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Forty-six-year-old Clara E. Brown Donaldson
(b.1857)* had been married for seventeen years to
Frank Ludlow Donaldson (1857-1915). They had no
children. Frank worked as a loop chief at Western
Union in Chicago. He had begun his three-decade
career at age twenty-two with the Western office in Wabash, Indiana.
Over 5,000 telegrams came in and went out from the
Western Union offices in Chicago the day after the
Iroquois Theater fire. People sent telegrams to
relatives in Chicago upon recognizing a family
member's name in a newspaper list of Iroquois
victims. "Was John at the Iroquois?" And Chicagoans
sent notifications to friends and family around the
country. "John dead at Iroquois. Come immediately."
"John safe, not at theater.
Like any system when pushed to its limits,
transmission problems may have surfaced of a kind
Frank Donaldson usually dealt with. Newspapers
reported that while he worked to keep equipment
operating smoothly on December 30, 1903, he did not
know his wife had gone to the theater and was among
the victims.
It is not known who went with Clara to the
afternoon Mr. Bluebeard matinee on December 30, 1903.
Clara's body was located at the county morgue and
identified by her husband. Her brothers, Harry and
Louis Brown, traveled from the Cincinnati, Ohio area to join Frank Brown in escorting Clara's
body back to Ohio for burial in the Pleasant Ridge
Presbyterian Cemetery, next to a sister.
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Clara's funeral
The funeral was conducted the Sunday after the fire
by reverend D. Ira Lambert of the Presbyterian
church. A quartette sang "Abide With Me" and "Lead,
Kindly Light." Pallbearers were Clara's brothers,
Harold and Louis Brown, as well as Trimble
McCullough, Elmer Durrell, Roy Kennedy and Lawrence
Slayback. Frank and Clara had married in 1879 in
Newton, Indiana and before moving to Chicago lived
in Wabash, IN where Frank had grown up. Clara's
family was from Ohio. Clara's parents, Josiah
(1832-1907) and Rebecca Kennedy Brown (1838-1905),
may have been estranged in 1903. Rebecca lived with
her son Harry in East Norwood, OH outside
Cincinnati. Josiah lived another four years but not
with Rebecca.
In the years after
the fire
Western Union promoted Frank to wire chief and he
was active in the Chicago Telegrapher's Aid Society.
In 1906 he remarried, to another telegraph operator,
May V. Gallagher, who may have been a divorcee with
children from her prior marriage. Frank seemed to
preferred boarding houses to apartments or houses.
He and Clara let rooms in 1900 and he and May did so
in 1910.
Thanks to J. Chris Hausler at
Morse
Telegraph Club for helping me understand Frank
Donaldson's job at Western Union.
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Discrepancies and addendum
First-day newspaper lists sometimes cited "Clara Donaldson" and C. A. Donaldson." Also included on early lists was an "N. Donaldson," "H. Donaldson" and "Miss A. Donaldson" but the names disappeared on subsequent lists, leaving Clara as the only Iroquois victim named Donaldson.
* A Clara Browne appears in newspaper stories about the
Iroquois disaster. She was Clara Browne Klemme, mother of Iroquois
fatality Hazel Grace Browne.
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