I've been having some computer problems again lately and so will test the machine and my patience here with another of Laurence J.'s siblings. The PBS stations recently aired the Sondheim musical, Company, which won the 2007 Tony for the Best Revival of a Musical, notable because the whole cast played instruments, their own score. Probably the best known song is the sardonic "The Ladies Who Lunch," and I smiled at the family reference in the opening lines: "Here's to the ladies who lunch/--Everybody laugh--/Lounging in their caftans and planning a brunch/On their own behalf." Not quite the kind of kaftan Grandpa K. described, a long black robe for mourning, or the dictionary's "cloak with full sleeves and sash, reaching down to the ankles, worn by the men of the Middle East," but still in the vocabulary, fashionably updated.
Bozena/Bess was born 20 September 1894, and brother George was born 24 March 1901.
She married Lee A. Chapin, whose grandson and great granddaughter came through from the Columbia, Missouri, area a couple years ago and introduced themselves and their spouses and great great granddaughter on their way out to Ainsworth to check family records. Aunt Bess was apparently as happy as her photos. I told the Chapins Gram and Mom had considered Lee as a bit too conceited about his looks; i.e., a ladies' man.
Bess died terribly at 33 with one of her children, 5, on 21 November 1927. Though Jana Chapin Dierker probably has a better, more detailed version, having spent some time out in the Ainsworth and Bassett area with local historians, what I know is that Aunt Bess had to take a handicapped daughter, Margaret/Josephine (Gram said the first, Aunt Babe the second), in for regular medical treatments. Staying in an Ainsworth rooming house, Bess mistakenly threw kerosene on fuel in the stove, thinking the fire was out. The can exploded fire all over the room, and both of them died in the flames. They are buried at Mills, according to Mom's records.
LATER NOTE: As I've said in other places, [Great] Aunt Margaret/Babe Koftan Langhammer thankfully wrote down her "Memories" in 1988, which I've now re-read and so can fill in some spots where I definitely was lacking, deeply grateful for her family thoughtfulness. She noted that, when Bess married Lee Chapin in Nebraska, "I cried when she married him. I wanted to. When Mom made her wedding dress, she had to make one for me." She says that Bess and Lee lived in Witten, South Dakota, where Ella and Otto Adel lived; Ella stayed with Bess and Lee for a time, apparently before her marriage. She says Lee ran a barber shop and showed movies but "never worked very hard in his lifetime." Their son, Joe, went to school, but "Josephine was retarded" (my sister Sue has a note of "muscular dystrophy" about the child). "She had to be taken care of full time as she couldn't walk or talk." Aunt Babe's account of the Ainsworth rooming house fire, when Bess had taken the child to a doctor there, was that "Bess started a fire with gasoline. The can exploded and went across the bed where the baby was and out the window. The bed caught on fire, and Bess was trying to put the fire out on the girl and got afire herself." She adds that Lee remarried, "but it didn't last," and, after he died, Joe, their son, moved to Missouri and stayed with his grandparents, Joseph and Fanny Koftan. But he moved to George and Ellamae Koftan's because he couldn't get along with his grandfather. His first marriage had been annulled, but he married again to a Helen VanHouten.
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