Emil Charles Pfeiffer

A head-and-shoulders portrait of a young man with a moustache, posted to his Find a Grave memorial with the caption that it comes from the Harvard class of 1889’s twenty-fifth anniversary report. The date of the photograph is not known.

Emil as “Paul Jones,” in the suit of paper he made after his naked start from Boston in February 1894. “From a Photo. by Elmer Chickering, Boston,” as printed in the Strand Magazine.

A flat red granite marker: “IN MEMORIAM / EMIL C. PFEIFFER / 1865-1935.” He died at Los Angeles in November 1934. Lot 59, space B.

“Paul Jones Now Clothed in Brown Paper. Left to Go Round World. Must Return in a Year With $5000.” The scheme, the Globe says, began in the rooms of the Boston Athletic Association.

The page of the class poem with the stanza on “our pride, E. C. Pfeiffer, ‘Paul Jones’,” who started round the world “Posing at first as the nude in art.”

The page with the Coupeville column: “Mrs. Mollie Holbrook Pfeiffer, late of Emerson college, Boston, together with her husband, Prof. Pfeiffer, will give an entertainment this week at W. C. T. U. hall.”

The page with his sworn statement, as circulation manager of the Buffalo Express, that his wife had been “almost completely prostrated” from about 1898 to 1900 and had recovered under Mrs. Wilmans Post’s Mental Science.

The class’s notice of his death, his career from Boston schoolteacher to the University of Nevada and Los Angeles, his last years as an invalid, and his wife Frances Holbrook, daughter Alice and grandson.

Sworn in Jackson County, Missouri, during his “Paul Jones” walk: born at Portsmouth, 2 May 1865; a journalist of Cambridge; to return about 1 Feb 1895. Aged 29, six feet two and a quarter, with dark brown eyes, dark chestnut hair and a complexion “sallow + tanned.” Vouched for at New York by Arthur F. Pfeiffer, of Tiffany & Co.

Page 136, no. 2446, of the Boston register, where the marriage took place: the same couple, parents and minister as the Cambridge entry, recorded 18 June 1898.

Page 112, entry 383, of the marriages registered at Cambridge, the groom’s city: married 15 June at Boston by Charles R. Tenney, minister, of 28 Glenarm [Street]. He was 33, a publisher, of 57 Wendell Street; she was 27, a teacher, of Coupeville, Washington.

Enumeration district 92: E. C. Pfeiffer, born May 1865 in New Hampshire, newspaper man; M. F., his wife, born Dec 1870, teacher, mother of one child; A. P., daughter, born Aug 1899; and H. P. Holbrook, mother-in-law. The house was rented.

Enumeration district 19-144: Emil, 65, head, renting at $24 a month, no occupation, married at 33; Frances, 59, his wife, married at 27.

Died at home, 3715 Keystone Avenue, Palms, aged 69. Advertising manager in a newspaper office until 1918 [?]. The informant signed “Frances H. Pfeiffer.” Cause, after a coroner’s autopsy: hemorrhage from a chronic duodenal ulcer. Cremated at the Los Angeles Crematory.

“Born, to Mr. and Mrs. E. C. Pfeiffer, née Frances Holbrook, a twelve-pound daughter,” quoted from “a far western paper dated Aug. 25, 1899.” Signed “L. P.”

The front page with the item on the high-school girls’ gift of a sterling-silver desk set to Mrs. F. H. Pfeiffer, for her work on the graduation speaking and the play.

Her letter on the letterhead of The Cinema Lyceum, 714-715 Story Building, Los Angeles, proposing an educational film with Booker T. Washington’s life as its basis, and recalling that her husband had been with Du Bois at Harvard.

The city’s register across two pages. The entry for 25 Aug 1899 names the parents, Emil C. and Frances H. Pfeiffer (their birthplaces swapped), and on the right-hand page, a line higher, gives the place, 104 Tacoma Avenue, a girl, and the physician J. R. Yocum [?].

Frances H. Pfeiffer, 49, married, lodger, in advertising for a newspaper, and her daughter Alice P., 20, a bookkeeper. Emil is indexed separately in the same census as a boarder.

Alice Phillips Pfeiffer, 21, bookkeeper, of Los Angeles, daughter of Emil Chas. Pfeiffer and Frances Holbrook, married Robert H. Carter, 21, contractor, of Sierra Madre. Her father, E. C. Pfeiffer, signed as witness.

Alice Phillips Carter, 46, of North Hollywood, in her second marriage, to Harold Franklin Forrester, 41, of Van Nuys. Her mother is named “Molly Frances Holbrook.”