I am often asked where my story ideas come from. I sometimes jokingly say "I just get up in the morning" but I really do not, even now, understand how my stories (all true...100%) emerge and look up at me from pieces of paper. J.K. Rowling told Oprah that Harry Potter was born when she was (penniless) riding on a train through the English countryside, looked out her window and saw the ruins of an ancient castle on a hilltop...Poof!!! a boy wizard was born. William Styron's inspiration for "Sophie's Choice" was from a young blonde woman he just happened to see one day. They never spoke, he only had a glance of her and the heartbreaking young Polish mother came alive.
My head has been collecting bits and pieces of pictures, smells, music, anecdotes, things I have witnessed or have happened to me as long as I can remember. Sometimes when a story is forming, I visualize what a cell looks like when it is beginning to divide. One little bubble of protoplasm squeezes out another little blob, and so on and so forth, then you end up with a 3,600 word piece, or a book or a poem or whatever.
Some random slips of ideas, though, seem to keep coming back, over the course of decades; they seem to bug you, gnaw away never wanting to be forgotten.
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When I was growing up, grownups tended not to talk much about the olden days or stories from their younger days, especially to little kids. My mom told me a story several times, though. At about my age, she was living in the carriage house on the estate of a prominent coal baron's family where my grandfather was the caretaker. That estate bordered another where a prominent attorney lived with his beautiful wife and three sweet little girls, all close to my mother in age. From her bedroom window, my mother could see over to the lush gardens where the girls and their mother would sit on summer afternoons. A large Oriental carpet would be spread under a tree and ornate pieces of Victorian furniture brought out from the house. She remembered the girls dressed in frills and ribbons, magical to my mother's Depression-era life. They even had a pony.
Then for a few terrible days, she could look out of her bedroom window over to the house where the family lived and see the red glowing casket lights at the foot of the three small coffins containing the bodies of those charmed little girls. Their father, fearing losing all his money in the Crash, had shot them and their elegant, beloved mother in their heads. My mother became hysterically afraid of her own father, one of the most gentle of men ever on this earth. But all my mother could understand was that the dad of the three obedient, pretty, wealthy children had murdered them. If their father had killed them, might not her own? Perhaps this was not the best of stories for her to tell me but I seemed to instictively understand that, for her, this was a deeply important part of her life's narrative. And then, the little girls my mom had so wistfully watched in their idyllic garden seemed to become a part of mine. Well, some day and somehow, I thought, I will look up the story. It was as though I could feel their small hands tugging on the hem of my sweater....do not forget us, and then they would fade away for a while. I did not even know their names.
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And along came my two-week free trial on Ancestry.com. After hours and days I spent digging up stuff about my own family (see my previous blog post about my Uncle Dick Commiskey) I understood the richness available on-line and tug...tug...tug... What about the three little dead girls who had lived in the huge, beautiful house with the their pony? A few years ago, I had mentioned my mother's story to my cousin-by-marriage Victoria in Fayette County who is a certified genealogist and repository of local history extraordinaire. "Oh" she paused. "That was the Playford family". Her voice was almost hushed and I sensed that even now, some eighty years later, that terrible event was still a deeply painful memory for many there. Instantaneously "respectful" flashed before me. I pledged to myself to keep close the memory of this lost family. It is one thing to learn Uncle Dick was a scoundrel and a carnie bum killed when a VA hospital fell on him during an earthquake....my brother and my cousins all had great laughs but this was something so different...
I chose to begin my search in the archives of the Uniontown Morning Herald. And in somewhat chronological order the Playford name appeared with hundreds of citations. William Playford had been the son of a wealthy coal fortune family and he had gone to Yale, all dutifully reported and began the study of law. He married an elegant, immensely loved younger woman from a prominent Baltimore family, Nancy Stirling. The paper reported their purchase of one of the grandest of many grand mansions built with coal and coke wealth.Then trickled in the births of their four daughters, one who died young, I suspect from the date from the Spanish flu. They were named Margaret, Nancy (after her mother) and Pauline.
This was an age were the local newspaper had three "society editors" and seemingly every, even the most minute, activity of the social set was reported. The Playfords were everywhere. He was a founding member of the country club and head of the vestry at the Episcopal church. They entertained lavishly and often. Mrs. Playford was a gardener extraordinaire; her dahlias were especially prized. They, along with other wealthy local families (Uniontown at one time had seventeen millionaires--pre-Depression) regularly loaned out pieces from their art collection for an annual public gala. And what endeared me especially to Nancy Playford was her support and advocacy of early Girl Scouting. Not only did she work tirelessly to form the local scout organization, she led the girls on nature walks, taught needlework and flower-arranging and raised huge amounts of money for her girl scouts. The Girl Scouts in America had just formed and in many ways it was not a popular orgnization, looked down on by many as encouraging girls to be too independent and as one critic said "loosening their morals" by going into the woods without male chaperones fretting they might even start to wear pantaloons. But, I would guess, no one would have dared say this to Mrs. Playford.
The three girls were frequently hosting or were guests of other privileged children of the region at birthday parties and teas. It seemed they were always reported as being delightful and wearing the most beautiful of frocks and little hats. Popular at that time were lavish "theatricals" produced by professionals from New York City and Paris (as reported in the papers). Hundreds of the privileged and cultured competed to have parts in these productions. Little Margaret Playford was both a "faerie" and a "buttercup" and my heart began to ache. I knew what was coming; I kept looking at the dates of the newspapers I was scouring. It was like watching the Titanic sail, knowing how it would end. But I could not stop reading.
And then I saw the bold, black headline across the entire front page of the November 14, 1930, edition of the Uniontown Morning Herald. "Members of Playford Family Die in Grim Tragedy". Despite the tabloidesque writing of the day, the overwhelming sense of horror was almost palpable. I froze. Is this what I had wanted to find for all these years? I felt despair and that shock we experience when suddenly knowing some terrible truth. The three girls had been shot while in their beds, two of them reading and doing school work. Mercifully, the third girl, Pauline, was still alseep but she did not die immediately, lingering for two hours, never regaining consciousness. I could see them in their pretty nightgowns, full of lace and ribbon trim. Mrs. Playford was shot next in their bedroom; it was not reported if she might have been awake to see her husband pointing the gun at her. My imagination wildy led me to see her rising from her bed when she heard the three gun shots that had killed her precious girls. She lingered for almost fourteen hours, dying in her elegant home according to the paper "too gravely wounded to be moved". A maid, hearing the noise she believed to be from the furnace, came down from the servants' quarters on the third floor in time to see Mr. Playford put the gun to his own head. I could not move from my couch, any sense of time drained from me. I was overwhelmed by grief. What had I done? Why had I felt so compelled, even almost gleeful at the idea of finding out about this family? I felt like a grave robber.
The papers of the next few days were filled with the story. An inquest was held but the facts were indisputable. A crude will done in pencil by Mr. Playford shortly before the killings was found. His close friends and colleagues reported that he had not been himself for several months, being irrationally worried that he would lose all his wealth, a fact quite untrue. His wealth was not in the market. His friends had persuaded him to get away from work and the town for some rest. The family had train tickets for Baltimore to leave the morning they died where they often visited with Nancy Playford's close-knit family. A picnic basket with foods for the trip had been prepared the night before and was waiting in the kitchen for the family. These small, wrenching details that always seem to magnify a tragedy...
The funeral in the family's home was for family and "members of the bar" only. Burial was in the same cemetery where my grandparents are buried. It was reported that some 900 people crowded into the cemetery and along the cortege route, wanting to get a glimpse of the three small silver-gray caskets smothered in flowers that matched the two of their parents. The three sisters were buried next to their sister who had died before any of them were even born; the parents at their feet. How many times had I walked or ridden past those graves? The burial site is right in front of the hospital wing where I had been born in 1949, not that long after their deaths. The phrase "meaningful adjacency" came to me. Why had I felt such a strong connection to these unknown little girls for all those years?
Still, I kept plowing through the newspaper archives. The publishing of the will. A debate over its distribution, the order of their deaths a factor. Mrs. Playford was the last to die, shortly before her youngest daughter. Who were the heirs? The girls each had small trust funds...how was that money to be disbursed? Then the paid ad in the paper announcing the sale of the contents of the Playford home, including, it was noted, garden tools and hoses. I was stunned...the thought of people, strangers walking through that sad and sacred place buying the dead family's closest personal belongings. My head throbbed at the thought. Would there be toys, the dishes the Playfords ate from every day, the night before their murders? Would there be more sensitivity today? There was one small mention of Girl Scouts signing up for some events on the Playford grounds, free to those who could not afford sleep away camp. Another "society column" note that a family had moved from their previous residence to the former Playford home on Oakland Avenue. Then a few years later, the huge ad in the paper announcing that the "formerly Playford home" had now been turned into a night club...yes night club--the Elm Crest Inn. Crowed the ad: yet another spot in Fayette County for dining and dancing... The second floor turned into a dance floor with surrounding rooms (the bedrooms) for private functions". Unimagineable. The Elm Crest Inn did not last long and has been for quite some time home to an order of Franciscan monks.
For a few years after, there would be occasional mentions in the local paper's society columns of Mr. Playford's sister. Then she died not long after. Her will was listed as being filed with her son as heir. Then, a few years later, another paid ad for a sale "Leaving town, Getting rid of everything" put there by that heir.
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I could not sleep for weeks after my discovery. It seemed everywhere I looked, I saw pretty little girls and dahlias. I dreamt of my own birthday parties and of ponies. I looked closely at the treasured picture I have of my mother and her family posed among lush rose bushes my grandfather tended on the estate where they lived and in front of their carriage house. I wondered which window had been my mother's bedroom, the one where she saw so much beauty and then loss. And tears welled up at the most random times, for no apparent reason. I had the physical need to do something with my grief. And I pray it was respectful.
I dug into the boxes of artificial flowers stored in my attic, untouched since my move from Pittsburgh in 2001. I almost instantly found the delicate pink spray roses I had wanted to find, those for the girls. But no dahlias, so I chose larger darker pink roses, frosted with small crystals that looked like drops of dew or tears, those for Mrs. Playford. I found the box with artificial fruit and pulled out branches of lemons, my grandmother's favorite. And on my way to the cemetery, stopped and bought a pack of the small, ugly smelly Parodi cigars my grandfather loved.
There were no other people anywhere in the vast cemetery. I had hoped there would be a caretaker as I wanted to inquire about any of Nancy Playford's family members that might still be alive. I did not want to trespass into their family any more than I already had. I went to my grandparents' graves first. I had forgotten about their baby daughter Rose (my aunt) who had died at three from kidney disease. I pinched off some of the tiny roses and tucked them safely into the ground in front of her headstone. I did the same with the cigars and lemons for my grandparents. I patted the ground and left some small stones on top of each of the headstones...I'll come back soon, I promised.
Then I searched for the Playford plot and found it right away. Probably, you are thinking, as it must be prominent but it isn't and I seemed to sense just where it was. I will stop here and not share what I did...it is just something I need to hold in my heart for now in the place where those little girls stayed with me for all those years. They are not forgotten...Nancy, Margaret and Pauline and your lovely mother.