(THIRTEEN)

Chicago Today

2

  After Harry passed away, May struggled to revive  her hopes for the future.  Hamilton purchased the Western Springs Sanitarium property where Jack and Katherine had been born.  Time should have been the enemy of sorrow, and May tried to work through fits of depression.  The difficulty of getting along with Pearl didn’t help.  Both of them were stubborn.  Pearl tried to draw her out.  “One has to be a mind reader to understand you, May!”  Pearl was right about everything!  “They should clean up the Levee!  It’s disgusting! Have you heard the latest?  The pimps have formed a Cadets Protective Association!”  The horrendous Levee was a Chicago red light district bounded by Clark Street, Wabash Avenue and Twenty-Second and Eighteenth Streets, packed in with all sorts of vice.  Its showplace was the internationally infamous Everleigh Club run by two Kentucky sisters, Ada and Minna Everleigh.

   “Pearl!” Emily admonished.  “You shouldn’t know about such things!”

  “I know plenty!” Pearl fired back.

  If it wasn’t vice or politics, it was May’s children.  “You’ll spoil them rotten!”

  There were interludes of relative peace.  Pearl did enjoy the children, although she was a little stiff with them, like a spinster aunt rather than fun-loving girl in her early twenties.  She couldn’t seem to relax into slinging mud pies with Katherine in the back yard or charging up San Juan Hill with Jack’s toy soldiers.  She insisted on reciting the alphabet or reading them Horatio Alger, “Luck and Pluck,” and “Tattered Tom.”

  “Those stories are too advanced for the children,” May warned her.  “Ease up a little.  They’ll love you more.”

  Hamilton had purchased the Western Springs Sanitarium in 1902, and on July 17, that year May gave birth to her third child.  When Pearl heard what they were going to name her, she scoffed.

  “Jane!  It’s such a common name!  Why don’t you call her Jean, or Jennie, or Jeanine!”

  May said nothing.  If this was the kind of factitious nonsense Pearl was picking up at Miss Stone’s School, the family had wasted their money.

  Chicago at the turn of the Century was much more than a city of vice and depravity, thieving politicians and rascals, as pictured by hysterical reformers.  Perhaps the utterance of the historian, John Clark Ridpath was a bit exaggerated—“It’s a marvel,” he declared after ascending Sullivan’s Tower, “not only of our own age and century but of the modern world.  Even from the dome of St. Peter’s the landscape is by no means so fine, so extended, so full of progress and enthusiasm.”

  On the other hand, Rudyard Kipling declared, “Having seen it (noisy, industrious, wicked and brash Chicago) I urgently desire never to see it again.  It is inhabited by savages.”  But nobody paid any attention to him.

  A move was on to clear up the lakefront, leaving the Art Institute as it stood.  The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, reigned over by Theodore Thomas, performed fifty successive concerts a season, “The only city on the continent,” Thomas said, “next to New York, where there is sufficient musical culture” to give so many performances in a series.  By 1902 John D. Rockefeller had contributed “spare change” of over ten million dollars to the University of Chicago which had opened its doors on October 1, 1892.  Chicago rapidly was becoming the literary capital of the United States.  The movement had started in 1892 and came to be called the “Chicago Renaissance.”

  May and Hamilton enjoyed the stimulation of the city’s social life, when­ever he could get away from the Sanitarium in Western Springs, lecturing at the University, or from his duties with the State Electro-Medical Society.  Emily was on hand to watch the children.  Hamilton didn’t enthuse over the opera or symphony as much as May; comedy and vaudeville more to his liking.  They barely missed the tragedy at the Iroquois Theatre on the afternoon of December 30, 1903 at the perfor­mance of “Mrs. Bluebird” starring Eddie Foy.  Pearl also had planned to go with them but a personnel problem came up at the Sanitarium and Hamilton couldn’t cut free.  May had a premonition.  Pearl fumed.  They stayed home.

  In the “absolutely fireproof” theater, as the happy audience applauded the performers, an unseen strip of gauze on the proscenium drapery ignited from an open arc light; a tiny flame sputtered up the strip and licked at a velvet drape.  The flimsy scenery caught fire.  The audience rose in panic.  Eddie Foy in his grotesque costume, called out, “Please be quiet!  There is no danger!”  The orchestra, taking his cue, struck up a tune and calm was restored—briefly.  But then blazing muslin drifted down, followed by more fiery fragments.  Instantly the auditorium trans­formed into a scene of horror.  Crazed, screaming struggling people, men women and children, rushed for the exits, some of which were locked tight.  The asbestos curtain jammed half way down.  Flames billowed upward into the ceiling and roared toward the balcony.  In fifteen awful minutes, five hundred and ninety-six persons were dead.

  News from California was less grim.  They kept up with events there, alert to the slightest cue which might draw them back again—the end of the drought; improved economic conditions.  Hamilton had maintained  his professional contacts from 1899.  He was preparing papers on the “diagnostic problems of the Mission Indians” and anticipated some day he would continue on-the-spot research.

  May longed to return—if not to the desert—to most anywhere in Cali­fornia.  The Iroquois Theatre tragedy had depressed her, as had a particularly harsh winter.  She longed to see mountains again and breathe in the smell of eucalyptus after rain.  Living in Palm Springs was out of the question, but they could always settle close to the valley—in Riverside or Redlands, perhaps.  All depended on Hamilton’s practice, now their only source of income.  Remembering the historical deluge in Southern California in 1883, Emily declared, “San Bernardino is out!”

  The drought in Southern California held into the rainy season of 1903-1904.  That didn’t stop “progress” in the vast Colorado desert, however.  There were some startling results.  Harry had carried stories to them of a gigantic desert recla­mation project in the making—a wild scheme to harness the Colorado River to bring water into a huge trough known as the Salton Sink far south of Palm Springs and extending to the Mexican border.  “And people thought father was crazy!”  Harry said.

  George Chaffey, the irrigation expert who’d developed Ontario in the eighties, renamed the southern part of the trough, the Imperial Valley.  Harry had attempted to tie in the Palm Valley Water Company holdings, but their rights were too far removed from the area to be reclaimed.  Who needed the meager resources of the Whitewater River when the speculators had all of the Colorado to draw from?

  In a complex structure involving eight mutual water companies which purchased shares of water stock from the California Development Company and then transferred the stock to a holding organization known as the Imperial Land Com­pany staffed entirely by promoters of the Development Company, the speculators began enticing prospective settlers.  The “homesteaders” had to take care of getting their own land from the government by filing homestead claims from the checker­board land grant acres owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad or from the California Development Company.  But to obtain water for their new land, the settlers pur­chased stock in one of the mutual companies, which in effect, meant the Imperial Land Company, and usually they bought on credit.  If the land failed, it reverted to the Imperial Land Company to sell on a rising market.  How altruistic now seemed John Guthrie’s enterprise in Palm Springs! 

  Chaffey started digging his aqueduct in November, 1900.  In May, 1901, as soon as water flowed into the Imperial Valley, crops sprang from the earth.  Land prices skyrocketed.  But in 1904 silt began too plug the upper end of Chaffey’s canal.  Water deliveries shrank.  Directors of the California Development Company, now close to bankruptcy, cut a new opening in the riverbank south of the border to take water through a temporary ditch, but they made no allowance for high water.  A series of floods poured down the Colorado and Gila rivers.  The unguarded break below the border sucked in the entire Colorado flow and flooded into the Salton Sink, spreading until it was thirty-five miles long, fifteen miles wide and forty feet deep, creating the Salton Sea.

  Fortunately the disaster hadn’t touched Palm springs, but it strengthened Hamilton’s argument that the family couldn’t depend on the Palm Springs property as a means of income.  If it wasn’t drought, it was flood and if they ever went shop­ping for cash to develop the land, they’d end up in the clutches of avaricious specu­lators, or worse, the extent of Harry’s land holdings would become known, and wouldn’t the creditors love to get onto that!

  One year after Harry’s death, C.G. Kellogg in Los Angeles was appointed administrator of Harry’s estate—most likely at the instigation of his creditors.  In the final report of his administration on October 26, 1903, Kellogg reported that Harry’s estate was worth only twenty dollars!—that his death occurred “on August 2, 1902 in Los Angeles,” and he left no heirs.  Following this, on January 11, 1904, another petition was submitted by Kellogg presenting that Harry’s personal property was valued at a total of ten dollars.  In this petition, Harry’s next of kin were listed:  “Emily McCallum, mother; Pearl McCallum, sister; May McCallum Forline, sister; all residents of Chicago, Illinois.”  The petition continues:

  That due search and inquiry have been made to ascertain if said deceased left any will but none has been found, and according to the best knowledge, information and belief of your petitioner said deceased died intestate.

  So the family had succeeded in hiding Harry’s assets and the true date of his death.  It would appear that the McCallum Ranch had been deeded by Emily to Pearl more than a year before any possible probate of Harry’s estate; thus no fraudulent attempt had been made to avoid liens on the McCallum Ranch which Harry might have incurred using his mother’s Power of Attorney.  Presenting also that since Harry died “in the County of Los Angeles” according to Kellogg’s first petition, was it not apparent the family knew nothing about his holdings, or debts?

  In February, 1903, the M.W. Stewart Company, now United Wholesale Grocery, did come after satisfaction of the loan of one thousand dollars against Section Eleven.  This would become known by May’s children in later years as “Emily’s Grocery Bill.”  The property was sold in default of the loan on February 26, but for only two hundred and fifty dollars.  When United Wholesale looked for the remaining debt of seven hundred fifty dollars, they discovered Emily had no more assets—not even the McCallum Ranch; Pearl owned it, even before Harry died, supposedly.  The Los Angeles probate of Harry’s estate in 1902 had revealed Harry had nothing left to will to his mother.  Dying intestate, Harry’s interest in Syndicate shares of six hundred acres in Palm Springs passed to his mother and sisters after his death—but this fact remained hidden.  The ruse had worked.  The McCallum Ranch couldn’t be touched.

  May and Pearl were, however, drawn into the sale of Section Eleven to United Wholesale Grocery because of a technicality—the incorrect description of the property when Harry, May, and Pearl deeded the property to their mother in the 1898 partition.  On May 4, 1903—once again and in Chicago—May and Pearl quit-claimed their share of Section Eleven to Emily, just as they had done in the partition so that she would have clear title to sell the property to satisfy the debt to United Wholesale—to pay “Emily’s grocery bill.”

  This new quit-claim from May and Pearl to their mother, underscored the tacit agreement the family had to their joint ownership of all the Palm Springs property—no matter who had title to it; and the assurance that all of them would do whatever necessary to protect the McCallum Ranch for their successors.

  However, Harry’s estate wasn’t quieted yet.  On February 25, 1904, Kellogg again petitioned the court,  this time at the request of the First National Bank in Los Angeles which held the Water Company stock.  The petition stated:

  That decedent during his lifetime borrowed from the First National Bank . . . a large sum of money which, including principal and interest amounts to the sum of $10,000, and that at the time of borrowing said sum the decedent delivered to and hypothecated with said First National Bank, said shares of stock as security for said money so borrowed; thereafter an assessment was regularly and duly levied to pay the debts of said corporation [The Palm Valley Water Company] . . . estate of decedent owns an equitable interest in said stock; That the estate of decedent has no means with which to redeem said stock or any part thereof . . .

  Since some of the stock pledged belonged to Emily and May; and since Harry’s estate by law passed to Emily, May, and Pearl because he died intestate, the possibility arose that all property might be attached if public auction of the stock failed to settle the loan.  But the two Powers of Attorney from May and Emily never were made part of the petition, and again no connection was made between Harry and his heirs, nor the six hundred acres of Syndicate land, even though this land had been deeded to Harry in the 1898 partition, and these deeds were public record.  Had such connections been made, it’s probable the Ranch still would be protected since the primary heiress—that is, Emily—no longer owned it.  The wisdom of deeding the Ranch to Pearl again was confirmed.

  In July 1903, in Western Springs, May was driving the phaeton, accom­panied by seven year old Jack, when, frightened by an automobile sparking at full speed beside them, the horse kicked off the dashboard of the phaeton, causing a compound fracture of May’s leg.  In spite of the injury, May controlled and checked the frenzied horse as it ran through the streets, managing to turn it into the golf links where it finally settled down.  May was laid up for weeks after the incident.  It didn’t help her melancholic spirit.  She longed to return to California no matter what the cost to Hamilton’s work.

  But the clinic at Western Springs was failing.  In 1904, the Sanitarium faced it’s own water crisis—the springs dried up.  Hamilton was adjudged bankrupt and a trustee was appointed, and May began slipping further into melan­cholia and severe moods of depression—fear she might lose Hamilton’s love.  She was pregnant and wondered if she might die in childbirth.  Hadn’t the McCallums been haunted with death for the past fifteen years?  She was thirty-five years old; Hamilton still young for a man—only a year older than she.  How could she live through the next nine, irritating months; drag herself through the drab winter, denied the physical comfort of her husband while she watched lines creep from the corners of her eyes?  She fought her moods but they persisted like March sleet and snow.  She must get back home.  The failure of the Sanitarium convinced Hamilton there wasn’t much   left for him professionally in Illinois.  He agreed the time had come to return.