I often reference the burden that carrying your family history entails. I usually dwell on the mental load, how it requires — and can drain — your time and energy and spirit. But other times, I’m talking about an actual, physical burden.
I’m talking about Gertrude’s window.
This stained-glass window currently lives in my dining room. I haven’t found a better place for it. I have somewhere in mind, but first, a little history.
Continue reading “Gertrude’s Window”
Feb. 16, 1921; Santa Barbara, Calif.
Caroline Townsend Comstock had been married in a bohemian ceremony, at dawn, on the top of a mountain. Her husband designed bookplates and was an expert lepidopterist. They began their married life in an artists’ colony. She knew about choosing a life outside the mainstream. And she also recognized that this was beyond even that.
“I knew something like this would happen,” she said with resignation.
Continue reading “Mother Love: The Townsends (Pt 2)”
February 1921; Chicago
One chill February afternoon in 1921, a call rang into the Englewood police station from a Greek restaurant on 63rd Street. Could they please come remove some patrons who wouldn’t leave?
Police arrived to find two reluctant customers: Ruth Townsend (61) and her daughter, Marian (26). The pair had just been evicted from their home a few blocks away, at 57th and Stony Island. It was cold outside. They came to this restaurant, where they’d eaten before, because they had nowhere to go and nothing to go with.
Accustomed to handling sympathetic hard-luck cases, the police took the now-homeless women to the Hackett Stevenson Memorial Lodging House, a women’s shelter on South Prairie Ave. They probably thought that was the end of it.
But a week later, on Valentine’s night, the police had reason to return — and they weren’t bringing valentines. The Townsends’ neighbors had watched their eviction take place, and had seen the furniture piled up in the backyard. They also noticed something that was missing from the scene. Rumors began to spread. Eventually one of the neighbors had approached the police to say: Ruth’s elderly mother was living with them. We haven’t seen her since last summer.
The cops wanted answers. Where was Ruth’s 93-year-old mother, Nancy Chamberlain?
Catch up with Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4
And just like that, she was gone.
Lady Bledzo failed to make her two court appearances on Nov. 7, 1927, and seemingly vanished. There were a few casual mentions in newspaper articles reminiscing about her ex-boyfriend, Yellow Kid Weil, but never again was in she in the news for herself, and never again under that name.
It was her curious name that drew me to this story in the first place, and its disappearance convinced me that I could never know her true ending. What I had seen of her life didn’t promise a good finish. I resigned myself to the idea that she probably died somewhere seedy, unknown and alone.
Continue reading “Unearthed: Lady Bledzo (Pt 5)”Catch up with Part 1; Part 2; Part 3
The summer of 1927 had been the peak of drama for Lady Bledzo. As part of her very public lawsuit against ex-fiance Darby Day, Jr., she had appeared in national newspapers. She garnered the support of sympathetic and powerful media. She had provided letters, photos of injuries, and compelling and dramatic testimony about abuse. Lady Bledzo had given it her all.
And yet it failed utterly.
Graveyard Snoop 
