text:
— William Shakespeare
1 In a Lonely Place
A cold rain is falling in Enid, Oklahoma. Inside Garfield Furniture, customers bustle, their shoes squeaking on the burnished wood floor. I seem to be the only one waiting to see a historical oddity the locals call "the Death Room." (They smirk when they say it.) When there's a lull in the trade, the proprietor greets me and guides me up a narrow staircase.
A century ago the furniture store was a hotel, and on the second floor its honeycomb of tiny rooms is mostly intact, and mostly crammed with excess inventory. He takes me into the Death Room, the walls of which are covered with tatters of turn-of-the-century wallpaper. In this narrow cell—maybe six feet wide, with walls reaching far short of the ceiling—the furniture is a century old. It's set up as if for living—an iron bedstead with a thin mattress, a wash stand and basin, a table and hard-backed chair.
An array of photocopied documents covers the bed: insurance maps showing the location of the town's businesses 96 years ago, a handwritten will, newspaper clippings, and a photograph of a mummified corpse sitting in a chair, eyes wide, with a newspaper spread in its lap.
The proprietor tells the story.
2 The Death of David George
In 1903, Oklahoma was not yet a state. The town of Enid, a city on the plains of north-central Oklahoma that now has a population of 49,000, was then a decade old, having formed literally overnight in a land run. It was an agglomeration of red cedar and pine buildings leaning on each other's shoulders, the land just beginning to be marked out from the surrounding prairie by lawns and hedges. The Old West may have been dying out, but in the Oklahoma Territory there were still long-riding outlaws with names like Rattlesnake Jim and Dynamite Dick. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Marquis James, who was a boy in Enid at the time, remembered being brought to the jail to shake hands with a dying killer named Dick Yeager.
James described the settlers of this "ancestorless country" as "people who for one reason or another had lost out, been run out or weren't doing well enough to suit themselves in the places they came from." Debtors, wanted men, elopers, men escaping paternity suits, itinerant printers forced out of the cities by the coming of the linotype, laborers rushing from town to town with the building booms. It was bad manners to ask about a man's past here. Most of the transitory populace lived in hotel rooms like the one I'm standing in, rooms more like horse stalls than human habitations.
Among the apparently rootless men of Enid in January 1903 was a 60-ish man who had been in town for only a few weeks. He had registered at the Grand Avenue Hotel under the name David E. George. In his three weeks in Enid, he had already run up tabs at several bars and hocked his watch for whiskey. His most successful gambit for getting drinks without cash was to recite poetry and passages of Shakespeare. ("It may have sounded like Shakespeare to the men in the saloons who heard it," one resident said decades later. "But we didn't know much of Shakespeare in Oklahoma Territory in those days.")
|Richard, Duke of Gloucester
(later King Richard III):My eye's too quick, my heart o'erweens too much,
Unless my hand and strength could equal them.
. . .
Then, since this earth affords no joy to me,
But to command, to cheque, to o'erbear such
As are of better person than myself,
I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown.
George was given to "bouts of melancholy" when he drank and did morphine or opium. In those days you could buy morphine over the counter along with your monthly supply of Electric Bitters or Dr. Thacher's Liver & Blood Syrup. He had recently told the proprietor of the Grand Avenue Hotel not to trouble with his body if he were found dead someday, but to toss it out the back door.
Early one morning George bought enough arsenic to kill a troublesome dog several times over. Everyone in the neighborhood, including the druggist's clerk, had heard the dog in question baying all night. George claimed he would ease everyone's sleep.
Back in his room, he swallowed the arsenic himself. A large dose of arsenic is a painful way to die. George's cries roused the house. His door was locked, but two men boosted a third over the transom into his room. The men found George convulsing on the bed. By the time a doctor arrived, George had lapsed into a coma. Soon he was dead.
His body was taken to W. B. Penniman's mortuary and furniture store. Two days later, Penniman's assistant was at work on the body when a couple named Harper came in. Before moving to Enid, the Harpers had lived some 60 miles away in the town of El Reno, where they had known George. Mrs. Harper said George had tried to kill himself with an overdose of morphine once before. Believing himself on his deathbed, he had told Mrs. Harper he was John Wilkes Booth, the man who killed Lincoln.
Soon others came forward with similar stories. A legend was born.
It's not the only legend of death and rebirth I'll learn in Enid.
|Richard III's mother:
Thou cam'st on earth to make the earth my Hell.
Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end:
3 The Assassination
John Wilkes Booth may have been the most popular actor in America in 1865. He came from a family of actors, but at age 26 he had already surpassed his famous father and brother in popularity. One newspaper called him "the most handsome man on the American stage." He received a hundred love letters a week. His annual income was about $20,000, 50 times that of an average working man. He was sexy and charismatic, and his reviewers usually alluded to his "flashing black eyes." His signature role was the demonic Richard III.
|Richard III:
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Offstage, Booth was a romantic who gave himself to torrid affairs, extravagant drink, and lost causes. As a boy in military school, he had taken part in an armed insurrection against his cruel masters—and was successful in having the school's draconian policies softened. Although he spent the Civil War years in the North, he loudly supported the Southern cause. When Abraham Lincoln, an avid theater-goer, saw Booth in a play and asked to meet with him, Booth refused; he hated what Lincoln stood for. Preaching the Southern cause in the North was risky, but Booth's popularity and family connections protected him. Some of his colleagues had the impression his support for the South was more pose than reality. "He was so infected and unbalanced by his profession that the world seemed to him to be a stage on which men and women were acting, living, their parts," wrote his contemporary Joel Chandler Harris.
Sometime during the war, Booth became involved in a conspiracy. At first, the idea was to kidnap President Lincoln and several other top government officials and use them to force an exchange, freeing Southern prisoners of war. This plan seemed to be the only way to reverse the South's declining fortunes. But the plan fell apart. In the end, Booth decided the only way to salvage things was to kill Lincoln instead.
As Lincoln watched a play the evening of April 14, 1865, Booth walked into Ford's Theater, where he had worked as an actor many times before, and where his presence aroused no suspicion. Lincoln's bodyguard stepped away from his post to watch the play. Booth slipped into the private box where Lincoln sat. He shot Lincoln behind the ear, the bullet sluicing diagonally through the President's brain before lodging. Booth tossed his derringer aside and drew a knife, which he used to wound the soldier sitting beside Lincoln. Then he leapt from the box to the stage 14 feet below. As he leapt, the spur of his boot caught in the American flag that draped the front of the box. He crashed to the stage, breaking his leg. The sound of his gunshot had been swallowed in the audience's chatter. When Booth made his clumsy appearance on stage, every person in the theater recognized him. There was applause, mixed with murmurs of confusion. Booth shouted, "Sic semper tyrannis!"—"such always to tyrants"—and fled. The poet Walt Whitman said Booth made this exit in a style suggesting he had rehearsed it.
Until the moment of his death, Lincoln was the most unpopular president in American history, reviled in the South as a dictator and lampooned in the North for his intention to preserve the defeated South. Almost overnight, the martyred Lincoln, the first American president to be assassinated, became a symbol of integrity, a sort of political saint. At the same time, Booth, the country's most popular actor, suddenly became its most notorious criminal. Whole families of Booths changed their surnames; fans ripped his photo from their scrapbooks.
The government launched an investigation. Eight people were eventually convicted in the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and other Northern leaders; four were executed, including Mary Surratt, the first woman legally executed in the United States. Even conservative historians soon came to believe the conspiracy was broader, and perhaps included government officials who were never indicted; Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is often mentioned. Booth had escaped, and the government immediately arranged a reward for his capture. Twelve days after the assassination, soldiers tracked Booth to a tobacco shed on the Garrett farm in Virginia. Booth refused to surrender. When he raised his gun to fire on soldiers, a sergeant named Boston Corbett dropped him with a single shot which took him in the back of the neck—two inches from the location of Lincoln's fatal wound. He was buried under the stone floor of a military prison. Four years later, his family managed to have his body exhumed and transferred to the family plot in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery.
|Richard III:
For many lives stand between me and home:
And I—like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying from the way;
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out—
Torment myself to catch the English crown.
That's the official ending of the story. Alternate stories of Booth's fate cropped up almost immediately, partly because of suspicious loose ends in the Lincoln assassination—pages missing from Booth's diary, Booth's calling card left for Vice President Andrew Johnson on the day of the assassination, General Grant mysteriously canceling his plan to see the play with Lincoln that night. Dr. Frederick May, who had once cut a tumor from Booth's neck, remarked upon seeing the official corpse that it looked nothing like Booth. But he changed his mind when he saw the familiar surgical scar. The central premise of the alternate stories is that Booth escaped while another man was killed in his place, and highly-placed conspirators covered up the switch.
4 Our Best Murderer
The rain has turned to a slushy snow by the time I get to the Museum of the Cherokee Strip. A man behind the counter has silver-and-gold hair and wears wire-frame glasses and a red Izod cardigan. He is, I soon discover, a published Egyptologist, which seems an odd specialty for somebody who works in a museum in Enid, Oklahoma. He begins a standard spiel—a gallery to your right, our reconstructed turn-of-the-century town through that door—but stops when he sees my notebook come out from under my rain coat.
"Are you researching something in particular?" he says. I think I detect a hint of trepidation in his voice.
"I'm interested in the mummy of John Wilkes—" I begin. He silences me with a bored nod and a grim smile. I've come to know the look well since my arrival in Enid.
He turns to a colleague at the other end of the counter. "Steve, he's another of the David E. Georges."
Steve Dortch, the museum's curator, is dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. "I'll be glad to argue David E. George with you," he says with a West Texas accent. "Which side you want me to take?"
I insist I want his true opinion, so he decides to argue both sides of the case. He begins with the factors in favor of George's authenticity, counting them off on the fingers of his right hand: "He looked like Booth. He was about the right age. He'd had a broken leg; Booth broke his leg when he jumped to the stage and got his spur tangled in the flag. David E. George had a flattened-out finger, so did Booth. George was a bad Shakespearean actor, so was Booth.
"On the other hand!" Dortch says. After a dramatic pause, he begins to count the reasons for George's fraudulence, literally on his other hand. "One, anybody could have a broken leg, or limp and say he had a broken leg. Two, what would a bunch of uneducated rednecks know about Shakespeare? He could have been faking that."
"But what do you think?" I interrupt.
"I think he said it to get people to buy him drinks."
The first man, whose name is Glen McIntyre, chips in. "We don't want to throw water on your project, but…" According to McIntyre's theory, George, who was a drug addict and perhaps schizophrenic, might have believed his own claim. McIntyre adds a theory an acquaintance of his came up with, which is that George had made his living passing himself off as Booth at opera houses and theaters on the frontier before Booth became a notorious assassin.
McIntyre tells about the local David E. George Society, where the only requirement for membership is to have an opinion about George's authenticity and be willing to argue the point.
"That society is more or less a joke," Dortch says.
"You guys seem kind of impatient with the George story," I observe.
"The trouble with people in Enid," Dortch says, "is they want a tourist attraction, but they don't want to charge admission. Enid has so many historically interesting personalities; it's a shame that our claim to fame is some dead old drunken fraud." He lists Clyde Cessna of airplane fame, the inventor of the Geronimo car, and an astronaut whose name he can't immediately recall. Then he tells about Dolly Douthitt.
Mrs. Douthitt was a pioneer who claimed a homestead in the county in 1893, the year Enid came into existence. Her first historically noteworthy act was in 1904, the year after David George's suicide. Having surprised her husband in the barn during a romantic interlude with a maid, Mrs. Douthitt shot him on the spot. Before dying of the wound, Mr. Douthitt made out a will leaving his wife a share of his estate on the condition she never remarry. His will also asked that she not be prosecuted for his murder—a dying wish that was granted.
|Richard III's father:
O tiger's heart, wrapped in a woman's hide.
Mrs. Douthitt was only 31, and though she abided by her dead husband's injunction against remarriage, she took a lover. This man apparently did something to displease his paramour, for one morning as he lay sleeping, she castrated him with a straight razor. The man ran from the house and traveled on foot to the hospital. Along the way he crossed a creek bottom and paused to say good morning to the paperboy. Despite losing a long trail's worth of blood, he survived. Mrs. Douthitt again escaped prosecution.
But her difficulties weren't over. One of her daughters went insane. Another, who had the memorable name of Mona Loma Thelma Pearl Douthitt Hourahan, became despondent over her husband's supposed infidelities. She had to try six drugstores before she found one that would sell her cyanide—perhaps the druggists remembered the case of David E. George. When she did score some cyanide, she used it to dispatch her husband and herself. "Life and men are such disappointments," her suicide note explained.
Two years after her daughter's suicide, Dolly Douthitt, having run into financial trouble, found herself in court to answer several lawsuits. She acted as her own attorney, and her defense ran as follows: "You fiends, you sons of bitches, I will get you all!" So saying, she produced a pistol and began shooting. Her first bullet lodged in the empty jury box. Her second was apparently aimed at the groin of opposing counsel. It went slightly high, puncturing the man's intestines 13 times. He fell to the floor with a law book in his hands. This he handed to a fellow attorney, asking him to return it to the mutual acquaintance who had lent it.
Another attorney ran out of the courtroom and into the street, where he is alleged to have tripped and rolled to the far curb. Two more attorneys took shelter under a table. Mrs. Douthitt's third shot was meant for the judge, but it only marred the sleeve of his tweed coat. Her fourth effort, a clean miss, was directed at yet another attorney, who tossed a file full of papers into Mrs. Douthitt's face. The judge, having apparently tired of the matter, descended from his bench, seized Mrs. Douthitt from behind, and choked her until her tongue protruded and her grip on the gun loosened. She was sent to a mental institution.
"So if you want criminals," Dortch concludes, "David E. George is not even the best murderer Enid has to offer."
5 Alternate Histories
Accounts of Booth's activities after his hypothetical escape from Garrett's tobacco shed are staggering in their variety. Newspapers reported Booth sightings for decades after 1865, sometimes in the tongue-in-cheek spirit familiar to followers of current Elvis encounters. Booth continued his acting career in Brazil under the name Unos, or he escaped to Europe on a steamer. His latter-day job descriptions included schoolteacher, house painter, and buffalo wagon driver. He lived in New Orleans or Atlanta, died in California or Indiana, England or India. "There's a whole slew of them in Mississippi," says author and filmmaker Michael W. Kauffman, who wrote a book on Booth. Kauffman has recorded more than 40 claimants to the title of "the real Booth."
In one of Booth's several Tennessee incarnations, a man named John W. Burks sought shelter at the Brigham farm near Erin after the war. He soon won the love of the young lady of the house, a Miss Georgia Brigham, but told her he could not marry because circumstances forced him to live under an assumed name. His wardrobe of velvet suits and silk hats impressed neighbors, as did his apparently ample supply of gold. Burks confessed to being Booth on at least two occasions, and his neighbors believed him to be the legitimate article. He died of typhoid in 1871. Journalist T. H. Alexander, who reported the Burks case in 1932, attributed the credulity of the "romance-starved countryside" to the hard life of Southerners during Reconstruction. Alexander also noted dryly that Burks misspelled "Wilkes" when he autographed a photo for Georgia Brigham.
Granbury, Texas, also has its own Booth (and, incidentally, its own Jesse James). John St. Helen came to the Granbury area in the early 1870s. St. Helen was a flamboyant bartender and rogue known for his dapper dress, his courtly manners, and his barroom conversation, which was studded with orations from Shakespeare. When a minor legal matter involving a liquor license required a court appearance, St. Helen, averse to contact with the law, hired an attorney named Finis L. Bates to help him pay his way out of the scrape. In 1872, St. Helen, sick and fearing for his life, allegedly confessed to Bates that he was Booth. St. Helen recovered his health and eventually left the area. In 1898, Bates, having apparently spent years researching the Lincoln assassination, was ready to present his theory of Booth's continued survival to the government. He tried to claim the bounty on Booth by turning in his former client. The soldiers who shot the man in Garrett's tobacco shed had already collected the reward, and Bates was informed the government had "no interest" in the matter. Bates's next gambit was to propose a book exposing St. Helen. No publisher was interested.
Whether St. Helen actually made a confession is a debatable point. Some of his contemporaries said the confession was exactly the sort of thing he might have said to young Bates as a joke. Years earlier, St. Helen had confessed to being a son of Marshall Michel Ney. Ney, a battlefield commander under Napoleon, was the subject of escape legends like those surrounding Booth. Officially executed as a traitor after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Ney was said to have used his Masonic connections to escape to America, where he lived as a schoolteacher.
When the story of David E. George hit the newspapers in 1903, lawyer Finis Bates appeared in Enid, claiming George was really St. Helen and both were Booth. Despite his earlier efforts to cash in, Bates wept at the sight of George's corpse and called it "my old friend St. Helen." His renewed claims on the bounty were fruitless. His second attempt at a book found a publisher. The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, published in 1907, presents an intricate biography of Booth after Garrett's farm, much of it based on statements St. Helen supposedly made to Bates in Texas.
From the time of David E. George's death, Bates had company—and competition—in his quest to turn George into cash. A woman wrote to Enid claiming to be Booth's daughter by a post-war marriage and inquiring after her legacy. A traveling salesman named in one of George's wills showed up to claim the estate. The trouble was that George seemed to make a will whenever he went on a bender and then forget about it when he sobered up. He also had a habit of willing away property he'd never owned.
At his death, George had precisely two cents in his pocket. Inquiries revealed a further estate worth $12. The various heirs vanished.
At the public library in Enid, I approach the man at the desk.
"I'm looking for information on the mummy of John—"
He stops me with the weary nod and directs me to the Marquis James Room upstairs. There I find two folders fat with press clippings and photocopied chapters.
One newspaper article reproduces a photo of Booth—one of the most often photographed human beings in that early photographic era. I glance up to a row of photos on the wall—Clyde Cessna, the Geronimo automobile, and other such Enid notables. There's David E. George's corpse in a chair with a newspaper spread in its lap. It's the same photo I've seen at Garfield Furniture and the Museum of the Cherokee Strip, but a particularly large and clean print. George's face happens to be turned the same way Booth's is in the photocopy before me. I get a chill, because they look so much alike it's hard not to see them as the same man.
6 The Mad Hatter
|Richard III:
And from that torment I will free myself,
Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.
Abraham Lincoln died long before Enid came into being, but the city's folklore is full of connections to the martyred president. Besides Booth, a first cousin of Lincoln's is said to have lived in Enid, and the son of a tutor who worked for the Lincolns settled in the nearby town of Ames. And then there's Boston Corbett, a man whose name is often preceded in popular accounts by the word mad.
Born Thomas H. Corbett in London, England, in 1832, he moved with his parents to New York when he was seven. As a young man, Corbett married and took up a career as a hatter. His wife died in childbirth, and Corbett immersed himself in the Bible and in meditations on sin. His solution to the problem of temptations of the flesh was to castrate himself with a pair of scissors. In 1858, Corbett took the name of the city where he was baptized as his own to commemorate his rebirth.
When the Civil War began, Corbett ardently opposed the South. He hated slavery and thought the South was acting in the service of the Devil. He signed up with the 12th New York Regiment.
By 1864 he was a prisoner of war, serving part of his time in Andersonville. That notorious camp starved prisoners to the bone, reducing people to living skeletons like those in German death camps 80 years later. At one point Andersonville produced 100 corpses a day, and scavenging animals defiled the shallow graves at night. At the war's end Andersonville cemetery held 13,000 graves. Corbett didn't have to wait for the end of the war; he returned to the North in a prisoner exchange in November 1864, but his health was broken. After a medical furlough, he returned to duty in what was expected to be a non-combat post, as part of the regiment's headquarters detachment. One of the duties of this detachment was to ride in Lincoln's funeral procession. That was the funeral that made flowers an American death-custom.
Despite their expectation of light duty, Corbett's detachment was sent to pursue Booth. After three days in enemy territory with little food, they found him. Some histories have Corbett shooting Booth against orders in a fit of patriotic fervor, or even in response to a divine command; others portray him as an inside man sent to silence a ringer before he could talk. The truth, according to Corbett biographer Stephen G. Miller, is that the men of the detachment were under no orders to take Booth alive. Corbett fired when Booth raised his pistol to kill another man in Corbett's detachment. Corbett aimed for Booth's arm, but actually inflicted the fatal neck wound.
After the war Corbett spent time in New York City and in Camden, New Jersey. He preached and worked as a hatter, though poor health limited his activities. In 1878 a political connection landed him a job as a doorkeeper for the Kansas state legislature. He continued to preach, becoming a popular speaker across Kansas. His faith was not of the armchair variety; he was perpetually low on funds because he gave his money away to the poor.
Although he was widely regarded as a hero, Corbett received hate mail from Booth supporters. One letter said, "Nemesis is on your heels"—it was signed "John Wilkes Booth." Such harassment seems to have changed Corbett. He developed a reputation as a man quick to draw his gun, though he never shot anybody. "He was wound pretty tight," says Miller. One day Corbett went through the state capitol with his pistols drawn, issuing threats to legislators and others who got in his way. No one quite understood the cause of his rage. Having been subdued without any real violence, Corbett was committed to an asylum.
After more than a year of incarceration, Corbett made his escape. The inmates were on a nature walk when Corbett slipped away and stole a messenger's pony. He turned up at the house of a friend named Thatcher in Neodesha, Kansas. Thatcher had met Corbett in Andersonville, and later had petitioned for his friend's release from the asylum. He harbored his old comrade for several days.
And this is where Corbett's fate, like Booth's, splits in two. One version of history—the "official" one, if there is such a thing—claims Corbett was disgruntled that he had been treated as a madman in the country he had served so well. He vowed to leave the United States forever. Thatcher put him on a train for Mexico, and he was never seen in this country again.
The alternate version has Corbett turning up in Oklahoma around the turn of the century. A man named John Corbit worked as a patent medicine salesman here; his employer believed him to be Boston Corbett. Later, this same snake-oil salesman applied for the pension due to Corbett as a veteran. He was living in Enid in 1902 and 1903; he never offered any comment during the media coverage of David E. George's death in that city. A government investigator denied Corbit's claim on the grounds that he didn't match the description of Corbett—he was, in fact, a head taller. The towering impostor did hard time for fraud.
Another variation has Jesse James poisoning George in Enid. James, who officially died 20 years earlier, is said to have accomplished this feat in his role as leader of a secret cabal of Masons. Yet another version plays on the fact that Corbett escaped the asylum in 1888, the same year Jack the Ripper began his career in London. Both men were violent; both were on record as having a problem with prostitutes. The connection is obvious, at least to some.
7 Mummified
Like every other part of the legend, George's mummification has been explained in six or eight contradictory ways. One story claims the arsenic with which George killed himself did the job accidentally. The most plausible story comes from the pen of the undertaker, William Broadwell Penniman. It reads like Frankenstein, but, as one commentator noted, with more slapstick. The afternoon of the suicide, Penniman opened George's right carotid artery and inserted an intravenous tube. He did this, he later wrote, "more to keep familiar with the anatomy of this part of the body than with the idea of preserving or disinfecting it." Penniman made a bloody mess of this procedure. A witness fainted.
When Mrs. Harper identified George as Booth, Penniman claims to have issued the smooth reply, "That being the case, I believe I will embalm him and keep him." Penniman made no effort to check Mrs. Harper's information because the Booth story was "cheap advertising," and he didn't want it debunked. When Finis Bates announced his intention of coming from his home in Memphis to see the corpse, Penniman coated it in Vaseline, wrapped it up, and hid it. He would take no chances of Bates being "an irrational Southerner" with designs on the body.
After meeting Bates and hearing his tale of John St. Helen, Penniman seems to have changed his mind. He no longer regarded the Booth yarn as a temporary gimmick for advertising his furniture store. Now he began to see the possibility of real money. Accordingly, he made a further attempt at embalming, injecting a formaldehyde solution into the large arteries in the thighs, apparently in combination with an arsenic compound. "The effect was far from satisfactory," he noted. "Within a few weeks the skin had the drawn and tanned look of an old mummy." It was, Penniman confessed, an unnecessary procedure, which he followed with another. He repeated the embalming so that a salesman who supplied him with embalming chemicals could participate. The salesman, who was allowed to work on the body cavity, thought it would be a good selling point in his business to have embalmed Booth. His company used a photo of George's corpse in a trade journal ad.
It was Penniman, abetted by Bates, who posed George's corpse with its eyes open and a newspaper spread in its lap. At Bates's suggestion, he combed George's hair to resemble the coif in a tintype of St. Helen. The photograph of George in this position was taken before the "drawn and tanned" look set in; his appearance was still lifelike.
Penniman recruited local boys to work as tour guides. The boys—one of whom was the historian Marquis James—would greet people at the train station, telling them the body of Booth could be viewed for a dime. Enid briefly became a tourist stop. Penniman claimed some 10,000 people had viewed the body at his establishment. He made good money with his scheme, but the body suffered. Tourists swiped its collar buttons—more than 50 of them—for souvenirs and took locks of its hair. Once Penniman caught a tourist trying to carve off the corpse's ear with a pocket knife.
8 Sideshow Days
When the mummy's drawing power began to dwindle, Penniman finally handed it over to Bates, who had been claiming it since the beginning. Bates planned to make the mummy a sideshow, but couldn't raise the cash. So he rented it out to other exhibitors, and John Wilkes Booth, or at least his facsimile, was back in show business. The corpse traveled as part of a show featuring lavish live marriages and freak animals. It emerged unscathed from a train wreck that killed eight people, which may have been when it picked up the legend of a Tut-style curse. Tutankhamen had only recently been dug up, and such stories were in vogue. It got kidnapped and ransomed. It was offered to Henry Ford for his museum in Dearborn, Michigan; Ford had the mummy investigated and found its credentials dubious.
By 1931, the mummy had somehow fallen into the possession of a Chicago woman named Agnes Black, who purportedly bought it for $8,000. Black, and the Chicago Press Club, arranged for a group of Chicago doctors to perform an autopsy to establish the mummy's authenticity. The doctors, led by Orlando Scott, used Finis Bates's book as a starting point. Bates listed Booth's physical imperfections: a scar over his right eyebrow, the result of an accident during a stage duel; the left ankle broken in his leap to the stage at Ford's theater; and a deformed right thumb crushed by a piece of stage gear. The thumb injury seems to have been unknown in Booth's life before 1865. Bates apparently found out about it from a woman who claimed to have married yet another post-war Tennessee Booth.
Using gross examination and X-rays, the doctors supposedly found evidence of all three anomalies. An autopsy report signed by half a dozen physicians was issued to the press. The surgical scar on Booth's neck is not mentioned in the report. But it is mentioned in an affidavit signed by two doctors who refused to sign the report. One of these renegade physicians attested that he had used a fluoroscope to look for scar tissue on the mummy's neck—and found none. He said Orlando Scott had asked him to lie about this finding and go along with the "publicity stunt." Dr. Scott told newspapers the X-rays had revealed a metal fragment in the mummy's stomach, which the doctors retrieved by cutting through the mummy's back. The fragment proved to be part of a signet ring bearing the letter B. The autopsy report does not mention the ring.
Booth scholar Blaine Houmes, who is also a physician and a deputy medical examiner, has seen the X-rays. He says they show no sign of a broken leg.
In 1932 a retired carnival performer named Barney Harkin owned the mummy. Harkin had worked as a tattooed man before settling down as a landlord in Chicago. The mummy lured him back. The eccentric Harkin believed Napoleon had escaped after Waterloo and a dummy had been sent to St. Helena in his place. That John Wilkes Booth was for sale in Chicago did not strike him as utterly improbable.
Harkin and his wife, Agnes, ran their show from a truck in which they slept at night, the mummy bunking between them for safety. Barney handled the gate; Agnes lectured the crowd, showing the Chicago X-rays and turning the mummy to show its shortened left leg. Hecklers sometimes claimed the figure was wax; she silenced them by rolling the mummy on its side and opening a flap in its back that had been cut at the autopsy. The mummy wore nothing but khaki shorts, and between shows Agnes Harkin lacquered its skin with Vaseline and combed its hair, which had gone white since the day David E. George expired with an atrocious dye job decades earlier.
Barney Harkin toured with the mummy into the 1950s. He died a destitute widower in Philadelphia. His landlady seized the mummy in lieu of his unpaid rent. The building where she stored it was demolished, and the mummy's trail since then has been difficult to follow. Scattered reports had sideshows exhibiting the Booth mummy as recently as the mid-70s, alongside a pickled set of Siamese twins and the car in which Jayne Mansfield was decapitated. All sources seem to agree it's now in the hands of "a private collector," but this person declines to speak with the press.
Ken Hawkes, an autopsy assistant from Memphis, spent a decade searching for the mummy. If he ever finds it, he'll happily buy it. But he'd settle for a few clippings and scrapings for testing and maybe a full-body X-ray. That sort of evidence might settle the debate for good. He estimates he has checked out 2,000 leads. He once came across a collector who owned the mummified leg of a victim in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and other collectors who had complete mummies of 1920s gangsters. One lead pointed to Seattle, where Ye Olde Curiosity Shop exhibits a mummy named Sylvester. Sylvester had indeed worked under the name John Wilkes Booth at one point in his own sideshow career, but old photos of the mummified David E. George make it clear that Sylvester was only a knock-off. Sylvester's true identity has never been established.
Hawkes located several mummies kept in homes. Some of these are relatives of the people they now reside with. According to Hawkes, the publicity surrounding David E. George in the early 1900s created a fad for mummifying relatives with a combination of arsenic and formaldehyde.
Blaine Houmes says the X-ray pictures from 1931 are studded with granules of a heavy metal—doubtless arsenic. If the mummy still exists, the concentration of arsenic in its tissues makes it a health hazard. The elusive "private collector" may be breathing in death every day, dying of slow poison even as he hoards his immortal emblem.
9 We Belong to the Land
Four months after my first expedition to Enid, I make another. The town has been invaded by a heat wave and a steer convention. The sign on a bank says 103 degrees and the marquees on the hotels say WELCOME INTERNATIONAL BRANGUS ASSOCIATION. Brangus are a breed of cattle compounded of Brahman and Angus. I go to see the Brangus at the fairgrounds and, though no events are going on at this particular time, I see people in Wranglers and oversized belt buckles grooming their velvety black castratos. They've been brushed to an exquisite lacquer, like contestants in a beauty pageant. When a steer looks at me, it's like gazing back into two cups of black coffee.
I visit the cemetery where lies the body of Dolly Douthitt, the colorful murderer the man at the museum told me about. The trees all around have a curiously ordered appearance, even for a cemetery. After a while I realize why. All of them, pines as well as elms, have been pruned up to about 10 feet, so that the whole expanse of the cemetery is visible under a green canopy. Through that canopy I can see hawks wheeling in the clear sky. The tune of the Oklahoma state song, from the Broadway musical, suddenly crawls through my mind: "Sit alone and talk, and watch a hawk makin' lazy circles in the sky. We know we belong to the land…"
The grave is easy to find. The marker is a gray pedestal inscribed DOUTHITT, on top of which stands a six-foot black cylinder with shimmering flecks; on top of that stands a six-foot white angel holding flowers. Flanking this are two knee-high cylinders for husband and wife. The murdered husband's epitaph reads, "God's ways are mysterious. I am not afraid to die but want all those I have wronged to forgive me." Dolly's cylinder has nothing but her name and dates. Three of her children are buried in this patch of ground, all having died young; one is the suicidal Loma. The graves are pocked with the holes left by cicadas when they emerged from burrows to shuck their shells and become winged adults. I hear those insects in the barbered trees, singing in the heat.
Originally published (with additional photography) in This Land: Spring 2016]]>
I am safe,
nine different passwords,
I am secure.
New model with crash sensor,
we are safe,
no needles for my kids,
they are secure.
No secondary colors,
no strangers with strange names.
Let's just play it safe.
Pistol under the pillow,
pistol in the purse,
pistol in the pocket,
semi-automatic in the safe.
No more movie theaters,
no more marathons,
no more Bible groups,
no more company parties.
More SPF,
more insurance,
more check-ups,
more pills,
more cages.
We are safe.
Originally published in This Land: Spring 2016
Jack Sawyer caught a glimpse of Carlos's diminutive wife Marguerite stealing across a hallway into the kitchen, as Carlos led him into his workshop adjacent to the kitchen. Wood chips curled yellow on the workbench and floor under the light of a bare bulb. Hanging askew in a cheap black frame on the wall above the workbench was a fading photograph of Carlos when he was a young man, grinning at the camera with three friends, one of whom was Jack's father. They were all holding shotguns and pheasants. The photo had been there, just as crooked, for as long as Jack could remember.
"Your father was younger in that picture than you are now," Carlos pointed out. That had been true for some time, and he had pointed it out before. He blew invisible dust off the figure of a horse that he had carved out of wood and handed it to Jack, who turned it this way and that in the light. He had painted the horse Chinese red, and its ornate saddle and other details in gold.
"This is fine," Jack said, not taking his eyes off it. "She'll like this. How much?"
Carlos waved the question away. "Nothing. It is a gift from me. And my wife." Jack noted a certain formality in the way he said this. Negotiations had begun.
"No, Carlos. It's a gift from me. And my wife. How much?"
"Please. Just take it. It was my pleasure. I've known her since she was a child."
"She's still a child, Carlos."
Carlos neither agreed nor disagreed. A moth fluttered softly around the bulb above his head.
Jack set the carving on the bench between them. "You are robbing me," he said.
Carlos grinned. "I am robbing you by giving it to you for free?"
"Yes. Now, how much? I'm serious, Carlos."
Carlos shrugged. "Twenty dollars?"
"That won't do. I couldn't possibly pay you less than sixty for this fine work."
"Sixty? That is out of the question! Now, you are trying to rob me. She's a beautiful girl, your Elizabeth, and I've loved her since she was born. I remember the day."
The two men frowned at the carved red horse sitting on the bench between them. Cooking smells began to permeate the air from the kitchen on the other side of the wall.
"I'd accept thirty," Carlos said at last.
"Fifty. And not one penny less."
Jack stood up as if to go.
"Alright. Forty. But I don't like it one bit." Carlos waved in annoyance at the moth, which fled to the shadows.
Jack produced his wallet. Once the money changed hands, the tension between the two men dissipated. Carlos pulled a nearly empty half pint of scotch and two shot glasses from his tool cabinet, and dribbled a tiny measure for each of them.
"To Elizabeth," Carlos said. "A beautiful girl." They held the scotch in their mouths for a thoughtful moment, eyes half closed. The smells of cooking had turned to smells of burning. Carlos seemed not to notice. "Now, just so you don't rob me completely blind, let me at least give her this." He opened a drawer and pulled out a pair of wooden combs, carved and inlaid with tortoise shell. He set them beside the horse.
Jack nodded appreciatively. "Thank you, Carlos. I'll see that she gets them."
They heard a thump and a muffled clang from the kitchen.
"You will, of course, stay for dinner."
Jack sniffed discreetly. "No. I will not. I need to get home. I'm grillin' tonight"
A flicker of amusement showed on Carlos's face. "Well. Next time, then."
"Yes. Next time."
The oak forest shrouding the Cookson Hills had turned copper with the season, and now glowed like coals in the evening sun behind and above the abandoned storefronts of Rainwater, Oklahoma.
"We're out of limes, Jack. Mr. Sawyer."
He looked sideways at her. "Well, that's a problem."
"He said to tell you to order something simple."
"I thought I had."
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and looked across the empty brick street at nothing. "Because he's tired," she added.
"If he's so tired, tell him to come out here and join me in the fresh air."
"He don't like it out here."
"Would bourbon and water be simple enough?"
"I'll ask."
He sat at a wobbly wrought iron table in a corner of the bar patio and studied the coppered hills. There were shadowed folds in those hills. Some he knew well, some he would never know. He remembered cutting firewood up there with his father near the cabin that his father and uncles had built. Their own fathers and grandfathers, and men like them, had laid out the streets of the town, and built the stores and banks and the railroad station.
He couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old. They'd spent the day, the two of them, working, relaxing, and working some more. At midday his father built a fire from hickory deadfall, in a small, bright clearing, and grilled hamburgers, which they ate between slices of white bread that soaked up the smoky juices, accompanied by cups of ice-cold milk that he poured from a glass bottle. At the end of the day they stacked half of the firewood on the cabin porch and loaded the rest in the back of the pickup. They stood together on the porch and watched rain dimple the skin of the lake cradled among the darkening gray hills.
As they drove down out of the hills in the dark and rain, he noticed his father's sighs and asked him if he was tired. "Yes, but it's a good tired. Tired from a hard day's work, instead of a hard day's worry. We'll sleep good tonight. You were a big help today." He still remembered how pleased that had made him feel.
As he remembered that day, it occurred to him that the work of building the world had already been done before he was born. The stones had already been stacked, the pipes had been laid, and the planks set side by side. He only occupied the spaces vacated by the men who had done the work. His own work, if it could be called that, was managing the inheritance his father left behind and maintaining properties. Sometimes, it seemed, he mostly answered phones.
His reverie was interrupted by a young couple on horseback in from the country, riding side by side down the brick street. The young woman was sitting very erect, in the same way Alice had, back when they'd had horses, and she looked fine and proud as they passed. The echo of the horses' hooves made them sound farther away than they were. As if he was hearing only the echo and not the thing itself. The air began to stir and chill.
It had been cloudless, like this, but also blustery, the wind laced with cold, on the day Elizabeth was born. Everyone's darling. That's what Alice calls her, although never in her presence. Abruptly, he stood and set money on the table, under his emptied glass.
"Mr. Sawyer." The busboy, about sixteen, and twisting his hands in his stained apron, had instantly appeared when he'd stood. "Tell Elizabeth that Danny says happy birthday."
"Yes, sir. She'll know." He held Jack's gaze.
The steak was marinating in a plate on the counter. Alice stood at the stove in their cheerfully lit kitchen, stirring fried potatoes and onions in a cast iron skillet with her right hand and reading from a paperback novel in her left hand. She looked over her glasses at him.
"That took a while," she said. The potatoes sizzled and hissed.
"Carlos wanted to talk. Where's Elizabeth?"
"You're going to want to get that grill fired up pronto or I'll have to fry that steak in the skillet. Don't think I won't."
He sat at the table. "Okay. Where's Elizabeth?"
Alice set the book facedown on the counter, turned the fire down under the potatoes and put a lid on the skillet. "She's in Tahlequah with her friends. Did you bring it?" She sat across the table.
"Which friends? It's almost dark."
"Just a couple of her girlfriends. They're practicing cheers. Then they're going out to eat. Where is it?"
"Who's driving?"
"She'll be fine, Jack. She's not a child anymore."
"Apparently, that's a matter of opinion."
She smiled at him. "You're a good daddy. Now, let me see it."
He pulled the carved horse and the combs out of his jacket pocket and set them on the table. She picked up the horse and turned it this way and that in the light, as he had done. He liked looking at her hands, her nimble fingers, her chipped red nails. When she finished examining the horse, she studied one of the combs.
"Beautiful," she said. He could see that she was pleased.
"The combs are a gift from Carlos and Marguerite."
"Everyone's darling. Looks like we're all ready for tomorrow night. This was the last thing. I'll get these wrapped up while you're grilling. You're going to get on that, now, right? How much did you pay?"
"Fifty," he lied. "Hey, let's go up to the old cabin next weekend. Just you and me."
"Fifty? For this? He robbed you, Jack."
"I know. But I think she'll like it."
"Yes. She'll love it." She looked at him then, and continued looking at him.
"Alright, alright, I'm going," he said. They rose and she went back to the stove, turned off the fire, lifted the lid to a burst of aromatic steam, and stirred the potatoes and onions one last time.
"Why do you want to go up to the old cabin?" she asked, with her back to him.
He took his hand from the door knob. "I don't know. I just remembered how nice it is up there this time of year."
She tapped the spatula twice on the rim of the skillet and put the lid back on. She turned to him. "Just the two of us?"
"Won't you be worried about Elizabeth?" she teased.
"I'm sure she'll be fine."
"It's been a long time since we've been up there. We'll have to clean it up." He saw a light of anticipation in her eyes.
"Yes, I know." He wanted to clean it up with her, sweep the cobwebs out of the corners, sweep up the mouse droppings, wash dust off the countertops with hot, soapy water. He wanted to do these things and more to pay penance. For what, exactly, he couldn't have said.
Once the cabin was clean and orderly, he would gather firewood while she prepared a meal. After they'd eaten, he'd build a fire in the fireplace and roll the squeaky bed into the main room. They would make it up with fresh linens and blankets from town. And then they would take each other to bed.
"Are you going to light that grill or aren't you?" Alice asked. She picked up the carved horse and combs from the table. Jack stepped out into the dark.
Originally published in This Land: Spring 2016]]>
he'd stumble in the diner ragged
as a dandelion in a dust storm:
ripped jeans, wrecked hat, boots
busted. Hacking his smoker's cough.
He'd sit at the counter, bum a cig,
stir his coffee too loud staring—blank,
glum—through fly-specked glass.
He'd say he was waiting on a ride.
You'd think, Chicken shit. Same SOB
you saw loafing under a hackberry
while you were sweating your ass off
loading hay, found waiting in the loft
when you got to the barn. Lurking
on her front porch when you tried to
slip away in the night. Running
his mouth in the AA bleachers. Drunk
at the VFW bar. Once, you and some
buddies tried chasing him down,
coon-dogged him halfway to Idabel
before he disappeared—poof—into
open prairie just north of the river.
And then: you'd look up from your
coffee and find him gone, nothing
but a thin curl of smoke rising
from his stubbed-out cigarette,
the front door closed, dead-shut,
its little bell mute, un-tinkled.
And you'd think: Good riddance,
and snap flat your newspaper.
Thank God he doesn't stay longer.
Originally published in This Land: 2016
John turned him down. He was in no shape to alter his work habits, and, more seriously, the Gosneys were dealing with the death of their only son, Johnboy, in a harvest accident. John had been burned out by his profession for some time anyway, and he was struggling to regain his zest for life. Kris was worried about him and their family's future.
But weeks later, after more calls and visits, John began to listen more intently, knowing what was at stake. Kris vividly recalls him announcing late one night, "I'm going to try this."
John wondered what in the world he would do without the "reliable" chemicals and pesticides that had become commonplace in farming for decades. Green, uniform fields were the norm—a sure and steady source of income, critical to contemporary farm practices. John had been successful on a large scale, managing his own places and signing agreements to take care of others as well. He was renowned for his acreage. He couldn't cite the exact figures, but liked to tease others by saying, "Well, I believe I have about 40 miles of fence I cover, enough to stretch from here to Enid." What could he possibly do when his fields didn't look the same as they always had? He needed to read about soil health, crop rotations, and how patience is the ultimate virtue for such an enterprise. The risks were many, some potentially devastating.
Sure enough, for a while their fields contrasted sadly with those nearby: others looking healthy, theirs paltry, uneven, bare in spots. It took three years before they noticed promising changes, and the amount of wheat yields increased ever so slightly. Even better, it was high quality, confirmed by the experts at the local elevators. As the wheat improved, so did the profit margins when the expenses of "medicating" the fields declined.
One day, a neighbor dropped by and marveled, "John, I don't see any weeds out there. What herbicides have you been using?"
"Nothing," John replied. "Not one thing."
"Impossible," his visitor scoffed and walked away unconvinced.
What once seemed impossible has become a sustainable success, which the Gosneys are reminded of every time Kris transports more than 100 five-gallon buckets of organic wheat flour, wheat berries, and other products around the state to various businesses. And now when they make speaking appearances at farmers' markets and educational institutions, their compelling story of preserving the land, practicing healthy production, and promoting nutritional awareness is proudly told and enthusiastically received.
The future of their enterprise remains a mystery as they age. But for now, the Gosney story continues in an area of Oklahoma that would seem hostile to nearly any agricultural endeavor, where farm-savvy immigrants, many of them Russian-German, started eking out a living over 100 years ago—their best resources being winter wheat seeds (often brought from their new homes in the hems of skirts and cuffs of pants) and their determination to succeed.
No one knows for sure how the Gloss (or is it "Glass"?) Mountains, the flat-topped gypsum hills rising near Cheyenne Valley about halfway between Enid and Woodward on highway 412, were named. Local speculation says an early English visitor must have been the culprit. Seeing sparkling shards of rock (the result of high selenite content) one sunny day, he exclaimed he saw "glass" in the dirt, but it came out "gloss" instead. Residents delight in arguing this fine point of pronunciation for inquiring visitors.
But everyone does agree about the harsh conditions, lending to the area's "stark beauty" ("with emphasis on stark," John likes to say). Much of John and Kris Gosney's extensive holdings are near these hills, where Cheyenne Valley's tiny abandoned school remains visible just north of the road—a reminder of Oklahoma's rural traditions and isolated educational venues.
The scenery and history of the area testify to the dichotomous experience of Cheyenne Valley life. Those glassy/glossy shards rest on a thin layer of topsoil, subject to drought, wind, and extreme temperature variation—sometimes as much as 80 degrees one way or another in just a few hours. Insects and other varmints are a constant presence, sometimes a menace. Rattlesnakes inhabit the fields and hills, and the area was a haven for pre-statehood robbers and gangs. Even as recently as May of 2011, the FBI tracked one Sandlin Smith, a suspect in the bombing of a Florida mosque, to a camp he set in the area, where he refused to surrender and was killed in a shootout with federal agents.
But the land hasn't been completely unkind for some who reside there, as the abundance of oil pumps on either side of 412 illustrates. The ease of drawing a fortune from underground, compared to the difficulty of producing healthy crops on the surface, is an irony not lost on residents. John says it is hard to find a place where the struggle between man and nature is more frustrating: "Sometimes I'm moved to tears by a scene at dawn or dusk, but for such a beautiful place, it is difficult to accept how hard it is to grow crops."
Even for those who do strike it rich, nothing really changes. A local banker once noted in regard to the fortunate few, "Most of them put their money away quietly and you'd never know they have it!" Their character, whether nurturing crops in hard times or depositing "easy money" in the banks, is resolutely consistent—"private and courteous to a fault," he reports. "No one who is in trouble ever has to wait long for help out there."
Such traditions shaped the lives of the Gosneys and Ratzlaffs throughout the late 19th, 20th, and now into the 21st centuries. The Oklahoma Centennial Farms Project recognizes operations that have been maintained by the same family for over 100 years, are at least 40 acres in size, and generate at least $1,000 in yearly revenue. The Gosney and Ratzlaff farms both made the list—a remarkable conjunction of long-term agricultural excellence through a marriage that seemed meant to be.
John, the strong and silent type, grew up with hard workers. His grandfather took random jobs on the railroad to make ends meet, walking 10 miles over rugged terrain to reach the station. John's father returned to the area after World War II and negotiated an agreement with a landowner a few miles from the original family place. They built a house and resided there continually, using the same terms that were settled a half-century before. The place still stands next to a creek below the Gloss Mountains. John wears the traditions, it would appear, on his strong shoulders; his quiet demeanor reflects that of a bygone-era western movie star, and his crushing handshake can cause a visitor's knees to buckle.
John vividly remembers when better times came for the family. His dad drove up one day in the late '50s with a truck bed filled with fertilizer that would ensure sturdy and consistent crop growth. The family all pitched in to spread the materials, thus joining a trend in farming that swept the area and helped lay the foundation for modern corporate farms.
Kris's abilities are also "come-by naturally." Great-grandfather Ratzlaff made the Land Run of 1893, filed his claim, and returned to Kansas to bring his father back to the dugout he had constructed. He dutifully went about his first legal responsibility to "improve the acreage" by planting 1,000 trees, one of which still stands. On that property, the first baby in Major County, Kris's uncle, was born. One day while Mr. Ratzlaff was gone, the notorious and violent Yeager and Black gangs visited the house. They requested nothing more than food and promised to depart after a meal. So, naturally, Mrs. Ratzlaff prepared a good spread for all. Kris also recalls her grandmother taking eggs and other goods to town for sale, perhaps presaging Kris's current drives around the state with organic wheat and meat products from their farms.
John Gosney and Kris Ratzlaff met at Fairview High School in 1964, when John transferred from Cheyenne Valley. After college at Southwestern in Weatherford, they returned to Fairview to assist in their family enterprises and start some of their own. They began a family—a boy and then two girls—and John began to rent farms at the usual "split" between owner and operator: 1/3 of the crop to the former and 2/3 to the latter. He also took odd jobs to make ends meet. Eventually, as their acreage grew, their primary challenge became obtaining loans to finance chemicals and equipment. Then they hoped for good weather, waited for a decent harvest, and paid off their notes—over and over it went, and tedium set in.
When son Johnboy was two years old, John and Kris found some business opportunities, and some variety, in custom cutting, which became family tradition for over a quarter century. Today, John's mood lightens when he describes following the trail of wheat from Texas north and westward—a summer-long conjunction of farming skill, familiar faces, and technical know-how. His voice softens when he talks about the beauty of the plains and the northwest—"especially Idaho, and not just for the beautiful mountains but the amazing crops they can grow there, on occasion as much as 100 bushels per acre." (In Oklahoma, 35 – 40 bushels is considered excellent.) After the girls reached school age, Kris stayed home with them to work on the farms and take care of local business, leaving the summer travel to John and Johnboy. She is proud of her abilities, both on the business and heavy labor side, although she laments that she can no longer repair machinery as she once could: "I still know how, but am not strong enough."
Johnboy grew to love the lifestyle, local and beyond. He decided one summer to cut wheat in California, so after finishing their regular stops he took the whole operation farther west, moving equipment over the mountains, from farm to farm. He would introduce himself to families by saying, "Hello, I'm John Gosney from Cheyenne Valley, Oklahoma, and I'm here to cut your wheat"—an introduction that at least once led to a doubtful response: "That's great, sonny, but where's the boss?!"
But the notion that this summer work is a carefree and lucrative getaway is misleading; it's exhausting and stressful. A sudden storm can bring the whole operation to a halt. If the heads of the wheat have drooped, hardened, and ripened, even the shortest delay can cause the crop to decline in quality. Timing is everything, and the farmers and roaming harvesters all know that finishing a job in time can be the difference between decent money or not for all involved.
Near the end of the 1995 season, the Gosneys' lives were shattered when Johnboy, age 27, died in a harvest truck accident in Idaho. As is her way, Kris recounts the story with direct and factual precision. John falters momentarily when asked if he ever worked in Idaho again, then says, "Yes, five more years. Johnboy would have expected it. That's why I went back." When asked about the emotional barrage that came with the offer to transform his work practices, especially as he also dealt with such a bitter personal loss, he quietly confides, "I wasn't so sure I was going to make it."
Eventually the Gosneys managed to reinvent themselves through study, hard work, and experimentation, in spite of countless frustrations.[1] They found the notion that they were preserving the land for future generations appealing, and when they met young families around the state who showed interest in their organic crops, they felt part of a new generation who wanted a healthier world for their children.
In 2009, John took a call from a woman who had recently attended one of his farm tours. She asked if John would meet her father who, after hearing her report, wanted to learn more. On the appointed day, the visitor's car stopped in the driveway, and John and Kris excitedly recognized the tall, older man who emerged from the passenger side—Henry Bellmon, two-time Oklahoma governor, U.S. senator, war hero, educator, and certainly one of Oklahoma's most famous farmers. In modest Bellmon style, he introduced himself, apologized for interrupting their day, and went immediately to the point.
"I understand you're raising high-quality wheat without commercial fertilizer or other chemicals most of us rely on," Bellmon said.
"That's right," John said.
"Well," Bellmon replied, "I just wanted to hear how you do that because it seems very unusual to me."
For two hours, John explained their methods. Two years later, John and Kris won the Henry Bellmon Sustainability Award for Environmental Stewardship for their outstanding contributions to the state of Oklahoma.
But the future of John's farms is uncertain now, and the years are slipping by. Kris and John have pondered what might become of their labors, and how their land and know-how might be passed to another generation when they can no longer handle the demands. John reveals the truth of such an endeavor: "It's a hard life, very hard." He's not so sure many would be willing to undertake such a difficult existence.
"These farms have been a part of God's plan for several generations, and we're all the better for it," Kris adds. "I have to think that plan is still in effect, and I've experienced some peace as a result."
Kris pauses and a quickly glances at John before she continues. "I suppose he'll just keep on goin' for now." There's a longer pause. "He just can't bring himself to talk about that much yet. I understand. I do understand."
1. More about John and Kris's practices can be found in Eco-Farm, An Acres U.S.A. Primer by Charles Walters and C.J. Fenzau, which offers a fascinating and eclectic view of the organic movement that incorporates numerous social, academic, scientific, and philosophical principles, many of which are on view at farmers' markets, small and large, around the country.
Originally published in This Land: Spring 2016]]>
His head too close to mine above
worn navy-blue faux-leather,
above the crackling of a boarding announcement
Speaks with a lisping drawl to the woman
Next to him through his shiny braces.
I miss the South.
Some years ago I sat next to a bona fide cowboy
On a plane from Denver to nowhere,
He wore his hat inside the plane.
We talked, as people do on planes, of all
we could think of to fill the time (except
The things one knows one shouldn't discuss).
It was his second flight ever
(the first being from nowhere to Denver)
home from an interview for a job as a ranch manager
A position coveted by many cowboys, I learn.
Once they moved, he told me proudly, his wife
Would home school their daughter.
I kept my opinions on home schooling to myself.
We talked about the wisdom teeth I was having pulled
a few days later—he kindly warned me of dry sockets
and advised that I don't go horseback riding
For at least a week afterwards.
I assured him there was little chance of that.
He asked me what I do (as people who
Have just met each other ask)
I told him about my college classes
Plans for medical school and other
future lofty doctor aspirations.
He asked if I planned to treat humans or animals.
I think he was disappointed with my answer.
The woman next to the man
Behind me guffaws at his joking Southern charm
We're gathering our things
Summoned by numbers
Boarding a plane to somewhere else.
Originally published in This Land: Spring 2016]]>
rolls and wobbles on creaky springs,
creeping over berms on a rutted
two-track with a house of
hay on its back, is inched back
through a doorway just big enough
to let her in, driver climbing out
and crawling under her flatbed
to enter the hell that is this barn,
a hundred-and-twenty-degree
corrugated-tin oven, air
a vortex of flying debris—
dust, grass, weed, vaporized wood
and dung. To live you must learn
to pivot the weight, to be one
with it: the downswing a free-
fall followed in rhythm by a push
on the upthrust. And thus
it's a thing that can be done,
ninety-pound bales heaved,
chucked into mow, stacked
side-down so as not to burn
(hauler's sacred lore), the last
pair in a row "married" in an al-
most too-tight hole. Daylight
growing incrementally around
the load's unstacked edges.
Then, puffs of fresh air—thank
you lord—ice-water slugs,
a dip/smoke/chaw, the swipe
of a bandana across the face.
And then, son, back to square one.]]>
Patti Adams was born in Atlanta, Texas, in 1882. Though her family was never particularly prosperous, she did manage to attend Polytechnic College, which would later become Texas Wesleyan University, in Fort Worth. At 19, she achieved sufficient distinction to be listed among its faculty as Superintendent of Piano Practice. Her talent brought her the opportunity to be featured as a performer in the Texas Building of the St. Louis World's Fair, which during its seven-month run was attended by 18 million people. A reporter later described Patti as "an artist of rare ability, an artist whom it is as pleasant to look upon as to hear. Gifted with a magnificent physique, she adds masculine strength to her feminine delicacy of touch and expression. A musical soul is apparent in all her work."
It was an impressive beginning, but Patti wanted to hone her talent under the best masters, which meant traveling to Europe. Forty years of the Belle Époque had cemented Paris as the cultural center of the universe, the ideal place not only to study but also to be noticed and to make useful connections. Americans with a little money might visit Europe for a year. Nouveau riche industrialists might stay for five or forever, knowing that friends from America would visit or were there already.
"We are now on board the Berlin [a ship of the North German Lloyd line]—Everything is fine & I know we'll have a wonderful trip," Patti wrote on January 29, 1910. With her were Mr. and Mrs. Conlan and their 14-year-old daughter, Hattie. They were fellow Presbyterians from Oklahoma City, where Michael Conlan had invested successfully in real estate and was now treating the family to a year on the Continent. Perhaps they had told Patti about their upcoming trip and urged her to throw in with them.
The ship arrived in Naples on February 9, giving Patti's group the opportunity to backtrack to Paris via Rome, Venice, Florence, and Lucerne. On March 3, Patti finally moved into her Paris residence, the literally named Student Hostel, at 93 Blvd St Michel.
Patti spent the next year exploring Paris, from the catacombs and sewers to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and every palace, chateau, church, museum, theater, monument, and public garden listed in her Baedeker's guide. She was determined to absorb as much of the voluptuous excess of Old World culture as she could. Her recorded insights weren't exceptional, though. About one site she noted: "Many famous people were beheaded here."
Many of the sites that she saw then you can still see today. But definitely envy the performances she attended: "How great is this wonderful Caruso!" she wrote of the opera tenor. "The finest voice I've ever heard. So sweet and full of sobs and tears in places, and his climaxes are so wonderful. He holds a high tone very long, and one doesn't feel at all uneasy about his voice."
About legendary stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, Patti wrote: "Wonderful in the extreme. She is 66 yrs old, but certainly does not show her age. She played the part of Joan beautifully and the audience nearly went wild calling her back 6 times at the end of the 1st act."
Or this: "Heard Fritz Kreisler and Harold Bauer tonight in a grand recital. Kreisler is the best violinist I think I ever heard! He did such wonderful things—not technically, but musically. One number was 'Chant of Louis 13th' and when he started it, I thought it was a woman's voice! He played many old-fashioned things, & oh! So lovely!! Bauer is one of the finest pianists in the world, I know. His runs are pearly and so full of tone quality."
While taking every chance to appreciate the talent of others, Patti also immediately set out to further develop her own. For that, she turned to Maurice Moszkowski.
Though not a household name today, Moszkowski had rock-star status in Patti's time. Composer, performer, teacher—Moszkowski was regarded as equal to Frederic Chopin. His photo adorned post cards in Paris, where he resided. Moszkowski had studied under Eduard Franck, who had been a student of Felix Mendelssohn.
A day after registering at the Student Hostel, Patti obtained Moszkowski's address and dropped in unannounced. She hoped to impress him enough to be accepted as his pupil. If she failed, her voyage to Europe would be wasted.
"Went to interview the 'Lion' in his den,'" she wrote afterward. "He was not in, but I was determined to see him, & waited for 2 hours for him. When he came, I told him frankly of my errand, & he asked me to play for him. I played Romance by Rubenstein, and he gave a grunt (of dissatisfaction or satisfaction, I could not tell) & said I lacked rhythm & asked me to play a scale in the same key. I made an awful 'bobble' & he gave me a list of music to get, including scales, by himself."
Mission accomplished, if a bit clumsily. Her first lesson went better: "Mr. Moszkowski was playing scales when I rang the bell, & my! How clear & lucid the runs! He came in with his smoking jacket on, & I was not bit nervous. He kept saying 'good' & 'very good,' and I dearly loved him for his sympathetic interest."
Next lesson: "Went to my lesson—had a good one. Moszkowski tested my touch at the clavier, and said it is good. Also said many nice things to me, and I feel so much elated. He smoked two cigarettes while giving me the lesson. I don't feel at all nervous before him, for which I'm truly thankful."
And so it went: "Nice lesson from Moszkowski & I'm delighted. He said I have an unusual trill with 3rd & 4th fingers—'very rare,' & said my hand was good, & everything I played his comment was a hearty, 'good.' Said I was improving very rapidly & that 3 hrs was enough for me to practice daily, as my hand was supple & needed less practice than most hands. It's hard to believe he's the Moszkowski; he's so nice to me. We talk & enjoy every lesson."
On the other hand, Patti fretted frequently in her diary over her uncertain finances. "Am sure I shall have to go home after one month in Paris!!!" she wrote just two weeks after arriving in Europe. She took piano students of her own and found gigs at church services, but it wasn't enough. On May 3 she moved into the Student Hostel's "poor house" as it was known, a room shared by more than two students.
The very next day brought Patti hope. "Have heard something about a 'scholarship' which sets my toes tingling. How I'd love to get it & stay another year!" she enthused. The hostel's management, which bestowed the scholarship annually, favored Patti. They also urged her to seek a letter of recommendation from Moszkowski, which she did.
"Just after writing him, I rec'd a pneumatique from him enclosing a ticket to Edward Gares' piano recital tonight and on a little note, he wrote, 'With best regards from M. Moszkowski.' I prize the words more than the ticket. I'm the luckiest girl in all the world, & I know it." And when her idol did help her clinch the scholarship, his letter of endorsement became the prize of Patti's career, framed and displayed ever after.
"Am anxious to see my dear old 'Mosey' again," Patti wrote at the end of August. She had been the guest of French friends in the countryside for much of the summer. Unexpectedly, she and Moszkowski fell out.
"Had a lesson today & Moszkowski was a regular a__," Patti shuddered. "I heard him scream out at a maid before he came in, & then he seemed to try to take his anger out on me. He railed & railed until I couldn't do a thing. I was so choked up with tears I could hardly see. Feel as if I gained nothing at this lesson. I may decide to change teachers."
She did just that, though her affection for Moszkowski returned. Besides the fright he had given Patti, she had another issue. "Am dissatisfied with dear old Mosey. He doesn't give me what I want," namely, public performances that could win her recognition.
Friends at the hostel suggested that Patti try Wager Swayne. Swayne was an American, the son of a Union Army Major General and nephew of a Supreme Court justice. He had been an outstanding student in Vienna of another great piano master, Theodor Leschetizky, who learned from Carl Czerny, a student of Ludwig van Beethoven.
By January 1911, she finally got what she was hoping for. Swayne, she wrote, "asked me to play in two concerts—an honor he bestows on few. He said several complimentary things. Said no telling what I could do if I'd try harder. Am afraid he thinks I'm not a very serious student, but I am."
Swayne featured Patti a number of times. One of her performances caught the attention of a Miss Mansfield, Paris correspondent for Music News in Chicago. She invited Patti for tea the following week, where she promised "a good write up" in her paper. It was reproduced by the Chickasha Daily Express on April 15: "One of the most successful of the students is Miss Patti Adams who played the Sixth Rhapsody of Liszt in a manner that elicited the enthusiastic applause of a critical audience." It further stated: "She will go back to America in July to enter the concert field. As she has had such great success in Paris, her success in America is assured."
Meanwhile, she was homesick and ready to leave Paris. The weather often made her ill. The skies were so often overcast that no one had been able to see Halley's Comet the previous May. Money was ever a challenge, and not just for her. Patti's father had failed to obtain an "oil inspection position" in Oklahoma City. "Had such a blue letter from home. It made me of the same deep hue this morning," she wrote. "Things will come all right, I'm sure. Wish I could help the dear ones now, but hope to be able to make 'loads' of money later."
On May 27, Patti quit the hostel. "Miss Smith broke her glasses in kissing me goodbye. I did hate leaving! I love that gay city and all my friends there." After making her way to London, Patti embarked for New York on the White Star Line's Oceanic. She arrived June 14, 1911, and was back in Oklahoma by July.
In some respects, Patti didn't leave Europe a minute to soon. Britain's King Edward had died the year before, marking the beginning of the end of glorious Edwardian England. And in the spring of 1911, the French minister of war had died in a gruesome aviation accident. The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in August and wouldn't be recovered for two years. And Oceanic's sister ship, Titanic, sank in April of 1912.
These calamities were mere portents of the ghastly disaster to come. Between July 1914 and November 1917, World War I killed 17 million people and wounded another 20 million. With the Belle Époque eviscerated, Wager Swayne fled to New York. Moszkowski was bankrupted when the war instantly made his bond investments worthless. Patti had been able to experience the very pinnacle of European refinement and culture just before it was swept away in a cloud of deadly mustard gas.
Back in Oklahoma, it took Patti a year to capitalize on her Europe-acquired connections and credentials. In the fall of 1912 she joined the Fairmont Seminary in Weatherford, Texas, as "teacher of piano, harmony, and composition" and as "director of the music department."
Then things got strange.
On December 29, while home on Christmas break, Patti married Jacob Schreiner. Eight years her senior, Schreiner was a stellar violinist who was then teaching at Patti's former school in Fort Worth. Evidently they met mere weeks earlier when he chanced to attend her performance at a Fairmont faculty recital. To the Daily Ardmoreite the wedding was "a great surprise." The Daily Herald in Weatherford noted that "the bride is one of the most popular young ladies ever holding a position in the faculty of the Seminary" and relayed the expectation that Jacob Schreiner would soon join its faculty.
Instead, just months after the nuptials came this staggering tidbit in the Chickasha newspaper: "The hosts of friends and acquaintances in Chickasha of Miss Patti Adams will regret very much to hear that she has been critically ill since the holidays. Miss Adams was removed from Texas, and carried to her home in Ryan, where she is now slowly convalescing."
Miss Adams? Back to her parents' home? Whatever the true nature of the personal disaster, the marriage would last until 1921, when Patti was granted a divorce on grounds of "extreme cruelty." Her great-niece Barbara Abbott thinks there may have been some physical abuse. Jacob ceded to Patti $500, their Tulsa house, and the furniture, including a Knabe grand piano. She also kept his last name, but in simplified form. For the rest of her life she was Patti Adams Shriner.
Now 39, she spent the summer of 1922 in Colorado and Southern California, visiting friends from her Paris days. In Los Angeles she found the studio of Albert Witzel, the photographer of choice for hundreds of Hollywood starlets. She had Witzel take her own starlet-style photo at a grand piano—evidence of the ambition that the undaunted artist would soon reveal.
In September, readers of the Tulsa World saw this: "Patti Adams Shriner (pupil of Moritz Moszkowski, Paris, France) announces the reopening of her piano studio."
Patti wasn't simply teaching lessons; she aspired to create her own institution for teaching music and so began laying the groundwork for a music academy. During the next four years, Patti prospered in terms of students, money, and social connections. But the "Patti Adams Piano School" was still a name without a building.
In 1928, she bought a plot of land facing the Arkansas River at the west corner of Riverside Drive and Houston Avenue. On the east corner, banker James McBirney was now erecting a 15,900-square-foot Gothic Revival mansion. With financing from McBirney, whose niece was a student of Patti's, she built something so unique that it has been called "Tulsa's Taj Mahal."
It might be unfair that the building is now most famous under the name "Bruce Goff's Riverside Studio" instead of the "Patti Adams School of Music." Most of Goff's other works—Bavinger House, for example—are named after the person who approved the famous architect's design and wrote his check. (As a matter of fact, Shriner rejected Goff's first design and approved his second.) Even Western Architect magazine, which featured photographs of the finished building prior to occupancy, referred to it as "Riverside Hall." (Today it's the Tulsa Spotlight Theatre.)
Patti opened her school to the public on Easter Sunday, March 31, 1929, to a thriving Tulsa. The Tulsa Worldwrote a glowing account of Patti's building and the artworks inside. The Chamber of Commerce featured an exterior photo in its publication under the headline "Much of Tulsa's Beauty is the Gift of Those Who Built for Business." Patti had overcome every obstacle by charm, determination, and talent. She had created in The Oil Capital of the World a monument to high culture.
And then the Great Depression seized America. Demand for crude oil, the source of Tulsa's money, evaporated. Shriner clung to her building, her school, and her vision until September 8, 1933. Just four and a half years after opening, the Patti Adams School of Music closed.
Patti later settled near family in Cleveland, Oklahoma, and continued to teach until her death in 1965 at age 82. She taught her sister Dimple's children and grandchildren. Great-niece Barbara Abbott, who still accompanies middle and high school choruses, learned from Patti. Barbara passed that instruction to the next generation of the family, which includes Eddie Walker, Patti's great-great nephew, the executive director of the Oklahoma City Symphony; and Barbara's daughter, Mollie Heaberlin, who teaches French and music at the Christian Montessori Academy in Tulsa.
Perhaps the last word on Patti should come from Elwyn Ratliff, the very advanced student whom she presented in the last recital held at the Riverside Auditorium—her name for the school's recital hall. Ratliff went on to become one of Tulsa's best-known piano teachers until his death in 2002.
In an undated letter signed "Your devoted pupil, Elwyn," Ratliff pledges to stand by Patti when other teachers had abandoned her school. "I shall always be loyal to you, and I say this with God as my witness," he wrote. "Please believe me, Mrs. Shriner, when I say that my association with you will ever and forever be close and sacred.
"You have given me a wonderful musical education for which I can never, never thank you enough."
Originally published in This Land: Spring 2016]]>


text:
No, it wouldn't disturb me. In fact, it would have no effect on me, or how I live my life.<quoted text>
It disturbs you that you are just a fancy holograph? You would like to believe that your will is greater than the forces of the universe?
We use those principles in our technology.
Ever try the magnet and hanging rock thing? Add just the smallest bit of iron to the rock and see how it bends to your will.
Chips off the old block?
And about the magnet/hanging rock. So what? You can't assume that the same is true of humans, and you can't explain the mechanism by which we could be controlled via the iron in our blood. These are your pipe dreams, and that's fine, but stop acting like you have a shred of proof for them.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
US consumer prices were unchanged in July from June, as a small drop in energy costs offset slightly higher food prices. The consumer price index hasn't changed since March, evidence that the weak economy is keeping inflation in check.
Core consumer prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs, ticked up 0.1 percent last month, the Labor Department said Wednesday. More expensive medical costs, clothing and rents pushed up core prices.
Prices increased 1.4 percent in the 12 months ending in July. That's down from 1.7 percent in June and is the smallest yearly increase in 20 months. Core prices have increased 2.1 percent in the past year, down from a 2.2 percent pace in June.
Lower inflation gives the Federal Reserve more leeway to launch new programs intended to rekindle the economy.
The Fed signaled at a meeting in late July that it is ready to act if growth and hiring stays weak. That led many economists to predict the Fed would announce a third round of bond purchases designed to push long-term interest rates down and generate more borrowing and spending in the economy.
But recent sign point to some economic improvement in July. Employers added the most jobs in five months, while consumers increased their retail spending after three months of declines. A slightly better outlook for the economy could prompt the Fed to hold off on taking action when its policy committee next meets in September.
Mild price increases also leave consumers with more money to spend, which can boost economic growth. Food prices increased only 0.1 percent in July.
But the low prices may not last. A severe drought in the U.S. Midwest has damaged corn, soybeans and other crops, which will likely push up a range of food prices on grocery store shelves in the coming months. Corn is used in many processed foods, from cereals to soda. And both corn and soybeans are used in animal feed, so higher costs for those grains will likely push up meat prices.
Wholesale food prices rose 0.5 percent in July for the second straight month, the government said Tuesday. Wholesale corn prices jumped 34.5 percent, the largest gain since Oct. 2006.
Gas prices have also increased recently after falling from a peak near $4 a gallon in April. The average national price for gas was $3.71 a gallon on Wednesday. That's up 31 cents from a month ago.
Slow economic growth is keeping a lid on price increases. The economy expanded at just a 1.5 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter, down from 2 percent in the January-March quarter and 4.1 percent in the final three months of last year.
More breaking news
- Nassau County IDA votes against Long Beach 'Superblock'
- Beyer Graphics to purchase building
- Pharmaceutical firm plans to open in Hauppauge
- Suffolk Bancorp net rises
- Bridge Bancorp earnings surge
- Nassau IDA meets Thursday on Long Beach 'Superblock'
- Applications for US jobless aid rise to still-low 266,000
- AEG Facilities tapped to operate Nassau Coliseum
- Regulators propose huge overhaul of debt collection industry
- Nassau comptroller stops paying jails health care provider


text:
Gone (2012)
Blend Film Database
Gone Synopsis
When her sister disappears, Jill is convinced the serial killer who kidnapped her two years ago has returned, and she sets out to once again face her abductor.
Gone Release Date
In Theaters February 24, 2012
Gone Credits
Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Carpenter, Wes Bentley
Written By:
Allison Burnett
Directed By:
Heitor Dhalia
Produced By:
Dan Abrams, Sidney Kimmel, Gary Lucchesi, Tom Rosenberg, Chris Salvaterra
MPAA Rating:
Summit Entertainment
Subscribe To Gone Updates
Subscribe To Gone Updates
I've already subscribed
If you're excited for Gone
Gone Images
Latest Gone News
Weekend Box Office: Act of Valor Takes Top Honors
It was a military thriller that took top honors this weekend, leading yet another strong February weekend. Act of Valor debuted at number one with over $24 million, bringing in double its reported $12 million production cost. Even more impressive, the movie has no big names to attract audiences, but it managed to handily outperform several movies that did.
Scott Gwin
Feb 26, 2012
Weekend Box Office: Act of Valor Takes Top Honors
This Rotten Week: Predicting Act Of Valor, Wanderlust And More Reviews
There's a lot to get to this week so let's just dive right in. We've got Navy SEALs fighting terrorists, Tyler Perry fighting to make a good movie (not likely), Amanda Seyfried fighting for her life and Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston fighting the corporate rat race
Doug Norrie
Feb 19, 2012
This Rotten Week: Predicting Act Of Valor, Wanderlust And More Reviews
Nobody Believes Amanda Seyfried In The First Trailer For Gone
In the movie Seyfried plays Jill, a young woman who is two years removed from a horrible incident: she was kidnapped by a serial killer and left in a hole in the middle of the woods to die. When her sister inexplicably goes missing, Jill believes that it's the work of the same serial killer out for revenge against the only one that got away.
Eric Eisenberg
Nov 17, 2011
Nobody Believes Amanda Seyfried In The First Trailer For Gone
Wes Bentley, Emily Wickersham And Jennifer Carpenter Join Amanda Seyfried Thriller Gone
Though Carpenter is a regular on Dexter and Wickersham appeared in I Am Number Four, none of them are as famous as Seyfried, which suggests this will be a real starring vehicle for the actress. Summit will be distributing the film
Katey Rich
Mar 09, 2011
Wes Bentley, Emily Wickersham And Jennifer Carpenter Join Amanda Seyfried Thriller Gone
Amanda Seyfried Will Hunt Down Her Abductor In Gone
There's no lack of movie fans and critics who will insist that Amanda Seyfried is among the most talented actresses of her generation. But with that in mind, the girl picks some seriously strange projects
Katey Rich
Feb 09, 2011
Amanda Seyfried Will Hunt Down Her Abductor In Gone
Back to top
Hot Topics
Adam Sandler's Next Netflix Movie Is Bringing Back His Old Gang
David Ayer Just Shot Down A Huge Suicide Squad Rumor
Justice League Trailer Brings The DC Heroes Together
A Montage Of Lex Luthor Noises Might Be The Most Annoying Batman V Superman Video
Man Pulls Out A Gun At A Movie Theater After Child Won't Stop Kicking His Chair
New Reviews
Jason Bourne
Lights Out
Top Movies
Suicide Squad
Wonder Woman
Doctor Strange
Black Panther
Assassin's Creed
Star Trek Beyond
Star Wars: Episode VIII
Fast & Furious 8
Avatar 2
Transformers 5
Follow Us
Gateway Media
©copyright 2016


text:
Chinese 125cc motorcycle parts
US $19.5-19.7 / Set
50 Pieces (Min. Order)
factory tovic butyl inner tube motorcycle 400-8
US $0.66-1.23 / Piece
1 Piece (Min. Order)
Motorcycle Chain-428
US $1-10 / Meter
1000 Meters (Min. Order)
2016 cheap high quality best price sports bike 150cc racing motorcycle
US $568-600 / Unit
5 Units (Min. Order)
BAJAJ chopper Bike 150CC 200CC Sports motorcycle
US $500-600 / Unit
96 Units (Min. Order)
The new sole small mini motorcycle 125cc 150cc vintage moped cross-country motorcycle sports car
US $820.0-820.0 / Piece
1 Piece (Min. Order)
Hot TAMCO GN125-R Chinese 150cc sports bike motorcycle
US $250-650 / Unit
32 Units (Min. Order)
150cc sporting motorcycle luxury/ street motorcycle for sale
US $725-825 / Piece
24 Pieces (Min. Order)
2014 hot selling tricker street bike 150cc sport motorcycle
US $550-560 / Unit
56 Units (Min. Order)
Chinese famous brands RATO 150cc 4 stroke sports motorcycle wholesale
US $520-580 / Set
5 Sets (Min. Order)
Sports Speed Racing motorcycle 150cc
US $400-700 / Unit
1 Unit (Min. Order)
Wholesale CCC Approved Speed Racing Sports 150cc Motorcycle
US $485-525 / Piece
100 Pieces (Min. Order)
Manufacture Supply New Popular 150cc Sport Racing Motorcycle For Sale China Motorcycles Wholesale BD150-20-V
US $620.0-690.0 / Sets
30 Sets (Min. Order)
2015 Hot sale Cheap 150cc High Quality China street legal sports racing Motorcycle
US $850-980 / Unit
32 Units (Min. Order)
china imports dirt bike motorcycle with eec /sport bike for sale
US $300-500 / Set
10 Sets (Min. Order)
2012 Newest WJ-SUZUKI 150cc Best Quality Racing Sport Bike Motorcycle WJ150R
US $700-1100 / Unit
1 Unit (Min. Order)
sell 2015 new cheap 70cc/90cc/100cc/125cc/150cc/175cc/200cc/250cc AX100 street bike/motorcycle
US $280-350 / Unit
42 Units (Min. Order)
dragon EEC sport racing motorcycle 250cc 150cc 4 stroke engine motorcycle
US $1-1000 / Unit
10 Units (Min. Order)
150CC SPORT BIKE Motorcycle
US $580-680 / Carton
20 Cartons (Min. Order)
150cc water-cooled sport motorcycle (TKM250-F)
US $850-1500 / Unit
10 Units (Min. Order)
2015 new powerul 150cc/200cc/250cc racing motorcycle/ sports motorcycle(250AT-6)
US $1300-1400 / Piece
5 Pieces (Min. Order)
OHC CB 150CC Dirt Bike Moto Cross Dual Sports Cargo Motorcycle
US $400-500 / Unit
5 Units (Min. Order)
4 Stroke Gas-powered Dirt Bike Motorcycles (DB603)
US $350-600 / Unit
20 Units (Min. Order)
HOT CBR 150CC 200CC 250CC sport motorcycle manufacturer price
US $1000-2000 / Unit
30 Units (Min. Order)
SX150-CFI 2013 Newest Hot 150CC City Sport Bike Chinese Motorcycles
US $460-520 / Unit
48 Units (Min. Order)
2016 Sport Motorcycle cheap motorcycle with 150CC cheap dirt bike nice design good sell
US $380-480 / Piece
20 Pieces (Min. Order)
Bewheel cheap sport motorcycle 150cc engine cool dirt bike
US $448-478 / Piece
20 Pieces (Min. Order)
150cc super bikes motorcycle 150cc sport bike
US $1-1000 / Piece
1 Piece (Min. Order)
Electric or Kick starter 150CC Chinese racing sport cheap china motorcycle
US $465.5-515 / Piece
100 Pieces (Min. Order)
150cc sport motorcycle,air-cooled sport motorcycle(CBR),Sport motorcycle
US $800-900 / Piece
30 Units (Min. Order)
Sport best seller racing motorcycle 150cc popular FZ
US $840-900 / Set
32 Sets (Min. Order)
Haven't found the right supplier yet ? Let matching verified suppliers find you. Get Quotation NowFREE
Do you want to show 150cc sports motorcycle or other products of your own company? Display your Products FREE now!
Related Category
Product Features
Supplier Features
Supplier Types
Recommendation for you
related suppliers
related Manufactures


text:
Pokémon Go guide, best tips and tricks
Best ways to catch and level up Pokémon out in the real world.
How to get XP fast in Pokémon Go
Earn a whopping 60,000 XP in 30 minutes.
Loading... hold tight!
Studying Computer Games Applications Development at Abertay University…
Currently playing
nothing :(


text:
iEatOut Gluten Free & Allergy Free
By AllergyFree Passport
Open iTunes to buy and download apps.
Eat safe ethnic foods using this "Best Allergy App" - works 100% offline with no international roaming charges and no WiFi connectivity required.
Personalize your food needs with the ethnic restaurant database to confidently avoid gluten, wheat, dairy, egg, peanuts, nuts, soy, corn, fish and / or shellfish anywhere.
Easily order safe meals in Chinese, French, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Steak and Thai restaurants close to your home or around the world without having to search for gluten free menus or allergy charts.
Quickly browse ethnic menu choices, ingredients, sauces, food preparation and cross contact considerations to avoid any combination of food allergens. Learn to ask questions in restaurant terms to order ethnic meals.
This app is based on the multi-award winning Let's Eat Out travel series created from 8 years of global market research, over 10 years of personal experience living 100% gluten and allergy free, 15 years of restaurant industry expertise and over 2.5 million miles of worldwide travel.
Please contact us with any questions at email@example.com.
What's New in Version 1.151115
Updated resources
Customer Reviews
Amazing app for eating out
Your app is amazing and I truly do not know what I would have done without it while traveling so thank you from the bottom of my heart!
- $4.99
- Category: Health & Fitness
- Updated: Dec 04, 2015
- Version: 1.151115
- Size: 5.7 MB
- Language: English
- Seller: AllergyFree Passport
- © 2015 AllergyFree Passport LLC®
Compatibility: Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.


text:
Account Signup
Log In
Used Car Prices
Rating Your Car
Terms & Conditions
About Us
Email Us
Old Cars Price Guide
Magazine Subscription
P.O. Box 1148
Sterling Heights, MI
Advanced Search
Canon EOS Rebel T5i Digital SLR with 18-135mm STM Lens
New: $849.00
Used: $600.00
Renew Your Creative Soul
Read More »
Find Deals on Car Insurance and More
Related Items
Wasabi Power Battery (2-Pack) and Charger for Canon LP-E8 and Canon EOS 550D, EOS 600D, EOS 700D, EOS Rebel T2i, EOS Rebel T3i, EOS Rebel T4i, EOS Rebel T5i
SanDisk Extreme 16GB SDHC UHS-I U3 Class 10 Memory card (SDSDXNE-016G-GNCIN)
AmazonBasics Backpack for SLR/DSLR Cameras and Accessories - Black
Canon EF-S 55-250mm F4-5.6 IS STM Lens for Canon SLR Cameras
Canon EOS Rebel T5i/700D For Dummies
We offer many more exciting products in addition to
Canon EOS Rebel T5i Digital SLR with 18-135mm STM Lens
! Browse our related classic car products above, or see our
complete list of classic car merchandise
Classic Cars Site Map
| Copyright © 1999-2016 OldCars.com. All Rights Reserved.
Web Design by iNetCity


text:
At this time there is no more inventory available for this item.
Please make another selection.
Ethnic Ballerina Christmas Ornament
Personalized Christmas Ornament
Dimensions: 5" x 6"
Material: Resin
Her ballerina shoes are her favorite possession and she is so graceful when she dances.
Read what our customers say about our Personalized Christmas Ornaments and their shopping experience!Hover over testimonials to stop scrolling
11/29/2015 - "I was very satisfied with the assortment of ornaments to select and I love the personalization and quality of the ornament. Brenda B."
7/26/2016 - "I cannot thank you enough. One for answering me so fast and Second for the credit. I always say to myself that I don't need any more ornaments and I am not going to look at your e-mail or your book and for some wonderful reason I always find something that I just have to have for my friends or myself. Thank you again, Sandie"
12/10/2015 - "Was very happy to find these items as ornaments. Nancy J."
10/26/2015 - "Hello, I received my order today...love them! They were packed so well and just beautiful. Thank you so much! Sherill K."
11/10/2015 - "Great value for the items. My children love these.Diana R."
6/25/2016 - "I love these ornaments, I always get one for my boys that represent something that happened that year. Tracey M."
11/23/2015 - "Fairly easy to navigate site. Good selection of ornaments. Judith B."
12/13/2015 - "Everything was as I had expected... Lisa H."
9/24/2015 - "I was absolutely thrilled with the raft ornament I received. The personalisation was perfect and done very professionally. Thank you! Joanne"
1/7/2016 - "The ornaments were so cute, & much heavier than I was expecting. So glad I purchased for OrnamentShop.com. Brenda H."