Tolli and I visited the Denver Public Library to look at old newspaper coverage from the days when Jack Fowler and Mabel Kelley were corresponding, starting in 1917. Jack’s cousin, Ruth Wheeler, was Mabel’s best friend. As a result, Jack and Mabel had known each other practically all their lives and began dating as teenagers, before the war. When war broke out in 1914, Jack was just 15 years old. America joined the fray in 1917 and Jack enlisted in the Wisconsin National Guard, where he was activated and sent to Camp McArthur, Texas. He began writing Mabel from Texas, then from New Jersey where he and his unit, the 121st Field Artillery of the 32nd Division, were stationed before embarking on the great ship, The Leviathan, to Europe.
I wanted to get a feel for the mood in the country at that time. I knew that before the national elections in November of 1916, the traditional American isolationist mentality prevailed. So we visited the Denver Public Library’s Downtown Branch and began reading microfilm from the day. We started by browsing the Denver Post archives. We were surprised to see the nearly unilaterally positive coverage of the war in the news.
Typical of the times is this cartoon showing Kaiser Wilhelm goading Germany over the edge of destruction, using the false hope of victory, while declaring “Gott Mit Uns (God is with us),” from the May 12, 1918 Denver Post.
We also did some checking on Jack’s brother, Gene, who wrote for the Denver Post at the time. We were pleased to find a number of Gene’s articles, and some home front bolstering poetry as well. Here’s an example of one of Gene Fowler’s pieces, from the same day’s Post:
After the library we went to King Street to see where Mabel received those letters from Texas, New Jersey, and the battlefields of France. The address is the same on all Jack’s letters, and after plugging it into our GPS, we drove right up to it. The front porch is where they did their courting, and now a large peace sign graces the area.
We stopped at Mabel’s old house on the current Auraria Campus where, as she recalls, she first saw five year old Jack climbing around a construction site, crossing the open basement on the scaffold.
This was her first house on 9th and Curtis where she recalled watching the fire trucks go by and hearing a paperboy call out the news of President McKinley’s assassination:
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