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Chapter 3 24 I started with his death certificate. It listed my grandfather’s parents as Joseph P. Lyons and Mary Connors and noted that they had emigrated from Ireland. He had come from Belfast to America in 1893, and settled in Kansas City, Kansas, five years later. I also found a ship manifest from the Britannic, in its day the fastest sail on the Atlantic. One September day the ship entered New York Harbor, and a young woman named Mary Connors, a “housemaid” carrying a bag of luggage in each hand, stepped off at Ellis Island. From the immigration records I traced her journey. Old census tracts placed her in the Kansas City area just before the turn of the century. City directories at the Kansas City Public Library chronicled her marriage and growing family. The Library of Congress in Washington, a subway ride from my home, had a microfilm roll of the May 1948 Kansas City Star newspaper. There I found my grandfather ’s obituary. Now I had the names of his three surviving sisters . Tapping into the computerized Social Security Index and other Internet resources, I found when they died and went back to Capitol Hill and the microfilm machine, and printed out their obituaries, too. That took me to their grandchildren—my cousins. I phoned them, feeling a bit like the outcast orphan, awkwardly approaching unknown relatives for the first time, summoning the courage to seek their help. But after thirty-five years as a reporter in the newspaper business I had hardened to the practice of cold-calling people for information, and they were kind and supportive and began filling in some family details. But they knew very little, really, about their ancestors. And they knew nothing at all about my grandfather or what had happened to him, and certainly nothing about any prison. So I went looking for myself. I learned that Mary Connors settled in Kansas City, Kansas, and there at St. Mary’s Church in October 25 My Grandfather’s Prison 1899 married Joseph Lyons. A microfilm copy of the Kansas City (Kans.) Gazette for October 25, 1899, reported that Joseph Lyons and Mariah Connors were among four couples issued marriage licenses by Judge Kimble P. Snyder. Judge Snyder came from a farm in southeastern Illinois, and he had served in the Civil War, at fourteen the youngest soldier in his Yankee regiment. He moved here in 1888, and took up positions as city attorney and city counselor. People always thought him honest and fair, and quick with a smile, a handshake, and a kind word. He was fresh on the bench when he granted the marriage license to Joseph and Mary. I flipped through the rest of the pages of the Gazette for that day, and the day before, and the following day as well, the whole week eventually, trying to get a feel for how life was lived in their community on the Kansas side of the metropolis at that time, right on the edge of a new century. I came away surprised that many of the news items concerned issues that would haunt the young Lyons family in the years ahead. Though the incidents did not directly touch on the family then, many of them in the coming years would scar them deeply. The curse of alcoholism that would ruin many in the Lyons family hovered over the Kansas City, Kansas, community—a boiling pot of immigrants from the British Isles and eastern Europe. A coroner’s jury ruled that three men, Mike Zunie, John Perodinac, and George Muhar, “must stand trial” for the slaying of an Austrian immigrant named John Yarnavic. He was killed in a drunken row in a Kansas River saloon on James Street two weeks earlier, beaten to death with a beer glass. Booze bred violence, and that brought more trouble. A pair of boxcar thieves named John Ryan and George Anderson were arrested and fined one hundred dollars each. Police added an additional charge of vagrancy. Officials sent them to “the rock pile.” An Irish fellow named “Red” Murphy showed up. He was notorious in “all of the large cities in the West as a dangerous crook and confidence man.” Red was plucked up off the street in Kansas City, Kansas, and alone behind closed doors police gave him a “sweating.” They gave him something else too: fifteen minutes to leave town. Divorce and child abandonment were wrecking families, the rich and the poor...

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