The Albertis of Eureka Springs: A tale of Insanity and Inheritance - Part 1

There is a saying I have heard a few times in my life...The definition of insanity is repeating the same
behavior over and over and expecting a different result. There are days where I think insanity might be what drives me to keep digging into the past of my ancestors. Especially when I spend weeks searching for a piece of information and come up with nothing.

Researching our family history has taught me a few lessons. First, I am not patient. I want everything immediately. Especially when it comes to fascinating tidbits about our clan. Two, I might be a little bit crazy. Why else would I spend so many late nights scouring the inter-websfor clues?

Three, hard research work pays off. What you are about to read if proof of that. Never a dull moment in this family!

I don't have a good Alice analogy this time, but I can say that the experience of locating, requesting and reading this next set of records made me feel a bit like Alice at the Mad hatters tea party. If you begin to feel a bit bonkers reading this blog, don't worry....all the best people are!

The Waiting Game

I have been quiet on the blog front for awhile because I have been waiting for the courts of Jackson County, MO to complete my copy requests. I requested the probate records of both Albert and Laura, the divorce decree of Charlotte Bloch and Albert and Albert’s naturalization paperwork.

All of these records are kept in a storage cave in Independence, MO. Can’t you just imagine that place? Endless rows of dusty archives, creepy fluorescent lighting and a clerk as old as the records shuffling down the isles to locate my requested records. In other words, it takes FOREVER to get them.

I received Albert’s records a few weeks ago. First, let’s go over the naturalization and divorce records. The naturalization is pretty straightforward and didn’t provide any new information.
It confirms that he became an American in 1900. I have added his two witnesses to my research list,
perhaps those connections will open new doors. I imagine they are business acquaintances of some kind. Maybe more on that later.

Divorce in 1913

The divorce decree backed up some of the stories we’ve heard about what Charlotte got in court.
They were officially divorced on February 19th,1913. Charlotte got exactly half of every property
and $1,000 in alimony. They owned two properties.Their house in Kansas City valued at $7,500
and 75 acres of land in Shawnee Township in Kansas valued at $15,000. I am still looking into what
this land was used for. A 1914 platte map of the area shows it as farmland. Adrian, MO, Laura’s birthplace, was also called Shawnee Township at that time. An interesting coincidence? Or another lead to explore?

By my math Charlotte received a settlement of about $12,250 before she paid her court costs.
That would have been around $300,000 today. This was equal to about one year of Albert’s salary.
He and Charlotte married when she was just 16 years old. She had three children and buried one
of them. Her husband left her for a younger woman in very public way. Is there an amount of money that compensates for those hardships?

She died just three years later with only a few thousand dollars of that settlement money left in her
estate. I don’t imagine she was great with money. It probably wasn’t something she had to think
about, or was allowed to manage, as the young wife of a wealthy man. With the facts I know abouther
life, I wonder if it was a happy one.

According to the KC Star Article from 1912 announcing their divorce, Albert was worth $75,000 in 1913 around $1.8 Million today. It is safe to say the divorce settlement didn’t break the bank.He walked away still a millionaire. Before the ink on the divorce paperwork was dry, he married his second wife Laura in Niagara Falls, NY. Just 26 days later.

A-l-b-e-r-t-i spells Alberti

Now that we’ve explored the divorce records and the financial situation at the end of Charlotte’s life, let’s move on to Albert and Laura. The KC courts mailed me probate records for an Albert Alberti. Just one tiny problem. There was another A.A. Alberti roaming around Kansas City. His probate records consisted of 10 pages. He died in 1933, had just $40 to his name and no living heirs. A bit of a research red herring that I waited six weeks for.

I was so certain that Albert would have a will. In a determined huff, I contacted the probate records department of every county he lived in. The conversation with every Records Clerk I spoke with, in all five counties, went pretty much the same way...

Records Clerk: “Last name of the deceased?”

Me: “A-l-b-e-r-t-i”

Records Clerk: “First name?”

Me: “Albert”

Records Clerk: “The name is Albert Alberti? The last name is the same a the first name, just add an i?”

Me: Yep.

Records Clerk: “Are you sure that is the name?”

Me: Yes.

I wonder if Albert got that reaction a lot in his life. If so, I can relate slightly to how annoying it must have been for him.

I digress. The point is, no record of an executed will exist in Delaware, Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada
or Iowa. This doesn’t mean he never wrote a will. It just means he never filed it with a county court. Maybe it’s still tucked in a rusty old safety deposit box somewhere.

It is very surprising to me that someone who was worth over a million dollars and dealt in insurance
and finances his whole life would fail to legally prepare for the end of his life. We know he was ill during his last years, but perhaps he thought he had more time. Perhaps Albert’s finances took a hit in the 1929 stock market crash. Maybe they blew all their money traveling the world. With no final statement of his assets I may never know exactly. Whatever money was left, it’s likely his wife inherited everything upon his death in 1940.

A Person of Unsound Mind

Now on to Laura’s probate records. My hope was that these records would provide clues to the state of their lives and financial situation in their later years. We really don’t know a lot about their lives between 1928 and 1940. A record of travel exists for a trip home from Italy through San Francisco, then on to Kansas City in 1928. Albert was 73 and Laura 46. I can’t image how taxing a journey like that via train and steamship was for them.

Albert and Laura - taken around 1925-1930

They appear again on the 1930 census living in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Another 10 years go by with no publicly recorded activity until Albert’s death in 1940. He was buried in Kansas City and from what I can glean from the probate records, Laura left Arkansas and was living in Kansas City in 1943. She still owned their Arkansas home, but abandoned it and its contents.

Laura’s probate records are extensive and they paint a pretty sad picture of the last 13 years of her life.I have decided to remain as objective as possible as I share these findings. I do have some theories about how and why these events unfolded as they did, but for now, I will hang on to them.

Her probate records were housed in Jefferson City,MO. In what is called the deep archives. They actually had trouble getting them to me due to their size. Too large to scan and e-mail and apparently also a challenge to photocopy and mail. I think everything might be a challenge for state employees. I tried to get the clerk to explain why they were so extensive, but she couldn’t be bothered to read them. After a 6 week wait, the brown UPS package arrived at my door on Monday.

Laura’s assets equaled approximately $30,000 in 1943. Almost $430,000 today. While that is only a
fraction of Albert’s wealth from 30 years earlier, it is still a very healthy sum for that time. The first page of the documents is titled: Probate Court of Jackson County Kansas City, MO in the matter of the estate of Laura A. Alberti, Insane.

At age 61, just three years after the death of her husband, Laura was living in the Robinson Sanitarium at 30th and Paseo in Kansas City.

The Robinson Sanitarium was a hospital for mental illness and nervous disorders. It was built in 1913 as the Christian Church Hospital, with a mission to provide free care for the sick. The owner spent too much money on the elaborate architecture and due to financial challenges it was sold to the VA In the 1920’s. It became a home for disabled WWI Veterans. During Laura’s stay from 1943-1944, the hospital got a new owner - Dr. Robert Patterson. He ran the hospital from 1927 to 1957 and was known to use controversial methods to treat his patients, including: chains, wet sheets, cages and ice pick frontal lobotomies.

In the late 50’s Dr. Patterson developed mental illness himself and stopped practicing psychiatry. The doctor became the patient. Only this time at his own facility. A book titled, “Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: Ghostly Locales from Around the World” lists The Robinson Sanitarium and claims that the ghost of Dr. Patterson can still be seen from the windows of the hospital. Apparently he received a frontal lobotomy and didn’t live long afterward.

In 1975 the Robinson Sanitarium became a home for the criminally insane.Today it is an apartment building. You couldn’t pay me to live in that place! Ghost stories aside, when I discovered that Laura was living in an insane asylum that abused and tortured it’s patients, I felt terrible. I have read about how women with mental illness were “treated” in the 1940s and how easy it was for a their husband or male relative to have them committed.It’s a disturbing fact to discover on my own family tree.

At this time I don’t know how or why Laura was admitted to the asylum. I have requested a court order for her patient records from the Missouri Department of Mental Health. I hope those will shed some more light on things. Like I said, I have put together some theories and will expand more on those when my records request is approved.

Here is what I do know based on the probate records from 1943-1964:

In 1943 - The husband of Laura's niece (Zora), Guy Bowen, filed a motion to have her declared a person of unsound mind by the State of Missouri. He recommends himself to serve as her legal guardian. Laura was served an official notice by the Sheriff of Jackson County and informed of her right to appear at the guardianship hearing and obtain counsel in her defense.

A notice of these events was also published in The Daily Record, a local KC newspaper.

A court appointed representative and investigator, Alex D. Saper, appeared at the hearing on Laura’s behalf. On December 16th, 1943 at 10 o’clock in the morning, The matter of the sanity of LauraA. Alberti was heard before a Judge. Just two pieces of evidence were provided.

The testimony of Guy Bowen and a letter from the medical office of V. Edgar Virden, M.D. , written by Dr. MB Ketron.

The letter says:

Dear Sirs,

In the matter of Mrs. Laura Alberti of Eureka Springs and Kansas City. I have known her for 10 years and have witnessed her progressive mental failure. She is at the present time a patient of the Robinson Sanitarium with the diagnosis of dementia precox and is incurable.


Dementia Precox was the most common psychiatric diagnosis in the 1940s. It was used when doctors
didn’t know what was actually affecting a patient. Dementia Precox symptoms were: mental weakness, nervousness, depression or disorganized thinking. Today it would have been called Anxiety in it’s minor form, or at it’s most extreme Schizophrenia.The note from the doctor makes me curious if Laura was being treated in Arkansas as well.

There is also an itemized list of expenses that shows up a bit later in the 1945 files, well after Laura was declared insane and stripped of her rights. It shows the amount each witness was paid for their testimony during her hearing:

Alex Saper, Investigator - $25.00

Witness expenses in sanity hearing - $18.00

Dr.Marvin Ketron - $36.75

That was that. Her brother in law was appointed her legal guardian and curator of her $430,000 estate. In fact, on that same day, all four of Laura’s brothers and sisters were named beneficiaries of her estate. Someone was looking to out for Laura’s interests. A surety bond was taken out to protect
against any mismanagement of the funds. Typically this is something the estate owner requires of the executor of their will, but perhaps the court mandated it.

Home Sweet Home

In May of 1944 Laura was relocated, by Sheriff’s escort, to the Nevada State Hospital #3 in Nevada, MO.

I assume this move happened so Laura could be closer to her family in Adrian, MO. The Nevada State Hospital was another lovely institution where “Dementia Precox” was commonly treated with Electro-convulsive therapy. Her estate paid the hospital $90.00 every three months for her care and board. It was her permanent residence for the next 8 years. She was allowed $5.00 a month for spending money. Once, she was given an extra dollar for stamps.

The Nevada State Hospital #3 was opened in 1885. It was the third and largest hospital for the insane in Missouri. Some accounts report that the building was a mile in circumference. It operated like a small town and employed a large number of people in Nevada. My research reveals that it had a movie theater, baseball team, dairy, hennery, seamstresses, laundry facilities, a cannery, carpentry shop, hog farm, tunnels, dormitories, a fire station and a nursing school. It also had its own cemetery where 1,500 patients were buried before it closed in 1991. Many of those graves are unidentified.

I had a nice conversation with the Vernon County Clerk about the hospital. I was curious what he remembered about the place. He told me that when they shut the doors in 1991, they turned everyone out on the street. Only the criminally insane patients were re homed in a nearby county.


Laura moved in with her brother, Charlie Martz in 1952. So she didn’t have to experience eviction from her “home”. I wonder what happened to everyone else. It’s safe to say Missouri’s mental health system has had problems for long while.

In Part 2, I will dive deeper into the remaining years of these records leading up to Laura’s death in 1965. Her guardian was required to file a detailed record of the expenses paid out of her estate each year and submit detailed statements regarding the sale of her personal belongings, property and investments. Stay tuned!

My dad and his buddy "Toppy"

“A Bitter Day”

July 6, 1946.  That Saturday was the most tragic day in the life of my mother.  “A Bitter Day” is how she titles one page of longhand where she describes what happened that day.

            “My husband, Leonard Sherman and myself had arranged to go to Church Reunion at Lake Doniphan with our five children.  He was involved in the Heart of America Airport and President of Blue Valley Flying Service.

        Several men contacted him and desired that he stunt fly for the air show to be held at Fairfax airfield. – One of our friends, Clyde DeWalt, heard him refuse three times.  Leonard told him he didn’t approve of that kind of flying.  “Well, how about a listing under the heading – How not to fly - He still refused, but his Buddy (Toppy) Toplikar accepted – He took the plane up the first day of the three day air show.  Leonard became so worried about him because he had three children that he took over the second day.  The third day he took me with him in the plane to the airport.  Dale, Judy, and Sharon went in a car with some friends.  Dan and Ruth stayed with some neighbors.  Well, that was the day that we lost him!”

            There is a lot of confusing irony in that second paragraph.  Did my dad forget that he had five children of his own?  I doubt it. I expect my father thought he was a better pilot than Toppy.  He probably was.  He got glowing reports from Captain Ong for his safety record when he was in the Civil Air Patrol in Manhattan, Kansas.  Letters from past students after the accident echoed his emphasis on safety.

           

I have always heard varying reasons for why my father took over for Toppy Friday and Saturday, the second and third days of the air show; Toppy had a migraine headache, someone else had a migraine and Toppy had to take him to the hospital, and now there’s my mother’s version that my dad was worried about Toppy and his children.

I think it was a coming together of many unfortunate conditions that led to that ill-fated day on the sixth of July.  The three day show was a splashy display of air power to reward everyday citizens who had purchased war bonds in support of the war.  I think my father felt obligated to some extent because the air show was sponsored by the Civil Air Patrol which he had enlisted in and served in.  Combine my father’s sense of youthful invincibility, risky maneuvers too close to the ground, a plane not designed for the extreme aerial acrobatics he was performing, a one armed mechanic, and a loose cushion, and you have all the ingredients for a catastrophe.  There were even rumors of sabotage of the plane by partners or associates at the “Heart of America Airport.”

 

            Let’s go back to the beginning of that Saturday in July of 1946. This is what I imagine happened after reading all the newpaper accounts and combining it with my mother’s writings.

            That morning my mother packs sack lunches and delivers Ruth and myself to the door of the Linhares family up the street.  Their 14 year old daughter Lilah will baby sit us for the day.  My mother cautions my older siblings about the hazards of riding in a car with their friends and gives them entry money for the air show.  She then climbs into our family car with Leonard and they drive the seven miles to the “Heart of America Airport” on 40 Highway and Blue River Road. In her writing she describes the car as “ready to fall apart.” 

Aeronca Champ

At the airport, she climbs into the back of a two seater Aeronca Champ.  I am reasonably positive that it was an Aeronca Champ by the description given by reporters.  The Champ wasn’t put into production until 1945, the previous year. My father had evidently purchased it as the centerpiece for his fledgling “Blue Valley Flying Service.”  It only held two people, one in the front seat and the passenger or student in the back seat.  It had a dual set of controls for training purposes.  The Champ’s fuselage and tail surfaces were constructed of welded metal tubing. The wings, fuselage and tail surfaces were covered with cotton fabric.  This Aeronca Champ was probably the standard Aeronca yellow, spiffed up with a wide swath of red on the tapered back sides of the fuselage.  The only picture I have of the plane is a black and white newspaper photo taken later that afternoon showing mangled metal tubing and ripped fabric. My father had not yet been extricated from the plane.

           

While my mother is sitting in the back seat I imagine my dad does the standard pre-flight walk around.  I watched my nephew Michael do this once and it is an extensive time consuming procedure. Leonard would have checked the wing flaps to make sure all the bolts, nuts and cotter pins were secure.  He would have checked to make sure there was no tears or rips in the cotton fabric that covered the plane. These light planes were what they called “rag and tube designs”.  Collectors restoring these vintage “ragwings” today replace the cotton or linen fabric with polyester.

In trying to re-construct what happened that Saturday I’ll just assume the one armed mechanic in my father’s employment at the “Flying Service” was there to spin the propeller. Starting these small planes is usually a two man job.

 This colorful warning was printed in the “Operating Manual” for the Aeronca Champ.  “As any good gunman can tell you, “Every gun is loaded.”   Likewise, every prop is hot.  If you must look down the barrel of a gun or put an important piece of your anatomy inside the arc of the propeller, do so very, very carefully.”  (Now I’m wondering if this is how the mechanic lost his arm.)

After the mechanic spins the prop and gingerly steps back, my father releases the brakes and slowly taxis to the end of the grass runway.  Then he turns to take off facing the wind.  Any small plane like this 700 pound Aeronca is basically a weathervane.  He applies full throttle and somewhere at just less than fifty miles an hour he applies slight back pressure to the control stick and the plane lifts off the ground. After banking the plane, they head in a northwesterly direction toward the Fairfax Airport in Kansas City.

           

            As the plane gained speed the engine had an uneven roar, a trademark of its 65 horsepower Continental Engine. The peculiar engine noise accounts for the Aeronca Champ’s nickname, the “airknocker.”  They are in the air only a short time cruising at the speed of about 80 mile per hour. Somewhere in the short flight to Fairfax Airport my mother mentions that the seat cushion strap is loose.  (There is a cushion for vertically challenged flight students that might need a booster seat.  Evidently there was a faulty strap that was meant to keep it secure when not in use.)

My nephew Michael Ackley said my mother told him she suspected that the cushion had come loose during the afternoon acrobatics and had somehow wedged in Leonard’s control stick. It’s possible that the warning about the cushion was unheard over the engine noise, or was possibly forgotten as they entered the busy air traffic surrounding the Fairfax Airport.

I don’t know what time they actually arrived at the Fairfax airport. They would have wanted to avoid the morning pre-show activities.  Each morning war planes did a simulated strafing and bombing run over Kansas City.  At one point there were fourteen bombers and jets flying in formation at the same time.  There was a B-29 like the one that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. There were four A- 26 bombers, four B-25 bombers, a pair of P-61 night fighters and two pairs of P-51 fighter planes.  The star of the morning spectacle was a p-80, a jet-propelled fighter that raced through the sky at over 500 miles per hour.  I imagine some of the less informed street people in the city must have been extremely alarmed.  My parents glided into one of the non-military runways at Fairfax at  about sixty miles per hour.

I don’t know what my parents did at the airport that day.  They probably engaged in small talk as they watched the military planes and the parachute jumps. They may have discussed their plans to attend a church reunion with the family later that month, or the farm that they wanted to buy someday..  Maybe my dad thought this show was an opportunity to showcase the pilot training and other services at the “Blue Valley Flying Service” where he was heavily involved and invested.

 I doubt they dined at the airport café.  Between the two of them my parents had only twelve dollars, five in his billfold, and seven dollars in her purse. They had no other rainy day money in a bank account or money stashed away in a cookie jar.  They probably ate their sack lunch away from the crowds of people who were lined up to view the military planes. This was the first time the bombers and jets had been made available to the public for inspection.  There were over 4000 people that last Saturday, not counting hundreds of cars lined up on the side of Richards Road watching for free.  They would honk their horns, clap and cheer when something spectacular occurred.

My dad’s stunt act was scheduled at the end of the show.  Only a parachute jump was scheduled to follow him.  It was after 4 p.m. when my mother gave him a goodbye kiss and left to find her three older children who were somewhere with their friends.  After the pre-flight ritual my father climbed into the cockpit. One of his flying buddies probably spun the prop as he revved the engine of the little “airknocker.

  Horns were honking from the road in appreciation of the LS-8 blimp that bounced and maneuvered along the runway at 5 miles per hour. The pilot was bouncing the big blimp’s single landing wheel on and off the earth throughout the entire length of the runway.  Then he applied the power of its two engines, and climbed at an angle far too steep for an airplane. Goodyear had produced a number of them for the military during the war..

After the blimp performance my dad lifted off the runway to perform his final and fatal act.  He gained altitude and positioned himself above the crowd.  He successfully did a number of spins, stalls and other acrobatic maneuvers, just as he had done the day before. 

The Champ Operating Manual lists a number of permissible acrobatics including normal spins, stalls, snap rolls, and half rolls. It cautions the operator not to exceed 129 mph in a dive and not to bank the plane further than 70 degrees. I’m sure he was outside the recommended bounds of the manual.  I’ve heard that he was doing low altitude loops and bouncing his wheels off the runway after each loop. 

The next day the Sunday edition of the Kansas City Star reported that “36 Year old Pilot Fails in Tactics Showing “How Not to Fly.”  Sherman was showing the dangers of stalling tactics and failed to pull his light Aeronca 2-seater plane out of the resulting spin in time, and crashed in the center of the field.”

             In the next blog I will continue with the rest of that “Bitter Day” and the life changing impact it had on our family.

My Dad's Flight Log, Piper Cubs, and Pogo Sticks

The first entry is June 14, 1940

Questions multiply like Catholic rabbits when I try to puzzle some of my family history out.  I’ve always wondered why and when my father first got interested in flying.  He didn’t have one ancestor, living relative, or friend that had flown or showed any interest in flying.  His five brothers and one sister were a tight earthbound family that seemed apprehensive about wandering too far from home and family traditions.  

 The question of when my father started flying was answered recently when my nephew Michael Ackley, loaned me my father’s log book.  Michael is a Captain who flies commercial jets to Europe and South America. Years ago, my mother, proud that Michael had earned his wings, gave him the logbook, knowing he would treasure it.

When it was delivered by FedEx I was very surprised to see how good a condition it was in.  For a logbook older than I am it is very well preserved. I doubt it’s been opened more than a few times in the seven decades since my father’s accident. My father must have been very careful with the book, having opened it hundreds of times to log his flight entries.  (Any paperwork or books in my possession for a nanosecond end up dog eared with telltale coffee stains and jelly thumb prints. I will try hard to treat this logbook like it’s from the Library of Congress.)

The one I wore had no ear protector

 My mother, a wise woman, did not entrust me with the logbook. I did end up however with my father’s fleece lined leather flying helmet at the young age of seven or eight. It’s likely that I appropriated it from the cedar chest in the attic. I wore it, and the silk Japanese jacket my brother Dale sent me from Tokyo at the same time. I wore them as if they were a matched set. In all kinds of weather. If my memory serves me, the gray blue jacket was covered with embroidered multi-colored dragons. The leather helmet and the dragon jacket were worn day after day after day.  It was an odd fashion statement, and an even stranger political statement so close to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The leather helmet survived battles with Indians and the rich Cernech brothers up the street much better than the jacket.  With so much climbing over, through, and under neighborhood fences the jacket began to fray and unravel into its original silkworm threads.   Eventually even the leather helmet started to flake off lichen like brown chips. Ultimately they were declared unfit as apparel and both the helmet and the jacket were clandestinely disposed of by my mother. It is fortunate that I did not see the flight logbook in the cedar chest when I discovered the leather helmet.

My mother made the right choice in giving the logbook to Michael.  Neither of her sons, Dale nor myself, showed any true interest in flying.  Any interest my brother Dale had might have been extinguished the day of our father’s accident.  Dale was leery of high places. Water was his element.  Navy all the way!   My interest in aerial events ended the day I jumped off the garage with my feet firmly mounted on the treads of a Pogo stick.

Forgive my drifting mind; I’ll get back to the log book. I was impressed at the good condition of the log book, but the real surprise was that my father didn’t start flying until he was 32 years old, with three children.  Dale was eight, Judy was five, and Sherry was three.

According to the flight book my father begins taking lessons from Charles Toth, a Frenchman who ran a flying school out of the old Municipal Airport in Kansas City. I can’t find much information on the man or the school. The airport was located within a looping bend of the Missouri River in the West Bottoms, a busy industrial district.  It was very close to the rising buildings above it that made the city’s skyline.  It was dedicated in 1927 by Charles Lindbergh.  Its main client was a fledgling airline called Trans World Airlines. Because of its location so close to the city it was considered one of the most dangerous airports in the country.

My father was working at the Wyandotte Furniture Factory very close to the airport. He was close enough to watch the continuous panorama of ascending and descending planes and hear the prop noise from even the smallest single engine planes.  His father and several brothers had worked at the furniture factory also; possibly they were all working there at the same time.  I presume the job must have paid decent since no one was starving at home and there was enough extra money for flying lessons at the flying school.

I’m going to speculate here on the how my father’s interest in flying started.  I could grasp at a number of straws but I’ll just pick one.  Maybe he enjoyed watching the planes take off and land as he took a lunch break on a bench outside the furniture factory, away from the pounding and sawing inside the building.  Who wouldn’t want to soar in the clouds above all the racket?  So one day curiosity caused him to cross over the Hannibal Bridge to the airport, and one thing led to another.

 His first lesson is in June of 1940 in a Piper Cub.  While most aviation companies crashed in the Great Depression, William Piper’s company soared.  Piper sold hundreds of his tiny, yellow airplanes.  Yellow was the only color they came in.  They were as cheap as a good car, and not much faster.  They flew about sixty miles an hour but were easy to fly and reliable. 

After the Cub my dad has numerous lessons and flights logged in his book.  He flies many different kinds of planes for the next three years, up until March of 1943.  Many days he would take a local flight above the city after his work shift at the furniture factory and then drive the ten miles down Independence Avenue through the Italian district to our home in Fairmount, Missouri.

Porterfield like this one was flown often

In July of 1943, the month I was born, my father was in the air 24 of the 31 days.  He was in the cockpit of a Porterfield the day I was born on the 18^th.  Out of very strange curiosity I go back in the flight book to the month I was conceived.  It had to be November of 1942 since I was a full term baby weighing in at over ten pounds.  My father was only in the air six times that month, always in the Porterfield.  I’m surprised I’m not named Daniel Porterfield instead of Daniel Winfield.  I was just surprised at the number of hours he spent in the air.   He spun the propeller of a Porterfield again the day after I was born on the 19^th of July, my first day of not breathing through an umbilical tube, and   o f f   he   f l e w.

Before you conclude that my father wasn’t giving his wife and his new son the time of day, that’s not the case!  He had recently switched airports and had enrolled in a “War Training Induction Course” that was being offered at the Ong Airport at Blue Ridge and 50 Highway east of the Municipal Airport.  The airport was also known as the Old Richards Airport or Richards Flying Field. The airport was sold years ago to contractors and an aerial view today shows only the rooftops of hundreds of homes where runways used to be.  There was bad blood between the downtown Municipal Airport and the Ong Airport because they both wanted to name their airports after John Richards, a World War 1 airman. Someone pried the bronze plaque bearing Richard’s name off the entrance of the “Ong” airport and fastened it at the entry of the Municipal Airport.

   The “War Training Course” at the “Ong Airport” was basically a screening program for potential pilot candidates to serve in the military. It was paid for by the government. The catch was that all the graduates were required to sign a contract agreeing to enter the military following graduation.  The reason my father signed the contract was partially patriotic but I think he was beginning to think of flying as a career.

The owner of the airport was William Armitage Ong, a captain in the Army Air Corps Reserves.  He was a charismatic character, seven years older than my dad, and winner of several International Air Races. On completing the course my father was inducted into the Army Air Corps and both he and Captain Ong served at the military airport in Manhattan, Kansas.  It lasted only for a short four months, from March of 1944 to June of 1944. The program trained civilian pilots for military support roles. Many of the graduates who were trained by my father and inducted in Manhattan served by shuttling planes from base to base and searching from the sky for German U-boats along coastal waters..  Captain Ong was put in charge of the program in Manhattan and he made my father the Chief Flight Instructor, with extra duties running the airport itself.

Entries in the logbook are missing for this military time period. I assume there was another military logbook for training flights my father made in the four months in Manhattan.  Personnel are re-assigned from Manhattan because the Allied Forces were making headway and my father leaves active duty.  

  Entries resume again in July of 1944 at the “Ong Airport.”  He makes 24 flights out of the airport between the 15^th of July and the last day of August, 1944.  He’s in the air 42 days out of 47 between the two dates. It appears he is delivering planes and possibly giving lessons at the airport.

This is where I think he borrows against our family home, his life insurance policy, and any other money he can get his hands on.  He buys a used Aeronca Champ, and invests heavily in the Blue Valley Flying Service.  It is based at a small airport at 40 Highway and Blue River Road, not that far from the “Ong Airport.”  The airport went by various names; Heart of America Airport, 31^st Street Airport, or simply Heart Airport.  A relatively recent aerial view shows what looks like a junkyard. One large silver hangar is still intact and you can see the fuselage of a wingless Stinson sitting near the hangar. 

Wingless Stinson Fuselage at Heart of America Airport

 I don’t know how much my father invested, who his partners were, or if the Blue Valley Flying Service was making money. The unsubstantiated rumor was spread that my father’s partners cheated him out of his share after the accident. I’m looking into this but not finding much evidence other than the airport safe was rifled following the accident and no records of my father’s ownership was found.  He was the president of the Blue Valley Flying Service and vice-president of the “Heart of America Airport” where the service was based.

The news reporters made a number of errors in their reporting following the plane crash July 6^th, 1943.  Megan Kunze, my great niece, has retrieved several Kansas City Star articles that I had never seen.  They seem more credible than the ones I had in “The Box.”  The next blog will cover the day of the accident. 

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https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Blackout Drills and Wartime Letters

While in Kansas City I had a short visit with my sister Sherry and asked her about the “blackout drills” that were occurring in our neighborhood during the war in 1944.  She was only five but remembered that men from the civil defense would come around and check to make sure the lights were completely blocked out.  She reminded me that the Standard Oil Refinery was a key target if any German planes were to reach the skies above us.  The refinery was less than a mile from our house.  I could stand in our side yard and see the top of the highest tower at the refinery and watch the flame from the top of it burning off excess gas.

I could see the top of the tallest tower from our side yard at 219 South Huttig

     In the letters written to my mother from my father in the spring of 1944 I try to get a sense of their lives.  Most of them are about the children, war rations, money, and missing each other. Here is a letter from May of 1944.  I re-typed it because it was written with such a light pencil it was hard to read.  I re-drew his pictures as close as I could.  His were better.

1944 :Letter from Air Base in Manhattan Kansas

  
There was never much money on my dad’s side of the family unless you go back several centuries to the Sherman cloth merchants in Suffolk, England.  My dad’s parents, Plinnie and Maud, raised seven children in a one bedroom home.  That single bedroom with its narrow bed never had a door. For privacy, Maud strung one of her hand made quilts on a rope across the entry. At night my uncles Ronald, Bob, Willard, Kenny, Everett and my dad Leonard, climbed a ladder into the attic where a single bulb illuminated what must have been interesting continuous camping site.  I was never up there so maybe it was roomier than I imagine. My aunt Joy, the single offspring of the female gender that survived to adulthood, was eventually housed in a little hobbit sized log playhouse by the creek. A small wood refinishing and upholstery shop building behind the house was the source of any income.  

           
           Any stories I have about my dad’s life are second hand.  His best friend Larry Good told me a few interesting ones.  As grade-schoolers, the two of them de-feathered a neighbor’s rooster that dared to pillage grandpa’s garden.  A few years later there was an ill fated attempt by Larry and my dad to raise mink.  Then, as teenagers they skipped school with two girls to go swimming.  That ended with Larry breaking the vertebrae in his neck doing a jack-knife dive. Throughout his long life Larry had to turn his entire upper body toward whoever he was talking to.  I’ll explain what I know of those stories in another blog. What jobs my dad had as a young man I will never know now that I’ve waited too long to ask.  Larry would have told me, or any one of my dad's brothers. I’m asking questions decades too late.

           I never spent much time at my grandparent’s home. After the accident we depended on others to give us rides.  Sometimes my Uncle Kenny would come and get us.  One Thanksgiving Grandpa Sherman came and got us in his Model-T.  They said he was legally blind and it may be true.  We hit a car in front of us and pies went flying. My sisters were with him another time when he rear ended some teenagers on Noland Road.

            I remember one Christmas night at my grand parents small home when I was five and there was a spindly Christmas tree in the living room with its branches brushing the quilt that was hung across the opening to their bedroom.  We had arrived late and there were several very small presents beneath the sparsely adorned tree. I assumed there had been more presents and that my cousins had arrived earlier and left taking their presents with them. I began to cry non stop. Grandma was probably looking on with dismay, that poor woman who had worn herself out bearing and rearing so many children, none of them as spoiled as the grand-son she was now watching bellowing and mewling beneath the tree. She should have taken a switch to me but instead she must have alerted the two remaining Uncles who were out back.  The sun had already set, but somehow Ronald and Kenny returned with a brand new Radio -Flyer wagon. With stores closed I don’t know where they got it.  Seventy years later I am mortified remembering this incident and my selfish behavior.  

The letters are a stark reminder of what inflation can do to the buying power of the dollar.  For some reason my father gives an exact accounting for his first two week paycheck in March of 1944.  After $3.25 was deducted for tax he received $106.42.  He had to spend two nights in a hotel and complains that it cost $1.50 a night.  Cereal, milk, and grapefruit juice for breakfast cost thirty cents.  Dinner at the hotel cost fifty cents and consisted of roast beef, carrots, peas, mashed spuds, salad, and milk.  Supper was fish, sauce, vegetables, and milk for forty-five cents.  His entire hotel bill for two nights and six meals came to $4.25.  A note at the side said referring to the expense says “No good!”  At the end of the letter he adds:  “I will write kids again tonite but I may send it all in one envelope, which could run into money, with stamps at 3 cents each.”

My mother writes back; “Don’t scrimp on your meals, please honey, we really are managing fine and can do on less because we have the food in the basement and it really needs to be used before the year is over.”

           

            At the base of our stairs there was a narrow room to the right that had once been filled with coal for our furnace, until our house was converted to gas heat.  At the time of the letter shelves had been added to the coal bin room and they were lined with Mason jars packed with green beans, tomatoes, and the dreaded beets. When I was older I would sometimes brace myself, brush away the cobwebs, and try to identify some of the unknown things my mother had put away, and pray that those jars would never be opened.

            My mother was raised in a family a rung up in the ladder of accessible money in comparison to my father’s family..  Both her grandfathers were relatively wealthy.  Her father Wilford made a decent living and all the pictures of her before she was married show her in nice dresses and a number of fashionable hats. I can find no whiff of regret or complaint about the lack of money or the back breaking amount of work she signed up for in this marriage.

           

            With no intention of “comic irony” my mother writes this in one of her letters.

       

        “The sun came up and it’s a lovely day, the wash is done, babies to school, Danny bathed and fed, and beds made, now I can start on my day’s work.”

       

            This letter includes information on what must have been the end of the road for the chickens and the rooster  housed in the small chicken house at the back edge of our property.  On my short visit with Sherry last weekend she reminded me of her ingenious method of removing the heads of the chickens.  Closing the heavy chicken house door on the chicken’s neck was much easier than the unpredictable and dangerous hacking away with a hatchet.  Was Judy on the other side of the door stretching the chicken’s neck?

            Here’s an excerpt from my mother’s letter on the chickens:

           

“The chickens didn’t bring such a good price – by his (the buyer's) scales the rooster only weighed six and a half pounds, so you see there is quite a difference in the way they figure and the way we figured.  He figured 73 lbs of hens at .23 cents and six and a half lbs. for the rooster at nineteen cents.  He gave me $18.03.  I objected, said I know the rooster weighed more, but it was the last weighed and he had weighed the hens in bunches and already had them in the car.

        The water heater broke down after I was through with the wash – Chris is coming after the saw.”

            In addition to being strapped for money my parents were planning to move us all temporarily to Manhattan Kansas.  My mother had lined up a renter for our house at $45.00 a month and she was selling all of my father’s tools.  The outcome of the war was shifting in our favor and the move never occurred.

           

            Here’s a line in one letter that sums up how she must have felt many times.

“I’m tired – tired – tired –all the kids have colds.”

As you can see from the two previous blogs the ancestry of Albert (o) Anatole Alberti is still being discovered by the meticulous research of my great niece Megan Kunze.  I’m blown away at what she’s turned up!  I traveled to Kansas City last week and gave her everything I had in “the box” on the Alberti’s only to find she had most of the important documents already in her possession, neatly bound and filed in plastic sleeves.  She is very close to finding that elusive Alberti “beautiful estate” in Pienza, Italy. When she hits what appears to be a dead end she backs out and heads down another road. All things “Alberti” are now in Megan’s capable hands and I expect there will be another blog  written soon in her captivating style. It seems the “writing gene” is expressed most vividly in the “fillies” of our family