Emil Charles Pfeiffer

Mollie's typescript calls him "3rd Son of Joseph S. Pfeiffer" (scan 5).

Harvard and the schools. Portsmouth High School; a special student at Harvard from 1885, he left in his senior year. He rowed on the class and university crews (captain of the university crew "for a short time"), was an editor of the Harvard Advocate, and belonged to Delta Upsilon, the Hasty Pudding and the Institute of 1770. He taught in the Boston public schools from 1888 to 1891, was superintendent of schools at North Attleborough from 1891 to 1893, and taught at Cambridge and Somerville to 1895 (Harvard College Class of 1889, secretary's reports and annual bulletins, 1898-1935: Emil Charles Pfeiffer).

"Paul Jones." On 12 Feb 1894 he set out from Boston without a stitch, dressed himself in brown paper, and announced that he had wagered to go round the world in a year and come back with $5,000 earned on the way. Within two weeks, locked up at Springfield, he admitted there had been no wager. He went on anyway, as a store attraction and lecturer, to Omaha (Sept 1894) and Tacoma and Seattle (Jan 1895), where a telegram from the Boston Press Club called him "a fake and beat" (Newspapers on Emil C. Pfeiffer as "Paul Jones," 1894-1902). In Sept 1894, in Jackson County, Missouri, he applied for a passport as a journalist of Cambridge, to return about 1 Feb 1895 (U.S. passport application of Emil Charles Pfeiffer, sworn in Jackson County, Missouri, 28 Sept 1894). A modern account, Davy Crockett's Around the World on Foot, follows him on from there to New York, Liverpool and London (Nov 1894), through Suez to Hong Kong and Japan, and back by Vancouver in January 1895; those legs are not yet checked against the papers (Davy Crockett, Around the World on Foot: The Early Globetrotters, the chapter on "Paul Jones" (Emil C. Pfeiffer)). His Harvard class put him in its poem of 1898: "Like a wandering Jew round the world doth he pass, / And renders immortal our glorious class." The Portsmouth Herald still called him Paul Jones in June 1898, eleven days before his wedding, and again in June 1902, when he was arrested in Boston for borrowing directories in one office and selling them in another; it said he had "taught school in several places" and been in legal trouble for debt several times.

Work, 1898-1919. In business at 7 Tremont Place, Boston (1898); in the business office of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (1900); circulation manager of the Buffalo Express (1901); with the Natick and Cochituate Street Railway (1904) and the Merchants Mutual Electric Light & Power Co., Santa Barbara (1905-07); principal at Gardnerville, Nevada (1907-08), where he started the town's public library; "specializing on work along sociological lines" at the University of Nevada, Reno (1909-14); Americanization classes for the Y.M.C.A. at Seattle, Astoria and Salem in the war, and acting librarian at Mather Field, Sacramento (1918); assistant auditor for the General Development Co., Los Angeles (1919), working on a device to make aeroplane landings safe. The class bulletin of 1935 adds "keeping a summer hotel, writing for magazines, inventing an attachment for fountain pens, traveling salesman, lecturing" between 1895 and 1904. His death certificate gives him 15 years as an advertising manager for a newspaper, last working in 1918 [?].

Last years. He and Mollie were together at Palms, Los Angeles, in 1930; he had no occupation. "During the later years of his life, he was an invalid, resulting from paralysis." He died at home on 25 Nov 1934, Mollie signing the certificate, and was cremated at the Los Angeles Crematory. A flat memorial stone, "In memoriam, Emil C. Pfeiffer, 1865-1935," lies in space B of lot 59 at Sunnyside Cemetery, Coupeville, beside Mollie's (Find a Grave memorial 11548353: Emil Charles Pfeiffer, Sunnyside Cemetery, Coupeville); whether his ashes are there is not recorded.

Open questions

• Where his ashes went, and when the Sunnyside stone was set.
• The "papers, separate, on the Pfeiffer Family written in Grandpa Pfeiffer's beautiful hand-writing" mentioned in the typescript (scan 95).
• Arthur F. Pfeiffer of Tiffany & Co., New York, who vouched for him in 1894: a brother?