Tragedy would strike again when Arthur was seven, as Lydia and Ben suffered from a severe case of diphtheria in 1892. Ben would recover, but Lydia died two weeks shy of her tenth birthday.
“One hour before she left us she prayed to God to leave her with her papa and mamma and her brothers,” Louis wrote in the American Bee Journal. “Still the Great Shepherd took her away from us to a better land, where the storms of this life will never reach her any more, and where all diseases are unknown—to a home in Heaven. What a joyful thought.”
Arthur grew up happy, spending hours upon hours in his father’s workshop. He made miniature threshing machines during bean harvesting time, crafting teeth for the cylinder out of cut shingle nails with their heads flattened on an anvil. These activities weren’t without episode, either, with a narrow cutter head once cutting a triangular hole in his fingernail. It happened in the dead of winter, and Arthur later reported that “the cold seemed to increase the pain which was excruciating.”
Despite growing up on a farm, he always “preferred winter work in the woods to summer jobs. A particularly repulsive job in the fields was to shock bundles of rye or barley on a hot summer’s day with the barbed ‘beards’ of the grain finding their way inside my shirt.” In winter, however, he found “there was something fascinating about the cold stillness of the forest; or, if the wind was blowing, to hear it moan in the pine tops overhead.”
The only rule his father had for him in the shop was that he was not allowed to use the saw or hammer on Sundays, as it might be disrespectful to the neighbors. The Koehlers weren’t particularly religious, although Louis did say grace in German before every meal.
In fact, Arthur and his brothers spoke German when their parents were included in the conversation and English to each other. The five boys were close, literally and figuratively, three of them at one time sleeping in an attic room usually used for storage. Walter remembered once being upstairs with Hugo and Arthur in the middle of the winter and having to “shake the snow off his underwear before dressing.”
They weren’t the type of family to play games together or dance around the phonograph. When Arthur’s parents had spare time, they chose to read. His father liked his children to keep quiet after dinner so he could read the paper undisturbed.
Arthur’s affection for learning was apparent at an early age. He began attending school at age three and went fulltime after he turned four. He finished eighth grade at age twelve and then moved in with Hugo and their maternal grandmother in Manitowoc so he could attend the high school, which was nearly ten miles from the farm. He worked as a school janitor and in various stores to help support himself.
He graduated high school at age sixteen with a focus in English and a thesis on Arctic exploration. His commencement program mistakenly listed him as “Arthur G. Koehler,” the only time he would have a middle initial until getting involved in the Lindbergh case more than three decades later.
In his junior year, Arthur began chronicling literally every expense he incurred, a practice he would follow for the next sixty-three years. On the first page of his first financial ledger, he wrote: “Though money talks, As we’ve heard tell, To most of us it says—‘Farewell.’”
The very first cash received came in a $5.00 payment for his janitorial services and an additional $1.10 from “Grandma.” He already had seventeen cents in savings for an opening balance of $6.17 for the month of June 1900. On the spending side, on June 2 he spent seventeen cents on a “Fishing outfit” and another six cents on laundry. He balanced his new ledger just two days later—his birthday, June 4. He accounted for every penny, including numerous five-cent payments for ice cream, cookies, and banjo strings.
In his senior year, he spent and earned more, including spending eighteen cents for each book of the Leather Stocking Tales series by James Fennimore Cooper. For his graduation from high school, he spent five cents on firecrackers, fifty cents to attend the banquet, and five cents for a banana. He left high school and headed back to the family farm with $13.67 in his pocket.
To say Arthur Koehler lacked direction after high school would be accurate. He bounced around in Manitowoc, working for a bookstore, a wholesale fruit dealer, and at the general store, and then moved back home from 1903 to the fall of the following year. He was nineteen years old, with no job and no career. But he had developed a passion for photography that would stay with him for the rest of his life. As an early Christmas present to himself in 1903, he spent $5.14 for a “camera outfit,” including developing paper, chemicals, a tripod screw, and exposure tables.
That fall, he moved to Milwaukee to work for a wholesale candy dealer who offered room and board as part of the compensation. Arthur delivered the candy and took care of the horses that got him to where he needed to go.
His older brother, Hugo, got him a grocery clerk job in Ohio in the fall of 1905. He was earning ten dollars every two weeks with room and board covered. He closed the year and his first ledger with a balance of $108.80.
The second edition begins with three quotes, including from the business magazine Collier: “As a man spends his money, so is he.”
Another business magazine made an even greater impact on Arthur. Success was founded by Orison Swett Marden, who encouraged readers that “all who have accomplished great things have had a great aim, have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible.” Marden was America’s first true self-help guru. Like Arthur, he had been born on a farm with modest means, but unlike Arthur, Marden had gone to college and graduate school before embarking on his career. To Marden, education was vital to success.
The monthly publication he founded in 1897 had half a million subscribers just a decade later, meaning it likely was read by roughly three million people. To Arthur, it certainly was worth the ten cents per issue. He had read it off and on during his time in Milwaukee, but the move to Ohio seemed to fuel his own desire to succeed, and he bought the magazine every month. He liked it so much, he ended up working to sell subscriptions.
If the publication inspired Arthur to go to college, his preferred area of study percolated after he spent the 1907 New Year’s back at the family farm. His trip to Ohio took him through Chicago’s Union Depot, created in 1874 by five separate railroads. The station opened to Canal Street and stretched from Madison to Adams Streets. Commercial vendors lined the building that served as the main passenger thoroughfare to the city. In addition to buying the January edition of Success from an area merchant, Arthur braved Chicago’s westerly winds and relatively mild 40-degree temperatures to spend two dollars on a book called Our Native Trees.
His brother Ben said Arthur started thinking about a career in forestry right after high school, after he heard a speaker discuss the topic. But it wasn’t until he picked up the seminal book in the field by naturalist Harriet L. Keeler that the idea took shape.
The book came out in 1900 to rave reviews. The New York Times called it “well-written and thoroughly interesting.” Keeler wrote eloquently about trees from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to the southern states.
Arthur wanted to learn more and would enroll at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, in the fall of 1907 at age twenty-two. On his first day in botany class, he was paired up with Ethelyn Smith to go to the home of a woman who raised petunias and bring back a flat for the rest of the students.
His third financial ledger tells the tale of a blossoming romance with the young woman, three years his junior, from Evansville, just south of the Wisconsin state capital of Madison. He took Ethelyn to a “Magic Show” for a dollar, bought her ice cream and candy for a nickel each, and treated her to meals and to the theatre for two dollars.
The Lawrence yearbook, the Ariel, mentions their relationship, proclaiming during their freshman year spring break that “Koehler wanders about Botany lab, but all in vain: Miss Smith has left for home.�
� The next year, the yearbook postulated, “Did you ever see Koehler without Miss Smith on Sunday evenings?”
He put his passion for photography to work capturing his newest passion. She was tall, standing above most other women on campus and even an inch or two above his five-foot- nine frame. The camera liked her, as did the photographer behind it. She exuded warmth and an openness emblematic of a woman happy to dote on those she encountered.
Arthur Koehler worked at a grocery store in Ohio and sold subscriptions to a leading business magazine before going to college. Here he is at age 23 before his sophomore year at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He would finish his degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (Courtesy: George E. Koehler)
When he wasn’t focusing his lens on Ethelyn, Arthur focused on mathematics, averaging 93 over six different courses. Despite being brought up in a home where his parents spoke the language, he scored only a 90 in third-year German. His lowest grade was in freshman elocution, a 78, which he raised to a 90 in his sophomore year.
His income came primarily from a serving job in the Ormsby Hall dining room, supplemented by selling his photos, which his younger brother Ben would point out proved to be “quite profitable work.”
Arthur knew all along he couldn’t study forestry at Lawrence, so in the fall of 1909, after a five-day “vacation” to see Ethelyn in Madison and Evansville and one more trip to Appleton, he crossed Lake Michigan on the ferry boat and began his junior year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
He took his first job in the field, working in the Botany Department for $7.20 per month. He supplemented that by working as a commercial photographer, taking group and individual pictures, as well as waiting tables. He continued to see Ethelyn despite the distance between them.
He bought more publications related to forestry, including a booklet called Timber published by the US Department of Agriculture. Arthur started his senior year in Ann Arbor with a balance of $601.17 in his ledger. He sold his waiter’s coat and apron for fifty cents because he was hired on campus as an assistant instructor in tree identification, a job he later said “helped very much in fixing in my mind how the different species of trees can be distinguished and in permanently increasing my interest in life outdoors.”
His interest in Ethelyn remained a constant as well, and the Lawrence yearbook staff continued its chronicling of the now long-distance relationship, writing, “What would happen if Ethelyn Smith failed to hear from Ann Arbor?”
Arthur was partnered with Ethelyn Smith on their first day of Botany class at Lawrence. They would be married roughly five years later in 1912. (Courtesy: George E. Koehler)
That would not be an issue. The Christmas before their last semester in college, they met in Milwaukee and got engaged. Arthur graduated and left the university on June 21, traveling back to Evansville to see Ethelyn before going to work for the summer for the Wisconsin Forestry Department near Trout Lake, in the northern part of the state. He apparently did so more for the experience than the wages, since his ledger records little income—or expenses, for that matter—during that summer job.
Arthur returned to Ann Arbor that fall to start postgraduate work in forestry while still earning twenty dollars a month from the university for teaching undergraduates in that field. Only a month later, after paying fifty cents to watch his Michigan Wolverines wallop Ohio State 19–0 behind All-American Stanfield Wells, Arthur left campus for Washington DC, and a job with the US Forest Service as an “assistant in the study of the cellular structure of wood.”
His first check came on November 16, a whopping $41.00. He’d receive another $42.33 from the “U.S.,” according to his ledger, for a total of $83.33 per month. The goal was to save money. Ethelyn was doing the same, teaching high school math in a small town in western Wisconsin.
Over Christmas 1912, he took an unpaid vacation to head home for nearly two weeks. During that time, he separated from his fiancée long enough to take the federal Civil Service exam. He needed a 70 to pass, which would make him eligible for promotion opportunities. He scored 87.60 on the practical questions, 85 on the thesis, and 92 on the education, training, and experience component. It was another step, like those he had read about so often in Success, toward bettering himself and creating a better future for himself and Ethelyn.
The couple planned to be married in October, but in August Arthur got sick, threatening the event. Purchases mentioned in his journal—a nasal atomizer, syringe, and two medications—suggest he thought he had a cold, but four days later he paid $1.50 for a “Taxi to Hospital.” A full seven weeks passed before the next expense was recorded. The cold was in reality typhoid fever and required a long stay at Providence hospital at a cost of $100.75. Further costs incurred included $70 to a Dr. Yates.
Before the medical bills came in, he had nearly doubled his savings, from $461.77 when he left Ann Arbor to $899.25 by October 1. That’s when he left for Wisconsin, “to recuperate and also to get married,” as Ben would later write. Two days before the October 16 wedding, Arthur started spending some of that money on things he needed for the event, including twenty-five cents for a haircut (basically a trim around the sides, as he was already bald on top of his head) and ten cents for a shave. The biggest expenses would be four dollars for shoes and four dollars for a ring.
The early-morning ceremony would be on Ethelyn’s twenty-fourth birthday at the farm where she grew up. Her new husband was twenty-seven.
Arthur got married with $627.80 on hand, finishing the last open space on his third financial ledger. The fourth, a large, gray, cloth-bound book, began with a five-dollar payment to Reverend Charles E. Coon, a Methodist pastor, for officiating the wedding, two train tickets to Manitowoc for $6.58, and the beginning of their trip back to Washington, where they would start their new lives together.
They would rent for their first couple of months there before a disagreeable landlady hastened their plans to buy a home in December 1912. They put $300 down on a three-bedroom, two-bathroom $1,300 house at 167 Uhland Terrace, in the northeast quadrant of the city. It was off of North Capitol Street, about three miles from the Department of Agriculture headquarters on Independence Avenue.
By that time, Ethelyn was pregnant and they were enjoying what Washington had to offer. Ethelyn wrote home that “it is so beautiful here . . . the most beautiful city I ever saw or imagined.” They saw Ben Hur at the theatre, went to movies, even attended the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson in January 1913.
Kathryn Marie Koehler was born on August 20, 1913, in Madison, where Ethelyn had spent the last few months of her pregnancy at her parents’ newly built home on the city’s near west side. The Smiths had sold their farm and moved to the city to live near Ethelyn’s Aunt Cora, her mother’s sister.
Arthur returned to Washington a few days after Kathryn’s birth, and mother and daughter would join him in late September. Despite the family’s enjoyment of where they lived, they were planning a move roughly a year later, as Arthur had applied for and was accepted as a xylotomist with the US Forest Service in Wisconsin. The job would pay $1,000 per year and would take them back to Madison.
Family lore has Ethelyn’s father lying awake all night as he contemplated how the new home he was building for his retirement could be expanded to accommodate an additional family of three. Arthur and Ethelyn put their Uhland Terrace home up for sale. Before they sold it to G. L. Keenan, who provided a down payment of $100, the total family savings was only $67.99.
The Koehlers left for Madison on January 14, 1914, for Arthur’s position, which was at a new facility called the Forest Products Laboratory. It was an assignment his Washington colleagues didn’t understand. They openly pitied him for being sent to “Indian Country.”
In reality, Arthur Koehler and his family were being sent home. And they couldn’t have been happier about it.
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Since its foundi
ng in 1905, the US Forest Service had preached the need to study, research, and preserve the nation’s wood supply. After all, in the story of creation the word knowledge is symbolized by a tree.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt spoke to the Society of American Foresters at a private home in Washington about the country’s direction with regard to its most important natural resource at the time:
You can never afford to forget for one moment what is the object of our forest policy. That object is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful, though that is good in itself, nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land part of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional policy of home making of our country.
Every other consideration comes as secondary. The whole effort of the Government in dealing with the forests must be directed to this end, keeping in view the fact that it is not only necessary to start the homes as prosperous, but to keep them so. That is why the forests have got to be kept. You can start a prosperous home by destroying the forests, but you can not keep it prosperous that way. Forestry is the preservation of forests by wise use.
So in 1909, US Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot sought the cooperation of a university willing to provide space and equipment to create the world’s first research facility dealing solely with wood. The University of Wisconsin in Madison was selected over a number of universities that “showed a keen interest” and who made “very generous offers.” The university promised to build, heat, light, and power the new laboratory at an initial cost of $50,000.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 3