Yes, they were. And the Fenn children too. Drowned by:
They skedaddled. Frick, Carnegie, Mellon: three of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world. They never went back. No member ever went back.
There were some on the mountain that day.
Lewis Semple Clarke, aka Louis Semple Clarke, aka Simpson Clarke, aka LS, was a member, and he was at Lake Conemaugh when it became Lake Johnstown. Last seen of Louie was his asshole and elbows as he made for Altoona just as fast as he could get there. Never went back. In fact, denied to a reporter that it was Lake Conemaugh that broke.
There were some on the mountain that day.
Lewis Semple Clarke, aka Louis Semple Clarke, aka Simpson Clarke, aka LS, was a member, and he was at Lake Conemaugh when it became Lake Johnstown. Last seen of Louie was his asshole and elbows as he made for Altoona just as fast as he could get there. Never went back. In fact, denied to a reporter that it was Lake Conemaugh that broke.
Louie was young, sort of out going, hadn't the necessary...circumspection for the situation, was prone to run his mouth. It was the last time and Louie was the last member to ever speak.
Just days after the 2,209 had been killed by them, members of the South Florida Fishing and Hunting Club met at the Pittsburgh home of Louie's father, Charles J. Clarke.
And one can instantly assess that Charles J. Clarke was indeed a man who had the "necessary circumspection" for the situation, and if one hesitates to make that assessment Charles J. Clarke's lawyer, the Club's also, and fellow member Philander Knox made that assessment instantly clear to the other members present at that meeting at Charles J. Clarke's house. MUM'S THE WORD. And mum it was. Thereafter mum was so much the word that some members' descendants didn't know their forefathers had ever been members. Knox and his law firm successfully prevented the Club and its members from ever having a nickel collected from them in any judgment for liability.
Thus this Style, the top-hat and shining leather shoe style of Charles J., the sailor suit young-man-on-the-make style of LS, the ENORMOUS bloomer style of the virgins, this style of fabulously wealthy gentility that never before existed in Cambria County, departed Cambria County. And never went back.
But...Oh friends, I am sorry, but there is one more, I promise the last, "but." That's about what you'd expect, isn't it? All of that stuff is about what you'd expect from the Gilders and the Gilded Age, no? It is. And one might expect that all that stuff did not sit too well with those left behind in Johnstown who the Gilders did not kill, the X.J. Swanks and all. And one would be right about that too! It left a sore spot.
It made the undersigned a little sore when he got over his momentary befuddlement when he visited Johnstown some years ago, went to the Johnstown Flood Museum, went to the Johnstown Flood National Memorial and was then directed to the "1889 South Florida Fishing and Hunting Club Preservation Society" and walked around and walked into the clubhouse and looked around and..."What is this place? You're not part of the...What is the name?"
"I grew up in St. Michael. My uncle [Ed Schwartzentruver] was the only one who saw the dam break. He had been employed by the fishing and hunting club," Mr. Costlow said.
A retired aircraft maintenance mechanic for Boeing, Mr. Costlow is nostalgic about his boyhood in St. Michael, which was a heady stew of Italian, Polish, Germans, Eastern Europeans and Russians.
"Nostalgic?" Indeed!
"It was probably the nicest coal mining town in the world.
"It was probably the nicest coal mining town in the world.
Well, there you go! 'Nuff said.
"Every year, they painted the houses red, green or yellow. If you broke a picket fence, all you had to do was call the mine office and they sent one of their carpenters out there to repair it. On Friday nights, there were fights between ethnic groups down at the clubhouse barroom. It could get pretty wild down there," Mr. Costlow recalled.
Okay! Well, that's two things it had going for it.
Don't you find that all a little weird? I do! And I did. Once I was master of the case on where I was and who they were I got out of Dodge, St. Michael, in this case.
I didn't like preserving monuments to the perpetrators, preserving and restoring and caring for the houses, right there on the edge of where the lake used to be, of the perpetrators. But that is Cambria County Style, another example of which we shall see next time.
