This is Part Three of a story upon which I stumbled by accident when I was gathering intelligence for something entirely unrelated. I became intrigued, put my intended project on hold — it’s not as though any urgency’s attached to it; to be able to write what I want, when I want, and how I want to write it is my one remaining earthly pleasure — and allowed myself a detour into turn-of-the-twentieth century Madison County, Indiana. The high-pitched “beep-beep-beep” you might have been hearing is me backing into the main meat of the story, which is a gothic tale of an Armstrong family secret. All families have them — secrets, I mean — but the more I read about the Armstrongs of Summitville, Indiana, and the more I read between their shadowy lines, the more I think they must have had, somewhere in the Armstrong family manse, a spacious closet devoted to the storage of skeletons. You can read the first two chapters of the story here and also here.
John’s and May’s second-born, Bertha, was the first to die. She was twenty-two, just turned, in August, 1907. The cause was Bright’s Disease: a nephritic catch-all, an early-19th century description of what would eventually be recognized as several discreet, degenerative kidney ailments, each capable of maintaining its own identity, each deserving of its own page in the diagnostic manuals. In the early years of the twentieth century, Bright’s remained a usual, if dreaded, diagnosis: prognosis necrosis.
Bright’s enjoyed a hundred year run as one of mortality’s most ambitious agents. Its clients included Emily Dickinson, Booker T. Washington, Gregor Mendel, Howard Pyle. By 1907, when Bertha succumbed, nephrologists were becoming more specific in their descriptions and diagnoses, but were still keeping it amongst themselves, not yet ready to declare themselves publicly. A measure of their accruing boldness is that by 1932 when Gladys, the fifth-born, became the second to die, age 39, in the Central Indiana Hospital, in Indianapolis, her cause of death was listed as “chronic interstitial nephritis.” I suppose this is progress, even if taxonomy’s gain was poetry’s loss. “Bright’s Disease” has about it the sheen of promise, the suggestion of Paradise shimmering while choirs of angels sing a welcoming anthem in cheerful C or E-Flat Major.
“High above, in cloudy palaces / None requires the brute dialysis / Giant tall or puny pygmy / No one here requires kidneys.”
“Chronic Interstitial Nephritis” is a punchline that doesn’t land; it has about it the hard whack of the coroner’s stamp on a death certificate, the thudding scatter of wet clay on a coffin. On Saturday, March 5, 1932, the Muncie Morning Star (which, as newspaper names go, peals out more of a Wesleyan ring of hymnody than do most Grub Street rags) reported Gladys’s passing as part of a regional roundup: news from Summitville.
None of the Summitville Armstrongs lived into what we’d now think of as “old age.” Only Pearl, sometimes identified — as on the stone pictured above — as Pearle, made it past three score and ten. The family tended to wonkiness of the heart, the men especially; they came into the world with pumps that were good for 66, 67 years, and then they packed it in. Only Bertha and Gladys demonstrated renal susceptibility; a quarter century separated the failing of their respective kidneys. A safe, if fatuous, speculation is that Bertha, had she clung to the quick, would have bristled with both familial and professional ire on reading her sister’s brief death notice, see above, published in the Muncie Morning Star. I imagine her shouting aloud:
“How hard can it be to get it right, to simply get it goddamn right? MAY! Our mother’s name was MAY. M - A - Y. Like the month! Like the modal verb! MAY, not Mary. Jesus H. Christ!”
Bertha would have expressed the righteous umbrage not just of a grieving daughter and sister, but of a hardened newswoman, a barnacled professional, someone with old-fashioned standards of accuracy, with a gift for marshalling the facts and keeping them in line, standing straight and at attention. Had she survived, chances are better than average that this is what Bertha Armstrong would have become, a newsroom doyenne. Her own obituary, published in the Elwood Daily Reporter, July 27, 1907, suggests this was her foreordained path.
The paper with which Bertha was most closely and proudly identified was The Summitville Reporter. About the Reporter — this pains me — I can’t tell you much; I haven’t found any facsimiles of it pages, nor located an archive where its frangible pages might be preserved against the ravages of sun and air. Its first number was published in 1901, and I imagine it to have been one of those quixotic, brave little upstarts: a weekly, with aspirations. Now and again, the Reporter rates a mention in one of the larger Madison or Grant county dailies. When, on June 20, 1902, the Elwood Daily Record ran a story about how Monroe Wood, brother of the then editor of The Summitville Reporter, Miles F. Wood, had been committed to the asylum in Richmond, suffering from homicidal mania, and noting that he was not the first one in the family to go insane, one wonders if this was a none-too-subtle jab, a suggestion that readers might want to be wary of taking The Summitville Reporter too much to heart, considering the inherent intellectual instability of the helmsman.
This was a time when all the sleepy country towns within a hundred or hundred-and- fifty mile radius from Indianapolis were experiencing huge influxes of cash and population, owing to the discovery of gas. A boom economy, a time of massive, rapid change, and great change is always great fodder for news: hence, the advent of so many thriving papers in what had long been “blink and you miss it” outposts. We can take it as a given that everyone in the news-writing game would have known everyone else, and surely, then as always, they would have seen themselves as both colleagues and rivals, combative but congenial, embittered yet admiring. Bertha Armstrong, news writer of Summitville — she must have been one of very few women in the trade — was widely, if grudgingly, acknowledged to be a cut well above average, and not just because she suffered the indignity of death at twenty-two.
The “trained” journalist bearing a degree from an accredited institution is a relatively rare invention. That was not Bertha’s path to newshounding; I’m not sure how she got there, I think possibly through teaching. There are traces of a Bertha Armstrong — not so unusual a name in Indiana in the late nineteenth century — who attended Normal School; probably she would have attained her qualification and been in the classroom by the time she was 16, which seems absurd, but was then usual. Whether this is the same young woman who became the mainstay of The Summitville Reporter — there was another paper in town, The North Madison Democrat — I can’t say for sure, but Bertha certainly brought to the paper the same work ethic any teacher would have been expected to demonstrate in the schoolhouse: there early to get the fire going, there all day to teach the lessons and wipe every nose, there after work to clean the grate and fill the inkwells, back at it early in the morning. No one is indispensable, but Bertha, at The Summitville Reporter, must nearly have made herself so. On May 28, 1907, just two months before Brights came for Bertha, a reporter at The Fairmount News wrote, admiringly:
A 12- page paper — a page count of 4 - 6 was usual for most of these publications — would have been a real declaration of intent. The inclusion of the splendid picture of third prize beauty contest winner Miss Nora Wright was also extraordinary; illustrative content, apart from the graphics attached to ads, was a real rarity. There was no question that The Summitville Reporter, which began publication in 1901, was positioning itself as contender, throwing down the gauntlet, Goliath meet your David, etc. etc. How sad then that, just a few months later, on November 30, 1907, as the first snows of the impending winter fell upon Bertha’s grave, the Alexandria Times Tribune reports:
What had changed, of course, in the interim, was that Bertha Armstrong, so young and vital and talented, the heart and soul of the operation, had faded away, unexpectedly, having been “bedfast but a week.”
This was the death noticed that appeared in the Muncie paper, The Star. When did bylines become usual additions to newspaper stories? At some point these engines of either vanity or accountability caught up with the business, but identifiers almost never adhere to stories in the papers I’ve been browsing, piecing together what I can about Mrs. Alice Faulkner and Fred Wertner and John and May Armstrong and, now, their brilliant daughter, Bertha. She was provided news about Summitville not just to The Muncie Star — though I think it was her main outlet — but to other papers in the wider metropolitan area, in Fairmount, Elwood, and Alexandria, for instance. I wish I could pinpoint a date, say when she began, or how long she filed. Given that she’d scarcely grazed 22 when she died, safe to say she wasn’t at it for long. Safe also to say, though, that during that time she, as “an efficient newspaper woman,” she was more than usually productive; and, safe to say that if you’re reading news of Summitville in Madison / Grant county papers from about 1904 - 1907, what you’re getting is Bertha’s take, which is just plain old magnificent. Bertha Armstrong was the Real Deal.
This lively example of civic boosterism, the furthest thing from impartial, was published in the Magazine Section of The Star, February 19, 1905. It trumpeted to Muncie and Marion and beyond the virtues of the little city on the hill. It is surely Bertha’s work. Summitville, we learn, has been latterly transformed from a sleepy backwater where the one certainty was that wagons would become mired in muddy streets, to “the thrifty little, busy aristocratic city of today, with paved and lighted streets, swift electric cars, rows of substantial business blocks, busy people and the general air of ‘something doing here all the time…’” The reader learns of the many churches and fraternal organizations, of the two good banks, and the two telephone companies servicing 250 paying customers, of the modern school attractively situated in a natural grove of oak trees, of the twenty-seven fire hydrants, of the promise of gas and oil, of the light industry offering employment to townsfolk — drain tile and window production — and of a public transportation system that far outstrips what one might expect of a small community: “twelve trains daily on the Big Four stop, which each hour from 6 a. m. to 12 midnight cars go both north and south on the I. U line.”
Bertha — I’m so persuaded she’s the unsigned correspondent of all the news from Summitville that I’m laying aside any consideration of doubt and naming her as such — paid close attention to public transportation issues, so much so that her morning routine of catching the first traction car into town was noted in her obituary: see above. She was a serious, studied observer of civic life. The brief account of her life published in the Muncie Star notes her fearlessness, and credits her with being an agent of social change. The Elwood Daily Record took similar note.
Bertha’s advocacy is implicit and explicit. When she writes about the case of a woman being brought to trial for stealing food, she makes the point that her domestic circumstances are far from ideal, that her husband is dissolute, and that, when arrested, she was found to be sharing quarters with many pigeons and a goat; perhaps the theft of food should not be the community’s main concern. She writes not just about the economic advantages brought to bear by oil and gas but about the threats to the land, the displacement of farmers, and the shocking conditions in the work camps. When the community is rocked, and largely made ill, by a tainted meat scandal, she stops short of naming names but manages to call the culprit to account in no uncertain terms. These are a few of many, many examples. There’s verve in Bertha’s writing, wryness, and, often, great humour, as when, for instance, in The Elwood Call-Leader, November 22, 1904, she tells the story of three boys — the youngest, aged eight, the ringleader — who stole $59.00 from a Mrs. Judd, and equipped themselves for an adventure. “They boarded a traction car and went to Marion, where they purchased the rifles and a punching bag. They returned back through Summitville and went to Alexandria where they purchased three knives, a set of boxing gloves, a shotgun, a quantity of ammunition, dime novels, etc. and started to make their way west to the Mississippi River. There they expected to obtain a boat and drift down the river to the gulf and from there make their way across to South America to fight savages and hunt.”
Space here doesn’t allow for the inclusion of more examples of Bertha’s varied reporting — she was incredibly industrious — so I’ll publish a supplement that will better show off her range and versatility. “Died too young,” is one of those stupid, reflexive assessments of a life and career that end early. We die when we die, when it’s our time, and no one comes into the world with a guarantee of days from which we’re cut off in violation of the contract. That said, I do wish Bertha could have gone on longer, I wish she could have written more, I wish her name was remembered, I wish it were easier to discover her writing, and I really, really wish she would have had the opportunity to tell her own family’s story. Bertha would never have allowed 1922 to appear as the death date of Stella V, who died of hiccups in 1923. Bertha might have been persuaded to part with the truth, or part of the truth, about John L and May and Mrs. Alice Faulkner. And no one would have had more insight than Bertha in the strange tale of the two names missing from that Armstrong family monument in the Fairmount Cemetery, not so far from where James Dean, the graveyard’s most celebrated denizen, is buried. Where is Nola? Where is Geneva? It was Nola and Geneva who roped me in. It’s to Nola and Geneva we’ll travel next time.