East to the Dawn (12 page)

As 1911 drew to a close, Amelia Otis lay dying; Amy and Margaret were in attendance. On December 23, too weak to write, she dictated a letter to Alfred's younger brother Charles telling him how she had treasured his help following Alfred's breakdown. “What you have been to me all these
years all of the sad years especially no one will ever know—both friend and brother. And I want you to know before I go away just how much I think of you. Ever since you came into my life when you were only a boy. We have been together but little in person, but in heart, I am sure we have been much with each other. May you and yours always be blessed as you deserve is the prayer of Your loving sister Millie.”

Shortly after Amelia Otis's death, the terms of her will became known to the family, and because she was such an illustrious citizen of Atchison, on February 24, the same day the will was filed, it became common knowledge all over town—
The Atchison Globe
printed the terms in great detail on the front page, so everyone got to read that “the deceased bequeathed to her children share and share alike her interest in the Otis Real Estate Co. The children are Mark E. Otis, Margaret Balis, Amy 0. Earhart and Theodore H. Otis. The shares of the last two named children shall be held in trust for them for fifteen years after the death of Amelia Otis and Mark Otis was named as trustee.”

The account wasn't totally accurate, but it was close enough: Amelia left half to her children—she left the other half to Alfred. The estate consisted of real estate in Atchison, Kansas City, Kansas, and Philadelphia valued at $65,730; stocks and bonds totaling $55,880; and over $50,000 in mortgage loans. It was a great deal of money in those days, and in the form she left it, most of it actually consisted of shares of the Otis Real Estate Company.

Mark, a year younger than Amy, had worked most of his life for his father as secretary-treasurer of the Dayton-Otis Grain Company, then as secretary-treasurer of the Chicago office of the Otis Real Estate Company; Alfred was always president. Alfred had finally put Mark in control, but only because he had to—William was dead, Carl was dead, Mark was the last one left. Certainly if Alfred had trusted Mark's judgment, he would have turned over the reins of his businesses to him years before, but he avoided it until, at eighty-four, he had no other choice.

Amy liked Mark, although as she would later make plain, she didn't respect his business sense any more than Alfred did, and she certainly didn't think he was competent to be trustee of her money. Treading carefully, she enlisted Margaret on her side (who, shocked, had refused to qualify as her sister's trustee) and, with her uncle Ephraim Otis advising her, within thirty days forced Mark's resignation as trustee in favor of the Northern Trust Company, a well-known, well-respected Chicago investment firm that specialized in trust estates. Ephraim even agreed to witness the legal document drawn up between his nephew and niece that effected the change.

In spite of the furor the codicil caused, life went on much as before. Amy and Margaret and Mark weighed possible alternatives for their increasingly infirm father and finally decided that he should remain exactly where he was, in familiar surroundings, cared for by the faithful Charlie Parks and Mary Brashay, who had been caring for him for years. Alfred's nephew James Challiss and his wife Rilla, who lived next door, could also keep an eye on him there.

Alfred at eighty-four was still alert, but his will to live had weakened. There was no shattering decline. One day at the beginning of May, he felt well enough to go into town, accompanied by Charlie Parks, to have a shave at the barber shop and then to inspect a portion of riverbank the town was fixing up. On the first Sunday in May, he attended services at Trinity Church, walking the six blocks to and fro. On Monday evening, according to the
Globe,
“he sat on the porch of his home and talked to Mrs. J.M. [Rilla] Challiss.” The next morning he was found dead in his bed.

The
Globe
estimated his fortune at more than $200,000 and noted the buildings he owned on the main town thoroughfare, Commercial Street.

The funeral, at Trinity Episcopal Church, was notable for the family members who attended and for those who did not. Alfred's brother Charles came from St. Paul; Mark, with his wife Isabel, came from Chicago ; Carl's widow Anna arrived from Kansas City; Amy arrived from Des Moines. Margaret, delayed by a sick child, came from Philadelphia. But not surprisingly, Edwin stayed away.

On May 11, Alfred's will was filed for probate. In spite of the bitter protestations Amy must have made to her father regarding the codicil in Amelia's will, in spite of the fact that Alfred knew Mark had been replaced as trustee because he also had signed the document appointing the Northern Trust Company trustee in Mark's place, the identical wording that his wife had put in her will was also in his will. Alfred had taken his feelings about Edwin with him to the grave.

Again the public read all about the humiliating blow, for again
The Atchison Globe
published the terms for everyone to read and ponder: “The entire estate was bequeathed to the four children, share and share alike. The children are Mark E. Otis, Amy O. Earhart, Theodore H. Otis, and Margaret Balis. The will provides that Mark E. Otis act as executor of the estate, also as trustee of the shares bequeathed to Amy O. Earhart and Theodore Otis for a period of fifteen years after the death of Judge Otis.”

Amy wasted no time. That same day a lengthy document was filed
on her behalf in the Atchison County courthouse, in which Margaret and Mark again declined to act as Amy's trustee and again the Northern Trust Company was designated in their place. By the end of June, the Northern Trust Company was trustee of this inheritance also. But there was a price that Amy had to pay—she had to agree to make Mark no further trouble “And the said Amy O. Earhart agrees that she will make no objection contest or controversy whatsoever over the provisions of said will or the execution thereof.”

The terms of the wills dealt the Earharts a stunning blow. There was no doubt that the change was directed at and had been caused by Edwin, no doubt that it publicly branded Edwin a ne'er-do-well, no doubt that it was a clear vote of no confidence in Amy. No matter what Edwin did, no matter what Amy did, there was no way for them to escape from this humiliating public condemnation of their character.

Up until now, Edwin had been able to hold himself together and hide his drinking from most people. Now the last vestiges of self-control went; he became a bitter, angry, sullen drunk, too far gone to have any regard for the proprieties. Not only did he drink in private, now he stumbled his way home for all the world to see.

The Prohibitionist sentiment erupting throughout the United States would culminate, in 1919, in the passage of the Volstead Act, the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution. Iowa was historically a strongly Prohibitionist state; since the 1880s laws had been on the books banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Unfortunately for Edwin, Cottage Grove was the center of the state's Prohibitionist activity; many of Cottage Grove's most prominent residents—university officials, church leaders, politicians “of all stripes”—were actively involved in the movement. It made Edwin's drinking particularly unforgivable. Muriel, many years later, would write, “All the old bitterness toward Mother's family was accentuated, as Dad alternately brooded and raged.... He seemed to drink now with a distorted idea of punishing Mother because of Grandmother's canny intuition, which made her regard the establishing of a trust fund for Mother as a safeguard, while he looked on it as an insult.”

The scene of Amelia's great pleasure, the Saturday cowboy-and-Indians game, provided the denouement. It was a spectacular fall from grace that took them all down—a major public humiliation. Assembled were Amelia and Muriel and a group of their friends from the neighborhood. All were waiting on a Saturday afternoon for the beginning of the game, all were gathered in front of the house, killing time till Edwin came home. And then they saw him getting off the streetcar and
raced to meet him. And saw that he was walking slowly, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, as if to keep from stumbling. He told them he couldn't play because he didn't feel well, walked past them, lurched up the steps. Amy opened the door with a smiling face. “Your Indian clothes are upstairs, Edwin,” she said, then looking at him, her face changed, her smile froze. She helped him over the threshold, then firmly shut the door. Ten children plus two daughters—Amelia and Muriel stood exposed to the shock and horror in public, in front of their peers, each of whom, knowing the ugly truth, would relay it back to their families.

Edwin did public penance, appearing, for a change, in church the next day. Privately he promised it wouldn't happen again. And because they wanted to so much, at first they believed him. But his drinking grew worse. His work became so erratic that a supervisor came from Chicago, caught Edwin drinking in his office, replaced him (temporarily, he said), and sent him to a hospital that specialized in alcoholism. He stayed a month, and when he came home he was, they all hoped, cured.

As a welcome when he came back from the hospital, Amy bought him a carpenter's bench and a set of tools for metal and woodworking. (She, as well as Muriel, must have been impressed with Edwin's energy and happy state of mind when he had been working on his invention all those years before.) Amelia and Muriel, with three dollars they had earned picking cherries, purchased a jointed fishing rod with a reel on the handle. The homecoming scene, as remembered by Muriel, was poignant: “It was our ‘old' Dad, bright-eyed and buoyant, who came up the porch steps two by two at a time to seize Mother around the waist and waltz her joyously a few steps down the front hall while Amelia and I laughed and applauded until we came in for our share of hugging.”

It didn't last. No business would hire him, and given his history, it was not surprising. Indeed, one of his job-seeking letters reveals just how close he was to his next drink, for he saw his alcoholism as a function of his surroundings rather than of his own mind, and thus he wrote, rather ingenuously, to one possible employer (italics mine): “I am now safe in saying that I am free from this unfortunate habit, not unqualifiedly or absolutely, but I have been burned and suffered so much from it that I am safe in saying that I am safely and surely beyond any future danger.
Of course environment and associates have and did have everything to do with my difficulties, but in Omaha I would have a clean slate.
I make you the promise that there will be absolutely no offence or reproach as to my ever taking a drink while in your service. If upon any reliable authority you should hear of it, I will
leave your office without delay, feeling myself wholly disgraced. This will enable me to walk the straight and narrow path and do a good job for you and the railroad.”

Before long, according to Muriel, Edwin was again “drinking a little at a time.”

In spite of the document Amy had signed agreeing not to contest the wills, she inevitably became embroiled in a fight with Mark, for upon going over the list of properties of the Otis Real Estate Company that he had given to the Northern Trust Company, she found what she was sure were serious discrepancies. She wanted an independent inventory.

Amy was a decent, moral person herself, and she believed her brother was “cut from the same cloth” as she was. She thought of him in terms of having poor business judgment (she and her mother had been of the same mind about that) and of keeping sloppy records—and she feared she was being shortchanged through his incompetence. She didn't actually suspect Mark of deliberate wrongdoing.

To challenge the company records, Amy needed help. She turned first to Margaret, but Margaret and Mark were still close. Margaret had named one of her sons after Mark, and he had more than once appeared at the Balis home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and swept her three boys off for a weekend in Atlantic City—which the boys adored and in which the two girls hungered to be included. To Margaret, who believed that Mark was carefully preserving her inheritance—
her
249 shares in the Otis Real Estate Company—Amy's demanding an inventory seemed like an act of war. The sisters became estranged.

Next, Amy turned to her Uncle Charles, whom she had met for the first time when he came to Atchison for Alfred's funeral. As happens sometimes at funerals, there had been a reestablishment of family ties. Charles had been terribly moved by Amelia Otis's deathbed letter to him, which she had dictated to Margaret.

Amy, particularly, had felt she had lost a father but gained an uncle; her feelings were reciprocated by Charles. Scarcely was he back in St. Paul after the funeral when he had written to Amy, “We did have such a delightful visit together in Atchison and I hope we will continue to keep in touch with each other as we have not properly done in the past.”

So now Amy decided to write Charles to see if he would help her. In her letter she laid out the sorry state of her affairs—how the enmity between her husband and her brother was making it impossible for her to get an inventory of her inheritance.

I cannot depend on my husband's opinions in this matter as the feeling between Mark and himself is so bitter that an unbiased opinion would be impossible while when I ventured to ask Mark for explanations of certain things, he immediately felt that I had been incited to ask by my husband, and has been suspicious and angry ever since.

She assured Charles that she had no intention of breaking her mother's will. She also explained that although Mark blamed her for an atmosphere of “seeming distrust” of his business abilities, that opinion existed in Atchison independent of her. The letter was long and well thought out, and her request was eminently reasonable. She was, after all, asking that “discrepancies” in Mark's listings be investigated. Whether or not Charles thought she had a case, he was a good uncle and a careful corporate lawyer, and he would have seen an inventory as an eminently reasonable request—one that, once carried out, might settle the troubled waters in the family.