Last week I spent the day at the Watkins Museum in Lawrence, Kansas. Why? because Lawrence has had a lot of strange people go through there, and so I figure that one of the persons I am looking for who worked on NEQUA just might have spent some time in Lawrence.
The Watkins is in a grand old building downtown on Massachusetts Ave.  Being my bull in a china shop, self I just ambled in a minute after it opened. They run their place on an appointment basis. How the public is supposed to know that I do not know. Of course I was able to slide by the rules with my best sad face showing.
They put me in touch with a woman named  Mary Wallace, a volunteer archivist. She had actually been responsible for preparing the files in the section where she works, which was great because I just told her the story of what I knew about the NEQUA crew and she wrote down a couple of key words and pulled the files for me. It only took about two hours to go through  the potential files.
Mary also gave me a card for the “Collection Manager” who she said could do a search of the notations on photographs and see if there were any  photographs of the dozen or so names I gave her. 
Two days later I got an email saying, No Luck, but it included a couple of suggestions of other places to check.
It is this type of service that I have come to expect from research people.  They know there section of information better than anyone else or they should, and they usually have an idea how to play their intuitive card which sometimes pays off with very unsuspected information.

Seems there is always one more place to check.

    I was doing my early morning search for more information on the Nequa crew and hit on a great site. The site url is http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/   It is a site where newspapers that have been digitized are available and better yet you can type in a persons name and it will search for the name in the newspapers that have been digitized. So I put in A. O. Grigsby and then spent a couple of hours looking through the notations that have been found by the search system. A lot of the items I have already seen. But there were two real, real interesting notations.
    In 1892  Mr. and Mrs A.O. Grigsby are listed as members of the welcoming committee for the Inauguration of the Governor of Kansas. I wasn’t surprised that a political operative with Populist connections would be involved in that Inauguration as it was for the Populist Governor that had been elected.
    What made this surprising is the fact that I had found NO notation of there being a new Mrs. A. O. Grigsby after the death of Mrs. A. O. Grigsby in Hubbard county.  I spent today at the National Archives looking for marriage licenses. didn’t find any so the story  takes a new turn and might just come out the way I predicted. No I will not reveal the prediction until the book comes out.

 

    The second notation appeared in the St. Paul Daily Globe on Novenber 11, 1888. I copied it out of the newspaper so you can read the original.

    Now for those of us who have always been happy in the middle of the road doing what the Republicans say or the Democrats suggest, the above newspaper item doesn’t mean much. It is just a meeting to commemorate the death of some men with principals  in Chicago. But the fact that these men were asking for an eight hour work day.  Their Labor Unions were calling for a boycott. The powers that ruled were afraid that they would lose a little money, so it all ended with violence and people getting killed and eight men being hung, (actually they choked to death because the nooses were loose and so the usual breaking of the neck could not take place, they swung until they choked to death, a very gruesome way to die, according to the witnesses.)  They were labeled Anarchists. They did not follow the Republican or Democrat party line. Thus, Judicial Murder.

   So that is the reason for this “Festival of Sorrow”at which A. O. Grigsby is listed as one of the speakers.

    I first learned a little about the Haymarket Affair while at a conference of the  National Association of Gravestone Studies. They had their conference in Chicago which I attended.  We toured cemeteries in Chicago and one was the cemetery where Emma Goldman and some other nefarious characters were buried. The first thing that the guide told us was that NO cemetery in Chicago would accept the bodies of  the men who were hanged as Anarchists responsible for the Haymarket riots. Finally the German Waldheim Cemetery allowed the burial of these men. There is a  Haymarket Martyrs' Monument in the center of where these men are buried, which has been placed on the National Historical Monument list. The dead men were pardoned.
    One of the men on the Gravestone Association tour was the grandchild of one of the Haymarket Riot martyrs. His grandfathers envolvement was that he printed circulars to announce the protest. Seems strange that printing a poster could get you hung by the Police.

In NEQUA I am reading about the Ice King, which is frozen in the ice near the north pole. The weather here in Kansas City has been perfect for providing a background for this chapter.

When it snows I just stay in, except for keeping a hole open in the fish pond. No reason to drive out the driveway and mix with the loonies sliding to work. (Incidentally there is a piece of Canadian money called a loonie.)

In the book there are several very creative endeavors undertaken by some of the crew of the Ice King while they are stuck in the ice.  The dialogue reminded me of my Swede relatives talking about a fellow relative who seems to have a little bit more creativity than the rest of us. In a half whisper, under their breathe, they say “he’s real sharp,” to describe a young person with a little bit of their creativity showing.

Personally I thought that probably the young person has a little bit better ability to focus their attention than most people. Maybe their retention of previous situations is superior. It could be they have developed their ability to recall a previous similar situations and with some minor readjustment they can use the old answer to solve the present problem.

It seemed to me that usually there is a lot of luck involved with real creative solutions. At times it seemed that the usual intellectual answers  were rejected with perhaps a cessation of the human involvement, a little spaced out glazed look in the eyes, a seemingly brief period of silent prayer. I even concluded that there was a little repartee with the higher sources. My relatives always came down on the side of  “sharpness” which in my opinion obfuscates the actuality of what creativity, true creativity really is.

The two most creative persons on board the ICE KING, other than Jack Adams are Scandinavian. Maybe there is some genetic answer.

Every book needs a front cover so I started working out some ideas and then I remembered the guy  who put the animation and sound on a political web site that I own. When you click on www.Taxhog.com , you hear, “Here Pig Pig, Here Pig Pig, Souuee Souuee”

The guy who did this is Joey, a very interesting guy. Joey earned  a degree from a college in central Kansas seven miles north of where Dr. T. A. H. Lowe started practicing medicine. Joey moved to Kansas City. He found a job with the Public Library.

I first met Joey while doing some political harassment of guys who think that widows and lower economic households should pay for athletic teams.  Major league ball teams who pay players millions of dollars to chase a ball or run around with a ball and yet they expect that the taxpayers should pay for box seats for good ol boys to swill expensive booze while “watching” millionaire ball players play games.  They  want taxes to upgrade the stadiums where they earn their money. I disagreed and I met some other guys who also disagreed. We successfully stopped several tax votes to collect and transfer MILLIONS to teams in Kansas City. It is amazing what a few internet sites like  www.TaxHog.com  can do before an election.  Joey helped us out.

                                                 This is one of his starts on the cover

Next thing I knew Joey was married, had a couple of kids and had moved on to a better paying job in another city.  He was still doing I.T. stuff and following his first love when not working.  He would rather be painting  paintings. Anyhow I ran him down and asked if he would be interested in creating a front and back cover for a book project I was going to do. I sent him a quick drawing I had done, which was to be a guidance image for getting started on this book cover.

Well he is off to a great start and is planning on showing  various stages of development on his web page. So if you want to see how an art project starts and progresses you should check out his personal website.

The Eclectic Medical Institute which Dr. Tilghman A. H. Lowe attended was only one of several. There were also the:
        California Eclectic Medical College in Los Angeles, 
        Hospital Medical College, Eclectic in Atlanta, Georgia,
        College of Eclectic Medicine and Surgery,
        Eclectic College of Physicians and Surgeons in Indianapolis,          
        King Eclectic Medical College in Des Moines,
        Eclectic Medical College of Indiana in Louisville Kentucky,          
        Eclectic Medical College of Maine in Lewiston,
        Worchester Medical College, Eclectic in Massachusetts,              
        Michigan Eclectic Medical College in Detroit,
        Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City,
        Lincoln Medical College, Eclectic in Nebraska,
        Eclectic Medical College of the City of New York,
        Randolph Eclectic Medical Institute in Rochester,
        American Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati,
        Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,
        Eclectic Medical Institute in Memphis,
        Wisconsin Eclectic Medical School in Milwaukee
So one can conclude that the word Eclectic probably meant something at one time.

 A quick look at the history of the Eclectic Medical Schools shows they were responsible for changing medicine in the United States from the dominate British Rationalist system.  They systematized the knowledge of Native Americans and other “root” doctors and experimented many times on themselves to obtain information on what certain plants and plant compounds would accomplish when administered to humans. Take five minutes and read the following page for an interesting background on something that was largely obliterated by it’s competition.

    http://doctorschar.com/archives/eclectic-school-of-medicine/

I’ve found three Eclectic Physicians who wrote books about traveling to the center of the earth. Dr. Tilghman A. Howard Lowe, Dr. John Uri Lloyd and Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed.
Did the idea carry some special meaning? Did their experimentation cause some type of mental aberration? Did these men ingest compounds which actually caused them to “go inside” in the meaning of investigating the interior landscape of the mind? Did they expand the normal range of consciousness and use the idea of traveling into the interior of the earth to explain traveling inside of their own minds? Were there plant compounds which decreased the power of their egos or changed the usual human “me first” perspective to one of compassion and consideration for their fellow man? With the acquisition and publication of some of these ideas, these physicians might be ostracized, ridiculed or literally “road out of town on a rail”.  So they wrote a book of fiction.

    What made me suspicious is that when Dr. John Uri Lloyd reflected on his writings he was adamant that he wrote, just to attempt to sell to “fictional readers”, but Lloyd actually writes about transcending the physical realm. Going inside. Some of the same ideas and approaches exist in Nequa.

There are still a lot of blanks in Dr. Tilghman A. Howard Lowe’s life story. Part of his life story centered around his desire to become a physician. I have not found any notations that explain  why he decided to become a physician.
Did he want to be of service to the world or his little part of it? Did he want to make a lot of money like a large percentage of today's medical school graduates? Maybe he just met someone and saw an opportunity that might give him an inside track  to acquire a profession.

The medical school he attended required a proctor. Some one to vouch for ones character. A person to oversee the progress and provide a little encouragement to each student. Dr. Lowe’s proctor was George Washington Hull.  Hull was probably born in Ohio  in 1820 and graduated from the Cincinnati Eclectic Medical College in 1861. He practiced medicine in Renick’s Mill up river from Lexington Missouri. He was evidently run out of Renick’s Mill, because he was a Union sympathizer. A lot of the state of Missouri was inhabited by slavers and confederate sympathizers. After a period of time in Indiana, G. W. Hull shows up in Labette County, Kansas, which is where Dr. Tilghman A. Howard Lowe’s parents lived. So probably Tilghman met Hull and found a way to get a little help getting into The Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati, Ohio,

The Eclectic Medical College is where Tilghman's story gets real interesting. I’ll write about that a little later when I get it all straight.

Dr. Tilghman A. Howard Lowe graduates in 1883 and returns to Kansas, McPherson Kansas to be exact. The Eclectic College lists him as practicing in two locations, McPherson and Sherman City,  Kansas. It would have been a long drive between patients, particularly by horse and buggy.

The question about whether he was service minded or after the money may be answered in part by the fact that he charged his mother, his brother, and brother-in-law for medical treatments while living in McPherson Kansas. 

Maybe culprit is the wrong word. 

Me culpa , “accepting the guilt” was the position I was coming from.  My dictionary provides mostly definitions that carry hints of criminality or misdeeds for the word culprit. I mean that Tilghman was the person who supposedly started the project. He is the culpable human that must take responsibility for starting something which seemed to consume a lot of the time available to his wife and also the time of Alcanoan Grigsby. 

Who knows, there may have been a lot of others involved in some way or other, which we have no way at present of knowing about.
I know that it has consumed a lot of my hours over the last year and a half. My time is explainable as perchance, a bit  of obsessive behavior, which I prefer to call following a line of coincidences. 

The slight change in perspective which has appeared in my life,  in retrospect, seems almost inevitable, but it required a catalyst . The persons I’ve run up against, through out my life include several who could have been that catalyst, but for some reason it took a 114 year old book. 
Some have said the book is a very good read, I hate that type of talk. A good read can be equated with finally taking a long awaited “good elimination of water”.

The reality is that it is an intriguing book, it is something which I appreciated spending time reading. I also reveled in researching the who, what for, and where ever of its appearance. It’s pages  carry adventure. It’s pages carry and lay out succinctly, IDEAS worth PONDERING. I am also of the opinion that there are at least two levels at which one may read the book.

I am positive that Dr. Tilgman A. Howard Lowe started putting the book together.