Creepy history – Page 2 – Alan E. Hunter

Creepy history, Indianapolis, Pop Culture

Nazi’s at Arsenal Tech…What?

April 7, 2025June 20, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Part I

https://weeklyview.net/2025/03/13/nazis-at-arsenal-tech-what-part-1/

Original publish date March 13, 2025.

It’s true. In the years leading up to World War II, there was at least one eastside Indianapolis family openly identifying with the American Nazi Party. And three of those proud young Nazis graduated from Arsenal Technical High School. It all came to a head 87 years ago this Saturday when the Soltau home on North Summitt Street (where the La Parada Mexican restaurant now stands) came under attack by an angry mob of Circle City citizens seeking to enact their own “Night of Broken Glass” on March 15, 1938, seven months before Adolph Hitler’s Kristallnacht in Berlin, Germany in November of that same year. In March of 1938, Indianapolis newspapers were dominated by reports of German Wehrmarcht invaders poised at the gate, prepared to annex Austria into a “greater German Reich” and threatening the entire Western European theatre. Those same front pages reported on an organization of Hoosier ethnic Germans who were resolutely pro-Nazi, vehemently anti-Communist, deeply anti-Semitic, and staunchly American isolationists. In 1938, an estimated 25,000 Americans were members of this German American Bund. Indianapolis boosters hoped to swell that number by appealing to the large German immigrant community by advocating “clean American nationalism against Communist international outlawry.”

However, the German-American Bund secured very few Hoosier followers and gained little sympathy for their cause. Indiana had a well-deserved reputation for xenophobia and white nationalism that is most clearly reflected in the Ku Klux Klan’s ascent to power just over a decade before. The number of Hoosiers in league with the German-American Bund was certainly much smaller than the number of members of the 1920s KKK. Still it was committed to many of the same ideological issues as the Klan. Its history confirms the complex range of xenophobic sentiments simmering in the 20th-century Circle City.

The Soltau family was closely associated with Indianapolis, particularly the east side and Irvington. John Albert Soltau (1847-1938) was a German immigrant who founded the first grocery chain in Indianapolis, the Minnesota Grocery Company. Soltau arrived here in 1873 at the age of 10. After marrying Miss Elizabeth Koehler (1851-1920), Soltau opened the first of what would become a chain of twelve grocery stores at 208 North Davidson Street. The couple had five children: William, Edward, James, John, and Benjamin. The elder Soltau remained in the grocery business for over fifty years. Three of his sons joined him, managing stores of their own. Mr. Soltau was a member of the First Evangelical Church near Lockerbie Square (where New York crosses East Street). The family residence was located at 837 Middle Drive in Woodruff Place.

**Edward B. and John H. Soltau grocery store at 2133 E. Michigan Street in Indianapolis.**

**837 Woodruff Place Middle Dr, Indianapolis**

In 1894, John was a Republican Ward delegate in Indianapolis. In 1902, he was an unsuccessful candidate for Marion County Recorder on the Prohibition ticket, and in 1916, he was a delegate to the national Prohibition Party convention. His long adherence to the temperance cause smacks of social conservativism, but offers no clear evidence for why his family embraced the Nazi ideology. Hoosier Prohibitionists allied themselves with the Klan’s cause in the 1920s, and in 1923, John’s brother James Garfield Soltau (1881-1932) was identified as one of the first 12,208 Ku Klux Klan members in Indianapolis. John died of “uremia and carcinoma of the prostate” on July 18, 1938, and is buried alongside his wife, Elizabeth, at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.

John’s eldest son, William Soltau, was a realtor who operated his agency in room 202 of the Inland Building at 160 East Market Street in the city for a quarter century. William and his wife Laura E. (Hansing) Soltau (1879-1943) were the parents of three children: Pearl Brilliance Soltau (1905-1968), Charles William Soltau (1909-1971), and Opal Margaret Soltau (1920-2008). All three children graduated from Arsenal Technical High School, Pearl, in 1922, Charles in 1926, and Opal in 1938. Pearl graduated from Butler University in 1925, Charles from Purdue in 1931 (with honors and a perfect 6.5 GPA), and Opal attended Butler University until at least 1940. The Soltau’s moved to 339 North Summit Street in 1916 and while the Soltau family was residing under that roof, it appears that all five were emersed in and sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

The front page of the March 9, 1938, Indianapolis News ran a photo of the Soltau House with a notice that a meeting of the German American Bund, described as a “Patriotic Fighting Organization of the German Americans”, was to be held there. Regardless, the Soltau family denied that a meeting was to be held in their home. The next day, the news ran a copy of the invitation with the address of the home and the announcement that Wilhelm Kunze, National Publicity Director of the Bund, would be the speaker and that admission was free and open to the public, especially to “All Truth-Seeking Americans”. Again, the family denied that Kunze was in the city at all, let alone scheduled to appear at the house. Kunze was fresh off his January 1938 appearance in a March of Time newsreel that the Library of Congress called “the first commercially released anti-Nazi American motion picture.” The News article announced the meeting’s date as Monday, March 14, at 8:30 pm.

Hoosiers were shocked. After all, in February, the Athenaeum, the Liederkranz Hall (1417 E. Washington St.), and the Syrian-American Brotherhood Hall (2245 East Riverside) had all canceled the Bund’s reservation and refused to host the event. On February 25th the Indianapolis Star identified “an American-born Nazi agent…born in Indiana” attempted to secure a venue “to organize Brown Shirt Nazi units in Indianapolis.” That local organizer was revealed as Charles W. Soltau from the near-Eastside. Charles wrote a letter to the Star complaining that “the German-American Bund has been accused, maligned and condemned without a trial” and suggested that the Bund’s right to meet had been undermined by “Jewish business interests”, arguing that “a certain powerful minority group, which seems to have gained almost complete control of the press, fears the effect of public enlightment.(sic)” Charles further declared that the Soltau family was “anxious to have our house filled with German-Americans who have enough backbone to assert their constitutional right of peaceable assembly in the face of opposition by these boycott racketeers.” He closed his letter as “Yours for a cleaned-up, white man’s U.S.A. Charles Soltau.” Shortly after that revelation, 27-year-old Soltau announced that the meeting was called off.

**Indianapolis News Notice March 10, 1938.**

The front page of the March 15, 1938, Indianapolis Star reported, “Rocks hurled through the windows at the home of William A. Soltau, 339 North Summit Street, broke up an organization meeting of the Indianapolis affiliate of the Nazi Amerika Deutschen Volksbundes (German American bund) late last night.” William Albert Soltau (1875-1950) called the police for help after it was learned that Gerhard Wilhelm “Fritz” Kunze (1882-1958) and a small entourage had joined the Soltau family for dinner earlier that evening. Fritz Kuhn, often referred to as the “American Führer”, was the leader of the fledgling German-American Bund (Federation). Fearing for his dinner guests’ safety, Soltau asked police to escort Kunze and his guests to safety. Although Kunze refused to divulge his identity to any of the officers present, his “tooth-brush mustache”, proper Sturmabteilung brownshirt, and swastika tie-clasp made the physical connection to German Chancellor Adolph Hitler unmistakable.

When escorted from the home, Kunze declared to the officers and crowd gathered on the sidewalk, “I am a guest of Mr. Soltau, and he does not want my name known.” Kunze eventually admitted his identity to the police after they discovered the Bund application blanks Kunze held in his hands, wrapped up in a newspaper. An Indianapolis News article claimed that visible through the broken windows were, “Fifteen chairs had been arranged around a dining room table, and on it were application blanks for Bund membership.” The article noted that the “photographer for the Associated Press was ordered off the Soltau property by a man who carried a gun.” Soltau repeated his denials that a Bund meeting had been held in his home, claiming it was just “a few guests in for dinner.” The shades of the house were drawn, and a police squad car remained in front of the house from dusk to 10:30 pm when the officers went off duty. At 10:43 pm, a barrage of rocks crashed through the north windows of the Soltau house. Cars buzzed Summit Street for days afterward as curious motorists drove past the Soltau home and a near-constant gang of 40 or 50 youngsters “milled in the neighborhood”. Further exacerbating the situation, on July 18, 1938, just 4 months after the attack at his son’s home, family patriarch and Indianapolis grocery chain magnate John Albert Soltau died at age 90. Over the years, the elder Soltau and his son had purchased 4 tracts of land totaling 234 acres along State Road 46 in Gnaw Bone, 8 miles east of Nashville in Brown County. Newspapers speculated that the land was to be used as a Bund camp for Nazi activities, but the Soltau’s denied it.

Next Week: Part II: Nazi’s at Arsenal Tech…What?

Nazi’s at Arsenal Tech…What?

Part II

https://weeklyview.net/2025/03/20/nazis-at-arsenal-tech-what-part-2/

Original publish date March 20, 2025.

On March 15, 1938, an eastside Indianapolis house was rocked (quite literally) by an angry crowd after the city learned about a formational meeting of the German-American Bund, an organization formed to follow the ideals and edicts of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party. The Soltau family, who lived at 339 North Summit Street, welcomed a controversial visitor to their home, a German transplant named Fritz Kunze. The Nazi’s visit was greeted by Circle-City residents hurling rocks through the front windows of the Soltau home. Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze was the Bund’s publicity director who invented derogatory names for people (Franklin D. Rosenfeld) and programs (The Jew Deal) he disapproved of while extolling Jim Crow laws, warned against immigrants, and advocated for the Chinese Exclusion Act. Fritz warned white Americans: “You, Aryan, Nordic, and Christians…wake up” and “demand our government be returned to the people who founded it…It has always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation.”

**Wilhelm Kunze German American Bund Rally.1938.**

Despite the Eastside Indianapolis Nazi recruitment session debacle, the Soltau family stayed committed to Nazi ideology. In November 1938, Charles and his youngest sister, Opal, fresh off her graduation from Tech High School, returned from a Bund indoctrination trip to Germany. Some of these trips included meetings with Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hitler himself. Whether the siblings were in the Rhineland to attend a German youth camp or to enjoy a post-graduation vacation is unknown. While 18-year-old Opal fit the profile, Charles was almost 30 and may have aged out of that group. They left Hamburg on November 3rd, arriving back in New York on the 11th. The Soltau family quietly supported the Bund cause by subscribing to The Free American newsletter and other Nazi propaganda publications including a liturgy of anti-Semitic tracts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s Mein Kampf manifesto. A November 1941 FBI investigation identified the Soltau family as 4 of 38 stockholders in the Press (The publishing house had issued 5000 shares of preferred stock at $10 a share in 1937). The FBI noted that the Soltau family were the only stockholders from Indiana. While the Free American had local news columns in Fort Wayne and South Bend, there were none in Indianapolis.

The German-American Bund was at its zenith in 1938-39, but after 20,000 people attended a Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia instigated a series of investigations that would ultimately bring them down. In September 1939, after the Nazis invaded Poland the FBI and federal government went after the Bund. Fritz Kunze was detained by the South Bend Police on May 12, 1941.

In the inventory of Kunze’s papers confiscated by the Police were cards with the names and addresses of Bund members, including the Soltau family, the only members from Indiana. Kunze was charged with espionage, and in November 1941, just a month before Pearl Harbor, he fled to Mexico, hoping to escape to Germany. Kunze was captured by the Feds in Mexico in June 1942 and sent to jail for espionage, where he spent the rest of the war. The German-American Bund disbanded officially immediately after Pearl Harbor. Regardless, some Bund members had their American citizenship revoked and were deported, while others were prosecuted for refusing to register for the draft. Kunze was eventually deported himself in 1945.

In September 1940, when the draft began, the Bund instructed its members to boycott registration, and soon, former Bundist members began to be prosecuted by the Selective Service System for failure to register. 33-year-old Hoosier Charles William Soltau was among those who refused to report for induction. In August 1942, draft dodger Soltau was arrested, and his home was raided by US Marshals who discovered a large cache of Nazi propaganda there. It included issues of The Free American, a portrait of Hitler, Swastika banners, and Nazi memorabilia. In a four-page letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soltau argued that “in all my association with the German-American Bund I never was guilty of any subversive activity.” After spending a couple of nights in jail, Soltau posted a $5000 cash bond. When he appeared in court in November, he argued that, “My conscience will not permit me to bear arms against the German people.” He informed the court that “This war is a war of aggression by the United States against the Germans. I am a man of German blood, and I don’t think it is right or fair or just for a man of German blood to bear arms against the German people.” It took the jury six minutes to deliberate and deliver a five-year sentence to Soltau. Judge Robert C. Baltzell concluded that “I have never seen a more contemptuous fellow in this court,” and “I am going to do all I can to see that you serve as much [time] as possible.” In December 1943, while serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Milan, Michigan federal prison, Soltau’s mother Laura died. Charles was released in 1946, and with his sisters, Opal and Pearl, he moved to their secluded Brown County property near Gnaw Bone.

Their father, William Albert Soltau, died there on October 6, 1950, at age 75. His funeral service was held at Shirley Brothers Central Chapel in Irvington, and he is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery on Washington Street alongside his brothers, whose funeral services were also held at Shirley Brothers. At least one brother, Benjamin Harrison “Ben” (1889-1963), was a member of Irvington Masonic Lodge 666, and another, James Garfield Soltau (1881-1932), was an admitted member of the KKK. The Soltau siblings quietly left Indianapolis and moved to Gnaw Bone, where they lived together in Brown County for the remainder of their lives, and none of the three ever married. The siblings started with three goats in 1952, and by 1962, their “trip” (or tribe) had reached 44 head, so they created Pleasant Valley Goat Farm on their 200-acre Gnaw Bone property. The family sold goat’s milk and yogurt in local farm markets. Pearl Soltau also moonlighted as an accountant for a local hosiery mill, preparing tax returns on the farm. After a two-year illness, Pearl died at the Gnaw Bone farm in May 1968 at the age of 62. Charles died there on July 5, 1971, at age 61. Although Charles’s membership in the “German-American National Congress” was mentioned in his obit, Pearl betrayed no history of continued xenophobic activism after the war. Both are buried at Henderson Cemetery in Gnaw Bone.

However, the youngest sibling, Opal, remained committed to neo-Nazi causes for more than a half-century after the war. Even after the deaths of her siblings, Opal continued to agitate for unpopular political causes. Opal had been a standout at Arsenal Tech High School. She was a straight-A Honor Roll Student and received the scholarship medal from the Tech faculty in 1938. In the 1980s, Opal Soltau was accused of mailing neo-Nazi propaganda from the post office in Nashville, In. In September 1996, Opal sold her parcel of 120 acres in Brown County and by January 1997, she had moved to Nebraska. That same month, she became a Director for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party-Overseas Organization. Opal Soltau died in Lincoln in August 2008 and is presumed buried there. No one knows how the pilot light of Nazi fervor was lit in the Soltau family and, for that matter, how it burned out of control within the hearts and minds of these three Arsenal Tech graduates. Political ideology grows unchecked when surrounded only by like-minded individuals living in a silo of misinformation. Sometimes, it is the better part of valor to explore divergent opinions. The flame of Nazism burns through everything it touches. Characterized by extreme nationalism and steered by blind faith in misguided authoritarianism, its victims don’t realize what has happened until it’s too late. And by then, no matter what, they will never admit that they were ever wrong in the first place.

For a more thorough study of the Soltau family, I recommend the blog Nazis in the Heartland: The German-American Bund in Indianapolis by the late Paul R. Mullins (1962-2023), Anthropology Professor at IU Indianapolis (formerly IUPUI).

Creepy history, Gettysburg, Hollywood, Pop Culture, Weekly Column

James Dean in Gettysburg.

March 8, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Originally Published in December 2011. Republish Date December 21, 2023.

https://weeklyview.net/2023/12/21/james-dean-in-gettysburg/

There is an item on my office desk that calls to me every time my mind wanders, I’m gathering my thoughts, or most often, while I’m waiting for a document to load on the computer. It’s a ticket stub, smaller than an index card, from a Tuesday, February 19, 1957, double feature movie at the Majestic Theatre in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I bought the ticket in an antique mall just off the Gettysburg town square while on a trip with friends to the famous Civil War battlefield this past Spring. Native Hoosier that I am, my heart jumps a little whenever I see something with an Indiana connection so far away from home.

The ticket is for a movie touted as being “Direct from Hollywood” (Where else would it be from in 1957?) called “Dracula in House of the Living Dead”. The ticket features the cartoon image of a young woman on her hands and knees crawling away from a house whose disembodied eyes follow her, and oh yeah, she’s in a skimpy bathing suit. I’m not an expert on Dracula movies, but my guess is that this movie was just a rehash of an old well-known film with a brand new title designed to lure unsuspecting people into the theatre believing they were seeing a new release. A despicable practice common amongst studios back in the 1950s Era.

While the Dracula ticket and its promise of an additional unannounced “Thrilling Horror Movie”, were intriguing to be sure, they were not the reason for my purchase. Above the terror-stricken swimsuit-clad woman, there was an eerie floating head of someone very familiar to me and many of my fellow Hoosier baby boomers. It was Fairmount’s own James Dean. The printed promise near his image read: “See…the materialization of James Dean BACK FROM THE GRAVE!” On Stage in Person” Cool, James Dean in Gettysburg, why that’s so…Wait, that’s…impossible. James Dean died in a car crash on September 30, 1956, and this ticket is dated after Valentine’s Day of 1957! How could that be?

After a few minutes, I realized that this surely must be one of the earliest attempts at the exploitation of a dead celebrity ever attempted. Today, Hollywood barely waits for the body to get cold before cranking out biopics and making cable movies about dead celebrities. Anna Nicole-Smith, Heath Ledger, and Michael Jackson are recent examples. But in 1957 Gettysburg, really? One can only imagine the theatre owner dreaming up this stunt to draw a crowd, finding a good looking blonde haired kid from nearby Gettysburg College, paying him a small fee, and instructing him to walk out on stage wearing blue jeans, a white t-shirt, a red cloth jacket, and sunglasses before exiting speedily amid the gasps, squeals and screams of the frenzied teens in attendance.

**Gettysburg’s Majestic Theatre in 1953.**

Did I mention that the Majestic Theatre is built so close to the historic Lincoln train depot station that you can almost touch it? The very same train depot where Lincoln arrived the night before he delivered his incomparable Gettysburg Address on the battlefield, on November 18, 1863. A spot many consider to be hallowed ground. But how could this be? Was this an isolated incident of gross exploitation or part of a larger movement? A little research reveals that shortly after James Dean’s death on a lonely California highway, a “James Dean Lives” cult was born.

**Brochure/leaflet from Magician Kara Kum’s conjuring of James Dean.**

The first indication that the “James Dean Lives” cult was getting out of hand appeared in January of 1956, just three months after Dean died on the last day of September of 1955. Since October, Warner Brothers studio had been deluged with frantic fan letters expressing shock and disbelief that the teen idol was really dead. The letters continued to flow into the studio past Thanksgiving, but by December, the letter stream dramatically increased, both in volume and in spiritual tone. It now seemed that fans didn’t believe Jimmy was gone at all. New rumors claimed that he was being kept alive in a California nursing home and that the studios were stalling for time, just waiting for his recovery and a comeback. Hollywood Gossip columnist Walter Winchell printed the rumor that Dean was disfigured but still alive in his column. Other stories insisted that it wasn’t Dean at all who died in the car wreck, but rather a hitchhiker. Still more farfetched was the rumor that the actor was in hiding learning to operate his artificial limbs or that he had been placed in a sanitarium to recover. Three thousand letters came in during January and increased so steadily that by July, that number had increased to seven thousand. By the first anniversary of his death, Warner Brothers had received over fifty thousand fan letters from all over the world.

**The automobile crash that killed James Dean on Sept. 30, 1955, in Cholame, California.**

However, some of the “Mass hysteria” attributed to the “James Dean Lives” rumors can be rationally explained away. Much of this fan mail came from remote regions of South America, Australia, and Western Europe. While these areas still received the movies, albeit posthumously, they did not receive much news and were most likely unaware that James Dean was dead. Many times, these letters were addressed simply to: “James Dean Warner Brothers Studios Burbank California USA” and contained notes that read “Dear James Dean-I love your movies. Will you send me a picture?” That first year, the studio obliged and sent out the photos as requested, which undoubtedly did little to quell the rumors.

**James Dean next to his Porsche 550, a few hours before his death.**

But that didn’t explain all of the letters. From the day of his death, it seemed that young people would not let Dean die. Warner Brothers hired a special fan mail agency, the first of its kind in Hollywood, to deal with the deluge of mail that poured into the studio addressed to the dead star. Mattson’s, a Hollywood clothing shop, received hundreds of orders for red jackets identical to the one Dean had worn in Rebel Without a Cause. Griffith Park, where pivotal scenes from the movie were shot, became a tourist attraction overnight. Fans lined up inside the Observatory, hoping for a chance to sit in the same seat Dean had occupied in the film.

Although today’s generations might not be familiar with James Dean, over the years, an impressive list of actors and performers have claimed to have been influenced by him, including Bob Dylan, Al Pacino, Martin Sheen, and the late Jim Morrison, poet and lead singer for the Doors. Humphrey Bogart, who outlived Dean by two years and also knew a thing or two about cool, once said: “Dean died at just the right time. He left behind a legend. If he had lived, he’d never have been able to live up to his publicity.” Eventually, the realization that James Dean was gone set in. The world of cool moved on to others like Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Terre Haute’s own Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman, to name just a few. The Paul Newman comparison is not a random one. Not only will readers of my column recognize my admiration for Newman, but they might also be surprised by the ethereal connection between Newman and Dean.

**Fantasy photo of James Dean as Rocky Graziano.**

James Dean’s final screen test for East of Eden (1955) was shot with Paul Newman, who also was in the final running for the role of Dean’s character Cal’s fraternal twin brother Aron. At the time of his death, Dean was signed to star as the lead (as Boxer Rocky Graziano) in the 1956 MGM movie “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and the 1958 Warner Brothers movie “The Left Handed Gun” (as Billy the Kid). Both roles subsequently were taken by Paul Newman and both helped make him a star. Some film experts have claimed that Newman’s career may never have gotten off the ground at all if Dean had lived. Both young actors often competed for the same roles and there just weren’t enough scripts to go around. When Dean died, he was signed to play in “The Battler” on the “Playwrights ’56” television series. The role went instead to Paul Newman. To further illustrate the Dean-Newman connection, Jimmy was the front-runner to star alongside Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Released in 1958), when he died, the role went to Paul Newman. The role earned Newman an Academy Award nomination and established Newman as a star once and for all.

The two megastars mug for the camera for a few seconds when Dean says to Newman, “Kiss Me” to which the older Newman replies “Can’t here.” Watch closely and you’ll see that Newman is sweating profussely under his armpits. More importantly, the clip instantly transports the viewer back to a time before James Dean climbed into the driver’s seat of his Porsche Spider and rode towards the California horizon, and immortality.

Just before his death, Dean’s agent, Jane Deacy, negotiated a 9-picture deal over 6 years with Warner Bros. worth $900,000. In 1956, Dean became the first actor to receive an Academy Award nomination posthumously, for his role in East of Eden (1955). He did not win. A year later, in 1957 Jimmy was nominated for his second Oscar for “Giant”, thereby becoming the only actor in history to receive more than one Oscar nomination posthumously. James Dean was nominated for Academy Awards in two-thirds of his films, a record which will probably never be bettered.

Creepy history, Health & Medicine, Medicine, Weekly Column

The Last of the Radium Girls

March 4, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original Publish Date January 2105. Republished January 2, 2025.

https://weeklyview.net/2025/01/02/the-last-of-the-radium-girls-2/

The year 2014 has come and gone, and along with it, the passing of many notables whose time on this earth has run out. Lost among them is a woman you may have never heard of. Mae Keane died this year. She was the last of the radium girls.

Radium was soon all the rage: bottled Radium water was used as a health tonic, Radium-filled facial creams were used to “rejuvenate the skin”; the Radium Institute in New York City was giving Radium injections to all who could pay for them; some toothpaste started to include Radium; high-end spas began adding radium to the water of their pools and some hospitals were using Radium as a treatment for those who had cancer after it was observed that exposing tumors to Radium salts would shrink them. Although the latter sounds admirably feasible, the former should sound shocking when you consider that radium is highly radioactive.

Additionally, it was found that when Radium salts were mixed with zinc sulfide and a glue agent, the result was a glow-in-the-dark paint. During World War I the advent of trench warfare necessitated the invention of many things. The trenches were dark, damp, and dirty. A single match lit by a soldier hunkered down in a pitch-dark trench might be the spark to draw enough enemy fire to wipe out an entire company of soldiers. Time dragged on endlessly; when you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face, you had no hope of seeing the hands of a clock face.

Not only were soldiers crawling and wading around in the mud unable to see their watch dials at night, their pocket watches weren’t suitable for this environment. Soon, watchmakers created men’s watches with straps designed to be worn on a wrist rather than placed in a pocket. Before the Great War, wristwatches were primarily worn only by women, with men favoring pocket watches. By November 1915, British soldiers were putting dots of Radium paint next to the hour numerals to make them visible at night. The dimness of the glow was beneficial as they could tell the time without giving away their position.

Of course, at this time, the dangers of radioactivity were not fully understood. Enter Mary “Mae” O’Donnell Keane and the Radium girls. In the early 1920s, the hot new gadget was a wristwatch with a glow-in-the-dark dial. Their ads extolled “the magic of Radium!” And according to some, Radium was magic. Salesmen promised that it could extend your life, pump up your sex drive, and make women more beautiful. Doctors used it to treat everything from colds to cancer. In the Roaring Twenties, women earned the right to vote, got the urge to smoke, and marched to work in factories alongside their male counterparts.

**Radium Girls painting an Ingersoll clock face in 1932.**

Young women ranging in age from the mid-teens to the early 20s were employed to apply the paint to clock dials and watch faces. The job was promoted as ideally suited for delicate female hands. The work was easy, the wages high and most dial painters were typically single and living with their parents. Over the first 10 years, about 4,000 women were employed at 3 locations: Orange, New Jersey, Waterbury, Connecticut, and Ottawa, Illinois.

**Workers would often lick the paintbrush to achieve a finer point — directly ingesting the Radium.**

The first dial painters came from the china painting industry. These seasoned workers used a technique called lip-pointing which involved wetting their camel hair paintbrushes between their lips to bring it to a sharper point. The practice was passed on to the Radium painting industry whose products required fine brushwork. In 1924, 18-year-old Mae Keane was hired at the U.S. Radium Corporation factory in Waterbury Connecticut. The pay was $18 a week for a 40-hour work week, and 8 cents a dial — a pretty good salary for a woman back then.

Twelve numbers per watch, 200 watches per day — and with every glowing digit, the Radium girls swallowed a little bit more poison. Mae said that on her very first day, she decided that she didn’t like the taste of the gritty Radium paint. “I wouldn’t put the brush in my mouth,” she recalled years later. During breaks and at lunchtime, it was a popular pastime of the Radium girls to paint comic faces on each other, and then turn out the lights for a laugh. “The girls sneaked the Radium out of the factory to paint their toenails and teeth to make them glow,” Keane said.

Mae couldn’t remember what led her to work at the watch & clock factory but did remember that she disliked the work more than she liked the paycheck. Luckily, she was not as fast as her supervisor wanted her to be. “I made 62 cents one day,” Keane once said, which translates to a high of 8 watches per day. “That’s when my boss came to me and said I better find another job.” That poor performance probably saved her life. She worked in the dial painting room for eight to nine weeks, then transferred to another job at the company. “I often wish I had met him after to thank him,” Keane said, “because I would have been like the rest of them.”

**Worcester Democrat and the Ledger-Enterprise (Pocomoke City, MD), March 4, 1938, p. 9.**

The dial painters would become some of the earliest victims of radioactive poisoning. By the late 1920s, they were falling ill by the dozens, afflicted with horrific diseases. The Radium they had swallowed was now slowly eating their bones away from the inside out. “We were young,” Mae told The Hartford Courant in 2004. “We didn’t know anything about the paint. I don’t think the bosses even knew it was poison. The foreman would tell us it was very expensive, and to be careful. We had no idea. But when they did find out, they hid it.”

Reports of maladies afflicting the Radium girls began to bubble up to the surface. Dial painters began to suffer from a variety of illnesses, often crippling and frequently fatal as a result of ingesting Radium paint. One account describes a woman (Frances Splettstocher) visiting her dentist to have a tooth pulled only to have her entire jaw yanked out in the process. Soon, her gums and cheek rotted away, ultimately resulting in a hole in her cheek. Her health continued to deteriorate and she died within the month.

**Radium Girl Grace Fryer before and after suffering from radium-induced sarcoma.**

Other radium girls had their legs snap underneath them and more still had their spines collapse. Dozens of women died, many while still in their 20s. Ingested Radium is known to deposit permanently in bone structures damaging bone marrow. In all, by 1927, more than 50 women had died as a result of Radium paint poisoning. Many of them developed cancerous tumors, honeycombed and fragile bones, and suffered painful amputations. At a factory in New Jersey, five of the women sued the U.S. Radium Corporation for poisoning. The trial would have a profound impact on workplace regulations.

**Radium Girl Mollie Maggia’s Radioactive Jawbone After Remov**al.

Ironically, many in these factory towns blamed the women for the loss of jobs during the Great Depression. Furthermore, it would be discovered that U.S. Radium had paid off doctors and dentists to claim the girls were suffering from the sexually transmitted disease syphilis (often having this listed as the cause of death when the girls died), with the hope that it would not only shield the corporation from litigation but also sully the girls’ reputations.

**U.S. Radium Corp. Stock Certificate.**

At every turn, U.S. Radium sought to delay the trial as much as possible with the hope that all the women in the case would die before an outcome could be reached (in fact all five of the original Radium girls were dead by the mid-1930s). With the company asking for delay after delay, the trial crawled along at a painful pace. Marie Curie herself chimed in on the issue, but had little comfort to give the radium girls by stating, “I would be only too happy to give any aid that I could, [but] there is absolutely no means of destroying the substance once it enters the human body.” Curie herself would die on July 4th, 1934 from leukemia; likely caused by her long-term exposure to Radium.

By the time the girls finally got a chance to testify in January of 1928, none of them were able to raise their arms to take the oath, and two were bedridden. After their testimonies, the case was once again postponed for a few months for no good reason. The case was settled in the fall of 1928 before it could be deliberated by the jury, and the settlement for each of the Radium girls was $10,000 ($135,000 in 2014 dollars) and a $600 per year annuity while they lived, and all medical and legal expenses would also be paid by the company. Many of the victims would ultimately end up using the money to pay for their own funerals. The lawsuit and resulting publicity were a factor in the establishment of occupational disease labor laws. Most importantly, the trial proved that the injuries suffered by the radium girls were completely preventable.

**Abandoned U.S. Radium Corp. building at the southwest corner of High and Alden Streets in Orange, New Jersey.**

As part of the settlement, the girls agreed not to hold U.S. Radium liable for their health problems. So what was U.S. Radium’s official position in the aftermath? They stated they didn’t settle because they were wrong, but rather because the public was biased against them and they couldn’t have received a fair trial. U.S. Radium’s president, Clarence Lee, stated: “We unfortunately gave work to a great many people who were physically unfit to procure employment in other lines of industry. Cripples and persons similarly incapacitated were engaged. What was then considered an act of kindness on our part has since been turned against us.”

But these Radium towns’ plight didn’t end when the case was settled in court. The chemical element found its way into the soil and groundwater, contaminating residential and commercial properties around the towns. The dangers of Radium no longer was isolated to those who worked in the Radium dial plant, it now threatened the populace. The factory sites became EPA Superfund cleanup sites in the 1980s. The plight of the Radium girls was now known to, and shared by, everyone.

**Mary “Mae” (O’Donnell) Keane (1906 – 2014)**

But Mae Keane was a proud survivor. Over the years, she had some health problems: she developed numerous skin ailments and eye problems, suffered from migraines, and had two bouts with cancer. “The doctor wanted to give me chemotherapy,” Keane said. “I told him ‘no.’” Keane lost all of her teeth in her 30s and suffered pain in her gums until the day she died. “I was left with different things, but I lived through them. You just don’t know what to blame,” she said. The only prescription medication she ever took was to control her blood pressure. Despite her ailments, Mae admitted, “I was one of the fortunate ones.”

Keane, a Red Sox fan, was once asked about her secret to longevity. “I’m lazy,” Keane said, adding she never smoked, loved to walk and dance, and enjoyed caramel candy, chocolate, and an occasional apricot sour or Bailey’s Irish Cream. “I didn’t get old until I was 98,” she once said.” She was 107 when she died on March 1 in Middlebury, Connecticut; the last living participant in one of the darkest moments in American industrial history.

Art, Assassinations, Creepy history, Criminals

The Gun That Killed Vincent Van Gogh?

February 25, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original Publish Date February 15, 2024.

https://weeklyview.net/2024/02/15/the-gun-that-killed-vincent-van-gogh/

**Alleged gun that killed Vincent Van Gogh.**

I have spent the past 12 years on a quest. A quest to discover a little-known Lincoln collector turned museum curator named Osborn H. Oldroyd. I have written about Oldroyd many times and, sometimes, the mere mention of his name elicits groans from family and friends whom I’ve forced to share my obsession, whether they want to or not. No worries, I’m not going down that road again today. I simply mention him regarding another of my early obsessions: artist Vincent van Gogh. I know, I know, Oldroyd to Van Gogh? Evel Knievel couldn’t have made that jump. Stay with me now.

A few years back, a Paris auction house (Auction Art–Rémy Le Fur) sold the gun that Van Gogh allegedly killed himself with for approximately $182,000 to an unidentified Belgian buyer. The hammer price was almost triple the auction estimate of $44,800 to $67,000 and presumably included the buyer’s premium. Like everything in Van Gogh’s life, the sale was not without controversy. And, like many of the objects in Oldroyd’s collection (for his collection was his life), the provenance of the firearm is the sticking point. If authentic, the auction house’s description of it as “the most famous weapon in the history of art” would be unchallenged. However, let’s examine the event, the discovery, and its ultimate disposition and see what you think.

As a kid, I spent most of my free time in the library. Like many my age, my first instinct was to discover a much-wished-for connection to some (or any) historical event. I pored through the annual book of Guinness World Records looking for some record (any record) that I could conceivably break. I never found one. Then I tried to prove a genealogical link to anyone of note . . . Please be Lincoln . . . Please be Lincoln. It was not Lincoln. I was descended from a long line of boringly average people. The last hope was a connection to someone/something according to my birthday (July 30th). I found two: Jimmy Hoffa disappeared and Vincent van Gogh was buried. Oh sure, Henry Ford was born, Jamestown was founded, but not much else. So I clung to the Van Gogh square. He’s been a windmill for me to tilt at ever since.

There are so many mysteries surrounding Vincent van Gogh. Was he crazy? Was a visual problem responsible for his unique painting style? Why did his paintings, all acknowledged masterpieces, not sell until after he died? And perhaps most of all, did he REALLY kill himself? Well, he did famously cut off an ear after an argument with fellow artist Paul Gauguin and famously presented it to a prostitute in a nearby brothel. And he was confined to insane asylums more than once in his lifetime. But that gun may fuel the biggest Van Gogh mystery of them all.

Arthur Ravoux’s Inn in Auvers-sur-Oise in France today (at left) & in Van Gogh’s time.

In May of 1890, after one of those asylum stays, Van Gogh moved into Arthur Ravoux’s Inn in Auvers-sur-Oise in France. While living in room number five there, he turned out an average of a painting a day, despite his increasingly unstable mental state. The common theory is that on Sunday, July 27th, 1890, Van Gogh ventured from his château hideaway to a nearby wheat field in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise and shot himself in the chest. The gunshot did not kill him immediately, instead, Van Gogh lost consciousness and, after waking up and in seeming defiance of his mortal injuries, left his easel against a haystack before stumbling back to his modest attic room, lit only by a small skylight, in the Ravoux Inn. He died two days later, his beloved brother Theo by his side.

According to the auction house, while admitting that it could never be 100% certain that it was the actual gun used by the artist to take his life, circumstantial evidence certainly points to that conclusion. According to museum officials, the rusted skeletal frame of the 7mm Lefaucheux revolver was “discovered where Van Gogh shot it; its caliber is the same as the bullet retrieved from the artist’s body as described by the doctor at the time; (and) scientific studies demonstrate that the gun had stayed in the ground since the 1890s.” Devil’s advocate: Lefaucheux pinfire revolvers were inexpensive and plentiful in the late 19th century. They can be found everywhere all over the world, so finding one in a field under a random tree in France may not constitute proof experts require for authentication. While stories like that may have worked in Oldroyd’s day, it certainly does not live up to modern curatorial standards. However, it does pique one’s imagination.

The story goes that a local farmer found the gun in 1965 after plowing up the very spot in the field where tradition states the artist shot himself in the stomach in July of 1890. The farmer presented the weapon to the owners of an inn in the village, and it was passed down through their family before it was given to the auction consignor’s mother, who put it up for auction. Also weighing in the gun’s favor is the fact that it is a low-power gun, which explains why the gun didn’t kill Vincent instantly. For those subscribing to the theory that Van Gogh did not shoot himself, the auction house explains that even if his death was caused by hoodlums with a grudge against him or after two young boys playing with a gun “accidentally pressed the trigger and wounded Van Gogh by mistake” the gun could still be the weapon responsible for his death. In 2016, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam exhibited the gun as part of the show “On the Verge of Insanity, Van Gogh and His Illness.”

**This is an 1887 tintype photo of Vincent Van Gogh (third from left) in conversation with Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Félix Jobbé-Duval. André Antoine is standing between them.**

Regardless, Vincent’s myth is so complicated, his art so unattainable to all but the ultra-rich, the thought of owning the pistol that killed him may strike some as irresistible. Imagine owning the ultimate instrument of tortured artistic doom, carried into an otherwise unremarkable wheat field in northern France in late July of 1890 by a man tortured with night terrors and “overwhelmed by boredom and grief.” Did the nightmares of mental illness finally prove too much to bear? Is this the final instrument of self-martyrdom? I’ll leave that for you, the reader, to decide. Shortly before his death, on July 2, writing to his brother Theo, Vincent commented: “I myself am also trying to do as well as I can, but I will not conceal from you that I hardly dare count on always being in good health. And if my disease returns, you would forgive me. I still love art and life very much…” Eight days later, Vincent wrote Theo in French, “Je me sens – raté” (I feel failed), and added: “And the prospect grows darker, I see no happy future at all.” Before his death at 1:30 in the morning, Vincent’s last words to his brother were remembered as “La tristesse durera toujours” (The sadness will last forever).

On the afternoon of July 30th, Van Gogh’s body was laid out in his attic room, surrounded by his final canvases and masses of yellow flowers including dahlias and sunflowers. His easel, folding stool, and paintbrushes were placed before the coffin. Van Gogh’s last retreat at the Auberge Ravoux has remained intact since his death, as according to legend a room where a suicide took place must never again be rented out. Legend states that the room remained sealed up for almost a century for fear of bad luck. The room is unfurnished, except for a chair. However, like Oldroyd’s museum in the House Where Lincoln Died in Washington D.C., Van Gogh’s spirit can be felt there, permeating the very floors, joists, ceiling, and walls where he passed.

Creepy history, Music

Johnny and June Carter Cash’s Home: Nashville’s Graceland, Part I

February 23, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original Publish Date August 22, 2024.

https://weeklyview.net/2024/08/22/johnny-and-june-carter-cashs-home-nashvilles-graceland-part-1/

In July 2023, my wife and I made the 4 1/2 hour drive down to Nashville, Tennessee, for my birthday. After a few stops in Music City, we made an 18-mile side trip to the northeast suburb of Hendersonville and Old Hickory Lake. We traveled to Hendersonville to visit the site of Twitty City (the former home and amusement park complex owned and operated by Conway Twitty in the 1980s and 90s), Marty Robbins’ recording studio that he never used (he died in 1982, the same year it was set to open), Johnny and June Carter Cash’s gravesites, and the Cash family home at 200 Caudill Drive in Hendersonville. Well, what was left of it anyway. As you might imagine, the Cash Home, often described as country music’s Graceland, has an interesting history.

**Rhonda Hunter at Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash’s Graves.**

Johnny Cash fell in love with the house and the sprawling property the moment he saw it. Builder Braxton Dixon was building the home for his family, but Cash convinced him to sell it as a wedding present from Johnny to June. Dixon was no stranger to building celebrity homes, having built homes for Roy Orbison, Tammy Wynette, and Marty Stuart. Johnny bought the seven-bedroom/five full bathroom, 14,000 square foot mansion overlooking Old Hickory Lake in 1967 and lived there with June from 1968 to 2003. The four-lot lakefront property features five acres sitting right on the water, including 1,000 feet of lake frontage. The four large, 35-foot round front rooms featured stunning views of the property. Johnny and June lived there for 35 years and Cash wrote much of his famous music there. It was the only home the couple ever lived in together. Johnny Cash’s parents, Ray and Carrie, lived across the road from his mansion. Johnny’s brother Tommy described the house as “a very unusual contemporary structure. It was built on a solid rock foundation with native stone and wood and all kinds of unusual materials, from marble to old barn wood. I don’t think there was a major blueprint. I think the builder was building it the way he wanted it to look.”

It was the spiritual home of Cash and the musical universe he created. The home was visited by nearly every famous country star you can imagine: actors, rock stars, artists, politicians (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Vice President Al Gore), and even Billy Graham. June cooked for them all in the home’s kitchen: eggs, pancakes, and ham in the morning, fried chicken, cornbread, and biscuits all day long. The home hosted Cash family Christmas celebrations, songwriting sessions, and informal jams (Johnny called them guitar pulls) featuring the likes of Bob Dylan, Brooks & Dunn, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, and a slew of others. In 1969, legend claims that an upstart songwriter named Kris Kristofferson landed a helicopter on the lawn, in hopes of getting the home’s famous owner to listen to some demos (from which Johnny picked “Sunday Morning Coming Down”). Cash’s late ’60s and early ’70s “guitar pulls” were held in a lakeside room accessed through a hallway and down some stairs from the home’s main family room. Although informal, these star-studded jams were profound, as Johnny writes in his 1997 autobiography, “Kris Kristofferson sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ for the first time … and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now.’ Graham Nash sang ‘Marrakesh Express’, Shel Silverstein’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’ and Bob Dylan let us hear ‘Lay Lady Lay” during those sessions.”

**Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash Gravesite.**

The couple lived happily in their lakefront home until their deaths four months apart in 2003. With Johnny at her bedside, June died on May 15, 2003, at the age of 73, following heart valve replacement surgery. Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003, at the age of 71, from what doctors said were complications from diabetes, but most believe he died of a broken heart. They are buried at the Hendersonville Memory Gardens near their home. A visit to the cemetery finds the manicured plot of the Cash family, the polished bronze grave ledger of John R. Cash at the left, and June Carter Cash to the right. The markers lay flat against the earth, completely covering the bodies that rest below. The markers usually found peppered with coins and guitar picks, feature facsimile signatures of both artists along with Old Testament Bible quotes from the book of Psalms. June’s mother Maybelle Carter and her sisters Helen and Anita are buried nearby. As are Luther Perkins, the original guitarist of Cash’s “Tennessee Three” band, and country stars Ferlin Husky and Sheb Wooley rest nearby.

**June & Johnny Cash inside their home.**

The Cash Mansion became an empty shrine to the duo for two years following their deaths. The couple’s furniture and many of their belongings, at least those that June didn’t give away to friends and family during the last years of her life, were still inside the house, but the couple was gone. It was always a tourist spot. Countless Greyhound buses, station wagons, vans, and carloads of people made the trek up that winding, narrow lane every day to lean on the stone and wood fence imagining Johnny and June as they were in life walking the property. To the surprise of many, in 2006, the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb purchased the Cashes’ home for a mere $2.3 million. The Bee Gees frontman bought the property with plans of renovating, restoring, and making it an artist/writer’s retreat. Although he remodeled the interior, Gibb was determined to preserve the home to honor their memory and even pledged to keep intact whatever furnishings and decorator accents left behind. June was legendary for filling the house with ornate, tasteful objects that she had picked up and shipped home from performances all over the world. The renovations were at their final stage and Gibb was expected to move in that summer.

At 1:40 pm on April 10, 2007, a fire broke out outside the stone and wood building and while the fire department was on the scene within five minutes, the structure was already engulfed and the three-story contemporary structure burned to the ground. Only the chimney was still standing. But, a few original parts of the property survived the inferno, including the original garage, a covered boat dock, a bell garden, and a cute 1-bed, 1-bath detached apartment space where June stored her stage costumes. There’s also a tennis court, swimming pool, and a little guardhouse by the gate. The stone walls and steps that surrounded the home are still there as well as the stone/wood fences and gates that surround the property as they have done for half a century. The picturesque hardscaping still frames the trails that once hosted walks near the water from country royalty. The blaze spread quickly due to the flammable materials used in the construction work taking place in the mostly wooden interior. It was later revealed that the exterior structure itself was gutted when a flammable wood preserver that had been applied to the house caught on fire. Firefighters said the unusual multi-level structure of the house made the blaze even tougher to tackle. To his credit, Bee Gee Barry Gibb had removed most of that furniture, like Johnny and June’s bed, during renovation and it was safe and sound in storage.

While much music was written inside the mansion, not much music was made inside its walls. Photos of the Cash mansion can be found all over the internet and there are a couple of well-made videos you can check out too. The home was featured in the movie Walk the Line. In the film, the property is shown when Johnny and June’s families come together for Thanksgiving dinner. But the better view can be found in a 2002 music video filmed before Johnny died for the song “Hurt” which was filmed in the home. The video depicts a weakened, vulnerable Cash looking back at his life while surveying the home he and June shared. The video was largely filmed there, and it shows rare interiors of the home as well as views of the derelict House of Cash museum nearby. It is a must-see. Cash’s final recordings took place within the house as well, when he was too weak to make it to a studio.

If you visit the Cash property today, you can almost feel Johnny’s presence. After all, you can lean against Johnny’s stone & wood fence along Caudill Drive and gaze at the remaining buildings with ease. If you spend any time there, you’re likely to be joined by other pilgrims on the Cash trail. Not much in the way of conversation, just long moments of quiet reflection and an occasional nod of shared reverence. However, if you look over your left shoulder across the street, you can see the house where Johnny died. Johnny spent his final days living in the house at 185 Claudill Drive overlooking his old Lake House. The ranch house, which was built by the same architect, Braxton Dixon, was always referred to as “Mama Cash’s house” because it was where Cash’s parents lived before their passing. The ranch house is expansive, with 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, vaulted ceilings, stone fencing, and 200 feet of road frontage. Johnny spent his last days there when it became harder for him to get around in a wheelchair in the lake house. Both the lake house property and ranch house across the street have been sold (or have been offered for sale) in the years since Cash’s passing. The issue remains unclear and when I reached out to the registered owners for this story a few years back, my e-mails and phone calls were never responded to, so…

Better still, there is another lesser-known living connection to Johnny Cash on Caudill Drive. In 1978, Johnny began building a log cabin, finishing it in 1979. He intended to use it for rest, relaxation, songwriting, and recording. He named it Cash Cabin Studio but friends and family said the man in black called it the Sugarshack. The year the Cabin was built, Elvis Costello and Dave Edmunds along with members of the band Rockpile visited, being some of the first to write their names on the fireplace mantle piece. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stopped by in the early 1980’s. In 1982 Johnny’s daughter Kathy and her husband Jimmy were wed there. Television star John Schneider of “The Dukes of Hazard” fame lived in the cabin for some time in the mid-1980s. Other early visitors included actor Robert Duvall, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Bono and Adam Clayton of U2.

**Cash Cabin Studio Interior With Mantel Above Fireplace.**

According to the website, “In 1991, June’s sister Anita Carter moved into the cabin and made it her home. It was Anita who first recorded in the cabin. Recording gear was brought in and set up and featured some wonderful musicians including Anita’s dear, old friend and master producer/guitarist Chet Atkins. In 1992, Johnny met producer Rick Rubin. Rick had a diverse creative palate, having made recordings for Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, and several other groundbreaking rap and heavy metal artists. Johnny signed up with Rick’s record company and went to California to work with Rick. Although most of Johnny’s first album in the Grammy Award-winning American Recordings series was recorded at Rick’s Los Angeles home, there were a couple of tracks recorded in the Cabin, with a simple tape machine and standard microphones. The magic of the Cabin’s music took off from there. Johnny went on to record almost half of the remainder of the American Recordings series at the Cabin. June Carter Cash also recorded both of her latter life Grammy Award-winning albums Press On and Wildwood Flower at the Cabin. Through this process, John Carter Cash worked intensely with his parents on their music. In the Summer of 2003, Johnny’s last recording, made mere days before his death, was in the Cabin. He recorded two songs in their entirety in those two sessions that day: “Like the 309” early in the day, for the album “American Recordings V, A Hundred Highways”, and “Engine 143” at the end of the day, for an album being produced by John Carter, “The Unbroken Circle, The Musical Heritage of the Carter Family”. But the story doesn’t end there.

Next Week: Part 2 of Johnny and June Carter Cash’s Home: Nashville’s Graceland.

Johnny and June Carter Cash’s Home: Nashville’s Graceland, Part II.

https://weeklyview.net/2024/08/29/johnny-and-june-carter-cashs-home-nashvilles-graceland-part-2/

After reading Part 1 of this article, it should come as no surprise that Johnny and June Carter Cash’s beloved Lake House has a mystique all its own. Johnny and June lived happily in the house for some 35 years. When they died (four months apart) in 2003, it sat empty for two years before it was sold by the Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, to Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. As a bevy of contractors worked to meet the Gibbs’ July 4 deadline, the home caught fire and burned to the ground on April 10, 2007. Then Gibbs built a new house on higher ground, keeping the original Cash home foundations as a testament to the memory of Cash. The new house has been sold a few times but the Cash property remains pretty much the same as it was after the fire. Johnny and June had some famous neighbors too: Marty Stuart (Cash’s former son-in-law) and The Oak Ridge Boys’ Richard Sterban among them. After the fire, Sterban reportedly remarked that “perhaps, after all, no one except Johnny and June Carter Cash were meant to live at the lake house.”

So the Cash presence is strong here. While the Johnny Cash story is complicated, Kris Kristofferson wrote of his friend “John” that “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” Cash struggled mightily with addictions and the only thing that saved him from himself was June Carter Cash. I can appreciate that. All questions of the Cash Lake House’s demise being tied to the passing of Johnny and June Carter Cash aside, Hickory Lake is no stranger to tragedy in its own right. There is an air of mystery that haunts Old Hickory Lake and extends beyond the charred ruins of the Cash mansion. Roy Orbison once owned a home right next to the Lake House. It burned down, killing two of his three sons. Orbison (1936-1988), was best known for his distinctive, natural lyric baritone voice featuring a range from A2 to G4: higher than the standard baritone range on the high end and not as low on the low end. Orbison’s (a.k.a. The Big O) lyric baritone voice was sweeter and lighter than the average baritone, and he could sing faster songs with more vocal agility than an average baritone. Orbison chose complex compositions and dark emotional ballads conveyed a quiet, desperate vulnerability, which led to his “Lonesome Roy” reputation. (Believe me, Roy Orbison was no boy scout. He was famous for his carousing and womanizing on the road and his conquest numbers could match anyone from Elvis to Wilt Chamberlain, but THAT is another story.) Between 1960 and 1964, 22 of his songs were placed on the Billboard Top Forty, including “Only the Lonely,” “Crying,” and “Oh, Pretty Woman.” Orbison’s trademark stage performance was standing still and solitary, lit by a single spotlight, dressed in black clothes and dark sunglasses which only added an air of mystery to his persona.

**Anthony King Orbison and Roy DeWayne Orbison with their mother Claudette holding baby Wesley.**

While playing a show in Birmingham England on Saturday, September 14, 1968, Orbison received the news that his home in Hendersonville had burned down. This occurred less than two years after the death of his wife Claudette Frady Orbison in a motorcycle accident on June 6, 1966, at the age of 24. It was a tragedy that plunged Orbison so deep into grief that he couldn’t write songs for a year and a half. To make matters worse, Roy received news that his sons Roy Dewayne Orbison, Jr. (age 10) and Anthony King Orbison (age 6) died in the fire. Their baby brother Wesley (age 3) survived. Fire officials stated that the cause of the fire may have been an aerosol can, which possibly contained some kind of lacquer. It was speculated that the boys were playing with a lighter or matches and using the spray can as a makeshift flame thrower when furniture or curtains ignited. The fire spread so quickly that when the boy’s grandparents, Orbie Lee Orbison and Nadine Shultz, opened the door to the room, the resulting blast knocked them to the other side of the house. Even though firefighters responded quickly, the flames were too intense to save the two young boys. By the time Roy made it home, all that was left of the home was the chimney.

Roy moved in with his parents and became a recluse, refusing to see or talk to anyone. When Johnny Cash visited, he found Roy sitting in his room staring at a television with the sound off. Cash told him that he loved him and was there for him. Orbison said he did not know how to cope with his grief. After the fire, Orbison had to start all over again and he could never bear the thought of rebuilding a home on the property. Roy’s parents helped to raise Wesley while his father was on the road and in the studio. In December 1988 just as his star was on the rise again, Orbison spent the night visiting with Wesley, from whom he had been estranged. The two stayed up all night singing together and writing songs. The following day, Roy died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 52.

**Orchard Signage On Hendersonville Site.**

Eventually, Johnny Cash bought the lot, promising Orbison that he would never build on the site again and insisting “Only good shall grow on this land.” The Cash family planted fruit trees and cultivated an orchard where the Orbison house once stood. It was not unusual to see Johnny Cash, watering can in hand, tending to the saplings during the early years of the orchard. As the fruit trees and grapevines flourished, they were maintained personally by the Cash family and the orchard came to fruition. Several years after Roy’s death, Johnny saw Wesley standing in the orchard on the lot where his brothers died. Cash asked Wesley why he was there. Wesley replied that it comforted him. Together, they gathered fruit from the orchard that Wesley took with him. Soon afterward, John and June gifted the lot to Wesley, who maintains the orchard to this day. It is ironic that years later, like Orbison’s, Cash’s house burnt, leaving only the chimney.

**Luther Perkins Grave Near Johnny & June’s Gravesite.**

Not only was Johnny’s 1963 song “Ring of Fire” a hit, staying at No. 1 on the country chart for seven weeks and declared the number one greatest country song of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine, it was written by his wife June Carter years before they were married. Tragically, fire remained an unfortunate theme in Cash’s circle. On Saturday, Aug. 3, 1968, his first “Tennessee Three” guitarist, Luther Perkins, fell asleep on the couch in his den with a lit cigarette in his hand. Luther’s home (at 94 Riverwood Drive) was just a little further down the road from Johnny’s. The accidental fire failed to burn the home but Luther suffered burns over half of his body and never regained consciousness. Two days later, he died at Vanderbilt Hospital of burns sustained in that fire. Perkins had bought the lakeside house just two months earlier and had spent the afternoon of the fire installing a television antenna on the roof. When his wife returned home from a poker party at a friend’s house that night, she found the house filled with smoke, and flames in the den and the kitchen, her husband unconscious on the floor. Perkins had called Cash the night of the fire and asked him to come over. Cash, thinking Perkins’ wife was there to take care of him, begged off. Later, Cash would rank Perkins’ death with that of his brother Jack in terms of the impact it made on his life. “Part of me died with Luther,” Johnny said.

Bandmate Marshall Grant, who along with Cash and Perkins, made up the original “Tennessee Three,” wrote in his autobiography I Was There When It Happened, said, “Luther apparently woke up, realized what was happening, and tried to escape, but he was overcome by dense smoke and couldn’t make it to a sliding glass door leading outside. The house itself never caught fire, but there was terrible smoke damage, the likes of which I’ve never seen. They told us at the hospital that if Luther had lived, the doctors probably would have had to amputate his hands, and I don’t think he could have lived with that.” Luther Perkins is buried only yards away from Johnny and June Carter Cash at the Hendersonville Memory Gardens. Bassist Marshall Grant died on August 7, 2011, at the age of 83, in Jonesboro, Arkansas while attending a festival to restore the childhood home of Johnny Cash.

But wait, there’s more. Cash’s longtime friend, Faron Young, known as the ” Hillbilly Heartthrob” for his chart-topping singles “Hello Walls” and “It’s Four in the Morning” has an eerie connection to the Cash property as well. In 1972, Young was famously arrested and charged with assault for spanking a girl in the audience at a concert in Clarksburg, West Virginia, after he claimed she spat on him. Young appeared before a justice of the peace and was fined $24, plus $11 in court costs. Afterward, Young’s life was plagued with bouts of depression and alcoholism. On the night of December 4, 1984, Young fired a pistol into the kitchen ceiling of his Harbor Island home. When he refused to seek help for his alcoholism, Young and his wife Hilda separated, sold their home, and bought individual houses. When asked at the divorce trial if he feared hurting someone by shooting holes into the ceiling, Young answered “Not whatsoever.” The couple divorced after 32 years of marriage in 1986.

Feeling abandoned by fans and the country music industry and in failing health (he was battling emphysema, and had undergone prostate surgery for cancer), Faron Young penned a suicide note specifically enumerating his health and the decline in his career, shot himself on December 9, 1996. Sadly, Faron didn’t die immediately. Hearing the shot, Young’s long time friend and bandmate, Ray Emmett, rushed into the room to find Faron lying in his bed, still alive. Young was rushed to Nashville’s Summit Medical Center where the next day, December 10, 1996, at 1:07 p.m., he died at the age of 64. Faron Young was cremated, and his ashes were spread by his family over Old Hickory Lake at the house of Johnny and June Cash. In a “Country Music Spotlight” interview with Willie Nelson (who wrote Young’s biggest hit “Hello Walls”), Cash said, “He (Faron) was one of my favorite people, he was one day older than me. He requested that his ashes be distributed on Old Hickory Lake and my property. So they came out there with his ashes…and the wind was blowing…So he’s everywhere, he’s all over my place, my yard, my house, my windows, in my sill, on my car, I turned on my windshield wipers the next day and there’s Faron. There he went, back and forth, back and forth, until he was all gone.” So, the next time you’re heading south, take a side trip to Hendersonville and venture over to 200 Caudill Drive, park your car on the side of the road, put your elbows on Johnny Cash’s fence, and dream.