IBID (10 page)

18.
“Seein’s how they got all us doughboys to wearing those sissy wrist watches, maybe Jonny won’t have such a tough time of it convincing us all to perfume our armpits.”
Luddy Greco’s Diary, 17 November1918, private collection of the Sherman Greco family.

19.
“Now that the war is over, I have big plans.”
Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 19 November 1918, private collection of Bloor’s grand-nephew Christopher Paton (hereafter referred to as AnB).

20.
Each took a different path.
Though the three trenchmates swore lifelong allegiance to one another, they would ultimately drift into orbits that rarely intersected. Reunited years later at the Bonus March on Washington D.C. in 1932 (q.v.), the three men came to realize how far they had grown apart, and beyond memory of their crowded hour at Château-Thierry, how little they had in common. Luddy Greco heartily embraced socialism and, later, communism. Fate sent Darrell Delehanty to the opposite political extreme. Both of these men found easy reason to exercise strong suspicion and mistrust of one another, and of Jonathan as well. In Greco’s mind, Jonathan had become capitalistic and bourgeois. Delehanty, who would become a rising star in the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, found Jonathan, conversely, far too progressive and much too embracing of the “intolerables”
for his taste.

Incidentally, I discovered a document that sheds a bright light on Jonathan’s strong distaste for the Klan: it is a transcript of an exchange between Jonathan and Imperial Kleagle Edward Y. Clarke, recorded from just outside the door to Clarke’s office by Jonathan’s friend and corporate lieutenant Harlan Davison. Jonathan had been directed to Clarke for purposes of making a sizeable contribution to the Roosevelt Memorial Association (for which Clarke served as officer) and quickly found himself the target of a high-pressure sales pitch for membership in the KKK. True to form, Jonathan quickly shored up his composure, then proceeded to have great fun at Clarke’s expense. Davison allegedly shared the transcript with Governor Al Smith during his 1928 run for the White House. Smith confessed to never having been so thoroughly entertained. Harlan Davison’s Diary, Harlan Davison Papers (hereafter referred to as HD).

1.
“Even a week in this ridiculous quarantine was too long.”
Jonathan’s Diary, JBP. Although Jonathan spent only eight days in the cave, a number of other Pettivillians passed a good part of the autumn and winter of 1918-19 there. True, none of these apocalypse-minded Arkansans caught the dreaded Spanish flu, a pandemic that was hitting this part of the state just as brutally as it was the rest of the world, but many of those who retreated into the cave did endure nasty bouts of scabies as well as the tyranny of Rance Chesler who installed himself as “Cavern King” and issued edicts from his stalagmite throne.

The bizarre tale of this fascinating chapter in Arkansas history is documented in Donna Krell’s self-published, yet finely written
Dwellers of the Night: the Story of the Flu Dodgers of 1918-1919
(1993). Curiously, though, Krell chose to engage her daughter Jacinth as illustrator. The stick figures offered by the seven-year-old do not enhance the text, and in some ways detract from it. By way of example, in
Chapter 7
, as Krell explores the regrets of some of the cavern-dwelling expatriates who articulate their longing for the salubrious light and warmth of the sun, Jacinth offers a group of stick men and women wearing large and irrelevant orange fright wigs, eating multicolored peas.

2.
Lucile took the pledge.
Lucile Moritz like many members of her generation took “the pledge” when she was very young. It went something like this:

Maura Hester,
Love Interminable or Till Death We Shall Not Part: Fifty Great Enduring Love Affairs
(Savannah: Bookmirth Publications, 1975), 47-52.

Her sister Beryl took the pledge as well, but broke nearly every clause on the same day, December 5, 1933—the day Prohibition ended—declaring at a St. Louis speakeasy turned “speakfreely”:

Bowie French,
How Dry I Am: an Oral History of Prohibition
(Cicero, Illinois: Luck Be a Lady Press, 1947), Preface.

3.
“Will You Marry Me?”
Jonathan Blashette to Lucile Moritz, 24 December 1918, carbon copy, JBP.

4.
“Yes, oh yes, I will be your wife, my Christmas angel!”
Lucile Moritz to JB, 26 December 1918, JBP.

5.
When Lucile did not show up, Aunt Evelyn became worried.
Evelyn Waldron was very close to the “good niece,” having served as surrogate mother to both Lucile and her scheming sister Beryl. According to Evelyn’s account of the harrowing week that followed, when Lucile failed to arrive at her “Gloucester, Massachusetts retreat” to receive pre-nuptial pampering and trousseau selection assistance from Evelyn, Jonathan was notified and put directly on the case. He immediately alerted law enforcement authorities all the way from New York City to Gloucester of Lucile’s disappearance. In the meantime, Evelyn fell into a morass of
fear and agitation and eventually had to be sedated. The initial anodyne was administered by a Madame Lourdes, a French holistic whose herbs did little more than make Evelyn “feel a little droopy.” A second physician was brought in and Evelyn was successfully tranquilized and received the horrendous news in a dull stupor. Interview with Paulette Poole (great niece of Lucile and Beryl Moritz), November 22, 2001.

6.
“Yes, we have a sticky Jane Doe.”
It was Jonathan who correctly identified the molasses-covered body. No one can say why Lucile ventured to Commercial Street in Boston’s North End while awaiting her train connection to Gloucester on that deadly day in January. But there she was, just as the Purity Distilling Company’s huge cast-iron tank burst open and the great swell of raw molasses—more than 2.5 million gallons of it—gushed forth, drowning twenty-one and turning the city of Boston into sickeningly sweet-smelling flypaper for weeks. Patrick Oldeman,
Tears for the Shawmut
(Boston: Old Corner Book Printer, 1995), 223-228.

7.
There was a lacuna in the Luna.
I discovered the full text of the expurgated material from the January 16, 1919, edition of the
Boston Luna
in the paper’s morgue.

Mention of the molasses might have been withdrawn but the recipe would certainly have suffered.

8.
Jonathan failed to see the black humor of it.
Nor would he permit anyone to speak of the freak accident that took his precious Lucile from him. It was not until Jonathan had reached his seventy-second year that he finally allowed himself to appreciate the cruel yet cosmically humorous irony of it all. Lucile had fought hard for prohibition. Within a year of her death, rum would become illegal. The Purity Distilling Company would no longer be allowed to
turn its vats of molasses into the demon potable. And yet, it was a well-recognized ingredient of rum itself that had taken a deadly-aimed preemptive shot at Lucile and her temperance crusade. As he approached the end of his own life Jonathan finally allowed himself a good laugh and a good cry and then drank a toast with his manservant Uriah to the memory of his beautiful Lucile. Appropriately, they drank rum. Maura Hester,
Love Interminable
, 55-58.

Postcript: I have no record that Beryl renewed her efforts to win Jonathan’s heart, damaged as it was by the loss of Lucile. I note that shortly before Lucile’s death Beryl had begun to see a man named Runstein who manufactured anatomically correct articulated mannequins and wooden darning eggs, and was apparently quite devoted to her.

9. “
Our broadcloth patterned dress shirts are over here and thank you for the compliment and no I do not have plans for lunch.”
So smitten was Jonathan with the perky little sales clerk in Men’s Furnishings at Rosenwasserberg’s—downtown Pettiville’s very first “full service department store”—that he made daily trips to the store to purchase all manner of men’s clothing and accessories, including at least two gold-filled dress sets which he neither needed nor could afford. It therefore came as a blow to Jonathan to learn of Tulip’s sudden marriage to Ambless dental student Newbold Osbert. The news may have precipitated his hasty move to New York City a short time later. The cold shoulder he received from his forsaken former employers Izzy and Moe didn’t help. Jonathan’s Diary, 3 November1919.

10.
“The bad news of the week is that Tulip and I will no longer be dating.”
Ibid., December 10, 1919. The good news was that Ford had just coming out with automatic starters for its model T’s.

11.
“She left me something to remember her by.”
When Jonathan made his permanent move to New York City in early 1920, he carried the poem with him. As it disintegrated with time and wear, he admitted that simply touching the paper-dust remnant at the bottom of his pocket would conjure up memory of “that pretty little pixie” Tulip McTigue. The text of the poem follows.