Buffalo, Forest Lawn, Part 3: Shirley Chisholm and Edward Streeter

Buffalo, Forest Lawn, Part 3: Shirley Chisholm and Edward Streeter

Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery was founded by lawyer and businessman Charles Ezra Clark in 1849, the year that he was elected to congress as a Whig, although he himself is buried in Brookside Cemetery in Watertown. To the list of famous interments in “Buffalo, Forest Lawn” Parts 1 and 2, I would add Dr. Frederick Cook (1865-1940), reputed discoverer of the North Pole; William Fargo (1818-1881), cofounder of the American Express Company and Wells Fargo; and E. R. Thomas (1850-1936), early car manufacturer whose 4-cilander Thomas Flyer in 1908 won the only around-the-world race ever held.

Electric chair, Auburn

And we mustn’t forget the contributions of Buffalo dentist Alfred P. Southwick (1826-1898), also buried in Forest Lawn. He was the inventor of the electric chair, first used at Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890. There had been a number of botched hangings around the country in recent years, and authorities wanted a humane alternative. Sound familiar? The lucky Number One, William Kemmler, a convicted murderer also from Buffalo, was dispatched to the stars on the above date, despite his lawyers’ efforts to stop it on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment. The lights would dim all over the City of Auburn whenever they threw that switch. Anarchist Leon Czolgocz would be executed in that chair in 1901 for the assassination of President McKinley in Buffalo. Prior to Kemmler’s execution, the contraption was tested out on stray dogs by the Humane Society.

Shirley Chisholm

Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) Unbought and Unbossed

She was a fighter in the best sense of the word. A teacher and political organizer in her native Brooklyn, Shirley Chisholm served in the New York State Assembly, starting in 1965, where she quickly gained a reputation for being a scrapper, for not playing political poker with the big powers, and for being unpredictable. In 1968 she became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress where she served until 1983, and where she fought for refugees, Native American land rights, legal services for the poor and the marginalized, and for special education, and was the first woman to seek the Democratic Party nomination for president. (Margaret Chase Smith, Republican, was the first to run for a major party’s presidential nod in 1964.) Her campaign slogan was “Unbought and Unbossed.” The mention of her name was almost always in the context of feminism, peace and justice, and sanity.

She did what she thought was right, and damn the torpedoes.  She visited Gov. George Wallace in the hospital after he was shot in Maryland while running for president, bring stinging criticism down on her head; after all, he was the one who stood in the schoolhouse door to resist desegregation of schools in Alabama. He later helped her win the votes she needed to win minimum wage for black women workers. Being unpredictable pays dividends to the honest. According to his daughter, Chisholm’s kindness touched Wallace deeply, and began to make him realize that his segregationist ideas were wrong.

But few think of her as an author. Yet her best known book, her autobiography Unbought and Unbossed (1970), was republished a few years ago in a 40^th Anniversary Edition. It is a strong book, and an eye-opener. She was born in 1924 in New York City to immigrant parents from Barbados. They may have hoped that the United States would be their promised land. But when her father was out of work, she was sent along with her two sisters to their family farm in Barbados where they were raised by their grandmother until their parents could get on their feet. She credited the British school system on the island for the quality of education that gave her the advantage to take leadership roles in her community and, eventually, in the US Congress. And for her ease at writing.

After her retirement from Congress, she moved to the Buffalo suburb of Williamsville. She died on New Years Day 2005 in Florida where she had later moved. But in death she returned to her adopted community of Buffalo.

Finding the Grave

Shirley Chisholm is in the Birchwood Mausoleum. From the main gate, follow the yellow-, blue- and white-lined path, which turns to the right before the bridge over the Scajaquada Creek; continue to follow past Mirror Lake and the grand field of mausoleums to a second bridge over the creek, after which follow the yellow route up the hill. Birchwood Mausoleum is No. 6 on the Overview map. She is in the Center Lane, Wall 32, Row 158, Tier F, which may or may not be helpful. Walk in the front door. Her crypt is about 12 feet off the floor on the left side, which she shares with her second husband Arthur Hardwick. The epitaph, “Unbought and Unbossed” is slightly legible.

Sources: Jacqueline Trescott, “Shirley Chisholm in Her Season of Transition,” The Washington Post, June 6. 1982, web (accessed 11/10/18); Vanessa Williams, “’Unbought and Unbossed’: Shirley Chisholm’s Feminist Mantra Is Still Relevant 50 Years Later,” The Washington Post, January 26, 2018; Shirley Chisholm, Unbought and Unbossed, Take Root Media Edition, 2010, Washington, DC, copyright © 1970 by Shirley Chisholm.

Edward Streeter, author of Father of the Bridge

Edward Streeter (1891-1976) Novelist, Satirist…and Banker

It is hard to think of another successful American writer who was also a banker. I’m talking about Edward Streeter, twenty-five years as vice-president of the Bank of New York. Before that he did eight years at Bankers Trust. Well, Wallace Stevens comes close: he was vice-president of a major insurance company. I’ve known a few writers who had a lot of money, but a banker? It does not seem that one individual would be able to survive with those very antithetic ambitions. He must have been hilarious to work with. When someone remarked to Robert Graves that there’s no money in poetry, he answered, “There’s no poetry in money, either,” and he was right. I once tried to get a job as an insurance agent, but when they found out that I didn’t have any insurance myself they turned me down, and rudely. I can imagine what they would have said if I’d told them I was a poet. But let me set my doubts aside for a moment.

Edward Streeter was born in Buffalo in 1891, attended Harvard University, and became a World War I correspondent for the Buffalo Express, which later became The Buffalo Courier Express. The Express, by the way, was the paper Mark Twain wrote for when he lived in Buffalo, but had gone on to fame before Streeter was born. During World War I, Streeter started a regular newspaper column titled “Dere Mabel,” [sic] which were the endearing letters from a fictitious soldier named Bill with spelling problems, writing to his true love. The column was very popular during the war, and after the conflict ended they were compiled in a book, Dere Mabel, and it was a bestseller. It hatched into a series, including That’s Me All Over Mabel; and Same Old Bill, Eh Mabel? Americans love to feel sentimental about our wars.

Then Streeter went into banking and joined the New York City vortex. But he didn’t disappear. He continued to write articles and short stories for the slick mags. And in 1938 he published a novel, Daily Except Sundays, a satire of New York City commuters. Do Americans want to bust a gut laughing about struggling to get to work? They used to, apparently. They take it too seriously now. Maybe someone should update Streeter’s Daily to include twenty-mile backups, road rage, and getting dragged off of airplanes by security.

Ah, the Bride!

He hit it bigger in 1949 with the novel Father of the Bride, a satire of a man’s paroxysms of love and anxiety as his daughter gets ready to march down the aisle. This one elevated him to the higher offices of fame because, not only because it was a bestseller, but the following year it became a movie with Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride.  Now he was on a roll. Next came Mr. Hobbs’ Vacation (1954), which also became a movie in 1962 with James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara. His novel, Merry Christmas, Mr. Baxter (1956), was adapted for NBC’s The Alcoa Hour, starring Dennis King, Patricia Benoit and Margaret Hamilton. He was retired now, and he could spend all the time he wanted writing books, and he produced four more, though they did not pack the wallop that his earlier books did. Father of the Bride was also a TV series from 1961-1962.

His novels are known for dry wit, and insight into the modern human condition. Streeter’s “genial thesis,” said the New York Times review of the film version of Mr. Hobbs’ Vacation, is that “the family unit is perhaps the most anomalous and irritating social arrangement ever devised by so-called civilized man.” The family unit survives Hobbs’ holiday, said the reviewer, but “Mr. Streeter has still got in some nice, sharp, accurate digs.”

Edward Streeter holds a deserved place in American pop culture. His books may not be classics, but he is not forgotten—not at all. If you want to read them, they’re available online. Or a librarian will go to the basement and get a copy for you from the stacks. They’re down there somewhere. Father of the Bride (1950) is now considered a classic movie. The 1991 remake does not come close to it. If you see Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show you’ll see a short clip of the original in one of the movie theater scenes. But even those few seconds have enough gravitas to send you to the library for the DVD. It is, after all, a good story.

Finding the Grave

Streeter made his fortune in New York City, where he died in 1976; his funeral was held at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on East 56^th Street. But for his burial, it was time to come home to Buffalo. He is buried in Section 9 at Forest Lawn Cemetery, and he is easy to find. From the entrance, follow the Yellow, Blue and White Path.  After you pass the Red Jacket monument on your right you will pass Sections 11 and 8 on your left. The next section on your left is 9. There is a triangular roundabout there with a spreading fern tree. Prominent on the nearest point of Section 9, facing the roundabout and just to the left of a Rose of Sharon tree is a monument to James D. Warren (who in the nineteenth century was editor and proprietor of The Buffalo Commercial Advertiser and a Republican stalwart). Around it are twenty-three smaller markers for individual members of his family, and Edward Streeter is one of them, three markers to the right of the monument. Streeter was married to Charlotte Warren Streeter, of James D.’s family, and they kindly made room for him in the family plot. His stone has not weathered well these forty–plus years, so you must look closely to read his name.

Sources: “Edward Streeter, Humorist, Dies at 84,” New York Times Obituary, April 2, 1976;  “Edward Streeter: Accomplished Novelist, Journalist…and Banker,” www.forest-lawn.com/blog/2017/03/30/edward-streeter ;”Edward Streeter,” Revolvy.com, web; Bosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation’: Edward Streeter Book Twists Family Life,” New York Times, June 16, 1962.  Obituary, Mrs. Charlotte Warren Streeter, New York Times, January 3, 1966.

 

 

Buffalo, Forest Lawn, Part 2: Edward Caleb Randall and Paul Kurtz

 

Gave and monument for Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States

By Steven Huff

Buffalo, Forest Lawn Cemetery, Part 2: Edward Caleb Randall and Paul Kurtz

In my Part 1 post on Forest Lawn Cemetery, I wrote that this expanse of wooded acres is the resting place of numerous people important to history, such as Millard Filmore, thirteenth President of the United States, Ely S. Parker, who wrote the terms of surrender at Appomattox, Seneca chief Red Jacket, and Louise Bethune, the first woman architect. I’ll add a few more here (and still more in Part 3).

Memorial stone for the 17 unidentified victims of the 1867 train wreck in Angola, NY

Buried here are 17 unidentified victims of the infamous wreck of the New York Express train of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern railroad. Bound for Buffalo on the afternoon of December 18, 1867, the last two passenger cars jumped the rail on the bridge over Big Sister Creek in the town of Angola, near Lake Erie, and plunged into the creek, killing 49 and injuring 40 more. Most of the dead were in the last car which caught fire when the stove spilled. Known as the Angola Horror, it was one of the most tragic accidents in U.S. railroad history. The unidentified were burned beyond recognition. The tragedy led to safety reforms in railroad passenger cars—phasing out flammable wooden cars for iron, and the standardization of track gauges.

There is the Butler Mausoleum, for Edwin H. Butler, the founder and one-time owner of the Buffalo Evening News. It was his carriage, by the way, that on September 6, 1901, drove President William McKinley to the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo where he was shot by Leon Czolgosz.

Grave of musician Rick James

And singer-musician-producer Rick James (1948-2004), whose highly successful career, and troubled life, ended in cardiac arrest at his home in Burbank, California. His bestselling albums were Come and Get It, Fire It Up, and Bustin’ out of L Seven.

I am going to repeat here the information from Part 1 on getting to Forest Lawn. From the New York State Thruway, take the Kensington Expressway (Route 33) west toward the city of Buffalo. Take the exit for the Scajaquada Expressway (Route 198) and follow it to the right-side exit for Delaware Avenue, where you will turn right. Following Delaware you’ll see the sloping hills of the cemetery on your left. Stay in the left lane. The corner of Delaware and West Delavan Avenue is tricky, and to turn into the cemetery gate on your left you must be very cautious.

Coming in the next post—Buffalo, Forest Lawn Part 3: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm is buried in Forest Lawn, the first African American woman elected to Congress, and the first black candidate to run for nomination for president in the Democratic Party. She is the author of a captivating autobiography, Unbossed and Unbought. And Edward Streeter, author of the famous novel, Father of the Bride, which became a movie classic.

The two writers I am focusing on in this post could hardly be more dissimilar. Paul Kurtz was a scholar, skeptic, atheist, and secular humanist.  Edward Caleb Randall was a skeptic and agnostic trial lawyer before converting to spiritualism and communing with the dead.

Edward C. Randall

Edward Caleb Randall (1860-1935): Speaking for the Dead

He was born in 1860 in Ripley, New York, a quiet rural town on the shore of Lake Erie, near Fredonia. It’s still a rural place. When you drive the New York State Thruway to the very western end, the surrounding fields and woods is Ripley. But Edward Caleb Randall’s life was on an upward spiral. Admitted to the bar at 23, he was a trial lawyer with a yen for business, and before he died he was board president of the American Superpower Corporation, the Niagara Terminals Buildings, Inc., Cataract Development Corporation, and two or three other business—all at once. It’s a wonder that he had time to get married, but he did, to Maria Howard of Buffalo, where he had migrated after a short stint as a lawyer in Dunkirk.

Make no mistake, he was a serious man, and by accounts an agnostic. According to N. Riley Heagerty, “he had no place in his mind for even a conception of a spiritual existence, or for any agencies in the universe other than matter and force.”

Things began to change in 1890 when several people came to him and asked him to investigate a certain Mrs. French of Rochester, who they said was a magician of some sort, and a fraud. Being a sharp trial lawyer, they assumed that he would raise the shade on her tricks. So, he went to 227 Tremont Street in Rochester and knocked on her door. (The house is no longer there.) And this is where the published account is a little fuzzy. The train from Buffalo to Rochester would have been a short ride, maybe a couple hours; but why would a renowned trial lawyer, a stalwart agnostic, bother with such an inquest? He must have been in one of those dire mid-life broods, although he was only 30. He must have been feeling his Doric columns trembling a bit.

The Real Mrs. French

The woman he met, Emily S. French, was an elderly widow with a bad heart, living with her daughter in a modest home, who refused to accept money for her services as a medium. Everyone who has written about her has attested to her civility and refinement, so Randall must have been a little disarmed. He was probably expecting a charismatic Madam Blavatsky, or an exotic with a crystal ball.

And here’s another fuzzy thing: He says that he when he entered her house he met two other men “of national reputation.” He doesn’t say who they were, no doubt because he thought it wise not to expose reputable men who visit spirit mediums.  One individual who was named as a regular participant in the early sessions was Monroe County judge William Dean Shuart, who died in April of 1900 and no longer needed protection. But all the published obituaries that followed, while attesting to his being an upright citizen with many friends and absolutely trustworthy, made no mention of his dabbling in spiritualism. Another was A. W. Moore, an immigrant artist from England who was then secretary of the Rochester Art Club. Both men were strong defenders of Mrs. French when others attended the seances and voiced disbelief and insinuated that she was a fraud.

With everyone seated, she turned out the lights. And the disembodied voices began to talk.

It was a life-altering experience for Randall. He became a firm believer in life after death and the author of six books on mediumship and the spirit world. In The Dead Have Never Died he wrote, “I have had strange experiences in my psychic investigations during the last twenty years. Refusing to be limited by accepted laws, I have devoted my thought to conditions prevailing beyond what is generally termed the material, and by combining and blending the mental and vital, with the tangible or physical forces, I have been able to have speech with those long thought dead. As a result I have found an unknown country about and beyond this Earth, and I would not go from this world of men without leaving a record of what I have learned.”

Over the next twenty years—until her death in 1912—Randall and Mrs. French communed with the voices. Everyone joined hands in the seances, so it would have been impossible for her to pull a lever of some kind. Her house was searched for pipes or other apparatus by which some actor could have imposed his voice. Mrs. French was nearly deaf, and sometimes she would talk while a spirit was speaking, so it was not likely that she was an accomplished ventriloquist. Moreover, they held the same sort of sessions with Mrs. French at other people’s homes, with similar results.

One regular spirit voice claimed to be the Seneca chief Red Jacket, who lamented the state of his soul at the time of his death, blaming the “fire water” that whites had given him.

The New York Test

In early 1905, Randall wrote to the publisher Isaac Kauffman Funk, of Funk & Wagnall’s, and suggested that he test Mrs. French. He was the man who had employed more than 700 scholars to produce the Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary. Funk, a Lutheran minister, was also a psychic researcher, but particularly cautious.  Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from Moore, also urging his attention to Mrs. French. But he declined. Then he was visited by an unnamed lawyer from Rochester who had been to numerous seances with Mrs. French, had known her for many years, and attested to her integrity. It seems there was quite a spiritualist movement in Rochester at that time in the higher circles of society, although very discreet. Funk relented.

He stipulated a number of conditions to avoid being duped. She was to travel to New York City alone except for one “lady escort.” The sittings were to take place at a home designated by Funk, one that he could thoroughly check, and that he would not make known to them until after they arrived. He later wrote that “These terms were accepted cheerfully.”

Although in feeble health, Mrs. French was put through the wringer. She sat with Funk and others for nights on end, twelve sessions in all, in a locked room, and she repeatedly summoned voices purportedly from the world beyond, and Funk could find no possible way that she could have produced the voices herself. Red Jacket’s voice returned, saying, according to Funk, “’We live as real lives, more real—on this side than we did when on earth….In fact, everything here is so real that many who come over—die, as you call it—do not know for a long time that they are dead. A great part of the work to be done here is to instruct the dead in the true science of progress.’”

Apparently convinced, Funk recounted the sessions in his book, The Psychic Riddle.

Randall wrote, “Again, one word to those who mourn. There is no death; there are no dead. Those whom we love and who loved us, in obedience to the great law of evolution, have simply progressed to a new plane of existence…. They walk with us, know our trials, help us by their mental suggestions, and comfort us by tender, loving thoughts.”

But it is fair to ask, what was really going on? Randall logged some 700 sessions with Emily French, some with his wife in attendance, some with Moore, Judge Shuart, some with Funk, and with numerous others. Many seances were held in the Randall home in Buffalo. Could all those people have been deluded on every occasion for the twenty years until Mrs. French’s death in 1912?

The Psychic Highway

Emily S. French and her spiritualist associates could be viewed as an extension of the movement of enthusiastic religion that,  beginning in the early 1800s, swept east to west across New York State along the route of the Erie Canal, which included revivalist denominations; millennialism, such as Millerism; Jemima Wilkerson’s cultist Public Universal Friends; Mormonism, which of course is now recognized as a solid denomination; and the Oneida Colony. The nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Finney called it the Burned Over District. But it is also called the Psychic Highway because it includes psychic phenomena and mediums, the most famous of which are the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York. Today, the largest spiritualist community in the western world is Lilydale, in Chautauqua County.

His Books

Edward Caleb Randall’s books are, Life’s Progression (1906); Future of Man (1908); The Dead Have Never Died (1917), which is his best-known title; Frontiers of the After Life (1922);Told in the After Life (1925); and The Living Dead (1927). There is also a more recent compilation of his work edited by N. Riley Heagerty, and titled, The French Revelation (1995, 2015).

Finding the Grave

From the Main Gate, follow the white, blue and yellow striped path until you come to the first bridge over Scajaquada Creek, then continue on that road through its winds until you reach the north end of the cemetery. Then the path curves to the east. Section X is on the right, which is your destination. Circle around the section—which will have you leaving the path for a new narrower one—until you see a sign “U/X” marking the border of the sections. You will see a prominent monument for R. L. Howard. To the left of that monument are two small stones for Edward C. Randall and his wife Maria.

And, by the way, Emily S. French is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, in Section O—

 

as is Judge William Dean Shuart, in Section 4.

Sources: Edward Caleb Randall, The Dead Have Never Died VVVVVVV; N.a., Biographical info on Edward C. Randall, White Crow Books, n.d., http://whitecrowbooks.com/books/page/frontiers_of_the_ afterlife/; Blake McKelvey, “The First Century of Art in Rochester—to 1925,” Rochester History, edited by Blake McKelvey, Vol. XVII, No. 2, April 1925; Isaac K. Funk, The Psychic Riddle, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1907, ebook;

 

 

 

Paul Kurtz (1925-2012) Secular Humanist and Skeptic

Paul Kurtz was a man whose life is both easy and difficult to summarize. Easy in that he held unwaveringly to secular, scientific and ethical humanism. Difficult, because in fact he did so much for the cause of nonreligion-based ethics, which he referred to as Planetary Humanism, and to scientific skepticism, a standard now carried by Richard Dawkins and others. And he was not afraid to cross swords in the cause.

Like Leslie Fiedler (In Buffalo, Forest Lawn Part 1), he was born in New Jersey to Jewish parents, and came here to teach. He was Professor-Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and chair of the Institute for Science and Human Values. He founded the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York in 1991. The brass plate that covers his grave, in addition to noting his service in the Army in World War II, reads, Secular Humanist. In case anyone should wonder.

He also added a word to the English language: eupraxophy, meaning an ethical, non-religious, life of free thought and logic, with a cosmic outlook based on science.

In 1969 he founded the publishing house Prometheus Books which published works on secular humanism which the big houses regarded as radioactive because of their anti-religious slant. It has always been the role of small presses in America to publish works that otherwise would not reach the reading public; Kurtz understood this, and the importance of the enterprise.

He founded the bi-monthly journal Free Inquiry in 1980, published by the Council for Secular Humanism, an affiliate of the Center for Inquiry, which is still an influential publication and a flagship for skepticism. He left the Center for Inquiry in 2010 after a dust-up with the board over succession. Anyone who has ever worked for a board knows how easily such things happen.

His Books

Kurtz wrote or edited more than fifty books, including, The Humanist Alternative (1973); Exuberance: An Affirmative Philosophy of Life (1978); Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism (1988); Living Without Religion: Eupraxophy (1994); Humanist Manifesto 2000 (2000); Embracing the Power of Humanism (2000); Affirmations: Joyful and Creative Exuberance, (2004); Skepticism and Humanism: The New Paradigm (2001); and What Is Secular Humanism? (2006). His last book, The Turbulent Universe, was published posthumously by his old press Prometheus in 2013.

Finding the Grave 

From the main gate, follow the yellow-blue-and-white-striped road, turning right before the bridge over Scajaquada Creek. Immediately after you pass the Mirror Lake Pond, you will be in a section of classic mausoleums—an extraordinary sight, really. Find a modest mausoleum for Sheehan on the right. To the right of that mausoleum is a tree, and to the right of the tree, is the humble brass plate over the grave of Paul Kurtz. It is flat on the earth; you have to walk up to it to see it.

Sources: Robert Evans, “Paul Kurtz, ‘giant’ of humanism, dead at 86,” Reuters, 22 Oct., 2012, web (accessed 10/11/18 P); “Paul Kurtz, ‘an extraordinary proponent of humanism,’ 1925-2012,” International Humanist and Ethical Union, 22 Oct. 2012, web (accessed 10/11/18).

Text and cemetery photos copyright 2018 by Steven Huff

 

 

 

Buffalo, Forest Lawn Part 1: Al Boasberg, Leslie Fiedler, Anna Katherine Green

 

At the entrance of Forest Lawn Cemetery is this monument to Seneca chief Red Jacket. Also buried in the foreground is Ely S. Parker

Forest Lawn Cemetery, Part 1, Al Boasberg, Leslie Fiedler and Anna Katherine Green

Forest Lawn in Buffalo is one of the largest cemeteries in Upstate New York. For those of us who are familiar with hometown cemeteries of a few acres, this one is stunning: 269 partially wooded acres, and more than 163,000 interred persons, who if they were up and around in 2018 would make up 61% of the city’s population. President Millard Fillmore is buried here, as is Red Jacket, the Seneca Indian orator and warrior; also Ely S. Parker, the Seneca man who was adjutant to Gen. Grant and drew up the terms of surrender at Appomattox, and later served in Washington as the first Native American head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; Dorothy Goetz Berlin, the first wife of Irving Berlin; and Louise Bethune, the first professional woman architect. And that is just for openers. Like many of the cemeteries included in this book, it is a microcosm of our nation’s history.

You will find the office staff very helpful. Anna gave me a booklet with an Overview map, as well as photo-copied maps for individual sections. And, as importantly, she looked up the names of each writer I was searching for. As with most cemeteries, the plot numbers are not going to do you much good, since they are not posted on the grounds, and that is why the section maps are important. She highlighted plot locations on each, which avoided me having to tromp up and down the rows of any section, searching by process of elimination. I’ve had to do that in other cemeteries. But the trouble with the some of these section maps is that they cover a vast number of plots, and they have been shrunk down to Xerox-able 8.5 X 11 pages with names of the interred so small as to be almost unreadable, so bring a magnifying glass with you. The groundskeepers are friendly too, and will help you if they can.

The booklet gives a bit of the history of the cemetery. But the Overview map is a two-page spread and is essential cartography: You will be lost without it, and my directions here will make regular references to it. It shows all sections, main edifices and mausoleums, and the maze of connecting roads. Some of the roads are marked in combinations of white, blue or yellow stripes without which you would become quickly disoriented in the rolling, wooded terrain. On the other hand, if I did not like getting lost occasionally in cemeteries I would not have considered writing this blog.

A Tragic Tale

You will see many extraordinary monuments in Forest Lawn, but perhaps none as starling, or as spooky, as the monument to a sad bit of history. Nelson Blocher, the only child of wealthy Buffalonians John and Elizabeth Blocher (John was a manufacturer of footwear for the Army, among other enterprises) fell in love with the family’s maid Katherine Sullivan. Predictably, Mom and Dad disapproved and put a stop to it by sending Nelson on a business trip to Europe. When he came back and found that Katherine had been dismissed, he went in search of her and when he couldn’t find her, he became despondent. His health broke down, and he died in 1885 at age 37. Now it was Mom and Dad’s turn to be broken hearted, and they built one of the most extraordinary monuments in America for their son, with a hexagonal glassed-in room complete with marble likenesses of John and Elizabeth, and an angel, standing vigil over their son lying on his deathbed, upon his chest the bible left for him by Katherine. All three family members are buried in a crypt below. Katherine Sullivan, by the way, never reappeared. Who could blame her?

Getting to Forest Lawn

From the New York State Thruway, take the Kensington Expressway (Route 33) west toward the city of Buffalo. Take the exit for the Scajaquada Expressway (Route 198) and follow it to the right-side exit for Delaware Avenue, where you will turn right. Following Delaware you’ll see the sloping hills of the cemetery on your left. Stay in the left lane. The corner of Delaware and West Delavan Avenue is tricky, and to turn into the cemetery gate on your left you must be very cautious.

Sources: “Buffalo, New York: Deathbed Scene in Marble,” RoadsideAmerica.com (accessed 10/12/18); “John Blocher Family” Buffalo as an Architectural Museum, web (accessed 10/12/18).

 

Al Boasberg

Albert “Al” Boasberg (1892-1937): Laughing at Death

Alfred “Al” Boasberg, screenwriter and director, was a Buffalo-born son of a Jewelry merchant who attached himself to vaudeville actors coming through town, and, according to Hollywood biographer Max Wilk, started developing wisecracks and one-liners for them. He moved to Hollywood in the 1920s where he wrote title cards for silent comedies, particularly for Buster Keaton, for whom he also wrote visual parts. Then came the sound era, which was fertile ground for ambitious screenwriters.

As film buffs know, screenplays are most often the work of several hands, and in the old studio days the bigger name often got the top writing credit while those who may have done the heavy lifting are listed third or fourth, a system that sometimes resulted in a tussle. When Boasberg held out for sole credit for comedic scenes in the Marx Brother’s A Day at the Races, which he no doubt deserved, MGM punished him by listing him last. Signally riled, he had his name removed from the film altogether.

He directed 17 short films—back when movie theaters actually showed shorts prior to the main feature—but he was mainly known as a comedy screenwriter and a dialogue doctor: when sections of screenplays seemed slow, they could give it to Boasberg and in a few hours he’d hand it back with new gags and jokes. Said Jack Benny, “he never failed me…he was always there when I needed him.”  In fact, according to Wilk, Boasberg had just made a $1,500 per week agreement with Benny when he suddenly died. Forty-five years old, a terrible loss to screen comedy. He preferred to work at home in the bathtub, according to Jeff Stafford, “firing off jokes into a Dictaphone.”

Freaks

The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) lists 61 writing credits to his name, sometimes story, sometimes screenplay, or “additional dialogue.” He was often uncredited on the screen credits, so no one knows how many jokes he wrote for the movies, much less vaudeville. It is probably a good thing that he was not credited for dialogue for one film, Freaks (1932), which was not a comedy at all. A kind of morality play in which circus  “freaks” get brutally even with a trapeze diva and her boyfriend for trying to murder a midget and rob him of his inheritance. It is now considered a classic, but audiences found it so repugnant (apparently because real circus “freaks” were in the cast) that it all but ended the career of director Tod Browning, and it was the first film that MGM pulled from theaters in mid-circulation.

It was produced by Irving Thalburg, more of a lion at MGM than the one that roars, and he was too big to fall. But according to The New York Times, “The only thing that can be said definitely for ‘Freaks’ is that it is not for children. Bad dreams lie that way.” And, according to Stafford, that was after MGM, following a horrific response to a preview screening, cut the most offensive scenes and reduced the film length from and hour and a half to 64 minutes. You could almost squeeze it into your lunch hour.

Much more typical of Boasberg’s work is the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (uncredited dialogue, in addition to the famous stateroom scene), or Silly Billies (screenplay); Let ‘em Have It (additional dialogue); The Nitwits (screenplay); Make a Wish (additional dialogue). Like Thalberg, he was one of Hollywood’s huge talents who died altogether too young: Thalberg of pneumonia at 37, Boasberg of a heart attack at 45. The New York Times reported that Boasberg had been suddenly stricken while telling a joke to his friends that he was planning to go to a big Hollywood epic that evening in order “to get some sleep.” The Times obituary headline was “Al Boasberg, Writer of Jokes for Radio,” as if he had been a one-medium man.

Finding the Grave

From the Main entrance, follow the road with the white, yellow and blue stripes, heading north. Where the striped path turns right, go straight, and you will cross a bridge over Scajaquada Creek. Proceed on that path until you round a corner at the X section on the north and heading east. The next section on your right is FF, which is your destination. Stop where you see a stone for Lewin and walk straight back about 500 feet. (If you approach from the road on the south side, look for a stone for Aurhaim or Goldstein and walk straight back about 200 feet.) There are an array of stones for the Boasberg family, including marker for the family plot large enough that you will see it easily. It may be difficult at first to find Al’s stone since the family plot seems to go in all directions, but it is there. And along with the stone is a large brass plate in the ground, placed by “the children of his affectionate younger sister Phyllis Boasberg Michaels.” The plate contains extraordinary testimonials:

“Our biggest break was to get Boasberg to write for us. He was a comic Genius.” Groucho Marx.

“He lived in a world of laughter.” Chico Marx.

“The greatest gag man who ever lived.” Jack Benny

And a quote from Boasberg himself: “If I can make people laugh at their troubles, if I can make them laugh at death, I have reached a sort of perfection.”

Sources: “Circus Side Show,” Movie Review. N.a. The New York Times, July 9, 1932; Erickson, Hal. “Al Boasberg.” All Movie. N.d. Web. (5/25/17); Jeff Stafford. “Freaks.” TCM Film Article. Nd. Web. (5/25/17); Max Wilk. The Wit and Wisdom of Hollywood. New York: Atheneum, 1971; Anon. “Al Boasberg, Writer of Jokes for Radio,” New York Times obituary, June 19, 1937.

Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003): Come Back to the Raft Ag’in

Literary critics become famous far less often than writers of other genres, even poets. There are Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag. More often, Like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, they’re famous for something besides their critical work. Leslie Fiedler was a titan among critics, a provocateur; which, owing to his approach to the American novel that examined its relationship to American culture, made him also a social critic.

The first of his essays that grabbed the attention of the reading world was “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” in The Partisan Review in 1948, in which he woke readers up to the fact of the love relationships between white heroes and their dark-skinned partners in numerous American novels. Think of it: Huckleberry Finn and Jim the runaway slave, Natty Bumppo and the Mohican Chingachgook, Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg, and yes, The Lone Ranger and Tonto.

According to David Meischen, “Fiedler blasted away the tired old tropes about plot and character and theme, the symbol hunting that passes for life as an English major. He took the blinders off me and said, Look, the myths we live by, our secret longings—the great books lay them bare, if only we have the courage to see.”

He was born in New Jersey in in 1917 to Jewish immigrant parents, attended New York University and took his MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin after serving in the Army in WWII. He joined the faculty of The State University of New York at Buffalo in 1964, and was Samuel Langhorne Clemens Professor of English from 1973 until his death in 2003.

His Books

Probably his most famous book was Love and Death in the American Novel. But there were thirty-nine in all, including Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin (1964); Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978); What was Literature?: Class Culture And Mass Society (1982); and several volumes of fiction.

Being Busted (1969), is his account of the sudden invasion of his home in 1967 by Buffalo police who found a small quantity of hashish and marijuana (which it turned out had been planted), and the long legal aftermath of the incident. “Where did it all begin,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “I keep asking myself, where did it really start—back beyond the moment those six or eight or ten improbable cops came charging into my house, without having knocked, of course, but screaming as they came (for the record, the first of their endless lies), “We knocked! We knocked!”; and producing only five minutes later, after considerable altercation, the warrant sworn out by a homeless, lost girl on whom my wife and daughter had been wasting concern and advice for over a year.” Though convicted, he fought the case for five years and finally won.

Fiedler was ever the literary provocateur. Before his death he lamented that no one would say kaddish for him because his children did not know Hebrew. Saul Bellow, furious at Fiedler’s comment that he had traded on his Jewishness, said, “If he’s willing to die now, I’ll say it for him.”

It is worth searching out William F. Buckley’s Firing Line episode with Leslie Fieldler on YouTube.

Finding the Grave

Leslie Fiedler is in the Rosewood Mausoleum. From the main gate, follow the yellow, blue and white, which turns right before the bridge over the Scajaquada Creek; continue to follow past Mirror Lake and the grand field of mausoleums, to a second bridge over the creek, after which follow the yellow route up the hill. Rosewood Mausoleum is No. 4 on the Overview map. Walk directly through the front door all the way through to the atrium. From there a door will lead you to a brick walk. Follow that walk around the back of the building to an area bordered by an arborvitae hedge. Dr. Fiedler is there, about six feet up the wall with his second wife Sally.

Source: David Meischen,“How a Literary Critic Slapped Me Awake: My Favorite Critic,” Talking Writing, Feb. 14, 2014, web (accessed 10/12/18); Leslie Fiedler, “On Being Busted at Fifty,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 1967(accessed 10/13/18); “Leslie Fiedler, Celebrity critic who liked to provoke,” Independent (UK), web, 3 February, 2003 (accessed 10/13/18)

Anna Katherine Green

Anna Katherine Green (1846-1935) The Detective Genre’s Mom

Born in Brooklyn, she came to Buffalo when she married actor and furniture designer Charles Rohlfs. She is called the Mother of the Detective Novel, and her first, The Leavenworth Case (1878), is also widely noted as the first American bestseller, selling 3 million copies. It was also a hit in Europe, unusual then for an American book. St. Petersburg, Florida’s The Evening Independent in 1924 reported that its sales were closer to 10 million, that forty-six years after its publication it was still selling briskly at $2 per copy, that it had been “serialized and repeatedly syndicated and twice it has been dramatized and presented on the stage,” and “translated and successfully published in virtually all modern languages.”

It was the beginning of a long career as a popular mystery novelist for Anna Katherine Green, with eventually some forty novels to her credit, including the once famous Amelia Butterworth Series, and her series of detective novels featuring the sleuth Ebenezer Gryce.

 

First to the Formula

But the claim of motherhood is more complicated than that, and some explanation is called for here. Edgar Allen Poe holds the laurel for the first detective fiction with “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is a short story, not a novel. According to Dorothy Hayes of the website Women of Mystery, the first detective novel was actually The Dead Letter (1867) by another American woman named Metta Victoria Fuller, who wrote under the nom de plume Seeley Register, beating Green to the genre by eleven years. She had other names up her sleeve, but Register is the one most remembered. She was a dime novel writer, generally considered a cut below the more mainstream fiction such as Green published with G. P. Putnam, and she wasn’t married to mysteries but wrote a wide spectrum of popular genre fiction.

If we call Green the mother (and I do), then it is because she established the genre, and gave it a level of sophistication, whetting the public’s appetite for sleuths; but, she also wrote the first mystery series. She established a standard for mysteries, that the dastardly doer is not discovered until the final five percent of the novel—a standard that still holds: If the reader knows who the perp is, and the only question is how the police (or whomever) will to apprehend him (read: shoot the creep), then we have a crime novel, not a mystery, and mystery fans will never forgive anyone who claims the cloak but transgresses the formula.

Green’s novels have all the twists and quirks that we would expect of a mystery today, and her characters are drawn with an admirable level of psychological complexity. Unlike a contemporary murder mystery, the perp in Leavenworth is brought to justice by dint of cracking under the weight of guilt; it does not end in a bloody shootout, which is what we would expect today.

The claim of first bestseller is probably an exaggeration, at least in America, where the laurel more likely goes to one of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Two other women, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Jane Holmes wrote books earlier than Green, which were considered bestsellers.

The Well-researched Novel

Green was the daughter of a New York lawyer, so she had a reliable consultant for questions of criminal law, and, according to The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1907), The Leavenworth Case was assigned to Yale law classes to demonstrate the precariousness of pursuing a case on purely  circumstantial evidence. Moreover, says the Cyclopedia, “several noted jurists have acknowledged its mastery of legal points.” Eventually Leavenworth became a movie, though not a terribly good one.

Among her fans were Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. She was the wife of actor and furniture designer Charles Rohlfs and mother of Roland Rohlfs, an early aviator who broke world speed and altitude records.

Although her books seem to be out of print, at least in hard copy, she still has fans and there is a lively variety available through used book dealers online. I downloaded to my Kindle the Anna Katherine Green Ultimate Collection for under a dollar. It includes twenty-four novels and four story collections, enough to keep me in my overstuffed armchair for many nights.

Finding the Grave

From the Main Gate, drive in a northerly direction, following the three color stripes: white, blue and yellow. Keep following the stripes, turning right (east) before the first Scajaquada Creek bridge. Sections 1 and 23 will be on your rig.ht, 24 on your left. After crossing the second bridge, turn right again (southeast), following just the blue and white. At the next crossing, turn left (northeast) to follow the yellow again. Section 27 will be on your right. A short distance before the next crossing you will see a prominent stone on the right, marked Pray. Stop, and walk directly across for about 100 feet, look for a prominent stone for the Rohlfs family, among whom is Anna Katherine Green Rohlfs.

When I was there the plot was well kept with flower plantings. Her name is etched somewhat close to the base, and may be partially obscured by grass.

Sources: Dorothy Hayes, “The Dead Letter” by Seeley Register is the first detective novel ever written? Women of Mystery, web, July 24, 2013 (accessed 6/4/17); Michael Mallory, “The Mother of the American Mystery: Anna Katherine Green.” Mystery Scene, No. 94, Spring 2017, web, (accessed 6/4/17); The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol 9, p. 257, 1907 (accessed 6/4/17).

Roxbury: John Burroughs

John Burroughs (1837-1921) The Catskills’ Great Naturalist and Philosopher

Some years ago I began to hear the phrase, “sense of place.”  Poets talked about it. It seemed that every distractedly lonesome person wanted such a sense. It is inherently hard to define, but it must mean a psychic rootedness, a familiarity with a place so deep that one knows not only the local people and where to get the best pizza, but the flora and fauna, the early signs of coming seasons, the geology, and what people were here before us—more or less what you get from reading Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper.

John Burroughs, who certainly possessed that sense, did not live his entire life in the Catskill Mountains, but, as he said himself, he never truly took root anywhere else. Essayist and poet, he is most often described as a naturalist, but that hardly describes his capacity for observation: to read him is to know what grows in the mountains, and its uses; the habits and quirks and songs of every species of bird; the animals (fox, beaver, skunk) and the hunt. His essay, “Phases of Farm Life,” is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what a sense of place is, or was, in the Catskill Mountains in the nineteenth century, the hand-mowing and threshing of grain, cow and sheep raising, sugaring in the spring when the sap ran, the varieties cottage manufacturing. To my lights he is the observer of record for what kinds of farming predominated at various elevations in those mountains, along with the barn raisings, and the neighboring farmers who dropped everything to help another farmer get his crop in. He wrote:

When the produce of the farm was taken a long distance to market,–that was an event too; the carrying away of the butter in the fall, for instance, to the river, a journey that occupied both ways four days. Then the family marketing was done in a few groceries. Some cloth, new caps and boots for the boys, and a dress, or a shawl, or a cloak for the girls were brought back, besides news and adventure, and strange tidings of the distant world.

As the above indicates, he was already writing of the past, Burroughs was a witness to that time for a world that was already changing. Indeed, he counted among his friends men who were major agents of change: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Theodore Roosevelt. In a letter to Clara Barrus, his disciple, late-life companion and biographer, he rhapsodizes over his love for the family farm, and pines for his deceased siblings and parents: “We used, too, in my boyhood to make over two tons of butter annually, the care of which devolved mainly on her [his mother], from the skimming of the pans to the packing of the butter in tubs and firkins, though the churning was commonly done by a sheep or a dog…I can remember Mother’s loom pounding away hour after hour in the chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth. I used to help do some of the quilling….”

In one of her books on Burroughs, Barrus points to essential differences between him and the better-known Henry David Thoreau, not only that Thoreau had a tendency to preach, but that Thoreau became identified with Concord “almost to the exclusion of other fields,” although this unfairly ignores Thoreau’s works on Maine and his excursions on Grand Island in Western New York. But anyone looking to Burroughs to bear the standard for the environment and for preservation must sooner or later countenance his Faustian friendships with the Gilded Age barons. On one of his visits to Burroughs’ family farm, according to biographer Edward J. Renehan, Jr., Ford mused on the practicability of building a Ford plant in Roxbury.  Burroughs thought that was a capital idea (my pun entirely intentional). He was thinking of local young people who would benefit from the prosperity that such a facility would bring to the area. But thanks be to God that Ford never followed through. The fragile ecosystems of our beloved Catskills would be forever changed, and its charm lost. Yet Burroughs deplored natural history museums for their stuffed animals and other artificial representations of nature; and about that—sorry, Clara—he did indeed preach.

But creative writers are complex characters, and most, in my experience, are cranks. Burroughs was not a prescient thinker, and it is probable that if he could have seen ahead to what mass industrialization would cost the natural world, the polluted lakes, the bad air, the frightening indications of our changing climate, and how it would put humanity at an even greater psychic remove from the earth than he witnessed in his own time, he would have felt differently about Ford’s idea, though he may have pronounced it inevitable. One has only to read that most rural American of recent poets, Hayden Carruth, to understand what has befallen the beloved family farms (see Brothers, I Loved You All). Burroughs’ reputation, his gift to all of us who love the natural world, is his stunning body of writing. And there he sits, atop such a pile of books as would have exhausted most writers. Nor did he stick only to writing about farming, hunting and the natural world. He was one of the earliest champions of Walt Whitman, and wrote two books about him. He was a poet himself, by the way, though not a particularly successful one.

And he had better angels. He was also friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and of course Whitman.

Said C. Lewis Hind, “Not only was he the most popular of American naturalists, he was also a philosopher, but one who wrote the clearest style, and who convinced you in every paragraph, of his radiant sincerity.”

He died in 1921 at the age of 84, while on a train home from a sojourn out west.

Somewhere Wendell Berry has written that all it takes is one generation to stop performing some old task, such as making butter, weaving wool, or making soap, for us to forget how it is done, and some of us have a hell of a time trying to relearn it. My mother was the last person I knew who actually made butter at home with a churn, when she was a girl on a farm in Ohio and certainly regarded it as drudgery. When I decided that I was tired of insipid commercial butter, I had to go in search of how to make it with the utensils that I have in our home kitchen (It was worth the trouble, by the way). Burroughs’ work, entertaining as it is, tells us not just quaint stories about what used to be, how things were done, but how things idyllically should be. And for that, he is not only a tall member of the pantheon of New York authors, but a national treasure.

His Books

Here is a short selection of his thirty-two books: Locusts and Wild Honey (1879); Fresh Fields (1884); Signs and Seasons (1886); Whitman: A Study (1896); Squirrels and Other Fur Bearers (1900); Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (1906); Leaf and Tendril (1908); The Summit of the Years (1913); Accepting the Universe (1920); The Last Harvest (1922). It doesn’t matter which book you start with. All his writing is lucid and absorbing. They are in many libraries in the state, very available online from used book stores. And of course, Kindle. His soul rocks in the bosom of Amazon.

Finding the Grave

I love driving in the Catskills. The air is sweet, and I keep my windows down even in the cold. The temperature changes smartly from one elevation to another. It still has its old wooden barns, well-maintained–they haven’t torn them down and replaced them with ugly aluminum buildings. Any town is worth stopping in, having lunch and looking around. It will be good for your mental health.

As with a few other towns in this blog, Roxbury is not serviced by any freeways or interstate highways. However, you can take US 88 to Oneonta and take Route 23 east to Route 30 and turn south; or you can take 23A northwest from Route 87 through Catskill Park to 30, and turn south. You’re looking for Hardscrabble Road off 30, on your right, which will take you to Burroughs Memorial Road. Or you can set your GPS for 1067 Burroughs Memorial Road, Roxbury, New York.

You’ll see a small roadside park, John Burroughs Memorial State Historic Site. There is no parking lot, but plenty of space to pull off. The main feature of the park is a two-sided sign with illustrations from Burroughs’ life. His old house, Woodchuck Lodge, is nearby, well-maintained, and open to visitors the first weekend of each month, May through October, but I wasn’t lucky enough to land on one of those dates. Maybe next time. It’s an easy walk to his grave. From the park, you’ll see a trail leading up the mountain ridge. In a short distance you’ll find a gigantic black stone, which was his favorite perch and lookout point when he was a boy. Nearby, and looking like a stone-made four-post bed, is the philosopher’s grave.

Sources: Barrus, Clara, Our Friend John Burroughs, A Public Domain Book, n.a., e-book; John Burroughs, “Phases of Farm Life,” In the Catskills: Selections from the Writings of John Burroughs, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press Cambridge, 1910, e-book; C. Lewis Hind,  More Authors and I, New York: Dodd Mead and Co., 1922, p. 61, e-book); Edward J. Renehan, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, Post Mills, Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1992. Print.

 

 

 

 

Fredonia: Grace S. Richmond and Olive Risley Seward

Forest Hill Cemetery, Fredonia

 

Fredonia is a small, lovely village in the Town of Pomfret, Chautauqua County. Its primary claim to fame nowadays is the State University of New York at Fredonia, formerly Fredonia Normal School, and before that the Fredonia Academy. Like many college towns in Upstate, it has in its history more than its per capita share of notable people. Forest Hills Cemetery on Lambert Street has two congressmen, Francis Smith Edwards and Warren Brewster Hooker; and Irish-born Captain William Oliver Stevens who led a regiment in the Civil War and died of a bullet wound in 1863 at Chancellorsville. Buried at West Point is Alonzo Cushing, a Civil War artillery officer who died at Gettysburg in Pickett’s Charge. And then, there are the literary folks.

Charles L. Webster

It is worth mentioning that Charles L. Webster (1851-1891) and his daughter Jean Webster (1876-1916) were from Fredonia, although neither is buried there. In fact, the whereabouts of their remains is unknown. They were both literary people. She was a popular novelist, the grand-niece of Mark Twain and a close friend of Rochester poet Adelaide Crapsey; in fact, it was she who saw to it that a few of Crapsey’s poems were published before tuberculosis claimed her. Jean was born into a family of women reformers on her mother’s side. She was a “modern, liberated, educated and traveled woman,” according to scholar Karen Alkalay-Gut.

Her father, Charles Webster (the husband of Twain’s niece), along with Twain himself, founded The Charles L. Webster Publishing Company in New York City, which published Huckleberry Finn, and the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. In fact, it was Charles Webster who arranged for Grant to dictate the last volume of his book to a stenographer when he became too ill with throat cancer to finish writing it himself. It became the bestselling book in the history of American publishing up to that time, and it is now considered a classic memoir. Huckleberry Finn was a cash cow too, and of course it is a classic. The company was rolling in cash. Twain wrote a check to Mrs. Grant for $200,000, around $4.5 million in today’s dollars.

But, but later publishing projects sold poorly, including Pope Leo’s autobiography, Libby Custer’s book about the General’s life on the plains, and George B. McClellan’s attempt at immortality. The two men had a falling out when the company hit the financial skids. Twain accused Webster of ineptitude and forced him out of the company, or he bought him out actually for $12,000, possibly leading to his partner’s suicide at his home in Fredonia at age 39; that is, whether it was a suicide or not remains a matter of debate. But this naturally had a devastating effect on daughter Jean Webster, and for the remainder of her life, according to Alkalay-Gut, she “exhibited a protest against patriarchal authority, authoritative systems and authoritative individuals, and an examination of alternatives to destructive authoritative systems is her constant concern in almost every aspect of her life and writing.”

But according to Twain, Webster had been suffering from a “cruel neuralgia in the head” (other reports said that he suffered from unremitting headaches), and that he treated it with a German drug called phenacetine, which Webster found other sources for than the limited prescription his doctor had given him, and when used in ever-increasing doses caused him to walk about in a dream state. “In his condition he was not responsible for his acts,” Twain said, adding dryly, “under our free institutions anybody can poison himself that wants to and will pay the price.” So, it may have been an accidental overdose done in a stupor.

Jean Webster

Jean Webster’s novels for girls were quite popular. Among them are Daddy-Long-Legs, When Patty Went to College, Much Ado about Peter, and Dear Enemy. Her stories reflected her social concerns such as temperance, prison reform, and woman suffrage. She married lawyer Glenn McKinney in in 1915. On their honeymoon at a camp in Canada they were visited by former president Theodore Roosevelt who was hunting in the area and said that he’d always wanted to meet Jean Webster. She died in childbirth in New York City in 1916. And, like her father, she was only 39.

Posterity has not done justice to her. For many years only Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy were available in print; recently, however, her work has become widely available in e-book formats, such as Kindle.

Anyway, on to Fredonia’s Forest Hill Cemetery.

Grace S. Richmond

Grace S. Richmond (1866-1959) The Art of Romance

Grace Richmond was born Grace Louise Smith in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of Charles Edward Smith, a noted Baptist clergyman who later transferred to a church in Syracuse, and then to Fredonia Baptist Church. There, Grace was married to Dr. Nelson Guernsey Richmond. In her twenties she began publishing romance stories in the slick magazines of the day, such as the Ladies Home Journal.

Beginning with The Indifference of Juliet in 1902, she wrote 27 romance novels, her last in 1934. “When in doubt,” she said, “start a new paragraph.” One of her books Red Pepper Burns (1910) was particularly successful and became a series, including Mrs. Red Pepper, Red Pepper’s Patients, and Red of the Redfields.

In researching her, I read The Twenty-Fourth of June Midsummer’s Day, a very cozy read, and not so formulaic as one might expect for a romance these days. The principal players are all rich, naturally.

Finding the Grave

Grace S. Richmond’s stone is second from the mausoleum

The quickest route to Fredonia from most places in the state is Exit 59 for Dunkirk and Fredonia. From Main Street  in Fredonia, take White Street north to Lambert Avenue, which will take you directly to the gate of Forest Hill Cemetery.

Right after the main gate the paths split. But take the main path (not the two-track that curves left) for a short distance and make the first left. Follow that path until it comes to a T. At that point you will see, straight before you, a mausoleum for Newton- Campbell on a low ridge (see the photo at the head of this post), and to its left a large tree with a sign for “J” plot. The Richmond family plot is a series of small footstones to left of the mausoleum, and from the T you can walk straight up the ridge to it. Grace Richmond’s  stone is the second in the line from the mausoleum.

 

 

Olive Risley Seward

Olive Risley Seward (1844-1908) Companion, Author, Philanthropist

He was a renowned Upstate lawyer and politician of national prominence, President Lincoln’s secretary of state, and survivor of a brutal assassination attempt on the same night as Lincoln’s assassination, which however probably led to his wife’s death from a heart attack three months later. He remained in Andrew Johnson’s cabinet, defending the hapless president against Republican stalwarts who wanted his head for his reconciliation efforts with the South. He engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia. He established informal relations between the US and China and Japan. William H. Seward was a monumental statesman. But his health was in decline. Before he left the cabinet, he nearly died of cholera. And he returned to Auburn, New York in a weakened state.

Olive Risley, was the daughter of a treasury department official, and from a prominent Fredonia clan; her grandfather Elijah Risley Sr. was a Revolutionary War veteran and an early settler in Fredonia when it was still called Canadaway. She was forty-three years younger than Seward, and beginning in 1868 she became his companion, ever near-at-hand. When they traveled together tongues began to wag, as tongues will, and even their families were worried that they might marry. But Seward was also a clever lawyer and when he decided to do the honorable thing, he did what probably few would have guessed: he adopted her as his daughter. His own daughter Fanny had died recently from tuberculosis.

Together, and along with Olive’s sister Harriet, they traveled the world, and once they were back in Auburn, Seward and Olive sat down to write William H. Seward’s Travels Around the World, working from her notes. He is listed as author, she as editor. But he died in 1872 before the book was completed, and Olive was left to finish the project, which, by the way, became a bestseller. In 1889 she published her own book of travels, Around the World Stories, for young readers; it is very absorbing. She inherited one fourth of the Seward estate, $50,000 dollars, about a million and change in today’s dollars.

Olive moved to Washington, DC, after Seward’s death, where she became active in philanthropic organizations, including the DAR, although she often summered in Fredonia. There is now a sculpture of her by John Cavanaugh in Seward Square Park at 6^th Street and North Carolina Avenue in Washington.

Finding the Grave

The grave of Olive Risley Seward

Follow the above directions to reach Forest Hill Cemetery

After the gate, the path will split: the main path goes straight, and the lesser-traveled two-track secondary path branches off to the left. Take that left path for a short distance to where it curves again to the left. On the right you will see some stones under arborvitae trees; the more ornate stone, though not an imposing one, is Olive Risley Seward’s grave, in the Risley family plot.

Sources:

On Charles and Jean Webster: Alkalay-Gut, Karen. “Jean Webster”. 6 July 2005. http://karenalkalay-gut.com/web.html; “The Publisher of Grant’s Book.” The Kansas City Star, June 25, 1887; Samuel Clemens, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2, Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, editors, Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2013.

On Grace S. Richmond, C. D. Merriman, “Biography of Grace S. Richmond, The Literature Network, web., http://www.online-literature.com/grace-richmond/ (Accessed 9/5/18); Jason Sample, “Bi-Centennial Biographies, No. 152 Grace Richmond,” web, 9/12/11, McClurg Museum, Chautauqua County Historical Society (accessed 8/5/18); various other sources.

On Olive Risley Seward: Maggie MacLean, “Frances Seward: Wife of Secretary of State William Seward,” Civil War Women: Women of the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras 1849-1877, 10/01/2010, web. (accessed 9/5/18); April Diodato, “Shades of Olive: Fredonia Woman Continues to Fascinate a Century after Her Death,” Forever Young, web, November 2014 (accessed 9/6/18); Robert Pohl, “Lost Capitol Hill: Olive Risley Seward,” The Hill Is Home, September 16, 2013; various other sources.

 

Albany

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Cooperstown, New York

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In Our Home Ground

Mission Statement: In Our Home Ground will serve as a resource for readers and travelers interested in Upstate New York’s Literary Heritage by focusing on the burial places of notable authors who happened to have been Upstaters and are actually buried here. It will feature short essays on authors, photos and directions for the the traveler seeking their resting places. Its longer range goal will be to raise awareness of the contributions writers have made to the history and culture of New York State

Introduction

IN the spring of 2016 I went to Los Angeles for the annual conference of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs, fondly known to writers, teachers and publishers as AWP. I flagged a taxi outside my hotel to the convention hall and I got an Iranian driver. He wanted to know what the conference was about. He said, “You mean there are poets?” I said yes, there were. That got him excited.

I said, “You love your poets in Iran, don’t you? How about Omar Khayyam ?” And I recited a few verses from the “Rubaiyat” that I knew in English, which pleased him grandly.

He said that in Iran he made pilgrimages to Khayyam’s tomb, and that many others do as well. “He was an atheist, you know. But we go anyway.”

I thought about that encounter for a long time. Americans go a-pilgrimming too. Thousands go to Graceland every year, to the DC monuments, or to the Gettysburg battlefield. Many travel to monasteries to stay as guests in silence. I’d visited  the graves of Robert Frost and Kenneth Rexroth. My Massachusetts cousins graciously took me to Emily Dickenson’s plot. Those were pilgrimages too.

Many of us have an aversion to cemeteries for a variety of reasons. We associate them with our personal grief, or maybe we have not reconciled ourselves to the reality that our own lives have an end date, and some are afraid of ghosts. My friend the poet Mihaela Moscoliuc has said that in her native Romania people commonly go on Sundays directly from church to a cemetery, bringing their picnic lunches and spend a good share of the day communing with the spirits of their dead family members. Here, some never visit the graves of their grandparents and other elders. In fact, among the things that people of other countries find puzzling in America are our disconnection from our history and our passivity toward our ancestors. Many could not name a living American poet, much less a dead one. Yet, I think if we did, if we did recognize those singers and storytellers and cultural shamans who came before us, if we noted not only what they wrote, when they lived and where their remains went to rest, it would help us preserve a sense of ourselves, instill a sense of lineage in our young and wavering culture.

Anyway, a day came when I finally decided that I would take on this project. I was driving through New York’s Finger Lakes region with my partner Betsy, and we decided to take a detour to a cemetery on a back road in Glenora where I had heard that Paul Bowles, American novelist, translator and composer, is buried. It was a little astonishing to find him there, in a rather lonely little cemetery, three hundred miles away from his birth place in New York City, and thousands of miles from Tangier where he lived most of his life and died. I left a small stone on his marker, where someone else had left a bronzed pine cone on a slender stick. When I told my friends in Rochester where Bowles is buried, they were, every one of them, surprised.

But I decided to search out not only the renowned and celebrated writers buried in New York soil like Bowles, Mark Twain and John Gardner, but also the lesser known who also deserve our reverence and respect.  Moreover, I would call this a book of journeys, rather than of pilgrimages since, while a trip to the grave of an author that you have loved for years, who may have had a profound influence on your life, could certainly be called a pilgrimage, the discoveries that I hope this book leads you to—of writers you may be only slightly aware of, or only discovering through this book—are perhaps not pilgrimages except by the broadest definition. But by journeying to their graves, and being introduced to their book, they can become part of your journey.

Perhaps more important, I want this book to do more than revere the writers’ resting places, I want it to help raise Upstate New Yorkers’ awareness of our literary heritage.

I am, by identity, an Upstate New Yorker, and this is an Upstate book. Had I included New York City, its downstate counties, exurbs and Long Island, they would have dominated it, and made it a different work than I intend. That will be a subject for a later book, perhaps. I have, however, included an Appendix of Upstate New York authors, or those who had a notable association with Upstate, but who, for one reason or another, are buried elsewhere or in some cases nowhere at all, their ashes stored or scattered according to their wishes. That section includes such notable writers as Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of The Oxbow Incident, and Samuel Hopkins Adams, author of Tales of a Grandfather and Canal Town, and L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While cemeteries are not museums, they are often a microcosm of an area’s history and culture, and for that reason I often make mention of other notables interred therein.

I have included one person, Edward R. Crone, who was not a writer, but as the real-life model for the character Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five, he is an icon of modern American literature. He is in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester.

Without a doubt, I will find out that I have left someone out. Probably more than one. But here I want to lay before the reader my criteria for inclusion. The writer must have published at least one significant full-length book, play, or screenplay (recognizing that full-length in a book of poems is very slim by comparison to most other genres; recognizing also that screenplays are often written by two or more authors). Pamphlet writers then, and those whose works have appeared only in journals or magazines, are not included. The individual must be remembered primarily as a writer, excusing poor Billy Pilgrim, and  Susan B. Anthony who is known primarily as an activist in the women’s suffrage movement, although she co-authored the massive History of Woman Suffrage with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper. Lastly, the author, or the author’s ashes, must be interred in Upstate New York.

This book makes no pretension to in-depth biography or literary criticism (and I do not consider myself a scholar). However, you might consider it a pathway to the works of those included herein. All of them are worth further exploration. All had reputations that extended far beyond the borders of our state, and yet have made the ground of our Upstate New York heritage richer. The Annotated Bibliography in the back pages is not a scholarly one, but meant to serve as a list of titles for anyone wishing to pursue these writers’ works. In the cases of those who were most prolific, I have listed only the most prominent titles, or those that I like the best. Enough to get you started.

But I knew from the start that I would not write a mere catalog. This book is for the curious traveler who shares my compulsion to explore books. In my research I drove thousands of miles, visited local libraries, town halls, and delis, things that also add to our sense of home ground. While I often make only passing reference to other points of interest in many areas, the reader will find that off-the-path Upstate New York is a soulful place, not the “colorless hinterland” that Norman Mailer called it. Many times I swept the gravestones clean of sticks and dirt. Often I talked to local people who were unaware that a noted author is buried in their neighborhood. I met wonderful people who cheerfully gave me directions to remote cemeteries, and where to get a beer and a burger afterward. If you are adept at using a GPS or other navigating device, you may not need my directions to find a cemetery. But once inside the gate, I know that you will find my instructions for finding the actual grave useful. I have walked it. More often than not finding an author’s grave in even a cemetery of even moderate size has been a challenge, and even with the help of online photos such as are provided in findagrave.com.

Traveler, consider my Upstate, my home ground.

Steven Huff