Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (6 page)

Jerry and I cross over the Arkansas/Tennessee border and drive into the Memphis National Cemetery, where ten thousand American servicemen are buried. Although born and raised in the South, Jerry has become very protective of the
Sultana
’s Union soldiers—or “his boys,” as he refers to them—and wants to check the grave of an Ohio officer named John Ely. “Originally they had him being from Illinois, and I
asked them to change it.” Jerry finds the new marker and confirms it’s been corrected.

“Good,” he says.

We then walk over to a section that, Jerry tells me, emphasizes the final, heartbreaking indignity of the
Sultana
’s aftermath. In row after row we see white markers with only
UNKNOWN U.S. SOLDIER
engraved in the marble. There are more unidentified U.S. troops buried here, I learn, than anywhere else except Arlington National Cemetery.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” Jerry says again. This time, however, he isn’t referring to the disaster but the anonymous headstones. Soon after the corpses of several hundred Union troops killed on the
Sultana
were recovered, they were identified and laid to rest in Elmwood Cemetery, just south of Memphis. When government officials disinterred the soldiers from Elmwood in 1867 to rebury them with honors here, they wrote their names on the wooden coffins before loading them onto railcars. All of these young men who had died so pointlessly would, at the very least, have a permanent grave site with their name on it, a place where their family members could come and find their lost son or husband or brother, mourn for them, and pay tribute to their sacrifice. The dead would be remembered as individual heroes of the war and not just anonymous victims of a catastrophic accident.

But it was not to be; as the trains rolled through Tennessee to carry the bodies to this cemetery, a thunderstorm erupted. The men’s names, which had been written on the coffins in chalk, got washed away by the rain.

BEFORE EMBARKING ON
my trip, I established three unbreakable rules. First, no trespassing. Tempted as I am to join the growing band of thrill seekers flashlighting their way through abandoned asylums, prisons, sanatoriums, hospitals, and similar institutions, these subversive expeditions are usually illegal and can damage the physical structures themselves. (Plus, I hate spiders.) Rule number two is a corollary of the first: Respect the privacy of those who live in historic homes. This means keeping addresses confidential unless the current occupants agree to disclose them and making no surprise visits.

In a few cases, alas, I strike sites off my itinerary because the home owners haven’t answered my letters asking for their consent. One especially disappointing loss has been César Chávez’s birthplace in Arizona, a forty-acre ranch that was essentially stolen by a greedy neighbor in cahoots with the Chávez family’s own lawyer. César was eleven when his parents were robbed of the land, and according to his autobiography, seeing them get swindled incited his lifelong passion for social justice. Also off-limits for now is the house in Connecticut where Ely Parker lived. A full-blooded Seneca Indian, Parker served as General Ulysses S. Grant’s personal aide during the Civil War and handwrote the surrender papers signed by General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

Fortunately, most of the people I’ve contacted have agreed to let me visit, starting with Kelly King, who now resides in the Homer, Nebraska, house once owned by Richard “Two Gun” Hart. A famous Prohibition agent during the 1920s, Hart was renowned for hunting down and capturing bootleggers and busting up stills nationwide. He was also harboring a family secret that made his chosen career all the more remarkable.

On my way to Homer, I’m planning to meet with Richard Hart’s eighty-three-year-old son, Harry, to learn more about his father’s eventful life. And while zipping down the highway en route to Lincoln, where Harry lives, I have my own troubling encounter with the law.

“Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” a patrolman asks after pulling me over.

There’s really no correct response to this, but I proceed nevertheless to give one of the dumbest answers possible: “I’m driving all over the country, and every once in a while I just kind of zone out behind the wheel and don’t know what I’m doing.”

Barely containing his anger, the officer warns me that I was a mere few miles per hour shy of reckless driving, a jailable offense. He hands over the ticket and sternly advises me to set my cruise control to the speed limit and leave it there. I swear to him I will.

Ten minutes later, as the shock of my near arrest wears off, I hastily
pencil three words on my ticket, the only scrap of paper I have on hand: “Cruise control inventor?”

Delayed by the stop and having crept along at what feels like a painstakingly slow pace (that is, the posted speed limit), I arrive late at Harry’s. Despite my tardiness, he gives me a warm welcome and invites me into his apartment.

As Harry pours me a glass of water in the kitchen, I glance at the awards and photographs lining his walls. One plaque, surrounded by letters of recognition, is inscribed to Harry from the Homer Fire Department and honors his almost six decades of service. Harry walks in and sees me looking at a picture of a beautiful woman.

“That was my wife, Joyce,” Harry says. “We were married forty-nine years.”

By the dining room table, Harry has two trunks of memorabilia that, together, contain a physical timeline of his father’s peripatetic life as a runaway, a World War I soldier, and, eventually, one of the nation’s most celebrated G-men. Harry begins pulling out leather holsters, half a dozen Indian Police and Special Agent badges, and fan mail. In lieu of an actual address, one letter mailed to his father simply has a drawing of two guns and the word
HART
in all caps on the envelope. The post office knew exactly where to send it.

“Where does the nickname come from?” I ask Harry, expecting a rousing story about his dad blasting his way through a circle of outlaws.

“He usually carried two guns with him, and he could shoot with both hands.”

“Well,” I say, nodding, “that would explain it.”

There are also stacks of large black binders inside the trunks, each one crammed with pictures and newspaper articles. From a random culling of clips I jot down several headlines:
TWO-GUN HART SNARES QUINTET, R. J. HART RECEIVES THREATENING LETTERS—BELIEVES AUTHORS ARE BOOTLEGGERS, AND TWO-GUN HART MAKES RAIDS HERE [IN SOUTH DAKOTA]; LIVES UP TO REPUTATION
.

One biographer who apparently nursed a vendetta against Richard
Hart claimed, among other accusations, that Hart never served in the Army. The numerous pictures that Harry shows me of his father standing in formation with other troops while being reviewed by senior officers all look pretty authentic.

Flipping through the binders, I come across a photo of Harry himself in his late teens or early twenties. Boyishly handsome, half grinning with a hint of a rebellious smirk and his hair slicked back, he’s standing next to a tubby, bald man in his late forties. “That’s Al Capone!” I blurt out. “Holy smokes. What was he like in person?”

Harry shrugs. “He seemed like a guy.”

From his response, I’m uncertain if Harry wasn’t able to form much of an impression or doesn’t remember him well.

Fat-cheeked and smiling, Capone is wearing a plain white dress shirt tucked into khaki pants. He looks like a nebbishy middle-aged man and not the murdering Chicago boss whose lavish lifestyle was paid for by running illegal booze, robbery, shakedowns, and prostitution. Harry doesn’t appear eager to elaborate, so I don’t press it.

I do, however, ask him why he thinks men like his father—the “good guys”—are often overshadowed by the Al Capones, John Dillingers, and Bugsy Siegels of the world.

“Bad guys are more interesting,” Harry replies.

I’d be disingenuous to suggest that I don’t find them alluring as well. Indeed, what initially drew me to Harry’s father was the fact that his real name was Vincenzo Capone. Richard “Two Gun” Hart was Al Capone’s older brother.

Born outside of Naples, Italy, in 1892, Vincenzo immigrated with his parents to Brooklyn about a year later. Around the age of sixteen, he fled New York’s cramped tenements for the spacious Midwest and earned his keep laboring on ranches and working as a circus roustabout. He admired silent-film star William Hart, a quiet but fearless law-and-order type, and changed his own name to Richard James Hart. After World War I, he rode a freight train west and hopped off in Homer, where he worked a series of odd jobs. Richard yearned to be more than a bit player in life, and he stepped into the spotlight as a
real-life action hero when he rescued a young woman named Kathleen Winch during a flash flood. Like a true leading man he even got the girl; Richard and Kathleen fell in love and married.

With his newfound fame he became town marshal, and by the early 1920s he was chasing moonshiners as a federal agent. Starting in 1926, the Bureau of Indian Affairs assigned him to several Native American reservations (including in Cheyenne, South Dakota, Harry Hart’s place of birth), and as a bodyguard to President Calvin Coolidge. When Prohibition ended in 1933, Richard became a justice of the peace. He had scant communication with his six younger brothers, each of whom had become entangled in nefarious activities, and met Al only a few times. By the late 1930s, Al was a powerless ex-con, his criminal empire gone and his mind ravaged by syphilis. He died of a heart attack in 1947, and Richard suffered a cardiac arrest himself five years later, dying at the age of sixty.

Before I leave, Harry gives me a short, self-published biography of his father that he’s written as well as specific directions to the family’s old house in Homer. I thank him profusely for his time and head to my hotel.

WELCOME TO HOMER—LITTLE BUT LIVELY
, a tall red-and-white sign proclaims as I pull off Route 77 after driving up from Lincoln the next morning. I cross over a short bridge that leads directly onto Homer’s main avenue, John Street. With American flags hanging from every lamppost, the tiny, immaculate town looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

From John Street I take a right on Third and, after a few blocks, park in front of a light-blue two-story house on the corner of Spring Street. The lawn is large and bright green. There’s a birdbath in the front yard nestled within a cluster of white, pink, and purple flowers. Another small garden presses up against the garage. Kelly King, the house’s current owner, has maintained the property wonderfully.

Before coming here, I asked Kelly how she learned that Richard Hart used to live in the house.

“First the realtor mentioned it,” Kelly told me. “And then I met Harry, and he gave me more of the details.”

“What was your reaction?”

“I thought it was very interesting.”

“Did you find anything exciting when you moved in, like trapdoors or hidden contraband?” I asked, instantly realizing that the question made me sound like a kid raised on too many Hardy Boys mysteries.

Kelly laughed and said, “Well, we did look through the basement and the crawlspace in the attic real carefully, but there was nothing there.”

I now photograph the house from different angles, and while I’m shooting it from the side, an older woman drives by, stops, and asks me if I’m friends with Kelly King.

“Not personally,” I say. “She’s at work now, but she gave me permission to take pictures, and last night I met with Harry Hart in Lincoln, who used to live here and was telling me all about his father, Richard. I just wanted to come and see the house for myself.”

“He was a very nice man,” the woman says. I’m about to ask her if she means Richard or Harry, but she rolls up her window and waves good-bye.

A private house can’t be designated a national landmark without the owner’s approval, and while I more than understand why some individuals aren’t enthusiastic about gawkers congregating on their front lawn and snapping photos of where they live, it’s frustrating to consider how many intriguing places will remain indefinitely unknown. There’s more than just idle curiosity at stake; these “regular” homes are reminders that history doesn’t dwell solely in the estates and manor halls of the privileged. It can also be found in suburban split-levels, on family farms, and within public housing projects that people pass by every day—or actually live in, often without even knowing it.

Fortunately, for every site like Ely Parker’s house or César Chávez’s ranch that remains hidden, new possibilities constantly reveal themselves. As I’m leaving Nebraska, I get a call from a woman named Marjorie
Teetor Meyer, who’s responding to the message I had recently left asking about her father, an influential inventor, and their family home in Hagerstown, Indiana. Marjorie kindly gives me the address, and although I doubt I’ll have a chance to stop by during my upcoming trip to Indiana, I can save it for another visit.

Marjorie’s father, Ralph Teetor, was a brilliant mechanical engineer who built a full-sized car at the age of twelve and, after graduating from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania in 1912, developed a revolutionary procedure for balancing turbine rotors in warships. Teetor received numerous patents throughout his life, mostly related to cars, and he served as president of the Society of Automotive Engineers. And he did all of this despite being blind since childhood; at the age of five, Teetor was jimmying open a locked drawer with a penknife when the blade slipped and pierced his eyeball. Both retinas became infected and Teetor lost all vision.

Although extremely independent and familiar with every component of an automobile, Teetor obviously couldn’t get behind the wheel of a car and drive himself. While riding around one day with his attorney, Harry Lindsey, he became annoyed by Lindsey’s lurching, gas-and-brake driving habits. Later, in the basement workshop of his Hagerstown home, Teetor began tinkering with accelerator and brake pedals, throttles, control cables, and manifold vacuum power sources to design a regulating system for cars that maintained their speed with just the touch of a button. He christened it the Speedostat. Automakers loved the invention, and Cadillac was among the first to offer it commercially, in its 1959 models, with one slight change. The company called it “Cruise Control.”