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Curious Cousins: Admiral Raymond Spruance and Alger Hiss

I happened to notice that Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance (1886-1969), perhaps the most effective American naval commander during the war in the Pacific, 1942-44, was born in Baltimore and that his mother’s family name was Hiss.

Hiss and Baltimore: this got me curious.

Turns out that Annie Ames Hiss, the Admiral’s mother, was second cousin to Charles Hiss, father to State Department official, founding Secretary-General of the UN—and suspected Communist spy—Alger Hiss (1904-1996).

Charles committed suicide in 1907 when Alger was very young, but his cousin Annie lived until 1938, when she was past 80 years of age.

Their common ancestors were Jacob Hiss (b. 1762) and Elizabeth Gatch (b. 1766).  Alger is the great-grandson of their son Jesse Lee Hiss (b. 1788), while Raymond descends from Jesse’s younger brother Philip (b. 1795).

The Hisses were a fecund clan, and Hiss is a common name around Baltimore. It is possible, even probable, that Raymond Spruance and Alger Hiss were completely unaware of the family connection.

But what I find most remarkable is that both family strands—most of their relatives, in fact—remained in Baltimore for nearly two centuries, or six generations. Among my own ancestors for the period, it is rare to find a family in the same place for more than about two generations. Perhaps having vast number of relations in relations within a small area gives one an emotional incentive to stick around, even if you don’t really know most of them.

 

 

 

 

 

Kilowatt Notes

In my grandparents’ house on Green Hill Lane, there was a vast attic at the top of a rickety flight of wooden stairs. When we visited we were not supposed to go up there, and so of course we would, whenever our grandmother wasn’t nearby. When she discovered us (as she would) she was invariably cross, although if there was anything compromising or untoward up there, it eluded me entirely.

Mainly it was old boxes, old furniture, some splendid Philadelphia Inquirers from 1957 with Sunday Rotocomics of Dick Tracy, Little Iodine, etc.; and an adult-size promotional figure of Reddy Kilowatt (“Your Electric Servant”) from the Philadelphia Electric Company. I have no idea what it was doing there. It’s the sort of thing one might find in an antiques shop today, but it certainly wasn’t brought in by my grandparents as a valuable curio in the 1940s or 50s. A gag gift, maybe? Maybe, not likely.

I did think, when I was 5, 6, 7, that Reddy Kilowatt was a bit frightening to look at. Maybe my grandmother thought it was scary, monstrous. Or apt to tip over and kill a small child. In the end I formed the vague idea that I wasn’t to go up into the attic because of Reddy Kilowatt.

Of course it could just be she thought the slippery, narrow attic stairway was treacherous. I don’t think either grandparent visited the attic very often. Although the house had only been built in the 1930s, it was quirky, designed by my grandfather after some old English country houses he had studied. He was a mechanical engineer rather than an architect, and his emphasis was on antiquarian cleverness rather than utility and safety. The house had things like a witch’s-hat turret with no functional purpose, and ground-floor stairway-ceiling so low that anyone over six feet would need to duck.

Outside, a weird, curving stone staircase wound up from the driveway to the front door. This was never used, as it was unusable; the flagstones were crooked and the steps were tiny. I gather this was meant to look like the detail of a 300-year-old habitation, preserved solely for antiquarian purposes. Anyway the front door of the house was the only entrance (of four) that was almost never used. There was a “sanitation” receptacle sunk into an outside walkway near the kitchen, and I was long grown before I realized this was another useless holdover installed just for period authenticity. A hundred years before this was the thing where people would dump the contents of chamberpots, and other unmentionables, to be collected each day by the nightsoil man.

My grandmother finally sold the house in the 1970s and moved back to her homeland of western Ohio, having first deposited with my parents anything that might possibly have some meaning of value— photo albums, furniture oddments, and boxes of 19th century memorabilia. What became of Reddy Kilowatt I never found out.

Tales of Old Wyoming

wyoming-nowHere we have the Wyoming Apartments at 853 Seventh Avenue, on the southeast corner of West 55th Street. The Wyoming is a vast old complex, rich in history: the largest residential building in the neighborhood when it was built about 1906. Or rather re-built. It replaced a smaller Wyoming that had been designed a quarter-century earlier by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, the same architects who designed the Dakota and the Plaza Hotel.

This newer Wyoming (by Rouse and Sloan) put all its ornamentation at the top, where it is now virtually undetectable. Thanks to the clutter of delis and electronics shops at street level, passers-by see nothing but an unnamed, undistinguished grey hulk.

dr-o-s-lowsley-cropped-1935

Cousin Oswald in his usual habitat: aboard an ocean liner.

I wouldn’t even know it was called the Wyoming if I hadn’t discovered that some remote cousins of mine were living at that address about a hundred years ago. This was the family of a prominent medical pioneer by the name of Oswald Swinney Lowsley, M.D.

Lowsley was a native of Santa Barbara, California, born in 1883. He worked his way through Stanford, taught physical education for a couple of years in Los Angeles, and then entered medical school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. By age 30 he was urological surgeon at New York Hospital, and at 33 he was named the first head of the new James Buchanan Brady Urological Center. (“Diamond Jim” Brady had earlier endowed a similar clinic down at Johns Hopkins.)

Lowsley lived in the Wyoming, with his young wife, the former Kitty Staples (my great-grand-aunt’s niece, or something like that), and their baby girl; with a baby boy soon on his way.

Doctor Lowsley’s specialty was male urology, particularly diseases and surgery of the prostate. He wrote the authoritative medical texts, he designed the tools (his prostatic retractor is still a hot item), and he largely defined the surgical techniques that would be used for decades to come. And he was familiar with the risks of prostate surgery, which brings us to his second area of specialization.

21jan1938-lowsley-rejuvenating-operations-virility

Amazing breakthrough by surgical savant!

Eldiva, the governess.

Eldiva, the governess.

Lowlsey developed surgical techniques to cure impotence. Tighten this muscle, shorten that vein—voilà, Uncle Pennybags, you are the Casanova once again!  Tactfully described in the press as “rejuvenating operations” to restore “male virility,” these techniques were front-page news in the 1930s.

Another topic that put this eminent surgeon on the front pages was his propensity to remarry. It didn’t seem likely in the early days, when he was a studious, sedate, rather plump young surgeon with a disgusting medical specialty.  But then in 1920 he got an appointment as chief surgeon at the American Hospital in Paris. So off to France sailed Dr. and Mrs. Lowsley and their two tots, and their newly hired governess, Eldiva Brown, a Vermont girl with better-than-passable French.

The governess was beguiling; the Lowsleys were soon divorced. Oswald married Eldiva, while Kitty immediately married another physician, a family friend who worked for Esso.

Winifred, the Last Nurse

Winifred, the Last Nurse

Oswald and Eldiva stayed married for a good quarter-century, rearing two more children, and figuring prominently in the New York society columns. Lowsley kept up a convivial life on his own, but he kept it out of the newspapers and Eldiva tolerated it all. At least till 1949, when their kids were grown, and she went off to Reno for a fat divorce settlement.

The 65-year-old Dr. Lowsley now married his latest inamorata, a 44-year-old New Jersey divorcée named Celeste Nocito Little. But Celeste did not thrive. She died about a year later, of undisclosed causes.

At the beginning of 1953 Lowsley took his final bride, an Albany nurse named Winifred Atherton, thirty years his junior.  They had a six-week honeymoon, after which they traveled some more. In fact they traveled for most of their marriage, which ended two years later when Dr. Lowsley finally died, age 72. Winifred lived on until 1992, outliving not only her husband but all three of his previous wives.