Go back to reading about Harry’s development of theatrical spectacles.
Harry Thearle reached his mid-50s, with his business eventually concentrating on managing the fireworks business that had been booming up to this time.
Unfortunately, the public taste for these spectacles had been declining. One reason was a safety concern: thousands were dying from accidents. A national campaign for a “Safe and Sane Fourth” gradually caused many cities to back away from commissioning large-scale traditional pyrotechnics.
The J.S. Pain Company itself was driven into bankruptcy by lawsuits stemming from a particularly horrifying disaster in Madison Square on Election Day, 1902. In the aftermath, Thearle was able to completely take over the U.S. firm and re-christen it the Thearle-Duffield Company in 1911.
This makes H.B.’s final violent spectacle, the explosion on that quiet morning of September 1914 that killed him and several of his staff – that the inquest described as death from “shock and burns received” – all the more ironic. Some would suspect German saboteurs targeting munitions factories (after all, the Great War in Europe had recently begun, and Germany did have an active sabotage program running). A simple and sad accident is more likely though we will never know for sure.
By now, Nettie and Margaret had fully taken up residence on the West Coast with her grandparents, John and Arminda Smith. Nettie, like most in the Thearle orbit, was musically skilled and would accompany her niece Charlotte (my grandmother) on the piano at recitals at the Thearle Company music store in downtown San Diego. Margaret, now in her 20s, would marry Walter Trepte and create a family of Thearle descendants still active in that area.
Over the course of his career, H.B. saw much change. The Jubilee had given way to ragtime, then blues, gospel, and folk music. The Lyceum paved the way for vaudeville, which was the root of Broadway theater. The gentle world of gifted amateur musicians, lecturers, and public speeches would be taken over by radio, then television, then the internet. Perhaps in some fashion, YouTube and Ted Talks can be seen as a return to the open stages in every town that characterized the Lyceum and Chautauqua Movements, once found in every corner of the land, a huge part of American culture now mostly lost.
We can only imagine that H.B.’s knack for promoting talent must have been an influence on his brothers, and advertising pioneers such as my grandfather Henry Sulcer, his nephew by marriage after 1910, who was just in the process of joining a fledgling ad agency to begin his own career as a creative businessman.
Go back the introduction of Harry Thearle, back to the family history page, or read about his niece Charlotte Thearle Sulcer and husband Henry Sulcer.
Sources
- Smilor, Raymond W. “Creating a National Festival: The Campaign for a Safe and Sane Fourth, 1903–1916”, Journal of American Culture, Volume 2, Issue 4, pp 611–622, 1980, available at http://cgs.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/media/Smilor_CreatingNationalFestival.pdf on 2 January 2014
- “Inquest into Explosion; Pain’s Employees Held”, The New York Times, 5 November 1902, available at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FB0A11FC3E5B11738DDDAC0894D9415B828CF1D3 on 5 January 2014
- “Pain Works Co. Plant Blows Up”, Evansville Courier and Press, 1 October 1914
- Death certificate, Harry B. Thearle
- Jones, John Price, and Hollister, Paul Merrick, The German Secret Service in America, 1914-1918, p. 102, Small, Maynard and Company, Boston, 1 January 1918
- 1910 Census available at https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/tree/10702367/person/6060404614/media/31111_4327298-00158 on 18 April 2020
- NPR Books, “During WWI, Germany Unleashed ‘Terrorist Cell’ in America”, available at http://www.npr.org/2014/02/25/282439233/during-world-war-i-germany-unleashed-terrorist-cell-in-america on 16 April 2015
