The Fan and the Stone
The Timeline
Scanned Letters and Telegrams
Selected Excerpts

ghoulish -is witnessing how news of Carl's death spread through telegram, word of mouth, and telephone nationwide, and watching, nearly 100 years later, the web of family and friends that pulled tightly around my great grandfather's family. The reaction to Carl's death is documented day-by-day and second-by-second because of the reliance on telegrams in 1918. A somewhat boisterous family get-together that Christmas in Atmore turned quiet as we realized what we had found and began reading intently, piecing the information together

Carl was buried on what would have been his high school graduation day.

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Agnes and Carl

Agnes Nichols Weis was originally from Kentucky; Carl Albert Weis I was from Illinois. They were my great grandparents, and I didn't know either of them in life. They lived in Alexandria, Louisiana at the time of their son's drowning. I wonder, how did Alexandria receive them? Were they comfortable in a South still bitter from reconstruction; were they welcomed? Did they have accents that stood out?

Carl Albert Weis I was a reserved man of German extraction, and no one remembers seeing him in less than a shirt, vest, tie and jacket. Kind and soft spoken, a deeply spiritual man, he was also a private man; I know that upon his death, family members learned of the first time of the extent of his generosity to the less fortunate. A school in Pensacola still carries his name. Pictures show us a sensitive face, with soft cheeks and pleasant, although non descript features. And, a rarity in my dark-skinned, dark-eyed family: blue eyes.

His wife, Agnes, is harder for a great granddaughter who never knew her to love by proxy. Agnes, too, had a deep-seated belief system- my Presbyterian upbringing is the result of the Weis' influence - and the letters from church organizations and philanthropic organizations are numerous thanking her for her good deeds and kindness. Family papers related to Agnes are rarely from relatives: they are thank you notes from dozens of charities, programs of luncheons and prayer meetings held in her honor, and newspaper clippings.

Letters both before and after Carl's drowning paint a fragile Agnes with health problems, in need of a lot of support and constantly in a difficult situation, but few people seem to remember her that way. Did the death of her son break her heart completely? Some tender hand carefully packed all these letters away in 1918, including Carl's entrance ticket to his college entrance examinations at Tulane, the letter of congratulations he never received from his grandfather, and the brightly colored balls of ribbon with his name stamped on it that would have been sewn into his clothes before he left home. Someone wanted us to remember.

Grandpa Weis' first words to his wife after learning of the drowning tell us a great deal about the man. No questions about the how, the why, no distance in his speech dictated by grief or natural reserve. Imagine Agnes' relief and perhaps exhaustion - I see her slumped in a horsehair chair, holding her head in her hands - upon seeing the first opening word from her absent husband: "sweetheart." These two telegrams tell us to the story:

SWEETHEART GOD KNOWS HOW SAD WE BOTH ARE I RECD THE AWFUL NEWS TOO LATE TO MAKE A TRAIN FOR STLOUIS TO CATCH THE IRONMOUNTAIN IN THE MORNING SO MUCH WAIT FOR MORNING I C REACHING NEWORLEANS IN TIME COME HOME ON T AND P THURSDAY 7PM THE DELAY IS MADDENING BUT AM HURRYING FAST AS POSSIBLE
BERT

A few hours later, Bert wired Agnes again.

LEAVING FOR HOME VIA STLOUIS BE BRAVE.
BERT

Carl Albert Weis II

Carl Albert Weis II was the first of two sons. The younger son, Henry Mahlon Weis, was my grandfather. My grandfather was 10 years old when his brother, 17, drowned. Note that these letters were found at the home of Carl Albert Weis III; my grandfather carried on his drowned brother's name through his own bloodline.

We know that Carl's arrival was welcomed in the Weis family. His grandmother Weis wrote the following in 1901:

You can hardly imagine with what joy your Telegram was resieved last evening. At last our hopes are realised, and we have a grand son (you surely would not Joke with us) May the Father in Heaven Bless the little man. And help him to grow up to be as good as his Papa, And I know if your influence will help, he will.

Dear Children how I wish I could be with you, just for a five minutes so I could know more of the perticulars, Telegrams say so little. I sincerely hope Agnes Dear you got along all right; At even the very best it is a very hard and exerting experience I can imagine Bert suffered with you, as he is very sympathetic. What time did your baby arrive and is he healthy and striving and does he look like Papa or Mamma, you see I am anxious to know all about it. And the most important of all, is Agnes doing well, I sincerely hope.

… Tell her to give the darling baby lots of kisses for his Grandma in Waterloo And Bert you and Agnes may give this to one another for me. I dreamed all night about the baby and Agnes. The Babe was Healthy and Strong, And Agnes was up and quite Motherly, I know Albert is just as proud as every young Father can be, And he certainly has a reason to be in this perticular Case, Being Father to the first boy. I know you will hardly be able to find a name nice enough, so if you cannot find one to suit, name him John Henry, I think that is what Agnes called him while here, you oughta see Pa Weis, He is almost as tickled as Bert; I would like to see him and Grand Pa Nichols together, I know it would be interesting conversation. But I assure you the 2 Grandmas could keep step with them.

Was Carl Sr.'s mother alive when her grandson died? I have to wonder: did she dream that night too?

Looking at early pictures of Carl and my grandfather, I suspect they would have looked much the same as adults. Both were blonde, rosy-cheeked babies, and a somewhat serious portrait of Carl taken in his later teenage years seems to validate that there is a strong family resemblance. My grandfather grew into a perhaps brutally handsome man and in his 20s and 30s, didn't resemble the pipe-cleaner mustached man with thinning hair and thick glasses I remember. Would Carl have looked the same? Would he have followed in the family business, as my grandfather did, and would my grandfather have felt constrained to follow in that family business if his older brother had been there to do it instead?

Indeed, while we find high powered industry-related history that mention Mahlon Weis' name, we find more clippings about his jewelry making, orchard growing, and early progress in artistic photography. Mahlon once commandeered a helicopter pilot to fly him over an erupting Nicaraguan volcano, Mt. Heliza, and took photographs that later won national awards. What sort of pressure was my grandfather under as the remaining heir? He knew his brother well because he was ten when Carl Jr. died. Were they true friends?

Indications of the Age

I would be glued to this story even if my family wasn't involved, because I love the bits and details that tell us how people lived in past days. Charming indications of the age show through everywhere in these letters. For example, many of the letters are oddly shaped, with matching envelopes; clearly, there were no mailroom machinery standards to consider to make envelopes sort-able by an automated system. The word "and" is frequently written vertically to save room on the page, and the penmanship on many of the letters looks old beyond its years. Some of the monogrammed stationary has a lovely Art Nouveau feel to it; nearly every letter has at least one line that says, "Oh! How I wish I could…." Many letters are addressed merely to Alexandria, and when letters do have street addresses on them, the street appears beneath the city and state. Even in 1918, some of the letters were typewritten.

On the day his son drowned, Carl Albert Weis was traveling. Telegrams tell us that he was bound for Chicago via train. Imagine the world of 1918, before an interstate highway system, before cell phones, computers and pagers, before extensive telephone systems. Communication was done via word of mouth, some phone calls and telegraphs.

The Drowning

There seems to be some mystery about the drowning, but it's hard to know whether facts were unclear then, or are unclear now simply because of the passage of time. No hint of foul play, but mystery about the hows and whys. Some letters and shared family memories indicate that Carl developed a cramp of some sort. One letter from Henry Weis, father of Grandpa Weis, asks for clarification about something he learned from Agnes, that the drowning was in fact caused by Carl's weak heart.

Some correspondence indicates that he was supposed to have tests run at a medical facility - or was he going to tour it to investigate medicine as a possible field of study? Did Agnes seize on the idea that it must be something medical, unwilling to believe it could simply be an accident? Did she need to believe it was medical because she felt utterly responsible for the death of young Carl while her husband was gone?

Some believe Carl drowned at a swimming party actually on the Weis property, and other indications tell us that he was swimming in a log pond, which would prove dangerous at any time because of submerged limbs and vegetation. Whether or not the log pond, which was surely located close to the saw mill, was actually adjacent to or part of the Weis family property is unknown. Other versions led us to believe it was a graduation party and a group of boys went swimming on a whim, and Carl Albert did not return.

We do know from Carl Jr.'s grandfather that according to another family member, Carl died in the afternoon. Were Carl's friends the first to find him and to know? Did they see him struggle, and not resurface? Did they think he was playing? What happened to them after the loss? There's no mention explicitly of whom he was with.

Comfort of the Day

We have all written and received our share of condolence notes, struggling with what to say to grieving friends and family. The same was true, not surprisingly, in 1918. People wished they could say something that would help and freely admitted they could say nothing; most urged acceptance and proffered time and God as the ultimate healers; many shared memories of Carl II and all mentioned they would keep the family in their prayers. Writers were delicate about intruding into the Weis’ privacy during mourning. More than one stranger penned multi-page letters, and three people wrote about close calls their own sons had experienced with swimming with a markedly different outcome.

Every letter and most of the telegrams mention the power of God – the power to take, the healing power God offers, that all things work for good, some puzzlement over this “cruel stroke” – but was this a genuine spiritual sentiment, or the speak of the day? My great grandparents, I know, were deeply religious people; scores of letters, as well as memories from the living bear this out. But were all their friends and acquaintances too?

The religious speak takes what I find to be a sinister twist in places too, but the fact several writers said the same thing probably means that what I find sinister wasn’t sinister in 1918. Numerous correspondents threw out the upside of Carl Albert’s early death as being that he was so young, he surely hadn’t sinned much – so he’d be a more likely candidate for God’s mercy and quick admission into Heaven. Several letters point out, with relief and a hint of pride, that because of the Weis’ effective rearing, Carl had been sheltered from the world’s contamination. It seems that Carl had a double stroke of luck in the eyes of 1918’s onlookers: sheltered and young. Did my great grandparents find comfort in this pale sliver, this sharp-edged piece of hope, or shudder a little, as I did? What did my grandfather, a young Mahlon, make of comfort like this? Did he wonder in his ten-year-old mind if it would be better for him, too, to die young? One woman went as far to say that early death was preferable to torture in German prison camps and maiming that would scar a young man throughout a continued and long life, the only reminder of World War I in these letters.
Interesting, too, was the choice of words by Carl Jr.’s contemporaries. How many young men of today would call a friend a “treasure,” “beautiful,” “God’s gift,” and wax on with eloquence about meeting him in Heaven?

Contamination and Gun Control

It’s hard to imagine a 17 year old preparing to go to college untouched by some of the “contamination” the letters refer to. In my own experiences, I know of no young people of college age that are (or were) completely chaste or have never tried drugs or alcohol. At the very least our teenagers today been exposed to violence and conflict in a way unimaginable in 1918, as close as their TV sets can offer, and sadly closer. Maybe the correspondents were genuine for their time, and our world is very different, after all.

But is it? A man who I cannot place through later correspondence wrote a letter in shaky copperplate hand to my great grandfather, thanking Grandpa Weis for his letter of sympathy. This man, a Mr. Miller, had recently lost his youngest son, Dupree, after a classmate accidentally shot him. He writes, “Dupree, our fourth and youngest son would have reached his sixteenth year May 31st, an exceptionally bright and large hearted youth and whose tragic death was due to the innocent act of a young playmate, who was handling my revolver thinking it unloaded, the sad story and one that is repeating itself the world over in one way or another, almost daily, death was instantaneous, the heart being punctured.” Sound familiar? Mr. Miller, in 1918, knew keeping firearms away from kids was an ongoing problem.

And, my great grandfather had the generosity of spirit to write a consolation letter to this business friend within two weeks of his own son’s death.

The Fan and the Stone

As a girl, I remember playing with remnants of Agnes’ tattered silk fans – I’m sure I didn’t help their condition – and these fans still sit in their hard, leather covered boxes on the white wooden shelves of my mother’s guest room in Pensacola, Florida. Last Christmas, Mother and I were going through old family things, our memories and curiosities sparked by the family web site I’m building.

While playing with one of the fans, its coffer-like box tilted onto its side on the soft bed cover, and I noticed for the first time handwriting on the bottom of it. In scrawled pencil, it read: “The Rock, Carl inhaled in his right Lung 1908.”

A chill going up our spines, Mother and I emptied the contents of the fan box completely. Nestled among the scraps of silk was, in fact, a small, smooth, mud colored stone, the size of a man’s thumbnail.

But what does this mean? Was an autopsy performed on Carl Jr. after his drowning; how else would you get a pebble from a lung? But the dates – the dates don’t match. 1908 is ten full years before he drowned, unless someone inadvertently wrote a 0 instead of a 1. Had he nearly drowned before at some other time, and perhaps as part of resuscitation coughed up the pebble? Does the choice of words have significance here; without an autopsy how would they in fact know that the pebble came from the right or left lung? Was he simply more sore on one side than the other, if this incident happened before his drowning? Was an autopsy performed to try and validate the theory that Carl Jr. had a weak heart? What other circumstances would possibly lend themselves to a young man inhaling a rock, other than struggling underwater?

I wonder about Carl’s burial, too. He died in Alexandria, Louisiana but is buried in Pensacola, Florida in between his mother and father. When was his body moved? Under what circumstances? How was it regarded in that day, as a “rightful” thing to do, or an odd thing to do, moving an aged coffin? Was there a ceremony? Did people raise their eyebrows and comment on it being macabre? Was a new service held? No one knows and I suspect this information is lost for good.

The Timeline

We know that Carl Jr. died on May 21, a Tuesday, sometime in the afternoon. We have telegrams that span the 21st and 22nd ranging from Chicago, Waterloo, Carbondale, Quincy, Kansas, Terre Haute, Kentucky; letters quickly poured in from Rhode Island and Los Angeles. I wonder, did Agnes read each one of them as they came in, or once her husband was located did she quietly turn her hand to other matters? Did they have one of those old-fashioned letter holders in the entry way where people left their calling cards in Victorian times and who answered the door each time a telegram was delivered? Did she carefully read them a single time before packing them in the box we found last Christmas, or did she routinely pull them out for examination in later years? None of the letters were well-worn, showing signs of frequently folding and unfolding. I tend to believe that each one was read in a timely manner, answered with consideration and put away. I think the Weis family was big on their Ps and Qs.

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