Eleanore Browne Oskaloosa Iowa Author

 

Eleanore Browne (Tulsa Tribune. February 22, 1925)

This one’s a work in progress. It started with an article in the Des Moines Register that sent me down a slippery slope.

 

Eleanore Browne ran away from Oskaloosa at sixteen to join a comic-opera company. Thirty years later, American newspaper readers knew her as a woman who interviewed celebrities, wrote about kings and princes, reported from Monte Carlo and India, serialized exotic romances, and moved through European royal society. Then she largely disappeared from literary history—and eventually even her own name was cataloged as her husband’s pseudonym.

 

She was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1878. Her father, Charles A. Browne, was a prominent local lawyer. She went to school in Oskaloosa and Des Moines. Years later, she told the Des Moines Sunday Registershe’d been writing stories since she was eight or nine. She entered a few contests. Dreamed about seeing the world. At sixteen, she quit dreaming and ran away from home.

 

A traveling comic-opera company was passing through, and Eleanore went with it. We don’t know which company or how long she stayed. But the girl who left Oskaloosa didn’t plan on coming back anytime soon.

 

By the 1920s, she’d made it to England, France, Monte Carlo, India and Kashmir. She mixed with princes and maharajahs, actresses and society women. She wandered through casinos and royal courts and picked up stories about gamblers, crooks, and thieves. Then she sold those stories to newspapers back home.

The Bank Robbers Had Guns. Iowa Farmers Had Telephones

 

Abner Hicks (Sioux City Journal. December 30, 1903)

On the morning of December 16, 1903, burglars hit the Citizens’ Savings Bank in Quimby, a small town in Cherokee County in northwest Iowa. They got inside, attacked the safe with explosives and left with thousands of dollars in cash and a stack of notes worth considerably more.

 

It looked like another successful small-town bank job.

 

Fifteen hours later, two of the men were surrounded in the countryside near Sheldon. They had three revolvers, a magazine gun, and hundreds of cartridges. They surrendered without firing a shot. The other two men made it all the way to Kansas City before authorities caught up with them.

 

The four men who eventually went to prison were Charles White, John Wicks, Elmer Dunning, and Abner Hicks. Their mistake wasn’t robbing the bank. It was trying to escape across northwest Iowa in 1903.

 

Bank robberies had become a problem in Iowa. The men who did it were sometimes called yeggmen. They traveled, often by railroad, looking for banks in small towns where police protection was thin and safes could be attacked at night. They didn’t need a teller to cooperate. They needed explosives.

Pat Crowe Spent Five Years Running From The Law, Then Spent The Rest Of His Life Fighting For Prison Reform

 

Pat Crowe at the time of Eddie Cudahy's kidnapping
(The Duluth News Tribune. May 29, 1921)

Pat Crowe spent five years running from the law. Then they caught him.

The strange part came later. A jury let him go; Crowe admitted the crime anyway, and the outlaw who had embarrassed police and Pinkerton detectives started lecturing about prison reform.

He was an unlikely man for the job. By the time Crowe became famous, he’d already robbed, stolen, escaped custody and spent years moving between Iowa, Nebraska and cities farther east. He knew jails, the police, and how much he liked money.

In 1919, Crowe talked about his past with the San Antonio Light. “I had got the habit of easy money,” he said, “and it was easy money I wanted.”

That explained a lot.

Crowe grew up in Iowa and left his parents’ farm near Vail as a teenager. He opened a small butcher shop in Omaha in 1886, but the business failed after running into competition from a Cudahy retail operation.

Old Blackhawk Beer Advertisement Independent Malting Co. Davenport

 

Another fun brewery advertisement for Old Blackhawk Beer, brewed by the Independent Malting Co. This one is from The Daily Times. July 16, 1907.

Sioux Falls Brewing & Malting Co, Advertisement 1907

 

Interesting advertisement for Blue Label Beer, a product of the Sioux Falls Brewing & Malting Co, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This one was publised in The Sioux City Journal. June 8, 1907.

The Iowa State Bank Robbery At Des Moines (1919)

 

(Des Moines Tribune. March 25, 1919)

For seven weeks, M. R. Pharmer was the victim. Then the police decided he might have helped plan the robbery.

Pharmer was assistant cashier at the Iowa State Bank in downtown Des Moines. On the morning of March 25, 1919, two gunmen talked their way through the bank’s locked door, pulled revolvers and forced Pharmer and two other employees into a back room.

Minutes later, the gunmen were gone with a bag full of cash and bonds.

The Des Moines Tribune put it across the top of the front page:

BANK ROBBERS GET $20,000

Police searched Des Moines and the surrounding countryside, questioned witnesses, checked automobiles, and chased suspects.

Nothing worked.

Three days after the robbery, the chief of detectives admitted he had no fresh evidence. Two men had walked into a downtown bank in broad daylight, taken a small fortune and disappeared.

They Robbed Two Iowa Banks And Escaped - Then They Ran Out Of Gas

 

Jerry Nepovin

At 10:15 on the morning of May 8, 1928, two young men entered the Swisher Trust & Savings Bank. They carried guns but didn’t bother with masks. Both wore overalls and blue denim jackets. They were in their twenties, about five feet eight inches , 150 pounds. One was dark-complexioned, the other light.

The robbers ordered assistant cashier Jerry Bys and customer J. Doskocil to turn around and put up their hands. Then they tied them up.

One robber stayed with Doskocil while the other forced Bys to explain how to open the safe. When it was over, $2,017 was gone.

Outside, two young women were sitting in a parked car. Instead of walking out, the robbers waited inside the bank until the women drove away. Then they emerged, climbed into an old red Marmon, and headed out of Swisher.

It should have been the beginning of their escape. Instead, the car began to fall apart.

The Marmon was an old touring car. A 1921 model with yellow wheels and a broken rear window patched with dark material. Part of the license plate had been painted over. It was about the worst getaway car two bank robbers could have chosen.

And people noticed it.

A farmer north of Swisher saw a car matching the description heading toward Cedar Rapids. Other witnesses saw it too.

The Minister Was A Bank Robber

 

The Get-a-way car. (The Sioux City Journal. October 2, 1929)

On the morning of September 30, 1929, a masked man robbed a bank in Sioux Center, Iowa. A few hours later, he was dying on a farm outside Le Mars with a bullet through his head.

 

The dead man was Rex Frokley, 38, and that’s what made the story strange. He wasn’t a drifter or some hard case passing through northwest Iowa. Frokley was a Le Mars business person, former radio station owner, college football player, husband, and father.

 

He was also an ordained minister.

 

The newspapers went wild with it. One called him a “WEIRD THUG.” Another ran the headline, “ORDAINED MINISTER TURNS BANK ROBBER, SHOOTS SELF WHEN TRACED THRU AUTO.” The Independent Record called him “DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE.”

 

It wasn’t much of a stretch.

 

Frokley had been born and raised near Kearney, Nebraska, and attended Western Union College in Le Mars, where he played football. He was ordained in the Evangelical Church, but had never held a regular pastorate. He filled pulpits while in college and performed a few marriages.

 

Then he went into business.

Neta Snook The Ames Iowa Aviatrix Who Taught Amelia Earhart To Fly

 

Neta Snook (Los Angeles Evening Post-Record. July 13, 1921)

In the summer of 1920, newspapers around northern Illinois told people there was something at the Carroll County Fair worth traveling miles to see.

 

Her name was Neta Snook, and she flew airplanes.

 

The fair had the usual attractions. Livestock. Grain exhibits. Horse racing and free entertainment. But the advertisements promised something most people still hadn’t seen up close: an airplane taking off, circling the fairgrounds and coming back down.

 

Better yet, a woman was going to fly it.

 

“AEROPLANE FLIGHTS EVERY DAY,” announced the Pearl City News. It called Snook the “GIRL BIRD” and said the Mount Carroll native was known across the country. She was “one of the most daring of aviators, and would be worth going miles to see.”

 

Another advertisement for the fair was simpler. Beneath the giant words “THE CARROLL COUNTY FAIR” were the words “Aeroplane Flights,” followed by Neta Snook’s name.

 

For four days, August 24 through 27, Snook would take an airplane into the sky over the fairgrounds at Mount Carroll, Illinois. Airplanes were still strange enough to stop traffic and draw a crowd.

The Davenport Aviation School An Early Chapter In iowa Aviation

 

(Davenport Democrat and leader. July 2, 1917)

The Davenport Aviation School opened with a war plane, a crowd, and big plans on July 4, 1917.

 

Nine weeks later, its manager was dead, its test pilot was lying badly injured in a Davenport hospital, and the school was finished.

 

By the end of September, workers were hauling the company’s airplane-building machinery out of Davenport and moving it to Bettendorf. Not long after that, the business disappeared.

 

It had come apart almost as quickly as it had come together.

 

But for a short time in 1917, Davenport wasn’t just trying to teach people how to fly. A group of local businessmen, mechanics, and aviators thought they could build airplanes there. They opened a factory, hired draftsmen and aircraft workers, designed their own machines, and flew them over the city.

 

They even talked about military airplanes as the United States was entering World War I.

 

The best known of those machines was King Boreas.

 

It was built in Davenport and advertised as a 90-mile-an-hour “Army Tractor.” Newspapers called it a war plane. The company said more airplanes were already under construction.

Advertisement Holsman-Stevens Auto Company Des Moines

(Des Moines Register. June 23, 1918)

Interesting advertisement for the King Auto from Holsman-Stevens Auto Company in Des Moines. It has a tie in to the races at the Des Moines Speedway. It give a good look at how automobiles had changed from 1894 to 1918.

Curtiss Flyer Exhibited At The Des Moines Corn Exposition

 

Glenn Curtiss in his flying machine (Des Moines Register. December 3, 1909)

Des Moines was about to get a look at something most Iowans had never seen up close: a real flying machine.

Glenn H. Curtiss, one of the biggest names in the new and slightly crazy world of aviation, was sending one of his aeroplanes to the Corn Exposition. The machine was expected to arrive by express and would be assembled inside the Coliseum.

And this wasn't just any airplane.

Curtiss had recently become an international celebrity after competing against some of Europe's best aviators at Rheims, France. He won the Gordon Bennett aviation trophy there, beating Frenchman Louis Blériot in a 20-kilometer race by only a few seconds.

The Des Moines exhibition was handled by A. P. Warner of Beloit, Wisconsin, an aviator associated with Curtiss. Warner was expected to explain the machine, answer questions and show curious Iowans how this strange new invention actually worked.

There was even talk of flying it.

That part depended on the weather. Curtiss machines could fly in winds that would keep some other early aeroplanes on the ground, but December in Iowa wasn't exactly ideal flying weather. If conditions cooperated, organizers hoped to arrange a short outdoor flight.

Sioux City Brewing Company Heidel-Brau Beer

 

(The Sioux City Journal. July 12, 1914)

The Sioux City Brewing Company opened in 1899, founded by Joseph Baumgartner and Abel Anderson. Its brick brewery became part of a growing industrial city filled with packinghouses, railroads, factories, and plenty of thirsty workers.

Its beers included Bavarian Export, Extra Pale Select, Western Brew and Alpen Rose. By 1914, newspaper ads were also pushing Heidel-Brau, promoted as “The Royal German Beer.” The name would survive long after the original brewery was gone.

Ownership changed around 1908, when George Kingsbury and F. L. Eaton bought the company. They took over at a tricky time to be in the beer business. Iowa’s temperance movement was getting stronger, and brewers and saloon owners were facing an ever-growing pile of rules.

Sioux City Brewing tried to work around them.

One answer was Justus Beer, a low-alcohol brew made much like regular lager, except fermentation was stopped early. It contained only one-half of one percent alcohol. Even that wasn’t simple. A dispute over Justus helped produce an Iowa Supreme Court case in 1910.

Still, the beer kept flowing.

By the 1910s, Sioux City Brewing was selling several brands and distributing its products beyond Sioux City. Heidel-Brau advertisements from 1914 show a brewery still actively fighting for customers.

Then Iowa pulled the plug.

Statewide prohibition arrived in 1916, ending legal beer production. Sioux City Brewing shut down, and its brewery went quiet.

For the moment, anyway.

The company—and Heidel-Brau—would eventually get another life after Prohibition.

Early Racing At The Boone Dirt Race Track

 

(Des Moines Register. June 22, 1916)

This is the start of a history of early dirt track racing in Iowa. It’s rough, incomplete, but it gives some good information on the dirt track in Boone.

It contains the scoop on three races. One in 1910, and two in 1916. The purses in 1916 were huge for the time. As much as $35,000 in today’s dollars.

There were other tracks at the Des Moines fairgrounds and in Sioux City. I hope to have more on them later. If you have info to share, please leave it in the comments.

Dirt track racing in Boone goes back to at least 1910.

 

The place was North Side Driving Park, near what is now 22nd and Linn streets. It was a half-mile dirt oval connected to the Boone Driving Park and Fair Association. Horses and harness racers used the grounds before automobiles came along. Like a lot of fairground tracks in those days, it didn’t take long before somebody decided to see how fast a car could get around it.

 

By the summer of 1910, they were racing for real.

 

And people showed up.

 

The Evening Times-Republican reported on August 10, 1910, that around 10,000 spectators had watched automobile and motorcycle races in Boone the previous afternoon. Boone itself had only a little over 10,000 people.

Boone Iowa Race Track

(The Des Moines Register. July 2, 1916)

A scene at the Boone race track. A. Striergel is driving a Stafford car, with a Duesenberg close behind. 

Track manage, Joe Lowrey, said he had fourteen drivers signed up for the season, and was expecting several more to join in. Prizes were $1100 and $750 for one event alone.

The track has been in operation since 1910, and several dirt track records had been set there.
 

Davenport Actress Helen Keener

 

Helen Keener (pencil drawing after an early newspaper photo)

Helen Keener grew up in Davenport, Iowa, where she attended Lincoln School.

 

In 1921, at age 16, she won a national beauty contest sponsored by the Chicago Tribune.

 

Within a few years, she was in California, posing for publicity photographs. Trying to turn a beauty contest into a living. Hollywood had plenty of pretty girls. The trick was being one they remembered after the picture came down.

 

Keener did all right.

 

Her first feature was The Married Flapper in 1922, starring Marie Prevost and Kenneth Harlan. Keener played Muriel Vane. The title tells you all you need to know about what the studios were selling. Flappers were hot. So was youth. Pretty young women photographed well and cost little.

 

Keener fit the bill.

 

Early on, she worked under the name Barbara Worth. As Worth, she appeared in An Old Sweetheart of Mine in 1923. Other pictures followed, including The Brass Bottle and Tea—with a Kick!

Barney Oldsfield Sold A Lot Of Iowans On Peerless Automobiles

 

(Omaha Daily Bee. August 21, 1904)

Barney Oldfield didn’t just race cars. He scared the hell out of people with them.

 

In the early 1900s, most Americans were getting used to automobiles. Oldfield was tearing around dirt tracks at speeds that seemed insane. 

 

His daredevil antics made him America’s first racing superstar. Crowds came just to see what he’d do next—and maybe to see whether he’d survive another day at the track.

 

In 1904, Oldfield became a spokesperson for Peerless, a Cleveland automobile maker. His racing machine, the Green Dragon, was a stripped-down monster built for speed.

 

And Oldfield knew how to sell a show.

 

He raced at fairgrounds and horse tracks, challenging other drivers. Chasing speed records. Newspapers followed him everywhere. Peerless quickly figured out that having the country’s most famous driver behind the wheel was pretty good advertising.

 

That’s exactly what this ad was selling.

 

It promised spectators a chance to see a Peerless driven by “the world’s most fearless driver—Barney Oldfield.” You weren’t just going to see a car race. You were going to see Barney Oldfield.

 

The Green Dragon made Peerless famous. And Barney Oldfield made automobile racing a spectacle Americans couldn’t stop watching.

 

This advertisement was published in Omaha, but targeted at Iowa and Nebraska drivers. It sold cars. Lots of them.