Why I Love Hearing From You

Sylvia's paternal relatives lived in Fall Creek, WI. Today's population 1,500.

I am always delighted when readers respond to these posts, and today Dr. Bob Drehmel, retired family physician, shares childhood memories of "the Bartz girls" -- sisters including Otto Plath's first wife Lydia Bartz Plath -- his neighbors in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. Around 1910 their brother Rupert Bartz introduced classmate Otto Plath to the "very pretty" Lydia, as shown in a photo taken that year at the Mercantile local general store. She worked there, lived at home and saved her money. And would lose it. In 1912 Lydia married Otto and became a Plath. 

Dr. Drehmel's memories come from the late 1950s-early '60s when the "Bartz girls" were retirement age.

 

"I found the name of Otto Plath. I then realized his first wife was Lydia Plath, who lived 3 houses down from our house. I have two brothers and one sister [born 1948-1957] and we would frequently see Lydia and her two sisters Odelia and Caroline. . . . known as the 'Bartz girls.' We would often walk down to their house as they seemed to like small children. Only Lydia had married, and she had no children, so I think we were their 'surrogate' kids. They would fuss over us, invited us in for a chat, and ALWAYS had a candy jar available. I think it was a 'win-win' proposition. They enjoyed our company, and we loved the candy. . . 

"Caroline was the most outgoing and did most of the talking. I remember Lydia had a vocal tremor with lower-pitched speech. They had shelves of knickknacks on the walls. When outside, they were frequently seen wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and tending to a flower garden. They were pretty much homebodies and I don't remember seeing much of them around town.

"That Mercantile store was still there when we were growing up. The Zetzman family was still running it. I used to play on some silver bars that were out front . . . my father said they were there to tie the horses up . . . I think the candy was 'rock' candy, often what is called 'ribbon' candy. 

"When the [Bartz girls]  had to leave the house they drove together and always had umbrellas, rain or shine, I guess to block either the rain or the sun. My sister remembered them wearing long black stockings (not 'nylons') and black shoes with low heels. They drove a big blue sedan."

 

Lydia in the Plath story had been known only as the "sexually cold" (so said Otto) and embittered first wife who lost her and her sisters' money to Otto's bad investments. Otto called Lydia "uneducated," but she soon claimed an education, attending nursing school alongside of Otto's sister Frieda Plath. Thank you, Dr. Drehmel, for adding nuance to the picture. Lydia found success and happiness and I hope you do too. Here's my outline of Lydia's nursing career. And also see a portrait of Lydia and her mother and sisters taken in July 1912 just before Lydia left Fall Creek to marry Otto.

Fall Creek High School with Bartz girls Odelia (3rd from left) and Caroline (far right), 1910. Before then Fall Creek had no high school so Lydia Bartz didn't go. She later earned college credits to qualify for nursing school.

Otto Plath in the News

I'd thought a Nevada divorce was your own business and no one else's, so was surprised to read about Otto's in the old Boston American, January 5, 1932.

According to "dispatches"? From whom and where it didn't say. Otto Plath had divorced the day before, January 4. That news arrived in Boston overnight? Did Otto phone the Boston papers to tell them? Did Aurelia's mother phone in to get ahead of any gossip? Was Otto so well known? The fancy biology professor divorced in Sin City, U.S.A. some Lydia gal. Who knew?

The tattlers were Reno's squad of part-time newspaper "stringers." These freelance reporters wrote up and telegraphed to papers news too minor for full-time journalists. Stringers in Reno got the list of the day's divorces -- public information. They chose and distilled them, then wired them overnight to the parties' hometowns(!). A published dispatch paid the stringer $2, or $5. For a celebrity's divorce, maybe $10.

The Plath divorce notice again appeared January 8 in The Boston Post, specifying Carson City, Nevada. Not a peep about Otto and Aurelia marrying there.

Otto Plath wasn't in the newspapers much. He spoke to a beekeepers' society in 1923, gave a few other public talks. Aurelia took little Sylvia to hear Otto speak at Boston University, I think on February 23, 1935. The Boston Transcript said his topic was "Nature Study." Maybe it's that memory Sylvia wrote about in her short story "Among the Bumblebees":

Alice had thought, then, of the great hall at college where her father stood, high upon a platform. She had been there once with Mother, and there had been hundreds of people who came to listen to her father talk and tell them wonderful strange things about how the world was made.

About Their Marriage Certificate

Click to enlarge.

Otto Plath got a quickie divorce and Otto and Aurelia married January 4, 1932. In Carson City, Nevada. So what's new? A closer look at the marriage certificate. Both claimed they lived in Reno, but courts winked at lies from out-of-staters as long as they brought money for lawyers, legal fees, and so on. During the Great Depression, Nevada only thrived.

And Otto's divorce lawyer witnessed the wedding. E.E. Roberts happened also to be the mayor of Reno. The judge who had just decreed Otto's divorce married the couple. And the certificate is time-stamped: 1:32 p.m.

Because lawyers don't stay around unless they're paid, and because divorce mills waste no time, I'm thinking the Plaths' civil ceremony immediately followed the divorce. Did Aurelia stand by as Otto divorced his first wife by proxy? (A male lawyer served as the proxy and was paid.) Or did Otto trot down the courthouse steps in the January cold to the car -- Esther Greenwood said her just-married parents got into a car -- and say "Hurry up, I'm divorced, the judge is waiting"? Doubtful.

One indicator says they went after the ceremony to Lake Tahoe, then San Francisco; Otto had to sell a piece of land he owned there. If they went by car, Aurelia's mother drove. Having Mother on a honeymoon fries our minds, but the original "wedding journey" was a dutiful round of visits to relatives and friends unable to attend the wedding, and having parents along was not strange. Otto had relatives in Chicago and Reno, Aurelia in St. Louis and Lincoln, Nebraska. These were along the trio's cross-country route. Serendipitous.

More here about their cross-country trip from Boston by car, and Otto's strategic divorce.

How Otto Plath Divorced His First Wife Without Telling Her

Where Otto Plath was divorced and Otto and Aurelia were married, Ormsby County Courthouse. Flickr.com

Daylight was at its briefest, but December of 1931 was mild, more rainy than snowy, and late that month three Bostonians headed west to Reno, Nevada, “Sin City,” just under 3000 miles away. They were a married man of 46, Otto Plath; his 25-year-old fiancée Aurelia Schober; and her mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober, 44, who drove the car.

Otto Plath sought a quick divorce from a wife he hadn’t seen for years and didn’t care to hear from. Socialites and movie stars had been shedding spouses in Reno since a scandal in 1906 made it famous. It so happened that in 1931, the year Otto and Aurelia were ready to marry, Nevada cut its three-month residency requirement for divorce seekers to an unheard-of six weeks. That was headline news, and the year’s B-movies such as Peach O’Reno and The Road to Reno and Night Life in Reno showed how it was done.

Bound by a deadline and a budget, the three could not stay six weeks, but Otto—who was rarely so lucky—had relatives in Reno he had visited before. Those relatives could testify almost honestly that Otto on visits had spent six weeks there in aggregate, or fib that he had been their guest since November. Someone arranged—amazingly—to hire as Otto’s divorce lawyer Reno’s mayor, E. E. Roberts, a colorful public servant who lost more elections than he won, but not for lack of trying.

Nevada divorces worked like this: You or your spouse filed papers charging adultery or cruelty or such, and on your court date, spouse present or not, your lawyer told the judge the charges were true. Judges ignored lies that were not too obvious. But Otto did not have to file any charges, so his wife was never served with papers or notified. Along with Nevada’s six-week law, there was in 1931 a brand-new grounds for divorce, no charges needed: non-cohabitation for five years or more. Otto and his first wife Lydia had lived apart for fifteen years. In the courtroom another attorney simply stood in for her and agreed that the marriage was over.

By chance or by stratagem, the presiding judge was Clark J. Guild, chief proponent of Nevada’s non-cohabitation rule and Mayor Roberts’ crony. Otto’s divorce decree says “Ormsby County” and therefore was granted in Carson City, population 1,600, rather than glitzy Reno, of well-deserved ill fame, in the county next door.

It was Monday, January 4, 1932. No waiting, no blood tests required: Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober were married at the same courthouse that same day. We don’t know what they paid for the divorce, but the cheapest price for a lawyer plus the defendant’s lawyer plus court costs was $150. The wedding announcement sent out later says they married in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

The required legal notice was published only in Nevada, so Lydia Plath in Wisconsin learned of her divorce another way.

Sources: Nevada court costs in 1931: Mella Harmon, M.A. thesis, University of Nevada-Reno, 1998; Winter weather 1931-32; Wikimedia photo via Flickr used under CC by 2.0 license; wedding announcement, Smith College Plath archives; Aurelia S. Plath, preface to Letters Home; Clark J. Guild, Memoirs of Career (1971), University of Nevada Oral History Program; Renodivorcehistory.org. Ormsby County was absorbed into Carson City in 1969.