1876
MARCH – Alexander Graham Bell was granted the patent for his telephone. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/alexander-graham-bell-patents-the-telephone
JUNE – “Custer’s Last Stand” took place at the Little Big Horn River in Montana. https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/sitting-bull.htm
AUGUST – Colorado became the 38th State.
NOVEMBER 13 – In Jefferson City, Missouri a child was born to Ellen Nancy Pitts Allen and her husband Robert Alexander Allen. Despite the political and economic turmoil around them, the birth of a healthy baby was reason to celebrate, as Robert and Ellen well knew. They had four other living children, but their oldest daughter Kitty Pitts Allen (named after Ellen’s mother Catherine “Kitty” Spence Pitts) had died almost nine years prior at the age of six years, two months, and 30 days. In those days roughly one out of every three children born would die before they reached the age of five. This birth held even more cause to celebrate as it was their first and, as it would turn out, only son. Robert, who had turned 40 nine days before, and Ellen, who was 37, named their son Lambeth Shelton Allen from two surnames that bore significance in their families’ histories. (See “A Convoluted Saga From the Pitts Side” for more information on those names.) The older sisters of Lam, as he would be called, were Roberta (12), Lola (9), Mary (6), and Esther “Genna” (3).
1877
MARCH 5 – Rutherford Hayes was sworn in as the 19th President of the United States. This Presidential Election between the Republican Hayes and the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was one of the most contentious in American history. “Its resolution involved negotiations between the Republicans and Democrats, resulting in the Compromise of 1877, and on March 2, 1877, the counting of electoral votes by the House and Senate occurred, confirming Hayes as President. It was the second of five U.S. presidential elections (as of 2023) in which the winner did not win a plurality of the national popular vote.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned one while living in Missouri.
1878
FEBRUARY 19 – Thomas Edison of New Jersey received the patent for his phonograph, the first device that could record and play sound back. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/thomas-alva-edison-patents-the-phonograph
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned two while living in Missouri.
1879
MARCH 14 – Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned three while living in Missouri.
1880
JANUARY 27 – Thomas Edison received the patent for his light bulb. https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/edisons-light-bulb-patent
MARCH 22 – By March the Allen family had moved to Lexington, Missouri where their family grew to eight with the birth of Lam’s youngest sister Mabel Carrie.
JUNE – In the U.S. Census Lambeth Allen (3) was recorded as living on Washington Street in Lexington, Missouri with his father Robert A. Allen (43, a preacher who reported having “lung disease”), his mother Ellen Allen (41), his sisters Roberta (16), Lola (13), Mary (10), Virginia (6), and Carrie (2 months).
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned four while living in Lexington, Missouri.
1881
MARCH 4 – James Garfield was sworn in as the 20th President of the United States.
JULY 2 – President Garfield was shot and wounded by Charles Guiteau while waiting to board a train. “Guiteau falsely believed he had played a major role in Garfield’s election victory, for which he should have been rewarded with a consulship. He felt frustrated and offended by the Garfield administration’s rejections of his applications to serve in Vienna or Paris to such a degree that he decided to kill Garfield and shot him at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Guiteau
SEPTEMBER 19 – President Garfield died of his wounds in Elberon, New Jersey, becoming the 4th sitting President to die in office and the second to be assassinated. He had been “taken to a cottage on the Jersey shore in the hope that the cool sea air would revive him … A massive infection—most likely caused by his medical treatment—had left Garfield with a persistent fever and abscesses over his entire body … He had been president for just 200 days … many historians now believe that Garfield would have lived if not for the limitations of 1880s medicine.” https://www.history.com/news/the-assassination-of-president-james-a-garfield
SEPTEMBER 20 – President Garfield’s vice president Chester Arthur was sworn in as the 21st President of the United States.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned five while living in Lexington, Missouri.
1884
Three Years Later
MARCH 5 – The Kansas City Journal reported the following from Rich Hill, Bates County, Missouri:
The family of Rev. R. A. Allen, of Lexington, Mo., arrived here Saturday evening [March 1st] and will make this their home in the future. Mr. Allen is principal of the female seminary.
Lam’s parents Robert (47) and Ellen (44) had started the Rich Hill Female Seminary, which appears to be for girls up to the end of high school. While Lam’s father was the principal, his mother, his aunt Virginia Pitts (54), and his two older sisters Roberta (20) and Lola (17) were teachers. Lam was seven and school aged himself, but I have yet to find any records of his school years. Rich Hill had schools, but it was also common for children, especially as they got older, to be sent to another city to attend school where the opportunities might be better for their education.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned eight while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1885
“World’s first skyscraper is built in Chicago.” Nancy Ellen Allen Haeger The Home Insurance Building which “towered all of 10 stories with its peak at 138 feet, miniature by today’s standards but gargantuan at that time.” https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/first-skyscraper/
MARCH 4 – Grover Cleveland was sworn in as the 22nd President of the United States.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned nine while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1886
JUNE 30 – In Rich Hill, Bates County, Missouri, the two oldest living sisters of Lam were married in a double wedding at the Allen home: Roberta Allen (22) married Frank Alton Briggs (27). (Frank and Roberta would later move to Kansas before finally settling in Cedaredge, Colorado where they raised their family and lived out their lives until Frank died in 1935.) Lola Allen (19) married Thomas E. Kirk (21). (After the marriage record of 1886 I can find only two definitive records for either Thomas or Lola. In the August 10, 1888, Bates County Republican the following announcement was printed: “Mrs. T. E. [Lola, 21] Kirk, wife of our former townsman, now of St. Joseph, came in Saturday night and is visiting her mother, Mrs. R. A. Allen.” Two weeks later the newspaper also announced that “T. E. Kirk came down from St. Joe last Friday to see his wife who is visiting her mother here.” Unfortunately, most of the 1890 U.S. Census records were destroyed in a fire so no information can be gleaned from there. The 1910 U.S. Census for Lola’s parents Robert and Ellen Allen recorded Ellen as having had seven children with only four still living so apparently sometime between 1888 and 1910 Lola, as well as their sister Mary, had passed. Their Uncle Joseph Bensin Allen in 1901 reported that they had died in Chicago. There is a record in the Illinois, U.S., Select Death Index, 1877-1916, of a Lola A. Kirke who died in Chicago on January 31, 1896, but there is no way I can verify that this is our Lola. I find nothing to date of Mary’s death. The other child, Kitty Pitts Allen, Robert’s and Ellen’s first born, had died in Missouri in 1867 at the age of five years, two months and 28 days old.)
Around this time Lam’s father Robert had purchased a homestead in what was known as the Indian Territory or “No Man’s Land” in the panhandle of what four years later would become the U.S. territory of Oklahoma. While he appeared to travel back and forth, Ellen and the younger children possibly only joined him during school breaks, as many newspaper articles show that Ellen at least lived in Rich Hill, Missouri until 1892.
[In a contribution to the Find A Grave site for Lam’s father made by Robin, who is a long-time family researcher and aunt to a great granddaughter of a Lam’s uncle Charles Pines Allen, the following is said about Robert:
Between 1880 and 1900 he moved around parts of what was to become Oklahoma, often in concert with his younger brother, Charles Pines Allen.
During the 1880s, while he was living in Beaver City in what is now the Oklahoma panhandle while it was unattached to any U. S. state or territory, he was part of the organizing group attempting to form it into its own territory known as the Cimarron Territory. He was later elected as a territorial senator under the territorial constitution that he helped to write.]
JULY 3 – Otto Mergenthaler’s invention, “a machine that came to be called a Linotype (because it could set a ‘line ‘o type’) was used to compose part of that day’s issue of the New York Tribune newspaper … Thomas Edison (called it) ‘the eighth wonder of the world.’” https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/engineering/science-history-the-invention-of-the-linotype-machine/ (In a quote from Nancy’s memoirs under the year 1938 below, a Linotype is listed as one of the instruments in Lam’s office in Chicago.)
OCTOBER 28 – The Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Cleveland. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/statue-of-liberty-dedicated
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned ten while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1887
Mabel (7), Ellen (48), and Lam (10) Allen
Taken in Rich Hill, Bates, Missouri
The above picture was probably taken some time between 1886 and 1888 which would place Mabel between 6 and 8 (she looks too baby-faced to be much older than that), Ellen between 47 and 49, and Lam between 9 and 11. Lam could possibly be a year older, but I have a hard time seeing Mabel as nine years old there.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned eleven while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
DECEMBER – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. https://bakerstreet.fandom.com/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet
1888
George Eastman invented the Kodak box camera. “With the KODAK Camera … Eastman put down the foundation for making photography available to everyone. Pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures, the camera could be easily carried and handheld during operation. It was priced at $25 [about $834 in 2024 dollars, still out of the price range of the average American]. After exposure, the whole camera was returned to Rochester. There the film was developed, prints were made and new film was inserted — all for $10 [about $333 in 2024 dollars].” https://www.kodak.com/en/company/page/george-eastman-history
SUMMER – With the unsolved murders in London of five women, the legend of Jack the Ripper was born. http://www.fsmitha.com/time/ce19-9.htm
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned twelve while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1889
MARCH 4 – Benjamin Harrison was sworn in as the 23rd President of the United States.
MARCH 31 – The Eiffel Tower in Paris was inaugurated. https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/the-monument/history
NOVEMBER 2 – North Dakota and South Dakota became the 39th and 40th States to be admitted to the Union.
NOVEMBER 8 – Montana became the 41st State to be admitted to the Union.
NOVEMBER 11 – Washington became the 42nd State to be admitted to the Union.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned thirteen while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1890
MAY 2 – The Oklahoma Territory was officially organized by Congress. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=OK085
JUNE – The Oklahoma Territorial Census recorded Lambeth Allen (13) with his father Robert A. Allen (53), his mother Ellen N. Allen (48), and his sisters Mary Allen (18), Genna Allen (15), and Mabel Allen (10), living in Beaver County, Oklahoma Territory for the previous four years. Robert’s widowed mother Louisa J. Allen (74), Lam’s grandmother, was recorded as having lived with them for the previous three years. But, as newspaper articles from the previous four years proved (see the narrative for Robert Alexander Allen and Ellen Nancy Pitts for these articles), possibly only Robert had lived in Beaver, and then only intermittently. The family may have been in Beaver for the summer school break.
JULY 3 – Idaho became the 43rd State to be admitted to the Union.
JULY 10 – Wyoming became the 44th State to be admitted to the Union.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fourteen while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1892
Two Years Later
JANUARY 1 – Ellis Island, in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, official opened to receive immigrants. https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/ellis-island
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixteen while living in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1893
MARCH 4 – Grover Cleveland was sworn in as the 24th President of the United States.
SUMMER – At the Chicago World’s Fair the “first fully electrical kitchen” was introduced as well as Thomas Edison’s Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition#Notable_firsts
NOVEMBER 7 – Colorado became the first State to allow women to vote in the State elections. http://www.fsmitha.com/time/ce19-91.htm
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned seventeen while possibly while still in Rich Hill, Missouri.
1895
Two Years Later
NOVEMBER 8 – The X-ray was accidentally discovered. https://www.pastmedicalhistory.co.uk/wilhelm-rontgen-and-the-first-x-ray/
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned nineteen, possibly in Chicago, Illinois.
DECEMBER 28 – “The world’s first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe … The entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and charged admission for the first time.” https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-commercial-movie-screened
1896
JANUARY 4 – Utah became the 45th State to be admitted to the Union.
APRIL 6 – The first modern-day Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-modern-olympic-games
MAY 26 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average was first published. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100214/when-did-dow-jones-industrial-average-djia-begin.asp
At least by this year Lam had moved to Chicago as he enrolled in a two-year course at the Sopar School of Oratory.
When Daddy first moved to Chicago at about the time he was starting his business, he enrolled in a course in a School of Elocution and received a diploma which qualified him to give speech and acting lessons. The picture [below] was taken about the time he first moved to Chicago … His course also included stage directing. Although he never had any intention of becoming a professional actor or director, he did become interested in amateur theatrics, at first with a group putting on plays and other Amateur entertainments in the Austin area [a community in Illinois which in 1899 was incorporated into the greater city of Chicago, but was still referred to by locals as Austin], and after marrying and moving to Glen Ellyn, volunteering his expertise to a drama club at the Methodist Episcopal Church which the family belonged to, directing and acting in minstrel shows and plays.
What is a Minstrel Show? Something definitely “politically incorrect” these days!** All of the actors performed in “black face” – charcoal or black makeup which covered all of their faces except for about an inch around the mouth. This space and the lips were then colored red, making the entire face a characterization of a black man’s face. They wore short, curly black wigs, white gloves, and clown-like or hobo-like costumes. The only white face was the “Mr. Interlocutor” who acted as the “straight man” to the jokes told by the black-faced men, introduced the acts like duets or quartets, dances, funny stories, poetry recitations, and so forth. Each of the black-faced men had a tambourine which he shook or slapped against his hands as applause at the end of each act. At the urging of the “black” men, at least once during the performance, Mr. Interlocutor would do a number. Daddy was always Mr. Interlocutor, dressed in “top hat, white tie and tails”. He had a beautiful tenor singing voice, so his act was usually a song. One I remember was “Old Man River” from the musical “Show Boat” which still makes the rounds of dinner playhouses and was a revival of the full stage show which toured the country, including Denver [where Nancy was living when she wrote this], not too many years ago. Daddy always removed the hat when he sang, holding it (collapsed) in front of him and using it with gestures to emphasize the words of the song.
Lambeth Shelton Allen, Senior circa 1896
**According to Karolyn Smardz Frost in her book I’ve Got A Home In Glory Land (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008), Thornton Dartmouth Rice, a famous white actor in the early 1800’s who made popular the minstrel shows, had “observed the antics of a slave disabled by arthritis who worked at Crowe’s Livery Stables. The old man sang a little song and did a shuffling dance to amuse himself. Rice wrote a song based on his tune … and went on to become famous as the father of American minstrelsy … [The] racially demeaning blackface show … spread throughout the English-speaking world, where it continued through much of the twentieth century. Rice’s original lyrics went: ‘Wheel about, turn about, do jes so. An’ ebry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crowe.’ With the rise of legislated segregation, the old Louisville slave Jim Crowe’s name would become synonymous with the South’s racially discriminatory laws.” As written by Jim Wallenfeldt in Britanica.com, “Rice first introduced the character who would become known as Jim Crow between acts of a play called The Kentucky Rifle, in which he performed a ludicrous off-balance dance while singing ‘Jump Jim Crow,’ … He portrayed the character principally as a dim-witted buffoon; in the process, Rice … fed on, heightened, and popularized pernicious stereotypes of African Americans even as his presentation reflected white fascination with Black culture. By the late 1830s ‘Jim Crow’ had become a pejorative epithet for African Americans … Its adoption in the late 19th century as the identifier for the laws that reinstated white supremacy in the American South after Reconstruction speaks to the ways in which the demeaning caricature was used to legitimize notions of the alleged inferiority of African Americans and to rationalize the denial of equity and access that was at the heart of segregation.”
Whether Lam understood the overwhelmingly derogatory nature of these minstrel shows is unclear. It seems largely incongruent to the unprejudiced, kind, and gentle man portrayed by Nancy in her memoirs. There were also African Americans who performed minstrel shows at the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century. According to the website britannica.com/art/minstrel-show, “Minstrel troupes composed of Black performers were formed after the American Civil War, and a number of these … had Black owners and managers.” Perhaps Lam saw the production of these shows simply as a comedic form of entertainment.
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned twenty while living in Chicago.
1897
MARCH 4 – William McKinley was sworn in as the 25th President of the United States.
SEPTEMBER 1 – The first subway in the United States opened in Boston, Massachusetts. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/new-york-city-subway-opens
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned twenty-one while living in Chicago.
1898
APRIL – The Spanish-American War began. https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Spanish-American_War
JULY 7 – The U.S. annexed Hawaii. https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-civil-war-and-reconstruction-1850-1899
In 1898 the Chicago directory listed Lambeth S. Allen as living at 984 Garfield Boulevard and having the occupation of a printer. I do not know where he acquired the skills to start his own company, perhaps he apprenticed while living in Oklahoma, or perhaps he was self-taught.
MAY 26 – Below is a copy of Lam’s senior recital as an elocutionist. He was 21 years old. This was two years before Alice Julia Smith, his future wife, was born.
The poem which follows is a transcript of the only piece I can find from the works Lam performed at his Senior Recital.
Sidney Lanier composed this poem in Baltimore, Maryland in 1878.
It was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay;
And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man,
Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran
Down the hill-side and sifted along through the bracken and passed that way.
Then Nan got a-tremble at nostril; she was the daintiest doe;
In the print of her velvet flank on the velvet fern
She reared, and rounded her ears in turn.
Then the buck leapt up, and his head as a king’s to a crown did go
Full high in the breeze, and he stood as if Death had the form of a deer;
And the two slim does long lazily stretching arose,
For their day-dream slowlier came to a close,
Till they woke and were still, breath-bound with waiting and wonder and fear.
Then Alan the huntsman sprang over the hillock, the hounds shot by,
The does and the ten-tined buck made a marvellous bound,
The hounds swept after with never a sound,
But Alan loud winded his horn in sign that the quarry was nigh.
For at dawn of that day proud Maclean of Lochbuy to the hunt had waxed wild,
And he cursed at old Alan till Alan fared off with the hounds
For to drive him the deer to the lower glen-grounds:
“I will kill a red deer,” quoth Maclean, “in the sight of the wife and the child.”
So gayly he paced with the wife and the child to his chosen stand;
But he hurried tall Hamish the henchman ahead: “Go turn,” —
Cried Maclean— “if the deer seek to cross to the burn,
Do thou turn them to me: nor fail, lest thy back be red as thy hand.”
Now hard-fortuned Hamish, half blown of his breath with the height of the hill,
Was white in the face when the ten-tined buck and the does
Drew leaping to burn-ward; huskily rose
His shouts, and his nether lip twitched, and his legs were o’er-weak for his will.
So the deer darted lightly by Hamish and bounded away to the burn.
But Maclean never bating his watch tarried waiting below
Still Hamish hung heavy with fear for to go
All the space of an hour; then he went, and his face was greenish and stern,
And his eye sat back in the socket, and shrunken the eyeballs shone,
As withdrawn from a vision of deeds it were shame to see.
“Now, now, grim henchman, what is’t with thee?”
Brake Maclean, and his wrath rose red as a beacon the wind hath upblown.
“Three does and a ten-tined buck made out,” spoke Hamish, full mild,
“And I ran for to turn, but my breath it was blown, and they passed;
I was weak, for ye called ere I broke me my fast.”
Cried Maclean: “Now a ten-tined buck in the sight of the wife and the child
I had killed if the gluttonous kern had not wrought me a snail’s own wrong!”
Then he sounded, and down came kinsmen and clansmen all:
“Ten blows, for ten tine, on his back let fall,
And reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at the bite of thong!”
So Hamish made bare, and took him his strokes; at the last he smiled.
“Now I’ll to the burn,” quoth Maclean, “for it still may be,
If a slimmer-paunched henchman will hurry with me,
I shall kill me the ten-tined buck for a gift to the wife and the child!”
Then the clansmen departed, by this path and that; and over the hill
Sped Maclean with an outward wrath for an inward shame;
And that place of the lashing full quiet became;
And the wife and the child stood sad; and bloody-backed Hamish sat still.
But look! red Hamish has risen; quick about and about turns he.
“There is none betwixt me and the crag-top!” he screams under breath.
Then, livid as Lazarus lately from death,
He snatches the child from the mother, and clambers the crag toward the sea.
Now the mother drops breath; she is dumb, and her heart goes dead for a space,
Till the motherhood, mistress of death, shrieks, shrieks through the glen,
And that place of the lashing is live with men,
And Maclean, and the gillie that told him, dash up in a desperate race.
Not a breath’s time for asking; an eye-glance reveals all the tale untold.
They follow mad Hamish afar up the crag toward the sea,
And the lady cries: “Clansmen, run for a fee! —
Yon castle and lands to the two first hands that shall hook him and hold
Fast Hamish back from the brink!” —and ever she flies up the steep,
And the clansmen pant, and they sweat, and they jostle and strain.
But, mother, ‘tis vain; but, father, ‘tis vain;
Stern Hamish stands bold on the brink, and dangles the child o’er the deep.
Now a faintness falls on the men that run, and they all stand still.
And the wife prays Hamish as if he were God, on her knees,
Crying: “Hamish! O Hamish! but please, but please
For to spare him!” and Hamish still dangles the child, with a wavering will.
On a sudden he turns; with a sea-hawk scream, and a gibe, and a song,
Cries: “So; I will spare ye the child if, in sight of ye all,
Ten blows on Maclean’s bare back shall fall,
And ye reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at the bite of the thong!”
Then Maclean he set hardly his tooth to his lip that his tooth was red,
Breathed short for a space, said: “Nay, but it never shall be!
Let me hurl off the damnable hound in the sea!”
But the wife: “Can Hamish go fish us the child from the sea, if dead?
Say yea! —Let them lash me, Hamish?” — “Nay!” —“Husband, the lashing will heal;
But, oh, who will heal me the bonny sweet bairn in his grave?
Could ye cure me my heart with the death of a knave?
Quick! Love! I will bare thee—so—kneel!” Then Maclean ‘gan slowly to kneel
With never a word, till presently downward he jerked to the earth.
Then the henchman—he that smote Hamish—would tremble and lag;
“Strike, hard!” quoth Hamish, full stern, from the crag;
Then he struck him, and “One!” sang Hamish, and danced with the child in his mirth.
And no man spake beside Hamish; he counted each stroke with a song.
When the last stroke fell, then he moved him a pace down the height,
And he held forth the child in the heartaching sight
Of the mother, and looked all pitiful grave, as repenting a wrong.
And there as the motherly arms stretched out with the thanksgiving prayer—
And there as the mother crept up with a fearful swift pace,
Till her finger nigh felt of the bairnie’s face—
In a flash fierce Hamish turned round and lifted the child in the air,
And sprang with the child in his arms from the horrible height in the sea,
Shrill screeching, “Revenge!” in the wind-rush; and pallid Maclean,
Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain,
Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked hold of dead roots of a tree—
And gazed hungrily o’er, and the blood from his back drip-dripped in the brine,
And a sea-hawk flung down a skeleton fish as he flew,
And the mother stared white on the waste of blue,
And the wind drove a cloud to seaward, and the sun began to shine.
DECEMBER 10 – An armistice was signed to end the Spanish-American War. https://museum.mil.idaho.gov/idaho-military-history/spanish-american-war
NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned twenty-two while living in Chicago.
familyties3.com 