Diana of the Dunes Read online

  A postcard of Longfellow School, formerly named Brighton, where it is believed Alice Gray attended grammar school in Chicago. The McKinley Park Branch of the Chicago Public Library now sits on the property. Courtesy of the author.

  Historical proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education document Alice’s 1897 graduation from South Division High School, then located at Twenty-sixth Street and Wabash Avenue, eight blocks from her house. South Division tended toward liberal educational philosophies, with an emphasis on classical studies. Perhaps this is where Alice first discovered her love of reading and her admiration for Lord Byron’s poetry, her curiosity about the starry heavens and her ability to work through challenging mathematical problems. All played key roles in her later life. Three years after Alice’s graduation, the high school celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. An article in the Chicago Tribune touted South Division’s “remarkable” history, noting its status as the second-oldest high school in the city. “Many of Chicago’s most prominent citizens and celebrated men have been graduated from this school....The history of the South Division high school lies parallel with the progress and growth of Chicago since its rejuvenation in the early ‘70s.”10

  The school prided itself on allowing students to work at their own pace and focus on particular subject areas:

  From a rigid and prescribed course of study formerly laid down for all students it has now adopted a system which permits the students to choose certain courses of study and to specialize in these alone....Mr. Jeremiah Slocum, the school’s first principal...is well known throughout the entire West as an educator of advanced liberal views.11

  Records from this early period could not be found in Chicago Public Schools archives at the time of this writing, so Alice’s particular studies or extracurricular activities during her high school years are unknown. However, it appears she was among the most successful students. During the 1895 graduation ceremonies, two years before Alice’s own, she received one of two Victor F. Lawson medals awarded for academic excellence.12

  At the age of sixteen, Alice graduated from South Division High School13 on June 24, 1897, in a ceremony held at Sinai Temple on Indiana Avenue and Twenty-first Street. She was the youngest in a class of ninety students. Among her fellow graduates was her cousin, Sylvester Beers. During the graduation proceedings, just one student addressed the audience—Alice M. Gray, who read an essay titled “The Old Teutonic Home.” The keynote address was given by Dr. S.J. McPherson of the Second Presbyterian Church, who spoke on “The School, the Home and the Country.”14

  After graduation, Alice enrolled at the University of Chicago for the following fall semester. She was destined for a long association with the university.

  CHILDHOOD VIEW OF CHICAGO

  Although she may have been oblivious by virtue of her age, Alice was a young child when the nation’s first skyscraper rose up in the heart of Chicago and when the infamous Haymarket Riot, a protest for workers’ rights, resulted in the deaths of eight police officers. She was eight years old when activist Jane Addams opened Hull House, a pioneering settlement facility serving Chicago’s growing community of immigrants.

  The 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition invigorated the population. The six-month world festival graced Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance, stretching across six-hundred-plus acres of land near Lake Michigan. The Gray family lived about six miles south of the festival, but transit then was cumbersome. As millions of people from all over the world filtered through its gates, Alice, eleven years old, might have been among them, paying a child’s fare of twenty-five cents. Perhaps she rode the world’s first Ferris wheel and other carnival rides or meandered through the replica Street in Cairo to admire the souvenirs. She might have been amazed by the breathtaking display of electricity—yet uncommon in Chicago—and enjoyed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a popular encampment on an out-parcel near the official fairgrounds.

  Despite its proximity, Alice likely did not visit the fair often, however. Hers was a working-class family, one that could not afford to own its home. In fact, circumstances would cause her father, Ambrose, to struggle financially until the day he died.

  Ambrose and Sallie Gray

  Just think, dear. I have never had a friend, except my mother, who died

  thirteen years ago.15

  —Alice Gray

  Although most accounts of Alice’s family describe her father, Ambrose Gray, as a successful physician, he simply was not. This refutes, among other misconceptions, the notion that the Gray family was wealthy and that Alice left behind a privileged background when she settled in the Indiana sand hills. The mistake likely occurred decades ago when someone checked the Chicago directories and noted the listing of a physician by the name of Allen Gray. Because reporters harped on her impressive education and refined manner, the first researchers may have concluded Alice’s father was this Allen Gray, not “A.” Gray, the resident listed as a “laborer.”

  In fact, the Grays lived on a sparse income. A tragic accident befell Ambrose when Alice was fourteen years old. The episode created additional economic hardships for the family.

  Ambrose Beardsley Gray was born in 1842, in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he lived until he left home to seek his own fortune. Because it would plague him the rest of his life, one particular story survives from Ambrose’s childhood. In later years, he would relate this incident to a U.S. Pension Board medical examiner: “My eye and ear were hurt. When I was a boy, a log of wood rolled over me....On my left eye I see every object double. This eye is now no good to me at all.”16

  He also suffered permanent, partial deafness resulting from the same accident.

  As a young man, Ambrose was an early settler of Brown County, Indiana. He had served as an apprentice to a spectacles maker in Connecticut and followed his employer, George Staples, to Indiana to establish a new factory.

  In 1865, at the age of twenty-four, Ambrose enlisted in the Civil War in Columbus, Indiana, identifying his occupation as a “spectacle maker” in Bean Blossom, Indiana. The enlistment record describes him as darkhaired and standing five feet, eight inches; he had hazel-colored eyes and a dark complexion.

  Gray became a private in Company E of the 145th Indiana Regiment. His Union regiment first guarded the railroad in Dalton, Georgia, and then was assigned to Marietta, Georgia. In the fall of 1865, it was ordered to Cuthbert, Georgia. Having served the final year of the Civil War, this group of soldiers mustered out at Macon, Georgia, in January of 1866.17

  Four months after he returned to Indiana, Gray married Sallie Gray. (Gray was also her maiden name, which provided some early, puzzling hurdles during genealogical searches.) Sallie was born in Indiana in 1844, although her parents originally came from North Carolina.

  The couple married April 4, 1866, in Brown County. Three children—Leonora, Nannie and Hugh—were born in this first home. The family moved to Chicago in July of 1873.18

  When the Grays first settled in the city, Chicago directories listed Ambrose as an ironworker and later as a laborer; the specifics of these jobs are unknown. At some point, he began work as a lamplighter, this in an era when thousands of gas lamps still spanned the streets of Chicago. His beat included Archer Street, just blocks from his home. It was on this stretch of his route that a serious accident occurred, one with severe, longterm consequences.

  One late summer afternoon, a disturbing commotion interrupted a druggist while he worked in his store at 3199 Archer Avenue.19

  The druggist reported the incident this way:

  On August 29th, 1895...Ambrose B. Gray, rushed into my store and informed me that he had been filling a street-lamp (as that was his occupation). The lamp leaked and saturated his clothing with gasoline and ignited, burning his left hand, arm and shoulders. He was so badly burned the skin hung in shreds. I immediately applied dressing, pending the arrival of George E. Willard, M.D., who was sent for.20

  In his own hand, Dr. Willard recorded the story for the U.S. Pension Office
:

  On the 29th day of August, 1895, I was called to attend said soldier and found him suffering from a very severe burn of the left hand, arm, shoulder, neck and face, (caused, he told me, by the leaking of a gasoline street lamp saturating his clothing and igniting.) The destruction of tissue was so great that he has totally lost the use of the left arm and hand. He also received such a severe nervous shock as the result of the accident that he was confined to his bed for one year from the date of the receipt of the injury, since which time he has been continuously under my care, I having visited him at his home during his year of confinement.

  Alice’s father spent an entire year unable to leave his bed. Whatever his household duties had been, no doubt many of those tasks fell to Alice and her younger brother, Chester. Their next-oldest sibling, Harry, was already eighteen and likely living on his own, as were the other Gray children. Their father did the only thing he could, given the situation—he filed for yet another military pension increase to help improve the family’s income.

  Three times in four years prior to his accident, between 1891 and 1894, Ambrose requested an increase in his Civil War pension. He claimed a need based on his impaired sight and chronic diarrhea; the latter, he wrote, resulted during his army stint and caused him to lose “a number of weeks of work” each year. On one of these applications, the examining doctor found him “poorly nourished” and confirmed his other ailments. Yet the government denied every one of his requests for additional payments.

  Ambrose sent in paperwork for a fourth request for an increased pension in 1895. That application followed his burn incident. With his emotional capacity waning, Ambrose described his overall condition in stark terms. He told the pension board that the burns caused him “nervous prostration” and declared he was “wholly unable” to earn support for his family. Dr. Willard confirmed the dire circumstances: “Since his ability to walk out he has visited me at my office every 4 or 6 days. And during the time since the 29th day of August 1895 to the present date the loss of time from labor has been total, or 100%.”21

  During that first year of recuperation, when Ambrose undoubtedly spent many painful, monotonous days confined to his bed, Sallie managed the household’s affairs. A friend of Sallie’s later wrote, “During his sickness and disability she maintained and kept the family together by hard work, in raising poultry, vegetables, etc.”22

  Ambrose filed his last request for additional pension funds in 1897. He died, at the age of fifty-seven, of cerebral hemorrhage on June 7, 1898, ending three years of suffering from the debilitating, demoralizing effects of his burn injuries.

  The family buried its husband and father in Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery on a hot summer day, thunderstorms threatening overhead. Alice was surely accompanied graveside by her mother, along with uncles, aunts and cousins, many of whom lived in the same neighborhood. Each of Alice’s sisters and brothers, except Chester, were living on their own. Her eldest sister, Leonora Dunn, would have traveled with her growing family to the funeral from her home in nearby Michigan City, Indiana. Two other siblings, if they made the trip, came from Iowa. Another brother still lived in the Chicago area, on the same street as his family, one block separating their houses.

  Following the death of Ambrose, the family continued to seek additional income. By the time U.S. census workers came around in 1900, Alice (spelled “Allas” on the census) worked as a stenographer, while Chester indicated work as an “office boy.” In the meantime, Sallie Gray applied to the U.S. Pension Office for an increase of two dollars per month. The process was tiresome; the response less than satisfying. On multiple affidavits for the pension board following Ambrose’s death, Sallie detailed her meager living. Neither she nor her husband owned real estate. They held no stocks, no bonds and no other investments.

  Among the disclaimers, she wrote, “I obtain my livelihood by the board of one man and keep about twenty hens, and have a garden plat of about 20 x 40 feet, where I raise a few summer vegetables for my own use.”

  As if the process were not humbling enough, Sallie felt compelled to add this note at the end of one notarized affidavit: “There is no taxable property in my name and as Samuel Beers owns the property where I live he sends herewith his affidavit that I own no property as the clerk refuses to make affidavit as it takes too much of his time to hunt up the records.”

  Chicago neighbors, as well as several from Sallie’s childhood home in Indiana, sent statements to the pension office attesting to her marriage and in witness to the truth of her claims.

  The pension board again denied the family’s request for an increase in the monthly stipend. “Rejection on the ground that there is no period for which increase of pension can be allowed, the solider having died without medical examination under application filed April 28, 1897.”23

  Along with other records, the original marriage license of Ambrose and Sallie Gray is on file at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Pension Office required the document to prove the couple’s marriage, ensuring that Sallie would continue to receive pension payments for herself, Chester and Alice. When Sallie died, Alice, who was named Chester’s legal guardian, continued to receive this benefit for one year, until her brother came of age.

  In that last year, the U.S. Pension Office finally saw fit to allow an additional stipend, raising the pension benefit from six to eight dollars.

  In February of 1902, during her fourth year at the university and in as many years after burying her father, Alice once again stood inside the gates of Oak Woods Cemetery, this time to sign papers for the interment of the woman Alice later said was her one true friend—her mother. Sallie Gray, at age fifty-nine, died of pulmonary tuberculosis. The disease was one of the leading causes of death in Chicago at the time.

  As had happened with Ambrose, Sallie died on a Thursday. Temperatures hovered near freezing. On the following Saturday, the day of burial, the family gathered to say their farewells under a warmer, sun-filled sky. The Gray children and their families, if they attended, traveled from the same places as they had when Ambrose died; by now, most of them, with the notable exception of Alice (and with the possible exception of an older brother), had firmly settled into their respective cities.

  Leonora paid for the graves of both Sallie and Ambrose, according to cemetery records, and—given their location in the cemetery—at a probable cost of two dollars each, the most inexpensive available. Headstones do not mark these graves or those of other family members who died in the years following.

  In that case, it should come as no surprise that Alice’s family later chose not to mark her grave. Some published stories insist, however, that her grave is unmarked because her family had “disowned” Alice long before her death. Marion LaRocco,24 Alice’s great-niece, has indicated that, on the contrary, Alice’s siblings were quite fond of her; they spoke of her so often, in fact, that the husband of a great-niece recorded an audiotape25 of the stories the family shared about Alice as a child. This woman never knew Alice, so her affection grew from the stories told by her mother and her mother’s siblings—Alice’s nieces and nephews.

  At the age of twenty and on her own in Chicago, Alice moved out of the family home to an address on Lake Street. She must have taken a deep breath and moved quickly to learn the business of caring for herself, at least in time to salvage her education. Her grades, which had slipped during her mother’s illness, shot back up to top marks the following semester.

  Given her coursework from that point on, it seems that Alice had found her niche—she focused almost exclusively on the study of mathematics.

  Phi Beta Kappa

  To be human is to be social, to be social is to be historical, judgments, in order

  to be sound, must be historical. The term “crank” is one we use to characterize

  that class of individuals who are completely sterilized from the taint of historical-

  mindedness.26

  —Benjamin Ide Wheeler

  Alice
enrolled in the University of Chicago just six years after the school opened its doors. Given the income level of her family at the time, it seems unlikely her parents paid for her tuition, which was forty dollars per quarter. Several alternatives seem plausible, but, either way, a determined Alice enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate studies over a period of fifteen years.

  An obituary for Alice, published in the New York Times,27 is rife with interesting, but unverified, information. The notice claims that Alice attended the University of Chicago on a scholarship passed on to her by Sarah Adler, a fellow classmate and wealthy friend who earned it but was not financially in need. University researchers could not confirm the scholarship nor recover Alice’s financial records. At age seventeen, Alice was already working as a stenographer and may have paid her own way through school, along with grants or other assistance. Or perhaps her uncle, Samuel Beers, helped pay her tuition costs. It was this uncle who owned her family’s house and whose daughter became a general practice doctor.

  Alice’s academic ambitions might have spawned an early nickname, which later fell away in favor of other, more notorious ones. The New York Times obituary noted that Alice, along with two of her high school classmates, was known as one of the College Class. These young women included the same Sarah Adler and another friend, Grace Nathan. A Sara (no “h” this time) Adler did graduate from South Division High School, although she was one year ahead of Alice, in 1896. However, a student named Grace Nathan does not show up in a list of graduates for either the year Alice graduated or the year after. More intriguingly, the Chicago School Board proceedings show asterisks next to the names of students who took a college preparatory course; neither Alice nor Sara is so noted.

  In her undergraduate years, 1897–1903, Alice studied two languages, German and French. Along with introductory and required courses, she focused on theology, astronomy and mathematics—primarily mathematics; her courses ranged from geometry to increasingly advanced calculus and advanced theory classes. She often enrolled in two math courses per semester.