(TWELVE)

Aerial View, 1893 Chicago World's Fair

May and Hamilton

1

  The Muse is a Lorelei, luring us to a portrait of May McCallum Forline with scent from a jeweled cache of crushed, dry rose petals; seducing with sepia-tinted photographs—astonishing beauty—pensive eyes.  But the story of her brief life deserves more realistic elegy.  When May traveled with John Guthrie to Boston in the Spring of 1890, she experienced moments of elation, permitting herself to let go long enough to enjoy her father’s company; even to imagine she would succeed in her studies and become a great opera star—and skilled—mastery was most important to her.

  Optimism and idle hope weren’t part of May’s nature; for if she were instilled with a single fragment of the Tahquitz demon, it took the form of driving self-discipline, uncompromising self-appraisal.  If she failed it could only be the result of her own lack of effort—and deficiency.   She and she alone would be responsible; harsh, self-imposed demands for a girl of twenty-one.  Her mother admonished, “Be more kind to yourself, May.  You’re young.  Don’t fret if your studies turn out differently than you expect.”

  The trip itself was a pleasant diversion during which she tried not to anticipate how her study in Boston would evolve.  It was her first time out of California.  Not that going by rail was all that luxurious, but they were traveling first class, such as it was, and so much to see!  She was content to sit by the window all the daylight hours absorbed in the incredible panoply of the land which seemed to change with every mile; fascinated as they neared Chicago by the cozy farms and greening thick woodlands—so unlike California.

  Her father was delightful company.  He beguiled her at mealtime with stories of his early days in California—the rowdy years in San Francisco, his brief flirtation with the “Know-Nothings,” the violence of the Sacramento political riots—stories she’d never heard at  home.  She began to feel less like a daughter, and more like a friendly companion.  For a man of sixty-four he looked amazingly young.  Perhaps because he was clean shaven at the time, not even a moustache—and more significantly, because his wildest imaginings had come true in Palm Springs.  His eyes revealed a zest for living—enthusiasm for the future.

  As they sped through Illinois farmland, she learned something about her father she’d never known.  Sitting across from her in the compartment, looking out across verdant pastureland, he said, “This is the land, the earth of my childhood.  It’s different here in the east, May.  Severe winters test a man’s endurance.  And in Spring, God rewards us.”

  Tears filled his eyes.  “Do you see now what it is we’ve created in Palm Springs?  We’ve brought eastern values to the desert, as never before, in spite of too many greedy men who have no respect for the land.  I challenged the old devil Tahquitz, but I didn’t ravish his stronghold.  I improved it—not only for us, but for his people.  So you see how magnificent an achievement!  In giving water to the desert, we’ve been rewarded—the fulfillment of a young man’s dream.  I have never forgotten it.  Once long ago on my way to California, I wanted to settle on the land in Nebraska and if I hadn’t been drawn to California in the search for my brothers, I may well have.”

  May listened, fascinated.  He smiled, sitting upright suddenly, as if ready for a brawl, but his voice was gentle.  “Those Syndicate partners, I had them going every which way of Sundays and when they beheld the orchards, they stood in awe.  They, who wanted to rip up Palm Springs, cheat the Indians out of their land and build cement factories and tear into the mountain!  Well we showed them, May, and it’s only the beginning.”

  Stopping over in Chicago, John Guthrie arranged for them to stay with the Forlines in their elegant home on the lakeshore.  He hadn’t seen anyone in the family since leaving Indiana more than forty years ago but he’d kept in touch.  Dr. Henry Harrison Forline, a younger man than John Guthrie, had married during the Civil War and now practiced medicine in Illinois.  John Guthrie’s father had known his father.  Both had settled along the Ohio River in 1815.

  One of their heroes was William Henry Harrison, a frontier American, who drew national attention as the first representative of the Northwest Territories in 1800—“northwest” to easterners; actually what we consider today the Midwest—with his “Log Cabin” bill providing for poor settlers to buy small govern­ment tracts.   Harrison had defeated Chief Tecumseh’s brother, the Prophet, at Tippecanoe; freed the Territory from threats of British invasion and concluded several treaties with the Indians opening the Territory for rapid settle­ment.

  As a young man on the Indiana frontier, John Guthrie had known the Forlines more than casually, although Henry Harrison was only twelve years old when John Guthrie left for California.  Now Henry Harrison was a successful, practicing medical doctor with two sons, Marc and Henry Hamilton, who liked to be called “just plain Hamilton,” he told May.  He was a few years older than May, a student at Northwestern University studying medicine and with scrapping fellow-students had founded the Phi Rho Sigma Fraternity.  Originally they called the fraternity  “Hamline,” but that seemed a bit egotistical, and was quickly renamed.

  It was John Guthrie who brought back the story that “May’s voice was ruined by that blasted teacher who tried to force her to sing soprano!” not aware that he himself might’ve been responsible by encouraging May to study at so young an age.  Then Johnnie died.

  Failure because of her own shortcomings—yes, she could live with that—but not being able to prevent the loss of her beloved Johnnie at so early an age, darkened a corner of her mind forever.

  On the first of May, 1892, Chicago opened its splendiferous “White City” – the World’s Columbian Exposition.  Seven months after the four hundred year anniversary of America’s discovery it was intended to celebrate, John Guthrie and Emily packed up and traveled eastward with Wallace, Harry, May, and Pearl, hoping that visiting the Exposition would alleviate some of the sorrow over Johnnie’s death; and John Guthrie would assist the delegation of Luther Calvin Tibbets in River­side to promote the navel orange.

  Certainly the wonders of the Exposition were a diver­sion:  thousands of exhibits gathered from all over the world emblazoned by the new wonder of the century, electricity.  The Exposition was graced with both artistic and aesthetic exhibits—gleaming lagoons and a midway for pleasure seekers featuring the gigantic Ferris wheel imported from Europe, rising one hundred and sixty-five feet in the air; an intramural train with a third electric rail, a huge network of incan­descent lighting, a telephone hookup for listening to concerts from New York, engines and water wheels and refrigeration machines and horseless fire trucks, awesome naval guns, hydraulic presses, Edison’s Kinescope with camera and phonograph working simultaneously.

  On display were expensive paintings in the Fine Arts Palace, cured meats from Chicago stockyards, rose plantations, and French tapestries and model tene­ments; a Canadian ten-ton cheese, the Yerkes telescope.  And “Little Egypt” dancing the hootchie-kootchie on the Midway’s “Streets of Cairo.”

  Also it was an opportunity for John Guthrie to reacquaint himself and family—especially May—with the Forline family.  Hamilton had just graduated from the Medical Department of Northwestern University with an M.D.  He was going to be twenty-five in November.  Young and vigorous, Hamilton seemed gentle, but May sensed a lurking animal virility beneath the smooth, flushed face and intensive blue eyes.  They fell in love.

  Hamilton was ambitious—almost to excess, she realized, and this thrilled her even more than physical attraction.  Here was a man she could not only look up to, but admire, support and encourage.  His proposal of marriage was tentative.  “I’m leaving within the week for London,” he told her, “for post graduate studies.  Then, Paris—Vienna.  Electricity is opening up a whole new science of diagnostic tech­niques.  We excel in technical proficiency but I’m afraid the Europeans are far ahead of us in subtleties, and the Germans even outpacing us in the mechanics.  I’ll probably be gone for an entire year.”

  She touched his hand.  “I’ll wait, Hamilton, but shouldn’t you perhaps take advantage of opportunities here?  You’re recently out of school—valedictorian of your class—yes, your father told me—a recognized anatomical expert—and head pro—what is that word?  I’ll never get it straight!”

  “Prosector.”  He laughed.  “What are you up to?  Playing the doctor’s wife already?  Prospector means only that I indulge frequently in dissection to demonstrate anatomy in front of a lot of sleeping med students.  I guess I’m somewhat of an expert in anat­omy, but what do you want me to become—Coroner for Cook Country?  Like your father, I’ve got no use for politics.”

  “You could set up a private practice with no difficulty.”

  “The country doctor?  No, that’s not for me.  Let me tell you—I don’t want to brag or anything you understand, but I’ve got this sixth sense figuring out what’s wrong with people, physically, that is.  Diagnosis is second nature to me, and I seldom miss the mark.  I want to do something with that.  For instance, I’ve got a special interest in diseases of the spinal cord and I’m—well, right now I’m trying to work out an injection method for treatment and—there’s so much more, a bundle of things I don’t know beans about.”

  May shrugged.  “I’ll wait for you,” she said.

  They were married in Los Angeles on September 19, 1894—a church wedding, the reception held at the McCallum home on Bunker Hill.  Hamilton had completed his studies in Europe.  At Western Springs, a suburb of Chicago south of Cicero, he’d succeeded Dr. Justin Hayes at a popular health resort Dr. Hayes and his wife Julia had founded in 1885, building a house and Sanitarium there.  Also, Hamil­ton was to instruct Clinical Medicine at North­western University Medical College as Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Diagnosis at the West Chicago Post Graduate School.  May braced herself for the role of a doctor’s wife.

  In 1895 at the Western Springs Sanitarium, young John McCallum Forline was born—they called him Jack.  Hamilton also was building a practice and a reputation as “healer” in Chicago with offices at 391 Fifth-fifth Street.  One his most bizarre challenges was to bring a young woman, Sadie Johnson, out of an hypnotic spell cast upon her by her aunt, Emma Johnson, during a party at the Johnson home at 5343 Ingleside Avenue in Madison Park.  The girl refused to wake up.  Not a few guests at the party believed the young girl wasn’t hypnotized at all.  Dr. Forline was called in.  After several attempts to revive her, Hamilton as a final resort, said, “If you don’t wake up, young lady, I will throw you out the window.”  Instantly, the girl was on her feet.

  When  they came back to the Coast in 1899 to be close to Harry and support him, Hamilton joined the Los Angeles County Medical Association and the Medical Society of the State of California, continuing research medicine in spinal cord diseases, later originating a “supra-dural injection method of treatment,” and a “nutro-alternative solution” to accomplish it—a delicate operation requiring great skill.  (Supra-dural matter is situated above the outermost, toughest and most fibrous of three membranes covering the spinal cord; the solution invented was to change the blood composition in this microscopic membrane reestablishing “healthy functions to the system.”)

  During the winter of 1899 in Palm Springs, Hamilton’s attempts to prescribe for Harry ran up against the same kind of stubbornness he’d found in May.  “You McCallums are all alike!” he bit a Harry.  “You won’t listen to anyone except your demons.  You’ve got to get away from here, young man, or you’ll destroy yourself.”

  In California that year, May and Hamilton became closer than they’d ever been.  She’d drawn him into family affairs and sometimes, when Hamilton came back after an afternoon of administering to the Indians, it was as if John Guthrie himself were walking up the path.  When he tried desperately to help Harry, May’s love for him deepened.  Every­thing had meshed—her life with Hamilton  conjoined with Palm Springs.  She permitted herself some optimism.

  Staying in Los Angeles with visits to Palm Springs for long periods was difficult.  John would start school in the fall.  Hamilton’s practice in California was slow in developing, and he was needed in Western Springs,  Pearl was about to finish high school at Ramona Convent.  Reluctantly with the children, Emily and Pearl, they returned to Chicago in September, 1900, but not until they’d extracted a commitment from Harry that he would close up the Palm Springs venture, for a little while at least, and come live with them in Chicago.  He warned May it might take him more than a year to “close up things,” and there were several ideas he wanted to look into.  The Imperial Valley was developing down near San Diego and that meant, soon, the Coachella Valley closer to Palm Springs would follow.    “There’s possibilities we might yet pull ourselves out of the hole!”