We had no word for the strange animal we got from the white man—the horse. So we called it sunka wakar, “holy dog.” For bringing us the horse, we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey. Horses make a landscape more beautiful.
—LAME DEER, LAME DEER SEEKER OF VISIONS,
quoted by Alice Walker in Horses Make
a Landscape Look More Beautiful
KEY, KEY, AND ROGERS WERE NOT AT ALL PREPARED to leave center stage. The forty-three-year-old promoter had the hardest time of it. By 1907, he, Clara, and their three sons lived full-time at Glenmere, while Mercy and Hiram purchased a home near Boston, where the rest of the family would soon migrate. In April of that year, Rogers took an engagement at Cincinnati’s Music Hall in conjunction with a new event, the First Annual Pure Food Drug and Confectionary Exposition, and dared to debut his new Wonderful Educated Horse, “Bonner the Great, the Horse with the Human Brain.”
The event was entirely disappointing. At once, Rogers canceled the search for a stand-in and proceeded with the work of the Jim Key Band of Mercy. He issued press releases that Jim was taking a year off and would be ready for engagements by early 1908. But when he put off inquiries about hiring Jim, the less interest he heard. Fan mail to the Equine Wonder trickled to a halt. Out of sight, out of mind. Before the year was out, he began to receive letters asking if it was true that Beautiful Jim Key had died. One such letter was from Mrs. Colby, the president of a Springfield, Missouri, humane group. Rogers hardly knew how to respond and was afraid to write to Dr. Key, not wanting to hear the worst.
Jim was not dead in the least, and after a brief depression he had begun to kick off a most lively existence in Shelbyville, where life at Bethany Lane agreed with him. Somewhere in this era he apparently met a mare or two that suited his celebrated tastes, as Bedford County was soon abuzz with the possibility of a future Jim Key Jr. Stud fees were not advertised but could have been sizable.
Doc and Mrs. Key hosted frequent shows in the amphitheater out back, and for a while there was a steady stream of hundreds of visitors stopping by to say H-E-L-L-O. As long as they came bearing gifts and could get past Monk, they were welcome. The Doc and Maggie created a room in the paneled, blanket-lined stables that was devoted to Jim’s and the Doctor’s extensive collection of awards, ribbons, gifts, and trophies.
Bill Key continued to read his daily newspapers, sharing items of interest with Jim, still using those discussions to keep up his prodigy’s education. After a year passed, both of them had eased into their slower life. Jim’s ailments came and went; the more moderate climate helped. But it was William Key whose health began to decline in late 1907. A handwritten letter he sent to Albert Rogers on December 9 of that year must have come as a shock to the younger man. Dr. Key’s usually energetic clean penmanship, typically written with an ink pen, now wavered across the page without punctuation and in blurred pencil, while his grammar and spelling were failing fast:
Mr. Rogers, This leves me well Jim Key is doing well he is in good order he is in a grasslot out at my farm he gose in and out of his stable as he wishes run around goes in stable at will and eates as much as he wishes then he gose out and runs around he dont lay down often some times he gets up with don’t help When he dont want to get up we cach him up by the tail give him lift and he will get up he is not much truble to get up…. The horse can make the shows now if northern safeness to him in the future. I will look for you in January write me your ames for another year. Yours Truly, Wm. Key
Doc Key never told anyone what his condition actually was, with symptoms that also came and went. There is a possibility that he and Jim suffered from the same ailment. Sleeping on a cot in the stables 365 nights a year, or close to that many nights, along with the extremes of climate change, had undoubtedly taken a toll on the Good Doctor. Then again, he was almost seventy-five and not doing so poorly after all he’d lived through.
But Albert Rogers refused to accept that the letter was anything but an aberration. He immediately wrote to Mrs. Colby to allay her fears about Jim being deceased:
I appreciate your kind letter and I am very glad to tell you that Jim Key is feeling fine. He is down on my farm in Tennessee, and I had a letter from Dr. Key a few days ago saying that Jim Key was in better condition than he had been for three or four years. I do not know where these rumors crop out every once in a while that Jim is dead, but I hear of them very often, pretty nearly every year since I have had him.
Dr. William Key and Albert Reynolds Rogers seemed to each suffer from a postfame delusional streak, as if they could feel themselves slipping out of history and refused to believe it. For the Doctor, it was partly because history was preparing to swiftly pass that time when the horse was king, and when those with horse knowledge reigned as well; and it was also because he was aging, unable to grasp hold of the changing times. For Rogers, it was more complicated, perhaps because his place in history had been attached to the destiny of a horse he never really owned.
As he waited to hear from his promoter, Doc Key began to rehearse with Jim, with the clear intention of going out on the road again. In the meantime, he looked into the prospect of breeding horses in his old age, maybe carrying on in the equine education field, and in early 1909, he had his eye on a pair of German Coach Horses that Shelbyville’s J. G. Jackson was offering for stud service.
At this point, Rogers had temporarily lost his mind. It was not only his way of referring to Jim Key as his horse, or to Dr. Key’s place in Shelbyville as his farm. In feverish rounds of correspondence, he almost referred to the humane cause as his movement, his creation. He bombarded the officers of the MSPCA and the AHES and the AHA with urgent missives about projects and concepts to aid the work of the organizations. Some of his ideas were brilliant, like his recommendation for a form of planned giving, complete with elegant sample letters suggesting that wealthy individuals include contributions to humane charities in their wills.
Albert’s gravest concern was that the Jim Key Band of Mercy, now one million members strong, lacked adequate funding. Without money, he couldn’t publish Uncle Bert’s newsletter, or continue to expand the base of his cause. Rogers didn’t mention to his fellow officers that his promotions business had seen a marked drop in income, though he did say that he couldn’t afford to fund the Jim Key Band of Mercy himself. He did say that more funding was also needed for the American Parent Band of Mercy in order to productively harness the energy of its millions of members.
When the various officers wrote back with tersely worded replies, Rogers began making overtures to the National Humane Alliance in New York, and when no forward motion was obtained, he even occasionally dropped a plaintive line to eighty-five-year-old George Angell. A. R. Rogers knew that Angell was in poor health but either didn’t want to accept it, or felt that the great Apostle of Mercy and Peace needed to be informed of the incompetence of his boards of directors.
Clara Rogers attempted to cool Albert’s frenzy, suggesting that perhaps he focus his passions on the show business that he knew. Moreover, if they wanted to continue the lavish lifestyle they’d been living, they needed an income. In early 1909, Rogers opened a large-scale musical variety production, coincidentally at the Hippodrome in Boston, in which he had invested most, if not all, of his fortune. Everything that could go wrong did. The show was a bomb. Albert was sued for nonpayment of rent for an apartment leased by one of his company members; performers in his show were said to have used his name in charging meals and hosting parties across Boston. He found no relief in court and was forced to file for bankruptcy. When he next went to take out a loan, he was rejected on the grounds that, according to information from individuals at the AHES, he had hundreds of thousands socked away, not to mention that he owned Glenmere free and clear.
From his deathbed, the saintly George Angell had first written to Rogers to say that he had heard about the bankruptcy and could offer him financial assistance. Rogers refused but was honored by the offer. Straining for ideas that would redeem him, as they always had, he went to pay a visit to Mr. Angell to discuss the possibility of getting started on a project that Angell had previously approved, a new national humane education organization to be headquartered in New York under Albert’s guidance. One of its first acts he proposed would be to appeal to Congress to enact a national “Be Kind to Animals Day.”
Apologetic and frail, Angell announced that his directors, two in particular, were up in arms over what they saw as a competing organization. But there was more. Albert’s frail old friend had apparently heard from his officers that Albert had been sued for skipping rent and restaurant charges; Angell felt compelled to be honest about expressing his disappointment. Rogers explained his side of the story; Angell accepted his explanation and promised to intervene. The new project had his blessing.
A month later, on Saturday, March 20, 1909, Albert opened his newspaper, along with the rest of the nation, to read that George Thorndike Angell “Soldier of Peace” had died. The world collapsed for Albert Rogers. He felt the loss viscerally, as if he could hear the cries of every nonhuman creature on earth mourning the passing of their protector. That is, until he struck upon an idea, an incredible idea. Swallowing his every molecule of pride, he hastily presented his vision to boards of the MSPCA, the AHES, and the AHA. He called it the “Angell Penny Fund,” a fund drive to be organized by the schoolchildren throughout Boston to collect pennies in order to erect a memorial for the hero of the humane cause. The boards said no. They would erect a memorial but not via a penny drive.
Furious, Albert Rogers went ahead and publicized the Penny Fund himself, under the auspices of the Jim Key Band of Mercy. When he refused to acknowledge the many cease-and-desist letters from the directors of the boards, his very painful rift with the MSPCA and the AHES found its way into the Boston newspapers, with public advisories included that the school board would not permit the Angell Penny Fund to go forward. A memorial was to be erected, but from other sources of funding.
Then the final blow came when the secretary of the AHES wrote to thank Albert Reynolds Rogers for his years of service as a vice president and wished him well in his future endeavors. With that, Uncle Bert was banished from the movement. At his lowest and perhaps most delusional, he stormed into the offices of the MSPCA at 19 Milk Street and demanded a fair hearing. Instead, a fistfight ensued between him and one of the directors, whom Rogers later described in his failed lawsuit as a madman. The reparations he sought were not fiscal; he only wanted his vice presidency back. His last deed of desperation was to write the AHES a lengthy narrative detailing his contributions to their cause and the wrongs done to him, none more unjust than their thievery of his good name and reputation. But all in all he now saw that their behavior toward him went against the goals of mercy, kindness, justice, and peace that George Angell had stood for, and he was better off not to be in their association.
Unfortunately for all parties, Albert’s idea to found a unifying international umbrella organization that would further develop humane education and policy might have been a worthy endeavor. Such an organization could have been a driving force in the future, when the issue was no longer front and center. It might have also served to better link animal welfare to the conservation and environmental movements, and perhaps even have provided a forum in which to create more cohesion within the humane movement.
On the other hand, even without the drive and innovation of Albert Rogers, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals flourished and more than honored its founder throughout the decades to come. In 1912, the Angell Memorial Fountain was dedicated in Boston’s Post Office Square, followed soon by the opening of the George T. Angell School (in service over five decades), and the establishment in 1915 of the Angell Memorial Animal Hospital. That same year, the first national “Be Kind to Animals Day” celebration took place, proposed by the MSPCA. No credit was given to Albert Rogers, even though he might have taken some comfort in its passage. Angell’s followers went further, opening animal shelters and veterinary teaching hospitals across the state. In 1944, the S.S. George T. Angell, a ten-thousand-ton liberty ship, was christened, and fourteen years after, Angell Memorial Plaza was dedicated at Post Office Square.
Another one of Albert’s ideas was pursued in 1956 when the MSPCA formed an alliance with Britain’s RSPCA to create an international humane alliance, the ISPCA, later to be renamed WSPCA. In 1968, after celebrating the 100th anniversary of what George Angell had started and estimating that thirty-nine million animals had been helped over its first century, the MSPCA continued to grow—rescuing animals in disaster zones, campaigning against animal overpopulation and the exploitation of animal performers, and even, in 1991, sponsoring a literacy outreach program through the AHES to provide free books on humane subject matter to classrooms. In 2003, the organization changed its name to become MSPCA-Angell in recognition of its seven animal shelters and three veterinary centers. Two years earlier, the first Annual Animal Hall of Fame dinner had been held, 102 years since Beautiful Jim Key had become the first brute animal they had ever honored.
Rogers felt that he had been cast out of Eden. But with classic American entrepreneurial gumption, A. R. Rogers soon reinvented himself. In the midst of his gloom it occurred to him that the job of promoting others was far riskier and far more thankless than the job of promoting oneself and one’s own ideas. Almost the moment he hung out his shingle as a marketing consultant, he was hired by planning committees of fairs and exhibitions from across the country, and in 1912 he stepped into a distinguished position as manager of New York’s Grand Central Palace, where he was responsible for overseeing every aspect of the special exhibits and touring expositions it housed. On January 26, 1935, seventy-one-year-old Albert made it into the newspaper for the first time in two and a half decades when the New York Times ran a brief article under the headline “Gets Tercentenary Post”:
Hartford, Conn. Jan. 25—Albert R. Rogers, director of the Massachusetts tercentenary and Georgia Bicentennial celebrations, and organizer and director of many exhibitions and celebrations elsewhere, has become associated with the Connecticut Tercentenary Commission as director of celebration, the State commission announced today. Mr. Rogers, whose home is now in West Newton, Mass., is a native of Ohio and connected with the Rogers family associated with the early settlement of Connecticut.
No mention was made of Beautiful Jim Key or Albert’s previous incarnation as his promoter and alleged owner. That didn’t mean, however, that Rogers hadn’t tried in different ways to resurrect that part of his former life. In the 1920s, he corresponded with breeders of educated horses, and in 1927, he clipped out an article in the New York Times entitled “Tell of Mind Link to Horses and Dogs” by a German doctor named Karl Krall, who trained nonhumans with telepathy and hypnosis. It had to have brought into question everything that Dr. Key and Jim had convinced A. R. Rogers was true. Was Jim a hoax? Was telepathy at work? Had Dr. Key hypnotized his audience? Was Rogers himself a hoax? Or was it all true, that it was simply education with a little trickery and real hocus-pocus thrown in?
Rogers had at various points attempted to write a book about his adventures promoting the Celebrated Educated Arabian-Hambletonian, but each of the myriad drafts fell short of capturing what it had been like to be along for that ride. After he retired and moved in with Archibald and his family in Brockton, Albert returned to the project, poring often over his scrapbooks and his memories.
After the last letter he had received from Dr. Key at the end of 1907, Rogers had corresponded with Stanley for news of his former partners and to compare notes about the two known offspring of Jim Key. Old Jim had sired a pretty filly named Queen Key who went up North to live at Glenmere, where she was trained by Clarence Rogers—Albert’s firstborn, and on his way to becoming a college graduate—and there was also a colt, Jim Key Jr. Dr. Davis wrote that he was “a very smart little horse” and that he hoped to train him. Unfortunately, Dr. Stanley Davis wrote early in their correspondence, Jim Jr.’s eyes bothered him quite a deal. “He has a case of periodic ophthalmia. I hope that he will get all right.” Davis had been impressed that Queen Key already had her own letterhead with Clarence’s name on it, promoting her education by kindness and patience. Young Doc Davis signed off that letter by cheerily saying, “I hope Clarence will have success with her as you had with Jim Key.”
Inevitably, Dr. Davis had occasion to report less cheerful news. By 1909, he was already much in demand in his growing veterinary practice, which he had built after taking over Dr. Key’s offices on North Main Street. This was a career that would span fifty years and earn him the love and admiration of Bedford County, black and white. But no matter how busy he was, he still stopped by daily to check on Doc Key, Jim, Monk, and Maggie. Sometimes he’d arrive on a sunny afternoon to find a little group of visitors watching the Doctor and Jim in impromptu performances. Dressed in his fine suit and boots, though hatless in the warm weather, Dr. Key obviously enjoyed the attention as much as Jim.
As beautiful and regal as ever, somewhat slimmed down at age twenty, Jim Key no longer seemed to mind the smaller audiences, as if in his equine sense memory he could conjure the old roar of the crowds and was, as ever, making sure to give them a show they would never forget. Jim was frequently draped in one of his many expensive, monogrammed blankets, like any aging star comfortably lounging in a smoking jacket and cravat, but who just happened to be a horse.
Monk was less ornery to people stopping by, not because he had succumbed to the rules of Southern hospitality, but more because he was getting up in years. When the Doc and Jim had no audience, Monk made himself available as a lifelong fan and friend by springing onto a sole chair set up in the yard just for him. Otherwise, Dr. Davis would find him on the front porch, resting in the shade next to Maggie, who was content in her reading chair, the two keeping cool under the overhang of the charming white frame house on Bethany Lane.
Stanley was one who knew that William Key’s death on October 18, 1909, had been expected. The Doctor had been on the decline since the end of that summer. Even as he grew weaker, Bill Key read his newspapers and books, keeping up with the daily news as he peered into the future he would soon be leaving behind. One of the last pages he took out from the newspaper had been from the Sunday edition of the Chattanooga Times, an Ochs-owned paper, which had a column from Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, that had captured Dr. Key’s interest. It was a list of Eliot’s recommended reading for giving any man a liberal education, even if read for only fifteen minutes a day, something the Doc optimistically planned to do. Among the recommended authors were Plato, Bacon, Milton, Emerson, Browning, Marlowe, Dryden, Shelley, Plutarch, Epictetus, Tennyson, and Goethe, and specific titles included Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Fruits of Solitude by William Penn, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton’s The Changeling, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Pilgrim’s Progress, Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Arabian Nights.
An obituary in the Shelbyville Gazette referred to a few but not all of the many chapters in Dr. William Key’s life, noting his enormous success with Keystone Liniment and Beautiful Jim Key, as well as his service as a veterinarian and prominent member of the community. The obituary author expressed surprise at the large numbers of individuals, both white and of color, who attended the funeral services and flocked up the hill at the Willow Mount Cemetery to witness his burial. The article stated that his comfortable estate was thought to be worth around $15,000.
William Key’s comfortable estate was worth many times that estimate, but it was convenient for his heirs that outsiders didn’t know the particulars. Ever the poker player, even in death, he kept those cards close to the vest. He did swear at the time he made out his last will and testament in 1904, “I am not the father of any living child and have never been.” Dr. Key had been frugal but never stingy, and he had divested himself of property, trust accounts, and cash to friends and loved ones over the years, not in loans but in gifts to support individual education, to pay for funerals and the creation of businesses, and to fund charities in the areas of humane education and African-American concerns. The property and money he had at the time of his death he left mainly to Maggie and Stanley, with miscellaneous smaller gifts to various relatives on the Key, Davis, and Davidson sides, and to friends. The large acreage on Tullahoma Highway—also called Dixie Highway—later passed from Maggie to Stanley and Sam. Dr. Key left no instructions for the care of Jim in his will, perhaps because he knew that Stanley would be in charge. William Key did have one request for himself—he wished that a monument of some significance be placed at his grave.
Maggie did just that. The impressive tombstone she selected was appropriately unusual. Made of marble that was half rough-hewn and half-smooth, it appeared to be of two worlds, fitting of course because Bill was always of two worlds. With the name KEY prominent on its base and the word PEACE on its top, it bore the simple inscription: “Dr. Wm. Key, Trainer of Jim Key, 1833–1909.”
Maggie, Monk, Stanley, and Sam could think of little they could do to mend Jim Key’s heart. In mourning the loss of his best friend, he went into a steep decline, his rheumatism becoming more acute, now with pain, swelling, and fever. These episodes grew more frequent, when Jim could be moving about and suddenly lie down wherever he happened to be and not be able to get up without the special pulley device Dr. Davis had developed for him. But the most worrisome symptom was his apparently unstable mental state.
Then, after Monk died around this same time, Jim developed a kind of amnesia, as if he couldn’t recall anything Dr. Key had ever taught him, barely recognizing Stanley or Maggie or any of those around him trying to do whatever they could muster to make him feel a little better. Jim responded to everything with a faraway, fearful look that asked: Who are you? And worse: Who am I?
Albert Rogers later wrote in one of his versions of Jim’s biography that when Dr. Key died at the age of seventy-six, “it was feared that Jim Key would die also for they had never been separated, and the affection between the two was marvelous. Fortunately, for a number of years previous, Dr. Stanley Davis, a brother-in-law of Dr. Key’s, had been the groom while studying to be a veterinary, and was constantly in attendance on Jim Key.”
Over the next year, thanks to “everything that love, kindness and money could do to end Jim’s life with every comfort,” he improved noticeably. With around-the-clock supervision, he was not allowed to languish, and Dr. Davis, or “Uncle Pet” as his family members called him, put him on a diet and exercise regime that the dramatic horse soon started complaining about. A hired groom responsible for getting Jim up to his feet and taking him for his daily walk had gotten badly on Jim’s nerves one afternoon when Sam and Essie Davis stopped by to check up on him and Maggie.
Essie gave Jim a rub along his neck, asking, “Well, Jim, they treatin’ you all right?”
Jim glanced over at the groom to make sure he wasn’t watching, then turned back to Essie and shook his head from side to side, very pointedly indicating no. On other days, he was himself again, an entertainer, able to demonstrate when cajoled into practicing, that he could yet be considered a scholar and model office boy.
Beautiful Jim Key turned twenty-three in early 1912, not ancient in equine years, but slowing down even more. Jim had managed to have some better days here and there, although Stanley anticipated it wouldn’t be long before he was completely lame. As a last resort, Albert Rogers, back in the money at that point, offered to pay for Jim to receive treatment again at the San Antonio sulfur baths.
At least four or more versions emerged about what happened next.
In Albert’s own recollection, Jim was taken to Texas, helped, and returned to Tennessee much improved, but not entirely.
In a second version that was published in the Shelbyville Gazette, dated September 18, 1912, with the headline “Jim Key Dies,” he didn’t survive the trip home from Texas and died en route, according to a dispatch from Potosi, Missouri, where the news broke. The Shelbyville paper noted:
Jim was raised and educated here by the late Dr. Wm. Key. Pretty nearly every one here who went to the World’s Fair seven years ago saw Jim. He was the educated horse that was shown in a pavilion on the Pike and was known as the smartest horse ever, which all who saw him will admit…. Jim was about 16 years old and his training began with his colthood. So much education was not good for him, however, and he went crazy before his death.
A third version, which appeared decades later, was that Beautiful Jim Key died of diabetes caused by an overconsumption of sugar. That was to be a warning against giving too much candy to future generations of children growing up in Bedford County, who were told the supposedly true story of the horse who could almost talk.
The other, most credible, and documented version was that Dr. Stanley Davis did not send Jim to Texas, fearing the physical and emotional stress of the journey would be worse than any benefit to be gained from the sulfur baths. He let God and nature guide Jim’s course and hoped that the Celebrated Educated Arabian-Hambletonian might enjoy the passing of his last few seasons in Bedford County.
In the fall, on September 18, on one of those perfect picture postcard autumn days—that participants in the annual Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration later started coming from around the world to see—Jim Key got up on his own and came out from his stable to mosey around the front yard. He was able to hear the wind whispering down from the hills, feel the shaded sun on his flanks, and maybe have a last taste of grass or a nibble on some of the turning leaves. Then Jim lay down in the front yard and didn’t get up again.
“He just passed out with all ease,” wrote Dr. Stanley Davis to Albert Rogers. There was no struggle, rather a surrender. He was buried where he lay, in the front yard, in a grave raised about a foot high, over which Maggie Davis Key planted a bed of flowers.
This was the first but not the last burial place of the good bay horse who would have gone to heaven no matter his color or his goodness because, as William Key had told Jim, all horses go to heaven.
History happened. The world advanced and it regressed. Progressive movements lurched forward, the map of the planet changed, wars of unprecedented magnitude raged. Life went on.
Toward the end of World War II, with few momentous events happening in Shelbyville, a small delegation of citizens gathered at the train station to welcome a newsworthy arrival. On October 18, 1945, Mr. Archibald A. Rogers, Albert’s youngest son, had made the trip on behalf of his ailing father to pay his respects at the graves of Dr. Key and Jim.
Dr. Davis would not have recognized the tall, outgoing forty-nine-year-old Archibald if not for his broad smile and fast gait. That was A-R-C-H-E all right, the same child who had toddled after his brothers Clarence and Newell when they took Stanley around Glenmere, and the same fun-loving boy of ten last seen in 1906. Their reunion, witnessed by reporters from the Shelbyville Gazette, was an emotional one. The two approached tentatively, shook hands, and then embraced with gusto as they might have forty years earlier. Archie could have sworn that sixty-six-year-old Stanley had barely aged a day.
After reminiscing at length about some of their shared experiences, Mr. A. A. Rogers and Dr. S. W. Davis were asked some questions by the journalists present. One reporter just had to know exactly how rich Albert Rogers had become, what with buying the horse at the Tennessee Centennial and all, plus with the expenditures of traveling over the United States, and often. What he meant to say was, “Did he make any profit?”
Archie laughed. “Yes,” he said, “quite a bit. Expenses were heavy, that’s true, but my father made lots of money.”
Someone had to ask. “How much?”
Dr. Davis knew that line of questioning. For many years, everybody was always trying to get the lowdown on the value of Dr. Key’s estate, and nobody ever seemed to have a clue. Archie Rogers didn’t know how much his father ultimately made, but he did say, “The pennies from the show receipts were given to me and I had over $40,000 in my name by the time it was over.” His older brothers, Clarence and Newell, received the larger coins, he said, and accumulated over $100,000 each. “Of course, my father had the major share.”
The reporter noted that Albert’s earnings were so profitable that Archibald Rogers was later inspired to try his hand at show business, producing “some wonderful shows in Boston and elsewhere,” which were well received but not always profitable. He and his brothers went through their savings eventually and turned to other pursuits. When World War I came, his older brothers enlisted, and Newell, an aviator, was killed in action.
Archie went on to recall that after a time he left show business for the shoe business, hinting that his leather company, A&B Tanning of Brockton, Massachusetts, had been enormously lucrative. He obviously came by his entrepreneurial talents honestly.
Dr. Davis drove Archibald out to see Sam and his wife, Essie, at their home on the old Tullahoma Highway, also known as Dixie Highway. This was the large property Dr. Key had bought not long after meeting Albert Rogers at the Tennessee Centennial and striking up their partnership. Essie, the “Queen of the County” as the petite dynamo was known, later named it the Jim Key Farm. The Davis brothers, Archie, and Essie spoke sadly of the death, ten years earlier in 1935, of Maggie Davis Key, almost eighty years old at the time. Aside from the property and financial assets she passed on to Stanley and Sam and their families, Maggie bequeathed her late husband’s scrapbook to Essie. When Archie mentioned that he was in possession of his father’s scrapbook and files, the two made a pact to see that Jim Key’s story be written down for posterity one day.
Stanley promised to get around to going through the two steamer trunks that held much more of Dr. Key’s collection. For the past four decades, the trunks had been in a storage area in the back of his veterinary offices. Busy as he was, he had never gotten a chance to go through them.
Before he returned to Brockton, Archibald Rogers went with Stanley Davis to have a look at where Jim was still buried in front of the house on Bethany Lane, and Monk somewhere behind it, then on to the Willow Mount cemetery to stand at William Key’s grave as Archie meditated quietly on that one, simple word: PEACE.
When Albert Rogers died five months later, on March 31, 1946, Archibald was grateful that he had given his father a feeling of comfort before he departed this world by delivering his fond impressions of Shelbyville, Tennessee, in the year 1945, where and when people still remembered Beautiful Jim Key.