I recently discovered my grandaunt, Mary Grace Farley, was murdered in Chicago in 1916, that the investigation led to the founder of Cracker Jack, and that no one in the family thought to mention it for nearly a hundred years.

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My father, James Owen Farley, M.D., was a meticulous man. He kept letters, fitness reports, and fraternity beanies. When he wanted to know about the Farley side of the family, he wrote to his aunts in Michigan. They wrote back on Hummel stationery. They told him stories about the Murrays, about Montana, about the old days. They did not mention his Aunt Mary.

Not once.

My grandfather, William John Farley, was a plumber in Chicago. His father, Lawrence, was a teamster. His mother was Ellen Mead. They were second-generation Irish, born in Cook County—not recent arrivals scraping by in a new country, but a family with roots. William had a sister named Mary Grace Farley. She was born on February 20, 1897.

She died on April 22, 1916, in Room 720 of the New Bradford Hotel, 3000 Michigan Avenue, Chicago. She was nineteen years, three months, and three days old. Her occupation was listed as waitress. Her marital status was single.

She was not registered under her own name.

—

I found Mary the way I find most of my relatives—by typing names into databases at odd hours and following whatever thread the search engines give back. She first appeared to me in the Northwestern University database titled “Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930.” She was one of two relatives in that database.

With a death date I turned to the Cook County Deaths Index, 1878–1922, and it returned a clean hit: Mary Grace Farley, born February 20, 1897, died April 22, 1916. Father, Lawrence P. Farley. Mother, Ellen Mead. Cemetery, Mt. Olivet. Buried April 24, 1916.

Two days. They buried her two days after she died.

Then I searched the newspapers. And the Chicago Tribune had quite a lot to say.

—

But before the Tribune said anything, the Day Book had already told the story—twice, on the day Mary died.

The first item was a single line in the paper’s daily roundup: “Miss May Fields, 19, artist model who took poison, account of rough course of love, dead.”

The second was a police blotter entry: “May Fields, Bradford hotel, 30th and Michigan av., found in dazed condition. Dying. Police suspect quantity of opium.”

Artist model. Poison. Rough course of love. That was the story on April 22, 1916. A girl who killed herself over a man. The kind of item that fills a column inch and is forgotten by the next edition.

It took two weeks for the story to change.

—

On May 6, 1916, the Tribune ran a headline: “HELPS OFFICERS TO TRAP FIANCE.” The subhead read: “Stepdaughter of F. W. Rueckheim Keeps Dr. Robert H. Campbell at Telephone.”

The article described a scene at 4201 Vincennes Avenue—the home of Frederick W. Rueckheim, founder of the Cracker Jack Company. Government detectives had been trying to arrest a man using the name and title of Dr. Robert H. Campbell. They couldn’t reach him. So they appealed to Miss Alta Roberts, Rueckheim’s stepdaughter, who was described as Campbell’s fiancée. At their suggestion, she called Campbell and arranged for him to come to the Hotel Bradford at a stated hour. The detectives were waiting.

Campbell drove up in an automobile. He was prepared to leave the city in a hurry. The officers told him he was under arrest in connection with the death of May Fields.

May Fields, the Tribune explained, was registered at the Bradford Hotel. Her real name was Mary Grace Farley. She had died at Michael Reese Hospital from morphine poisoning.

—

The articles kept coming.

On May 7, Campbell was turned over to federal officers and arraigned before Commissioner Foote on charges of violating the Harrison anti-narcotic act—a federal law barely two years old. Campbell denied ever hearing of May Fields. He said he had been framed. He threatened to expose prominent physicians.

Then the Tribune reported something remarkable. Fred W. Rueckheim—the candy manufacturer, the Cracker Jack founder, one of the wealthiest industrialists in Chicago—signed Campbell’s five-thousand-dollar bond. He told the press he would assist in exposing prominent physicians.

The man arrested in connection with my grandaunt’s death had his bail posted by the man who invented Cracker Jack.

—

Campbell was a fraud. He had studied at Cornell but never graduated, never obtained a medical license. Until recently he had worked as an assistant to Dr. F. J. Port, house physician at the Auditorium. Port told reporters he’d fired Campbell because Campbell had talked about illegal operations.

But Campbell wasn’t the only man connected to Mary’s death. On May 9, the Tribune reported that Albert Bower of 2000 Indiana Avenue—charged with violating the Harrison act—had been identified by a Mrs. Leo Mansfield as the man she’d seen leaving Mary’s room at the Bradford Hotel on the night of her death.

According to Dr. William H. Sage, the deputy collector of United States internal revenue running the federal drug investigation, Bower admitted he was in the girl’s room. He claimed he had gone there to purchase narcotics. Dr. Sage noted that no money was found in the room.

Then came Lester Rose.

—

Rose was the editor of the vaudeville and burlesque department at the New York Clipper, one of the leading theatrical trade publications in the country. On May 18, the Tribune reported that Rose had been arrested as an accessory to the murder of May Grace Farley, whose death at the New Bradford Hotel resulted from an overdose of narcotics.

Rose admitted he had called to see Mary the night before she was found dead. His explanation: she had telephoned him about some pictures that were to be used in the New York Clipper.

Hotel attachés confirmed that Rose and Bower came together and were seen leaving Mary’s room. Rose was being held at the Wheaton jail on a Harrison Act charge. He refused to give testimony.

Federal agents, led by Dr. Sage, raided Rose’s room at the Warner Hotel on Thirty-ninth Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. They found a jar of cooking opium concealed in a pin cushion.

The Tribune noted that Mary’s death had created a sensation because federal authorities were in the midst of an investigation of a south side “dope ring.”

The next day, May 19, the Tribune ran a brief correction also published in the New York Clipper. Casper Nathan, western manager for the New York Clipper, requested that the paper note Rose was no longer employed by the Clipper. Rose died seven months later, on December 3, 1916.

—

On June 1, a coroner’s jury ruled. Albert Bower was ordered held for the grand jury. The verdict specified no formal charge, but recommended he be held for the death until released by due process of law. Lester Rose was exonerated at a reopened inquest.

The verdict ended an investigation of more than a month by the police, the coroner’s office, and the federal government.

But the coroner had already written his conclusion.

—

The State of Illinois Standard Certificate of Death for Mary Grace Farley is not ambiguous. Under the coroner’s certification, Section 17, the cause of death reads: “From Narcotic Poisoning (Morphine). Administered by one Albert Bowers. Held to Grand Jury.”

Not an overdose. Not self-administered. Not accidental. Not a rough course of love. The coroner wrote that Albert Bowers administered the lethal dose of morphine to a nineteen-year-old girl, and he put it on the official state record. This is the last honest document in the case. Everything that followed—the inquest, the grand jury, the collapsed indictment—was the system backing away from what the coroner already wrote down.

The Northwestern University Homicide in Chicago database confirms the rest. Case Number 3568: Farley, May, alias Fields. Type of death: Manslaughter. The grand jury convened on June 1, 1916, and returned an indictment for felony murder.

And then: no bill. No charges recorded.

A grand jury indicted a man for felony murder in the death of a nineteen-year-old girl—a man the coroner had already named on the death certificate as the person who administered the fatal dose—and the case simply stopped. Bowers walked. Rose walked. Campbell had the Cracker Jack founder posting his bail.

The only person who didn’t walk away was Mary.

—

The death certificate holds one more detail. Section 14 lists the informant—the person who provided the biographical information about the deceased. It is Mary’s mother.

She signed the form as Nellie Roller, with an address at 7017 South Racine Avenue. Ellen (Mead) Farley had remarried. She was living under a different name, on the far South Side, miles from the Bradford Hotel. And when her nineteen-year-old daughter died in a narcotics scandal that was about to fill the Tribune for weeks, Nellie walked into the coroner’s office and said: this is my daughter, and here is who she was.

She gave them Mary’s parents’ names, her birthdate, her occupation. She signed the form and swore the contents were true. She is the last person who officially acknowledged Mary Grace Farley before the silence began.

—

There is one more piece.

In March 1915—a year before Mary’s death—a newspaper in Champaign-Urbana ran an advertisement for the Orpheum Theatre. It featured a photograph of a performer, with the caption: “Miss May Fields of Winter & Fields. Orpheum Monday for three days.”

May Fields was a real person—or at least a real stage name—working the vaudeville circuit. And Lester Rose, the man who admitted visiting Mary the night before she died, was was employed by the New York Clipper for a time. He said she called him about pictures for the paper.

Mary rented a room in the New Bradford Hotel under the name of a vaudeville act. A vaudeville publisher was in her room. Her death certificate says waitress.

I don’t know whether Mary was part of Winter & Fields, or whether she borrowed the name of someone she’d seen on a handbill, or whether the alias was given to her by someone in that world. What I know is that a nineteen-year-old girl from a teamster’s family was living in Room 720 of a hotel near the City’s entertainment district (outside the red light district) under someone else’s name, and that the people who came to see her included a fake doctor, a drug dealer, and a “theatrical press agent” with opium in his pin cushion.

—

The family buried Mary at Mt. Olivet Catholic Cemetery, Section 25, Lot 106. They buried her two days after she died—before the Tribune had published a single article about the investigation. They got her into consecrated ground next to her maternal grandparents while the coroner’s office was still figuring out what happened in Room 720.

There is no grave marker.

Nellie outlived her daughter by twenty-six years. She spent her final years at the Chicago State Hospital. When she died in 1942, she was buried at Mt. Olivet—the same cemetery as Mary, but not the same plot. She was interred under the name Nellie Roller. A different name than the one her daughter was born with. A different piece of ground than the one her daughter lies in.

Nellie is the only person in this story who showed up for Mary. She claimed the body. She gave the coroner her daughter’s real name. She buried her in two days, in consecrated ground. And then the story broke her, too.

A volunteer genealogist named William Kazupski eventually added Mary’s name to Find A Grave. A stranger did the work the family wouldn’t—put her name in a place where someone could find it. That’s how I know where she is. A hundred years of silence, broken by a man who never met her, typing into a website.

—

My father didn’t know Mary existed. His aunts from the Murray side—Margaret and Fern—never mentioned her, but they married into the family after the fact. They wouldn’t have known. The family’s silence was not an accident or a lapse. It was a project. And it worked for a hundred years.

It stopped working when I started typing names into databases.

—

There is more to this story than a family never knew.

The federal agent who led the investigation into Mary’s death—Dr. William H. Sage—was later indicted for taking bribes to suppress drug cases. The key witness who placed Bowers at the scene was not an innocent bystander. The south side dope ring that the Tribune mentioned in passing was a network that consumed other young women before and after Mary. The coroner wrote the truth on the death certificate, and then a system of corrupt officials, compromised witnesses, and complicit silence made sure it didn’t matter.

I’m going to Chicago to find out what that system looked like from the inside.

—

This is Part 1.

I’m going to the Cook County archives to look for the coroner’s inquest testimony—to find out if Nellie walked into that hearing and spoke for her daughter, or if Mary died without anyone from her family on the record. I’m going to look for the criminal court file on Bowers’ felony murder indictment—to find out what made a grand jury’s true bill evaporate into nothing. I’m going to the National Archives to see if the federal Harrison Act cases against Campbell, Bowers, and Rose left any trace, and whether the corruption that protected them left a paper trail.

And I’m going to Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Section 25, Lot 106, to visit the grave of a grandaunt I never knew I had.

Part 2 will be whatever I find.

Longer clips of the 1935 St. Petersburg Parade, hiking at Miner’s Castle County Park (Michigan), and sailing on White Lake (Michigan) can be found on my YouTube Channel.

Every family has a story that doesn’t quite hold up under cross-examination. Maybe it’s a great-grandfather who “knew Lincoln” or a cousin who was “almost famous.” You nod along at Thanksgiving, you let it ride, and you move on to the pie.

My family had many such stories. And they all came from the same woman.

Aunt Fern was my grandmother Sylvia Murray’s sister. She was not a historian. She was not a genealogist. She was something far more interesting: she was a good storyteller with a captive audience and absolutely no interest in the historical record. Over the course of her life, she constructed three blockbuster origin stories for the Murray family, each one more spectacular than the last, and passed them along with the confidence of someone reading from a leather-bound family Bible.

Aunt Fern’s tales didn’t die with her. They were faithfully transmitted to the next generation by her sister, my great-aunt Margaret—who wrote them down in a series of letters to my father, Jim, in the 1990s. On Hummel stationery, no less. If you’re going to commit family mythology to paper, you might as well do it next to a watercolor of German schoolchildren.

I know all of this because after my father died in 2012, I found the letters. And after I found the letters, I spent the better part of a decade doing the one thing Aunt Fern never intended anyone to do: checking.

* * *

Tale #1: The Prison Ship

In January 1993, Aunt Margaret wrote to my father on a Hummel notecard. The letter opens with a burst of enthusiasm:

Good news — hearing of your renewed interest in genealogy. You are entering the most interesting human interest true story of decades!! — “The Murray Story”!

Two exclamation marks and quotes around “The Murray Story” as though it were a feature film in development. Which, in Aunt Fern’s imagination, it essentially was.

Here’s the tale as Margaret relayed it: Seven brothers lived in Dublin, Ireland. During the Potato Famine of the 1850s, one of the Murray boys stole a loaf of bread. The British court found him guilty and sentenced him to five years in the salt mines of Australia. His six brothers committed the same act and received the same sentence. While on the prison ship, during a storm off the coast of Nova Scotia, the seven brothers jumped ship. Timothy, the youngest, broke his leg when he hit the water. The boys were befriended by a Nova Scotian family. Timothy’s leg was amputated. From Nova Scotia, they migrated to Canada.

It’s a blockbuster. Seven brothers, a stolen loaf, a daring escape in a storm, an amputation, a kind stranger. It has everything except evidence.

This story was so embedded in the family that when I sat down to write my biography of James A. Murray—Fern’s uncle, a Gilded Age copper king who amassed a fortune equivalent to $3 billion in today’s money—I opened the book with it. I gave it a full cinematic treatment: the mud hut in County Clare, the boys getting intentionally arrested so they’d be together on the prison ship, little Jimmy Murray spotting a red-haired Irish woman on the Nova Scotia coast who would save them. I let the tale unspool for several pages before pulling the curtain back.

Because it couldn’t be true. And I knew it couldn’t be true because records exist and I looked at the records.

The British Convict Transportation Registers from 1788 to 1868 contain no records of children under the age of ten being transported to Australia—let alone a group of brothers from a single family. There were seven Murray brothers, yes. But the eldest, James, was barely a teenager during the famine years, and the youngest were small children. The family escaped Ireland in 1849, but they did so the way millions of other desperate Irish families did: crammed into the hold of a British logging ship returning to Canada for another payload, using Irish peasants as ballast. Not as convicts on a prison barge. As cargo.

So why did Aunt Fern tell it this way? I think the answer is in what the story does that the truth doesn’t. A family stuffed into the hold of a lumber ship is a tragedy. Seven boys outsmarting the British Crown is a legend. As the Irish-American radical Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote in her autobiography, the awareness of being Irish “came to us as small children, through plaintive songs and heroic story.” The prison ship tale was one of those heroic stories. It turned the Murrays from refugees into rebels.

Aunt Fern was not making things up. She was doing something more interesting. She was making sure the Murrays mattered.

* * *

Tale #2: Robert E. Lee’s Secret Daughter

If the prison ship was Aunt Fern’s action movie, the second tale was her historical romance.

This one was about her paternal grandmother—the wife of prison ship jumper Daniel Murray. According to Aunt Fern, this woman was the secret daughter of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, exiled to Canada to avoid the Civil War.

Robert. E. Lee.

I’ll let that sit for a moment.

The general, according to Aunt Fern, had a secret Irish daughter who was spirited away to the Great White North and eventually married into a family of famine refugees in London, Ontario. If you’re scoring at home, our family tree now includes both a daring prison break from British tyranny and a direct bloodline to the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. We are, by Aunt Fern’s reckoning, the most interesting family in the Western Hemisphere.

I can tell you that Robert E. Lee did not have a secret daughter in Ireland or Canada. But I can also tell you that Aunt Fern got the claim into her own obituary.

Here it is.

Ann L. Kinsley, 91, of Rochester, Michigan. The second sentence of her death notice in the Oakland Press reads: “a Rochester resident who was reported to be a great-granddaughter of Civil War confederate leader Robert E. Lee.” Ann was Fern. Her given name was Ann; Fern was the name the family knew her by. She died on a Friday in February 1987 at the age of ninety-one.

Notice the hedge: “was reported to be.” Someone at the newspaper, or someone at the funeral home, had just enough institutional caution to add those three words. But they still printed it. The Robert E. Lee claim made it past whatever editorial review exists for obituary copy in a Michigan newspaper in 1987 and entered the permanent record.

And notice the survivors: “a sister, Margaret Gleason.” That’s Aunt Margaret—the letter writer. She was alive when this obituary ran. She read it. She may have been the one who supplied the information to the funeral home in the first place.

I found this obituary years ago while doing genealogical research and filed it away as a curiosity—irrelevant to the serious historical work I was doing. I was thinking like a researcher, not a storyteller. It took me decades to understand that this clipping is the single best proof I have that Aunt Fern won. She got a tall tale into a published death notice. It survived her. Somewhere in a Michigan archive, the Oakland Press from February 28, 1987 records for posterity that the Murray family descends from Robert E. Lee. No footnote. No correction. Just Fern’s imagination, set in type.

* * *

Tale #3: The Rose Castle and the Murdered Royal

Aunt Fern didn’t stop with the paternal side. She gave the maternal grandmother her own legend, too.

In the June 1995 letter, Aunt Margaret—writing to my father before his trip to Ireland—relayed Fern’s account of this other grandmother, a woman from an entirely different branch of the family:

Hoping my letter will reach you before you embark for the ‘ole Sod,’ Ireland — Here’s information you asked for — Your maternal grandmother was from Tipperary. Her parents must have been wealthy and affluent. Her father was knighted by Queen Victoria and they lived in a castle which was named Rose. Perhaps the castle’s garden was planted with an array of roses.

A knighted Irish nobleman. A castle called Rose. A garden of roses. This is already operating at a level of specificity that should make any genealogist nervous. “Perhaps the castle’s garden was planted with an array of roses” is doing an enormous amount of work. But Aunt Fern was just getting started.

According to the tale, after this grandmother “witnessed one of the ‘Royals’ murder,” her father shipped her to America, where she had relatives in Detroit. She assumed the name McLampey—her maiden name was Mary—and arrived in the 1860s at about fifteen years old.

This is the most elaborate of the three tales, and also the hardest to debunk cleanly because it’s the vaguest. Which “Royal” was murdered? When? The details are just impressionistic enough to resist a direct fact-check while being vivid enough to feel true. That’s not an accident. Aunt Fern understood instinctively what every good fiction writer knows: specificity creates credibility, but too much specificity invites scrutiny. A castle named Rose is checkable. A grandmother who “witnessed” an unnamed murder is not.

And here’s what makes this tale the masterpiece of the set: it’s about a completely different grandmother than the Lee story. Aunt Fern gave the paternal grandmother a Confederate general for a father. She gave the maternal grandmother a castle, a knighted nobleman, and a murdered royal. Each side of the family got its own origin myth, tailored to its own geography and romance. The woman was thorough.

How thorough? Those three tales weren’t even the complete inventory. In a February 1977 letter—written in her own hand this time, not relayed through Margaret—Fern added two more. She was eighty-one years old, recovering from a broken hip, and still connecting the Murrays to American legends from her recovery bed.

First, she reported that my father’s family “was related to James Farley, the U.S. Postmaster of New York.” James Farley was FDR’s Postmaster General and one of the most powerful political operatives in twentieth-century America. A useful relative, if true.

Then came this:

Your Grandpa assisted in the founding of the original Detroit Tigers. He’d be in his twenties at that time. A few years later he and Ty Cobb became enemies. Pa couldn’t stand Cobb’s arrogance and conceit but Cobb was a politician and kept your Grandfather from the first team.

The claim has all the hallmarks: just enough historical texture to feel plausible—Cobb really was legendarily arrogant—and just enough vagueness to resist a clean fact-check. Which grandfather? What years? “Kept your Grandfather from the first team” doing what, exactly? But the emotional logic is perfect: our family would have been famous, except a bully got in the way. It’s the Murray origin story in miniature. We mattered. Forces conspired against us. The record is wrong.

Once you see the pattern, you realize the three big tales weren’t isolated episodes. They were a worldview. Aunt Fern did this with everything. Every branch of the family tree got a legend. Every ancestor got promoted.

* * *

The Through-Line

Step back and look at the three blockbuster tales together. Each one elevates the Murray family from ordinary immigrants to people who mattered on the stage of history. The prison ship makes them freedom fighters. The Lee connection makes one grandmother Confederate aristocracy. The Rose Castle makes the other grandmother a witness to royal intrigue. Two grandmothers, two legends, and a prison break—none of it true, all of it magnificent.

And here’s what I find most interesting: the letters reveal that Aunt Fern wasn’t the only family mythmaker. In that same January 1993 letter, Aunt Margaret pivots from the prison ship tale to a piece of real family history—and gets it almost right:

Incidentally — Senator Murray of Montana was an attorney and he was a crook! He made Pa sign off papers which otherwise would make him well-to-do — He threatened Pa’s illegal stay in the country.

This one checks out, mostly. Senator James E. Murray did pressure William Murray—my great-grandfather, Margaret’s father—during the fight over James A. Murray’s estate in the 1920s. The senator and Mary Murray, James A.’s widow, did use threats, including the immigration status of relatives who hadn’t naturalized, to bully heirs into accepting lowball settlements. Margaret’s version compresses and simplifies, but the bones are real. She’d watched it happen to her own father. (I told that story in last week’s post.)

I mention it here because it shows you the spectrum. The same family that produced Aunt Fern’s fantasies also produced Aunt Margaret’s grudges—and the grudges turned out to be sourced.

* * *

What Tall Tales Are For

I spent years being mildly annoyed by Aunt Fern. When you’re trying to build a credible historical account—one that will hold up to peer review and get into the Library of Congress—a great-aunt who invented a Confederate princess is not your ally. Every time I encountered one of her stories in the family papers, I had to stop, trace it back to its source, and flag it as unreliable. She made my job harder.

But now, ten years and a published book later, I think Aunt Fern understood something I didn’t. She understood that a family needs stories the way a house needs a roof. It doesn’t matter if the roof is made of slate or tin—what matters is that it’s there, keeping the rain out, holding the rooms together. Her stories gave the Murrays an identity that census records and ship manifests never could. Prison-ship survivors. Confederate royalty. Witnesses to history.

The irony is that the real Murray story turned out to be better than anything Aunt Fern invented. James A. Murray’s actual life—the gold rush, the copper wars, the political radicalism, the $3 billion fortune, the estate fight that tore the family apart—makes the prison ship look like a warm-up act. Fern just didn’t know it. She was working with the oral tradition she’d inherited, not the archival record that hadn’t been assembled yet.

I spent five years researching the Murray family history to get four articles and a book published about their legacy (good and bad). Yet the person who first tried to tell that story, without a single footnote or a day in a reading room, was Aunt Fern. She was wrong about the facts. But she was right that the Murrays were worth the trouble.

She just had a more creative approach to the evidence.

* * *

Bill Farley, PhD The Dustbin Historian DustbinHistorian.com

P.S. I dismissed this obituary years ago as genealogically irrelevant. It took me until now to realize it was the best document in the entire collection. Researchers: save everything. Even the things that aren’t true.

Fifty thousand dollars in the 1920s was a significant sum. It was enough to change a family’s trajectory. My grandmother Sylvia used part of it to buy a restaurant and bar in Davison, Michigan. Other relatives bought a farm on Cummings Road. When the money arrived, someone bought a new car. There was also, at some point, an ice cream factory. My father mentioned it once—he would get a scoop on his way home from school. When I contacted the Davison Historical Society years later to ask about Sylvia, they had one thing to say: Sylvia was a tough bird.

The money came from a settlement. Not a generous one. Under the terms of James A. Murray’s will, the Daniel Murray branch of the family—my branch—was entitled to 2,000 shares or 25% of the Monidah Trust, the holding company that contained an empire worth $15 million. Daniel was Jim Murray’s brother. Daniel had died in 1907. He never sent any of his eight children out west to serve in his brother’s empire. Jim Murray paid for big grave markers for Daniel and his other brothers—but the gratitude stopped at granite. The will’s intentions never made it to a bank account without a fight. The man who ensured my family received a fraction of what was owed, and who pocketed the lion’s share for himself, was James A. Murray’s nephew: James E. Murray.

He would later become one of the most consequential United States Senators of the twentieth century. The Saturday Evening Post called him “Millionaire Moses.” Harry Truman said his awards were “richly deserved.” Lyndon Johnson thanked him at the signing of Medicare. He is my first cousin, three generations removed. And the fortune that launched his political career came, in part, from shaking down my side of the family.

I don’t cover this aspect of Murray lore in my academic writing. It only appears in my trade book on James A. Murray. When asked about the shakedown I explain the fortune was long gone when I arrived on the planet. And for my relatives, $50,000 just ahead of the Depression was a life-line. All of that money is just a memory four generations removed from that battle. The memory became a story I’m telling you now.

The Uncle’s Workhorse

James E. Murray was the son of Andrew Murray, one of Jim Murray’s brothers. Andrew died in Canada in 1887. After Andrew’s death, three of his children—James, Marcus, and May—moved with their mother to Butte, Montana, where their uncle had built a sprawling business empire from mining, banking, real estate, newspapers, theaters, and resorts. Uncle Jim Murray had no biological children of his own. He treated his nieces and nephews like employees.

He put Marcus and May through college, then rotated them among his banks in Utah, Seattle, Tacoma, and Butte. For James, the eldest, he extended a line of credit to attend law school at New York University. James graduated, returned to Butte, opened a private legal practice that represented his uncle, and eventually became one of three officers of the Monidah Trust—the Delaware corporation that held virtually all of Jim Murray’s assets.

James spent the next two decades serving his uncle’s business and political interests. He managed legal matters, ran Irish-American political organizations at the national level, and kept the family’s complicated web of enterprises from tangling. He raised money for Ireland’s revolution. He presided over a national organization dedicated to Irish independence. He did all of this with his uncle’s money and under his uncle’s shadow.

Jim Murray never publicly praised his oldest nephew. Not once.

The Will

James A. Murray died on May 11, 1921, at his sprawling seaside mansion in Monterey, California. He was eighty years old. His will, executed just four months earlier, was deceptively simple. He had transferred everything into the Monidah Trust. The will directed that stock certificates, pre-endorsed on the back to his chosen beneficiaries, would be found in a sealed envelope. Whoever’s name was on the certificate got those shares.

His wife, Mary, was at his bedside when he died. She was likely the first to find the certificates. There were eleven of them dividing 9,500 shares of the estate. She and her son Stuart Haldorn opened them one by one.

Neither of their names appeared on a single certificate.

The biggest prize—a certificate for 4,000 shares, was endorsed to James E. Murray. He received two other certificates with a total of 512 shares. Daniel Murray’s estate received 2,000. Marcus got 1,000. May got 500. Eliza Murray Poole— one of Daniel Murray’s daughter, the one who had faithfully tended the family graves back east—received 500 of her own. The last certificate, for 988 shares, was left blank, meaning it passed to Mary under the will’s residual clause.

Mary and Stuart had expected to inherit the empire. Instead, they inherited a residual clause and a grudge.

The Forgery

Here’s my take on what likely happened. Their first move was almost immediate. Mary—or someone looking out for her interests—carefully changed the middle initial on James’s 4,000-share certificate from an “E” to an “A.” The claim would be that Jim Murray had endorsed this certificate to himself, not his nephew. If it was James A.’s own certificate, it would pass to Mary under the residual clause. They placed the altered certificate back in the envelope, typed Stuart’s name on the front, and waited for the attorney to arrive.

James E. spotted the fraud immediately. Within weeks, the fight made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Blood Relatives File Contest of J.A. Murray Will.” The paper ran photographs of Mary and Stuart alongside facsimiles of the contested signatures. The estate was valued at $15 million. The widow, the paper reported, refused to compromise.

Nineteen days after his uncle’s death, James E. sat down in San Francisco and wrote a letter to Ed Fletcher, Jim Murray’s business partner in San Diego. The letter is desperate and strategic in equal measure. He describes seeing the certificates with his own eyes: two for five hundred shares each endorsed to May, and “one certificate for four thousand endorsed to me, but my name was written over and obliterated.” He tells Fletcher he has received telegrams from “our most substantial people in Montana” urging him to stand firm. He says he and Mary are “the only ones entitled to much compensation as we have borne the brunt of things for almost a life time.” He closes by asking Fletcher to keep the letter confidential.

Fletcher did not keep it confidential. He turned the letter over to Mary as evidence in the probate proceedings. Mary had already offered to forgive Fletcher’s $80,000 in personal loans from her late husband in exchange for his cooperation against the heirs. Fletcher chose the money. James E.’s plea for help became a weapon used against him.

James E. filed suit and won his shares back in court. And then something remarkable happened.

He and Mary joined forces.

The Shakedown

It took four months of mudslinging before the two realized they had a bigger problem than each other. Twenty-six relatives had swarmed the courts in Monterey, Butte, and Seattle, all claiming a piece of Jim Murray’s fortune. Mary was about to be forced to testify under oath about the tampered certificate. So she and James struck a deal. They would stop fighting each other and start fighting everyone else.

James and Stuart Haldorn traveled east to confront the potential heirs—most of them James’s own cousins, spread across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Canada. Their approach was not subtle. They demanded immediate cash from the claimants to cover inheritance taxes, warned that actual distributions would take years, and offered a fraction of each heir’s interest as a settlement. For any relative living in the United States who had not been naturalized, they added a special incentive: accept the offer, or we’ll have you deported.

The family remembered. Decades later, my father’s aunt Margaret wrote him a letter about the Murray story. Her assessment of Senator James E. Murray was unvarnished: “Senator Murray of Montana was an attorney and he was a crook! He made Pa sign off paper which otherwise would make him well-to-do—He threatened Pa’s illegal stay in the country.”

That is the family’s oral history of the estate fight, passed down from the generation that lived it. The Supreme Court documents describe the same events in legalese. Aunt Margaret’s version is better.

It took six years to tie down all the agreements. In the end, 6,000 shares were used to divide the estate. Mary received 3,100. James, May, and Marcus split 1,500. Thomas Murray’s family received 500. The remaining relatives split 900. There were plenty of assets that fell outside the settlement, side deals that remained secret. The executor filed his final accounting in 1930, nine years after Murray’s death. His report only included items that were publicly disclosed.

My great-grandfather, William S. Murray—Daniel’s son—did not go quietly. He took the fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In Murray v. Monidah Trust, William and the other minority shareholders argued that the estate’s assets should be distributed on the basis of 6,000 shares, not the full 10,000-share capitalization—a formula that would have significantly increased their payout. They also alleged that James E. and Mary had entered into a “secret and collusive agreement” to split the contested 4,000 shares between them, and that May Murray’s $300,000 in notes and certificates had been converted through a sham lawsuit. The court found nothing in the agreements to support their claims. May Murray, an indispensable witness, had died. The right to prosecute, the court wrote, was “barred by laches and inexcusable delay.” The decree was affirmed.

William S. Murray’s share of what remained came to approximately $50,000. James E. Murray’s share came to approximately $3 million, plus whatever fell off the books. He later told a constituent that he had “inherited practically nothing” and was “merely compensated for a lifetime of service to my uncle.” I agree. He dismissed his uncle’s business acumen as “blind luck.” To this I disagree strongly.

Millionaire Moses

Whatever you think of how Senator Murray got the money, there is no disputing what he did with it.

After the stock market crash of 1929 took a significant portion of his capital, James E. Murray reentered politics. He chaired the Silver Bow County Democratic Central Committee, campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in Montana, and was appointed to the state’s Public Works Administration Board. In 1934, at FDR’s request, he ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate. He served for twenty-six years.

His legislative record was extraordinary. He authored Senate Bill 380, which became the Employment Act of 1946—the law that created the Council of Economic Advisors. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith later called it the most important piece of economic legislation of the postwar years. He coauthored the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill, the nation’s first proposal for comprehensive national health insurance. Twenty years later, President Johnson recognized Murray’s work at the signing of Medicare, saying the legislation was made possible by “the long-enduring, and often thankless, efforts of earlier Presidents and earlier Congressmen.”

FDR trusted him enough to detail forty percent of the Executive Branch staff assigned to Senate committees to Murray’s operation. The Saturday Evening Post profiled him as “Millionaire Moses”—the wealthiest member of Congress and among its most progressive. Hubert Humphrey called him the “staunchest advocate of social legislation in the United States Senate.”

He survived a reelection campaign in which the Republican opposition used literature casting him as a Communist, winning with support from Senators Al Gore Sr. and Lyndon Johnson. He retired on January 3, 1961, and died less than three months later, ending what I have called—in a peer-reviewed journal, no less—the Murray family’s “unique seventy-eight-year span of radical politics.”

Getting Anyone to Care

I published the dual biography of James A. and James E. Murray in Montana: The Magazine of Western History in 2016, under the title “Rocky Mountain Radicals.” It took twenty-one months from submission to publication. The first version was rejected without peer review—the editors said it lacked interpretation. The second version split the reviewers. The third version was accepted as a simple biography. I learned that writing about your own relatives in an academic journal requires you to prove, repeatedly, that you are not simply writing about your own relatives.

The article on James E. Murray’s role in FDR’s legislative strategy went to several journals before the Journal of Policy History accepted it in 2020. The subject matter—how FDR detailed Executive Branch staff to Murray’s Senate committees to push the Second Bill of Rights—combined my independent scholarship on Murray with my PhD work at Virginia Commonwealth University. I identified the gap in the literature during a review course on the history of public policy. I suppose there is something fitting about discovering that nobody had written about your cousin’s most important contribution to American governance while sitting in a graduate seminar.

The Bygones

Here is the part I cannot fully explain.

After the settlement—after James E. and Stuart Haldorn traveled east to strong-arm the blood relatives into accepting a fraction of their inheritance, after the threats and the deportation warnings and the six years of legal maneuvering, after my great-grandfather took the fight to the Supreme Court and lost—James E. Murray came to Davison, Michigan, and slept under my grandmother’s roof.

The Flint Journal ran a notice on July 3, 1938: “Senator Murray Is Guest Of His Kin at Davison.” United States Senator James E. Murray of Butte, Montana, was a guest of his cousins, including my grandmother and Aunt “He was a Crook” Margaret (Mrs. James Harvey in the article).

If you read the previous post, you know Dr. Del Zingro. He was the Davison town doctor, the civic fixture, the man who hosted politicians and supported local charities. He was also Sylvia’s second husband—my father’s stepfather. The man who entertained the senator on Thursday night was married to the daughter of the man the senator had frozen out of a Copper King’s fortune.

My father was thirteen years old in 1938. He may have been in the room.

I do not know what was said that evening in Davison. I do not know whether anyone raised the subject of the estate, or the Supreme Court case, or the altered stock certificate. My relatives also visited James E. in Washington, D.C., after he became a senator. What I do know is that the connection held. It held long enough and firmly enough that my grandmother Sylvia—the tough bird with the restaurant, the woman who turned Murray settlement money into a business—felt she could pick up the phone and call in a favor.

The Phone Call

During World War II, my father spent summers in officer training classes and then took a break after his sophomore year in college to serve in the Naval Reserve in the Philippines. If you read the previous post, you know the broad outlines: the man who wanted a bigger ship, the letters to Marlyn, the career that took him from Albion College to the deck of LCT 726 in Subic Bay.

What I did not include in that post was this: at some point during his training to command a ship, Sylvia used the Murray connection to arrange a transfer for her son. She wanted him moved from naval studies over the medical corps. A U.S. Senator’s office could make that kind of thing happen. One day he was called in to the Commanding Officer’s quarters. The first question put to my dad, “who do you know.” My dad did not know how to respond. The C.O. offered him the chance switch tracks. Dad refused.

My dad told me this story a few weeks before he passed. He choked up telling it. He said it was his mom behind it. Sylvia—who had buried a marriage, bought a business with inheritance money, and maintained a connection to a United States Senator who had once come to Michigan to shake down her father’s family—had tried to keep her son out of harm’s way.

He didn’t take the transfer. That was the kind of man he was. But she made the call. That was the kind of woman she was.

The Long Shadow

Senator James E. Murray cast a long shadow. I teased this line at the end of the last post, and I meant it in more ways than one.

His shadow falls across the Employment Act of 1946 and the Medicare Amendment to the Social Security Act. It falls across the legislative history of the New Deal and the postwar labor movement. It falls, for the handful of people who read peer-reviewed journals about mid-century Senate procedure, across the story of how FDR blended executive and legislative power to advance the Second Bill of Rights.

But in my family, the shadow is more personal. It falls across a $50,000 settlement and a restaurant in Davison, Michigan. It falls across a phone call to a C.O. of officer training and a son who refused the favor his mother arranged. It falls across the visits—the ones I cannot explain—where the man who took the money and the family he took it from sat down together and let the bygones be bygones.

Murray’s vast fortune, the equivalent of $3 billion in today’s economy, has splintered and dissipated. My branch got $50,000 and a tough bird with a long memory. His branch got the Senate. My great-grandfather took the fight to the Supreme Court and lost. Then, somehow, the connection between the two branches was never severed. That is an inheritance for which I am grateful.

P.S. I am a second great-grandnephew of James A. Murray and a first cousin, three generations removed, of Senator James E. Murray. I wrote a book about the uncle and two peer-reviewed articles involving the nephew. At a reunion with Senator Murray’s direct descendants at Butte’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, nobody mentioned the stock certificates. Some shadows are better left where they fall.

In January 1969, the Sacramento Medical Society published a short profile of its new president, James O. Farley, M.D. The reporter—clearly someone who knew him—opened with a line that tells you everything about the subject: he was too small for the checkers team, so he devoted his spare time to music and the development of charm.

The profile covers his Navy service in the Philippines, his return to Albion College, his medical training at Wayne State, his practice, his partnership with William Hedges, his three sons. It is warm, well-written, and almost completely silent about anything that actually mattered.

My father wrote it himself.

The Official Record

James Owen Farley was born in Detroit in 1925, the son of Sylvia Murray and William John Farley. His parents divorced when Jim was seven. Sylvia remarried to Dr. Nicholas Del Zingro, the town doctor in Davison, Michigan, sixty miles north of Detroit. Dr. Del was a civic fixture, a man who hosted politicians and supported local charities. In Davison, the Del Zingro name meant something. Jim grew up in that household, carrying a different last name than the man who raised him.

Jim graduated from Davison High School in 1942 and enrolled at Albion College as a pre-med student. One year later, the Navy V-12 program sent him to Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts for officer training, then to Midshipman’s School in Chicago. He received his naval commission in January 1945 and was transferred to the Philippines to take command of an LCT (Landing Craft for Tanks).

According to the Medical Society profile, he had worked out a plan to evacuate General Douglas MacArthur by PT boat from the Philippines to Australia. The war ended before he could execute it. He was sorry about that.

My father was not a man who overstated things. He was, however, a man who told a story with a straight face that left you unsure whether to believe him. In later years, he mentioned once that after the war ended, he was briefly in charge of the Pacific Fleet. I have looked for documentary evidence of this claim. I have not found it. What I did find, in his naval fitness report dated June 30, 1945, is that Ensign James Owen Farley first served as Executive Officer—second in command—of USS LCT(6) 725, and that under his preference for next duty assignment, he wrote, in his own hand: On board some larger ship.

He never got his bigger ship - only a bigger number (726). He went back to Albion instead.

The Library

He returned to Albion College in 1946. He was a junior, back from the war, president of his fraternity. She was a freshman from Detroit named Marlyn Barnett. She was sitting alone in the library.

The Medical Society profile describes what happened next as love at third or fourth sight. That is the official version—and it may be the most honest thing in the entire profile, because it admits that even he couldn’t explain what made him walk across the room.

They dated at Albion for a couple years. Then their lives split geographically. Jim enrolled at Wayne State Medical School in Detroit. Marlyn transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They lived forty-five miles apart and saw each other on weekends when his test schedule allowed. They wrote letters in between. Marlyn kept Jim’s letters.

The letters begin in 1948 after both moved to the Detroit area. They are funny in exactly the way the Medical Society profile is funny—dry, self-deprecating, completely unguarded in a way his official biography is not.

He got four Cs in one semester and celebrated them like a championship: Others can have their As and Bs but I won’t trade my little curved lines for anything. He batted .500 in an intramural softball game and noted that this was better than Ted Williams. In January 1949, he wrote from his room in Detroit: The beautiful lights of the library are shining my way. I’ll have to visit the place one of these days. They say there are a lot of good books over there. He was a medical student staring out the window at the library he should have been studying in, and he made it sound like a travel brochure.

In September 1948, starting his first year, he looked at the contents of his books and considered an alternative career path: Maybe I’d just better call the whole thing off and quietly sneak away to join the French Foreign Legion. Would you write me if I were in the middle of Africa?

A month later, he opened a letter with a cartoon—a small drawing of a man slumped at a desk, a question mark floating over his head, sweat pooling on the floor—and captioned it: What you see in the diagram is the pathetic scene of a man in the state of mental frustration until he is on the verge of complete mental breakdown and collapse. He explained that the experiment had originally been designed to frustrate dogs, but dogs were scarce, so they had switched to freshmen medical students. They frustrate more easily and their bite, while in the “mad” state, does not produce rabies.

He was, unmistakably, the man who would write about MacArthur twenty years later in a medical newsletter. The voice was already fully formed at twenty-three, writing to a girl he was afraid of losing.

The Problem with No Name

The Medical Society profile mentions that Jim finished his degree, married Marlyn, and headed west to complete his internship at Sacramento County Hospital. Simple. Clean. Westward and forward.

Here is what the profile does not mention.

Jim’s stepfather, Dr. Del Zingro, was a prominent physician in Davison, Michigan. For a new doctor finishing his training, the logical next step was to join an established practice. His stepfather had one. His hometown needed him. He did not take it.

The reason appears in his letters, and unlike most things in his life, he could not find a way to make it funny. In a letter dated August 3, 1948—the earliest in the collection—he writes to Marlyn about a question she had asked him. She wanted to know if he would change his religion for her. He was Catholic. She was Protestant. And his answer is the most Jim Farley sentence in the entire collection: I would hardly call that enough reason. I love you very much and I would change my religion for you—if you loved me.

Then, in the same letter, he catches himself: Aw nuts! Why do I have to go off the beam like that?

This was his pattern. Say the most serious thing he was ever going to say, then wave it off before the ink dried.

By December 1948, the problem had shifted from religion in the abstract to Davison in particular. He wrote: The more I think about it the more I think that you wouldn’t like it in a small town. Everyone is catty, they all know each other’s business. They are all jealous of what their neighbor has. They don’t make friends too easily unless they think it is to their advantage. It’s a rough row to hoe sweet.

He was describing the town where he grew up, the town where his stepfather was the most important man in civic life, the town where he expected to set up practice. And he was telling the woman he loved that she would not survive it. He didn’t say why—not yet. But by March 1949, the weight was showing: I know that our future looks grey but there isn’t any immediate solution to that problem. I just accept that I guess and enjoy being with you. When I’m alone I worry myself with the future but when you’re near the time we have to be together is too short to plug up with the weighty problems.

He would not name the problem plainly for another year. In what reads like a letter he had been composing in his head for two years, he finally wrote it out: Because of the town our differences in religion would be greatly accentuated. I’m not a religious person Marlyn and I would have been perfectly agreeable to any religion you chose but the town knows me as a Catholic. There is an awful lot of friction between the churches in Davison so consequently any change on my part would only add fuel to the gossip fire.

The doctor whose stepfather was the town doctor could not practice medicine in his own hometown. Not because of what he believed, but because of what the town believed about him.

The Releasing Letter

By 1949, Marlyn was finishing at Michigan and beginning a career of her own. Jim was still in school, still in Detroit, still unable to make the kind of commitment that would give her a reason to stay put. And he knew it.

In a letter postmarked May 2, 1949—a Sunday—he wrote her what I think of as the releasing letter. He had just been to church with his uncle’s family. They were, he wrote, pretty strongly Catholic. He sat in the pew and tried to talk himself into believing it mattered. He could not. He wrote: I love you very much and if it were possible to marry you as soon as possible I would change my religion for you and promise to never bring the point up again. You mean more to me. My ideas on salvation and the like do not require a specific religion.

Then the letter turns. He shifts from the religion problem to the problem underneath it—the one he had been circling for three years. He tells her what he thinks is going to happen:

I want you Marlyn but I can’t ask you to wait for me. It just won’t work out that way. Maybe it would due to the fact that you have a year before you graduate and the fact that you would probably prefer to work and travel a couple of years afterward. In that time you are going to meet many persons and I know that most would be able to offer you a more attractive life than I will ever be able to give.

He tells her that others may be able to offer her happiness and love, and that their love may be as great—but it certainly couldn’t be greater than mine.

He tells her he does not want to stop seeing her, and that it is precisely because she means so much to him that he will ask her to go out with others. Then he says the thing he had been trying to say for three years without ever quite managing it: I once asked you to let me love you without your loving me in return.

This letter is a mess and so am I.

He signs it: all my love, Jim.

The Bald Head

He walked it back.

In a subsequent letter—postmarked May 8, 1949—he writes: Gosh I felt good after talking to you last nite. Your voice sounded wonderful honey. He tells her he has been kicking himself for being so stupid. He agrees with her: life is too short to work all these complications into it.

And then, in a short note that may have been enclosed with the same letter or sent days later, he asks to be taken back:

You’re right honey, this situation is strictly for the birds! I do love you very much and I think that that is the most important thing to consider. If you will forgive me I would like you to take back this slightly used and beat up contraption with a bald head called me. I’m sure that everything will work out and that there isn’t any real problem at all. I did make you a promise and I had no right in the world to change it so I ask you to let me turn back the clock and make that correction.

He was twenty-four years old. He was bald. He thought he was losing her. And the way he asked to be taken back was to describe himself as a slightly used and beat-up contraption.

She kept that letter for sixty years.

The Wedding

Jim and Marlyn married in June 1952, the same month he finished medical school. They traveled to Sacramento, California, where he completed his internship at Sacramento County Hospital and eventually formed a practice with William Hedges, M.D. They were still at the same location twenty-two years later, according to the Medical Society profile. Jim and Marlyn had three sons. Then a fourth.

The wedding photographs show the Barnett side of the family. Marlyn’s parents, her father Guy, her mother Esther her brother Richard and his wife Elizabeth. From Jim’s side of the family: no one.

No relatives came from Davison. Not for the wedding, and not after. I never met my grandmother Sylvia. She never came to Sacramento. She never sent a card. She never, in any way I’m aware of, acknowledged that her four grandchildren existed.

What the Record Shows

The official record—the Medical Society profile, the obituary, the civic honors—shows a man who built a good life, served his patients, raised four sons, and retired from medicine in Sacramento. All of that is true.

What the letters show is the man who made the official record possible. The man who understood that the town he grew up in would not let him stay, and made his peace with that in writing, alone, and mostly without saying it plainly even to the woman he was writing to. The man who sat in a Catholic church with his uncle’s family and tried to talk himself into believing it mattered and could not. The man who told Marlyn she should probably find someone better and then asked, a week later, to be taken back—describing himself as a slightly used and beat up contraption with a bald head.

He was not an eloquent man in the conventional sense. He did not write long declarations. He told jokes when he meant something serious, and he meant something serious most of the time. In a letter postmarked December 13, 1948, he wrote: I love you so very much that I’m at a loss to tell you. I have to leave it that way for now honey. Maybe some day I can tell you in an eloquent manner but tonite I’m all fogged up.

The letters stopped, eventually. The practice started. The family grew.

In the 1980s, before heart surgery, he wrote Marlyn another note. I have it. He told her how lucky he was that he got up one day and walked over to introduce himself to that cute little girl at the library. He said he had never done anything like that before and didn’t know what prompted him to do it then.

He thanked her for being so nice, tolerant, and patient.

He knew exactly what he was thanking her for. He just couldn’t say it plainly, even then.

The Last Date

My mom developed Alzheimer’s disease in her final years and needed 24 hour care. My father, now 87, cared for her until leukemia sapped his strength. While he was in a convalescent hospital recovering from a setback, we placed mom in a residential care home. He looked at his sons and said: you did what I couldn’t.

That was the same voice. Six words to carry everything he meant—thank you, and I’m sorry, and I know this was hard. The man who waved off a declaration of love with “Aw nuts” was never going to deliver a speech. He was going to find six words and let them do the work of sixty.

One week before he died, we arranged for my parents to have a last visit. When my mother entered his room, she said: There’s the one. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. They spent twenty minutes alone together. As she left, she stepped back to give his hand a kiss. Later that day, she mentioned him by name for the first time in many months.

He sent her a box of See’s candy the next day with a note:

Hi Marlyn. Have some sweet candy for a sweet girl. It was nice seeing you yesterday. Love—Jim.

The man who wrote I’m at a loss to tell you in December 1948 was still writing the same way sixty-four years later. Small gestures. Oblique language. It was nice seeing you yesterday.

He had loved her since before she knew what love was. He said so once, in a letter, and then he never said it quite so plainly again.

He didn’t have to. She kept every letter.

What He Meant

My father thanked my mother, in that note before heart surgery, for being nice, tolerant, and patient. Those are the words he chose. Nice. Tolerant. Patient.

Here is what he meant.

He meant: you were twenty years old and you sat in a library in Albion, Michigan, and a bald junior walked over and introduced himself, and for reasons neither of you could explain, you said yes. He meant: I asked you to wait for me through four years of medical school and you did, even when I told you not to. He meant: the town I grew up in would not let me bring you home, and you never made me feel guilty about that. He meant: I left behind my family, my stepfather’s practice, and everything familiar, and you came with me to Sacramento without looking back. He meant: my own mother never acknowledged our children, and you carried that weight without asking me to explain it. He meant: I spent my whole life unable to say any of this plainly, and you never needed me to.

He meant all of that. He wrote nice, tolerant, and patient.

I have spent thirty years in archives, reading the letters and documents of people who are no longer here to explain themselves. Most of the time, my job is to figure out what happened. Occasionally, my job is to figure out what someone meant. And every once in a while, my job is to say the thing that the person I’m researching could never quite manage to say out loud.

This is one of those times.

My father loved my mother completely, from the moment he walked across the library until the box of See’s candy arrived the day before he died. He loved her through four years of letters, a religion problem he couldn’t solve, a town that wouldn’t have them, and a cross-country move that cut him off from everyone he knew. He loved her in the only language he had, which was jokes, deflections, and small gestures that meant more than he would ever say.

She knew. She always knew. She just let him say it his way.

Every family has an official version—the obituary, the résumé, the story that gets repeated at Thanksgiving until nobody questions it. And every family has a box somewhere. A drawer. A closet shelf. A stack of papers nobody has looked at because the person who wrote them is gone, and the person who saved them is gone, and nobody who’s left knows what’s inside.

Open the box.

P.S. Next time I’m returning to Montana. I have been sitting on the story of James A. Murray’s nephew—a man his uncle put through law school, who spent thirty years in the United States Senate and once rode with Franklin Roosevelt to the Fort Peck Dam. Senator James E. Murray cast a long shadow. Stay tuned.

P.P.S. This post was built from fourteen handwritten letters, a naval fitness report, a Medical Society newsletter, a wedding photograph, a note written before heart surgery, and a box of See’s candy. None of them were in an archive. All of them were in a house. If you want to know how those pieces fit together into a story, that’s a future post.

If you’ve been following this series, you know the Dustbin Historian has two missions: rescue the material and publish the stories. My earlier posts covered how to mine Civil War pension files for stories and how to turn family history research into published articles. This post is about the other half — what to do with the things they left behind.

The Problem

After someone dies, their belongings scatter. The kids take what they want. The rest goes to Goodwill, an estate sale, or the trash. Even meaningful objects lose their meaning without context. A small green beanie is just a small green beanie. A ceramic stein is just a stein. A tarnished silver trophy is scrap metal.

I see this every time I walk into a thrift store. Objects separated from their stories. The anonymous discards that fuel my hobby are proof of what happens when no one does the work of connecting an artifact to the right audience.

The solution is straightforward but takes effort: match the artifact to an institution that already cares about the story it tells. Provide the context — names, dates, the narrative — so the object isn’t just displayed but understood. And do it while you still can, because the people who know the stories are dying, and the objects will follow them into the dustbin.

Here’s how I’ve done it, five different ways.

Dad’s Fraternity Memorabilia — Albion College

My father, James O. Farley, started at Albion College in the fall of 1942 and pledged the Alpha Pi chapter of Sigma Chi. He was there for about a year before heading off to Navy training as part of the V-12 program — a wartime initiative that paid for college while incorporating officer training. He wanted to captain a ship. His mother had other ideas. Her cousin was a U.S. Senator, and she had him arrange a transfer from naval training to a medical program. The commanding officer called my dad into his office and asked him, “Who do you know?” Then he offered him the transfer. My dad declined.

He skippered LCT-726 at Subic Bay in the Philippines. He came back to Albion in 1946, met my mother Marlyn Barnett at the college library, became Sigma Chi chapter president in 1948, and went on to Wayne State for his medical degree. He practiced medicine in Sacramento until he retired. He passed away in 2012.

After his death, I started going through boxes. I found his freshman beanie — a small green cap that Sigma Chi pledges wore in the 1940s. A ceramic stein with the Sigma Chi crest and “Albion College 1948” on it. His fraternity pin, about half an inch long, with his initials (JOF), ‘46, and the Greek symbols on the back. Photos of fraternity brothers, a Sweetheart Ball with my mom, and his Navy crew.

None of this was going to stay in my basement forever. So I searched online for the Albion Sigma Chi chapter and found Doc Mike Kabot, who had been the House Corporation President for about 35 years. I contacted his son Kyle first, then Mike directly.

Mike was thrilled. He was building locked, lighted display cases for the chapter house and had plenty of room. I shipped the beanie, stein, and photos in September 2018. Then I found the fraternity pin and mailed that separately. I provided yearbook pages and the backstory — the V-12 program, the Navy service, the Sweetheart Ball, the chapter presidency. Mike wrote up a historical document to accompany the display and had the photos matted and framed.

Then I waited. The fraternity brothers started a renovation in the basement where the display cases were going. Then COVID shut everything down. Mike couldn’t get into the chapter house for 20 months. In October 2021 — three years after my first email — he finally got back in and installed everything. He sent photos. My brother Tom’s response: “Takes a manly man to wear a tiny beanie.”

A couple of lessons from this one. First, the recipient matters as much as the institution. Mike Kabot had personal passion for preservation and the infrastructure to do it right. Second, providing the story made all the difference. Mike told me people love seeing memorabilia, especially when there are stories to go with it. Third, patience. Three years is a long time, but the result is a locked display case in a fraternity house that has memorabilia going back to the 1800s. It’s a shrine to Sigma Chi, and my dad’s stuff is part of it.

I told Mike not to hesitate to replace my dad’s items with new donations if better ones came along. The beanie and stein could be more permanent, but the other pieces could be rotated. No need to check with me. The point was preservation, not controlling the display.

The Haldorn Sailing Trophy — St. Francis Yacht Club

This one requires some backstory.

James A. Murray was a Montana Copper King — one of the wealthiest men in the state at the turn of the twentieth century and the subject of a biography I wrote. Murray’s second wife had a son from a previous marriage: Stuart Haldorn. You could say Haldorn spent my great-grandfather’s rightful inheritance in a spectacular fashion.

Among his expenditures: Six Meter racing yachts. The Six Meter class was the glamour division of international yacht racing in the 1920s and 1930s — sleek, expensive sloops built in Sweden and shipped across the Atlantic. Haldorn acquired “Ay Ay Ay” (US 34), which arrived in San Francisco Bay for the 1928 racing season.

In August 1929, the Pacific Coast Yachting Association held a championship regatta on the Bay. Nine Six Meters entered. The final race became legendary — three boats finished virtually simultaneously under spinnaker, producing one of the most famous photographs in Bay Area sailing history. Ay Ay Ay was declared the winner. That photograph hung at St. Francis Yacht Club until the fire of 1976 destroyed it.

Another Haldorn luxury item: Stuart’s wife, the former Enid Gregg, had her self-portrait painted by Salvador Dali. It hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. I see a tiny sailboat in the background.

Now to the artifact: While researching the Murray biography, I was constantly searching eBay for artifacts connected to Murray and his extended family. A Haldorn sailing trophy from 1930 appeared at essentially scrap metal value. I bought it as a conversation piece and it sat on a shelf for over a decade. This year, I decided it was time to declutter.

I contacted St. Francis Yacht Club. Their curator, Kimball Livingston, responded immediately. He recognized the trophy as one of a series connected to Dr. Albert Soiland, the founder of the Pacific Coast Yachting Association and Newport Harbor Yacht Club. StFYC already had two similar trophies from Six Meter racing, displayed in a lobby trophy case dedicated to Six Meter history. Livingston proposed placing the Haldorn trophy as a companion to those two, enlarging the story.

This was the ideal outcome. Livingston wasn’t just accepting a donation — he was a biographer of Dr. Soiland, the centennial commodore of the PCYA, and a former commodore of StFYC who had presided over the 2016 Six Meter North American Championship at the club. He knew the Haldorn and Ay Ay Ay history cold. He committed to entering the full provenance — Haldorn’s story and my contribution — into the club’s member-accessible archive.

His plan for the trophy was better than I could have imagined.

The lesson here is about alignment. This trophy sat on eBay at scrap value because nobody bidding on it knew the story. Without someone who could connect the Murray name, the Haldorn connection, and the Six Meter racing history, it was just old metal. My research gave it context. StFYC gave it a permanent home. When artifact, story, and institution align perfectly, the result is something none of them could achieve alone.

Sacramento Civic Memorabilia — Sacramento History Center

Not all the artifacts I’ve rescued come from family. Some come from my professional career.

I donated several items to the Sacramento History Center recently: a Challenge Coin given to me by the U.S. Army for my work on converting the Sacramento Army Depot, a set of renderings of a potential amusement park on the Sacramento River prepared by Knotts Berry Farm, and a very limited-run baseball cap printed by the mayor for his announcement that he was creating a stadium authority to try and bring major league baseball to the city.

The History Center was grateful. The theme park renderings were of particular interest, and I understood why. Sacramento’s waterfront and adjacent railyards have been the subject of ambitious plans and false starts since about 1992. Massive office towers were envisioned — a significant expansion of the central business district with private sector occupants. Almost none of it materialized, mainly because the railyard owners (Southern Pacific and then Union Pacific) needed high sale prices to offset toxic soil cleanup costs. As of today, the biggest developments on the site are two public courthouses, a hospital under construction, and a minor league soccer stadium under construction. Nothing like what was imagined.

The theme park concept was too early in the process — back when there was still hope for a major private sector build-out. It’s a document of civic ambition that didn’t pan out. About ten years ago, I attended an exhibit in Los Angeles that chronicled all the grand plans for that city that were never realized. Sacramento’s waterfront story belongs in the same category.

The Knotts Berry Farm rendering was the classic dustbin rescue. My successor in the role was about to throw it away. I grabbed it. Nobody archives what didn’t happen — which is exactly why someone should.

Rosa’s Postcards and Rocking Chair — Albion Historical Society (Planned)

This one is still in the contemplation stage, but it illustrates a different path.

My grandfather Guy Barnett grew up on a small farm in Albion, Michigan. His sister Rosabelle — Rosa — was born in 1902. Her world was tiny. The one-room schoolhouse was across the street from the family farm. Town center was a mile away.

On her seventh birthday in 1909, Rosa received picture postcards — birthday greetings and images of towns she’d only heard about. Over the next four years she carefully stored over 100 cards in a large album. Cards came from Jackson, Hillsdale, Grand Rapids, Battle Creek, Lansing, Marshall, and Detroit. She received them on birthdays, holidays, and whenever relatives traveled. Her collecting years coincided with the golden age of American postcards — the U.S. Postal Service delivered over one billion between 1909 and 1915.

Rosa’s collection ended in 1914 when she died of appendicitis. She was twelve. Her brother Guy saved the album and passed it down through the family. He also kept her rocking chair.

I pitched an article to Michigan History magazine — “The Golden Age of Post Cards: Rosa’s Window to the State” — proposing to tell her story alongside the postcards, with brief histories of each city during the period of her collection. The magazine passed.

But a rejection from a magazine doesn’t mean the story has no audience. I posted Rosa’s complete collection of over 100 cards to Pinterest along with her story. That digital record exists regardless of what happens with the physical items. And the Albion Historical Society maintains a period home from around 1910. Rosa’s postcards and rocking chair would fit the setting and era perfectly. The Albion connection is direct — she lived there. I haven’t contacted them yet, but it’s on my list.

The lesson: a story that doesn’t meet the threshold for a state magazine may be exactly right for a local institution. Different audiences have different needs. And digital documentation — Pinterest, YouTube, scanned images — creates a parallel preservation track that doesn’t depend on any institution saying yes.

Home Movies as Artifacts

Artifacts aren’t just physical objects. My grandfather Barnett’s home movies sat in boxes for decades before I had them digitized. I edited the footage into short clips — one to five minutes each — and posted them to YouTube. Then I joined historical society Facebook pages in the relevant communities and shared the links.

The most polished is a micro-documentary of the 1935 Festival of States parade in St. Petersburg, Florida. I found the newspaper coverage of the parade, identified each float by its sponsor, noted any awards, and added newspaper clips about the crowds. It’s raw home movie footage transformed into something a researcher or filmmaker could actually use.

The other clips are simpler but still historically significant. Sailing at White Lake, Michigan, with a cameo of the Murray Inn around 1940. A visit to Colonial Williamsburg. And my favorite: hiking through the Painted Hills and Miners Castle off Lake Superior, circa 1960 — shot before the lookout was constructed and before access to the turrets was cut off. That footage documents a landscape that no longer exists in its accessible form.

I think of these clips as potential B-roll in someone else’s work. They don’t need to be the main feature. They just need to be findable when a documentary filmmaker or local historian goes looking for footage of the 1935 Festival of States or pre-lookout Miners Castle. Unlike a rocking chair or a trophy, a YouTube clip doesn’t require anyone’s permission or shelf space. It just has to be there when someone needs it.

How to Do This

If you’re sitting on family artifacts and wondering what to do with them, here’s what I’ve learned:

Write down the stories while you still know them. The beanie means nothing without “Navy V-12 program, chapter president, met his wife at the Albion library.” A trophy is scrap metal without the Haldorn connection and the 1929 race. Do this first, before you contact anyone.

Think about the artifact’s natural audience. Fraternity items belong with the chapter. Sailing trophies belong at yacht clubs. Civic memorabilia belongs at local history centers. Postcards from Albion belong in Albion. Ask yourself: who would care about this?

Look for institutions with existing context. St. Francis Yacht Club already had a Six Metre trophy case. The Albion Sigma Chi chapter already had a memorabilia room going back to the 1800s. Your artifact is most valued where it fills a gap or enlarges a story that’s already being told.

Find the right person. Doc Mike Kabot and Kimball Livingston both had personal passion for the material. An enthusiastic curator or chapter historian makes all the difference between a box in storage and a lighted display case.

Provide the story with the artifact. Write it up. Include names, dates, connections. Make the recipient’s job easy. Mike Kabot prepared a framed historical document for the display. Livingston committed to archiving the full provenance. They could do that because I gave them the material to work with.

Be patient. My dad’s fraternity memorabilia took three years from first contact to installation. Renovations, COVID, logistics — it all takes time.

Be willing to let go. I told Mike Kabot to rotate items out as needed. The point is preservation and sharing, not controlling the display forever.

Create digital backups. Scan photos, photograph objects, digitize film, post to Pinterest or YouTube. The physical item may eventually be lost, but the digital record persists. Rosa’s 100+ postcards are on Pinterest right now. The Miners Castle footage is on YouTube. Those exist regardless of what happens to the originals.

Don’t overlook your professional life. The Army challenge coin, the Knotts Berry Farm renderings, the mayor’s baseball cap — these tell stories too. And nobody is going to save them for you.

A rejected magazine pitch doesn’t mean the story has no home. Michigan History passed on Rosa’s postcards. But the Albion Historical Society might love them. Different audiences, different thresholds.

Everything I’ve described in this post was headed for the dustbin. The beanie was in a box in my basement. The trophy was on eBay at scrap value. The theme park renderings were about to be thrown away. The home movies were deteriorating in storage. Rosa’s postcards had been sitting in a family album for over a century.

Publishing a story gives an ancestor permanence on the page. Donating an artifact — with its story — gives them permanence in a place. Both rescue lives from obscurity. And both require someone to do the work before it’s too late.

This post is a departure from our usual storytelling. Consider it a “how to” guide—a field manual for the aspiring archive detective. I’m going to walk you through what pension files are, how to order them, and what you might actually find inside. To make the case, I’ll use three files I’ve ordered over the years: a Union drummer boy who became the most famous hack driver in the American West, a Confederate cavalryman whose pension unlocked the meaning of artifacts in a family trunk, and a Union veteran whose 112-page file reads less like a military record and more like a domestic court proceeding.

Three files. Three wars—and I don’t mean the one between North and South.

What Is a Civil War Pension File?

Most family historians know about census records, birth certificates, and ship manifests. Pension files are the records that even seasoned genealogists sometimes forget to order—and that’s a shame, because they’re often the richest single document you’ll ever find on a Civil War-era ancestor.

After the Civil War, both Union and Confederate veterans (and in some cases, their widows and dependents) could apply for government pensions based on wartime service and disability. The Union pension system was administered by the federal government through the Bureau of Pensions. Confederate pensions were handled by individual Southern states, since the federal government wasn’t in the business of compensating the other side.

What makes these files invaluable to researchers is what the government required to prove a claim. A veteran couldn’t just say, “I was at Gettysburg and my knee hurts.” He needed sworn testimony—from fellow soldiers, physicians, neighbors, and sometimes family members—all documented in writing. The result is a file that can range from a few pages to well over a hundred, packed with details about military service, medical conditions, personal relationships, financial hardship, and the everyday texture of post-war life.

In other words: it’s the stuff census records dream about when census records go to sleep at night.

How to Order One

Union pension files are held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. You can request them by submitting NATF Form 85 (for pension files) or NATF Form 86 (for military service records). Several third party websites provide retrieval services as well. As of this writing, expect the cost to run between $50 and $100. The process takes weeks to months, depending on how busy the Archives are, or if someone else has already paid for them to be digitized. Not everyone has a file so use search index on Ancestry or other third party sites first.

Confederate pension files are held by the individual states. Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and most other Southern states maintain their own archives. Some have been digitized and are available on FamilySearch or Fold3. Others require a letter, a prayer, and a stamped envelope.

What’s Inside the Envelope

The contents of a pension file depend on the veteran, the war, and—this is important—how much trouble the claim caused. A straightforward application might yield a dozen pages. A contested one can run past a hundred. Here’s what you can generally expect to find: the original pension application with personal details (age, residence, regiment, rank, enlistment and discharge dates); sworn depositions from fellow soldiers describing battles, injuries, and character; medical examination reports documenting disabilities, ailments, and the veteran’s physical condition decades after the war; correspondence between the veteran, attorneys, pension examiners, and sometimes family members; and documents related to increases, denials, appeals, and—in some cases—widows’ claims that tell entirely separate stories.

You’re not just getting a record of military service. You’re getting the closest thing the 19th century had to a social media profile—written under oath.

Now let me show you what I mean. Three files, three very different stories.

Exhibit A: The Drummer Boy Who Became Butte’s Most Famous Hack Driver

John “Fat Jack” Jones — Civil War Pension File (1897–1920)

If you’ve read my book on James A. Murray—or any of the first six posts in this series—you’ve already met Fat Jack. Six-foot-two and skinny as a fencepost, John Codman Jones earned his ironic nickname in the mining camps of Montana, where a man’s first impression was worth more than his last dollar. His original moniker was “Flap Jack,” because he was as thin as a pancake. Somewhere along the trail it got shortened. The joke only got better with age.

By the time I was deep into the Murray research, Fat Jack had become one of my favorite characters. He drove every famous visitor who rolled into Butte—William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, John L. Sullivan—perched atop his hack in a silk stovepipe hat, looking, as one reporter noted, like Abraham Lincoln if Lincoln had taken up cab driving. Murray bought him his first horse and carriage. When Jack defaulted on the loan, Murray bought him a second one. When that arrangement also went sideways, Murray forgave the debt on Christmas night at the Thornton Hotel bar.

But here’s what I didn’t know until I ordered his pension file: before Fat Jack became the most beloved hack driver in the American West, he was a fifteen-year-old drummer boy in the 13th Maine Infantry.

His file tells us he enlisted on November 20, 1861—barely old enough to hold a drumstick, let alone a rifle. The War Department’s records show his medical history in terse military shorthand: treated for typhoid fever as “J.C. Jones, Priv. Co. D, 13 Me.”; then malarial cachexia; then more fever. He was discharged from service, re-enlisted, and was “absent sick in quarters” for long stretches. He got off the sickbed in time to take a bullet during the Union assault on Fort Esperanza (Matagorda Island, Texas). By the time he mustered out, the boy who’d entered the war as a drummer emerged broken by disease and crippled by a gunshot wound on his right leg.

When time came to collect a pension on that service, Fat Jack had no proof of when he was born. There was no help coming from family members as both parents and al his siblings were dead. His first pension application claimed 1845 as his birth year. That would make him 16 or 17 when he enlisted and qualify him for a pension n 1906 or 1907. Sixty-two was the age for taking a pension back then. The Feds looked at the 1860 Census and figured he was born in 1847. They couldn’t find him in the 1850 Census. If they had, and checked when each census was taken, they would have determined his was born in 1846. That means Fat Jack entered service at 15 and was eligible for a pension in 1908. One of the examiners seemed to be leaning towards a later date, noting Fat Jack entered service at five foot five inches tall, and as an adult stood over six feet.

What the pension file gave me, as a researcher, was the origin story. The newspapers gave me Fat Jack the character. The file gave me John C. Jones the soldier—a teenager who went to war and came out the other side carrying scars that no amount of silk hats and faro games could hide. When Murray finally bought him a seven-passenger Packard in 1913 to replace the horse and carriage, it wasn’t just generosity. It was one old-timer looking after another who made it through hell and back.

Fat Jack spent his last year in Los Angeles, living in two rooms at W.A. Clark Jr.’s mansion. The Veteran’s Home required everyone to wear a standard military beret. Fat Jack only wore his stovepipe. He lived to age 76 - but only because he adopted 1844 as his birth year. His Montana friends gave him a headstone that memorialized this final choice. The Anaconda Standard ran a full obituary comparing him to Bret Harte’s Yuba Bill. They got the legend right. The pension file got the man.

What the File Taught Me: Fat Jack’s pension file connected the colorful Butte legend to his wartime service. Without it, I had anecdotes. With it, I had the full arc—from a sixteen-year-old drummer to a dying man in a mansion, still wearing his treasured stovepipe hat.

Exhibit B: The Artifacts in the Trunk

Joel L. McPherson — Confederate Pension Application, State of Tennessee

This is the story that got me published for the first time.

My wife’s second great grandfather, Joel Lewis McPherson, left behind a small collection of artifacts that ended up in a family trunk: a photograph from the 1913 Confederate Reunion in Chattanooga, a tattered $5.00 bill from the Confederate State of Georgia, letterhead showing a paralegal business in Spring City, Tennessee, and a notice of auction to sell his belongings dated 1921. His daughter-in-law Helen thought these were the important remembrances of Joel’s life. How she knew is another story.

Traditional genealogical records told me the basics. Joel was born in Virginia in 1840, moved to Rhea County, Tennessee as a boy, headed west to Texas at 19, and joined the Confederate Army in 1861. After the war he came home, married Hanna Ladd (whose great-grandfather James Roddye signed the Tennessee State Constitution), raised 13 children, served as sheriff for three terms, and eventually practiced law. He died at 83 in 1924. His possessions were sold at auction.

A decent sketch. But it didn’t explain the $5.00 bill.

Joel’s pension application to the State of Tennessee changed everything. Unlike Union files, Confederate applications were handled at the state level, and they relied heavily on testimony from fellow veterans. Several of Joel’s brothers in arms stepped forward to describe his service. Joel Henry testified that McPherson “charged through the streets of Greenville, Tennessee with three others to take 12–16 Union prisoners—all within shooting distance of a Yankee brigade.” Henry also told how McPherson and five others in the Valley of Virginia cut off 40 Union soldiers, engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and saved the life of a 1st Lieutenant. They took 16 prisoners without losing a man. Another veteran described how Joel and two others stopped a Union flanking maneuver at the Battle of Winchester, saving an entire brigade.

V.C. Allen put it plainly: “No better soldier wore the grey than J.L. McPherson. Intelligent, quick and brave. No danger too great or duty too hard for him to respond to. He was always in front rank.”

Joel’s service ended with the Confederate forces in Kingston, Georgia on May 12, 1865—nearly four years after he first mustered in. His rank was 3rd Lieutenant.

Suddenly the artifacts in the trunk made sense. The $5.00 bill from the State of Georgia wasn’t just Confederate currency. It was a souvenir from the state where Joel’s war ended—kept for sixty years (Helen kept it for another seventy years). The photograph at the Chattanooga reunion wasn’t mere nostalgia. It was a man who’d earned the right to stand with his fellow soldiers, a man the “Rhea County Boys” remembered as one of the bravest among them.

I published Joel’s story in Tennessee Ancestors in Spring 2014 under the title “Pension Application Reveals New Meaning to Artifacts.” Not exactly a headline that would make the front page of the Anaconda Standard, but it got the job done.

What the File Taught Me: Joel’s pension application didn’t just confirm his service—it transformed artifacts from curiosities into evidence. The trunk went from a box of old stuff to a curated memorial. That’s the power of pairing documents (like pension files) with physical objects.

Exhibit C: 112 Pages of Domestic Warfare

Cyrus Weaver — Civil War Pension File, National Archives

If Fat Jack’s file gave me an origin story and Joel’s gave me a revelation, Cyrus Weaver’s gave me a soap opera.

Cyrus Weaver enlisted in Company D of the 7th Iowa Volunteer Infantry on July 24, 1861, just months after Fort Sumter. He was mustered out and re-enlisted, eventually serving with the 28th Iowa Volunteers as well. His service record shows the grinding toll that war took on ordinary men: typhoid, chronic diarrhea, rheumatism, and more. By the time he was honorably discharged on July 31, 1865, the war had wrecked him.

That’s not the interesting part.

Cyrus filed for a pension, and what followed was a bureaucratic marathon spanning decades. His file swelled to 112 pages—not because his military service was complicated, but because his personal life was. At the center of the file is a protracted battle between Cyrus and his estranged wife over twelve dollars a month.

Twelve dollars. That’s what Cyrus received from the government for his shattered health. His estranged wife wanted a piece of it. What follows in the file is a remarkable paper trail of claim and counter-claim, sworn depositions, examiner’s reports, and bureaucratic rulings that reads more like a divorce proceeding than a military record. You can trace the arc of a marriage falling apart through government forms—the accusations, the denials, the neighbors dragged in to testify about who was living where and with whom and whether the veteran was really as disabled as he claimed.

The medical examiners contributed their own chapters to the drama. Over the years, Cyrus’s listed ailments grew like a Victorian medical encyclopedia: rheumatism, nervous debility, chronic diarrhea, asthma, lumbago, heart disease, disease of the nervous system, impaired sight, and failing hearing. His application was submitted, rejected, resubmitted, approved for one condition, denied for another, increased, decreased, and reconsidered so many times that the file reads like a bureaucracy arguing with itself.

One poignant detail: a note on his later paperwork reads, “Claimant does not write.” By the time Cyrus was admitted to the Iowa Soldiers’ Home in Marshalltown—a facility for disabled and destitute veterans—he was 64 years old, his occupation listed simply as “miner.” His pension was $12 a month. His disability was listed as “Rheum.” He was honorably discharged from the Soldiers’ Home after a stay, with the notation: “No objection to his readmission is known to exist.”

The government let him come back. One suspects his wife did not.

What the File Taught Me: Weaver’s file is proof that pension records aren’t just about the war. They’re about the aftermath—the decades of fallout that no battlefield monument commemorates. If you’re looking for the texture of an ancestor’s daily life, this is where you find it.

The Trifecta: What Three Files Teach Us

I didn’t set out to create a comparison when I ordered these files over the years. I was chasing individual stories. But laid side by side, the three files demonstrate something important about pension records as a research tool: you never know which version you’re going to get.

Fat Jack’s file was about his age and medical conditions — important information for the backstory of a larger-than-life character. Joel McPherson’s Confederate application was pure testimony—sworn accounts from fellow soldiers that transformed a box of artifacts into evidence of heroism. And Cyrus Weaver’s massive Union file was a domestic epic—112 pages of human drama played out through government paperwork.

Each file answered questions I didn’t know I had. Each one made a story richer. And each one cost me $25 (ten years ago) and a few months of mailbox stalking.

Here’s what I want you to take from this: if you have a Civil War ancestor—Union or Confederate, famous or forgotten—there is almost certainly a pension file waiting for you. It might be ten pages. It might be a hundred. It might tell you about a battle your great-great-grandfather never talked about. It might tell you about a toxic marriage nobody mentioned. It might explain the meaning of an old photograph that’s been sitting in a drawer for a century.

Or it might just confirm what you already suspected: that twelve dollars a month wasn’t nearly enough.

Your Assignment: How to Get Started

If this post has convinced you to order a pension file—and if it hasn’t, I admire your resistance to peer pressure—here’s what to do:

First, identify your Civil War ancestor. Start with family trees on Ancestry or FamilySearch. Look for men born between roughly 1820 and 1848. Census records from 1870, 1880, and 1890 (what survived of it) sometimes note veteran status.

Second, find their regiment. The National Park Service’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (nps.gov/civilwar) is a free database. Fold3 (fold3.com) has indexed service records and some pension documents. You need a name, a state, and ideally a regiment to place your order.

Third, submit your request. For Union files, go to the National Archives website (archives.gov) or third party vendors and order a copy of the pension file. For Confederate files, contact the state archives of the state where your ancestor lived after the war. Many Southern state archives have online request forms.

Fourth, wait. This is the hardest part. Channel your inner Cyrus Weaver and prepare for a bureaucratic process that, like his pension claim, may involve multiple submissions, unexplained delays, and a vague sense that someone in Washington is arguing about your request in a windowless room. But when the envelope arrives—hopefully thick and heavy, from the National Archives—you’ll understand why I keep ordering them.

Parting Shot

I’ve spent years telling stories from the dustbin. Murray and his friends. Uncle Richard. The ghost hunters. But this post is different—it’s less about my stories and more about yours. Somewhere in your family tree, there is almost certainly a veteran whose pension file is sitting in a box in Washington or a state archive, waiting for someone to ask for it.

A drummer boy from Maine. A cavalryman from Tennessee. A broken miner from Iowa fighting with his wife over twelve dollars. These aren’t the stories that make it into the history books. But they’re the stories that make your family history feel real.

Go order one. Then comment on what you found.

You never know what you’ll find in the dustbin.

P.S. Next time we return to Murray’s world. I’ve been sitting on a story about a sterling silver trophy, and a connection I didn’t see coming—even though the evidence was sitting on my bookshelf for years. After that, I need to explain why Helen held on to Joel’s Confederate artifacts for nearly seventy years. Stay tuned.

When the Travel Channel’s “Ghosts of Devil’s Perch” aired their episode on James A. Murray and Ferdinand Van Zandt, I thought: Finally, someone’s telling this story.

Then I thought: Wait. Why did I only get ONE ghost?

Van Zandt—the California mining heir Murray destroyed through apex law litigation, who shot himself in a London hotel in 1892—makes for excellent television. Tragic backstory. International intrigue. A widow Murray swooped in on to buy the Blue Bird Mine.

But if you’re hunting for spirits with a grudge against James A. Murray, Van Zandt is just the opening act. I’ve spent years in Murray’s business correspondence, court records, and newspaper clippings. The man left a trail of ruined lives stretching from Montana to California to Idaho to Washington State.

Consider this your field guide.

BUTTE, MONTANA: The Motherlode of Grudges

Any paranormal investigator worth their EMF detector should start here. Murray operated in Butte for twenty-six years, and the bodies—metaphorical and otherwise—piled up.

Ferdinand Van Zandt (Already Featured on Television) What Murray did: Used apex law to claim Van Zandt’s ore was actually his, filed a $2 million lawsuit, obtained an injunction shutting down operations, then bought the Blue Bird Mine from the widow. The end: Suicide by gunshot, London hotel, March 1892. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Frederick Isele & John Streicher (A Two-for-One Special) These German immigrants died together on July 4, 1892, in a dynamite accident involving Hostetter’s Bitters (94 proof) and poor judgment about where to wire three sticks of giant powder. The explosion ripped Isele apart and tore Streicher’s eyeballs from their sockets.

Murray waited two years while the estate administrator collected royalties. Then he sent his shill, Silas King, to buy Streicher’s entire estate from thirty-seven relatives in Germany—for $8,000. Murray proceeded to extract $150,000 in ore.

The relatives pursued Murray for twenty-four years. A Montana judge called it “the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in this community.” Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐ (two ghosts, one location)

Sam Sumwalt (The One Who Almost Stopped Murray Permanently) Murray jumped Sumwalt’s claim after Sumwalt had worked it for eleven years. The issue: Sumwalt couldn’t afford to reach the deeper veins. Murray could. So Murray took them.

Sumwalt’s response was to draw a pistol on Murray on Main Street in broad daylight. Police caught his arm just in time. As they dragged him away, Sumwalt shouted: “You will have to go to the graveyard or I will!”

Murray went to his grave in 1921. Sumwalt’s whereabouts at death: unknown. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (unfinished business)

“Crazy Doc” Larkin Murray foreclosed on Doc Larkin’s mining claims while the man was visibly deteriorating mentally. When asked in court about his treatment of Larkin, Murray testified: “I’m not in the habit of running around the country protecting men.”

Larkin was committed to the Warm Springs asylum. He died there in 1899. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐ (might be too confused to haunt effectively)

George Haldorn (Murray’s Divorce Attorney—Yes, Really) Haldorn handled Murray’s divorce from his first wife, Sallie. Murray was so pleased with the work that he kept Haldorn on retainer—for free. Over six years, Haldorn handled forty-five cases for Murray. The promised riches never materialized. Instead, Murray offered Haldorn a loan at 15% interest.

Then Murray married Haldorn’s ex-wife Mary.

When Haldorn couldn’t repay the loan, Murray sued him and attached his house. The legal battle lasted sixteen years. Murray won in the Montana Supreme Court. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐ (betrayal by a client who married your ex-wife and took your house—that’s haunting material)

POCATELLO, IDAHO: Where They Set Up the
Gallows

Murray won the franchise to provide water to Pocatello in 1892. His method for consolidating control was memorable.

F.D. Toms (President of the Water Company—Briefly) Murray withheld payroll from construction workers for three months. The workers, desperate, sold their future paychecks to a saloon keeper for seventy-five cents on the dollar. The city had to feed them.

Murray told the workers that funding was contingent on Toms resigning as president.

The workers bought rope. They set up a gallows for Toms at the water works chimney.

Toms resigned.

Murray took the presidency, settled the debts, and ran the company for the next two decades. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐ (public humiliation via threatened lynching)

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA: The Browbeating Capital

Ed Fletcher (Murray’s “Partner” for Fifteen Years)

If you want to understand how Murray treated the living, spend an afternoon with the Fletcher correspondence.

Fletcher pitched Murray investment opportunities constantly. Murray’s responses ranged from dismissive to cruel:

On Fletcher’s optimism: “It seems to me you become very optimistic at times. Don’t care to accuse you of drinking or anything of the kind, but like many others you have your ups and downs.”

On a request for $115: “I’m surprised that a man of your age should refer the matter to me.”

On Fletcher’s ownership stake: “Your share wouldn’t buy a good breakfast for a poor woman.”

On telegrams: “Every time you say ‘stop’ it cost me money, and I don’t want any of these telegrams when 2 cents will answer the question.”

On Fletcher’s employees: “I am tired of working for twenty-five or thirty gentlemen looking at the sun to see when five o’clock comes.”

Fletcher once pleaded for Murray’s “patience and good heartedness” to keep his job.

Murray kept Fletcher on a financial leash—lending him $60,000 to maintain his ownership position, money Murray could demand back at any moment, including right before a sale, which would have wiped Fletcher out entirely.

When Fletcher tried to honor Murray by naming a dam after him, Murray fired back: “Naming dams after men is very poor policy, and I am superstitious about it. [You] had no business to call that the Murray Dam.”

The irony: It’s still called Lake Murray today.

The twist: After Murray died, Fletcher conspired with Murray’s widow against the blood relatives, helping her contest estate documents in exchange for a sweetheart deal on the water company. He cleared approximately $350,000 in profit.

Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (not for what Murray did to Fletcher—for what Fletcher did to Murray’s heirs after Murray died)

THE FAMILY: Those Who Bore the Brunt

Alex Murray (His Own Nephew) Murray bankrupted his own nephew Alex in Pocatello. The scheme involved a sham purchase of the water company, with Alex holding title and debt while Murray pulled the strings. When Murray sold the company to the city, he left Alex holding $58,000 of his debts..

A judge reviewing the case wrote that the senior Murray’s hanging Alex out to dry “transform(ed) a transaction of doubtful impropriety into an odious fraud.”

Alex received nothing and returned to Pennsylvania to live with his parents.

The lesson: Blood relation offered no protection. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐ (family grudges lack the theatrical quality of strangers’ grudges).

James E. Murray (The Nephew Who Went to the U.S. Senate)

Murray put his nephew through NYU Law School, gave him season passes to the theater, and open credit lines at the finest restaurants. In return, James provided legal services for decades—probably with little pay. Murray never publicly praised him.

When Murray died, James fought bitterly for his share of the estate, writing to Ed Fletcher: “She and I are the only ones entitled to much compensation as we have borne the brunt of things for almost a life time.”

After the dust settled, James dismissed his uncle’s fortune as the product of “blind luck” and told a constituent: “I inherited practically nothing. I was merely compensated for a lifetime of service to my uncle.”

James E. Murray went on to serve twenty-six years in the U.S. Senate, sponsoring groundbreaking labor legislation. He never acknowledged the great wealth he inherited. The bitterness ran deep.

Ghost potential: ⭐⭐ (more likely to haunt the Senate chamber than Butte)

MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA: The “Charitable” Years

Murray moved to Monterey in 1904 and presented himself as a philanthropist. The mask slipped occasionally.

Charles Rollo Peters (Artist, Earthquake Relief Coordinator) After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Murray gave the acclaimed artist $15,000 to shelter displaced artists at his thirty-acre estate, Peters’ Gate. The money was structured as mortgages, because Murray never gave money without strings.

When Peters sold his estate a few years later—without repaying Murray—the old man pounced. Murray foreclosed on the new owner, forcing Peters to sell two paintings hanging at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco to make a symbolic payment.

Peters left Monterey and never returned. His son later wrote that the town held “too many sad memories.” Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐

Hugh Porter (Monterey Daily Cypress) Murray started the newspaper and made Porter a “partner” by lending him the startup money. Porter worked for free, trying to pay off the loan while also covering the salary of John Maguire, Murray’s bestie, as associate editor. The lawsuit is in the Monterey County court records. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐

Dr. William Lillie (Murray’s Personal Physician) This one is circumstantial but unsettling. Dr. Lillie, who had served as Monterey’s mayor twice, pronounced Murray dead in May 1921.

Two months later, at 3:00 AM, Dr. Lillie walked into his garage and shot himself with a shotgun.

No note. No explanation. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐⭐ (what did he know?)

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON: The Slumlord Years

Tenants at Third and Union Murray owned properties in Seattle under his brother Timothy’s name—including buildings the Health Commissioner called “one of the worst places I ever saw.” The boarders carried water in pails because Murray refused to repair the plumbing. The city eventually condemned the properties. Ghost potential: ⭐⭐ (Timothy probably expecting this).

THE QUOTE THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING

Murray, in an interview: “There isn’t any honest money in the world. I’ve got $10 million and if I had an honest dollar in the bank roll I’d throw it away.”

A NOTE FOR PARANORMAL SHOWRUNNERS

If you’re reading this—and if “Ghosts of Devil’s Perch” was up your alley—I’ve got the A-list for you. Van Zandt is compelling television, but Streicher’s thirty-seven German relatives pursuing Murray for twenty-four years? The gallows at the Pocatello water works? A doctor who shot himself two months after pronouncing Murray dead?

Have your people call my people.

Next time: We leave Murray behind—temporarily—and discover what military pension files actually contain. Spoiler: One reveals a Confederate cavalryman charging through Greenville, Tennessee to capture Union prisoners. The other reveals a 112-page domestic war between a Union veteran and his estranged wife, fighting over twelve dollars a month. You never know what you'll find in the dustbin.

In the summer of 2021, I received an email from a man named Brian Peterson. He was the show runner for an upcoming paranormal series on the Travel Channel, and he had a problem.

His ghost wasn’t scary enough.

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The Call

Brian’s show was filming in Butte, Montana—the town I’d spent half a decade researching for my biography of James A. Murray, one of the Gilded Age’s most ruthless copper kings. When the book came out, a reviewer in Montana: The Magazine of Western History wrote: “One wonders why Murray has not already been the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster.”

I didn’t have an answer then. But in 2021, Hollywood—or at least basic cable—came calling.

The production was set to feature the Clark Chateau, a gorgeous mansion built by Murray's rival, and now one of Butte's supposedly haunted landmarks. The curator had given Brian some stories about John Murray, James's grand-nephew, who died at sixteen of kidney failure in the Chateau. Nice kid. Sad story. But Brian had found my book, watched my YouTube talk, and wanted something more. After a series of emails he finally got to the point:

Was anyone driven to suicide?

I had exactly what he needed.

A Better Ghost

I pointed Brian to chapter three of my book, “Killing the Competition,” specifically the section called “Clipping the Blue Bird.” The story features Ferdinand Van Zandt—and it ends with a revolver in a London hotel room.

Van Zandt was everything Murray wasn’t: charming, cultured, educated at the Staten Island Academy, and married to the daughter of world-famous scientist Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet, 1st Baron Avebury. He’d made a fortune in commissions selling investment opportunities to wealthy Europeans, then parlayed that money and his in-laws’ bank account into the expensive business of hard-rock mining.

Van Zandt arrived in Butte and purchased the Blue Bird Mine. He built a world-class stamp mill. He employed five hundred men. Newspapers and magazines loved him.

Then he met Murray’s partner.

Pat Largey, one of Murray’s confidants and a millionaire in his own right, attended the grand opening of Van Zandt’s new mill. Murray and Largey followed up with an offer to sell him their adjoining claims, including a mine called the Little Darling, for $123,000.

Van Zandt took an option on the mines—but failed to close the deal. This may have been the first sign that Van Zandt wasn’t as flush as the press reports suggested. Murray, who had eyes and ears all over Butte picking up whispers at saloons and dance halls, surely noticed.

Two years later, Van Zandt came back with a better offer: $200,000 for Murray’s claims. Murray refused. Instead, he started developing the mines himself. Soon he discovered a productive vein that peaked inside his claim and spread under the Blue Bird.

Here’s where the apex law comes in. Under this legal doctrine, miners could follow a vein of ore wherever it led—even under someone else’s property—as long as the apex (peak) was within their own claim. When Murray’s men reached the Blue Bird’s boundary, they discovered Van Zandt had already excavated their ore.

Murray filed an injunction to halt Van Zandt’s operations. Then he filed a $2 million lawsuit.

Van Zandt was suddenly bleeding money. The injunction cut off his cash flow, but he still had to pay to pump water out of the mine. He still had to pay security to fend off scavengers stealing the timbers that lined his tunnels and shafts. The case sat on the court calendar for over a year. Elaborate three-dimensional models were prepared for trial, showing how the silver veins peaked and dipped underground. The models clearly showed Van Zandt had taken Murray’s silver.

Van Zandt pleaded for permission to work portions of his mine that didn’t intersect with Murray’s property. Denied. He had more than $3 million sunk into the Blue Bird and was on the verge of bankruptcy. He was forced to settle, taking payment primarily in notes secured by the very claim Murray was trying to take from him.

Twelve months later, the Blue Bird was in financial ruins. Van Zandt traveled to England to explain his impending bankruptcy to the friends and family who held stakes in his company. They offered no favor and no money.

After failing to inspire his investors, Ferdinand Van Zandt returned to his London hotel, pulled out his revolver, turned it to his head, and pulled the trigger.

Murray moved quickly. He made a deal with the widow and her father, Sir John Lubbock, giving them one year to reconstitute the mine’s finances. But with the Great Panic of 1893 and plummeting silver prices, she had no chance. When the year was up, Murray took control of the Blue Bird, let the mine flood, and tucked away the patent for a day when silver prices would justify reopening it.

That was the story I gave Brian Peterson.

The Episode

The show premiered on Travel Channel and Discovery+ in August 2022 as Ghosts of Devil’s Perch. The first episode was called “Blood Feud.” Brian sent me a note when it aired: “Hey there - I just wanted to thank you for the insight into James Murray last year and let you know that the episode is now airing on Discovery Plus.”

I watched it a few days later. The production team had done solid work. They’d hired an actor to play Murray—he looked nothing like him, but the scenes where he looms over paperwork were satisfying. They’d even tracked down an original Blue Bird Mine stock certificate and made it out to Ferdinand Van Zandt as an offering to the spirits.

I wrote back:

“Got a chance to watch the show. Loved seeing Murray come to life. I hadn’t realized the Travel Channel was into the paranormal. Used to read lots of that when I was in school. Butte is a great place for that theme. Lots of creepy locations with a dark past.”

“Best of luck with the series. Now do one on Murray and his ‘friend’ Maguire :)”

That last line was a joke—but also not. Murray’s relationship with John Maguire, his longtime partner and fellow Irish immigrant, is its own complicated story. I’ve got the research. I’m just waiting for the right ghost-hunting crew to call.

What the Show Got Right (and Wrong)

The production team wove the Van Zandt story effectively into their narrative. Once they had the Blue Bird Mine connection from my research, the script wrote itself: EVP readings of “Blue Bird!”, a woman appearing in blue (the widow Van Zandt), even the blue bathroom at the chateau. The paranormal “evidence” was built around the history I’d provided—not the other way around.

That’s how these shows can work. The research comes first. Then the ghost-hunting is constructed to fit the story. I gave them a villain, a victim, and a motive. They gave it the treatment: dramatic reenactments, spooky lighting, and an actor in period costume looming over documents. It’s entertainment, and I don’t begrudge them that.

Chris Fisk, the local Butte historian who appears throughout the series, delivered the context with enthusiasm. He’s good at what he does.

But here’s what the recap show got wrong.

In the YouTube episode discussing “Blood Feud,” Fisk says of the Van Zandt connection: “We don’t have these things at our fingertips, but when the wolf pack found that, I went ‘Oh my gosh, here’s your Blue Bird right here!’”

The “wolf pack” didn’t find it. I did—a decade earlier, in archives across Montana, and I published it in a book in 2017. Brian Peterson found my research and asked me directly: “Was anyone driven to suicide?” I told him about Van Zandt and pointed him to the exact chapter and page number.

I don’t blame Fisk. The show’s narrative required the investigation to feel like discovery. That’s how these programs can work. But for the historical record: the Murray-Van Zandt connection came from my book, delivered via email to the show runner before filming began.

The Credit (Or Lack Thereof)

Here’s the part where, if this were a Christmas newsletter, I’d note that Bill spent several weeks exchanging emails with the show’s production team, provided extensive historical background, connected them with Murray’s living descendants, pointed them to specific chapters and page numbers, and received... no credit whatsoever in the final episode.

No red carpets. No paparazzi.

To be fair, Brian was gracious throughout. He bought my book, watched my talk on YouTube, and genuinely seemed interested in getting the history right. The show’s format just doesn’t include “historical consultant” credits for people who answer emails. And he did thank me personally, which counts for something.

So if you watch Ghosts of Devil’s Perch and hear the team talking about “a millionaire who crushed somebody that held a lifelong grudge—and maybe into the afterlife,” that’s my guy. I found him in the archives. I wrote his biography. And then I handed him over to cable television so he could haunt a mansion in Butte.

What This Taught Me

I’ve spent years trying to explain why family history matters, why archival research matters, why we should care about people who died a century ago. And sometimes it’s hard to make that case to people who don’t share the obsession.

But a ghost-hunting show called Ghosts of Devil’s Perch? They got it immediately.

The past isn’t dead. It haunts us—sometimes literally, if you believe the mediums, and sometimes metaphorically, in the way that old grudges and buried injustices keep surfacing in unexpected places. Ferdinand Van Zandt’s story matters because it shows us what unchecked power looks like. James A. Murray’s story matters because it shows us how wealth gets made—and who pays the price.

I didn’t expect a paranormal TV show to be the vehicle for that message. But I’ll take what I can get.

Next week, I’ll tell you about the five-year journey that put me in a position to answer that email—from my first conference paper on Murray, to a peer-reviewed article, to a trade book, to an entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. It’s the story of how you turn an obsession into a body of work.

And it all started, like most of my stories, with a document someone filed away.

Bill Farley, PhD The Dustbin Historian DustbinHistorian.com

P.S. If you want to watch the episode yourself, “Blood Feud” is available on Discovery+.

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29 years ago tonight—on my 38th birthday—I stood before the Sacramento City Council and presented a $90 million deal to keep the NBA Kings in town.

The vote was 5-3. The Los Angeles Times called it “draconian”—a compliment in my book. A local columnist said I played “bad cop” to the City Treasurer’s cheerleader, “clucking dubiously” through my presentation like a man who wasn’t comfortable “selling a deal.” My comfort zone was being a skeptic.

Five weeks later, I submitted my resignation. My position was about to be eliminated—part of a “bureaucracy shake-up” the Sacramento Bee predicted would begin “at the top.” Another compliment? I was a middle manager buried in the depth chart. Nevertheless, the Office of Economic Development I’d built over five years was being dismantled. My resignation letter landed in the archives of the California State Library.

The irony wasn’t lost on me then. It still isn’t.

I’ve spent the last year in several local archives—over 100 boxes of material from Mayor Serna, his chief of staff, his speechwriter, even his political rivals—piecing together how Serna accomplished what seemed impossible in Sacramento’s weak-mayor system. And why it all fell apart.

The Kings deal was the last major transaction of that era. The vote happened on February 5, 1997. By summer, the institutional capacity that made deals like this possible had walked out the door.

I was a small part of that capacity. I didn’t fully understand it at the time. Twenty-nine years later, I think I finally do.

The Room That Night

Mayor Serna called the special meeting to order at 7:00 p.m. in the Council Chamber at 915 I Street. Every seat on the dais was filled—Councilmembers Cohn, Fargo, Kerth, Pannell, Steinberg, Waters, Yee, and the Mayor himself. No absences. This was not a night to miss.

The Mayor thanked everyone who had attended the previous evening’s public hearing—”both for and against”—and then thanked the staff “who had given many hours of dedication and effort into this project, stating that the Council realized it was a tough issue but appreciated the expertise of those involved.”

I was one of those staff members. My title was Economic Development Manager. My job that night was to present the business terms of a deal that would refinance $90 million in debt on Arco Arena and the Kings, keeping Sacramento’s only major league franchise from leaving town.

The Special Committee appointed to review the Kings’ finances had already delivered their verdict. Henry Royer, a CPA with a reputation for fierce independence, chaired the group. Their conclusion: “There is a definite need in the near term for debt restructuring.” The owners had taken no distributions. All cash had gone back into operations. On a combined basis, the Kings and Arena had posted an economic loss in the most recent fiscal year.

The committee also delivered a warning: “The primary risk to the city in this transaction is the risk that Arena revenues will not grow sufficiently to repay the debt over the next 30 years.” The loan never made it to term. It was paid in full by early 2019.

City Council Minutes: February 5, 1997

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The Opposition

Councilman Waters had heard from his constituents. Over 500 calls, he reported. Ninety-five percent opposed. Serna remained quiet. (What I learned from my archival search is that Serna had commissioned a poll of every council district on the deal. Water’s district seven came in with 53% support and 36% opposed - the most support of any council district.)

“The City is not in business to support professional sports,” Water said. “There is a great need for police officers and many other things around the City that are of major concern.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Councilwoman Fargo, who had served on the Working Group, announced she would vote no. “Too risky and not good for the City,” she said. The timing was “way too rushed.” The NBA had “a small media market.”

Councilman Cohn praised the staff’s work—”the Working Group and staff have put together the very best deal that could possibly be done”—but said he couldn’t support it. The bonds were backed by the full faith of the general fund. Jim Thomas couldn’t back the risk personally. “Without putting this question to a vote,” Cohn warned, “the ‘well’ was poisoned for future professional sports.”

He was voting no.

That made three.

“It does for now”

The moment I remember most clearly came when Mayor Serna asked Jim Thomas directly: Would this deal keep the Kings in Sacramento?

Thomas’s answer: “It does for now.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But it was honest. Thomas explained he was the managing partner, not the sole owner. His presence that evening was “representative of the other owners and employees.” The deal was contingent on resolving a signage agreement. Nothing was guaranteed.

The Special Committee had already noted the uncomfortable truth: “The Committee is convinced that the owners economically could do better by selling and letting the franchise move.”

The Kings stayed because Jim Thomas wanted them to stay. The city’s job was to make staying financially viable. That’s what we did.

The Vote

Councilman Steinberg (and future mayor) gave the longest closing statement. He’d spent three weeks “probing and searching all sides.” He acknowledged the criticism—the rushed timeline, the escalating NBA salaries, the $90 million that opponents called a “subsidy” but he called a “secured collateral loan.”

Councilman Pannell quoted from a Bee editorial recommending the deal. Councilman Yee thanked me by name for “the time and clarification” I’d provided—then in dramatic flourish. “Read my lips,” he told the crowd. “Go Kings.” He held up a fist in the air. The room erupted.

Serna closed the discussion with few words. That meant he had the votes. The motion came from Kerth, seconded by Steinberg.

The vote: 5-3. Cohn, Fargo, and Waters dissenting.

The meeting adjourned at 10:25 p.m.

Why It Matters Now

I spent most of last summer at the archives—primarily at CSU Sacramento, where Serna’s papers are housed. Over 100 boxes of memoranda, strategy documents, unsent letters, and handwritten notes.

One afternoon, I asked the student workers who retrieved the boxes if they knew who Joe Serna was.

They did not. They knew his name was attached to a plaza on campus. They didn’t know he’d been Sacramento’s mayor.

Twenty-five years after his death, the monuments remain—a plaza, a building, occasional commemorations—but the memory of what he actually accomplished is dissipating. The students pulling his boxes from the shelves had no idea they were handling the papers of a man who reshaped their city.

That’s why I’ve spent the last year trying to understand what happened. Not just to me, but to the entire apparatus that made Sacramento punch above its weight in the 1990s.

Mayor Serna had no formal power. The Sacramento City Charter gave him exactly one job: preside over council meetings. He couldn’t hire or fire the city manager. He couldn’t veto legislation. He was one vote out of nine.

And yet, between 1992 and 1999, Serna reshaped the city’s skyline, led a gold-standard military base conversion, retained major corporations and an NBA franchise, and advanced school board reforms—all while serving part-time.

How?

The answer, I’ve come to believe, lies in something I’m calling “co-located capital”—expertise and networks embodied in key staff who bridged the political and administrative worlds. People like Deputy City Managers David Martinez and Bob Thomas. SHRA Executive Director John Molloy. Chief of Staff Michael Picker.

When many left—Thomas to the County, Molloy to Los Angeles, Picker to the State Treasurer —the bridge collapsed. The institutional knowledge walked out the door. Within eighteen months, the Office of Economic Development was gone, the Mayor’s downtown ballpark initiative had failed to gain traction, and Serna’s administrative capacity had effectively ended, even as his political popularity reached its peak.

The Kings vote was the last gasp of a system that was already dying.

29 Years Later

I’m presenting a paper on all of this at the International Conference on Urban Affairs in Chicago this April. It’s called “From the Fields to City Hall: Joe Serna Jr.’s Moment in Sacramento’s Governance (1992–1999).”

Getting Joe’s legacy into the academic literature is one step toward reclaiming what those students in the archive don’t know. Despite 100 boxes of material and a series of high-profile accomplishments, no one has captured Serna’s secrets to success as mayor—until now.

But tonight isn’t about academic theory. Tonight is about a room at 915 I Street, a 5-3 vote, a mayor who knew how to marshal political capital, and a staff that knew how to turn that capital into deals.

The Kings are still in Sacramento. Arco Arena—the building we refinanced that night—was demolished in 2022. The team now plays in Golden 1 Center, a downtown arena that opened in 2016 after a whole new generation of drama, threats to move to Seattle, and last-minute interventions.

Here’s another twist that still gets me: One of the funding sources for that new downtown arena was revenue from city parking lots. And one of the reasons those parking lots generate significant revenue? The CalEPA headquarters building that Serna fought for in the mid-1990s—bringing thousands of state workers who need places to park.

The building now bears his name: the Joe Serna Jr. Cal/EPA Headquarters Building.

So the mayor who fought to keep the Kings in Sacramento in 1997 also helped create the revenue stream that, two decades later, would help build the arena that replaced the one we saved. He didn’t live to see it—Serna died in 1999—but the infrastructure he built outlasted him.

This is the fourth installment of The Dustbin Historian. For the full academic treatment of Mayor Serna’s governance model—including the archival evidence, the theoretical framework, and the process-tracing methodology—subscribe to follow along. I’ll be sharing more from the paper before and after the Chicago conference in April.

When I found my grandmother Esther’s handwritten story after my mother died, I almost put it back in the trunk.

“Buried inside three pages of notes on her childhood, Esther Rask wrote ‘My folks were born in Sweden and I have no information about them.’”

Esther's Notes

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That’s how I opened my article proposal to American Ancestors magazine in February 2014. Three pages of notes. One devastating sentence. And a research journey that began in earnest at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 2011.

Esther lost her mother when she was one. Her father when she was ten. She spent most of her childhood with her three brothers at the Swedish Christian Orphanage in Cromwell, Connecticut.

How could a ten-year-old have no information about her parents?

That question is what drove the research. But it wasn’t until I went through the editorial process with Lynn Betlock, the managing editor at American Ancestors, that I truly understood what Esther’s statement meant. Before I get to that—before I show you what the back-and-forth with an editor actually looks like—here is the article itself. I have permission to reprint it in full. Read it first - the story behind it follows.

📰 The Article — Reprinted in Full

Reprinted by permission of American Ancestors. Bill Farley, “’I was left an orphan’: Reconstructing the Family History of Esther (Rask) Barnett.” American Ancestors vol. 15, no. 2 (spring 2014). For more information about American Ancestors magazine visit AmericanAncestors.org.

“I was left an orphan”: Reconstructing the Family History of Esther (Rask) Barnett

In 1976, when she was 80 years old, Esther (Rask) Barnett, my grandmother, wrote a brief account of her childhood. Her daughter Marlyn, my mother, had prodded her to compose three brief autobiographical paragraphs. Included in Esther’s short story was the sentence, “My folks were born in Sweden and I have no information about them.” Instead, Esther wrote about her upbringing at the Swedish Christian Orphanage in Cromwell, Connecticut.¹ When Esther died in 1985, she knew little about her parents other than their names and their birthplaces in Sweden. After my mother passed away recently, I found Esther’s story, several photographs from her time at the orphanage, and a family portrait of her father and brothers. Instead of putting her memories back in the family trunk, I decided it was time to learn more about Esther’s past.

Esther’s parents were Samuel Rask and Hilda Carlsdotter. (Hilda’s last name was “Americanized” to Carlson in some records.) During a visit to Boston, my daughter and I visited NEHGS for the first time and in Massachusetts vital records found Sam and Hilda’s marriage in Norwood in 1888. The entry included the marriage date, their parents’ names, and their occupations.² The information surprised me because I had assumed the couple had married in Sweden, and I thought they had arrived at Ellis Island in 1895. Before this discovery, I was trying to determine how the two might have met in Sweden when their hometowns were more than 200 miles apart.

Meticulous parish records document Sam and Hilda’s lives in Sweden. The Swedes recorded births, marriages, and movements of individuals inside Sweden and to and from other countries. Ancestry.com currently holds digital images of these collections, and many records are well indexed. When I was conducting my research, I accessed the records through a database managed by the Computer Genealogy Society of Sweden. The language barrier and indexing system were challenging, but, luckily, Esther left a few clues that helped me narrow down where to look for Hilda and Sam. A postcard of Strömstad contained a note stating her father was from that city, and a cousin’s letter mentioned that their maternal grandparents lived in Misterhult. With these two starting points, a Swedish dictionary, and a lot of patience, I leafed through hundreds of digital records to find several generations of Hilda’s and Sam’s families.

My search for the Rask family was made easier because I had to look for only one surname in the records. Sam’s family dropped the conventional Swedish surname practice (adding “son” or “dotter” to your father’s first name) and adopted “Rask” as their permanent surname in the 1850s. (This change happened about the time the family farm name was shortened from Rasktugen Kalfhagen to Kalfhagen in parish records.)

For Hilda’s family, I found help from the Sabelskjöld Family Society—a local genealogical society near Misterhult that keeps a database of families related to Major Carl Jönsson Sabelskjöld, a famous knight from that region. Using all these sources I could trace the first chapter of Hilda and Sam’s life together.

Sam and Hilda’s married life

Sam and Hilda arrived separately in America sometime after 1886, and met in Norwood, Massachusetts. At the time, Hilda was a dressmaker and Sam was a tanner in the leather industry. Norwood was attractive to new immigrants because of its solid industrial base—a furniture factory, an ink mill, a foundry, and two large tanneries.³ The town had been a hub for tanning and leather fabrication since 1776.⁴

Sam and Hilda married in Norwood on 30 July 1888,⁵ and lived there for two years. On 19 January 1890, the couple left America for Sweden. Return migration was common among Swedish immigrants. Twenty percent of Swedes who came to the United States in the late nineteenth century returned to Sweden.⁶

Sam and Hilda initially lived with Sam’s mother, Cecilia Olsdotter. The family farm was located just outside Strömstad.⁷ Sam was born at Kalfhagen 9 April 1859,⁸ and previous generations (his father, Anders Rask, and grandfather, Hilgo Eliajson), had lived on the land since at least 1800.⁹ By the time Sam and Hilda arrived in 1890, Cecilia’s husband and all of her children except Sam had died. Sam’s work in Strömstad was likely connected to the local fishing or timber industries. Strömstad, on Sweden’s west coast a few miles from the Norwegian border, was a main shipping center for lumber and herring during the late nineteenth century.¹⁰ After a year at Kalfhagen, Sam and Hilda found a home of their own and, in time, welcomed three boys: Johan (b. 1891), Joseph (b. 1893), and Enoch (b. 1895).

The health of the fishing and timber industries in Strömstad ebbed and flowed during these years and in 1895, when Enoch was still an infant, Sam and Hilda decided to return to America. Sam went first, followed by Hilda and the boys, who travelled via Liverpool, departing on 12 October 1895 aboard Cunard’s S. S. Campania. Hilda and her sons arrived at Ellis Island seven days later, on October 19.¹¹ Sam and Hilda once again settled in Norwood, and Sam worked at an ink mill.¹²

On 16 March 1897, Esther Frideborg Rask, the couple’s only daughter, was born.¹³ Sam and Hilda had barely a year to enjoy their new addition before tragedy struck. Hilda was afflicted with tuberculosis, then the second leading cause of death after pneumonia,¹⁴ and died in Norwood on 27 May 1898.¹⁵

Sam was now a single father of four children under 8 years of age. He could not both work and keep his children at home with him. He made the only choice he could—he placed his children’s care in the hands of others. In her story Esther reported that she was placed in a private home because orphanages would not take children under three. Enoch was likely also placed with a private family, and the two oldest boys, Johan and Joseph, were admitted to the Boston Children’s Friend Society home in Dedham, Massachusetts.¹⁶

The Swedish Christian Orphanage of Cromwell, Connecticut

Although Sam could not keep his children with him, he wanted them to be together. When Esther was old enough to enter an orphanage, Sam gathered the four children and brought them more than a hundred miles to Cromwell, Connecticut. Here Sam had found a place where his children could be under one roof with people who shared their language and customs—the Swedish Christian Orphanage.

Cromwell was a special place for Swedish immigrants. Local businessman Andrew N. Pierson actively recruited Swedish immigrants to work at his floral empire there. Pierson made the transition to America as easy as possible for his fellow countrymen. He provided jobs, housing, a Swedish church, and an orphanage. The Swedish Christian Orphanage was founded in 1900 after several years of planning and development. Reverend M. Nilsen of the Cromwell Swedish Congregational Church persuaded Pierson to donate an abandoned residence, three acres of land, and several buildings. Pierson even paid to have the rooms decorated. Rev. Nilsen worked with his church to secure the funding for operations and to hire staff. The orphanage doors opened on 30 May 1900.¹⁷

Sam was one of the first parents to admit his children to the new orphanage. Before he took the children to Cromwell, he stopped at a photography studio in neighboring Middletown. A fellow Swede, Gideon Appelquest, operated the studio.¹⁸ Sam commissioned a family photograph that captures his pride in his family. After the portrait session, Sam took the children to their new home. The admission records for Johan, Joseph, Enoch, and Esther indicate they were the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth children admitted to the orphanage, on 3 November 1900.¹⁹ Afterwards Sam returned to the Boston area.

Esther’s story included some memories from her orphanage years. She wrote,

My childhood was pleasant enough as we had lots of companionship and we had a healthy and Christian bringing up. There were four women that worked at the home, all very nice, two from Sweden and two of Swedish descent. We used to have prayer meetings in the evenings—sing the hymns etc. The boys use to take the cows to pasture and come home with their blouses filled with apples.

Esther’s recollections are echoed in the 1909 Board of Charities report to the Governor on the conditions at the orphanage: “The children attend the public school nearby, but have prayers and singing in the Home night and morning. There is a good sized barn and an apple orchard on the place, and the children enjoy many of the benefits of farm life.”²⁰ Esther also left behind a faded newspaper article with a picture of the orphanage. In neat script she wrote, “My Childhood Home,” over the photograph.

To try to find more about the Rask children’s lives at the orphanage, I contacted Ädelbrook, the successor agency to the Swedish Christian Orphanage that holds admission and dismissal records. Carol Vincuilla, the agency’s archivist, kindly retrieved the records for the Rask children. When she let me know the records were in the mail, she cautioned me that they were not very extensive and consisted of a single 5 x 8 card for each child. Nonetheless, I waited for her letter with great anticipation. When the letter finally arrived, I could not believe the amount of information packed into the small note cards. The records included a place for the child’s name, date of birth, names of father and mother and their places of birth, the date and place of the parents’ marriage, whether the parents were living or dead and their locations, the financial support provided by the parents, baptismal dates, date received at the orphanage, the dismissal date, where the child was placed, and notes.

Sam’s last years

A few years after Sam placed his children at the orphanage, his health began to fail. He suffered from progressive muscular atrophy—an affliction similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease.²¹ His prognosis was not good. Sam started to put his affairs in order by filing papers to become a naturalized citizen. This process would ensure that his three sons born in Sweden would have citizenship after he was gone. (Since Esther was born in the United States, she was already a U.S. citizen.) Sam’s application was approved on 11 October 1904.²²

Soon after, Sam brought Johan and Enoch back from the orphanage to live with him.²³ At 13 Johan was just six months from being released due to the orphanage’s age limit (14 for boys and 16 for girls). Enoch was 8. Only 7-year-old Esther and 11-year-old Joseph (who may have been sickly) remained at the orphanage.

A year and half later, Sam’s health had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer care for Enoch. Enoch was readmitted to the orphanage on 16 July 1906.²⁴ Johan was now 15 and too old for the orphanage. On 11 April 1907, Sam entered a Boston hospital and died eight days later, on 19 April 1907.²⁵

The Rask children were now truly orphans. Johan was 15, Joseph 14, Enoch 11, and Esther 10. Although they had lost their parents much too early, Sam left them with American citizenship, a community that would provide jobs and housing, and a family portrait they could cherish forever. Sam also had used Johan’s last two years with him to teach Johan how to survive outside the orphanage.

Johan returned to Cromwell with his younger siblings and worked at a greenhouse. Over the next few years, Joseph and Enoch joined him in the local workforce. Joseph’s dismissal papers from the orphanage noted that he was left in the care of “Cromwell Ct.” Census records indicate Joseph found work at a hotel in nearby Hartford. Tragically, in 1912 Joseph succumbed to tuberculosis, the same disease took his mother’s life. Enoch was released to the care of Timothy Hodge in neighboring Glastonbury; 1910 census records indicate he was employed by Hodge as a laborer.²⁶ While at the orphanage Esther completed eighth grade at the Nathaniel White School and was confirmed in the local church. When the day arrived for her to leave the orphanage, Esther made the transition with support from Johan and Enoch, who had remained in the area until she turned sixteen. Sam taught his children well—families stick together.

Esther first worked in Cromwell, and then moved to the Boston area to be close to an aunt (her mother’s sister) and cousin. Enoch served in the Navy during World War I, and after the war, Esther and Enoch followed their aunt and her family to Detroit. Enoch settled in Detroit and worked as a machinist for a shipbuilding company. Johan moved to Rochester, New York, to continue his career as a florist; he later moved to Staunton, Virginia, to open his own store. Esther became a telephone operator and met her future husband at a public dance hall. She married Guy Barnett and raised a family in Detroit. Esther’s photo albums include many pictures of her siblings and cousins reuniting and spending vacations with each other throughout the country. I believe Sam would have very pleased that his family remained close for many years after he expended so much effort to keep them together. ◆

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📬 Now—The Story Behind the Story

You just read the finished product. Here’s what it took to get there.

The Proposal

On February 27, 2014, I submitted a proposal to American Ancestors. The pitch was straightforward: one sentence buried in three pages of childhood notes, and a research trail that ran through NEHGS, Ellis Island, Swedish parish records, orphanage admission cards, and Massachusetts death certificates.

Lynn Betlock, the managing editor, wrote back the same day. “Your story sounds fascinating, and I think it will be interesting to readers on a number of levels: the steps of your research process, the opportunity to learn about a New England orphanage, and a very poignant family story. We would be pleased if you would write an article up for publication in our magazine.”

She suggested 2,400 words. Four pages. I responded within hours: I’d have it to her by March 31.

I was confident. I had been researching Esther’s story for years. I had the facts. I had the photos. I had the narrative arc.

I was wrong—not about the facts, but about what the story actually needed.

The Submission

By March 23 I emailed Lynn: “Almost there! I’m wrapping up the article submission. I just have to get all of my footnotes/references in order and scan a few images for consideration. I’m right at the 2,400 word count (plus or minus 10-20).”

I submitted on March 27. The word count was 2,360 words without my bio line and footnotes. I used Zotero to manage my sources and placed the references on each page to make them easier to track. I attached a separate file with potential images, noting which two would require permission to publish.

Lynn responded the same day: “Thanks very much for the article and images. I’m very interested in reading the story.”

Then came the wait.

The Edits

April 4: “Hi Bill, I’m checking in to apologize and let you know that I am running late on your article. I have started editing it and I will definitely back in touch with you on Monday.”

I wasn’t worried. I had submitted early specifically to allow time for editing and rewrites. I wrote back: “No worries. I submitted early to allow us both some time for the editing and re-write. I look forward to your edits.”

April 8: Lynn sent me the edited article with questions highlighted in yellow. Most were standard—image requests, source clarifications. She wanted specific photographs at 300 dpi or higher: Sam’s final family portrait, an example of an admission record, the children of the orphanage in 1906, Esther at grammar school, Esther’s confirmation, individual portraits of Samuel and Hilda, the family photo circa 1895, a postcard of Strömstad. She also asked if I had a contact at the Cromwell Historical Society for the orphanage photograph.

I did. I had two contacts: Richard F. Donohue at the Cromwell Historical Society, and Carol Vincuilla at Ädelbrook—the successor agency to the Swedish Christian Orphanage. These weren’t just names to cite. They were people who had opened their archives to me.

But one question from Lynn stopped me cold.

The Question

“In the opening paragraph you note that Esther wrote that she had no information about her parents. Since she was ten when her father died, I’m wondering if that statement is more nuanced than it might seem. Perhaps she meant that she had no information about her parents’ lives in Sweden and about earlier generations, or perhaps she really just didn’t know/remember anything about them at all. Of course you may have no idea what she meant there yourself. This last time when I read through the article, I began to really think about what a ten-year-old might remember. I have ten-year-old boy/girl twins, so I am sure they are at least part of what got me musing.”

I stared at that question for a long time.

Lynn was right. I had been so focused on reconstructing what Esther didn’t know that I had never carefully documented what she did know—when she learned it, from whom, and what her silence actually revealed.

The Response

On April 15, at 7:03 AM, I sent Lynn everything I had found. I had gone back through every letter my mother kept on her family history:

1978: Esther’s short “autobiography.” Two quotes about her parents: “My folks were born in Sweden and I have no information about them,” and “My father didn’t want us separated.”

1981: A letter from a cousin to Esther: Mother (Hilda) was born in Smaland.

1982: A note from my mother: “She (Esther) heard years later that her mother died in childbirth.”

Undated: A note on the back of a postcard of Strömstad from Esther: “My folks’ birthplace.” She also wrote “Smaland” on the card.

I wrote to Lynn: “From what I gather, all Esther knew about her parents were the birthplaces in Sweden—and this information she learned in 1981 from a cousin. She did not know they met in Norwood, married in the States, moved to Sweden, lived with Sam’s mother, their employment, cause of death, etc. The story she heard of her mother’s death does not match the death records.”

Then I added: “Johan would have been 7 when his mother died, so he may not have been able to tell Esther much about her when the two were older. He was about 16 when his dad died, but he apparently never passed on anything about his Father’s passing.”

And twenty minutes later, a second email: “I forgot one note on Esther’s knowledge of parents. She did receive a copy of Johan’s birth certificate from Strömstad. This was found by one of her cousins that was doing family research. So Esther knew where her parents raised her brothers.”

The Citations

Lynn also asked for footnotes on Sam’s birth and his grandfather’s residency on the family farm going back to 1800. I had to go back to Swedish genealogy research I’d done 10-12 years earlier and properly source it. I used FamilySearch’s guide for citing Swedish records and tracked down the specific Genline records:

Samuel Rask birth record, April 9, 1859, Göteburg och Bohus, Tjärnö: C:3: Marriage and Birth Records: Page 467, Genline GID # 956.18.58700.

Sam’s grandfather’s location on the family farm was implied in a household examination record from 1835.

Every question she asked revealed gaps I hadn’t seen. Every clarification request taught me to anticipate what a reader would need to follow the trail.

The Final Proof

On May 8, 2014, the Production Editor sent me the formatted article as it would appear in the Spring 2014 issue. “Please note that this low-resolution PDF is not of the same quality as the final printed version. As noted in the letter of agreement, this review is for accuracy only—unfortunately, we cannot accept major editorial changes at this point. Please contact me with any corrections by 9 a.m., Monday, May 12, 2014.”

The article was done. Published. Pages 36 through 40 of American Ancestors, Vol. 15, No. 2.

What I Learned

The editorial process wasn’t about polishing prose. It was about building an evidentiary foundation strong enough to support the weight of the story. Lynn’s question about what a ten-year-old might remember forced me to examine the silence in the record—not just fill it in. The requests for footnotes and high-resolution images forced me to treat every document and photograph as a historical artifact, not just an illustration.

In my original proposal, I ended with this line: “Esther would have been very proud of her father.”

Having gone through the editorial process—having understood what Sam actually accomplished in those final years—I know that line was exactly right. Sam taught his sons well. Families stick together.

Next week: I’m diving into a different kind of archive—the personal papers of another immigrant family that includes a mysterious mining monument and an inheritance battle that reached the Supreme Court. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it.

This is what I do: I rescue stories from the dustbin of history. Some families get three paragraphs. Some get nothing. But with the right research, the right questions, and the right photographs, we can give them back their full stories.

Bill Farley, PhD The Dustbin Historian

P.S. — If you have a family photograph that feels like a mystery, if you have a relative who left only a few paragraphs of their story, or if you’ve hit a wall in your research and need help knowing which questions to ask—hit reply and tell me about it. Every research journey starts with asking the right question. Sometimes you just need someone to help you figure out what that question is.

Thanks for reading The Dustbin Historian! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

After my mother died in 2012, I found a black vinyl pouch labeled simply ‘Richard.’ I left it alone for years. When I finally opened it, I found a map of a crash site, 12 pages of handwritten notes documenting three years of hell, and one engineer’s desperate attempt to save his son with data.

This is my uncle Richard Barnett’s story. It’s also a story about what gets lost when we reduce a life to three sentences in an obituary—and what gets saved when someone cares enough to do the research.

This is what I do: I rescue stories from the dustbin of history. Subscribe to follow along. Now, let me tell you about the man with a pen, the literary bike trip that cost $1 a day, and the longest journey of all: the one from the peak of fame, through the valley of the shadow, and finally, home.

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Every sports journalist remembers their “Day One.”

For some, it’s a shivering sideline in a small town; for others, it’s a high-school radio booth with a faulty mic and a dream.

In the early 1940s, Richard Barnett was the kid behind that mic at Detroit’s Redford High. Before he was a witness to New York City’s burgeoning art scene, he was a sports announcer and the Editor-in-Chief of his high school yearbook. He was a young man finding his voice at a time when high school sports were front page news.

Richard’s backdrop wasn’t just any city—it was the Detroit, the heart-beat of America’s industrial revolution. He got to experience the rise of Detroit every day. Guy Delos Barnett, his father was a body engineer who clawed his way up to Chief of Body Engineering for Chrysler.

Imagine the dinner table conversations. While Guy was test-driving the latest prototypes brought home from the factory, Richard was learning the mechanics of a different kind: the craft of story-telling. On occasion when the family took winter trips to Florida, you would find Richard checking out books from the local library. When he was 16, he embarked on a self-made literary tour of New England with his pal and fellow scribe Jim Taylor.

Taylor, 15, documented that summer trip in detail. It was 1941. Richard had just been gifted a bicycle and Jim knew where he could rent one at the start of their journey. Richard’s mother, on her way with daughter Marlyn to visit the orphanage where she was raised, dropped the pair off in Northfield, Massachusetts. The plan was to make a thousand-mile loop, stay in youth hostels, and return to Northfield for a ride home.

The pair travelled south to Amherst where they located the vacant home of Emily Dickenson. They noted a residence that was inhabited and knocked on that door. They were greeted by Madam Bianchi, Dickenson’s niece. She invited them to join her for breakfast the next day. The two writers headed to the library to prepare for their morning meeting. Bianchi, accompanied by a “European Count” (later found out to be a con-man), regaled the boys with stories of Dickenson as they sat under the watchful eye of a portrait of the famous poet. With their first experience under their belt, they continue south through Connecticut to the Long Island Sound.

During their loop through New England, they visited Boston and walked the Freedom Trail, stood on the bridge where the first shots were fired in the Revolutionary War, attended a lecture at Harvard on “The Psychological and Sociological Effect of Radio on the Masses” and listened to Carl Sandburg narrate Edwin Markham’s famous poem, “The Man with the Hoe.” Later they swam in Walden’s Pond, dropped a couple stones on the site of Thoreau’s cabin, and visited the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Then they pedaled north through the White Mountains and hiked to the top of Mt. Moosilauke. There on the summit, where you could see the Atlantic Ocean on a clear day, they met group of students from Dartmouth staffing summer camps and a meteorological station. As they turned south, they travelled to Hanover to visit Dartmouth College. A few days later they arrived in Northfield to catch a ride home. Jim kept all the receipts along the way. The final total, each of the boys spent $1.00 a day for their 1,000-mile literary trip through five states.

Richard graduated from High School, served in the military during WWII and launched into his career. The trajectory was vertical. Richard hit every beat with precision. He made his mark in New York City and met his wife, aspiring actress Elizabeth Pratt. They lived just a quarter mile from each other at the time in Chelsea. They married in 1949 and had a daughter, Vincent in 1957. Vincent’s earliest memories are being surrounded by artists and actors. Photos from that time capture family gatherings, scenes from NYC and Richard and Elizabeth attending the private wedding of Richard’s sister Marlyn in Detroit.

In 1964 Richard, just shy of his 40^th birthday, got his big break. He moved the family to McLean, Virginia to work on David Brinkley’s Journal. Shortly thereafter he was assigned to help launch NBC’s response to ABC’s wildly popular Wide World of Sports. Richard was in the thick of it, about to travel the globe. He wrote to his parents, now living in Sacramento next to his sister Marlyn, on David Brinkley’s letterhead. “We searched and searched …and found something – a pretty little house...15 minutes from NBC.” He thought they might get a dog or even pony for Vincent. He wrote of moving from Brinkley’s Journal to “an NBC Sports Spectacular that will go on in the New Year. It will be all about different sports in Ireland, Germany, etc…every kind of thing and hasn’t really been set any more than that yet.”

“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans / Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, / The emptiness of ages in his face...”

Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe

I found the next chapter in Richard’s life in a black vinyl pouch in my mother’s things after she passed in 2012. I left it alone until now. Simply labeled “Richard,” it was a collection of notes, news clippings, business cards, letters, a map of a crash site and one hand-drawn graph.

The first letter in the portfolio came from jail. Richard, who was working at a cannery at the time, wrote to his dad, “You can get all my clothes from Cliff Harrington (50 yrs old – heavy, spectacles – straw hat) around 6 PM at the Canton Café. They are in the back of his car.” The substance of the pouch, however, were Granddad’s notes. Twelve pages of single-space handwritten notes documenting three tortuous years from 1967 to 1969. And that graph? It was an engineer grasping at anyway to reach a son who was ravaged by alcoholism and perhaps, underlying psychological disorders.

According to Granddad’s notes, the job at NBC ended badly and Elizabeth divorced Richard shortly thereafter. Richard accepted his mom and dad’s offer to join them in Sacramento, California, where they had retired close to Marlyn and her family. That first letter, looking for help to retrieve clothes from a stranger in a straw hat, was preceded by Richard rolling his VW Bug after a night of drinking outside Winters, a small farm town. The CHP found Richard in a field, thrown from his car at 11 PM. They left him there, checking again at 5 AM to find him still passed out. A week later they cited him for drunken driving and sentenced him to jail.

Richard lost his cannery job while he served out his DUI sentence in a Woodland City Jail. After that he worked at carnivals and other odd jobs, stayed at roadside motels, drunk a lot, fought a lot, and spent weeks in jail. There were glimmers of hope during those tortuous twelve years. He landed a job at a local paper in Livermore, California. Four months and four fights later he was on the road again (fight in a bar, assaulted speaker at a Rotary Meeting, threw wastepaper baskets in the newsroom and assaulted a host at a private dinner club). This time he found work at Yosemite National Park, and shortly thereafter, two stints in the Mariposa County Jail.

Granddad’s graph stops tracking Richard’s spiral in 1968. It conveyed three years of events and illustrated the correlation between new jobs and success, and drinking and failure. Jail time is highlighted in red. Granddad found his skills as an engineer could not help his son.

Seven years of archival silence followed.

“How will you ever straighten up this shape; / ... Give back the upward looking and the light; / Rebuild in it the music and the dream?”

Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe

The paper trail picks up again in the fall of 1976. Now living in San Francisco’s Mission District, Richard writes to his parents “the hardest letter I‘ve ever attempted.” After a rash of muggings and robberies while drunk, he is voluntarily signing himself into a Salvation Army Rehabilitation Center. He signs off, “Life has nowhere to go but up.”

In May 1977 Richard got his first break in this new chapter of his life – a man walked into his AA Club on 16th Street and offered him a part-time job covering city politics.

The redemption of Richard Barnett didn’t happen in a stadium; it happened in the opulent, wood-paneled chambers of the San Francisco City Council. Sobriety brought back the one thing the bottle couldn’t kill: his pen. He became the chronicler of the city’s inner workings, reporting for a specialty newsletter with the same meticulous attention to detail his father had used to design a Chrysler chassis. He later joined a program operated by the City Library’s historian and became one of the first volunteer City Guides.

He became a small fixture in a big city —a man who shared his deep well of knowledge with tourists on the street and subscribers throughout the country interested in San Francisco politics. He wasn’t the “Big Time” anymore, and he didn’t need to be. He was a writer. He was a man with a pen.

In 1987, after ten years sober, Richard made it all the way back. Across the bay in Berkeley, California he reunited, if just for a few days, with his daughter and a few friends from those heady days in Chelsea. His role that day, to walk his daughter down the aisle. Standing tall, clear-eyed and restored, he walked his daughter to her future—a moment that no NBC broadcast could ever capture.

A year later, Richard’s life came to an end. His obituary just three scant sentences. One of which asked for donations to the St. Anthony’s Dining Room that kept him alive through his darkest days. Later that year, after his ashes were spread outside the Golden Gate Bridge, friends, relatives and fellow volunteers with the City Guide program joined together at Golden Gate Park to plant a tree in his memory.

They were honoring a man who took the longest bike trip of all: the one from the peak of fame, through the valley of the shadow, and finally, home.

###

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About the Author

I rescue stories from the dustbin of history.

I’m Bill Farley. I’ve published family history articles in American Ancestors, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, and Wild West. I wrote a biography of an Irish millionaire who funded communist newspapers during World War I. My research earned a foreword from a historian with fifty years of experience who called me “the most enterprising and tireless researcher” he’d encountered.

But credentials don’t matter if the stories disappear.

Your family has stories like Richard’s—stories of rise and fall, loss and redemption, ordinary people living extraordinary lives. Stories that deserve more than three sentences in an obituary. Stories that exceed what gets naturally remembered.

This Substack is where I share those stories. Some are from my own family. Some are from the archives I’ve spent years researching. All of them teach you something about how to find, research, and preserve the stories in your own family tree.

Because in two or three generations, most family stories vanish completely. Not because they’re unimportant—but because no one did the work to preserve them.

I’m teaching you how to do that work.

What you’ll find here:

• Stories from the dustbin (like Richard’s)—fully researched narratives with artifacts, documents, and photos

• Research methods that work—how I found the evidence, connected the dots, solved the mysteries

• Behind-the-scenes process—the archives I visited, the dead ends I hit, the breakthroughs that changed everything

• Preservation strategies—how to move beyond private family trees to create published work that lasts

Free subscribers get the stories and basic research tips.

Paid subscribers (Coming Soon) get complete access to the research files: full document scans, transcribed letters, correspondence with editors, detailed methodology, and the extended family context that didn’t make the final story.

Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss the next story from the dustbin.

And if Richard’s story resonates with you—if you have a family member whose life took unexpected turns, whose story deserves to be told—hit reply and tell me about them. I read every response.

—Bill Farley
The Dustbin Historian

I’m back after a year off from tracking the financial playbooks behind college athletics. I’ve spent the last year writing an academic article about Sacramento’s biggest sports fan in the 1990’s - Mayor Joe Serna Jr. He fought the good fight to get the Kansas City Kings to Sacramento and to keep them here. But he also failed trying to land the NFL Raiders and MLB’s Giants and A’s. My time in the archives reminded me how much I enjoyed digging up records and resurrecting forgotten figures - from the ordinary to the famous, from orphans to millionaires.

I am pivoting. I am taking the same investigative rigor I used to analyze NCAA finances and applying it to these forgotten narratives. From now on, The Dustbin Historian will be a place where we unearth the scoundrels, the heroes, and the complicated truths that the sanitized history books leave out.

The “Dustbin of History” isn’t just about famous rascals and Gilded Age bets. It’s about the gap between the stories we tell the world—on NBC letterhead—and the hard evidence left in the shoebox. For example…

First up will be a story about my Uncle Richard Barnett. The above excerpt is form Richard’s letter to my grandfather, written on David Brinkley’s Journal stationery in 1964. Richard was at the top of the world. He was living in McLean, Virginia—just down the street from the Attorney General—and prepping for a new role at NBC Sports Spectacular. He was going to cover sports in Ireland, Germany, and Russia. To any outside observer, it was the ultimate sports “big deal.”

I knew Richard hit a rough patch later. But I had no idea how bad it was until I spread out the evidence my grandfather had so meticulously preserved.

Next to the glossy NBC letter was a different kind of “receipt”: a handwritten timeline from the mind of a former engineer on graph paper. It wasn’t tracking broadcast schedules; it was tracking drunk driving arrests, car crashes, and time served in Sacramento, Mariposa, and Woodland jails.

I will return next week to complete Richard’s story. There is a lot more in Granddad’s folio.

We’re moving from the box score to the archive. I hope you’ll join me for the hunt.

Bill Farley, PhD DustbinHistorian.com

P.S.: Of course if a story falls in my lap about college athletics that I can’t resist I’ll post in a special “off-topic” space open to all.

Key Takeaways:

• Phil Knight’s financing plan for Oregon’s Best-in-class Arena put the Athletic Department in a huge financial hole.

• Oregon’s AD predicted the Arena would break even in 2013. It lost $11.5 million in 2013 (and continues to hemorrhage cash today).

• Past media revenue windfalls saved the Ducks from massive budget cuts.

• Oregon needs the Big 10’s future media revenue to stay afloat.

• Knight was likely silent on Oregon’s departure to the Big 10 because it was in part his Legacy Fund plan that drove the Ducks to blow up the Pac-12.

• AD Rob Mullens’ recent fundraising plea reflects the new reality for the Ducks. The football program needs to balance raising cash for player payrolls, while still needing donations to meet massive debt obligations and take care of expensive-to-maintain buildings.

Build It and They Will Come

Oregon spent nearly $700 million on new athletic buildings over the past sixteen years, primarily funded by Phil Knight’s conditional generosity (Table 1). This spree increased Oregon’s annual building expenses from $5.4 million to $39.8 and ended just as cash replaced facilities as the currency of player recruitment. Now, these world-class facilities host all kinds of money-draining sports; track and field, baseball, softball, soccer, and the biggest drain of all, men’s basketball.

Yes, men’s basketball is the biggest drain of all, and its place at the top of the money-losing list can be attributed in part to a failed Arena financing scheme pushed by Nike’s owner. Our window into how Knight’s scheme unfolded into a huge cash drain are coffee-table-sized spreadsheets published annually 1 by the Athletic Department (Figure 1). You can find the full series of these spreadsheets here. The spreadsheets track the status of the “Legacy Fund,” the linchpin of Knight’s failed scheme. The billionaire established the fund in 2007 to great fanfare with a pledge of $100 million. At the time, UO president Dave Frohnmayer claimed the gift would “set the university’s athletics on a course toward self-sufficiency and create the flexibility and financial capacity for UO to build a new athletic arena.”2 Since then the fund has been relegated to a shell game of sorts, continually hiding financial missteps and unfunded promises.3

Knight’s Grand Arena Plan

Planning for a new arena to replace the historic Mac Court started in 2002 with a survey of potential sites conducted by Convention, Sports, and Leisure, Inc. (CSL). This was followed by preliminary plans for a new arena in the $60-$80 million range. In 2005 Knight’s preferred site for the new arena came on the market with a steep price tag ($22 million). He then pushed for a $200 million arena budget. Together, the cost of land and building would result in the most expensive college arena ever built (and on par with NBA and NHL arenas). Knight, who could write a check for the full amount, instead pledged $100 million to the quasi-endowment/Legacy Fund, on the strict condition the State of Oregon guaranteed a $226 million bond issue for the full cost of the new arena.

Knight’s plan to build an NBA-worthy arena and underwrite the long-term success of the Athletic Department had five components; 1) seed his “Legacy Fund” with a $100 million donation, 2) attract an additional $50 million from other donors, 3) convince state legislators that the Arena would be self-sufficient and never draw on the Legacy Fund, 4) close the deal with the state legislators to issue and guarantee bonds for the full amount of the Arena project, and 5) invest his Legacy Fund cash balances aggressively (8% to 10% returns) to beat the interest rates charged on the State-backed arena bonds (3.5% to 4.5%) to generate extra income for the Athletic Department.

Knight’s plan was met with extreme skepticism by university faculty and officials outside the Athletic Department. His plan veered dramatically from traditional financing plans where an equal share of cash donations and university-backed bonds paid for new buildings. It was also unusual to ask a state government to back a bond for a university arena or stadium, and for that bond to be underwritten in part by an arbitrage scheme (profiting on the spread between borrowing costs and investment returns).

Plenty of Red Flags

Knight’s arena plan was evaluated by a faculty committee composed of experts in economics, sports management, and public finance. A sentiment guiding their deliberations was that:

“the sheer scale of this [Arena] investment challenges the perception that the University is focused on academic excellence as its top priority.”

The committee’s findings were published in a 2008 report to the Faculty Senate and University president.4 The report raised issues with the cost of the project, aggressive internal revenue estimates, and the complexity of the financing plan.

The committee noted that the Athletic Department’s consultant (CSL), surveyed 43 new collegiate basketball arenas and found that the average cost of a new arena was $65 million. The CSL survey also found no university used 100% bond financing for a new arena. The biggest share of bond financing (versus donor funding) for a new arena was 50% by Ohio State University. Many of the arenas in the CSL survey carried no debt payments as they were funded 100% by donations.

CSL also published revenue and expense estimates for the proposed arena, although much of the revenue component was based on estimates from Athletic Department staff. Speaking to the Oregonian newspaper in the Fall of 2007, UO Athletic Director Pat Kilkenny declared strong support for staff estimates that ticket sales and other arena income would generate $16 million per year.5 The faculty committee challenged the methodology behind staff estimates, noting that they were “not subject to any market test or certification until CSL conducted its market research in 2007.” After CSL completed an online survey of potential ticket purchasers, the firm provided a conservative estimate that the Arena would generate $14.6 million in revenue in the third year of operations.

Despite the AD’s enthusiasm and CSL’s survey results, committee members treated CSL’s conservative estimate as optimistic, writing in its evaluation. “Any prudent assessment of the revenue-generating capabilities of the proposed arena will treat the CSL 2007 Conservative estimates as an upper limit of what Duck fans are willing to pay for admission to men’s basketball games.” The committee suggested that using 50% of CSL’s conservative estimate ($7.3 million in revenue per year) was reasonable for planning purposes.

As for the financing plan offered by Knight, the committee questioned the legality of using arbitrage as a source of income. The IRS prohibits this practice for tax-exempt borrowings, but the university’s legal staff argued that interest earnings from the Legacy Fund would never be used to make any portion of the debt payments.6 This issue became moot later in the process as Oregon opted to issue less restrictive (and much more expensive) taxable bonds to avoid the arbitrage issue.

The committee concluded its assessment of the Arena financing plan by estimating that the Legacy Fund, using 50% of CSL’s conservative revenue estimates, would be drawn down to a zero balance in 2024. With that scenario in mind, here is a partial list of the management recommendations offered to the university president and Athletic Department by the committee:

1. The Athletic Department should issue regular financial statements for the Arena and detail any use of department revenue or Legacy Fund balances to cover revenue shortfalls.

2. The Athletic Department should invest Legacy Fund balances conservatively until the fund balance exceeds $75 million and arena operating income exceeds CSL’s conservative estimates.

3. Any necessary budget cutbacks due to revenue shortfalls should be borne by the Athletic Department.

4. The Athletic Department should limit the expansion of facilities and programs until the arena is profitable.

5. With the Athletic Department benefiting financially from using the State of Oregon’s credit rating, a portion (5%) of any excess arena revenues should accrue to the university for academic purposes.

Knight’s Folly

The Arena opened in 2011, financed 100% with State of Oregon-backed taxable bonds, and immediately lost $11.5 million in its first year. Seeing the financial disaster on the horizon, AD Rob Mullens issued an operational assessment three months before the Arena opened. His assessment concluded that the original intent of the Legacy Fund was seriously compromised by lackluster ticket and sponsorship sales, writing “The Athletic Department clearly faces some significant financial challenges” and that “careful fiscal management” was needed to turn around the department’s fortunes.7

The financial challenges Mullens’ referenced were tied directly to Knight’s financing scheme. Table 2 below compares two projections of the Arena’s stabilized performance (2013/year 3) versus the actual performance. CSL’s projection of Arena revenue in 2013, strongly backed by the Athletic Department, was nearly twice the amount of the actual revenue taken in that year. Debt payments, already high due to financing 100% of the Arena cost, increased another 20% as a result of shifting to a taxable bond to avoid issues with IRS arbitrage regulations. Finally, the draw against the Legacy Fund in 2013 was nearly $11 million greater than originally projected. The fund balance of the Legacy Fund was propped up in 2013 by an unexpected one-time donation and the carryover of interest revenue from 2012.

Despite the Athletic Department’s 2010 call for “careful fiscal management,” the Arena has not come close to approaching the financial performance predicted by CSL and Athletic Department staff. After predicting the Legacy Fund would never be used to pay bond payments, it has done so in twelve of the past fourteen years. When the 30-year financing for the Arena is finally paid off, the total payments under Knight’s plan will reach nearly $480 million. If the university had chosen a traditional path, convinced Knight to apply his $100 million donation towards construction, and borrowed the balance using tax-exempt bonds, the payments would have totaled just $211 million, a savings of $266 million.

Saved by Media Deals

At the time the Knight Arena was financed, the Athletic Department projected a 2.5% annual increase in department revenues over the life of the arena bond debt (through 2038). With that projected level of growth, the Legacy Fund would have been exhausted this year (2024). Fortunately for the Ducks, there was an unforeseen explosion in media revenue that all major conferences enjoyed over the following 14 years. This unexpected growth is the only reason Oregon survived Knight’s failed Arena financing plan. While all other revenues in the Athletic Department budget increased at an annual rate of 1.5% over the past 14 years, media revenue increased at an annual rate of 13% (Figure 2). Oregon took in $19 million in media-related revenue in 2012 and by 2023 that number increased to $62 million. During the same period, non-media revenue in the Athletic Department only increased from $69 million in 2012 to $76 million in 2023.8

A few additional benefits of the media revenue windfall for the Athletic Department are that discussion about sharing a fraction of surplus revenue from the Arena with the academic side of the university never resurfaced, and no one questions why Knight was given the valuable naming rights for the arena when it is hemorrhaging cash under his failed financing scheme.

The Ducks Need Help in the Post-House Era

The Ducks' lavish facilities and ties to Nike were very attractive to student-athletes before they were paid for their services. Great facilities and Nike may still be a factor, but direct compensation is expected to trump facilities in post-House recruitment battles. Oregon is now saddled with expensive-to-maintain facilities, a Legacy Fund with limited value due to the Arena financing fiasco, a donor base likely to target donations at player payrolls (and the chance to rub elbow with potential superstars), a relatively small academic budget upon which to bail out the athletic department (Figures 3 and 4), and limited prospects for the State of Oregon to boost the school’s funding to address facility maintenance.

Oregon AD Rob Mullen’s recent plea for donations from the masses reflects a grim reality. The Ducks are long on expensive-to-maintain, somewhat irrelevant buildings and short on cash for player payrolls. They desperately need a Legacy Fund II – one without strings attached from its biggest donor.

Footnotes

The most quoted line from the UN’s report touching on the impact of trans-athletes in women’s sports is this,

“Over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.”

Take this quote plus the title of the report, “Violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences,” and you could jump to the conclusion that women and girls are getting injured in great numbers by trans-athletes. Remembering that women’s basketball teams at my schools often used men for practice squads, I wanted to read the report to see if any male practice squads injured the teams they were supposed to help. Well, the report was not what I thought it would be.

The primary content in the report is divided into five main sections, 1) descriptions of the types of violence experienced by women and girls in sports, 2) causes of violence against women and girls in sports, 3) perpetrators of violence, 4) participation rates, 5) human rights and 5) recommendations (40 in all). Transgender athletes are only a small part of the report. Most of the report focuses on the treatment of biological women in other countries when they are not playing sports. The full report is attached below. The statement about medals lost to transgender athletes, however, mostly centers on the United States.

Lost Medals

The data on “medal lost” data comes from the website SheWon.org. The site keeps a running total of medals lost by girls and women to trans-athletes at the professional, collegiate, and high school levels. If a trans-athlete finishes first in a competition, the list includes three entries for the women/girls who lost a medal. The second-place athletes lost a “gold,” the third-place athlete lost a” silver,” and the fourth-place finisher lost a “bronze.” The list is based on self-reported data from around the world and includes some citations for verification. It is not comprehensive. The total “lost” medal count on the site is now 1,055 (as of November 6, 2024). Of these medals, 733 (69.5%) involved medals lost in competitions in the United States, and 273 (26%) were in sports sanctioned by the NCAA or tracked by the National Federation of High School Associations. Examples of sports on the list that are not associated with college and high school associations are Irish Dancing, Disc Golf, Poker, Darts, Rock Climbing, and eSports.

Here is the breakdown of medals lost in sports conducted by the NCAA and high schools in the United States:

Injuries to Biological Females

A section in the report on injuries to biological females also referred primarily to American athletes. That section (below) did not include any significant data but rather relied on a few single incidents. The footnotes associated with this section is clipped below the text.

There are no reports of men injuring women during practice sessions, which I suspect are far greater in number than actual competitions.

Summary

The data on lost medals and injuries in this report are not compelling and in my opinion, do not warrant the attention that it received. As a neutral observer on the issue of trans-athletes in women’s and girls’ sports, I’m reticent to suggest arguments for either side. But for the sparse data in this report, I suggest it be left out of the debate. If the data becomes more robust on the SheWon.org website, however, it could become a source worth citing. For now, I would edit the line that was widely quoted to as follows:

“Over 600 One-hundred and seventy-one (171) female college and high school athletes in the U.S., in more than 400 58 competitions have lost more than 890 273 medals in 29 5 different sports.”

UN Report-Violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences

446KB ∙ PDF file

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The South Dakota AG, on behalf of its FCS schools, sued the NCAA in State court on the financial impact of the backpay portion of the House Settlement. The NCAA filed a motion to move the case to the federal level (attached below). The SD AG’s response to that motion is also attached below.

Setting aside the legal arguments regarding jurisdiction (I’m not a lawyer), the filings by both parties make their case for and against the settlement. FCS schools are riled because they were not a party to the House lawsuit and were not consulted on the settlement. The Idaho State Athletic Director called it “taxation without representation” at a hearing last month before the Idaho State Board of Education. Here are a couple of excerpts from the South Dakota filing.

The filing today (November 5, 2024) comes from the NCAA and is a rebuttal to SD’s argument against removal to federal court. Here is a key excerpt from the NCAA’s filing regarding the financial impact of the ruling on FCS schools.

I’ll leave it to the lawyers to discuss the legal arguments on state versus federal jurisdiction, but I’ll continue to follow the case because of its potential financial impacts on FCS schools.

UPDATE 11/18/24: Title IX elements removed

On 11/15/24 the South Dakota AG submitted a revised complaint in federal court. The new complaint and attachments are listed below, plus the original complaint that was previously not included. The primary changes relate to removing most Title IX arguments. The attachments are correspondence between NCAA and non-P5 leaders.

October 9th Filing by NCAA (First in Federal Court)

NCAA Asks For Removal To Federal Court

1.89MB ∙ PDF file

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October 15th Filing By South Dakota

South Dakota AG Argument to Keep At State Level

3.72MB ∙ PDF file

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November 5th Filing by NCAA

NCAA Rebuttal Response To SD AGs Argument

226KB ∙ PDF file

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November 15th Filing by South Dakota AG

Original SD AG complaint filed in state court 9.10.24

1.32MB ∙ PDF file

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SD AG amended complaint filed in federal court 11.15.24

134KB ∙ PDF file

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Attachment to 11.15.24 SD AG filing

874KB ∙ PDF file

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Attachment 2 to SD AG filing

952KB ∙ PDF file

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Attachment 3 to SD AG filing

1.09MB ∙ PDF file

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I requested the Pac-12 Settlement Agreement from every party, hoping one university would not use the black markers to redact key provisions. The previously released version had three entire pages that were redacted. The Huskies came through. See the unredacted settlement agreement below released by the University of Washington today. I have marked the sections that were previously redacted with a yellow highlighter. You can check my work by downloading the redacted version (also below).

Here are some takeaways (nothing shocking):

House Settlement

• Each member agreed to pay 1/12th of the eventual settlement.

• The Pac-12 committed to reasonable efforts to minimize any “Power 5 Award.”

• The Pac-12 has insurance to cover an undisclosed amount of the back pay.

• A Settlement Conference Report from March 6, 2024, sets caps on liabilities for departing members but was not attached.

Analysis from a non-lawyer: The House back pay settlement as proposed by the NCAA (which came after the Pac-12 settlement agreement was signed) is addressed by deducting a portion of a conference’s men’s NCAA basketball units (see past composition section below). Since all those payments were to remain with the conference as part of the settlement agreement, I suspect there will be some debate about whether the departed members should reimburse the Pac-12 for a portion of any back pay deduction from those units. The departed members are capped on their back pay liability, but that amount is not in the agreement. The cap amount is included in a confidential settlement conference report. If departed schools owe the conference a payment, a 9/12 vote is required to confirm that payment. (There is an example given in the document on applying the cap., but I could not deduce a cap from that example) .

Other Items

1. There was a contribution agreed to by departing members for Broadcast Litigation (assumed to be related to the firing of Pac-12 Networks president Mark Shuken and former CFO Brent Willman and possibly the Comcast overpayment dispute).

2. Since a settlement was reached with Shuken and Willman before the last FY 24 distribution was made to departing Pac-12 members, this matter was likely resolved by withholding a portion of that payment.

Let me know in the comments if you see anything of note in the unredacted copy.

Unredacted Pac 12 Settlement

22.4MB ∙ PDF file

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Pac 12 Settlement Agreement with Redactions

2.4MB ∙ PDF file

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The Pac-12 Admission agreement discusses commitments to investment levels in collegiate athletics, good faith efforts to pursue new funding models, and combing institutional assets for the financial benefit of the conference.

The complete admission agreements can be downloaded from the previous post linked below.

The Huskies’ Membership Agreement is identical to the Ducks’. Both paid a $7.5 million application fee. Both receive $30 million in media revenue in the first year. Both offered an additional $10 million yearly advance against future media revenue. There is no indication the Ducks applied for the advance. Below is a copy of the Husky’s request for the $10 million advance.

Advance Agreement

$10 million Advance

571KB ∙ PDF file

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New Member Agreement

Uw New Member Agreement

21MB ∙ PDF file

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The MOU is attached at the bottom of the page. Here are my four highlights:

1. MWC agrees to maintain a $3.5 million annual payment to each regular Member Institution for media rights.

2. Distribution of Exit Fees ($85 million) from five departing members and Withdrawal Fees ($55 million) from the Pac-12 (subject of current lawsuit):

• First $61 million: UNLV/Air Force $15 million each with $7 million paid to other full members.

• Second: $18 million: Recruiting Reserve to attract new conference members

• Third: $21 Million (Partially funded by Exit Fees and contested Withdrawal Fees): UNLV/Air Force $5.1 million each with $2.5 million paid to other full members.

• Fourth: Legal Fees (not specified)

• Fifth: Balance of funds split evenly among full members.

3. MWC schools are released from obligations of this MOU (not conference exit fees) if an invitation is extended from ACC, Big 10, SEC or Big 12.

4. Las Vegas gets some perks. Basketball championship and MWC HQ move to Sin City.

Mountain West Conference MOU

Mountain West Conference MOU

1.6MB ∙ PDF file

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