Gladys's Odds & Ends

(All the stuff that didn't fit in the video)

Part 1 - Her Family

I did some pretty extensive - and maybe a bit obsessive (it involved spreadsheets) - research on Gladys's family in an attempt to dig up any clues about what she was running away from. Most of this information was gleaned from census records, available for free through FamilySearch (more exhaustive record search available through Ancestry - this project got me to sign up for a trial account and finally fill out my own family tree, too!)

While it is true that Gladys was the sixth child of eight, several of Gladys's siblings never survived past childhood. Such was the unfortunate reality of the time. The Wyatts' first children were twin girls, Stella and Della, born in 1898. Then came Rena in 1900, followed by Francis ("Frankie") in 1901 and Luther in 1902, then Gladys came in August 1904, followed by Allen Jr. in 1908.

Sadly, Stella and Rena died sometime before 1910, but I was not able to learn anything more regarding when/where/how it happened.

I do know that in 1900, the family was living in a census area identified as "Chickasaw Nation," which I understand to have been in what's now Oklahoma, then moved to Texas, then to New Mexico. By 1910, they were living in Antelope, Oregon, though not for long. They finally settled in Portland some time between 1910-1915.

Frankie, Gladys's old sister, was also a rebellious teen. Quite by accident, I found her name in a 1916 registry from the State Industrial School. She spent almost a year at the facility, though I don't know what for. But by 1919, she had gotten her act together and married Van Jorgensen, a young police officer.

Younger brother Allen Jr. passed away in 1920, in the midst of Gladys's troublemaking years, just days before his 12th birthday. His obituary was published in the Oregon Daily Journal on October 1, 1920.

Shortly thereafter, Frankie divorced the policeman and married Abe Kestlinger, a jewelry merchant from New York, and they had two children together, Robert and Joan.

Older siblings Luther and Della also found spouses and started their own families, and apparently lived quiet lives.

Finally, baby Evelyn was born in 1922, just two weeks after Gladys's final escape from the Frazer Home. I'll talk more about Evelyn in a future post.

Frankie and Abe divorced some time before 1940, with Frankie supporting herself as a nurse. Frankie, Joan, and "Dorothy G. Frazer" lived at the Grandview Apartments on Southwest 14th at that time- the building is still there today.

Gladys's father passed away in 1930, when she was only 26. By 1940, her mother Melissa was living with Evelyn, now 18, and a lodger, Samuel Pool, in an apartment on Northwest Irving. Melissa died in 1965, outliving Gladys by a few years.

Out of all the Wyatt children, only Gladys and Allen Jr. were listed with their parents on the family headstone. This seems like reasonable evidence that Gladys never settled down with anyone, or had children.

Part 2 - Her City

Like all American cities, Portland underwent great changes between 1910-1930. Most photos of the town from around 1910 showed horse-drawn carriages traveling on crudely-paved streets, but things were changing by 1920. Automobiles were becoming more common, and the metro area already had a surprising number of trains, trams, and trolleys that one could use to move about the city.

In particular, there was a streetcar line that ran up Greeley Avenue, very close to where Gladys and her family lived, which mostly served to connect the Union train yards with downtown Portland. It seems likely that Gladys would have used this streetcar to get around the town. It is certain that she and her band of runaway schoolmates took the electric train to Oregon City when they made their daring attempt to escape from civilization.

And how novel it would have seemed just to ride in a car, as Gladys must have thought when she took off with a neighbor girl (also named Gladys - Gladys Garrity - we'll call her Gladys 2) and a couple of local boys in the summer of 1920. (Side note: Strangely, I haven't been able to dig up any information at all about Gladys 2. No census listings, no school records, nothing. Just one of many tiny mysteries that I've been unable to solve.)

Such opportunities would not have been available 20 years before - these new methods of transportation certainly must have seemed very exciting indeed. I myself recall being a teenager and harboring fanciful ideas of hopping on a train and stealing away into the Great Unknown. How much more adventurous it must have seemed back then, when it was all still so new!

Images below courtesy of the Vintage Portland blog.

Part 3 - Young Jessie

Gladys's 13-year-old accomplice, Jessie Day, had a pretty interesting origin story of her own. In 1904, Jessie's mother, Anna Samuels, married a young electrician from Minnesota named Jesse Day, in Anaconda, Montana (yes, this is apparently a real place). Anna quickly became pregnant, but disaster soon befell the newlyweds. On May 1, 1905, Jesse was electrocuted at the top of a pole while working. He was only 26 years old. The Hillsboro Independent reported that, "Two thousand volts passed through his body, and he hung from a cross bar of the pole several minutes before being noticed by passers-by."

Anna gave birth 6 months later, on New Years' Eve, and named the baby girl Jessie, after her late husband. The local paper (rather confusingly) announced that a daughter had been born to Mr. & Mrs. Jesse Day.

Times must have been tough for a single mother in those days, so Anna came to live with her brother in Portland. After a few years had passed, she fell in love with a deeply religious ironworker by the name of Oliver Smith. One can imagine that it was strange for Oliver to have a constant reminder of his wife's first love, since young Jessie literally shared the man's name.

And Jessie was a firecracker. She rebelled against Oliver's dogmatic spiritual practices, which she found to be oppressive. A newspaper article stated, "She preferred girl friends and picture shows to the dreary atmosphere of religious camp meetings." Another article implies that Jessie had actually been the mastermind who came up with the plan to rob several businesses prior to running away from home.

She was evaluated by a child psychologist, who determined that "nothing could be found that suggested any cause for the girl's apparent delinquency." So she was shipped off to Salem to serve time at the State Industrial School. She eventually married a railroad inspector named Lloyd Robinson, and lived a quiet life after that.

Jessie is also one of the only characters in this story for whom I actually have a photograph, thanks to some friendly person on Ancestry who posted a family portrait of Anna, Oliver, and Jessie. (I was never able to find a photo of Gladys - her depiction in the video is based on physical descriptions from newspaper articles, combined with a yearbook photo I found of her younger sister, Evelyn - more on her in Part 4!)

Part 4 - Baby Evelyn

Evelyn Wyatt was Gladys's only younger sibling to survive past childhood, after Allen Jr. tragically passed away at age 11. Evelyn was born January 29, 1922, just two weeks after a very sick Gladys made her final escape from the Frazer Home.

Originally the timing of Evelyn's arrival made me seriously lift an eyebrow. Gladys's mother, Melissa, would have been about 43 - it had been 14 years since she'd had her last child in 1908. And teen pregnancy was a huge taboo back then - most newspapers would rarely report it - so at first I wondered if the descriptions of Gladys suffering from diphtheria were actually a cover for a different condition: pregnancy. Could Evelyn have actually been Gladys's daughter, instead of her sister? The timing just seemed too perfect - escape, marriage, then baby, all in the span of a month. Definitely a juicy notion.

It certainly seemed possible, but the more I looked into it, I'm not convinced this was the case - hence why I didn't mention it in the video. I found a record from the Frazer Home in the county archives, which does indeed show that Gladys was held in the isolation ward there. I also found an arrest record in the city archives from a week after her escape, stating that she was picked up for breaking quarantine (but released a couple days later - her occupation is listed as "housewife," though she was still 17, and had only been married for a few days).

Additionally, I found a lot of evidence that diphtheria was a serious problem in Portland in those days, spreading particularly fast between children, and claiming several lives. So while pregnancy isn't outside the realm of possibility, her diagnosis of diphtheria seems pretty well-supported. And despite prudish attitudes in those days, Portland did have facilities for underage mothers, including the Louise Home and the Florence Crittendon Home, but I found no evidence that Gladys was ever sent there.

Anyway, back to Evelyn. After Allen Sr. passed away in 1930, and all her older children had left the nest, Melissa was left to raise Evelyn by herself. It seems that Evelyn was in a bad car accident in 1939, when she was 17, while a passenger in the car of a friend and his father. This resulted in Melissa suing the boy's father for $15,000 - quite a sum of money (would be roughly $275,000 today). I don't know the extent of her injuries, or whether the lawsuit was successful - but I do know that Evelyn graduated from Clinton High School the following year, and was listed as being a member of the Swimming Club and Delta Sorosis, as well as receiving awards for typing and punctuality. The blurb next to her yearbook picture described her as "enchanting" (see below for photo).

She got married in 1943 to Albert Cartee, a Sergeant in the US Army. The next year, Evelyn gave birth to her first (and only, as far as I know) child, Patricia. (Side note: It may be worth mentioning that Evelyn's older sister, Frankie, had also had a daughter named Patricia - who sadly passed away when she was only 3 months old.)

Patricia went on to have two sons of her own, and passed away in 2003 at the age of 58. But Evelyn would live until March 2016, when she passed away at the impressive age of 94 - only a few months before I began investigating Gladys's story! How frustrating to think that I might have had the chance to speak with her directly, had I only started the project a little earlier. I thought that perhaps I could at least track down her grandsons, to see if they might have any memories of Evelyn talking about Gladys, but after some Googling, it seemed that both her grandsons have been continuously in trouble with the law throughout the years, so I decided it was probably best not to contact them.

Evelyn is buried alongside her husband at Willamette National Cemetery.

Part 5 - Edward

Ed Brodigan was Gladys's husband, though perhaps only briefly. I don't know how they met, or what the nature of their relationship really was, but I do know that they were married on January 17, 1922, in Vancouver, Washington. I didn't find any record of their divorcing, but Ed noted himself as single on the 1930 census.

It seems likely that this was a marriage of convenience - getting hitched was sort of a "get out of jail free" card for underage delinquent girls. Once you were married, you could make a much stronger case for release.

Ed came from a large Irish family who settled in Portland in the late 1800's. It seems that he was in trouble with the law pretty consistently from a young age. A 1914 article in the Oregonian tells that he was arrested for robbing houses and shops with Winter Willis (a somewhat infamous Portland criminal) when he was only 19. Luckily for the young men, they were paroled rather than jailed. The judge told them, "You evidently are trying to break into the penitentiary." Ed was arrested for larceny again in February 1916.

Later that year, an odd little article states that a sack full of goods stolen from a Salem general store was found in Ed's basement, including "a flash light, spark plugs, quantities of gum and candy, shears, gloves, and socks." But Edward insisted that he hadn't stolen these items himself - he maintained they were left there by his friends, Winter Willis and Max Hoaglin. Winter was sentenced to six years in jail.

On January 12, 1922, Edward was found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. At first I thought that minor might have been Gladys herself, but after looking through arrest logs in the city archives, it seems the charge was brought by an Elizabeth Moorad, mother of a 13-year-old boy named George Moorad.

Ed was sentenced to six months in the county jail on January 16, but then he married Gladys the next day. I'm not sure what this means - did they marry quickly before he had to serve his time? Or did they escape together? Did they choose to cross the river into Washington to get married because they knew they might be caught if they stayed in Portland? I honestly have no idea. I'm hoping to find some court records that provide more context for these events.

Edward continued being involved in criminal activity throughout his life. He was arrested in September 1935 for pickpocketing a man at Union Station, then a month later he himself was robbed of his coat and hat on Southwest Fifth Street by two men from California. He was arrested for being drunk in '37, and sentenced to 60 days on the rock pile at Kelly Butte.

He passed away in 1952, at the age of 57, and was interred at the River View Cemetery.

Part 6 - The Real Miscellanii

Here are some random things that didn't fit anywhere else:

- When Gladys was taken to the State Industrial School in March of 1921, the admission log shows her religion as "Scientist" - she was the only one on the page not listed as either Protestant or Catholic. I assume this means that she was a follower of Christian Science, which was relatively popular in the '20s. I found evidence that Christian Science practitioners were actively ministering to youngsters in detention facilities - I turned up a 1918 letter in the City Archives from an Alice L. Dustin, writing to ask for a pass to visit regularly with the girls at The Cedars, a facility where Gladys would spend time a couple years later. Perhaps she came to be a follower due to these efforts. I wish I could learn more about this angle!

- Clara Frock was an interesting side character. You might recall from the video that a pile of stuff was found on the riverbank, while Gladys was on the lam in May of '21, including a newspaper and an envelope addressed to Ms. Frock. My theory is that Gladys and Clara became friends at the Frazer Home, and Gladys hoped to find an article about her own escape in the paper which she could mail to her friend. Clara's history reads like a directory page of juvenile facilities - in addition to Frazer, she also spent time at the Home of the Good Shepherd, the Cedars, and the (unfortunately-named) School for the Feeble-Minded. Clara made her own escape attempt a few months later, fleeing the Feeble-Minded School along with two other girls (and presumably later caught and returned to the school). Thankfully, she was eventually released and got married, though I lost track of her after 1930.

- Gladys may have gotten married a second time. I found a license from Tacoma, Washington, showing a marriage between Gladys D. Wyatt and Ralph E. Cunningham, dated August 10th, 1931. It shows that both parties resided in Multnomah County at that time, and the signature looks somewhat similar, but I haven't been able to definitively prove that this is the right Gladys. They were divorced in 1935, but nothing more is known.

- This is a tenuous one, but I found an article from January 16, 1922 (in the short window of time between when Gladys escaped from Frazer, and when she got married a few days later) that states that a quantity of women's clothing and jewelry were stolen from a residence at 85 East Eighteenth Street. Is it possible that this was Gladys's handiwork? It certainly fit her M.O. and she would probably have been in need of some new clothes after escaping from the detention home.

-I found someone who was college friends with Gladys's niece, Joan (Frankie's daughter) - this person is actually an incredibly interesting lady, a prolific poet and acclaimed artist and filmmaker, with a Wikipedia entry and everything. I found her because she put Joan's name in a poem on her website, which I ran across while doing some frantic googling. I wrote to her but she never wrote back. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, as I don't know if Joan is even still alive (she would be about 84 at this point), but this is exciting stuff!