In October 1908, John Quincy Boner returned home to Milan, Missouri, from a trip to Kansas City. For several days my great, great grandfather had been complaining of a pain in his side. The pain wasn’t bad enough, though, to keep the 78-year-old from going uptown on the 27th. Downtown Milan probably didn’t look a […]
Elizabeth Boner’s Close Cousin Went Down With the Titanic
Going through some old family photographs, I stumbled on the one to the left–a picture of a young Elizabeth Boner, my great grandmother, posing with her cousin, Walter Clark. My mother always said that Bessie Boner (1878-1954), whose mother died when she was seven, was raised by “the Clarks,” and by that she probably meant […]
William A. Clark Probably Disapproved That I Slept in His Bed
William Andrews Clark slept in a very comfortable, elegantly carved bed in his 34-room Butte, Montana, mansion. He could call his servants from this room, and nearly every other, for that matter. He kept a liquor stash in the billiard room. And he could escape boring dinner table conversation through a secret door shaped like a window that […]