The Lincoln Chair- I was there!

[Houmes]

(05-16-2015 11:27 PM)historybuff22 Wrote:  On another matter, what I like to call it as being "The Postmortem Career of John Wilkes Booth," Finis Bates had purchased "booth the mummy" form the undertaker in Enid, Oklahoma in the early 1900s.

Actually, Finis Bates pulled a fast one on the Enid undertaker. First he attempted to procure the body in 1903, posing as legal representative of David E. George (AKA John St. Helen), which went nowhere. Finally, in 1920 (Bates gets credit for being persistent) he offered a partnership with the undertaker, William Penniman, using the mummy as a traveling sideshow exhibit. That was the last time Penniman ever saw the mummy. It was Finis Bates, not his wife, who offered the mummy to Henry Ford and was turned down. When Finis died in 1923, his wife wanted to wash her hands of the mummy (good idea--the mummy was embalmed four times, and the body was a toxic waste dump of arsenic and other chemicals) and it ended up being bought, sold, leased, kidnapped and held for ransom, and in 1928 was owned by Agnes Black. She arranged to have it "autopsied" in 1931 while it was on tour in Chicago. That's where xrays were taken of the right and left ankle which revealed no healed ankle fracture. No fracture, no John Wilkes Booth, although press releases at that time reported otherwise. Copies of the xrays were obtained by Otto Eisenschiml and exist in his files at the University of Iowa. The Fred Black files (he researched the mummy for Henry Ford) are at Oakland University in Michigan.