"Lulu and children unrecognizable.
Wire if you want bodies sent home."
Eight-year-old Melba's imagination had been captivated by the
Bluebeard fairytale and she begged her mother to see the play
when it came to Chicago. She didn't need to
beg very hard, however, as the family's enthusiasm with the theater
dated back many years. Her parents met and
married while fellow road company performers and her
aunt Nellie was making a name for herself in the
theater out east. The Boyer sisters'
infatuation with the theater had begun in childhood when
performers at the Johnson Theater in Springville,
Utah stayed at the Boyer's Hotel, offering the girls
a glimpse of a fascinating world outside their small community.
Melba's grandmother, sixty-four-year-old Sarah Ann Boyer, may have been in
the office at the Boyer Hotel in Springville when newspapers arrived with the first stories
about the Iroquois fire. Fear would have flooded her
thoughts and dread would have led her to find
her daughter's last letter, the one they'd
received just before Christmas.
Sarah probably prayed she'd misremembered the
specifics of Lulu's theater plans, but as she read the
letter, there it was.
Lulu wrote that after Christmas she was taking
he children, Melba and Boyer, to a Mr. Bluebeard
matinee at a beautiful new playhouse in Chicago, the Iroquois
Theater.
The family's innocence was
betrayed on December 30, 1903 when along with six
hundred others they lost
their lives to a fire at a
poorly equipped theater that claimed to be
fireproof.
The three victims
in the Alexander Iroquois Theater party
Rhoda Lucetta "Lulu" Boyer Alexander
(1866–1903)
Thirty-seven-year-old wife and mother of two, a
one-time actress and teacher, daughter of Sarah
and Philip Boyer. Her husband found her
body the day after the fire.
Melba Alexander (1895–1903)
Eight-year-old-student at Brown elementary school.
Her father found her body the night of the fire.
George Boyer Alexander
(1899–1903)
The four-year-old was referenced in newspapers around
the world as an eight-year-old victim of decapitation.
His father searched the morgues throughout the night of Dec 30
and the next morning finally identifying his son
by his watch, a Christmas gift.
Their loved ones
Dr. William G. Alexander (1862–1936)▼1
— husband and father of Lulu, Melba and George.
Dr. Alexander searched morgues for twenty-four
hours to find his wife and children.
Sarah Ann Sanderson Boyer (1844–1921)
and Philip Henry Boyer
(1839–1905)
Parents and
grandparents to Lulu, Melba and
Boyer. On their farm in Springville, UT
they grew beets.
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Sarah Boyer may have hoped Lulu and the children
had gone to the matinee on Saturday rather than
on Wednesday. When Phillip came in from the farm
that night, he might have cautioned her not to
jump to conclusions, but the next day she
studied the newspapers. Lulu's name did not
appear in early victim lists. There was an
unnamed eight-year-old boy among the victims but
little Boyer was just four so it could
not be him. Sarah and Philip felt hopeful when
there was no word from Lulu's husband, William
Alexander; Sarah penned a letter to Lulu, asking
if she and the children were okay.
Unbeknownst to Sarah and Philip, Lulu's husband
had sent word. Philip's sister
and her husband, Lydia and Don Johnson, had received a telegram
Thursday from William in Chicago: "Lulu and
children unrecognizable. Wire if you want bodies
sent home." Don and Lydia had delayed going
to see Sarah and Philip for a day, gathering the
resolve to impart the tragic news. When the Johnson's saw that
the newspapers were full of stories about the fire,
they knew Lulu's name would soon appear in
victim lists and her parents had to be told.
They telegraphed William that the bodies should
be shipped to Springville then set out to Sarah
and Phillip's house.
The Boyer's were prominent in Springville. Philip's brother
was the town mayor and a retired merchant; another
family member was a justice of the peace. Before
marriage, Lulu had taught school in Springville and
had been active in the community theater.
Because of William's occupation that involved
extensive travel, he and Lulu hadn't spent much
of their fourteen-year marriage in Springville
(since 1889), but the last several years they'd
lived in Salt Lake City, just a couple hours
train ride away, where Sarah had been able to
visit them last May. They'd then relocated
to Chicago so William could attend Rush Medical,
making a visit a four-day train ride, but Sarah would have given anything to
make that journey.
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William had continued to work his lecture-performance circuit
throughout the first quarter of 1903. By
then, he'd begun lecturing against the
phrenology
he'd spent the past twenty years promoting.
Analyzing skull shapes had been popular,
with plenty of engagements, and Lulu had accompanied him on tours
around the world. When professional and
public sentiment turned against phrenology,
William reversed his position and lectured on
"The Fallacies of Bumpology." (See a PDF
of one of his booklets below for an idea of his
brand of motivational speaking and snake oil.) Lulu's family
was of the understanding that he'd graduated
from medical college and was going to practice
in Salt Lake City but I suspect that may have
been their daughter's hopeful wishing.▼2
1903 the Alexander family lived at 471 Washington, Blvd. in
Chicago (1422 Washington Blvd. since the 1909
street renumbering).
In the years after the fire
In February 1904 William was still traveling and lecturing about phrenology,
and continued to do so from 1906 to 1915. Though
he called himself a doctor throughout his life, I found no evidence of his attending or
graduating from a medical college in Chicago or
elsewhere. There was a doctor in Chicago named
William G. Alexander who graduated from the
university, but he was almost a decade
younger than the birth year Lulu's husband
reported to the 1900 U.S. Census enumerator, his
first marriage came in 1909, he was from
Martinsville, IN, and laid an solid path as a
Chicago physician in general practice until his
death in 1952.
In 1905 Lulu's husband
remarried a newly widowed Helen Bayly Burr and
they had one child, Ruth Helen Alexander.
He wasn't living with them in 1920 but in 1930
they lived in Seattle and he did not list an
occupation.
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Discrepancies and addendum
Detailed description and graph of Boyer graves at
Evergreen Cemetery in Springville.
1. William G.
Alexander's marriage license to Lulu
reported his birth year as 1862, the 1900 U.S.
Census reported it as 1863 and a gravestone in
Canada states he was born in 1861. Several researchers have worked
hard at compiling information about the
Alexander family, most
fixing William as having remarried a
woman named Helen Bayly in 1905, others focusing
on a William who died in 1948. There were
four men named William G. Alexander at the time,
and Lulu's William wasn't a stickler for accuracy, but
his obituaries name his wife as a woman named
Helen with a daughter named Ruth, so I'm
confidant that he was the
William G. Alexander who died in a hospital in Camrose,
Alberta, Canada in 1936.
2. William had been an 1884 graduate of a
course in phrenology offered by the American
Institute of Phrenology, a division of
Fowler & Wells Publishing, co-founded by legendary newspaperman
Horace Greely. The
Institute offered a brief annual course and
issued diplomas. It emphasized financial
gain and to that end William encouraged his
audiences to leave gratuities.
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