History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column each Saturday reflecting on the history of Knox County.
MOUNT LIBERTY — Samuel Phillips finished a long day at work, selling men’s clothes to customers at the respected Fifth Avenue retailer Rogers Peet & Company in New York City.
His employer had made a stir when it opened a few years previous by being the first company ever to put a tag in their shirts stating exactly what kind of material each shirt was made of, which had never been done before.
Where other stores might introduce cheaper materials and then evasively waffle on prices, Rogers Peet stated on the label exactly what the material was, and included a fixed price tag on each shirt, too, making the salesman’s job considerably easier.
Having Sunday off, Sam decided to treat himself to a good, home-cooked dinner the following day.
He wrapped up into his coat and scarf against the brisk fall wind that was tearing up and down the streets of Manhattan, and headed out to find a main dish for his feast.
He stepped into a market on Bleecker Street and looked at a display of freshly plucked fowls that had just been delivered from Ohio. Sam found a plump duck, and bought it. He took it to his apartment on West Fourth Street and put it in the icebox.
On Sunday, Sam set to preparing his feast. He unwrapped the duck from the paper the butcher had wrapped it in and placed it on a roasting pan to prepare it for the oven. As he did, though, he noticed a small piece of paper, tied to the plucked duck’s wing with a dainty piece of ribbon.
For a moment, perhaps he thought it was a tag just like the ones in the shirts he sold, maybe one that said ‘Ingredients: 100% duck.’
But when Sam unrolled the paper, he could see that it was standard, lined notebook paper, and it had writing on it in a neat, cursive hand. It said:
Dear Friend –
I will write you a letter and let you know that I am going to pick
ducks to-morrow at my neighbor’s. I was 15 years old the last
day of August, and weighed 105 ¼ pounds, and 5 feet 2 inches tall.
I have got light blue eyes, light hair and light complexion. I am a
farmer’s daughter, the eldest of the children. When you write,
direct to Miss Gertrude Cochran, Mount Liberty, Knox county, O.
Write soon please.
Sam was bemused by the letter, but as he was, as he described himself, “on the shady side of life, and long since departed from the stage of love-making,” he decided to pass the boyfriend-fishing letter on to a younger acquaintance of his, who promptly wrote a letter to oung Miss Gertrude.
And how do we know this? Well, because Sam was so amused by the secret letter, he told the story to friends and acquaintances, which resulted in it being picked up as a wire story by the New York World, which insured that it got carried nationwide as a newspaper article.
So, what became of this ambitious stunt? As far as I can tell from research, nothing at all.
Indeed, Gertie may have become embarrassed by the national attention her clever maneuver received.
Her family moved down to Homer a few years later, where Gertrude continued to live at home for many years, along with her brother Charles.
Over the years, she began to prefer going by her middle name, Anzy, which was how she became known in Homer, where for decades, she was known by all as the librarian at the Homer Public Library, which in those days was located in Homer’s Town Hall.
Whatever her ambitions may have been at age 15, Gertrude Anzy Cochran never married, and lived with her brother in Homer until she passed away in 1949 after a long illness, aged 69.
I hope she had a happy life, and I salute her for her enterprising method of smuggling a personal ad out of Mount Liberty, Ohio, in 1894, via duck.