|
To friends and family, twenty-eight-year-old Elizabeth
G. Drehouse Kulas* (b. 1875) was known as Georgia,
Georgianna and Lizzie. She and her
husband, fellow Iowan Charles A. Kulas (1869–1912),
married around 1895 and moved to Chicago. In 1903
they occupied a rented flat at 349 Chestnut. They
had not yet started a family.
Georgia was oldest of four children born to John Drehouse
(1845–1927) and the late Theresa Rosina
Glass Drehouse of Dubuque, Iowa (1852–1892). Son of a
civil war veteran, John was a New Orleans
native; Rosina had been
born in Pennsylvania. For a living, John
manufactured derricks, sold safes and lightening
rods, and moved houses, later turning to chimney
cleaning.
One of Georgia's sisters, Matilda (also known as Marie and
Tilly) also lived in Chicago. Six months
before the Iroquois Theater fire she married Charles
J. Renshaw,† a drugstore clerk. Renshaw
identified Georgia's body at Jordan's Funeral Home.
|
|
Georgia's sister, husband, or
both are her most likely theater companions. It
is not known where she was seated or how badly she was
injured.
Georgia was buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in
Key West, Iowa. Charles Kulas was laid by her side
in 1912.
In the years after the fire
The son of a harness maker, Charles Kulas tried a
variety of jobs before his early death, working as a
machinist, typesetter, and salesman. He died nine
years after his wife, at age thirty-eight. By that
time, he lived in Manhattan, NYC, working as a
machinist in a printing company. I've failed to
learn the cause of his death.
Frank F. Drehouse, Georgia's brother, named his
daughter after his sister Georgia.
|
|
Discrepancies and addendum
* In one newspaper report, Georgia was listed as
Georgeanna Meyer, and her age was reported as
twenty-seven, though she'd turned
twenty-eight two months earlier. In some newspaper
lists she appeared twice, as Mrs. Charles Kulas and as
Mrs. Georgianna Kulas. Her first name appeared as
Georgiana, Georgeanna and Georgina. Her grave maker
reports her name as Elizabeth and her nickname as
Georgia. In the 1900 US Census, the last name was
spelled Kules and Georgia's birth year was reported
as 1876 rather than 1875.
† Renshaw married May Frances Lally in 1909, but the
pair died three years later, in tragic circumstances.
The couple was found dead in their four-room week-old
cottage they'd saved to purchase and furnish. They
were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide poisoning from
an improperly installed gas water heater. Charlie
installed it without a vent to relieve his May
from the burden of heating water on a coal stove.
Their bodies were discovered around a day after
their deaths by the contractor who built
the house. He had come to make his final inspection
of the Wilcox street structure. Because a kitchen
window was opened a few inches and the couple was
fully clothed, indicating they had not yet gone to
bed, police considered whether their coffee had been
somehow poisoned during their move to the new home.
Their two partly filled cups were on the kitchen
table. With further investigation, it was learned
the contractor had opened the window because the
water heater, though described as empty, was still
operating, and the temperature in the home was "150
degrees." The coffee remains were tested and found
to be free of poison, and the coroner ruled their
deaths as accidental suffocation from the water
heater.
|
