Mystery History

  1. Spiritualism still exists today, though it was at its height of popularity in the 1920s. By the 1940s interest in it had waned considerably. Harry Houdini was a famous skeptic, often attending séances in disguise in an attempt to expose fraudulent spiritualists.
  2. The Blatz Hotel was a real place, but all the characters and events in my novel are fiction, and the interior descriptions are strictly from my imagination. It was originally an office building on the corner of Water and Wells in Milwaukee. It became the Grand Central Hotel in 1872. It was then enlarged and a mansard roof was added when it became the Blatz in 1897. It was demolished in 1968.
  3. Valentin Blatz founded the Blatz brewery after purchasing the brewery owned by John Braun after Braun died. Blatz also married Braun’s widow. Blatz produced beer in Milwaukee until 1959.
  4. WBSM radio is a fictitious Milwaukee radio station I first created for my book Death Takes a Bow. It’s made up of the initials of my friends, who called themselves the WB.
  5. Myomancy actually is a method of divination involving mice, and stercomancy involves using bird excrement or seeds found in it, and both are used by some to predict omens. Cartomancy uses a regular deck of cards for divination.
  6. Banana slugs do exist, and are often bright yellow, hence the name. They are simultaneous hermaphrodites.
  7. Mozart’s opera The Marriage Of Figaro continues to be performed. The Florentine Opera Company of Milwaukee was founded in 1933, and in 1942 changed its name from The Italian Opera Chorus to The Florentine Opera Chorus. They first performed at Lincoln High School but moved to the Pabst Theater in the later 1940s.
  8. Ezio Pinza was a well-known Italian opera singer, born in 1892. He performed for twenty-two seasons at the New York Metropolitan Opera. According to an article in the March 28, 1948, Pictorial Review section of the Milwaukee Sentinel, Mr. Pinza actually did perform in Milwaukee in real life in April of 1948. He was considered one of the greatest Figaros and Don Giovannis in Mozart’s operas. He died in 1957.
  9. Boston Store was a major Milwaukee Department Store, with its flagship store located downtown. It closed its doors in 2018 and today operates an online presence only. Gimbels Department Store operated from 1887 to 1987, with a large store located in Milwaukee.
  10. Like WBSM radio, the Circle Room at the Hotel LaSalle was first mentioned in my book Death Takes a Bow, but unlike WBSM, the Circle Room really existed and was a popular dinner and nightclub location, and even hosted Nat King Cole, who produced a live record album recorded there, Live at the Circle Room.
  11. Woolworth’s was a popular nationwide five-and-dime store chain, opening its first store in 1879.
  12. Hot potato salad and frankfurters was a popular low-cost dish in the 1940s, made with potatoes, bacon, wieners, onion, and hardboiled eggs, along with a little vinegar, salt, and pepper.
  13. Florence Lufkin’s last name came from a tape measure I possess, a Lufkin.
  14. Golf World magazine was first published in 1947, so it’s very likely the publisher would have sent sample issues out to various libraries to hopefully be included in their monthly periodicals.
  15. The State Theater in Minneapolis opened in 1921, and still stands to this day on Hennepin Avenue.
  16. Soundies were three-minute musical films played on coin-operated movie jukeboxes called Panarams. They could be found in nightclubs, bars, and restaurants, among other places, and each film cost ten cents to view. They lasted from 1940 until 1947, the year this story takes place, at which time commercial television began developing rapidly.
  17. Bib and tucker is an old expression referring to one’s finest, nicest clothes.
  18. The Broadway Hotel in Gary, Indiana, was built in 1908 and burned down in 1952.
  19. The Chicken Dinner candy bar really existed, made by Sperry’s of Milwaukee. It consisted of chocolate with crisp, crunchy peanuts. Production ended in 1962, after forty years.
  20. The movie The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, about a young widow and the ghost of a sea captain who haunts her seaside cottage, was released in 1947 and starred Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. It was later made into a television series.
  21. The green carnation was first popularized by Oscar Wilde in the 1890s. In nineteenth-century England, gay men often wore green carnations as a signal to other gay men.
  22. The post–World War II housing shortage was very real, caused by returning veterans starting families, as well as mass immigration and the War Production Board order L-41, which stopped all non-war-related housing construction in 1942. The Veterans’ Emergency Housing Program built 2.5 million homes from 1946 to 1948, but still there were wait lists for apartments and homes.
  23. Wisconsin abolished the death penalty in 1853, making it the first state to permanently do away with it for all crimes. Missouri and Indiana still have the death penalty as of this writing.
  24. Christine Jorgensen was a transgender woman in the United States. She became widely known in the 1950s for having sex reassignment surgery. She was born in 1926 and actually served in World War II in the Army.