The Greeks in Oak Hills were fearful about retaliatory attacks. One man wrote a long letter to Perry on October 11, telling him that none of the other Greek miners was complicit in the crime, and that if they had a chance to capture the kidnapper, they would kill him. He said that some of his friends at the Moffat mine had quit already and went on, “I presume you know it, that the town is against to me, and not having any protection of yours, is no use for me to stay here at all, anyway I ain’t forgetting your past favors. . . .” The next day the Oak Creek Times reported the “wholesale arrest of local Greeks . . . on slender clues or no grounds at all, but later they were released.”
A wanted poster went up in the nearby towns, with a detailed description of the fugitive based on information provided by Bob: “Nationality Greek, age 40 to 50 years, height 5 ft. 7 in. weight 170 lbs., complexion dark, eyes peculiar, had heavy moustache, nose broad and flat, right thumb nail with spot from bruise. Was bareheaded when last seen: grey brown check shirt, eight hob nails in sole of each shoe.” The poster offered a thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspect, half to be paid by Sam Perry, the other half by the Routt County commissioners.
On Sunday morning, two sisters named Leota and Loretta Crosswhite, who owned a confectionery store in Steamboat Springs, were taking a walk to the springs and spotted a man by the railroad tracks fitting the description of the fugitive. They hurried back to town to tell the deputy sheriff. Karagounis surrendered without resistance and readily admitted his part in the kidnapping. He denied killing his partner, saying that the man was too badly wounded to move and that he had been forced to leave him in the creek bed. The reward was split between the Crosswhite sisters.
Bob Perry, accompanied by Ferry Carpenter, went to the jail in Steamboat Springs on Monday to identify Karagounis. “The Greek greeted Bob with a smile,” Carpenter wrote in his autobiography. “In turn, Bob shook hands with him and called him Jim.” On January 12, 1917, James Karagounis was tried in the district court in Steamboat Springs—the building where Dorothy and Ros had taken their teachers’ examinations the previous August. He was convicted of kidnapping and “assault with deadly weapons with a confederate.” He was sentenced to life plus six and a half years in the state penitentiary. Two years later, he was knifed to death by another inmate.
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On Friday, October 13, Ros began a prosaic letter to her mother about exercises they had conducted at the school to celebrate Columbus Day. The children had performed a play, songs, and recitations before an audience of mothers and babies. Ros and Dorothy had made costumes out of some of Mrs. Harrison’s old tablecloths and a few wisps of cheesecloth, and the children made paper crowns and ruffs. Ros joked about her growing ease at the piano, pounding out the pieces after a week or two of practice—“even Papa wouldn’t recognize my touch!”
“Now I have a long story to tell,” she began in a seamless segue. She wrote how Everette Adair had inquired about Bob Perry, either with poorly concealed spite or an unfortunate choice of tense: “You girls knew him, didn’t you?” She noted exultantly, “We both felt at that—that he’d been killed and was no more. He had almost been killed—but had a marvelous escape. It’s the most extraordinary tale in the century, and in this country I didn’t know such things happened.” She said she would send the newspaper accounts, “that you may read a thriller!”
Indeed, newspapers around the country carried the story, with descriptions of Perry’s athleticism and college credentials, his father’s prominence in the Denver business world, maps of the route Bob took with his captors, illustrations of him shooting Katsegahnis, and copies of his “Dear Pop” ransom letter. Reporters added their own flourishes: “Unarmed and defenseless, dressed only in his pajamas,” the Denver Post initially reported, Perry “was completely at the mercy of his assailants who with knives and guns threatened him continually, and frequently beat him when he failed to obey promptly the commands given him.” On October 8, after an interview with Bob, the Post declared in its headline on October 8, “I HATED TO SHOOT KIDNAPER” SAYS PERRY. SON OF MINE MAGNATE TELLS VIVID STORY OF DEATH BATTLE WITH POLITE PAIR OF BRIGANDS. The Los Angeles Morning Tribune published the story on its front page.
Back in Elkhead, Ros informed her mother, “Everyone seems to feel that Mr. Perry is perfectly safe now. The Greeks are scared to death of him, and he’s very well liked at the mine. These men were notably ‘no good.’ . . . Don’t think that kidnapping is customary out here or worry! It’s as unusual here as in Auburn.”
On an October Sunday afternoon a few weeks later, just as Ros and Dorothy had given up on seeing their friends, the two men showed up to take them on a long ride. Bob brought with him from the Oak Hills company store two mackinaws (brown for Ros, green for Dorothy) and some heavy woolen gloves they had asked for. Ferry, lacking presents and a story of courageous struggle with two desperadoes, fussed over the women’s failure to bring woolen underwear for the winter.
Dorothy wrote of “Mr. Perry,” he “looks thinner & worn; and of course it was thrilling to hear his account of the kidnapping.” He showed them the Luger he now carried in his coat pocket, and demonstrated its accuracy on their ride home by shooting a porcupine. At his family’s insistence, he had hired a bodyguard, but he asked the man to stay at Ferry’s cabin while they visited the teachers, and Dorothy noticed that he didn’t seem remotely concerned about his safety.
In Rosamond’s Elkhead photo album, under a picture of Bob posing on horseback in white shirt, jacket, necktie, and fedora, loosely holding his rifle, she wrote “Hero No. 1.” Pasted next to him is “Hero No. 2”—a candid shot of Ferry on skis, caught with his head thrown back in a moment of unrestrained laughter. She wrote underneath, “A very good likeness.”
Ros was discreet about her deepening affection for Bob, but Ferry knew that he had lost the competition.
15
“THE DARK DAYS ARE VERY FEW”
Ros taking a picture of Bob on Thanksgiving
On an unseasonably warm Saturday at the end of October, the teachers got up at six, took their cold sponge baths, cleaned their room, mended some clothes, washed Ros’s hair, and worked on their lessons. They had made most of the home visits already, but they had a few left in the farthest hills. That afternoon, they rode up into Little Arkansas, the area of heavy aspens Carpenter had described in his letter to them before they left Auburn. It turned out that people there really did eat bear cabbage and porcupine. Dorothy commented, “I don’t see how these people make a living—with just a tiny log cabin in a clearing—& a potato patch! Think of living in the country & not having a cow or chickens—everyone is ‘pulling Taters’ now and burying them for the winter.”
One place about two and a half miles north of the schoolhouse was particularly forlorn, a tiny cabin on the peak of a mountain, surrounded by aspens. It was the home of a family of “poor whites” from Kentucky who had five children, three of whom had joined Dorothy’s class. “I was positively terrified by the mother’s appearance,” she wrote. “She is tall & gaunt with a wisp of bright red hair—and 2 horrible tusks of teeth.” The cabin was “dreadfully dirty . . . and for furniture she had a stove, three double beds and two stools—for seven people! I felt so sorry for the poor creature.” Attempting to start a conversation, Dorothy asked her if she liked the country. The woman replied, “ ‘Naw—’pears like me & Chris don’t care about nothin’ any more!’ What can life mean, but mere existence to people like that? The children are neat & clean at school & no wonder they love it.”
Now the students’ frayed clothes were less picturesque than they had seemed in August. Tommy Jones wore a torn shirt, a ragged coat, and a duster around his neck. Six-year-old Robin Robinson was bare-legged in cutoff overalls and practically disappeared inside Jimmy’s coat, which was in shreds and so big on him that his hands dangled inside the sleeves. Their mother, a cultured woman from France whose family disowned her when she married a
cowboy, had died during childbirth, when Robin was three. Nine-year-old Jesse Morsbach, who informed Dorothy that the biblical Abraham came from Kansas, wept because his shoes, which he tied together with string, constantly flapped open and tripped him; he started wearing old rubber boots instead. Even children from some of the relatively well-off families were in rags, because the “freight” hadn’t come—their annual shipments from Sears Roebuck.
With no warning one afternoon, the temperature dropped and a snowstorm descended. Few of the children had worn coats to school, and they set off for home at a dead run. The teachers were moved by the students’ attempts to cope, and by their good cheer in the face of such adversity. Jesse’s brother Rudolph, Dorothy wrote to her father, “said he always ate radishes to keep him warm!” She asked her sisters for help, suggesting that they collect some old scarves, sweaters, and coats for the children: “They are hard working, self respecting people—very proud, but I am sure we could manage to give them some clothing.” Dr. D. L. Whittaker, the new doctor in Hayden, came up to examine the students and found several cases of enlarged tonsils and poor eyesight, among them Lewis Harrison, who needed glasses. Lewis was also told that he would have to go to Denver to have his adenoids removed. Tommy Jones had an ulcer inside his right nostril, causing nosebleeds.
The Woodruffs and the Underwoods had come to think of Dorothy and Ros as missionaries, and they responded to their daughters’ pleas for help. Dorothy’s father took her letters to his office and had his secretary type them up. Grace Underwood, using Ros’s typewriter, transcribed the letters herself. Copies were distributed to friends and family in Auburn. The two families, and the city’s congregations, went to work. In late fall, Ros’s mother spoke at a monthly meeting of the King’s Daughters of the First Baptist Church, a group of wealthy young women intent upon improving the lives of the poor. Their motto was: “Look up, not down; look forward, not back; look out, not in; lend a hand.” Mrs. Underwood passed around pictures that Ros had sent of the children and the schoolhouse.
Soon boxes and barrels began appearing in Hayden; they were taken to Elkhead whenever someone had a wagon available. Dorothy and Ros put clothing donations in the supply closet and distributed them when the need arose. Early one afternoon, a box of clothes from Ros’s aunt Nellie was delivered just before a blizzard struck. Ros tore open the box and clapped a sweater and shawl and her own green coat on three of the girls who had come to school in cotton dresses.
One box from the Woodruffs was full of sneakers and rubber overshoes. Ros told the boys that if they made goals for a basketball court and laid out the field, she would donate the ball, and she and Miss Woodruff would coach—a generous if improbable thought, probably inspired by the basketball lessons Charlotte Perry had given to children at Hull House in Chicago.
Grace Underwood sent books from her daughter’s childhood library, and as Ros unpacked Things Will Take a Turn, Each and All, and a Dickens storybook, she thought about how happy she was to see them being used by the children rather than stored in an attic box. She and Dorothy started a library of their own, and the students loved borrowing books. Louisa May Alcott was a favorite. Ros had to tactfully dissuade Mrs. Underwood from sending any more Spirit of Missions from the Episcopal Church, telling her, “They like spicier reading here in Routt Co!!” Zane Grey was popular among the adults.
The teachers were also recipients of the cross-country literary exchange. When Ferry was through with his magazines, he passed them along to the teachers: the educational reviews, the Yale Review, the Unpopular Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. Ros asked her mother if she could send along copies of the Atlantic and the Sunday New York Times as well.
Two days of blustery October wind and rain shook the house and blew in their bedroom window. The third morning they woke up to a blinding snowstorm. Waving aside the Harrisons’ advice to stay home, they rode to school, leaning into the wind as they tried to make out Lewis on Old Eagle ahead of them. Ferry, assuming they wouldn’t be able to get there and planning to substitute for the day, arrived just as they did. Fourteen children were already inside, and they had a fire going in the furnace. Robin Robinson’s father mined the anthracite coal on the hillside and hauled it to the Rock School. It burned so hot that the grates lasted only six weeks. The children lined up their shoes, caked with mud, in front of the furnace to dry them out. Even the horses had trouble extracting their hooves, and the teachers couldn’t see how the children had made their way on foot. Ferry spent the day doing odd jobs around the building, observing the classes, and chatting with the students. The teachers ate their lunch indoors with the students, as they always did on stormy days. Dorothy told Anna, “The din would make your hair stand on end. We laugh about it, for we are just like those oblivious mothers who don’t hear their children.” That night the snow stopped falling, and Ros noted, “a heavenly crescent moon and one of the real western sunsets makes me hopeful for tomorrow.”
Like the sudden shifts to clear skies, the students’ responsiveness in class compensated for the most trying moments. Dorothy found that it wasn’t hard to distract them from their discomfort. Drawn as the children were to tales at sea, she told them in current-events class about the destruction of the Memphis, an armored navy cruiser that had been struck by a seaquake a few months earlier in the Dominican Republic. The boat was wrenched from her anchorage, tossed above the waves, then repeatedly slammed into the harbor bottom. Three sailors were washed overboard, seven were killed when some steam pipes burst, and thirty drowned after their lifeboats capsized in the gigantic waves. Robin, unable to contain himself, shouted, “We have a crick by our house!”
Dorothy wrote, “The nicest part about it all is the way they love school, and their rapt attention is really thrilling,” and, in another letter, the children “fairly eat up work, and I rack my brains to keep them busy.” She told them a story at the end of every day and made up a long series about a little boy who was traveling around the world on a spectacular boat—the best way she had found to teach geography. When she held up her postcards from Antwerp, Zermatt, and Paris, there was a stampede to the front of the room as everyone jostled for a closer look. Ros told her mother, “My Ancient History class gets the collection of Greek p.c.’s and views of Corinth today.”
They all loved an excuse for a school party, and spent weeks preparing for Halloween, laying in a supply, as Ros put it, of peanuts, apples, and other provisions, along with more galoshes and heavy stockings. Ferry bought decorations in town, and the teachers arranged for a ghost in the closet, apple-bobbing, and pin the tail on the donkey. The children made a decorative border of witches and pumpkins on the blackboard while Dorothy and Ros set the tables in the basement. They had some trouble with their popcorn balls. “We wasted a can of molasses,” Ros wrote, “and got into a terrible mess, before we finally ‘swam out’! By 6 o’clock we had about 60 good balls, and they vanished like snow under the noon day sun.”
Report cards were issued to the children each month on two-sided preprinted index cards, with a signature line for the parents. Dorothy prepared them for her fourteen students, hesitating over the choice of grades: A (admirable; 95–110), E (excellent; 85–95), F (fair; 75–85), P (poor; 60–75), and M (very poor; below 60). The report cards stated: “Any Grade lower than FAIR will not be honored by promotion.” She wrote, “I felt so mean,” adding that it still felt odd to her to be in a position of such authority. Nevertheless, she doesn’t seem to have given any of the children a P or an M, even slow Ray. And, she went on, “Our ‘warrant’ is now due and I don’t suppose any one ever felt prouder than we will of that earned money!”
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School was closed for Election Day, November 7. About seventy-five men and women cast their ballots there, while back home in suffrage country, only men were going to the polls. Ros had written earlier about the primary, a ritual that she imagined taking place at public buildings across the country. “Just here I’d
like to remark that it is a beautiful sight to see happy family parties hand in hand casting their ballots in a fine clean school room—no smoking—no profanity!!!”
It was a close election. Wilson had stuck to his promise of nonintervention, while Charles Evans Hughes continued to attack his stand, and argued that Wilson’s support for progressive labor laws was inimical to industry. Ros wrote to her brother George and his wife, “It has seemed so queer to be so far away from any political excitement. I hear you and Ken [the second lieutenant] are quite the leaders in the Hughes Alliance, George. We have been so crazy to hear the returns.” Around noon on November 9, Ferry telephoned the school to say that so far Wilson had won three more states than Hughes; the California results were yet to come in. “What an election it has been!” Ros commented. Wilson “is idolized out here and it is astonishing to hear how he’s considered. Hughes’ strength is not in the west!”
The following Sunday, Ferry and Bob arrived at the Harrisons’ with sacks of mail and buffalo meat (rare even in that part of the country), duck, celery, and an issue of the Breeder’s Gazette. Carpenter told them that some buffalo had been shipped in recently for breeding, and that one bull had rampaged and had to be shot. They ate it for dinner, and it joined the list of exotic meats they had sampled—deer, bear, elk, and rabbit. Lewis recently had trapped a muskrat, and the Harrisons laughed when Ros asked if they were going to eat it, too. There was great excitement when Frank Jr. went up Agner and returned with a buck slung over the back of his horse. He came in at suppertime waving a bloody liver, which, Dorothy said, “was the signal for much rejoicing—it is a welcome change to us all, and the fact that it is against the law only makes it taste better.” There were very few deer and elk at the time, and the homesteaders, often desperate for food, ignored the injunction against hunting out of season.
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