On December 30, 1903 a stage fire spread to the auditorium during a Christmas theater performance in Chicago, killing nearly six hundred people. Ninety-nine percent of those seated on the first floor escaped.
Among the first floor escapees were two women from Manhattan, Kansas, friends at Kansas State University visiting in Chicago. They were thirty-four-year-old Elenora Harris, a student assistant in the music department at KSU, and twenty-one-year-old Ruth Mudge, a 1901 KSU graduate who had three months earlier accepted a position as a biology teacher in the domestic science department of a Catholic girls high school in Louisville, Kentucky.

The women were thrown to the ground several times in the Iroquois vestibule during their escape. Harris was "considerably singed" and had to be extricated from beneath a pile of other people but neither was in mortal peril. Both had the good sense or fortune not to grant breathless interviews to the press as was the case with some first-floor occupants who spoke before hearing of real horrors in the balconies.

I did not find newspaper references to a continued friendship between Harris and Mudge after 1903. That's more often the case than not, I've noticed. Theater companions seemed to draw apart after the fire. Unfortunately it did not occur to me to quantify it until too far into the project. Too many opportunities for disappointing behavior, perhaps.

Elenor Harris (1869–1954)^▼1

Elenora** Harris was one of seven children^▼2 born to farmer Rufus and Lucetta Smith Harris. The family then lived in Carlinville, Illinois^▼3 but Elenora spent most of her life in Kansas and Missouri, unmarried and childless. In terms of activity level and ambition, Elenora was ahead of her time, so much so that her contemporaries might have been intimidated. As was common in the early 1900s she kept newspapers apprised of her professional activities, and those news bits demonstrate that she was a person who "stepped up" when she saw an opportunity to reach students or advance her profession. She was one to take the bull by the horns, her rural neighbors might have said. Missing from her public profile, however, are signs of concordant recognition from schools where she taught. The answer may lie in a 1918 newspaper story. When Hutchison High gave a male teacher a raise 60% higher than what it gave to female teachers, Elenora walked. It was an era in which anything short of simpering was deemed as strident. I'm pretty sure Elenora didn't simper.

Highlights of Elenor's career:

In 1896, at age twenty-seven, Elenora ran for a state level office in education, Superintendent of Public Instruction. She ran as an democrat in the 1896 general election and received 1,763 votes, losing to a republican woman who received 1,885.
In 1897 she taught at the Elm Grove School in Republic City, KS.
From about 1900-1902 she taught at the St. Joseph Business University in Missouri, then attended KSU.
She began teaching high school in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1913. While there she ran a math club, hosted student parties, served several years as an officer in the Central Kansas Teachers Association, and six years as secretary and vice president of the Kansas chapter of the Mathematics Association of America. After Hutchinson her positions were at college level.
In 1918 she left Kanas and took a position as supervisor of Mathematics and Commerce in the Central Missouri Teachers College (that later became the University of Central Missouri — UCM).
While there, a 1919 issue of the "Missouri School Journal" (Vol. 36, pg 352) reported that she had a Bachelor of Musical Arts from the Chicago College of Music, a Bachelor of Arts from the Kansas State Agricultural College (Kansas State University), where she briefly served as an assistant to the music professor, Eline Shaw, and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago.

In 1928 at age fifty-nine Elenora gave up teaching to care for her oldest brother George after he suffered multiple strokes and blindness.

Ruth Attwill Mudge (1882–1959)

In 1900 as a high school student, Ruth A. Mudge, lived with her grandparents, Daniel and Betsy Himes, along with her parents and many siblings. Daniel and Betsy farm was in Manhattan, KS. Ruth's parents were Josiah B. and Phoebe Himes Mudge from Massachusetts.

In the 1860s Josiah had been a professor of geology at Bluemont College (that would someday become Kansas University). He later operated a grocery and a china shop.

In 1909 Ruth married Dr. William W. Dimock, a college professor who had obtained his doctorate in veterinary medicine from Cornell. After nine years in Ames, Iowa and Cuba, in 1919 they settled in Lexington, Kentucky where they raised four children. Josiah was head of the department of animal pathology. With the children out of the house Ruth worked as a secretary at the university.

Ruth's father, Josiah Bowler Mudge (1849–1931) was an interesting person!

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Discrepancies and addendum

1. Originally Ella Nora, later Elnora Elenora, Elenore, Eleanora, and Eleanore.

2. Three of Rufus and Lucetta's children died in infancy and a fourth, Iona, died at age ten in 1885, the same year that Rufus passed. Elenora was the only female to reach adulthood. In George Harris' obituary it was reported that there were actually nine children. Elenora was the last surviving member of the family.

3. The Harris' moved around a bit. In 1860 they lived two and a half hours north in Otter Creek and by 1880 had moved to Shaws Point, IL.

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