings were also in need of repair. The crowds dwindled and Carl Uthoff, who had been struggling to make a profit during the war years started allowing slot machines and gambling on premises. As a result, the park lost its liquor license. Soon theereafter, he sold the park to new owners. The time had come and time was cruel. By the 1950’s the only remnant of the park still in use was the dance hall building which was used as a auction house for a number of years. The once busy roller rink stood in mute silence along the roadway relegated as a storage locker, eventually surrendering to a ball of flame in 1957. As the decade wore on, the remains of this mecca of fun were mostly broken and lifeless. As many baby boomers of the 50’s and 60’s will attest, a drive-by on Woodville Road revealed only a mere wistful glimpse of what once was. Weeds and nature had mostly reclaimed the property and in 1967, that last remaining building, the big dance hall, also fell to fire and memory.

Peaches Browning, a scandalous actress and singer from the 1920’s was a big hit with the crowd at Forest Park.

It should be mentioned that Carl Uthoff and his business partner Bill Stanger also built an entertainment park in Pico California in the 1920’s. The community, now known as Pico Rivera, was in the mid 20’s a rural community wets of Los Angeles thta was growing quickly. Stanger, who lived nearby, must have seen the opportunity, so he and Carl Uthoff of Genoa built what became known as “Danceland” in Pico on Whittier Blvd. As of this wiritng, I am still researching this venue and what ever happened to it. Below are some images and photos of the “Forest Park” of California.

I am have unable, thus far to determine whether anything remains of Danceland in Pico Rivera. Perhaps like with Forest Park, mostly in the mist of memory. There is little if anything remaining on the corner of Woodville and Reiman that would inform the casual observer as to what an exciting and storied place it once was. A place that beckoned thousands of people every year to its gates. But while the buildings may be gone, the memories remain. Mostly second hand memories recountred in family stories and grainy photos. But I find that if you fasten your eyes on the faded photos and listen ever so closely, you can still hear the echoes of laughter and joy at a place called Forest Park.

Beulah and Ellsworth Scott were said to have been married on the dance floor at Forest Park.

The once popular roller rink that was visible along Woodville Road.In later years after Forest park was sold to new owners in the 1950’s, the rink was used mostly for storage and then in the late 1950’s fell to flames. (Below) a view of the miniature train and some of its young riders, and young at heart.

The Lake Shore Electric Interurban tracks (pictured below) ran along Woodville Road, and was a convenient way for thousand to get to Forest Park. Below are the tracks just north of Reiman Road.

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  Lake Shore Electric Tracks Along Woodville Road

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  The LSE on Woodville Road

River Horror: A Maumee Tragedy

The first week of May in 1902 brought a breath of springtime to Toledo. After another long and cold winter, the sun’s warmth cast its spell over the city, in a perennial promise of life renewed. The trees and flowering shrubs were clothed in a bouquet of color, the Maumee River was freckled with a variety of boats and ships, while along the riverbanks, hopeful anglers stood vigil waiting not just for a the pull of a fish or the meal it provides, but for the sheer joy of catching one.

Toledo Maumee Riverfront circa 1900

At Armory Park in downtown Toledo, the seasonal rites of baseball were well underway and the Toledo fans had reason to smile. Toledo had beaten Kansas City 7-5. In East Toledo, at Navarre Park, the trails and walkways on the gentle green slopes were filled with the sounds and scents of the season. The heady fragrance of the lilacs hung like a mist, inviting all to breathe deeper from the well of spring. The sweetness matched only by the chatter of children.

But as always with springtime, the weather can be unruly and restless. So too the ephemeral mood of gaiety and gladness. Sometimes a false peace, easily shattered by a sudden spasm of nature that breaks apart a city’s habitat of homes, or shattered by a foolish blunder of man that triggers a tragedy so great, it can break a city’s heart.

And so it was on the night of May 7th, 1902.

A group of Sunday School students, most of them teenagers, from First Baptist Church on Cherry Street in Toledo, climbed aboard a steam powered naphtha launch called the “Frolic on the Maumee River. It was to be a day of pleasure and play. A perfect day for a picnic on one of the nearby islands just beyond the bay in Lake Erie. It was to be a late afternoon-into-evening cruise with the bonus of a wonderful crimson sunset over the water. There were 11 people on board the Frolic, including the Captain and owner of the launch Joseph Hepburn. A man experienced at the helm of the craft who often took people on these excursions to Maumee Bay and the lake. His young passengers numbered ten. Seven young women and girls, all in their teens, several still in high school. And three young men, of similar ages. Two of the girls, Grace and Edna Lowe were sisters. And a brother and sister, Art and Clara Marx, was family with whom Captain Hepburn lived on Locust Street.

Eulalie Ricard

One couple, William Pfanner and Eulalie Ricard of Toledo, were engaged to be wed. They sat close to each other, staring into each other eyes as young lovers do. Clasped in each other’s embrace as day ebbed to night and a darkness set in over the waters. The young passengers, by all accounts, had enjoyed their excursion and by 10:00 o’clock that Wednesday evening, Captain Joseph Hepburn was on a heading back to Toledo, steering the Frolic inbound near the mouth of the Maumee River.

Further upstream, a well known tugboat, the Arthur Woods, of the Great Lakes Towing Company fleet, was making its way outbound, or downstream. It was not a huge tug, 55 feet in length and 35 feet at the beam. But it had been working the area of the Toledo docks for about three years pulling and guiding the larger vessels in and out of the docks and slips on the busy shipping channel. At the helm of the Woods was Captain Robert Fitts. Seasoned and well respected. His crew of three, the same. They were headed that spring evening for the slip at Ironville on the east side of the river where they were to dock and drop off a passenger. A woman who had asked Captain Fitts for a ride up to Ironville. It was not a customary practice to carry passengers for transport,aboard the tug, but for some reason, Fitts agreed and she climbed aboard. Little did he know that her presence on the Woods would become an embarrassing scandal for himself and the crew. .

As the Woods progressed downriver and drew closer to the Ironville area near the mouth of the river, Captain Fitts ordered the helmsman to make a starboard turn to the right towards the slip and docks at Ironville. As the tug cut across the channel, Fitts says he saw nothing, nor did he have any indication that any thing or any boat might be in his heading.

The position of the boats as described by Captain Joe Hepburn of the Frolic Launch

As the Frolic entered the harbor, the girls on the boat were still in a jovial mood from their long day on the water. They broke into song. A marching song, but before their voices could reach the next verse of the song, their voices cracked with horror. Bearing down on them was the bow of the tugboat, and not more than a second or two later, the front end of the Arthur Woods hammered into the side of the Frolic like a giant iron fist. Amidships it was hit, and turned the smaller boat up on its side, as if lifted by a hand, sending everyone on the Frolic into the cold inky water of the Maumee. As written the Toledo Bee on May the 8th, “The black Maumee opened its arms wide and took them deep down”.

The shattered Frolic rolled quickly into the water and within a minute it had vanished beneath the surface, “nothing remained on the ruffled surface of the river except the swaying tug that caused the devastation”. In the first moments of agony, the only things that surfaced were splinters from the Frolic and a few items from , but then, Captain Joe Hepburn, an experienced swimmer, made it to the surface, and Grace Lowe, a passenger also broke the water’s face and she grasped onto Captain Hepburn’s leg in her desperate bid at life itself. Hepburn grabbed Grace Lowe and pulled her close to him. Also a swimmer, 22-year old Art Marx, struggled to rise to the top and counted himself among those who would live, as a would his sister Clara Marx, who somehow found a floating seat cushion on the dark water and clung to it until she, like the other three, were plucked from the water’s grip by the crew of the tugboat. There was no sign of the other seven passengers. Five girls and two boys.. Later reports indicated that most of the girls did not know how to swim and there were no life preservers. It was estimated by some that the water in the river was about 20-25 feet deep at that location.

Arthur Woods tugboat in center with other tugs in Toledo

Example of a typical naphtha launch of that era

Captain Charles Fitts told news reporters that as the tug was cutting across the channel the first alert he got was the sound of a scream. At that point he ordered the tug into reverse and then heard a crash and more screams from woman and groans from men. Fitts says he’ll never forget those “bloodcurdling screams”.

No Running Lights on the Launch

He contended that the Frolic launch had no running lamps. No lights at all on a night when any hints of sunlight had long faded away and the sky and water were as dark as black glass. So dark that night, all the light was swallowed up and you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face. After the collision, they tried to shine lamps on the area where the launch went down, but said the lights on the tug were of little value.

Did the launch have a lamp or lantern? The Frolic Captain Joe Hepburn clung to his statement that he did have a light in the aft of the boat. Fitts, the tug Captain, held fast to his claim that there were no lights on any kind on the Frolic.

The search for those answers would have to come later.

Of immediate priority was the search for those who were lost. Survivors or bodies? By midnight, the hope for survival had ebbed to sorrow. The search was not renewed until daybreak the following morning. The search for seven bodies. As news began to circulate through Toledo of the events of the previous night, hundreds of curious onlookers assembled. They knit themselves together along the Ironville docks to bear witness and see for themselves the grim task of reclaiming the victims from their watery crypt. Some of the spectators were from nearby Shantytown along the river bank who gathered as soon as the morbid drama of recovery was underway. Nearby, clumps distraught family members stood and stared out across the water. Holding each other in the chilly morning sun, they studied the movements of the rowboats on the river for any sign that somebody they loved had been found at the bottom.

The reporters from Toledo’s newspapers also joined the curious and family members on the riverbank. Their search was for stories and they found them. They would write that the pastor of the First Baptist Church W.E. Loucks was first informed of the tragedy at six o’clock the next morning by a fellow pastor from another congregation. The Reverend Loucks spent the morning visiting the bereaved family members. He said “it came as a shock to me” and says he has known the families for five years and will do all for them that he can. The scribes from the Toledo Bee made it their mission to find out as much as they could about each victim, so that could attach more than just a name and age to the unfortunate.

A picture of the Lowe sisters was featured the first day in the Toledo Bee, as the two siblings would no longer have each other to confide in or share their future lives. Grace Lowe, by the grace of good fortune was able to survive the ordeal, but not without severe injury to her lungs and her heart. She was said to be hysterical with grief the following morning in knowing that her beloved sister, Edna Lowe, 19, was never to surface alive after she fell into the water’s unmerciful grip.

News Bee Photo of the Grace and Edna Lowe

Irwin Swain was just 17, a freshman in high school. Well liked and admired by many. His desire was to be an artist as he loved to sketch. He left many of his drawings lying about the house and his forlorn mother will have them to remember him by.

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Bessie Bystrom was 18, an active Sunday school member and a clerk at a local grocery store. Her father an engineer at the Nasby Building.

Beth Ann Seesee, only 17, was described as a tall slim girl with beautiful brown hair and black eyes. She was loved by all who knew her.

Grace Haskin, 17, also a student at the high school was well liked and an active participant in her church. Ironically, her father had drowned in a launch accident on the river, just two years prior.

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And then there was the poignantly sorrowful story of William Pfanner, 20 and Eulalie Ricard, 19. They were engaged to be married. He was working as a teller for Ohio Savings while his fiance Miss Ricard had graduated high school and Ursuline Convent and was active in Sunday school. Witnesses said they ran to each other as they saw the approaching tug and went to their death wrapped in each others arms. Miss Ricard was the cousin of victim Bessie Bystrom.

In the course of the next few days, there was no shortage of stories and remembrances about this river tragedy to feed the appetites of inquiring minds. There were of course the many questions that still lingered about what happened that night. How could the tug not have seen launch? Both captains, Fitts and Hepburn clashed publicly about whether the launch was displaying a running light. Tug captain, Charles Fitts was adamant that the launch had no such lamp or light. Captain Joe Hepburn was equally as adamant that they did. And he also accused the tug captain of taking a hard starboard turn that put the heavy tug on a collision course with their much lighter and vulnerable launch. An inquest into the vexing questions about the reasons for the tragedy would provoke even more questions. The identity of the woman said to be on board the tug was not known. The tug captain, Charles Fitts at first denied there was a woman on board. But other witnesses claimed to have seen her and she was reported to be drunk and amorous with the tug’s fireman. And during inquest testimony it was revealed by the tug’s fireman that he tried to make love to the mystery woman that night, but she rebuffed his advances. These sordid details may have had little to do with the cause of the accident, but in the black of white of newsprint, they helped sell newspapers. Not everyone was impressed with the sensational reporting in Toledo’s daily papers. A federal officer brought in to survey the damage and investigate the accident labeled the reporters as “newspaper leeches” and advised the people involved not to talk with them.

But that didn’t deter the reporters’ efforts to search for new revelations. Each new day seemed to bring new narrative of the human pathos that had played out on the river’s stage. Clara Marks, one of the four who managed to endure the torture of near drowning, did not survive easily. Her personal account in the Toledo Bee two days later was vivid.

“When the tug struck the boat, the side away from me went up in the air, and then I jumped off. I went down, down , down. I thought I would never stop going down. It was so black and cold. Then all of a sudden I seemed to stop. My lungs were bursting. I waved my arms, but they moved so slowly, as if a great weight was tied to them.”

The reporter who took her narration noted that Clara talked in a monotone and her skin was still white, and that water from the river was still in her lungs.

” I never swam before, but I kicked my legs and waved arms.” “I went to the surface, my throat and lung filled with cold water.” Within seconds she went down again. “I went down three times,” she said quietly. “I know that when I went down for the third time, that it was all over. And that I would not have to struggle any longer. It was a blessed relief.”

On her third time resurfacing she found a seat cushion, filled with cork, floating in the water and clutched it. It kept her afloat until she was finally rescued by her cousin Art Marks who swam to her in the darkness and was able to guide her through the water to be pulled aboard the Arthur Woods tugboat. Once aboard the tug Marks helped turn the victims, face down, to force them to expel the water in their lungs. A hero for the moment. The The Toledo Bee,said surely he should be ascribed that status.

And as every tale needs a hero, such heart rending horrors are sure to bring those forward who say they were “almost” victims. Such was the case of Pearl Miller, an 18 year old from the First Baptist church whose father strongly suggested he not go on the the Frolic excursion because it might be dangerous and he could die in there was an accident. Was it a premonition? Whatever the genesis of his father’s fear, young Pearl did not climb aboard the Frolic that day. He says that if he had, he probably would have drowned, for he can not swim.

Ironically, as if one tragedy to unfold in the headlines that week of 1902 was not enough to absorb, the day after Toledo’s terrible river tragedy, came word of catastrophic volcanic eruptions in the West Indies on the islands of Martinique and St. Vincent. Not one but two volcanoes erupted within hours of each other. Both were deadly, but the eruption of Mt. Pelee at Martinique was mind numbing with over 25,000 dead at St Pierre, essentially the entire city caught in the mountain of molten lava that mushroomed down the slope burying everything in the path. The earth’s convulsions spared few from he wrath of fire and rock. The stories did not need any florid embellishments, for the reality was sensational and horrid as the mind’s eye could envision. Toledo’s river horror would share ink and front page headline space with this seismic event of human calamity for the next week. The astonishing events in the Caribbean did little to impede or diminish the coverage of the the Frolic accident on the Maumee River and the full spectrum of the community response to it.

The coroner’s inquest, the mystery of the unidentified woman reported to be aboard the tugboat, and descriptions of how the victim’s families were coping all kept Toledo readers flipping the pages and drying their eyes. The story of the funerals was especially mournful. On Saturday May 10th, inside the sanctuary of the First Baptist lay seven caskets , side-by-side. The first time such a scene of this type and size had ever been witnessed in the city. The church itself was awash in clouds of floral beauty and fragrance as greenhouses in the city emptied their storage rooms of flowers and banked them in layers around the caskets. Hundreds of friends and family crowded the pews and stood near the coffins, as family members were given a chance for last last look and a chance to say goodbye. There were also hundreds of others who were strangers, affected curious who came to pay their respects and to be a part of this most solemn event. Extra rooms and the church vestibule were opened up to help accommodate the sea of people, many of whom wept openly, as others talked quietly about the investigation and who was to blame. The voices of a special quartet floated over the pews with song and hymns, keeping the mood somber. Outside, the skies had turned gray and cloudy. Cool and gloomy, fitting the mood of the afternoon.

Each coffin had its own set of pallbearers. Most were family or school friends. A poignant moment was observed as it was noted that all six of Beth Ann Seesee’s pallbearers were girls. Classmates. After the services, the caskets were taken that Saturday to Woodlawn and Forest cemeteries. Will Pfanner’s body was the only one to be interred at Woodlawn. The other six were taken by carriage to the Forest Cemetery.

The Burials at Forest Cemetery Turned Into a Mob Scene

It was at Forest where the mood of the mourners began to shift. Hundreds of other people joined those arriving caravan and according to news accounts, the scene devolved into one of chaos and disrespect. As news accounts described it, “Not less than 2,000 people gathered at Forest Cemetery to witness the internment of six of the young people who drowned Wednesday night…” The Sunday morning Toledo Bee called most of them “sensation seekers filled with morbid curiosity.” who laughed and joked as the six hearses slowly rolled into the cemetery. They were so unruly, they pushed and shoved and nearly caused some mourners standing on the edge of the graves to be “pushed into the cavity”. As the narrative of the burials continued, it noted the gray skies that brooded overhead and a sharp chill in the air as rude behavior of the curious continued. Miscreants who trampled fresh graves and tombstones as they rushed from one grave to another of the Frolic victims, stealing flowers and relics. A spectacle that disgraced the saddest funeral the city has ever known.

The next day, a similar scene played out once again at Forest as more of the irreverent made a pilgrimage into the graveyard. A Bee headline opined with chiding indignation, that all that was needed to make it a circus were “peanuts and popcorn”.

Mystery Woman Aboard the Tug Identified

With the victims at rest for eternity, the questions and controversy of the wreck were not close to being put to rest. The inquest was still underway and with each new day, new revelations broke the surface. One of the revelations came that Monday following the accident as the mystery woman was finally identified, In fact she freely admitted to it. Nellie Armstrong who lived at the Suburban Hotel on Water St. said she was the woman who got aboard the tugboat that night and was aboard when the accident happened. She was also identified by a man who says he was drinking with her in an Ironville saloon after the accident happened and she got off the tug. Nellie proved to be at ease on the witness stand and was described as glib and talkative. She said she had hitched a ride with the tug boat from the Jefferson Street docks so she could apply for a job as cook with one of the boats docked at Ironville. She asked tug captain Charles Fitts for a ride and he said, “Sure, hop on board.” One of the girls who survived the ordeal said after getting on board the tugboat, she saw Nellie Armstrong and asked her to help her out of her wet clothes, but the woman swore at her and refused to help.

The tug’s crew had lots of questions to answer about the events that happened just after the collision. One allegation made at the inquest was the Captain Hepburn of the Frolic, an experienced and excellent swimmer, wanted to jump back into the Maumee River waters to see if he could rescue any other passengers. But, he says the crew of the tug would not allow him to do it. Why they didn’t let him was a point of contention with tug captain Fitts stating that Hepburn said was going to jump into the water again with the intention to commit suicide. The tug fireman, William Smith agreed with the captain, but the tugs engineer, Charles Williams said he only heard Hepburn say he wanted to get back in the water to “save the girls”.

Captains of Both Vessels Held to Account

Captain of Frolic Launch: Joe Hepburn

Why more of an effort was not made by Charles Fitts, the Captain of the Arthur Woods, to rescue the victims of the Frolic, or at least make an effort to that end, is not clear. For many it was a haunting question mark for Fitts had a reputation for heroics in water rescues. Charles A. Fitts, was one of the most reliable pilots of the Maumee. Born in Toledo in 1872, he was the son of Captain Albert S. Fitts and had been around the lakes all of his life. As a younger man, he was a man of magnificent physique and strength. Athletic and aa little above the average height, he was regarded as a pleasant speaker and companion. His muscles according the friends and shipmates were like iron, and he was a strong swimmer. He aspired to be a pilot of Great Lakes steamers, like his father, and after leaving high school, he did so. Either working as a wheelsman or pilot on a variety of steamers including the Pastime which his father had sailed out of Toledo for a number of years. While on the hurricane deck of the Pastime,one day on the Maumee, he saw a boy fall off the dock. Fitts jumped overboard and swam to the boy who was near his last breath, and pulled him ashore, where he was resuscitated. His next rescue was at the foot of Jefferson street in Toledo. Three young men were on a small yacht when one them was swept off when he was hit by the main sail boom. He struggled helplessly in the water until Fitts swam out and succeeded in landing him on the deck of the Pastime where the young man recovered. Just why Fitts himself did not leap at the opportunity to help these struggling souls on that night in May of 1902 is silent to history. A question that would later become a part of the official ruling from investigators.

The inquest did not end quickly, the coroner conducting the proceeding was deliberate and methodical about gathering the evidence to determine where the blame might lie. A question that once determined could result in a wave of litigation against either the tug or the launch. A week after the accident, the coroner was taken to the scene of the collision on the river at Ironville. He wanted to see and judge for himself the supposed location of the vessels and who should have yielded to whom. Measurements and river depths were recorded and there was disagreement between the two captains as to where exactly each vessel was at the moment of impact. The coroner eventually said he has enough information and would make a ruling in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, the news and immediate excitement about the tragedy began to wane. The story was dropped from the front page and the city residents turned their attention to other and newer stories of interest.

A labor strike at Rossford’s Ford glass plant and at least five other factories idles thousands, the death of “Mary Ann the Gun” a once notorious pickpocket in Toledo, the Toledo arrest on “general principles” of a white man and black woman for their relationship, and the efforts by developers to build a new housing project near the zoo called Harvard Terrace.

This tragedy did keep some people focused on boat and water safety. There was an short story on how the river tragedy triggered a sudden demand for lights for boats and some shopkeepers said they were already sold out of the lamps. There was also a public demonstration at Walbridge Park of a new type of life preserver that promised better personal safety. It used inflated inner tube devices to keep people afloat in the water should they fall out of a boat. But sadly in the weeks that followed the accident there would be several more drownings on the river. Either from fishing boats that capsized in the currents, or children lured by the call of the cool water. Another summer when the river’s witch becomes a cruel temptress.

But the river is never blamed for its cruelty. The boat captain involved were left to fret as to which one of them might shoulder that burden of blame. The anxiety and the stress of the accident and the pending ruling began to take its toll on launch Captain Joe Hepburn, within two weeks after the disaster he resigned as head of the Toledo Yachting Association’s regatta committee, saying that he was no longer physical able to withstand the duties of the job. He is in such a state that he is in “no condition to participate in anything resembling festivities”

On May 27th, Coroner Storz finally ruled that neither skipper was to blame for the tragedy that took seven lives. Storz essentially sidestepped a final judgment as who was at fault, and relinquished that obligation to the Federal government, letting “Uncle Sam fix the blame”. In his Storz’s ruling he said he did not find either captain “to be liable for criminal negligence.” He also ruled that he couldn’t determine if the presence of woman passenger on board the tug was a contributing factor. He did write that he was surprised that more of the victims could not have been rescued, although he explained that might have been attributable to the “excited state of the tug crew” at the time.

In the end he implored other watercraft operators to be more careful, to be ready for emergencies and said he would leave it to the jurisdiction of the United States government to make a ruling.

Within a day, that ruling from the Customs office came and contradicted the coroner’s results. Colonel Bonner of U.S. Customs found both captains guilty and each should bear some blame for the deadly tragedy. The tug captain Charles Fitts was fined $500 for violating the rules by allowing a woman passenger on board the tug that night, and for operating with one crew member short, and without an adequate lookout for any impending hazard on the river. Colonel Bonner also ruled that Captain Joe Hepburn was not without fault, and was fined $200 for not having running lights on his naphtha launch, the Frolic, and that his craft also should had someone keeping watch for possible hazards in the darkness.

Epilogue

The rulings came the same week in 1902 as Toledoans were ready to observe Decoration Day, what we now call “Memorial Day”. Dutifully tens of thousands of people took carriages or walked or took a trolley to area cemeteries to pay their respects to those who died or served their country in the Civil War, and other wars in the nations history. Flags flapped in the breeze, bugles played, preachers prayed and everyone stopped if only for moment to absorb and reflect. School children, at the urging of teachers and veterans, gathered flowers to scatter over the graves of those who had fought their last battles. Forest Cemetery hosted the largest numbers of pilgrims who came to give their solemn thanks. Many of whom no doubt saw the fresh mounds of earth piled atop the new graves of six young people who perished when the Frolic launch flipped and discarded them to the bottom the river. Likely pausing to ponder the young lives who futures were robbed by the whim of circumstance. In time, however, the mounds of loose clay would subside and grass would grow over them and headstones would appear with etched names, so the living would not forget who they were. But, as always, memories do wither with the seasons. Perhaps not for the families and close friends, but those others who knew them only by their notoriety of death. Time and memory move on. There would be other tragedies, large and small, sensational and similar to ensnare the attention span of the public.

Maumee River A Lethal Seductress

Ironically, nine years later in 1911, on September 2nd, seven people, six of them Toledo city officials and employees, were also sent to the murky depths of the Maumee when their 35 foot fishing boat “The Nemo” was rammed by the bow of a freighter, the “Philip Minch”. This calamity too rendered weeks of journalistic and public fascination. But it too eventually faded to a footnote in Toledo’s past.

In, a similar tragedy would play out again when in 1930, eight prominent Toledo men mysteriously went to their deaths when they were flung from their high speed Dart boat into Lake Erie. The victims were on a night run from Toledo to Pelee Island in Canada for an Elks party. As the sped across the dark waters of the lake, something caused the sleek wooden speed boat to flip and pitch them into the black water of eternity. The story was charged with mystery and high intrigue for weeks and then the story’s sharp focus slowly faded into the mist.

Mystery of Why This Tragedy Still Unsolved

More than 100 summers have passed since the night in late spring of 1902 when what should have been a routine non newsworthy pleasure cruise turned into a horrible episode in the city’s history. However, much has changed since then. Steam launches are no longer seen on the river, replaced by gas powered pleasure craft. The community of Ironville is gone and so are the docks, at least as that generation knew them. First Baptist Church on Cherry Street later became a homeless mission and during urban renewal, torn down. And most of the city’s newspapers of that day, including the News Bee are gone too. The ink and its pages though, preserved in digital form, are able to reveal to readers volumes of history and this Toledo tragedy. The only tangible physical evidence enduring is found in the city’s cemeterys, Woodlawn and Forest. Here one can still find the graves of the seven victims and even the latter graves of some survivors. At Forest, the markers of those lost were joined by the tombs of the two boat captains , Joe Hepburn and Charles Fitts. Two men of water, joined for eternity in a sea of earth. Nearby one can find also the final homes of the victims’ family members, and friends who bore the sorrow and memories. Buried with them, no doubt, their burden of tears and torment.

Yes, much has changed. And much has not.

Now on a sunny spring day, as it was May 7th, 1902, the leaves in the green canopy at Forest still rustle overhead in the soft breezes that curl among the weathered headstones, whispering to all who hear them, the stories that time won’t forget.

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Mystery “Death Ray” Inventor Lived in Toledo

One of the motivations I had for starting this blog ten years ago in 2010 was my passion for discovering people and events of the past that had been largely ignored, forgotten or assigned to the junk drawer of history.

Every now and then I spend some time sorting through that old junk drawer and without fail, I tend to find a few gems. Such was the case this week when I came upon the story of Maurice J. Francill. Born in Marion Ohio just before the start of the 20^th century, Maurice, whose given name at birth, was Francis Marion Cowgill,(he changed his name later in life) would spend most of life exploring the mystery and magic of radio. In fact, he was known as the Radio Wizard, and by the early 1920’s he was stunning audiences around the country with his ability to use radio waves to control mechanical devices. From toys to cars to trains, Maurice Francill had figured out the technology of “remote control”. Recall that in the 1920’s, most people were still wrapping their head around the remarkable new concept of listening to people speak from far off cities on a crystal radio in their living rooms.

This was big magic to most people at the time. It was a technology in its infancy and radio stations were just at the early stages of development. Toledo would not have a radio station until 1925. But here was Maurice Francill, already showing people how radio waves could not only travel through the invisible “ether” of air, but how those waves could make things move.

Local Audiences Awed By Francill’s Shows

In the February 10^th , 1923 Edition of the Coshocton Tribune, Francill was demonstrating a remote controlled automobile on the city streets of Coshocton as part of a radio exhibition that was touring the country.

The paper wrote: The machine he will demonstrate tonight is valued at ten thousand dollars and required a year to build. The machine is equipped with a radio selector which makes it possible to perform an operation request from any member of the audience, much in the same manner as if it had “mechanical brains”.

From that description it may be safe to conclude that Maurice Francill, who would later move his operations to Toledo, was the inventor, not just of remote control, but the first autonomous car. That was almost 100 years ago.

Francill would continue his demonstrations for curious eyes in a broad swath of cities and towns across the nation. In New Castle Pennsylvania in 1926 Radio Wizard Francill gave demonstrations at a car dealership of his invention showing the crowd how he could start the automobile, flash its lights, honk its horn or turn its wheel “without the touch of a human hand”. The newspaper writer reflected on what this “remote control” technology might mean for future. Francill even allowed people in the showroom to thoroughly inspect the car to make sure it wasn’t rigged with a hidden driver or wires. It wasn’t. The article also said Francill demonstrated how to fry an egg on a block of ice using this technology, but didn’t elaborate.

His amazing feats before thousands of people would be repeated maimes over from Newark Ohio to Reno Nevada with many stops in between. In Waterloo Iowa in 1927, thousands of onlookers jammed various points of the city to watch in awe as he drove a Hudson Essex down a city street, turned on a washing machine at a city laundry, and started up an ice factory with the press of a button on his 15 pound radio transmitter from a remote location. He was theRadio Wizard. His creativity for finding new applications was impressive. In 1929, In Newark,Ohio he was demonstrating at a local dairy, how his radio device could operate a mechanical milking machine for cows. He repeated the same stunt on stage at a theater in Lima in 1929, and the newspaper reported that the cow, “Duchess” was calmly brought onto the stage and Francill, was able to extract 40 pounds of milk which cascaded into the bucket like “Niagara Falls”. On that same trip to Lima he also showed how radio could be used to operate a street car, and he did it for all to see.

It is not apparent if Francill had succeeded in finding commercial uses for his new radio technology. However, because Francill was seen by many as an entertainer and not a scientist, his credentials and credibility may have been questioned as a serious inventor. Especially when considering that many of his shows also included spiritualism and Seance features. But it was hard to deny that he did have something tangible to provide audiences who marveled at his ability to drive a car, or a play a violin or milk a cow without the aid of a human hand.

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It was the stuff of the future and in the 1920’s and 30’s, the science of radio was the new frontier of possibility and Francill brought some of that “wonder” to hometown America.

As far back at 1926 in an interview with a Reno Nevada reporter, Francill said he had built a death ray machine that could stop a beating heart and wanted to try it our on a convicted murderer who was condemned to die. He said he was asking some state governors to let him try it. He was convinced that the death ray technology would be the technology of future wars when armies would be able to use them to “annihilate people by the hundreds”. He also predicted it would become a popular crime fighting tool, for it not only could kill people, but kill the engines of speeding getaway vehicles and could start distant fires. His discovery of the“death ray”, he said, was found by accident while doing other experiments. He held its technology as a closely guarded secret lest it fall into the wrong hands of amateurs.

He also would later demonstrate the use of “light rays” which he touted as a new method to broadcast voice transmission on a,beam of light. He felt this was in many ways more effective and useful than radio waves. He was prescient on that thought, but light ray technology was not new. Hardly.

It had been invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1880. In fact the use of light ray photo-phones did become an effective stealth communication during World War Two. Today’s fiber optic technology is built on the foundation of light ray technology.

Francill’s one questionable claim was his public insistence that he had a “death ray” device. In 1940 he demonstrated it to reporters and witnesses in Toledo. In February of that year he assembled a group of reporters and witnesses to his home in North Toledo. Nine men, according to the article in the Toledo Blade, watched as Francill used a “queer machine” with port holes and coils, to deliver a death ray of sorts to a rat that rose up on its “shaky haunches, ran in a few agonized circles and died.”

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The reporter, Arthur Peterson, contended that the rat was a large brown alley rat and appeared to be in good health before it was taken out of a wire cage and put into a glass case. From 15 feet away Francill’s projector was trained on the rat inther glass case and caused its sudden death. How and why did it die? What exotic technology had this Toledo inventor uncovered? Francill told the reporter he didn’t know, but he theorized that the “ray” may have deteriorated the tissue of blood and flesh and nerves.

He also demonstrated another experiment with the strange projector by projecting a ray unto a pair of beakers in which were two unidentified chemicals. When hit by the “ray” the chemicals turned from a milky white color to blue color. Francill showed the witnesses assembled at his home other examples of his shadowy science including the projection of a ray from the secret box to a shaft of steel which became very hot. He also showed a “military” invention thathe says was a thermal compound that can be ignited by water and get so hot it can eat through the side of a battle ship.

Just how long Francill lived in Toledo I have not yet determined(still working on it). I do know that he was here in the 1930’s and through part of the 50’s before he returned to his hometown of Marion where he passed away in 1974 at the age of 77.

Was he a crackpot? A conman? Or was he the real deal? Maybe a little of all three. Not sure really, but what I can ascertain by what I’ve read in the limited research I’ve done, is that he made some of his money by selling sponsors to his shows. When he demonstrated his “remote control” automobiles, it was usually underwritten and marketed by a car dealership. Or a dairy if he was milking cows, or a street car company if he was “automating” the local street cars. His draft card and selective service application in 1943 shows he was living at 1702 N. 12^th Street in Toledo, was employed by the Massachusetts Protective Association(insurance company) and was married to his wife Josephine.

I am very curious as to what Francill’s “death ray” was. If it was not a hoax, I suspect that perhaps he had stumbled into some rudimentary microwave wave technology. The use of very high frequency radio waves to heat objects, which had been discovered in the 1930’s and even featured at the 1939 World’s fair in Chicago.

Regardless, even if Maurice Francill was just a clever huckster who could harness electronics to make a quick buck, he gave Americans of all ages and walks of life a sense of wonder of the world around them, a sense of the future wonders that would eventually come to fruition. Heat the very least a futurist, and a teacher who helped spark the imagination of the country.

The Strange and Elusive Mr. MacFarland: Genoa’s Infamous “Blue Beard” Bigamist and “Hymeneal Champ”.

 

This is a story that’s been taking up space in my files for several years and I’ve been promising to fill in some blanks and share it with others. So here goes. It’s a largely forgotten but sparkling little gem of a story about a strange man who lived briefly in the Toledo area, then set out to become one of the more notorious characters of American matrimony. His name and exploits are still talked about in parts of California to this day.

Around 1911, newspapers around the nation began following the saga of Mr. Andrew Franklin MacFarland who was said to have been a resident of Genoa, Ohio at one time in the 1880’s and was in the insurance business. But it seems Andrew liked to move about the country and liked ladies and money. For MacFarland, it proved a dangerous combination of pursuits. I will begin this tale somewhere in the middle, when in September of 1911, while Andrew MacFarland was living with his wife Ella MacFarland in a Colorado Springs Colorado hotel, he was arrested and charged with embezzlement from a a woman by the name of Ethel Groom in San Francisco. Ethel was a lady whom MacFarland had married earlier that year promising her a life of wedded bliss, but she claimed in a warrant that soon after the wedding, he left her, and emptied her safety deposit box of some $10,000 in cash, then absconded with the funds and vanished. He was missing for months, only to be found in Colorado Springs Colorado by detectives who had been in hot pursuit. When captured that September day of 1911, it was reported that he was preparing to leave for a long trop with his third wife Ella, on a trip to Puerto Rico.

 

San Francisco Call September 20, 1911

A scandalous article in the San Francisco Call newspaper and other papers around the nation referred to Andrew F. MacFarland as a wealthy businessman who had started an insurance company in that city. The articles took delight in providing the sordid details of his “hymeneal venturism” as they called it. For at this point in his life, MacFarland had exchanged vows with four women over the course of his 44 years. Some of the wives, however, he had not bothered to divorce or annul the nuptials before moving on to the next one. And his first marriage took place in the 1880’s near Toledo where he wed a lady by the name of Leona Maville. After the wedding, they made their home in the little village of Genoa, not far from Toledo.

Just why he was in Genoa, or what he did there is still yet to be determined, but he and Leona didn’t stay too long. They stayed long enough to have one son and left Genoa a few years later and moved to Indiana where they had more children and as best can be determined, they moved back to Toledo, where MacFarland was working as a “clerk”, per census records.

Then in about 1895, MarFarland, for whatever his reasons, deserted his wife Leona and three sons and moved to Kansas. This is where in Wyandotte Kansas in 1896, forgetting his first wife, he met and married wife number 2, Minnie Gerard. This marriage occurs despite MacFarland never having legally ended or divorced poor Leona whom he had left high and dry and destitute.

MacFarland’s second wife, Minnie, however, also turned out to be as indifferent to the laws of matrimony as was he. For MacFarland soon discovered that Minnie was married to someone else. Taking umbrage, he left her and trekked south to Oklahoma where he met future wife number three, Ella Clem. The story is told that he was able to convince her that he really wasn’t married to wife number two(Minnie Gerard of Kansas) and never bothered to mention his first marriange or family he had in Genoa from many years before. It was a tangled web indeed and MacFarland didn’t seem too vexed by it all. In a few years he moved on to California with his wife Ella. They settled in the San Diego area of Pacific Beach where they became respected citizens of the community. MacFarland, having built an insurance company as massing a tidy sum of cash built a grand home near the Hotel Balboa in 1907. The story of their lives in Pacific Beach can be found here.

MacFarland Home in Pacfic Beach

 

 

http://thewebsters.us/2014/10/31/the-macfarland-legacy/

A few years later, however, they left their home in Pacific Beach and relocated to San Francisco and carried on a life of prosperity in that region with his Pacific Life Insurance Company. Then in 1911, in a burst of sudden epiphany, MacFarland announced to Ella that he wanted to straighten everything out with his matrimonial entanglements of the past. To make it happen he asked for annulment from his wife Ella so he could be free to get an annulment from wife #2(Minnie of Kansas) and to be finally cleared from that former marriage. Ella consented but only if MacFarland would agree to remarry her immediately after the annulment from (Minnie) wife#2. (if you’re confused, I was too. Best bet read it again. We’re just getting started)

And as you might have guessed, once a lothario, always a lothario, MacFarland got his annulment from Minnie,and an annulment from Ella. But he had no intention of remarrying Ella as promised, instead he promptly traveled to Ogden Utah and married a fourth woman, Ethel Groom, one of his young stenographers.  After the wedding, they took an extended honeymoon to the East Coast and didn’t return for a month. Upon returning to California though, he was to learn that his strange behavior was now the talk of the town. The story of Andrew MacFarland’s sudden new marriage and all of his matrimonial adventures had made the front page of the newspapers and third wife Ella, now a woman scorned, was not a happy camper. She went back to court and had the annulment to Andrew rescinded, thus MacFarland was now officially a bigamist.

The case became a front page butt of jokes and comedy. The San Francisco Call newspaper published one article in March of 1911 entitled “Now Just Who Is MacFarland’s Wife?”

The article laid bare his life and his “matrimonial career”, but interestingly it left out the fact that he had been married and was still married to Leona Mavall of Toledo. MacFarland had held this secret very close to his vest over the years and it was not common knowledge.

Seemingly unrepentant, MacFarland’s folly persisted as he was able to convince wife #4(Ethel) to get an annulment so he could officially divorce wife #3(Ella) and then he and Ethel could settle down in matrimonial bliss. (What’s the saying “Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice…)

So who got fooled again?

Well once Ethel’s annulment was granted and the ink still wet on the court order, our Mr. MacFarland had a sudden and miraculous memory recovery. He rememebered he still had a legal marriage with Leona Maville with whom he had played house in Genoa Ohio back in the 1880’s. With sudden clarity of purpose, MacFarland reveals the truth to the world and grabs the first train to Toledo to reaquint himself with his old friends there, but then after a few weeks, he vanishes.

Back in San Francisco, Ethel the former wife #4, now also a scorned woman, checked her safety deposit box and found that MacFarland had appropriated the cash from it before heading for Ohio. Not only was a known liar and bigamist, he was now being called a thief.

The weeks turned to months and MacFarland was a wanted man. Just where he traveled or hid is not known, but in September of 1911 he was found by private detectives living in a hotel in Colorado Springs Colorado with his third wife Ella. To whom he was still legally wed.

MacFarland, a wealthy man believed to have a cash fortune into the six figures, voluntarily returned to San Francisco after his arrest in Colorado. He fought the embezzlement charges and a year later his case was still tied up in the courts. The furious and former fourth wide Ethel wanted what she said was her money, a wedding gift of 10,000 dollars. MacFarland claimed it was not her money, and he never gave it to her. He also claimed she was blackmailing him for another $30,000 for her to drop the charges against him. Despite this rancor, and MacFarland’s reputation, Ethel told the court she still loved him and wanted to be with him. (Wow did he have some of male magic or what? Money magic maybe?)

Finally in September of 1912, after his second trial concluded, the jury acquited MacFarland for embezzlement. The headlines and the publicity faded and it is written that MacFarland apparently gave up his wedlock wanderlust and settled down, for awhile, with wife #3 Ella.

He and Ella would eventually move back to San Diego to their luxurious home in Pacific Beach. Considered one of the grand homes of the town and stands to this day and as a landmark of Pacific Beach. But for the MacFarlands, life behind the beautiful facade of that home was a stormy one.

In August of 1918 Andrew MacFarland filed for divorce from Ella and accused her of being “cold and of an unaffectionate manner”, often denouncing him as untrue to her and wasting his money in “riotous living” when he was away from home. He denied the allegations.

Ella MacFarland’s also denied his allegations and claimed he had deserted and abandoned her. In September of 1918 a judge ruled in favor of Ella and granted her a divorce. A week later, MacFarland, now 51 years old married a 25-year-old court stenographer Carmen Kertson, and they apparently went on to lead a what was said to be a quiet life in Los Angeles.

Marriage License to Carmen Kertson, Wife #5

But even that wedded bliss did not end well. They divorced sometime in the 1930. By the 1940 census it showed him living alone in Los Angeles. He died in 1942 at the age of 75 and is buried at Forest Lawn in Los Angeles. Carmen went on to live a much longer life passing away in 1974. Census records show they may have had as many as two children together.

We do not know if he ever reconciled or acknowledged his first wife in Toledo, Leona Maville. A record search shows that he married her in Monroe County Michigan in 1884. It was appear that he was a mere 17 at the time, being born in December of 1866. According to the records I’ve reviewed they took up residence lin Genoa,had three children together before he deserted them in the 1890’s.

At that time he was using the name Frank MacFarland, not Andrew F. MacFarland. Their three sons were named Harrison, Ransalier, and Alonzo. The oldest son Harrison, born in 1884 in Genoa. Evenutally Harrison moved west, had several marriages himself over the course of his life and appears to have moved to the San Francisco area where his father was residing. Harrison also got tangled up in some unsavory behavior and ended up in San Quentin prison for passing bad checks in the early 1900’s. He died in San Francisco in 1961.

Son Harrison, born in Genoa. Prison Photo

The second son of Leona and Andrew Macfarland was Ransalier and he was born near Elkhart Indiana, later moved to California and died in Santa Barbara in 1962.

Ransalier MacFarland. Andrew on right?

The 3rd son, Alonzo was born in 1888. The 1900 census shows that he was 12 years old and living with his mother Leona and his brother Ransalier in the 300 block of Buffalo Street in North Toledo. She is listed in the census as a “washerwoman” and Ransalier was listed as a “day laborer”. Alonzo was still in school.

And one final footnote is that keeping to Andrew MacFarland’s crazy quilt world of wedlock, marriages, remarriages, and annulments. While he and Leona were on record as having been married in Whiteford Twp Michigan in 1884, they were apparently remarried in Ohio in 1892. Lucas County probate court records show they were wed again on January 2nd, 1892 in Toledo.

The Great Stone Face of Toledo

Photo of Great Stone Face taken at Dixon Inn in Toledo circa 1920

Okay, here’s a mystery that needs an answer. Or maybe a couple. It seems that back in the 1800’s when Toledo city workers were doing some excavating along Monroe Street in the downtown area, they came across  an ancient stone carving. It was the carving of face and it appeared to those who saw it to be the face of an early Native American, or a person with “thick lips and round face”who was deemed to be one of the “ancient” pre-historic people, known as mound builders.

This little gem has come my way from a book given to me by a friend who found the 1922 book it in a garage sale near Dayton.  The book is entitled “Memories” by Dr. Cyrus Noble of Toledo who practiced medicine in the early part of the 20th century in Toledo and Wood County.

Dr. Cyrus Noble

Dr. Noble was also a poet and observer of life in the area and his poems reflect on a number of local stories that piqued his curiosity and interest.  In “Memories” he writes fondly of the famed “Indian Elm” in Maumee.  A giant among trees where Indians reportedly perched to take aim at soldiers across the Maumee River at Ft. Meigs.  Dr. Noble also waxes lyrically about a variety of topics, but the one that snared my curiosity was the story of the “Great Stone Face”. There wasn’t much of a narrative about it, but there was a photo of it, presumably where it was exhibited for years inside of the now-forgotten Dixon Inn in Toledo’s old Tenderloin District.   The Dixon Inn had been a brothel at one time, amid the clutter of  the “sin zone” but after the Tenderloin was closed down in 1918, the Dixon Inn stayed open as a hotel, inn and boarding house, and more importantly – a very strange museum.  I have written about the Dixon Inn before in the Gazette, and its odd collection of bizarre artifacts, from shrunken heads to ancient battle weapons. But the “Great Stone Face” is the stand out among the collection, for if it is truly an artifact of ancient heritage, it conjures a list of questions, the first being how it came rest 20 feet below the surface of earth in the area of downtown Toledo?  One might wonder what else is still down there to be discovered?  If there are any folks who can offer some educated speculation as to the origin of this “face” or any other information about it,  please share them with us.  My search efforts to excavate more about information regarding the “face” have turned up nothing specific, but other stories regarding carvings found in other areas of the country.

In fact, the discovery of human effigy artifacts from the “mounds” in Ohio and other Midwest sites in Illinois and the Mississippi Valley are well established, but Toledo was not known for an abundance of such mound building activity, although, there were, as I have read, some small “mounds” discovered in the downtown area near the river upon arrival of the first pioneers to the area. So how did this carving get to Toledo. It was offered by some that it could have been transported here centuries ago from another area and left with those ancients living on the Maumee River.

When looking at the photo of this particular “stone face” at the Dixon Inn, it does not resemble the others I have seen, but looks more “finished” or finely sculpted. Thus, some shades of skepticism darken my door of belief. What do you think?  Where would it have come from? How did it get to Toledo, and what ever happened to it?  I have found from a newspaper reference that it was part of the Dixon collection that was auctioned at the Dixon Inn around 1925 after the owner died.

The Great Stone Face of Toledo seems to have disappeared in the past century, leaving me to wonder whether the carving was really the product of someone perpetrating a hoax and merely had been the handiwork of a con artist or someone with a sense of history and humor.  That is certainly possible and let’s face it, the Dixon Inn was not exactly the Smithsonian.  Despite the questions and the doubts, Dr. Noble seemed convinced of its historic gravity and message  when he penned his poem in 1920, about Toledo’s Great Stone Face.

If the veil of mystery,

were rent so I could see,

I could talk to the Great Stone Face,

and it could talk to me.

To tell me of the ages past,

of all the great unknown–

and about the Master Hand

that made it in the stone,

And of the mighty ruler,

in whose image it was made,

How it t’was worshiped as a god,

through many a decade.

How before some temple door,

t’was strewn with flowers and kisses

It saw the strife of human life,

And heard its howls and Hisses;

Then watched earth drink up the blood,

of men of might and brains

It saw the traitors slay their kings

To grasp the ruler’s reins

 

For centuries this face held sway,

above some sacred mound,

until a conquering army came,

and dragged it to the ground.

Its friends, by night, had stole away

And brought it over land,

with stealth and pride,

they buried it beneath the Maumee’s sand.

Then all the history of its past

Was plunged into the dark,

No doubt t’was safely hidden there

when Noah built his ark.

 

A modern city rose Above its resting place;

Men who delved into the ground

Came to this wondrous face.

They brought it once more to light,

where the curious could gaze,

and ponder over its handiwork of men of other days.

Perhaps a thousand years from now,

when this fair city’s gone,

Art and Science once more lost,

as time keeps marching on,

and as other cities rise again,

this stone face will be found,

To prove that the greatest of all men

Now sleep beneath the ground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First American Air Hijack Attempt Happened in Ohio

According to some “official” sources the first air hijacking attempt on American soil happened on July 31, 1961 when pipeline worker Bruce Britt, Sr., boarded and attempted to commandeer a Pacific Airlines flight at the Chico Municipal Airport, in Chico, California, intending to return to his home in Smackover, Arkansas. The hijacking attempt failed, but Britt did shoot two airline employees.

But this reporter has uncovered an even earlier attempt at an airline hijacking..and it took place in Ohio and ended with tragic results.  The year was 1954, 62 years ago this week on July the 6th when a large framed 15-year-old boy, wearing a leather coast denim jeans boarded an American Airlines plane at Cleveland Hopkins airport, waving a pistol and demanded that the pilot fly the plane to Mexico.  The pilot, however, reached into high flight bag and withdrew a .38 caliber handgun and shot the young teen twice, once in the hip and once in the chest. He died about an hour later at the hospital. There were 53 passengers on board the DC-6, and they were largely unaware of what had happened until the ambulance took the boy’s body out on a stretcher. That young man was identified as Ray Kuchenmeister, a 280 pound, six-foot tall teen  who his mother said was bitter because he was too big to be considered a boy and too young to be considered a man.  His 12-year-old brother, Donald, who was outside the plane when the shooting happened said he and his brother had run away from their run down old home in suburban Parma and  just wanted to go out West and “get work as cowboys”.  The pilot, Captain William Bonnell said later, “What was I supposed to do? I had a maniac on the plane with a gun.”  The gun that the young man brandished however was later revealed to be broken and empty. The boy’s mother said it was an old broken gun that been around the house for years and she thought it had been thrown out.

The Toledo to Chicago Canal. A Dream Never Dug.

Toledo’s past and future could have changed dramatically.

Once upon a time in America, some dreamers and visionaries had a plan. A plan that would have dramatically changed Toledo’s destiny.   Be it for the better or for the worse may be a tough call in hindsight, but certainly our history of our city would have been profoundly rewritten had this ever become a reality.

The plan was pretty simple.  To build a major shipping canal from Toledo to Chicago.  Unlike the Miami-Erie-Wabash canal system that was created in the 1840’s than ran parallel to the Maumee River, and laced itself through the Midwest, this one would have actually used much of the river itself as the canal channel and would have run across the landscape of Northern Indiana or southern Michigan.  It would have been large enough to have allowed the passage of larger ships, hauling massive cargoes to back and forth between Toledo and Chicago. To those who advocated this dream, it was a no-brainer. The prevailing school of of thought was to eliminate the long journey for the thousands of Great Lakes cargo ships that had to travel around the state of Michigan, via the Detroit River, Lake Huron, the tricky Straights of Mackinaw, and southward down Lake Michigan to if they wanted to reach Chicago. With a navigable shortcut across Ohio and Indiana, more than 400 miles and a three to five days could be cut from the travel time, thus a savings of of time and money. Toledo, geographically, would have become the gateway to the West..and the busiest port on the Great Lakes.

It should be noted that this canal plan was not just some idle talk from wild-eyed dreamers without resource or reason. It had been a topic of serious merit for decades in the 19th Century, and by 1908, the plan had the eyes and ears of Congress and the Congressional Committee on Rail and Waterways was strongly recommending that the shipping canal become a reality. In that committee’s report to congress in 1908, it said that such a Toledo to Chicago Canal, would..

“…open a waterway, which is certain to control freight rates between Chicago and Buffalo. It would occupy a territory that is populated by one fourth of the people of the United States and would be a connecting link by shortening the waterway from Toledo to Chicago by 400 miles.”

The committee also believed that such a major shipping channel would open the door for revival of the canal system through the Midwest and more and larger shipping channels could be built between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. It was also the aim of many promoters to use these canals to compete with the railroad roads and keep their rates competitive.

Had this canal actually come to fruition, it would not stretch anyone imagination to think that Toledo could have easily rivaled Chicago, or Detroit, for size and economic power on the Great Lakes and the Midwest. Other towns along the route, may have actually had their futures changed, as they became “seaport” communities in the middle of a largely agricultural region. The 1908 committee also predicted.

“ ……would give the impetus for the erection of large factories and a great diversity of enterprises, making it possible to get the raw materials along the waterway, making is possible for the purpose of manufacture at lowest possible costs”

The report goes on to estimate the cost  of construction at about 100 million dollars, and that water generating stations could be built along its path capable of  generating as much a 16 million dollars a year in power. More than enough to pay down the debt and the interest.

Scene from early canal days in Toledo.

As mentioned before, this idea of the Lake Erie to Lake Michigan canal was hardly new in 1908. The Erie Canal through New York State many decades before had ignited the fires of imagination around the country as others wonder if they too could pull off such an engineering feat.  In 1837, some ambitious Michiganders got the canal fever and even started digging a big ditch from Clinton township north of Detroit that was to extend Westward to Lake Michigan. By 1840, however, with only 16 miles complete and deeply in debt, the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal became a footnote in history.  But hope springs eternal and in 1857, the New York legislature voted to grant a charter to company to explore and pursue the concept again. The newspapers in both Buffalo and Detroit were especially warm to the idea, as these new plans would have placed the Eastern portal of the canal between Monroe and Toledo, routing most of the channel through southern Michigan. The Buffalo Advertiser even speculated on the dimensions of such a ditch, allowing that it could be 100 feet wide, 12 feet deep and 160 miles long. They also addressed the elevation change between the lakes, by proposing at least “two locks” that could lift the boats. The Buffalo newspaper estimated the cost of construction at $65,000 a mile, or about $12 million for construction overall in 1857. But while Buffalo, Detroit and Toledo talked in glowing terms of such a project, in Chicago, not so much. The editors at the Chicago Tribune were not impressed.  Clearly not in favor of such a plan, they railed against it, and called the idea “impractical” while challenging the estimates of construction costs, the potential savings to shipping companies, and also questioned whether there was ample water supply to fill such a canal.

Six decades later, in 1917, as the U.S. was distracted with the war in Europe, the Army Corps of Engineers also did another study and they would would essentially come to the same conclusion as the Chicago Tribune did in 1857. Given the costs and time required to build it, they said, and because such a canal would not be able to accommodate large ships, but only smaller packet barges, they wrote:     ”It is not advisable to undertake the construction of an artificial waterway between Lake Erie and Lake Michigan.”  The Corps even recommended that the government not waste any more money and put a halt to more studies.

Dead in the water?

Not quite.

The Toledo to Chicago canal idea rose again from dormancy the in the 1920’s. Some of the proponents once more began to talk optimistically about a Toledo to Chicago shipping highway. One of those voices was that of former Iowa Governor, William Harding, (not to be confused with Ohio Governor Warren Harding). When Iowa’s Harding was President of the Great Lakes -Seaway Waterway Initiative in 1923, he visited Defiance Ohio on the Maumee. There he told a gathered audience that he believed the Maumee River to Chicago water link would someday become a reality. It was his belief that such a project would come about only after the St. Lawrence Seaway project was complete and the shipping industry would demand it within a few years. He even predicated that Toledo would be the greatest shipping port in the nation and a docking facility along the Maumee might well extend “all the way to Defiance”. Well, Mr. Harding’s hyperbole was perhaps as hyper as his crystal ball was cracked. The Seaway linkage to the Great Lakes did not open for another 35 years, not until 1958. Five decades later, still no canal.   Albeit, over the years, plenty of talk about one. During the WW Two era,  it crept back into the headlines again  as the Army Corps re-considered it with “national defense” as a justification.  This plan did gain some traction and even won the approval of President Roosevelt just weeks before his death. But in the summer of 1945, as hearings were held and the war drew to a close, the grand canal plan was again ditched as unfeasible and too expensive. But big dreams don’t die quickly. They always linger of the deathbed of possibility for a long time. As late as 1968, hearings were underway to consider, a new network of canals and locks that would have linked Toledo and Chicago with other cities in Indiana and the Ohio River. A 450 mile system, requiring dozens of locks, and costing over a billion dollars that was primarily designed to improve the economies of rural Indiana. By then, however, the concept of the “big ditch” was viewed by many corners of the community as a big “folly”. Opposition from conservation groups, an early environmentalists was loud and hard to ignore. No one seemed to be in favor of the proposal and so this too, like the first big canal dig in Michigan of 1838, was to be filled in and forgotten. Forever?  Who know where and when future dreams arise?

Below the “Dead Line”: Toledo’s Notorious Tenderloin

 

Once upon a time in Toledo, there was a place called the “Tenderloin”.  A segregated area of businesses and homes near downtown, where life was lived on the wild side. A place where one could buy most anything to satisfy the cravings of flesh. If you wanted it, it was probably for sale. It was its own city in a way, which operated independently of the laws that governed morals and vice in the city, and it was a magnet for those who sought to live their lives on the tattered hems of society, if only for a few hours a week.  This was the Toledo Tenderloin. It is gone now.  The only remaining evidence of its existence are the stories and what was committed to print.

History researcher, Doug Tracy has spent a considerable amount of time tracking those old stories of the “district”, and what took pace there.  Part of his interest was personal, in that his great grandfather, Toledo Police Detective Lewis B. Tracy, was the police officer in charge of keeping peace in the Tenderloin. Maintaining the fragile balance of what was “allowed” and where to draw the lines of propriety in a neighborhood where little was considered “improper”.

 

The following account of the Tenderloin are excerpts from Doug Tracy’s research:

Toledo in 1918 was a war-weary, fast-growing and extremely busy Great Lakes port city, with a population that was rapidly approaching a quarter of a million people. World War 1 was reaching its apex overseas; horses and ‘machines‘, i.e., cars, still mingled in the streets of the city; Victorian attitudes still lingered from an earlier period, while the passage of the 18^th and 19^th amendments (prohibition and women’s right to vote) was just around the corner. The newspapers of the day were filled with titillating stories about ‘cops and robbers’, ‘birdmen’ (aviators), ‘yeggs’ (safe-blowers), ‘blind tigers’ (speakeasies), ‘slackers’ (draft-dodgers) and, of course, the war overseas. It was also a time when brothel Madam Nellie Schwinn was conducting business at her ‘resort’ on Lafayette street in the city’s thriving red-light district, also known as the Tenderloin, an area just a few blocks from downtown core, full of rooming houses, saloons, gambling halls and questionable characters. Toledo police, including Detective Captain Lewis B. Tracy, routinely patrolled the area, doing their best to maintain some semblance of order, but were simply unable to completely purge the streets of the grifters, pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes and drug users who preyed on the frequenters of the district.

Beneath the Dead Line

The Tenderloin District covered a number of city blocks in the vicinity of Lafayette and Washington streets and Swan Creek – near the area now occupied by Fifth-Third Field, home of the Toledo Mud Hens.  There were an estimated 35 houses of ill-repute, not to mention many more saloons, pool halls, gambling joints, wine rooms and seedy rooming houses.

Newspapers of the day paint a picture of the Tenderloin District as an area “beneath the dead line” where thieves, gamblers, grafters, sporting women, degenerates and drunks ran free. The police department did its best to control things, but could not keep up and often looked the other way. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s there had been many efforts by Toledo’s leaders to clean up the area, but none were entirely successful.

In late 1915, Detective Tracy presented to the citizenry new regulations and rules that were drafted by the police department to improve conditions for “dance hall proprietors and persons engaged in immoral business”.  The new rules included prohibition of dance music from Saturday midnight until Monday morning, outlawing outsiders from bringing liquor for ‘inmates’ into resorts, a three-times-per-year limitation on changes of residency of ‘immoral women’, bi-weekly medical inspections of the inmates, establishment of a registration system that included photographing ‘outcast women’ for a ‘rogues gallery’, and a general war on men profiting from inmates.

Toledo at the time was truly a melting pot of nationalities and cultures, situated at the geographical crossroads that drew Great Lakes sailors and ‘underworld’ figures moving between Detroit and Cleveland.  The criminal subculture in Toledo was a major law enforcement, as well as moral, problem for upstanding Toledoans.  The various clean-up campaigns by city officials to rid the city of immoral behavior throughout the post-Civil War and Victorian eras had been, at best, only marginally successful.
In early 1918, the War Department issued clear directives to America’s cities to take measures to protect draft-age young men from social diseases as well as from crime.  The fervor of patriotism was never higher and Toledo, following the lead of many other cities, was quick to seize upon this opportunity provided by the War Department to draft local laws and organize campaigns to drive the ‘immorals’ from their city as part of their contribution to the war effort.  Toledo’s clean-up campaign picked up steam in the spring of 1918, with near unanimous support of the public.  City Council wasted no time passing the statutes necessary to support the campaign.  The Mayor and Police Chief developed new guidelines for the officers on the street and set May 1, 1918, as the date that all of the perpetrators of immoral activity in the Tenderloin would leave town, or face lengthy jail-time and fines.  With the deadline set, public excitement escalated as city officials worked with civic groups, health professionals and church leaders to devise a plan for an orderly eviction from the Tenderloin.  There was much speculation by the public as to what would be the outcome of this campaign.

The Evoy Saloon at St. Clair and Lafayette

It was estimated that there would be approximately 1,365 ladies who faced expulsion from the area and there was great concern about what would become of them and their scandalous lifestyles.  Community and religious groups, including the Florence Crittenton Home for Girls, offered to help the affected Tenderloin residents change their evil ways by finding legitimate jobs for those who wished to make an honest living and try to return to a virtuous life.  Reverend T. B. Frizelle of the First Baptist Church said in his Sunday sermon, 3/24/1918, “The Florence Crittenton home is the only organized body fitted to cope with the vice-closing problem in Toledo . . . we must be in a position to save those who will avail themselves of the opportunity to make a new start. ”
The April 3, 1918, edition of the Toledo Blade reported that on April 29, 1918, The National Committee of the Florence Crittenton Home for Girls planned to march 200 women residents of the Tenderloin through downtown streets and even “invade the neighborhoods of preachers and reformers who have condemned them.  ‘If you don’t find us a place in which to work and sleep there’s nothing for us but the river,’ the refugees will cry.  ‘Will you be responsible for our souls?’”
Health professionals made plans to open clinics and hospitals in the vice area to test and treat the afflicted.  Venereal disease was the primary concern, but scarlet fever, diphtheria and morphine addiction were also major concerns, as was influenza, which was just beginning to cause epidemic numbers of deaths throughout the country, as well as around the world.  In neighboring cities and villages there was particular concern that eviction of Toledo’s worst meant that the criminal element would simply migrate to other neighborhoods or surrounding towns and set up shop there.

Saloon at Washington and Superior

Some of the proprietors of the older established resorts had no intention of leaving Toledo. Instead, they made plans to close their resort businesses and convert them to strictly stag rooming houses, i.e., no women allowed. The Toledo Blade reported that one proprietor of one resort at Superior and Lafayette streets (where the Spaghetti Warehouse is now located) did not want to abandon her house because it was “. . . said to have between $10,000 and $15,000 worth of mahogany and Circassian walnut furniture, Brussels carpets, costly draperies, masterpieces in oil paintings and classic statuary.”  Apparently not all resorts were shabby establishments.

While all of this was going on, Detective Captain Lewis B. Tracy diligently policed his beat – the Tenderloin district. More specifically, Detective Tracy’s job was to register, photograph and monitor the ‘inmates’ of the houses of ill-fame. He was so well-known and respected by the ladies of the area that many called him ‘Papa’, a nick-name that did not go over too well with some Toledo citizens who felt it was improper for an officer of the law to be so cozy with the unfortunates in the segregated district. The Toledo Blade editorialized that, “While it is a distinction of which he never boasts and one of which he is not especially proud, Captain of Detectives Lewis Tracy probably knows by face and name more women of To­ledo’s underworld than any man liv­ing.”

Nonetheless, as the Tenderloin shutdown date neared, Detective Tracy did his best to help out the ladies whenever he could. In a letter to the editor of a local newspaper citing concerns about unsanitary conditions in the Lagrange Street Station jail, one of the arrested ladies cited Detective Tracy and his efforts to help the ‘unfortunates’

 

Two hundred girls from Toledo’s tenderloin have declared voluntarily that they want to “go straight.”

Detective Captain Lewis B. Tracy, in charge of registration of immoral women, said Monday that since Mayor Schreiber’s order to resort keepers that they must close by May 1, on request of the federal government, more than 200 girls have come to him and asked for employment. Tracy says these girls tell him they desire to quit the old life and enter legitimate employment as domestics, clerks – any honorable work to which they may adapt themselves.

Two orphans, 20 and 21, respectively; who have been living immorally one year, came to Capt. Tracy Monday morning from a house on South Erie street. Both are white girls. One said: “I’m tired of this sort of thing, and I’d do anything to get a chance to live right. The Christian people have said in the papers they are willing to help us. Now is their chance.  Her companion’s story was almost identical, and Capt. Tracy promised to do what he can for them.

As the May 1^st deadline approached, activity in the vice zone increased dramatically, as much for the residents as for the curious citizenry. The Tenderloin became the center of attention and was visited by hundreds, if not thousands, of curious sight-seers. Disturbances were numerous. The continuous clang of police automobile gongs could be heard from early Saturday night until Sunday morning. Long lines of automobiles filled the streets. Sidewalks were almost impassable, due to density of the curious. So heavy was travel police were forced to station men on corners to act as traffic guides.  The Tenderloin was busier than ever and the Toledo Times headlined its story on the activity as: Slumming Open Doors of Sin:

In the last hours of their existence, the lights in Toledo’s vice grottos shed a malevolent glow. The ghosts of myriad nights of ribaldry were abroad, patrolling for the last time the precincts where in times past they had appeared as living, flaunting things.

Electric bulbs, once radiant, seemed to shimmer with a vixen-like glow, as the tapers of death, casting their last sad shadows over the figure of a corpse.

Click to Enlarge

They were the sepulchers of things which rest in the traditions of the underworld – fortunes won and lost, murders committed and forgotten, tragedies gossiped over and lost in the swirl of events “below the dead line.”  

By midnight of Tuesday, May 1^st, 35 resorts were closed and dark.  A Toledo News-Bee writer poignantly and poetically painted a picture of the final night of the vice zone:

.”...Never before was the tenderloin utterly crushed out, although there had been minor restrictions imposed on it from time to time. The women of the underworld accepted the order as a matter of fact. Their exodus began several weeks ago, but not all of the resorts were abandoned before the ban became effective. Many sight-seers collected during the last hours on Tuesday night in such places as were still open. There was a little feverish revelry but the district in general was quiet.No better night could have been chosen for the passing of the tenderloin. Rain swept the streets where the refuse which had accompanied the moving-out of some of the places during the day, was still scattered. Thru the cold mist, the lights of passing autos made yellow halos and the electric globes above the doorways of the houses blinked in a sinister manner. A few men loitered along sheltering walls. Cats, abandoned in the Tuesday exodus of the women, slunk thru the rain. Houses, where a few nights before there had been music and laughter, were silent. By midnight the lights above the doors of the houses had all gone out. Behind drawn blinds even the lamps were darkened. Notorious resorts were deserted and lowered heavily over the dismal streets.

The segregated district had passed.”

In the coming months after the closing, the story of the Toledo Tenderloin took a new twist. Ironically, a couple of the most famous houses of ill repute in the district were leased by the city and were converted into a Toledo Municipal Hospital for the destitute and poor.  The hospital that would accommodate 60 to 100 patients to treat blood disease cases, diphtheria, venereal diseases, influenza and scarlet fever. The neighborhood would change dramatically over the decades, but the people who inhabited the Tenderloin may not have changed so readily. Many of the ladies and men either moved to different parts of the city to ply their trade, or moved out of town.  In July of 1918, Detective Captain Lewis B. Tracy snagged 4 women in a raid on Spielbusch avenue and delivered them to the new hospital to be examined. They were the first patients to be examined.  In Maumee, a disorderly house began operating there and a late night raid netted the arrests of over 40 women.  And a few weeks later, Toledo Police raided two roadhouses near  Bay View Park in North Toledo, arresting nearly 100 men and women. The Toledo Blade reported on June 26th of 1918 that, “Toledo’s resort district, abolished May at government instigation, has re-established itself at Point Place, popular suburb.” Not surprisingly, Point Place was outside the jurisdiction of the Toledo Police Department and just across the border from dry Michigan. It was estimated that there were at least 100 former tenderloin resort inmates operating in Point Place, in the lower end of the Ten Mile Creek summer home colony. “There the girls disport themselves at night in front of the houses, while electric pianos carry on a discordant serenade. Automobile parties are the principal frequenters of the district. One street in the lower end of the settlement has been practically taken over by resorts, police officials say. Almost every house on both sides of the street is occupied by inmates of the old Toledo tenderloin and, the police say, practically every house is selling liquor.”

It became obvious, very quickly, that closing the Tenderloin had not solved the problems of disease, alcoholism and moral bankruptcy. Those social issues just moved to new neighborhoods and would continue to flourish.  Forced to uproot and relocate when public pressure prompted politicians and police to “crackdown” on the visible evidence of such behavior on the streets. The closing of the “district” also  provided a lesson that is still often ignored today,  that it is much easier to move people,  than to move what is inside of them.

In late May of 1918, the federal government sent a doctor to Toledo to assess our city’s health situation and to speak to assemblies of young women about the dangers of social diseases. In one speech she noted, “From a health viewpoint, nothing much has yet been accomplished by the abolition of Toledo’s vice district. Morally, it was a step in the right direction. The trouble with segregation is that segregation does not segregate. It is the women and children who reap the harvest of the wild oats sowing. The best and ultimate solution of the problem will be an insistence by the women of the country upon a single standard of morals. As long as the women permit a double standard of morals vice will flourish.”

 

My hearty  thanks to researcher and writer Doug Tracy, whose passion for exploring Toledo’s past continues to help promote a better understanding of where we have been as a city and where we are today. Doug is also researching the tenderloin’s notorious Madame, Nellie Schwinn. If you have any information about her, or where she fled  after she left Toledo, please contact us here at Toledo Gazette. We’ll be in touch.

The Historian’s Notebook

 

In the course of local history research and the incessant reading of old newspapers, I frequently come across little odds and ends that don’t always lend themselves to stories of greater depth, but are  at least amusing, or interesting or thought-provoking.  I thought it might be best to share some of these little gems with Toledo Gazette readers.

Toledo Alderman Visits The Tenderloin

Here’s one I haven’t verified yet, but a story that made the wire services in 1899 and carried in several newspapers claimed than a Toledo City alderman, who was visiting New York City made a stop in that’s town’s notorious vice-district, the Tenderloin and stopped by the police station to see if the cops would show him around. He said” I thought I’d drop by a see the Tenderloin so I can tell the boys at home all about it.” The cops said he was a small man in a fur cap, wore gold-rimmed spectacles, had brown whiskers and smoked big cigars and even gave the sergeant his card, but the paper didn’t identify him. When they police mentioned they had a murder earlier in the evening, the Toledo alderman said “He would have kinder liked to have seen it”. It is said he spent the rest of the evening at a resort(brothel) in the Tenderloin, passing out badges from Toledo with a picture of a frog on them promoting Toledo as the Ohio Centennial City for 1902.

Bovine Detour

During Christmas season of 1929, the Churchill family from Lima was headed to Toledo during a blizzard. This was long before I-75, so the popular route was Dixie Highway and somewhere near Van Buren, Mr. Churchill heard and felt something hit the front of his car…and the car kept going, but slowed considerably by the weight of something at the front of his car. He couldn’t see it because of the blowing snow….but stopped “a few rods” down the road and discovered a bull impaled by its horns into the radiator of the car.

 

The Human Bicycle

I never have been able to find out what became of two young men, William Robb and Don Taylor, of Toledo, who in 1934 rigged up a “wheelbarrow” like contraption and called themselves the “human bicycle”. It was basically composed of a bicycle wheel…and a saddle like seat into which one man is suspended face down in a stretched out position, while grasping the axle of the front wheel, while the other fellow grabs his ankles and pushes. They set out July 17^th in New York City, made it back to Toledo by August 22.    They were to set out again for Los Angeles in the next few days. Always wondered if they made it. I’ve scanned numerous subsequent editions of the News bee but never found a follow-up story about their exploits.

 

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

The August 7^th, 1927 News Bee holds the story of one – Johnny Mack of Toledo. He had just been set free for the Ohio Penitentiary after serving five years for a crime he didn’t commit.   Mack, it seems,  had been charged and convicted of a bread truck payroll robbery in Toledo in 1922. Said he couldn’t believe he was convicted and sent to prison because he was innocent and had nothing to do with it. His pleas to the police and the courts were ignored. Eventually though, after the trial, more evidence did come to light that Mack was telling the truth. Even the judge started having his doubts and ordered investigators to look into it. Finally a confession from the real bandit came forth, and Mack was set free, at the age of 40, in poor health and a prison record. He said he harbors no resentment.

Treasure Hunt at Duby’s Knob

There’s always something seductive about stories of buried treasure and Toledo has a few of them. One of them I found in a 1911 News Bee article about a quest for as much as $37,000 at Duby’s Knob near Point Place. Somewhere in the vicinity of today’s intersection of Summit and Manhattan.  The front page article reveals the tale of a a party of men digging to find an elusive long-lost “treasure” that was reportedly buried not far from the Maumee River banks in 1862. Someone had placed a spike in an elm tree to mark the site and men had been looking for it for many years.  The leader of this new crop of prospectors was Benjamin Heller who had invented a “detector” device and was using it to locate the largess of gold coins in the rear of Duby’s Saloon at 3727 Summit.  At nine feet down into the clay, the men had yet to find anything and had drawn little more than lots of curious and dubious spectators. As written in the News Bee.

“There wasn’t a very big crowd at first but the residents of the Bayshore district soon got wind of what was going on and began to edge over back of Duby’s place. Mother Hubbarded women, buxom and happy, left their washboards and clothes and came over to have a peek at the constantly growing hole in the ground. “H’m they’d better be home splitting wood, mused one, they’d be getting a heap more.” And old bay fisherman spat complacently at the spike in the elm tree and observed, “Them pesky critters here agin – last fall they dug this marsh over, didn’t get nothing. Knew they wouldn’t.”

It was reported that George Chase owned the property and gave the men permission to look for the gold coins. Apparently, though, they were never found and who knows..may still be out there.

 

One Day – Three Stories in Toledo

Ever wonder how the city fathers decided on the Erie Street site to build the Safety Building which was not just a police headquarters but was the city hall site for decades. I found an article in an old News Bee explaining that the land was called the “Paine Estate” and was decided in March of 1905 that this block bounded by Erie, Jackson, Beech and Ontario would become the site for the new city hall.  Not sure why it took another 20 years before it was built.

The same March 1905 issue of the News Bee also informed Toledo readers that the city was going to send state pie inspectors out to area restaurants to determine if the pies were safe to eat. A city chemist said he believes that too many Toledo restaurants are using “aniline” dyes to color the fruit in the pies and the compound is poisonous.

This particular issue of the New Bee was filled with numerous little gems, including one that speaks of a city problem that we’d love to have today. In 1905, the city of Toledo had more money on hand than it could legally deposit into the banks. The city coffers were flush with well over 1.5 million dollars and the laws at the time had limits as to how much the city could deposit into a local bank. The city was forced to use “national” banks to store its cash. Nice problem.

 

Married Women Teachers to be Fired

If you ever wonder why teachers have unions, might want to consider this story. In April of 1932, as the area was being squeezed by the grip of the depression, Maumee school board voted to fire all of the married teachers whose husbands had jobs. Only single female teachers or those were married and were the sole support of their family would be offered contracts for the next school year.

 

Where is the Historic Elm at UT

Folks at the University of Toledo may want to look around campus and find a piece of history. Washington Elm. On April 19^th, 1932, a descendant of the famous “Washington Elm” was planted on the campus at U.T. To honor the 200^th anniversary of George Washington’s birthday. The Washington Elm, at Cambridge Massachusetts, was reputed for years is to have been the place where Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775. The story has been debunked, but the Elm stood until 1925, and many limbs and branches were taken from it to make new trees, one of them presumably, if still on the UT campus, would be 82 years old.

 

Early Bulletproof Vest for Toledo Cops

Bullet proof vests have been around for awhile, but Toledo Police may have had some of the first ones. News Bee article from November of 1921 shows Toledo inventor Albert Schwartz wearing a an early vest made of armor-plated steel which is being tested by Toledo Police. It looks like a grocer’s apron, made of canvas and layers of Norwegian steel. The city had purchased some samples and were trying to find volunteers who would allow themselves to be shot with .45 caliber guns. If they couldn’t find any “volunteers”, they planned to use big hunks of beef.

 

Toledo’s Gems Include A Diamond in the Rough

Toledo has given the nation many military heroes through the years who are fondly remembered and honored. One Toledo man, though, who was a national legend as a “fightin” man may not come readily mind with other local heroes.  His name: “Lou Diamond”.  An East Toledo kid who used to hunt rabbits near the Fire Station #13 on Front Street with a sling shot and would later employ that prowess as a hunter to fight in not only the battlefields of World War I, but also those of World War Two.  He was known as the “fightinest Marine on Guadalcanal” and it was his battlefield skills  that are said to have helped win several key struggles in the Pacific against Japanese troops. Born Leland Diamond, he was from French Canadian stock and was described as a no-nonsense, tough-as-nails, hard-as-steel leatherneck. He rose to the rank of Master Gunnery Sergeant and was highly decorated from duty in both wars. Diamond was always eager to be in the center of the action and even at 53 years of age, he said he was not ready to retire, but he contracted malaria in the Pacific, and told a Toledo reporter in 1943 while on a visit home, “The“Japs” couldn’t get me,  it took a mosquito to do it.”  He suffered from the malaria for the rest of his life, which was only a matter of years. After World War two he returned to Toledo in 1945 and died in 1951 at the age of 61.  He is buried in Sylvania and, yes, in case you are wondering, the actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who plays in the TV drama “Longmire” is named for this Toledo war hero.