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Memoirs of John D. Zieley... Page fifteen
Now I come back to the link in the chain. Mr. Tewkesbury, I learned, had taken an office in New York. At the end of the week I was again without funds. I realized I just had to make enough money to pay our board and the nurse. So one day, I decided to go to New York and look up Tewkesbury. I knew where his (office) was so I started down Broadway to call on him. Just before I reached the office I met a man named Harry Brown, whom I had met in a boarding house. He stopped me as I was passing him, and asked me if I knew of a company operating in South America, and named the company. I told him I did. He then asked me if I could find him a market in the stock of the company. I asked him how much he wanted to sell. He said, "I have 300 shares that I am stuck with and would like to sell it." Well, I asked him for his address, and he gave it to me. I told him I would look around and see what I could do. I knew some of the people connected with this company and thought I might possibly sell it and make a better profit.
Well, I called on Mr. Tewkesbury, who received me cordially. I told him I was out of a job and he said, "Well, don't let that worry you away. You can use my office as your headquarters, and maybe we can work out something together." Well, to say this was encouraging news to me would be putting it lightly. I just felt a load taken off my heart, at least I had some place to go, and that would help. Just before leaving him I mentioned the stock Brown wanted to sell. Tewkesbury said, "How much does he want for it?" I told him I didn't know and Tewkesbury said, "Get his price and I'll see what I can do. So I communicated immediatly with Mr. Brown, he told me his price, I informed Tewkesbury, and that very day it was sold and my share of the profit was $300. I had made in one day more than a months salary and my expenses were taken care of for the time being.
Well, to make a long story short, I was with Tewkesbury for over a year, the worst year of the war, and at least made a living. I started work designing a wooden tank barge for carrying oil. I organized a company, and Tewkesbury raised the money. We were introduced to the patent firm of Emery, Booth, Varney & Jenney, who applied for patents for me. We employed a high class firm of navel architects who perfected the plans. We very nearly induced one of the largest industrial developing corporations to take over the barge and begin building then, and we would have, but the war came to an end in November of that year, and so did my little wooden oil barge.
Again, I find myself ahead of my story, and (now) return to Summit, N.J., after my meeting with Tewkesbury. While I was enabled to pay up my board bill and had enough funds for my immediate necessities, still I had my constant worry about Lucia always with me. She went from bad to worse, and one terrible night she was given an overdose of morphine by a young doctor who I called in a emergency when Lucia was having an especially violent attack of asthma. I immediately got in communication with Dr. Dunckel, and he hurried out from New York and he worked on her all night, and at last, in the early hours of the morning, brought her back to life and suffering. I recall how relieved I was when she at last was out of immediate danger, and I have often wondered whether it might have been better for her if she had passed away then, as she never saw a well day and she passed through many days of terrible suffering from 1917, until she died in 1921- four long years of agony. Yet again, I say, the ways of God are wonderful and past finding out, because if she had died in Summit, N.J., in 1917, my whole life would have been changed, and I doubt if the events in the chain of circumstance would have linked up as they have.
Well, after her recovery she had a few weeks of respite and seemed to be more comfortable, which gave me an opportunity to give more attention to my own affairs. I met at the Beechwood a man named Hermann E. Roys(?). He was a most remarkable character, and we became friends, and I will tell more of him later on in this story. Suffice to say, he felt sorry for me and tried to cheer me up in every way he could, and he had many ways to do this. The first time I saw him was during the winter of 1917, sometime, I should say, in Jan. or Feb. of that year. One day, there was a notice posted in the hotel that a free moving picture show would be given in the parlor at 9 o'clock. At about the appointed time, a tall, lank individual entered the room carrying a dress suit case. He proceeded to hang up a sheet on one side of the room, and then opened the suit case and pulled out of it a projection machine which he set up along side of the piano. He then adjusted the lights and started the show. He sat at the piano, and while he ran the picture through the projector by working a pedal with one foot, he at the same time played a wonderful accompaniment on the piano - a one man performance, _and it was good._
After the performance I introduced myself to him, and from that time on we have been friends. Roys friends called him "Si," because he could imitate perfectly a back country "rube." At this time he was working on an automatic moving picture projector called the "Cameoscope," which he had invented and was perfecting in a place called Berkeley Heights near Summit, N.J. One day, later on in the spring of that year, he took me with him to the factory and showed me a new invention which he had invented, which was a method to project stock ticker tape on the wall. Later on in the spring of the same year, he brought this machine to the Beechwood Hotel and demonstrated it by projecting the ticker tape on the wall of the dining room, and we could distinguish the ticker tape passing along the wall in daylight, and read the quotations clearly from the furthermost side of the room.
"Si" left the Beechwood Hotel that summer and I did not see him for sometime, but we did meet again and I'll mention our meeting later on in this story.
From the summer of 1917, to the spring of 1918, I remained at the Beechwood Hotel, and during this time I worked on the oil barge using Tewkesbury's office as my headquarters. We encountered many difficulties, in both perfecting this type of boat to a practical basis, and also obtaining the funds to carry on the work and to provide myself with the necessary money to meet my personal expenses. Our money ran out, and along in the spring of 1918, I again found myself unable to pay my hotel bills. At the same time, my doctor advised me to take Lucia to New York and have an operation performed on her nose, as he thought this might relive her of the asthma. How to provide the money for the added expense was a poser(?).
Well, I managed to sell some stock for a friend and he gave me a commission of $200, which allowed me to leave Summit and take Lucia to New York and have the operation performed. My brother, knowing the desperate straits I was in, asked me to come over to Brooklyn and he would let me have the top floor in their house until I could obtain funds enough to take care of myself and find more suitable accommodations.
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John D. Zieley and his dog Paddie. This is the last page of John D. Zieley's memoirs. I believe he intended to complete it to the late twenties, but for some reason he stopped. Sometime in the future, I would like to tell of the rest of his life, up until his death in 1942. If you have any comments, please email: West18john@webtv.net