dual personalities

On this day in 1841 William Rockhill Nelson was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “He came,” we are told, “of builders of cities and states. His American ancestry reached back almost three centuries.” If you are interested in the man who owned and edited the Kansas City Star and was a co-founder of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, you can read all about him here.

He was quite a fellow.

As a boy William was “exceedingly mischievous and difficult to manage.”

He used to say that he “must have been a natural insurgent.” One of the first insurrections came when he was ten years old. A political speaker was making an open-air address at night. The boy and one or two of his friends, armed with eggs, plastered the speaker from behind trees. The next day placards were posted offering a reward for the arrest and conviction of the offenders.

“I could see myself behind the bars,” he said in telling about it, “and I was overwhelmed at the thought of the disgrace I would bring on the family. So I determined to run away. I got on board the train. But my father had heard of my plan from my brother and he came and took me off. He asked me and I told him the full truth about what I had done, and I shall never forget the note of satisfaction in his voice when he said: ‘Well, thank God, you are not a liar.'”

William sounds like a character out of a Booth Tarkington novel, don’t you think?

After many such incidents, William was sent off as a teenager to the college, now the University, of Notre Dame, a school at that time famous for its strictness of discipline. Years later a friend inquired how it happened that his father, a vestryman in an Episcopal Church, sent him to a Catholic School. “It was a sort of Botany Bay for bad boys,” he explained.  He was more than a match for the severe priests, however, and the they kicked him out and asked him not to return.

I like to think of Notre Dame as a Botany Bay for Bad Boys.

Anyway, Nelson became a lawyer. And a leading citizen of Kansas City.

If they ever make a movie about William Rockhill Nelson, I know who should play him.

*Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “My Lost Youth”