Hennepin lies among numerous lakes and hills. Originally home to the Dakota Indians, it was largely settled by Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes. The area was another town built around sawmills and that was presumably why the family settled there.
However, the marriage between Maud and Francis did not last. By 1916 Francis Peeso was listed in the Hennepin directory living with “Cecilia,” possibly his sister. Peeso then drops out of the picture and by 1918 Maud was divorced and remarried to a forty-one-year-old carpenter by the name of Ben Klarquist.24 Ben had been an aging bachelor, moving often, living as a boarder in Hennepin, whose parents were Swedish born. Ben, probably born with the name Bryoguin, had blue eyes, light hair, and was of medium build. He too came from a large family with a sister and three brothers, all carpenters. There was a large contingency of Swedes by the name of Klarquist who settled in Minnesota and worked construction.
ON OCTOBER 25, 1916, MAUD’S TWENTY-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER IDELLA wed twenty-seven-year-old Edward Van Schaack, a South Dakota–born traveling “land salesman.”25 The two probably met in Hennepin where they would live for the next several years while Edward worked for the First National Bank.
Edward himself was from a divorced home and had been living with his father, Frank, a proprietor of a grocery store, while his mother, Rebecca, moved in with her daughter Mabel. Edward was handsome, stood five ten and a half, with brown hair and gray eyes.
Idella soon became pregnant, giving birth to a daughter in 1917. A year later, on June 28, Van Schaack enlisted.
Idella was by all accounts a beautiful, temperamental young lady. At some point she contracted polio, either as a child (though photos show no effects) or probably around 1916, when the United States was experiencing an outbreak, and indeed President Roosevelt himself contracted it as an adult.
With a husband in the army, Idella moved on. By 1919 she married brown-eyed, dark-haired Louis Sherman Cornett Jr., born in 1896 in Crawley, Louisiana. They had a child, Bettie Lue or Bettalee (“Betty”), born (probably) in Nova Scotia in 1919. A son, Louis Cornett (Jack), followed in 1921.
In the 1919 Hennepin directory, Louis is listed as a chauffeur for an undertaker. In 1920 the Cornett family was living in Louisiana with Louis’s brother; both were listed as rice farmers. By 1923 the family had settled in Texas.
Lili with Maud and Ben Klarquist
Not surprisingly for the ambitious Idella, that marriage didn’t last either. By 1925 Cornett was living in Nebraska and had remarried. He would have three more children, becoming a real estate salesman. With Cornett gone, the pretty Idella took her third husband, John Alfred “Ian” Blackadder, a charming “black-Scotsman” from an impoverished yet noble background who resembled Errol Flynn and had lovely “aristocratic manners.”26
Ian had sailed to Canada at the age of nineteen with $65 in his pocket, crossing into Minneapolis (where he listed his age as twenty-two and claimed no living relatives).
Idella and Ian were married in Grand Rapids, Wisconsin, on May 2, 1923, at age twenty-six and twenty, respectively. They were a gorgeous couple. Ian stood six feet tall, brown-haired with gray-blue eyes. He had a scar (possibly from a motorcycle accident years earlier) behind his right ear. Idella was petite and copper-haired. By the following year the two had a daughter, Idella Ruth (hereinafter “Barbara”). Fourteen months later Rosemary (hereafter “Dardy”), named after Ian’s favorite sister, was born.*
Sisters Barbara and Dardy (front) in Minneapolis
From 1924 to at least 1927, Ian was listed as a “helper” for the Minnesota Linseed Oil Co., residing at least once in Minneapolis.27 The company was the major producer of flax and linseed oil in the state.
Ian struggled financially, and with four children—Betty, Jack, Barbara, and Dardy—in tow he moved his family to Pasadena, hoping to find permanent employment in the Golden State.
MEANWHILE, MAUD’S SECOND HUSBAND, BEN KLARQUIST, HAD BEEN working for J. P. Klarquist and Bro., general contractors and presumably a relation. One afternoon Ben fell two stories and, while miraculously nothing broke, he damaged his optic nerve. Lili, their daughter, was four at the time. Gradually Ben began to lose his sight and was no longer able to work. It wasn’t a time in the country to be injured and unemployed. Maud, Ben, (son William was by now an adult and does not seem to have made the move28) and Lili moved to a farm in Webster, Wisconsin, where the grueling poverty soon drove them on to Seattle, Washington, where Maud’s older sister, Katherine Willis Deem, had settled with her family.29
A young Marie Van Schaack
It seems after Katherine died of a heart attack in 1930 the desperate family descended south to follow Ian and Idella to Pasadena, hoping life would get easier. Lili was around twelve or thirteen, a difficult age for a girl both sensitive and awkward who hadn’t grown into her looks nor made lasting friendships due to—she claimed—attending seventeen schools in all the years the family tried to find a permanent home.
BOTH FAMILIES SETTLED NEAR EACH OTHER. IAN HAD PROCURED A JOB as a garage mechanic (Barbara was now five, Dardy four). Shortly thereafter Ian moved his family out of Pasadena to the more rural Eagle Rock, a twenty-minute car drive from Maud, Ben, and Lili. It was like leaving the city altogether. Coyotes howled at night; rabbits bounded across the dirt roads. It was perfect for Ian, who loved horses. His father had been a championship horseman, supposed “three-time winner of the Royal Military Tournament.”30 With plenty of open land, Ian taught his young daughters how to ride while they were still toddlers.
The Blackadder clan was a sprawling, rambunctious family and Lili bounced between her home and Eagle Rock, occasionally sleeping upstairs in a small bedroom. Ian encouraged the children to fill the home with friends. It boomeranged with the sounds of laugher and racing feet; dogs barked and horses neighed. He proudly nailed a sign to the house: “Bedlam Manner.” Among the chaos the affable and outgoing Ian sought to escape Idella’s foul moods that often turned to dish throwing. Idella hadn’t always been so religiously unhappy. But after eight years of marriage with too many children and too little money she had hardened into a cranky despot. By the time Dardy was born, she was tired of caring for a house full of children. She was also tired of poverty, stuck at home with a leg stricken by polio. She sometimes used a cane and was self-conscious of her limp. She also wore “some sort of devices on her legs.”31
Idella in happier times sitting on Ian’s lap while Idella’s mother Maud sews
There were too many dishes and loads of laundry and beds
