John F Ward

Wednesday, June 5, 1918, broke crystal clear and cold in Newark, N.J., the early morning sun raking over this city of 414,000. The thermometer read 66 degrees at dawn.

It was a glorious morning for Carl and Helen Viard. The couple had married the previous afternoon in the dining room of the Bronx, N.Y., home of Helen’s parents, James and Elizabeth Davis.

The wedding had been small — 14 people, including the bride and groom and the Rev. Richard H. Weevill, who married them. Helen’s 21-year-old cousin, Lester Robertson, played the wedding march on the family’s piano. The guests then feasted on food prepared by Helen’s father.

Years later, Helen would write that she had planned a small wedding because the South Bronx had no proper hotel at the time and because other people were showing a patriotic restraint during World War I, which the United States had just joined. Perhaps, though, it was a fact that the bride’s family was not wealthy. On her long walks as far north as Tarrytown, N.Y., Helen had been known to have lunch on the lawn of one estate or another, but her father was a postal service supervisor and his wages, enough to sustain his family, were probably modest. In any event, the wedding was small.

In fact, the wedding was so small, and Helen’s only bridesmaid — her lifelong friend, Edna Brown — was the only guest who might have been inclined to catch the bouquet, so Helen did not throw it at all. She had made other plans for her flowers for the next morning.

The newlywed couple’s “getaway” car belonged to Carl’s grandmother, Augusta Heller Merz. She and her chauffeur, Edwin, had picked Carl up earlier that day at the Newark YMCA, where he was staying after giving up his lease on his own Newark apartment. During the wedding ceremony and reception, the car had been festooned with strings of tin pans and ribbons, until it was clearly waiting for a newlywed couple.

Any neighbors who were watching might have wondered what was happening when a man dressed like a groom led a large, stately, somberly dressed and somewhat elderly woman out of the Davises’ apartment building to the decorated car, where she was attended by the chauffeur.

Then the groom went back to the front porch and fetched a younger woman. When that couple reached the car and opened the door, they were showered with a cloud of rice and confetti.

As the car pulled away from the curb, the tin plates made a racket, very likely attracting the attention of most everyone along Fox Street that early evening. The scene that befell them in the lazy summer dusk: a long dark touring car draped with ribbons and tin plates, driven by a chauffeur in a navy blue uniform; a young couple seated in the middle, dressed for travel; an old woman, grand and somber, tucked away in the back seat; and a small crowd of people in front of number 1124 Fox St., waving and wishing some of the car's occupants good luck in their marriage.

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Carl’s last name wasn’t always Viard. In May 1918, when his legal address was 113 West 118th Street in Manhattan, N.Y., he had changed his last name from his German father’s surname, Krollpfeiffer, to the maiden name of his Alsatian great-great-grandmother, Anna Gertruda Viard. The Hon. Richard H. Smith made the change effective June 1, 1918 – just a few days before Carl and Helen would marry.

According to an account by one of Carl's aunts, changing the family name was "something [Carl's] father had often thought of doing before him.”

Carl told his friends Krollpfeiffer was too hard to spell, so he had changed it to Viard; one of his friends immediately asked, "How do you spell it?" Perhaps, though, the name Krollpfeiffer was too German at a time when the U.S. was at war with the Kaiser, when New Jersey school districts were dropping German from their language offerings, when a Reformed Church of America minister was censured for reporting that the Germans were treating their war prisoners “with kindness.”

The Viard wedding trip from Fox Street in the Bronx to Newark would have been simple enough – down Southern Boulevard to Third Avenue, across the Third Avenue bridge into Manhattan, west on a cross street and then across the Hudson River on the Public Service Co. ferry to Edgewater. From there it would not take long to drive south to Newark.

The couple had selected for their new home a modest four-room apartment on the top floor of a five-story brick building on the northernmost block of Newark’s busy Broad Street, in the northern reaches of that robust center of industry and commerce. The building was one of two apartment houses on the block.

The dining room and living room windows faced east, with views of gardens at the rear of the homes on the next street, Mount Pleasant Avenue. Two blocks east of Mount Pleasant Avenue flowed the Passaic River; east of the river were Kearny, Jersey City and Hoboken, and then the Hudson River.

Helen and Carl may have felt a white-hot optimism reserved for newlyweds: the kind of confidence in the future that pushes doubt and shadowy fear to the back of the mind. That optimism would have flown in the face of what was happening in the world. Seven days before the wedding, the U.S. Army had launched its first offensive of The Great War, advancing on Germany’s imperial troops in the Battle of Cantigny, France. War had been declared in 1914 among Austria-Hungary, Germany, and France. The United States did not become militarily involved until December 1917.

By the time Carl and Helen were married, U.S. soldiers were already being killed or wounded or captured every day: shot by snipers, shelled by artillery, poisoned or scorched by chlorine or mustard gas, surrounded by the enemy and imprisoned behind the labyrinth of trenches dug throughout the French battle zones.

On a good day, there might be only 25 men on the nation’s casualty lists, but on a bad day the lists could have as many as 150 or 200 names, perhaps as many as half a dozen of them from Newark. This city had already supplied more than 10,000 of the one million U.S. men sent to fight.

And Carl was draft age. He expected to be a soldier soon. He was already a member of the New Jersey militia (the precursor to the state’s national guard) and had served with the New York militia when that force went to the Mexican border after Pancho Villa made a raid in the U.S. in 1916. He had volunteered several times for the regular army, but was turned down each time because of his eyesight. He persisted and was finally told he would be trained as an infantry officer as soon as there was an opening. The couple knew that could be any day so they had not planned a honeymoon.

This war had deep roots, triggered in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. By June 1918, it stretched into Russia, throughout the Balkans and Europe and across the Alps into Greece and Italy, even reaching the distant colonies of the warring nations and the sovereign waters of the United States. As near as 25 miles from Barnegat, N.J. , American civilians and merchant sailors were being rescued from the sea after their liners and freighters were torpedoed and shelled by marauding German U-boats.

All along the Atlantic coast, cities ordered all but streetlights doused at night, plunging resorts like Atlantic City, N.J., and Coney Island, N.Y., into uncharacteristic summertime darkness. Newark, an active seaport, lay several miles from the coast, to the west and south of a wide turn in the Passaic River, but the city still dimmed its nonessential lights at night.

For Helen and Carl, though, the future was bright. The couple had chosen Newark for their first home because it would be convenient to Carl’s job in Newark and Helen’s job in New York City, just across the Hudson River.

Helen was a secretary at an organization that monitored how justice was doled out in New York City’s courts. Carl worked at a plant – owned by his family – that made colors and dyes for the textile industry. They both had roles in the bustling urban trade.

In fact, all around Newark, the wartime economy was roiling like a cauldron of soup on a hot flame. Shipbuilders were frantically assembling and launching steel freighters, although the launching of wooden vessels was still common. Munitions workers were assembling mines and tracer bullets in nearby factories, where there were occasional accidental explosions. Other local manufacturers were churning out everything from the parts that made up the machines consumed by the war effort, to the paint that adorned those machines.

The city’s draft boards were busy filling quotas of military enlistees, now registering men who turned 21 in 1918, and calling up the previous year’s registrants: men who, like Carl, had turned 21 in 1917. Two U.S. Army training camps — Camp Dix, near New Jersey's capital, Trenton, and Camp Edge, in Sea Girt, a small New Jersey town established on the Atlantic coast in March 1917 — were preparing the region’s volunteers and draftees for combat. Judges were busy conveying citizenship to anyone, including “enemy aliens,” who would volunteer for military service; about 123,000 men nationwide had already taken the Congressional offer of citizenship in exchange for military service, which had been made May 9.

Banks and women’s auxiliaries were raising defense funds by hawking war stamps; newspapers and conservation officials were urging homemakers like Helen to start war gardens and to use substitutes for flour, so that the nation’s agricultural output could be sent abroad to feed the Allies.

The American Red Cross was organizing volunteers to wrap medical supplies to be shipped to the fronts. The Y.M.C.A. was calling for volunteers to serve as much-needed truck drivers and stenographers behind the lines in the European theater.

During that wartime summer, life outside the war effort continued at its usual pace, with new firefighters joining the Newark force, new stores opening in the city with patriotic banners, old ones closing with notices of foreclosure, children enjoying their summer vacations, trolley cars crashing into horse-drawn trucks, local families celebrating weddings, and hits and flops opening on stage at the popular Broad Street Theatre.

It was into this frenetic and thriving city that Helen and Carl had plunged.

Helen, 25, was in the second generation of her family to be born in Manhattan, born while her family lived on East 85th Street. Her father, James, worked as a clerk at the City Hall post office, and would eventually be promoted to assistant superintendent in the Bronx. Her mother, Elizabeth, also born in the U.S., was a fiery Scotswoman with a quick wit, a quick temper, and quick moods. Helen's paternal grandmother, Edith Genge Davis, was an independent woman who raised her two sons after her husband, Marshall, died in 1867, at the age of 25. He had been working in Columbus, Miss., soon after the end of the Civil War. Exactly what he was doing has been lost to posterity, but it was related to the post-war policies known as Reconstruction. After a period of grieving in her native Ontario, Canada, Edith moved into a small Manhattan, N.Y., apartment, where she sewed clothing for babies, according to a federal Census form.

Helen had never ventured far from her home, except for rare family trips to visit their Canadian cousins or to spend summer vacations at a boarding house in Weston, Conn., or for her all-day walks into the Westchester County countryside with friends.

Carl, 24, was also a native of Manhattan, born when his parents, Henry and Frida, lived on St. Mark’s Place. Carl’s grandparents, George and Emilie, had brought Henry to New York at the age of 1, from Hamburg, Germany. George himself had been born in Immenhausen, a small and picturesque town in the Grand Duchy of Hessen, in central Germany. His wife’s family was from the hamlet of Bensheim, also in Hessen.

When Henry grew up, he became a doctor at the German Hospital at 77th Street and Park Avenue, later known as Lenox Hill. There, he treated many newly immigrated Germans and grew accustomed to being paid in hams or Old World cakes. Among his patients was Ottilie Merz, whose family had come from Germany 50 years before. Henry had married Ottilie’s sister, Frida. He died in the same hospital in which he worked, 11 days before Carl’s 17th birthday.

Carl had traveled out west in 1915, to be with his brother, Harry, in Leavenworth, Wash., to work as an engineer for a mining company, but had returned east at the urging of his uncles, Carl and Eugene Merz, who wanted him to work for the family factory based in Newark. The Heller & Merz Co. made aniline colors and ultramarine dyes. Their products had once been available only from German firms, but because of the war-related blockades, those firms could no longer do business with American companies.

Now, the couple had embarked on their own journey, but they had not ventured far from family.

Their new home at 26 Broad St. was a short walk from Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where Carl’s grandfather, Henry Merz, was buried. Henry had maintained a studio on Essex Street in Manhattan, where he shot people’s portraits in the early days of photography. Augusta Merz made daily trips to Henry’s grave from her home on Littleton Avenue, just a mile away.

And in the suburbs around Newark — Orange, West Orange, South Orange — lived the Merzes and the Hellers, Carl’s uncles and cousins and his uncles’ cousins, some of whom were connected with “the works”or "the blue works," as the factory was called, others with the firm’s main office on Maiden Lane in New York City, or its sales offices in Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston.

Newark was not far from Hoboken, N.J., where, Carl had attended high school at Stevens Preparatory School and nearly two years of engineering college at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Although it was Carl’s family and friends that surrounded them, Helen, too, was welcomed into her new life.

As a newly minted Viard – sentimentally a Krollpfeiffer – she had been welcomed by her husband’s extensive family.

As a resident of 26 Broad St., she had been welcomed warmly by their neighbor Helen Perkins, wife of Henry “Bert” Perkins. The two women met daily on the roof of the building to hang their laundry or beat rugs.

As a churchgoing woman, Helen would have been welcomed at any one of Newark’s 15 Episcopalian churches, one Episcopalian mission, or the Episcopalian cathedral, Trinity. The couple chose St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal Church at the corner of Ridge Street and Heller Parkway, just 10 blocks from their home, where they and the Rev. Louis A. Pitt would become fast friends.

As a homemaker, Helen was welcomed by stores in the city, such as Bamberger’s, which ran a newspaper ad suggesting “New Neighbors Visit Bamberger’s Tomorrow” to get children’s clothes at half price, kerosene ovens for $15, percale aprons for 35 cents — and thrift stamps to “help in financing the great fight for freedom of the world.”

And as a wife, she was welcomed by the thousands of other wives whose husbands had left — or expected to leave soon enough — to serve in the U.S. military, in the war “to end all wars."

In fact, women were taking on more and more of the roles that had been filled by the men who had been sent abroad, all the while still fulfilling their traditional roles of housekeeper and mother. They were keeping the factories producing and holding homes together, acting as apologists and cheerleaders and sales representatives for the government’s campaigns to raise money for war and for the efforts to save precious resources, like flour and beef. It was all done was in the name of patriotism – and out of necessity.

The development of women entering the labor force or the military had become so ordinary that a local newspaper — the Newark Evening News — carried regular stories profiling women who had gone to work or gone to war. The stories even suggested how other women might follow the example.

The war was an odd sort of boost for the era’s feminist movement, the suffragists, who were still fighting for voting rights for all American women.

With more than a million men overseas already in the war, and plans to send an additional two million within the next year, suffragists such as Carrie Chapman Catt asked why women should have no vote in electing the men who would decide whether to conduct war. They also believed women would make fine candidates for those offices.

Women could vote in 20 of the 48 United States (not including New Jersey), but there was no federal guarantee of that right. The 19th amendment, which would provide that guarantee, was still two years from passage.

For Helen, self-reliance was a complex issue. She could not be considered an intellectual feminist. And yet, during her teen-age years, she had developed a kind of independence and self-reliance. A studious girl, she nonetheless did not finish high school. During what would have been Helen's junior and senior years, her mother was ill. Helen was called upon to run the household, although she sometimes had help with the cleaning from a woman her father hired.

Elizabeth Smith Fife Davis was, by several accounts, a demanding woman who suffered vague, recurring illnesses that kept her from fully taking part in family activities.

Helen once confided that, while she was running the household, when her father was at work, she had made trips for her mother to the corner bar, which was run by family friends. She would collect bottles of wine, stash them beneath her jacket and take them home to her mother.

“He had no idea,” she told her daughter, Grace, insisting that James Davis did not know about those trips, but some evidence suggests otherwise.

James Davis, working at a sales window downtown in the City Hall post office, had amassed a sizable collection of collectible postage stamps. In fact, he had several books full of them – including exotic stamps that his regular customers would give him when they received mail from overseas.

Later in Elizabeth Davis's life, when her unspecified illness was taking a physical toll on her, her husband would take out one of his stamp books, study the stamps carefully, and remove enough to pay his wife's medical bills.

James Davis had been a sailor in the U.S. Navy, enlisting the day before his 16th birthday, and serving for four years during the 1880s, on such renowned sailing ships as the USS Constitution and the Navy's flagship, the USS Tennessee. Family legend says he tumbled from the rigging of the Tennessee at the dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, landing in the East River, uninjured beyond his bruised reputation. While the Tennessee was certainly present at that event, there is no independent corroboration of the family story.

From time to time, a sailor friend of his, Jerome Sleight, would visit in the Davises' Manhattan apartment and the two men would spend their evening telling sea stories, going through James’ ditty bag, which held mementos of their sailing voyages together. One afternoon, James noticed the bag was missing.

“Elizabeth, where is my bag,” he asked.

“Oh, that,” his wife said. “I got so tired of hearing those stories, I gave it to the junk man today.”

Without a word, James put on his hat and spent the rest of the day visiting junk yards, the story goes. Helen said her father never found the bag and never mentioned the incident again.

Elizabeth’s illnesses became debilitating. She grew thinner and weaker as time wore on, and perhaps less amiable and attentive to the household. The short trips the family made — for example, to visit James’s mother, Edith Northam Davis, when she worked at the Peabody Home in the rural West Farms section of the Bronx — were made without Elizabeth.

James had begun his postal career in 1884, three years before he married, at the ornate old City Hall Post Office in downtown Manhattan. He developed a reputation for collecting stamps from around the world, accumulating an impressive collection that he would later use as currency, whenever his wife needed medical care. Over the years, he reduced his collection from a notable one to a flawed one. (Several of his books, with blank spaces for the stamps he sold, are still in the possession of the family.)

Helen, too, developed a strong sense of duty to her mother. When her mother was ill, Helen ran the family’s home. She tended to her mother’s needs, while Helen’s younger sister, Grace, attended Morris High School in The Bronx. She also tended to the memory of her older sister, Edith, who died young of diptheria while in quarantine in Elizabeth, N.J., on Jan. 5, 1891. Helen later said she felt a duty to the sister she had never met, that she took on the responsibility of being the eldest to make Edith proud to gaze down on her from Heaven.

Over time, the Davis family would move from Manhattan to the Bronx, which had been opened to an easy commute to and from Manhattan by the extension of the Third Avenue elevated railroad, which followed the Third Avenue Bridge into the Bronx; the Bronx stretch first opened in 1878. The family moved sometime before 1918, most likely around the time James was promoted to Superintendent of the Fordham Station of the Post Office, located at 189th Street and Park Avenue, also in the Bronx. (He would retire from the Postal Service in 1931, after 46 years or service; by then, the couple lived at 3228 Perry Ave., near Gun Hill Road.)

Eventually, Helen was able to tend to her own needs, attending Woods Business College, where she developed extraordinary stenography and typing skills. She quickly landed a job with the Charitable Organizations Society of New York, working as secretary to the Secretary of the Committee on Criminal Courts. The committee was logging the decisions of the judges in the city’s criminal courts, trying to determine whether justice was meted out consistently from one judge to another. While Helen’s income went to her family, her growing independence was a benefit that went directly to her.

As she was then working, Helen started moving out in the world, meeting new people and experiencing new situations. She became close friends with Edna McCallister, daughter of the Davises’ Bronx landlord. A close friend of Edna’s was Elise Merz, whose nickname was Pat and who lived on City Island – a part of The Bronx that juts out into western Long Island Sound.

Pat’s family was very different from Helen’s. While Helen’s family lived a quiet life that centered on church and home, Pat’s family lived in something of a boisterous and public manner. They frequently dined at Thwaite’s, a City Island roadhouse, and soon invited Helen to join them. It must have been thrilling for Helen to see women dressed in fur coats and ermine wraps, and hearing the band strike up every time Mr. Merz entered the room armed with change to toss into their cups.

She and Pat Merz became good “chums,” Helen would say, sharing evenings together: Pat with her boyfriend, Helen with a date arranged by Pat or by the minister of the church Helen attended.

One evening, Helen went to the Waldorf Hotel, expecting another night out with Pat and two gentlemen. But Pat said one of the men had dropped out.

“His wife won’t let him out of the house,” she told Helen.

“His wife!” shrieked Helen. “My parents would almost certainly die if they knew!”

“Oh, don’t be a prude, Helen,” was Pat’s reply. Not wanting to spoil the night out, the two arranged that Helen’s date would escort Pat instead, and Pat would call her cousin, who could escort Helen. They headed to the Harlem hotel where Pat was staying while her family was away on a trip, and waited.

When Pat opened her door, there stood her cousin: six-foot-three-inch Carl Krollpfeiffer, topped by a shock of auburn hair, wearing a suit, sporting a broad smile that lit up his face, holding his straw hat in his hands. He bowed a deep, gracious bow and said, “How do you do, folks!”

“There’s a perfect gentleman, if I’ve ever seen one,” Helen thought to herself. That was 1914.

Now, in 1918, Helen was girding herself to send that perfect gentleman off to war.

This war had not been popular in the U.S. In fact, the 1916 presidential election, in which President Woodrow Wilson was narrowly re-elected, was decided on Wilson’s record of keeping the U.S. out of the war, which had begun in the summer of 1914 – the same year Helen and Carl met. But when Germany escalated its attacks on U.S. ships, and when it became known that Germany had sought an alliance with Mexico that would have given that country Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, the members of Congress overcame their isolationist leanings and declared war against the belligerent Kaiser Wilhelm II and his empire.

Now, a year after passage of the Selective Service Act, the ranks of the U.S. military were swelling and patriotism was a catchword. “Slackers” — draft evaders — were rounded up and taken at gunpoint to the same training camps they would have attended as volunteers or willing draftees. No patriotic American man would want to appear a slacker. Many lied about their age or tried to hide handicaps, just so they could join the military.

On Oct. 6, 1916, Carl Viard had mustered out of the National Guard, Co. B, and became a member of the New Jersey militia. There was no question that he would volunteer and serve, if only to counter the “German-ness” of his family. He had been born Charles William Frederick Krollpfeiffer, sired by a German emigrant father who had once sung at the Liederkranz Society in New York City for the visiting German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. He had been born to a German emigrant mother whose family was now profiting handsomely from the war blockade, making the products they fabricated far more valuable.

Helen knew that, she understood that, it made her proud of Carl. But it did not please her.

The World War was not a distant concept for Helen. Canada, still a dominion of Great Britain, had been sending men to fight in the war almost since Britain declared war against Germany in August 1914. Four of Helen’s Canadian cousins — Arthur Davidson, hockey captain Allen “Scotty” Davidson, Harold Smith and John Holder — had gone to fight; only Arthur returned alive. The clouds of war — already darkening much of the western hemisphere — were closing in on Newark, N.J.

The clear weather on that fresh new Wednesday – June 5, 1918 – was serendipitous for Helen and Carl. They could visit Carl’s grandfather’s grave, where Helen would lay her bridal bouquet. They could spend the day getting settled in their new city and in their new home: fetching groceries for their pantry, preparing the evening’s menu together.

They could share their first dinner in their new dining room, candles on the table flickering in the cooling breeze that rode the approaching cold front that would overtake them overnight. No matter how the day had begun, tomorrow was never guaranteed to start the same way. There was a forecast for gathering clouds that night, for showers the next day, for thunderstorms on Friday.

It was a forecast for change.