July 29, 2024 at 2:22 p.m.
Everyone can relate to loneliness
By By Hank Nuwer
Samuel Deeter was a character, one and all agreed. He once made his living as a carpenter in Darke County and Randolph County. When his wife Mary died, he lost all self-sufficiency.
At 73 in 1901, in an Indianapolis News portrait photograph, he looked like the poet Wal Whitman. He wore raggedy, longish hair and a beard down to his belly.
Rare visitors to his home near Union City reported Deeter hoarded the strangest things: cockleburs by the barrel, newspapers damp and moldy, even banana stalks.
He turned to begging, a sombrero at his feet, while he harangued about this and that and called his diatribes “preaching.”
He asked one and all to call him “Doctor ZA,” though he held no degree. The A and Z were the first and last letters of the alphabet run backwards.
One day Deeter’s life took a turn.
He read a news story about a carnival fat woman named Lucy Havens who quit the flea circus in disgust. About 30-years old and just five feet tall, she cloaked her reportedly 400 pounds in colorful, flowing dresses. All that weight widened her feet too much for shoes, and so she often walked about in bare feet.
Deeter was smitten. He mailed Havens an ardent letter of proposal to her new temporary home at a poorhouse in Indiana.
Newspaper reporters, tipped off to the proposal, waited for her answer.
She agreed to marry the eccentric ex-carpenter. The couple signed their names on a marriage certificate and submitted it to Jay Circuit Court.
Then some 1,500 persons greeted Havens at the Portland rail station upon arrival. At their urging, he gave her a chaste kiss, according to a Union City correspondent whose dispatch ran in Indianapolis and Buffalo, New York.
They scheduled their wedding ceremony to take place in Union City’s Grand Opera House.
Doctor ZA charged admission to the wedding. The mayors of Union City, Indiana and Ohio, vied for the right to perform the ceremony. ZA said he preferred to conduct his own common-law ceremony.
The wedding took place. A local orchestra played, “I Don’t Know Why I Love You but I Do.”
Doctor ZA slipped a ring on her finger.
Some locals genuinely hoped the unusual coupling might work out for two people who needed love and affection just like anyone else.
A few cold-hearted jokesters in Muncie demonstrated mock generosity. The reception organizers hired a brass band, put on a comic parade and set off fireworks.
The Evening Times of Muncie printed an editorial that lambasted those who ridiculed the offbeat couple with a circuslike reception.
To support themselves, the couple scheduled their own sideshow in Union City billed as “Doctor ZA and Mrs. ZA.”
ZA’s posters covered fences and area post office walls.
Many patrons came to cheer or jeer. The newlyweds collected $350.
After a series of sideshows, Lucy developed a coterie of fawning male admirers. Doctor ZA sued one suitor for alienation of affection and won.
Their marriage ended way too soon. Attempts at reconciliation failed.
Dr. ZA moved north and died alone in a Michigan City hovel in 1907.
Lucy wed another suitor in 1909. That marriage to Edward Burch also failed.
She died at 50 from pneumonia and chronic myocarditis on Dec. 3, 1922. Her last residence was a poorhouse.
The incurable romantic in me can’t help but wish that Lucy and Deeter found a way to make their relationship work.
Another part of me, a writer who has penned essays about human behavior, wonders what a fascination with the offbeat couple tells us about our local ancestors.
Maybe it is why many people, me included, stand mesmerized by Edward Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks” painting, with its slice of life at an urban café counter.
Perhaps the loneliness we see in Deeter, Lucy and Hopper’s café patrons is the same aching loneliness we human creatures all feel at one time or another — or always.
I hope, even if only on their wedding night, the bride and groom found comfort in one another’s companionship.
At least, as Ernest Hemingway’s Jake Barnes said in “The Sun Also Rises”: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
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