Back in 1909, my great-grandfather, Stanley Turner, was knocked out, robbed, garroted, and left for dead. Week 11’s theme of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is “Lucky.” Stanley was lucky he survived!
Although Stanley lived most of his life in Mount Vernon, Maine and Amesbury, Massachusetts, he spent 1908-1909 in Warren, Rhode Island where he worked as a collector and salesman for the Manhattan Market of East Providence. He was heading to East Providence on the evening of January 22, 1909 when two Italian-looking men approached him while he waited for the train at the poorly-lit North Warren flag station. A flag station wasn’t huge – it was more like a platform with a small building. Trains only stopped if a flag was out indicating they had passengers to pick up, or passengers aboard the train needed to be let off.
He didn’t pay much attention to the men until one approached him with a pipe in his mouth and asked to borrow a match. As Stanley searched for one, the other man crept behind him and bashed him in the head with a piece of wood. He fell to the floor and blacked out.
Stanley woke up dazed and confused. A piece of firewood – likely what the assailant used to knock him out – was lying next to him on the floor along with his hat and a sample case from a biscuit company. He put his hand in his front pocket only to find that the shot bag containing the $48 and change he collected for his employer was missing.
Getting hit in the head and robbed was obviously terrible, but even worse, Stanley reached up and found a rope around his neck tied garrote-style. He firmly believed the men intended to let him slowly suffocate and die on the train station floor.
After gathering his belongings, Stanley staggered to his home on Union Street in a mental fog. He didn’t remember much about the journey home, but assumed he must have looked drunk because he was so unsteady on his feet. Somehow, he made it through his front gate and collapsed on his steps where his wife and mother found him and carried him into the house.
I’ve found three separate articles about the attack, and the one in his local paper at the time, the Evening Bulletin in Providence, makes it sound like the police or reporters had some doubts about his story. It has a “we can’t prove that it didn’t happen, but….” vibe.
The police of Warren are unable to make much headway in the solution of the mystery. Although the streets would naturally have been full of people at that hour, returning from their day’s work in the mills, no one could be found who had seen the staggering Turner on his way home from the flag station to his home. Neither could anyone be found who had seen any suspicious looking character in the vicinity of the flag station. There is no agent there and it could not be ascertained that any roughly dressed Italians boarded any train from the station at the hour named by Turner as the time of the assault.
Despite doubts cast by the Evening Bulletin, it sounds like Stanley was seriously injured. Back in his hometown of Mount Vernon, the Kennebec Journal ran a short blurb about the attack, reporting that Stanley was in the hospital, much improved, but still recovering. This was reported on January 30, 1909 -- a week after the attack. Either there was a delay in reporting, or his injuries were pretty bad.
On February 3rd, the Kennebec Journal reported that the Turners, accompanied by their mother who was in Warren, Rhode Island visiting them, were moving back to Maine after the attack on Stanley. The next time Stanley was mentioned in the paper was during the summer when they reported that he rented a home. Since the Kennebec Journal found it newsworthy when the locals so much as farted, this also leads me to believe Stanley was still suffering from his injuries, and was perhaps unable to work for several months.
Back then, the medical community didn’t know much about head trauma. I do wonder, looking back on this incident and what I’ve gleaned about Stanley from newspaper articles and a few family stories, if he suffered a permanent brain injury that possibly altered his personality. The town pages from Mount Vernon and Amesbury both before and after the accident paint a picture of a well-respected, civic-minded member of the community. He was active in clubs, and along with his son, Harold, helped run Boy Scout troops. He even dressed up like Santa for the kids during their neighborhood party in Amesbury. Tales passed down from his daughter, Edith, make him sound like a difficult, jealous man, and from the little my grandfather, Fred, told my dad and uncles, he didn’t think too highly of his father either. There is also some weirdness with his mother’s will. She didn’t leave her property to her only remaining child, Stanley. Instead, she allowed him to live in her home for the rest of his life, but left the property to my grandfather. Some people wear lovely masks in public but show ugly faces at home. It’s impossible to know if Stanley was like that. If he was, was he was always that way, or did he change after his accident?
Surviving a near-death experience probably did change Stanley in some ways, even if my theory is wrong and he didn’t suffer permanent physical damage. There’s a lot of “what ifs” that goes through a person’s head. What if the guy behind him hit him harder, or kept hitting him and didn’t stop? What if they strangled him completely? He probably didn’t feel lucky when he was lying in that hospital bed, jobless and in pain, but he made it home to his family. Oddly enough, my grandfather had his own near-death experience 20 years later. Father and son both cheating death is a strange coincidence, but also an extremely lucky one.
In case you wish to read it, here is the full article:
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