Understanding Herma

 

Herma Wager around 1919

Herma was the fourteenth of fifteen children born to Robert and Harriet Wager of Ohio.

Just after the American Civil War ended, Rob, as he was called, left his childhood home in Parham, Canada. He traveled 500 miles along lakes Ontario and Erie to reach Toledo, Ohio. Then he pushed forty miles farther west to Stryker, a railroad town incorporated in 1855.  

Within a few years he met Harriet Justus of Defiance, Ohio, and they wed in 1869 when she was sixteen and he twenty-three. His older sister, Jen, who stayed in Canada, seems to have never recovered from Rob’s departure nor those of anyone she knew—whether to the blur of America or to heaven. 

In a series of small, black-edged letters, which arrived in black-edged envelopes addressed in her spidery script, Jen grieved for twenty years. The worst was Ma, in 1881:

 

I miss her every place I look, I can see something to remind me of her something that she has made or fixed and it seems almost more than I can bear, I am alone so much, too, Pa and Hiram are in at mealtimes and evenings and the rest of the time I am alone. I think if I had someone to talk to and keep me from thinking it would not be so hard. 

One year later Pa, his eyes streaming with tears, took to his bed and never got out. Next to go were the pretty, young schoolmarm and the neighbors’ children. 

Thus there was always bad news from Jen except when she went overnight to Kingston and bought new trimmings to fix up an old dress.

It’s not that death didn’t follow Rob to Ohio.

Herma came along in 1896, more than a decade after her sisters Estella, Florence, and Luella, her brother Charles, and a baby boy who didn’t live long enough to be named, had passed.

By now the family had moved to Wauseon, where Rob no longer worked as a farm laborer but as a section foreman for a manufacturer of plumbing equipment.

In Wauseon the houses marched up and down the street, close together with picket fences between them and front porches where friends gathered. The turn of the century approached and the family felt happy. In 1900, when Harriet was forty-seven years old, she gave birth to her last child, George.

The Wager family in Wauseon, early twentieth century.
Herma sits to her mother's right and Bob stands, far left.

But the happiness fled. Rob died in 1901 and George died in 1902. He caught typhoid fever from his brother Clyde but Clyde recovered and George—dear baby, he was just starting to talk.

“Oh we miss him so much,” Harriet wrote to Jen, still brooding in Canada. She put on her own black costume and wore it for the rest of her life.   

Herma had never been a smiling kind of person but now, when the camera captured her out in the yard in a white voile dress, she looked distant and sad. Only the sight of her brother Robert, whom she adored, could cheer her.

Bob Wager dressed as a cowboy

Bob, as they called him, was Herma’s favorite among the Wager brothers: Warren, Sheldon, Foster, Clyde, Elwood, and Floyd. Three years older than Herma, Bob was her protector and comforter, her imp who became a handsome, responsible young man.

He left home in his late teens, moved to Cleveland and worked for the Willard Storage Battery Company, an early manufacturer of automobile ignition batteries. Around 1912, amid skyrocketing demand from car companies, Willard opened plants in Atlanta and Huntsville. Bob was assigned to the latter.

The U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, and three months later Bob enlisted in the Naval Aero Service. He trained at Pensacola, the nation’s sole naval air station, as a flier and mechanic.

R-6 Seaplane, Pensacola, 1917
(National Museum of the American Navy)

Aviation was still primitive. In the U.S., military officers planned to use planes for observational purposes rather than in combat. Of course, this view changed quickly when the generals got to Europe. Still, the U.S. never kept up with the allies’ aviation capabilities.

Bob arrived at the newly established U.S. Naval Air Station in Moutchic, France in December, and within six weeks he died of cerebrospinal meningitis. Many enlisted men were struck down by tuberculosis, pneumonia, and meningitis even before the influenza became a pandemic. Bob’s story is not unusual, perhaps only to the extent that he was the first Wauseon boy to die in the Great War. He is buried in France. 

In 1920 Herma married William Carroll Keenan, a veteran who went by “Cal” during that particular heyday of nicknames. They had two sons, Bill and Bob, both of whom recalled an impersonal, detached mother. They couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

When Bill and Bob grew up and married, their wives disliked Herma, too. The grandchildren found her visits uncomfortable. 

So what of Herma? No one has spoken of her for a half-century or more. There is little reason to tell her story to each new generation, to make sure her name and face are imprinted in the minds of her descendants.

Still she demands some understanding, my husband’s disagreeable grandmother. 

I think that Herma may have suffered from untreated post-partum depression. And she never recovered, even partway, from her brother Bob’s death nor that of little George who toddled around the farmhouse and probably was her charge.

Perhaps she saw Bob and George in the faces of her own sons but could not summon for them the same depth of feeling. It may be that everything that lived and laughed for Herma was back, way back before the twentieth century inflicted its blows.

 

Harriet Justus Wager died in 1918.
As Herma grew older, she came to resemble her mother.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2023/02/understanding-herma.html

Otto Luyties, Part 2

Patent, Otto G. Luyties

Otto Luyties’ younger brother, Henry, disappeared from New York City in September 1912. The men were ten years apart. Henry, who was deaf, worked at the Dabs Cigarette Company, which bought out their father’s wine and liquor importing business a few years after his death.

Otto contacted the police when Henry had been missing for ten days. He also hired a private detective. The police reported that Henry left his apartment with two suitcases and a pet Chinese yellow chow dog. He gave the dog to a friend and stepped into a taxi on Riverside Drive.

An orderly at St. Vincent’s Hospital said he saw a man who looked like Henry Luyties, seemingly deranged or drunk. A representative of the Kisko Chemical Corporation told Otto that it had received an order for face cream from someone named Henry Luyties who lived in Chicago.

Then came a report that Henry actually left the dog with a friend in Port Washington. The friend was Addison Mizner, a high-society architect who went on to greater fame and fortune designing resorts and mansions along the south Florida coast in the 1920s. After visiting Mizner, Henry strolled to the Port Washington train station with a man named Dodge. Henry was thinking about going to the Maine woods for a rest, Dodge told the police.

Four months later Henry turned up at a hotel in Denver. Otto told a reporter that the family had known where he was since October but had “not wanted any further publicity given to the case.” Otto’s explanation of what happened involved Pennsylvania Station, the Chicago Yacht Club, and much more.

“The whole thing was the erratic action of a man who was suffering from a nervous prostration and desired to get away temporarily from work,” Otto said. “In his state of mind he never looked at a New York newspaper and knew nothing of the stir his disappearance had caused.”  

Until the advent of Social Security, Americans could disappear easily without a trace.  Therefore the discovery of Henry was fortunate – although who knows if he wanted to be found? Either way, Otto managed the situation well despite his probable anger.

Meanwhile, Otto’s younger sister, Hilda Marie, struggled in her marriage.

In 1906, Hilda married Bernard H. Ridder, son of the publisher of the Staats-Zeitung. This paper was the largest German language daily newspaper in the United States. The marriage produced a son but proved to be a bad match. In 1914 Hilda filed for divorce.

Just around that time, Bernard met the woman who would become his second wife. She was Nellie J. Hickey, daughter of an Irish political boss from Mount Vernon, N.Y. Chaperoned by the wife of a Columbia history professor, Nellie attended a convention in Chicago sponsored by “Friends of Peace,” an organization that opposed American entry to World War I.

It’s easy to understand why U.S. citizens of German ancestry opposed a declaration of war against Germany. But many Americans of Irish ancestry also found repugnant the idea of the United States aligned with England. In fact, one reason why Congress voted down the League of Nations was fierce opposition from brilliant legislators like William Bourke Cockran who did not want England in the position of adjudicating international conflicts.

Back to Otto: in 1915, he charged Bernard H. Ridder and his father, Herman, with assault. They “struck and held him and inflicted bodily injuries upon him,” the action stated. Otto wanted $10,000 in damages. “In the first place, there was no assault,” Herman Ridder told a reporter. “In the second, I was not even present at a quarrel my son had with Luyties.”

Otto may have been attacking Ridder's pro-German views or defending Hilda's honor. One has to wonder, though, who assaulted whom.

Hilda was beautiful and vain and wore fake fingernails. Each morning she spent hours in front of a three-way mirror putting her long hair in pin curls. She raised chocolate poodles and entered them in shows.

Otto himself disappeared from the scene when he moved to Sharon Springs, a New York spa town that had seen better times. He died suddenly of appendicitis the day after Christmas in 1922, at age 41, and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx.

Otto Luyties' gravestone,
Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, NY

See post November 18, 2015.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/otto-part-2.html

Otto Luyties, Part 1

Otto Luyties & his machine on the cover of Scientific American, 1908

Upon starting graduate school in 1997, nearly two decades after finishing college, I rediscovered academic jargon. Among the variety of new words and terms, one in particular really cracked me up and still does. This is the concept of “unpacking” an event, a tradition, an idea, a person’s life – anything that you want to take apart in order to understand it.

I’d just as soon explicate, deconstruct or interpret. But there is one case where none of those words will do. That is when I am unpacking Otto Luyties.

This is how I imagine it. Otto is tall and thin but somehow he has been fitted into a large black trunk. When he jumps out, papers fly everywhere including his patent applications for a self-bolting locknut and a non-glaring dome-shaped frosted car headlight.

Then there’s his article, “A Phenomenon Involved in the Nebulosity around Nova Persei.” His 1904 letter to the editor of Outing, the Outdoor Magazine of Human Interest, inquiring whether there is “an authenticated instance on record of salmon leaping a fall of ten feet?”

Not to mention sheaves of blueprints for the helicopter he invented, and a copy of the New York Times story in which he insisted that Congress must appropriate no less than $9 million if New York City could expect to stave off a sea attack by the Kaiser’s navy. 

The son of a German immigrant named Henry Edward Godfrey Luyties, who co-founded a vastly successful wine and liquor emporium in Manhattan, Otto grew up in high society. Unfortunately in 1905, on the verge of becoming a candidate for membership at the New York Athletic Club, Henry E.G. died of pneumonia.

On his deathbed, at least Henry knew that Otto had graduated from MIT and launched a career as an engineer. Between 1900 and 1908, Otto developed an “airship scheme” to build a “helicopter which belongs properly in the class with the aeroplane” according to a newspaper report.  

Autogyros, cyclogyros, gyroplanes – Otto’s rotary helicopter with canvas blades was one of hundreds of flying machines invented by Americans and Europeans during the first decade of the 20th century. Otto once wrote that the helicopter had been neglected as a superior alternative to the airplane since Leonardo proposed it around 1500.

Working with Professor Robert Wood of the Physical Department at Johns Hopkins University, Otto showed off his invention on a marshy inlet called Sparrow’s Point near Baltimore in 1908. It does not appear that his design won the award for gasless machines that he sought, but the story did end up on the cover of Scientific American.

A few months before the demonstration, Otto challenged a champion swimmer to a fist fight at the Baltimore Athletic Club. “You have been talking about me,” Luyties told the athlete, Roy Nelson. “We will have to settle this matter and there is but one way to settle it and that is in the brutal American style. I must have satisfaction.” After receiving a stiff punch in his stomach, Otto dropped his guard and went down.

It’s puzzling that Otto would display such animosity. Of course, some of the best-known inventors such as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison had notoriously bad tempers.

Soon after the fight and the helicopter demonstration, Otto left Baltimore and moved back to Manhattan where he consulted on various engineering projects. As head of the family since his father’s death, Otto would now devote time to his disappearing younger brother and sister's declining marriage.

See subsequent post, 11/21/16.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/otto-luyties-part-1.html