Blah Blah Blah

I have got the Blahs! I am sitting here and not studying on a Saturday. Nothing was sinking in. I'm doing my laundry and trying to prepare for my small dinner party tomorrow. It's going to be a simple menu: "oven" grilled chicken, spinach with bacon & mushrooms, seasoned rice with chocolate cake for dessert. I just have to make sure everything is nice and that my ironing and such are done so I can have an easy week and start to get set for Thanksgiving.

The picture above is of Crown Point, Indiana around 1911. You can tell it's early by the absence of cars. Everyone is aware of Dillinger's escape with the wooden gun from the Crown Point jail. Some people insist that one of the Trustees smuggled a real gun into him, but the FBI files have affidavits from other prisoners that Dillinger and his accomplice in the escape Herbert Youngblood that refutes that. Evidently, the two whittled the gun from a wooden piece of a wash table that was in the communal washroom. The rest as they say is history, but what what fails to be mentioned is that these high profile escapes by Dillinger and others have a responsibility for the controls and such that we have in our modern correctional institutions.

It's interesting how changes come about. Think about it typically we have to learn the hard way before we correct mistakes. I am having a bear of a time trying to find Vivian Chase's family prior to the 1920 census. If she was born in Nebraska then I thought it would make since to look for her family in Nebraska during the 1900 census but so far no luck. It doesn't help that Davis is such a common name. Oh well, Nebraska didn't start having actual birth certificates until well after Vivian's birth. Hmmm....what's interesting is that if this family is hers then she is a puzzle. While the family wasn't rich they owned there own home in 1920. I can trace the parents to the same house in the 1930 census and they list that they have $3500 worth of income for the year that's around $42,000 in today's currency. http://www.minneapolisfed.org/Research/data/us/calc/

Her sister Hazel, I found in boarding house and she worked as a registered nurse. What's interesting about all of this is that in 1935 when Vivian was shot to death no one claimed her body. There was sufficient coverage in the newspapers to doubt that her family did not know of her death. So if these are the people she was related to by blood, they wanted nothing to do with her by the time of her death and allowed her to be buried in a potters grave.