The secret of success in my business is to buy old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it upon other fellows.
—Charles Tyson Yerkes (circa 1897)
Two interesting news items concerning Minnie Wallace Walkup Ketcham surfaced after John Ketcham’s death. The first was the discovery that a woman who lived in the vicinity of Indiana Avenue was the niece of Minnie’s first husband, James Walkup. Mrs. Titus, the niece, had been fifteen years old at the time of Walkup’s death, but remembered the incident—and the subsequent hoopla—quite clearly. But she had no idea that her neighbor Mrs. Ketcham, aka Mrs. Wallace, was the famous Minnie Walkup until after the death of John Ketcham, when her real identity was discovered.1
The second item, never proved or disproved, was from 1901, just before the trial in Hansen v. Ketcham. Minnie was living in New York City, and the rumor had reached Emporia from Chicago that she was about to marry a rich New Yorker “who loves her madly” and was going to move her into a Fifth Avenue home. Her lawyer, George Trude, said he knew nothing about it and viewed it as untrue. The reason for the marriage, of course, according to the article, was that her money was nearly gone.2
Whether Minnie was out of cash or not, by 1900 she had latched onto another rich man, one who was still married: DeLancey Horton Louderback, twenty years her senior, who accompanied her to her trial in Chicago every day. By then he had been married for thirty-three years to Virginia Mixsell Louderback, born the same month and year as her husband (August 1849). DeLancey Louderback’s main claim to fame was his partnership with robber baron Charles Tyson Yerkes.
Louderback, the son of an Episcopal minister, was born in Iowa in the house that had been built by the owner of the famous slave Dred Scott.3 The very prolific Reverend Alfred Louderback had thirteen children: nine with his first wife, Susan, and four with his second, Sarah, whom he married after Susan died. By 1860, the family had moved to Alfred’s native state of Pennsylvania, settling in Philadelphia, with a brief stint in upstate New York.
DeLancey was a boy who was small for his age (and he would be small as a man as well), but very ambitious. He saved all the money he got from running errands until he had the princely sum of $5, at which point—at the age of fourteen—he left home to make his living on his first love, the railroad. Whether it was the large number of children in his home or an intolerable situation there that precipitated his leaving is unknown, but his older brother David had done the same thing at an early age, finally disappearing completely in 1889. Nobody ever found out what had become of David.4
When fourteen-year-old DeLancey approached the superintendent of the New York Central Railroad in Batavia, New York, and asked for a job as a telegraph operator, the older man scoffed. “Young boy,” he told him, “you should be at home with your mother.” “But I want to get out into the world and be a man,” DeLancey replied. His dedicated persistence finally wore the superintendent down, and he gave the boy the job. “But remember,” the older man warned, “you must not sleep on duty; if you do, two trains will surely crash together and you will be hung.”
DeLancey was a quick learner and a dedicated telegraph operator. He used his $30 monthly wages to buy books that taught him the principles of electricity and spent his nights studying when he had no railroad chores. Eventually, his proficiency netted him the job of train dispatcher in Buffalo, and from there he became a player in the growing field of telegraph companies. In 1876 Louderback was in charge of Western Electric’s sales department, and after that he was placed at the head of Western Union’s New York enterprise.
Through his connection with Western Electric and Western Union, Louderback came in contact with Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son-in-law, Hamilton M. Twombly, who was in charge of Western Union and whose telephone company was engaged in a bitter competition with Boston’s Bell Company. Louderback’s intervention caused a peace settlement between the two warring factions, and he was rewarded with telephone stock and franchises.
When Louderback was twenty-seven, a hunting companion accidentally shot him, completely blowing out his left eye and leaving shotgun pellets embedded in his brain and skull.5 However, this had no effect on his business acumen, and he eventually came to the attention of Charles Tyson Yerkes, a ruthless financier who had his sights set on improving and gaining a monopoly of Chicago’s streetcar system, particularly the elevated, or “L,” lines. Yerkes’s method of gaining control through franchises was to bribe Chicago’s aldermen, which was fairly common in the Windy City at that time. If an alderman balked at bribery, Yerkes would hire a courtesan to seduce him, then blackmail the hapless politician.6
Yerkes placed Louderback in charge of the Lake Street Elevated, which was to be a crucial aspect of the proposed Loop system, a difficult enterprise from both a political and an engineering point of view. But Yerkes solved both problems—the former through shenanigans that earned him the everlasting scorn of the public—and today the Chicago Loop is a mainstay of the business district.7
One day, during the construction of the Loop, a watchman was fired for being drunk while on duty. The employee was so irate that he stalked off to Louderback’s office, claiming he intended to kill him. The ex-watchman was a large man and Louderback was a small one, yet the latter was able to calm him down by hearing him out, again demonstrating his considerable diplomatic skills.8
In 1897, Yerkes, Louderback, and another investor, doing business as the Philadelphia Trust Company (both Yerkes and Louderback were Philadelphia residents), signed a contract to buy four hundred acres of a farm for $1,500 per acre. In the meantime, the heirs of the landowner, realizing that the land was worth $1,000 more per acre than the contract price, petitioned the court to get out of the deal. In Illinois at that time, an alien (non-Illinois entity) could not take or hold title as trustee, so the Chancery Court granted the heirs their petition to re-sell the property.
A year later, the land was still unsold and the heirs finally allowed the Yerkes-Louderback syndicate to purchase it for the 1897 contract price of $600,000. (It can only be imagined what machinations were involved that prevented the heirs from selling the land to someone else and causing them to capitulate on the price.) The syndicate then subdivided the property and sold it off at a profit.9
DeLancey Louderback also engaged in various silver mining enterprises in Colorado with his brother-in-law, Philip Mixsell, and had lumber interests in Louisiana and the Pacific Northwest. When he and his cousin James registered at a hotel in Tacoma in 1890, they gave their occupation as “capitalist,” the favored designation of men of that era who had accumulated riches through land, lumber, and livestock. It was a term of distinction and had none of the pejorative connotations it would later acquire.10
In July 1900, Louderback resigned his positions as president of the Northwestern Electrical Railway Company and of the Lake Street Elevated Road to go to London and take charge of Yerkes’s next project, the Charing Cross Underground Railway (known today as the Tube). But by the end of that year, supposedly because of his wife’s ill health, Louderback sent a cable to Yerkes telling him that he had to resign and return to America. There were rumors of a rift between Yerkes and Louderback, which Louderback denied, but it was entirely possible that this falling out was the primary reason for his severance from Yerkes and his projects.11
In May 1901 Louderback was in New York City, where Minnie was then living, and staying with his wife at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In June the Louderbacks were back in Chicago, where DeLancey was spending his days with Minnie at the Hansen v. Ketcham trial. In June 1902 Louderback went back to Europe, sailing with his wife on the ship La Lorraine, to visit Switzerland and Paris. In December of that year, he told a reporter that he and his wife were on their way to the Riviera to spend the winter at the Winter Palace Hotel in Mentone, a move suggested by Virginia’s doctor as a tonic for her ongoing ill health. Along with them on the ship and in Europe was Minnie Ketcham, whom DeLancey was introducing to society as their daughter.12
As Minnie was on the same ship, Virginia Louderback probably knew of her presence. But did she know that her husband was escorting Minnie around Europe as their daughter as she lay sick in their hotel room? Instead of “wintering in Mentone,” the Louderbacks, with Minnie still in tow, boarded the SS St. Paul in Southampton, England, on January 24, 1903, and arrived in New York City on February 2.13
Virginia Louderback had been in ill health fairly continuously since 1896. On June 7, 1911, she died of colon cancer at the family’s home in Chicago and was buried back in Philadelphia. Four months after his wife died, DeLancey Louderback purchased an entire block in Chicago, in the fancy Ravenswood neighborhood, and proceeded to build a unique home, known as “The Crystal House” or “The Glass House,” at 4918 North Bernard Street. It was a house within a house, with an exterior shell of iron and glass surrounding a three-story home of 7,500 square feet. Twenty-five feet of space separated the two buildings, with verandas furnished extravagantly in an Oriental theme connecting the two structures at each floor.14
DeLancey Louderback had a weakness for young women, a weakness that twenty-one-year-old Agnes Sowka thought could be used to her advantage. She worked as a stenographer in the office of Alonzo H. Hill, a Chicago real estate magnate, across the way from Louderback’s real estate offices.15
In the spring of 1912, Agnes became romantically involved with Hill’s twenty-nine-year-old son Harvey, a ne’er-do-well whose forte was passing bad checks, which his mother would then cover for him to keep him out of trouble—against Alonzo’s wishes. (Harvey was not the Hills’ only troubled child. In 1908, their youngest, twenty-year-old Elmer, depressed over a failed love affair, had gone up to a room over his father’s office and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.)16
Harvey was on his second marriage, and his wife was expecting their child in September, yet he and Agnes began seeing each other regularly, frequently hanging out in Levee dives such as Frank Wing’s. Agnes and Harvey would spend the night together in various Chicago area hotels, registering as husband and wife, then take a taxi back to the city. On one occasion, Harvey asked Agnes for money to pay the cab fare, and she entertained the downtown crowd by pulling up her dress and removing the money from her stocking.
Their little outings ended up costing Harvey Hill about $5,000, and when his father heard about them—some having taken place while Harvey’s wife was in the hospital giving birth—he cut him off entirely. Harvey and Agnes would need to come up with something to finance their entertainment.
Over the course of the spring and summer, Agnes had been working on DeLancey Louderback. She found excuses to go to his office and often sat on a bench with him, chatting, and eventually agreed to have dinner with him on Saturday, August 31.
After dinner, Louderback asked Agnes if she’d like to go somewhere they “could be more comfortable,” surely a code she understood. She replied, “Anything that suits you,” and he took her to a suite he kept on the third floor of a north side apartment building. There, he made advances, which were probably reciprocated to some extent. It is unlikely that they had full-blown sex, however, as she would have wanted to lead him on a little more.
Whether Agnes planned to blackmail DeLancey Louderback from the start or only hoped to keep him on a string for future financial favors is not known, but when Harvey Hill’s father disowned him, he and Agnes concocted a scheme to extort some money from Louderback. On October 26, undoubtedly after unsuccessful attempts at getting money from her victim by threats of exposure, Agnes Sowka filed suit against him for $25,000 (the equivalent of over half a million dollars today) for attempting to attack her in the apartment building. She said she only agreed to have dinner with him because she thought of him as a “kindly, lonely old man” but that he then lured her up to the apartment on a ruse.
DeLancey Louderback’s response was that Agnes was “an adventuress and blackmailer,” the partner in a conspiracy with Harvey Hill. The girl could have yelled for help out the apartment windows, he pointed out, which were wide open in August and overlooking a busy street. Moreover, he claimed he had made no advances “not countenanced by her,” which tells us that something happened between them.
Louderback hired detectives to investigate the matter, and they discovered the entire scope of Agnes and Harvey’s wild courtship. His counter-move was to seek criminal indictments against them for conspiracy and attempted blackmail, upon which Agnes immediately withdrew her suit. But, when Louderback’s lawyer tried to file the dismissal with the court, the entire file was discovered to be missing. This could have been a clerical error or a ploy by Louderback’s attorney to keep the case open indefinitely, always hanging over Agnes Sowka’s head because of the depositions in it that revealed actions by her that were considered very shocking. Or it might have been taken by someone connected with Agnes’s side to prevent the suit from being dismissed.
By the end of the Sowka-Hill saga, DeLancey Louderback was sixty-four years old and feeling his age. At that point he was suffering from Bright’s disease (a liver problem, possibly indicative of alcohol abuse), dropsy (edema of the brain), arteriosclerosis, and acute gastritis. He began to think about retiring from the business world.17