In the spring of 1973 I was still living in a basement in Manhattan, Kansas, while working at a local radio station and finishing my last semester at Kansas State University. My alarm clock in those days was a Motorola Mini-Combo “media center,” which had been a Christmas gift from my parents.
The Mini-Combo bundled a small black-and-white TV set with an AM/FM radio and a phonograph, any of which could be selected to provide a source for the morning wake-up signal. I usually picked the TV tuner, which was set to WIBW, allowing me to overhear either Captain Kangaroo or the CBS Morning News as I began to stir.
My most vivid memory of being roused from slumber by that Mini-Combo is the April morning when a calm voice began the CBS news broadcast with the words, “Today for the first time in 91 years, we wake up to a world without Pablo Picasso in it.”
This was truly stunning news. Picasso was not only a towering figure in the art world, but he was someone whom absolutely everyone had heard of. If you shoved a microphone at ten passersby in 1970 and asked each one to name an artist, nine of them could be counted on to say, “Picasso.” The tenth vote might have been for Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses, or Andy Warhol, but it just as likely would have made the decision unanimous for Picasso.
I was reminded of that April morning as I read the email from Dawn Gabel informing me that Rhoda Lovewell had passed away. Besides losing a dear friend and an all-around good soul, I found the world not only a bit emptier, but somehow less securely moored, as if another link with the past had drifted away overnight.
While it still strikes me as a silly thing to have done, I immediately checked the Internet to see if Harrison Ruffin Tyler were still living. Although he has passed away since, he was at that moment 96 years of age and residing in a nursing home in Virginia.
He had suffered a series of strokes a few years earlier and so, like most Americans, might not have been able to name the tenth President of the United States, even though Harrison Ruffin Tyler was the last remaining grandchild of John Tyler. Born in 1790, John Tyler became President upon the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841.
Thanks to a couple of May-December pairings in the family tree, Rhoda Lovewell was the youngest grandchild of Thomas Lovewell, the adventurous Kansas pioneer pictured at the top of this page, a man born in 1826 whose life story offers an interesting angle on the history of the American West.
I’m happy to report that one item which Rhoda had marked off her own bucket list a decade ago was her mammoth updating of family history The Lovewell Family Revisited. While the book is available for browsing on at least one free website, familyhistory.org, having a personal copy to search certainly cuts down on the long stretches of time waiting for pages to update.
Even then, opening Rhoda’s book can be a daunting prospect. The volume runs to about 2,700 pages and contains the lion’s share of everything ever written about the Lovewell family, including a few family legends of dubious provenance. However, Rhoda’s foreword immediately and thoroughly debunks the notion that a “person of quality” from England named John Lovell stepped into the equivalent of a New England phone booth to emerge as the progenitor of the Lovewell family of America. She traces numerous paths of evidence to demonstrate why the claim doesn’t hold up.
Her book is also stuffed full of primary sources such as maps, photographs, snippets of census data, marriage certificates and land records. I’ve been depending on it lately to trace the migration of the Davis and Lovewell families from Illinois to Iowa in the late 1850’s.
As I was going through boxes of Rhoda’s source materials, items she entrusted to me when she was through using them, I found a map of Sinclair Township, Jewell County Kansas, which someone (possibly Rhoda herself) had annotated to indicate trails, geographical features, and the former locations of schools, churches, and other long-vanished landmarks. The valley known as Switzer’s Gap is highlighted with red hashmarks, and a note at the side indicates the migratory bison trail that ran alongside it. A high-resolution version of the map has joined the Lovewell photo album on this site.
A few days ago I also stumbled upon the exciting news that Rhoda had narrowed down the date of the photograph of Thomas with his long-lost daughter and named the photographer who took it. That is, it was exciting news until the moment I realized that I was her source of information, and I did not reveal exactly what I had learned or where I had learned it. This was doubly disappointing. I think I may have been right, but now I forget why. Must remember to organize my notes.
It turns out that a select few of those 2,700 pages are letters from me to Rhoda, quoted in full, sometimes excitedly discussing historical matters, sometimes just filling her in on what was going on in my life at the moment, like the time I fell off my roof, or was betrayed by a rogue molar, or was delighted to have both children visiting our house simultaneously for the first time in years.
Well, at any rate, I’m also delighted to find myself sealed up inside a timeless resource of Lovewell history. Somehow I’m reminded of Belloq’s remark to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark: “Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.” Well, here’s hoping, anyway.