Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

In this week’s news item from the past, meet Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Chesley Ott, a couple who provided definitive proof that no love lasts forever.  “Hull Daily Mail,” August 28, 1912:

A courtship which, according to the principals, began 5,000 years ago on the banks of the Nile, culminated yesterday in the St. Louis Divorce Court, U.S.A., when Mrs. R. C. Ott brought a suit for a divorce from her husband and the custody of their two children. 

Mr. and Mrs. Ott both believe in reincarnation, and they declare that their shattered romance had its inception in a former existence once when both were Egyptians. Mr Ott is an artist, and his wife was an artist's model when he married her in 1910, after his return from Egypt, where he went for local colour, to reproduce Egyptian architecture, for a wealthy patron. 

Mr. Ott declares that he had strange dreams in Egypt, and that when after his return he met his future wife, he knew her immediately as Princess Amneris, Pharaoh's daughter, who was his love 5,000 years ago. 

"We first met," he says, “during our previous incarnation in the Queen's Chamber of the great pyramid. Then we used to meet in the palace gardens, and wend our way to the Nile, where she loved to throw sweetmeats to the sacred crocodiles. I recall the great tragic night when Pharaoh discovered us. There were torches and guards, and I was seized." 

Mrs. Ott said: "I remember how we went to the river together and fed the crocodiles.  I remember our first meeting in the pyramid. I had accompanied my father on a tour of inspection, and looking into the Queen's Chamber, I saw the handsomest man in the world. 

"We fell in love at once. That evening he came into the royal gardens, and our love, which has lasted through centuries, began.

“I have beautiful recollections of nights in the royal barge, and I vividly recall my father's anger when we were discovered together. It must have been Isis. Egypt's great goddess, who watched over us all these centuries, and finally brought us together." 

Mrs. Ott now alleges that her reincarnated husband, soon after their twentieth-century wedding, began to throw crockery at her, and became insanely jealous, often insulting her in the presence of guests. She wants the 5,000-year-old romance terminated.

Trying to revive old love affairs is usually a bad idea.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

The love lives of some people are...complicated.

Especially when ghosts are involved. The "St. Louis Post-Dispatch," August 4, 1909:

Mrs. Bessie Mendelsohn of 4457A Cottage avenue said Wednesday she was feeling fine spiritually and otherwise, now that her divorce suit against Jacob Mendelsohn, who has a spirit affinity, is on its way to trial in the materialistic Circuit Court.

Spirits disembodied, not alcoholic; yet spirits as loquacious as liquor sometimes makes embodied beings came between the Mendelsohns a dozen years ago, after they had enjoyed 15 years of wedded life. Ever since then the spirits have been causing trouble in the Mendelsohn household.

When poverty comes In at the door, love files out the window. It's just the same way as to spirits, or perhaps different in that when the spirits fly in at the window, love walks out at the door. Such is the Mendelsohn experience.

Jacob Mendelsohn associated with spirits so much that in time he came to have a spirit affinity. Not to appear selfish, however, he announced that his wife also had a spirit affinity. There was a difference In the qualities of these affinities which made Mrs. Mendelsohn sufficiently curious to attend a seance and find out about her affinity, though she scoffs at spiritualism. Hers was Irish.

"My husband told me," she said to a Post-Dispatch reporter, "that my spirit affinity was an Irishman. We, you know, are not Irish. I thought I'd go to a seance and try to find out something about this affinity of mine, whom I never had met and didn't really want to meet, you know.

"So Jacob took me to a seance over In East St. Louis, about three months ago. Mrs. Kate Davis, a medium at 6535 Easton avenue, conducted the seance.

"When I asked her to call up my spirit affinity, she did so. A voice readily recognized by its brogue, though of course I couldn't see the spirit, talked to me. He said he was a very handsome Irishman and was much in love with me. Some day, he aid, he would marry me. I was quite pretty, my affinity told me, and far too good to remain the wife of Jacob Mendelsohn."

It was just after Mrs Mendelsohn met her affinity voice to voice that Mendelsohn walked out of the house and took up quarters in a carpenter shop at 70S North Third street, where he sleeps on a cot.

But It wasn't the spirit affinity that drove him away. He had no objection to that spirit interference between man and wife. He had a spirit affinity of his own, as he had assured his wife time and again. Jacob's affinity, he told Mrs. Mendelsohn, was a tall, slender, handsome blonde.

Mrs. Mendelsohn is short and heavy, with dark hair, and is past 50 years old. Jacob's shadowland love was young as well as willowy. Whether he expected some time to wed the willowy wraith, Mrs. Mendelsohn says she does not know. She was not jealous of the sweet young spirit no more than was Jacob jealous of the handsome Irish spook who wooed his wife.

Jacob left the house because his flesh-mate utterly refused to credit his spirit mate, because she laughed at the willowy blonde and asked him how he knew she was a golden-halred ghost when he'd never glimpsed her--merely heard her cooing, wooing voice issuing from the mediumistic cabinet of Mrs. Davis.

Mrs. Mendelsohn laughed also at her own affinity, the rich-brogued son of Erin, and told Jacob she couldn't marry outside the orthodox Jewish fold.

But Jacob apparently never worried as to racial matters in the spirit world. In fact, his spiritualistic affiliations, Mrs. Mendelsohn says, had wooed him away from his religion. Mendelsohn insisted that pork was fine food and demanded that it be served on the table. Mrs. Mendelsohn protested, and there a decidedly unspiritual dispute over his material matter.

"It's immaterial to me what you eat way from home, Jacob." said his wife, "but you eat no pork in this house."

So said the two married daughters of the Mendelsohns, who live with the mother and the two other married daughters, who live elsewhere. It was a matter of five married women against one married man, with a spook affinity on his hands, and that is why Jacob Mendelsohn walked out of his door and went to live In the carpenter shop.

"Oh. yes. said Mrs. Mendelsohn, after detailing these facts. "I forgot to tell you that I know the name of my spirit affinity. He told me himself. He's Patrick O'Brien."

"And what is the name of the shadowy blonde?" she was asked.

"Ah. Jacob never would tell me." she sighed.

After reading this article a second time, I couldn't help but wonder if Mr. Mendelsohn's real "affinity" was not his nameless blonde spirit, but the very corporeal Mrs. Kate Davis.

But then, I have a suspicious mind.