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,” Kell
y 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.”
FORT MEADE
A belief in supernormal perception, and especially in the clairvoyant vision, is apparent in the history, however meager it may be, of every ancient nation.
Hebrew history is full of instances of it. A striking example is recorded as occurring during the long war between Syria and Israel. The King of Syria had good reasons for suspecting that in some manner the King of Israel was made acquainted with all his intended military operations, since he was always prepared to thwart them at every point. Accordingly he called together his chiefs and demanded to know who it was among them who thus favored the King of Israel, to which one of the chiefs replied: “It is none of thy servants, O King: but Elisha, a prophet that is in Israel, telleth the King of Israel the words thou speakest in thy chamber.”
—From Telepathy and the Subliminal Self (1897) by Dr. Rufus Osgood Mason, the U.S. Navy assistant surgeon during the Civil War and an early proponent of using psychic powers for military ends
MY THIRD SELF-IMPOSED rule while planning the itinerary was: No weird stuff.
I’ll plead agnostic about the existence of haunted mansions, alien abductions, demonic possessions, and other extraterrestrial or supernatural manifestations, but regardless of how entrenched these tales might be in a community’s local lore, they’re not verifiable or consequential and therefore wouldn’t be relevant to my trip.
Much to my own astonishment, I had to break rule number three while doing last-minute research on Niihau and Pearl Harbor, which led me to a bizarre but historically significant site at Fort Meade, Maryland, along with other top-secret places I hadn’t otherwise considered.
The route to Fort Meade, figuratively speaking, was a winding one but strangely enlightening. Before arriving in Hawaii, I read about a UFO sighting over Los Angeles in February 1942 that startled a nation still jittery from the attack on Pearl Harbor. I would have dismissed this incident out of hand if it weren’t for the fact that, whether or not an actual flying saucer appeared over L.A., seven people were killed or seriously injured due to the late-night scare. ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNS BLAST AT L.A. MYSTERY INVADER the Associated Press exclaimed the morning of February 25, 1942. Under a banner headline, ARMY SAYS ALARM REAL, the Los Angeles Times breathlessly reported: “Powerful searchlights from countless stations stabbed the sky with brilliant probing fingers while anti-aircraft batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, if sinister, orange bursts of shrapnel.”
Those gorgeous shell bursts sent jagged chunks of metal plummeting back to earth, critically wounding civilians scurrying to safety as air-raid sirens wailed and all electricity was cut off, plunging the city into darkness. Five people also died, two from heart attacks and three in traffic accidents caused by panicked motorists. “The spectacular anti-aircraft barrage came after the 4th Interceptor Command ordered the blackout when strange craft were reported over the coast line,” the Los Angeles Times also noted.
Initially, the military couldn’t explain with certainty what had set off “the Battle of Los Angeles,” and forty-two years passed before an official report blamed weather balloons for being the most likely cause.
For understandable reasons, government agencies tend not to go on the record about UFO sightings, but those who believe that aliens have visited planet Earth frequently roll out two “official” documents to buttress their case. The first dates back to the seventeenth century. “In this year one James Everell, a sober, discreet man, and two others, saw a great light in the night at Muddy River,” Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop wrote in his journal in 1639. “When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton, and so up and down about two or three hours.… Divers[e] other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.”
Some 330 years later, Jimmy Carter spotted a UFO minutes before attending a Lions Club meeting in Leary, Georgia. The Jimmy Carter Library was surprisingly helpful when I called to verify the October 1969 story, and staff members even sent me a photocopy of the questionnaire that Carter, by that time Georgia’s governor, dutifully filled out from the International UFO Bureau. “Seemed to moved [sic] toward us, stop, move partially away, return, then depart,” Carter handwrote on the form. He described the object as “bluish at first—then reddish—Luminous—not solid.” In the spirit of bipartisanship, I contacted the Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library to confirm that Reagan also claimed to have once seen a UFO. The staff there, alas, did not respond.
Intriguing as Carter’s account was, the sighting didn’t cause much of a stir at the time or impact his presidential campaign, although questions about it have dogged him over the years. “I never knew of any instance where it was proven that any sort of vehicle had come from outer space to our country and either lived here or left,” he stated in a September 1995 speech at Emory University, apparently trying to shake off rumors that as commander-in-chief he’d been shown evidence of recovered alien aircraft.
At this same presentation, however, the Q&A period took a peculiar turn when Carter began talking about a “special” Soviet military plane that went down in Zaire during his presidency. After U.S. satellites scanned the area and found nothing, the CIA conferred with a clairvoyant who, Carter told the Emory students, “went into a trance and gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point, and the plane was there.”
Hello? Here was a former president of the United States openly discussing government-sponsored paranormal operations. Now, this had potential.
Sure enough, intelligence agencies had been utilizing psychic espionage for years. “There are legitimate laboratory projects that may eventually unlock the mysteries of the human mind,” Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Jack Anderson reported in the Washington Post on April 23, 1984. “One of the most promising is the testing of ‘remote viewing’—the claimed ability of some psychics to describe scenes thousands of miles away.”
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 5