Read Online Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane by Patrick McGilligan - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Patrick McGilligan
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electing one of their own to the Kenosha school board.
Five years before the birth of Orson Welles, a number of leading characters in his parents’ early Kenosha years exited the stage, supplanted by new dramatis personae who would play important roles in the years ahead.
To general dismay, Reverend Florence Buck announced that she was taking a yearlong leave of absence, relocating to southern California to help care for her partner, Reverend Marion Murdoch, who was seriously ill. Florence Buck’s last public lecture addressed the subject of Halley’s comet, which was soon to reappear, as it does about once every seventy-five years. As usual, during the lecture, she employed a stereopticon—or “magic lantern”—to project photographic slides. Beatrice outdid herself rehearsing the choir for Florence Buck’s final church service, a performance of the cantata Faith and Praise by Chicago composer John A. West. Beatrice conducted the choir, with fourteen interweaving voices accompanied by an organist and by herself at the piano, for an audience of hundreds of parishioners and out-of-town guests.
Florence Buck would return to Kenosha now and then, but always fleetingly, and she never resumed her ministry there. Yet Beatrice and others in the congregation never forgot her—and Buck and Marion Murdoch never forgot their favorite parishioner. They kept in touch, and Murdoch dedicated a poem to “B.I.W.” in her slender volume of published poetry, The Hermit Thrush. “White Butterflies” recalled how Beatrice’s music transported hearts to a higher dimension:
O art, that in her touch o’erwhelms,
What witchery can be,
To lend release from lower realms,
And set the spirit free
Florence Buck was replaced by the renowned Reverend Rowena Morse, a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Rowena Morse was every bit the activist that her predecessor was, and during her tenure the meetings of the Woman’s Alliance featured presentations on the persecution of Jews in Russia and on the socialist ideas of the German philosopher Ferdinand Lassalle. But Morse left Kenosha after a year, and though the local Unitarians scrambled for another pastor, the position stayed vacant for months on end.
In the same month that Florence Buck departed, Mary D. Bradford arrived to lead the Kenosha public schools. Many of the older women knew Mary Bradford from their youth—she was a graduate of Kenosha High School, and later taught there—and she had since earned a national reputation as an educator. When the position of school superintendent opened up in Kenosha, she announced that she was willing to leave her job as a state kindergarten specialist for Wisconsin’s normal schools if the school board would make her the city’s first female head of public education, following a precedent recently set in Chicago.
The Kenosha school board decided unanimously to offer Bradford a three-year contract, doing away with the customary one-year term. She took a house on Park Avenue in the Library Park district, on the same street and block where the Welles family would move a year or two later. For Beatrice Welles, the void left by Florence Buck’s departure would be filled by Mary Bradford’s friendship, while the flux within the church would consolidate her own role as the leader of the Woman’s Alliance.
As summers usually did in Kenosha, the summer of 1910 brought heavy storms. The high winds and torrential rains caused widespread crop damage and flattened fences and trees. When nature cooperated, Dick and Beatrice Welles took the steamboat to Milwaukee, rode special trains to the pastoral lakes in the countryside surrounding Kenosha, and visited Chicago to see Beatrice’s parents and enjoy the shows. They were among the thousands of Kenoshans drawn to the annual Old Settlers’ Picnic at Paddock Lake, with lectures, games, music, and basket dinners at noon. Each year, sadly, the number of actual old settlers
Five years before the birth of Orson Welles, a number of leading characters in his parents’ early Kenosha years exited the stage, supplanted by new dramatis personae who would play important roles in the years ahead.
To general dismay, Reverend Florence Buck announced that she was taking a yearlong leave of absence, relocating to southern California to help care for her partner, Reverend Marion Murdoch, who was seriously ill. Florence Buck’s last public lecture addressed the subject of Halley’s comet, which was soon to reappear, as it does about once every seventy-five years. As usual, during the lecture, she employed a stereopticon—or “magic lantern”—to project photographic slides. Beatrice outdid herself rehearsing the choir for Florence Buck’s final church service, a performance of the cantata Faith and Praise by Chicago composer John A. West. Beatrice conducted the choir, with fourteen interweaving voices accompanied by an organist and by herself at the piano, for an audience of hundreds of parishioners and out-of-town guests.
Florence Buck would return to Kenosha now and then, but always fleetingly, and she never resumed her ministry there. Yet Beatrice and others in the congregation never forgot her—and Buck and Marion Murdoch never forgot their favorite parishioner. They kept in touch, and Murdoch dedicated a poem to “B.I.W.” in her slender volume of published poetry, The Hermit Thrush. “White Butterflies” recalled how Beatrice’s music transported hearts to a higher dimension:
O art, that in her touch o’erwhelms,
What witchery can be,
To lend release from lower realms,
And set the spirit free
Florence Buck was replaced by the renowned Reverend Rowena Morse, a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Rowena Morse was every bit the activist that her predecessor was, and during her tenure the meetings of the Woman’s Alliance featured presentations on the persecution of Jews in Russia and on the socialist ideas of the German philosopher Ferdinand Lassalle. But Morse left Kenosha after a year, and though the local Unitarians scrambled for another pastor, the position stayed vacant for months on end.
In the same month that Florence Buck departed, Mary D. Bradford arrived to lead the Kenosha public schools. Many of the older women knew Mary Bradford from their youth—she was a graduate of Kenosha High School, and later taught there—and she had since earned a national reputation as an educator. When the position of school superintendent opened up in Kenosha, she announced that she was willing to leave her job as a state kindergarten specialist for Wisconsin’s normal schools if the school board would make her the city’s first female head of public education, following a precedent recently set in Chicago.
The Kenosha school board decided unanimously to offer Bradford a three-year contract, doing away with the customary one-year term. She took a house on Park Avenue in the Library Park district, on the same street and block where the Welles family would move a year or two later. For Beatrice Welles, the void left by Florence Buck’s departure would be filled by Mary Bradford’s friendship, while the flux within the church would consolidate her own role as the leader of the Woman’s Alliance.
As summers usually did in Kenosha, the summer of 1910 brought heavy storms. The high winds and torrential rains caused widespread crop damage and flattened fences and trees. When nature cooperated, Dick and Beatrice Welles took the steamboat to Milwaukee, rode special trains to the pastoral lakes in the countryside surrounding Kenosha, and visited Chicago to see Beatrice’s parents and enjoy the shows. They were among the thousands of Kenoshans drawn to the annual Old Settlers’ Picnic at Paddock Lake, with lectures, games, music, and basket dinners at noon. Each year, sadly, the number of actual old settlers
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