Magazine illumined house's past

by ROBERT STINSON

I know how you're supposed to do history -- systematically, logically, faithfully, meaningfully -- because I've taught and written it for years. But a few weeks ago I had a chance to let the mesh and mess of the past simply happen to me. It was a little like taking a core sampling of earth to see what turned up.

The simile is not far off, because my study, if it can be called that, started with a sewer pipe.

One early morning I noticed that the drain in the upstairs sink of my "century home" was sluggish. I emptied a bottle of Drano into it. Still pretty slow. So, I tried a rubber plunger, and that brought up a sinkfull of black sludge that wouldn't drain at all. I called the plumber, who came the next day and "snaked" the drain. That emptied the sludge but cracked a hundred-year-old pipe in the crawl-space behind the bathroom, and now the kitchen ceiling was threatened. I eagerly accepted his proposal to replace the ancient iron pipe with modern plastic.

"What have we here?" I heard him exclaim midway through the job. He had found a hundred-year-old newspaper under the hundred-year-old pipe. He handed the damp newsprint to me. "Probably put down for insulation," he said, and went back to work.

So did I. What he'd handed me was a copy of The Advance, dated Oct. 28, 1909. I used to be an expert in the history of journalism and recognized it as a once-prominent religious magazine published in Chicago. Who was living here -- indeed, who was using the bathroom -- in 1909? First, though, I had to confirm that The Advance was what I thought it was. Then I could pursue the lavatory and spiritual life of its Oberlin subscriber.

The bible for historians of magazines is a colossal, multi-volume history by Frank Luther Mott. I knew Mudd Library would have it, and it did. In hefty volume three I learned that The Advance began publishing in 1867 and became the voice of western Congregationalism. A new editor, Charles H. Howard, got hold of it in 1873, insisting on a much higher literary standard than his predecessor but also on an uncompromising moral tone.

That was the year of the financial collapse and of financier skullduggery known as the Panic of 1873. Howard saw it as a whole-culture failure. "Simplicity has departed," he wrote, "principle has been undermined, and the very churches have lost the savor of godliness."

The Advance's fame now rests principally on its having published installments of a famous novel, the title of which became the slogan, "What would Jesus do?"--shortened lately to WWJD. The Advance serialized Charles M. Sheldon's "In His Steps, or What Would Jesus Do?" in 1896 but failed to register its copyright properly. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies, but Sheldon and his descendants never got a penny in royalties.

So, the magazine was famous when a latter-day subscriber pressed a copy under an Oberlin sewer pipe. Who did that?

City directories, made available online by the excellent Oberlin Heritage Society, show that in the years 1908-10, one Delavan L. Leonard had my house. A religious man? Oh, yes. He was the Reverend D. L. Leonard and worthy enough that his private papers are now held in climate-controlled, fire-proof safety by the Oberlin College Archives.

A manuscript schedule of the U.S. Census for 1910, which I read after just a few computer clicks on Ancestry.com, lists Leonard as having reached the age of 75 that year. He rented the house, and (I guess they had to ask) never served in either the Union or Confederate army, and was neither deaf nor blind.

Lots of people would have matched these criteria. When the census taker, E.P. Ralston, called at the house that mild Saturday in early April (high 55, low 40, no precipitation, I've learned), did he know what had already made Rev. Delavan Leonard an Oberlin worthy or why, in time, a granddaughter, offspring of one of the two daughters living there with him in 1910, would donate his papers to Oberlin and that the archives would want them?

Just who was this man in my bathroom?

Delavan Leonard was born on a New York farm in 1834, the next to last of his parents' 14 children. He was a graduate of Hamilton College, felt an early call to ministry, and after graduating from Union Seminary in 1862 served Congregational churches in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota and, eventually, west of here in Bellevue, Ohio.

In the 1880s, though, while he was in Northfield, Minnesota, a new vocation beckoned. An archivist in Mudd let me look through Leonard's diary from 1881. On April 9 he wrote, "'Called' at Northfield Minn. To the great astonishment of the callee. For six weeks great searchings of heart (1) shall I give up the pastorate. (2) Shall I stay in Minn. The soul [massed?] strength said go to U.'"

"U" stood for Utah, for Leonard was to become Superintendent of Home Missions and travel west preaching among the Mormons, whom he thought rather curious. He sent articles and commentaries on them back east to, among other magazines, The Advance. An account book tucked in an archives folder shows he was getting anywhere from $4 to 92 cents for his pieces.

By 1887 he'd moved to Oberlin and sent two sons to the college. His own loyalty led him to write "The Story of Oberlin" (1898), which my friend, Roland Baumann, the former Oberlin archivist, told me is a much underrated book. Six years later, thinking back on his years in Northfield before the missionary tours, Leonard published a "History of Carleton College," one of the great Congregational foundations.

By 1909 Delavan Leonard was in my house. What exactly was he reading in The Advance, perhaps in the living room's big front window, a hundred years ago? He might have seen that the magazine had lost none of its suspicion of big business. "The American Meat Packers Association met in Chicago last week," it said on page 4. "There were swell banquets and automobile rides and everything that makes life worth living to a class of people who have the 'bull by the horns' when it comes to rolling together great bundles of the coin of the realm." The meat men protested having to put up with federal food inspection rules.

The Advance also had a couple of new serials going. One was by Charles M. Sheldon, a follow-up to "In His Steps," and another by Jane Richardson, "The Coin of Vantage, A Story of the Trusts." The installment I read was about the shutdown of a factory and about one worker who, in rage and desperation, turned to abusing his family. His fellows, "who had been with the enterprise from the start, were pitifully dazed; they could hardly hold in their trembling fingers the last wage from the Works."

Leonard would certainly have tarried over page 13 and its long description of Carleton College's installation of a new president, Donald J. Cowling, Ph.D., D. D. The writer accounted for just about every notable who was there together with their congratulatory speeches and Cowling's own inaugural address. The thought crossed my mind that Leonard, given his happy years as a Northfield pastor and his recently published history of Carleton, might have sent this notice in himself.

I turned more fragile pages. Talk about a core sampling. Here were advertisements for constipation remedies, cruises to the Middle East, a 50-cent book called "200 eggs a Year per Hen," Quaker Oats ("best of all human foods" and "cheapest food you can eat"), and five-percent farm mortgages to be had in Iowa. Here, too, was a snide editorial on how silly a middle-aged woman looks trying to remain young, "mincing along in the latest style shoes, and tight at that, dressed in the most youthful costume imaginable and wearing a hat that might belong to her great-grand-daughter." Under Seminary Notes, The Advance observed that Oberlin's seminary had 42 new students, with "good additions to all classes."

Delavan Leonard died on Jan. 26, 1917 and was buried in Westwood Cemetery. His stone is modest, flush with the ground.

The house lives on, and in it I think about him all the time. Little things. I've seen his late-life photograph, so I see him here: stern eyes, steely chin whiskers. Which bedroom was his? Come to think of it, were he and his daughters still using an outhouse in 1909? If not, did they have to rattle that handle on the upstairs toilet to make the water stop running?

No, of course not. Different toilet. Probably seven or eight generations of toilets since 1909. I'm losing my touch at this, aren't I?