Grandfather Lost

By Vella Munn

Violent death mystery lasts for one hundred years

 

In 1924, Homer Eon Flint, a thirty six year old multi-published writer and married father of three young children was found dead at the bottom of a canyon. According to a witness and the police, he was pinned under a taxi with a loaded pistol nearby.  The media sensationalized his violent end.  Some sources suggested he'd participated in an earlier bank robbery. Several friends even considered that he'd committed suicide because of his interest in the occult. The taxi driver--who died in prison--told police that Flint had hijacked the taxi at gunpoint and had driven away, only to die in an accident later that night. 

 

Then there's the belief held by Homer's family. He was a victim—in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

Homer Eon Flint is considered one of the early twentieth century American pioneers in science fiction.  His work such as The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix have remained as pillars of the speculative fiction genre.  The Blind Spot, co-written with fellow pioneer Austin Hall, has been reprinted nearly a dozen times. He was a well-known writer of pulp fiction—some of his stories garnering payments of hundreds of dollars in the booming post World War I economy.

 

Fellow writer Ralph Parker Anderson, when asked if Flint had died a criminal replied, "I do not accept the view that he was a robber. If he had committed a crime, it would have been a superbly clever one, not ordinary thievery."

 

Modern writers and scholars tend to agree that Flint, who envisaged space travel and genetic testing when the automobile and movies were in their infancy, didn't commit a crime. There is more to the story—one he didn't live to tell.

 

His oldest granddaughter and fellow writer Vella Munn became obsessed with learning everything she could about the man who was taken from his family when her mother was only six. Not only was Vella given custody of the magazines that carried his published work and stacks of unpublished manuscripts typed on yellowed paper, she was also entrusted with the precious letters between Homer and his beloved wife Mabel when financial circumstances separated them during the last year of his life. Vella also collected the newspaper articles that covered the death investigation. She included them verbatim in this biography.

 

The full story of Homer's end will never be known, but Grandfather Lost brings him to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vella Munn
• Release date: Oct 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215456972

Vella Munn

I'm married, the mother of two sons, grandmother to four, and happily owned by two rescue dogs. My hobby, for lack of a different word, is digging in the dirt. I love going for walks and hate shopping. Also writes as Dawn Flindt and Heather Williams.

Book preview

Obsession

Trying to explain why I embarked on this journey to find a man who died long before I was born isn't easy. It would be too simple to say I became obsessed—that doesn't go deep enough or get to the core of what I feel for my grandfather.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

Grandpa, I can't remember the first time I heard about you. Until her death when I was fourteen, Nana (your wife) was part of my everyday life. My sister and I lived with her for a year, and weekends and summers were spent at her little house in Nevada City, the heart of northern California's gold country.

My memories are rooted in that home with its wood floors, huge old piano, unheated bedrooms, and single bed in the living room where Nana slept. I have a vivid image of standing in the kitchen on a sunny day, the air suddenly silent and heavy following some childish question I'd asked about your death. As one, Nana and my mother stared at me, their eyes warning me not to go there. Later my mother gently cautioned me never to bring up the subject in Nana's presence, because even after all those years the memory of you was too painful for her.

But you weren't forgotten. A box filled with your published and unpublished fiction rested in a bedroom closet. I'd take out one pulp magazine at a time, carefully open it, and read your stories. The paper was disintegrating, leaving fine particles in the air. Much of what you'd written was beyond my comprehension, but on an instinctive level I realized this was part of my legacy and thus precious. I loved the adventure-filled covers on those old publications. You'd typed some of your stories on half sheets of now-yellowed paper. Held together with fragile string or rusted paper clips, the manuscripts resonated because they'd been created with your hands. They became part of both of us.

In my mind's eyes, I see you hunched over an old manual typewriter (I wonder what became of it), your brain going places you couldn't always control. Mine does the same, which is sometimes exciting and sometimes unsettling. Your real world was a practical one bordered by wife and children, bills and responsibilities, and a day job spent repairing shoes. But your imagination occasionally took you from earth and transported you to the stars. Other times the need to write horror, humor, or mystery took over. How did that happen? What locks inside your brain were released during that process?

That's what I'll never know. But Grandpa, thank you for the letters you wrote to your wife and precious son and two daughters near the end of your 36 years of life, when economic hardship took them from your side. Thank you for your stories of imagination and intellect.

You also left me with the mystery of your death, and the questions of what more you might have written if you'd lived. Would you and I have talked about the creativity that begins in our souls and comes out through our fingers? I'll never uncover everything about you, but at least I have pieces.

What are my earliest memories of your place in my heart? I don't know! I'd like to believe they're the product of the few photographs my mother held onto for years before passing them onto me, the box filled with your writings, the revealing and personal letters...but perhaps they're not.

I believed as a child that you had been a bank robber. When I was seven, my mother took a teaching job in Washington, California, at the same small, isolated logging camp eighteen miles from Nevada City where Nana was teaching when you died. People who'd lived there in 1924 were still there. My classmates were the children of Nana's students. Undoubtedly, my fellow students had been told how their teacher's father had met his end—whatever versions came down through the years. My mind's ear hears a classmate passing along the tantalizing and erroneous gossip.

I was an adult when my mother and I went to the library in Nevada City and sorted through old newspapers. We found a handful of articles about your violent death and the police investigation. My sister and I later uncovered more in the Sacramento historical library. The first story, as I recall, really set the stage for sensationalism. Written a couple of months after your death, it was titled: THE MYSTERY ENVELOPING THE DEATH OF HOMER FLINT, FICTION WRITER and began, What killed Homer Eon Flint? And what relation did his end have to the daring, highly imaginative stories of visits to Mercury, Venus and other planets which he wrote for the magazines? Why was there a peaceful smile on his face in death?...Did he kill himself as a result of an overwhelming desire to visit the mystery world that lies beyond the pale? His works have been saturated with the occult....A letter written to a friend seems to make more reasonable the conclusion that he deliberately killed himself in the most spectacular fashion by driving off the embankment.

I see the article for the lurid nonsense it is, but that doesn't stop the hurt. My mother, who still mourns you, was only five when she lost you. Of course she loved her Papa. She and her brother (my Uncle Max) and sister (my Aunt Vella) would never believe you had a dark side. Several years ago I contacted a nephew who was then a detective in San Jose, California, where you died. I'd hoped he could locate the original records about the police investigation, but everything before 1950 had been destroyed. I sent him the newspaper articles and asked him to read and comment. He called several weeks later to address certain points in the investigation. When I said that the reporting might not have been thorough or accurate, he agreed that was a possibility.

He also said, All humans are capable of good and evil. Given the right circumstances, people will do anything.

Maybe that's what this biography is about, Grandpa. I want to share everything I've uncovered about you, and let others draw their own conclusions.

The Beginning

My grandfather, Homer Eon Flindt, was the youngest of four children born to Henry Flindt, a shoemaker, on September 9, 1888, in Albany, Oregon. My great-grandfather had been born in Freeport, Illinois, but his own parents emigrated from Wittenberg, Germany, having come to America and crossed the plains by ox team in 1850. According to the biographical sketch of Grandpa in The History of Santa Clara County, California (1922), his stout constitution came from the Germanic side of the family as did his abiding practicality, and a sound sense of moral values.

Grandpa's mother, Emily Burkhart, was born to pioneer settlers who'd come over the Oregon Trail in 1851. His maternal grandparents, the Tickells, were from Cornwall, England, and were separated for a time when his grandfather came to America to find work.

My understanding is that Grandpa and his father were extremely close, united by their curiosity and intellect. Nana remembered technical, scientific, and philosophical conversations between her husband and father-in-law. Here's an excerpt from a letter Grandpa wrote to his Pa on March 28, 1915, shortly after the birth of his oldest son, Max. Grandpa was 26 at the time.

Facts regarding Immortality. There are none. There is plenty of assumption, plenty of semi-scientific data from the Spiritualists, and still more speculation via deduction from the facts of earthly life. But we have no absolute facts whatever. A fact is a statement of truth. To be convinced of a truth is a mental process which becomes emotional only when Desire enters into the case. Sometimes conviction follows upon a desire to believe; and just as often it occurs as a result of Defiance—refusal to believe; the opposite of desire. In either case conviction occurs from being sentimentally forced to conclude that the person Desires to believe the Fact.

My mother, Grandpa's middle child and the only one still living, remembers sitting on her father's lap while he had a very technical talk with his father. Uncle Max told me much the same thing—specifically that father and son would choose up sides, pro and con, and discuss scientific matters.

As the oldest child, Uncle Max's memories of Grandpa were the strongest. He recalled Grandpa's older brother, Charlie, telling him that Grandpa could go to the opera, then come home and play the music on the piano from one end to the other.

In a three-page biography of his father, Uncle Max wrote: All boys get into trouble, especially if they are extremely active (and I was), and, in keeping with this, one time I helped steal some pigeons from the loft of the church across the street from where we lived in Santa Clara. I was discovered trying to hide the pigeons, and my mother wanted Daddy to give me a good whipping. However, my father, feeling that I could understand logic, lectured me gently, but firmly, on the pros and cons of doing something illegal. Then, in our basement, he used his belt to hit a post repeatedly, which made a quite satisfactory sound upstairs, and instructed me to cry, which I did.

According to Uncle Max, the last time he was alone with his father, they went out shooting together in Washington with a .22 caliber rifle. Max thought his father a crack shot, because he'd brought down a digger pine cone by severing the stem. Max tried to duplicate his father's success, but was unsuccessful. Grandpa finished the job in two or three well-placed shots.

Grandpa attended kindergarten in San Jose, followed by a few months in the local primary school. The family moved to Porterville for four years, then returned to San Jose. He received a secondary grade education but didn't graduate high school. His first job was as a delivery boy for a dry goods store. Following that he became an office boy for an insurance agent and took a correspondence course in architecture which led to a draftsman's stool at an architectural firm.

In an interview that appeared in the San Francisco Bulletin on October 20, 1921, Grandpa said, Had I a practical partner to attend to measurements and details I might become an architect, because I am always able to conceive what I believe are wonderful and beautiful designs.

The great earthquake and fire of 1906, and the need for reconstruction there, drew him to San Francisco. He commuted daily from San Jose. There's no record of how he did the commuting, but according to Uncle Max, he taught himself how to drive.

In his spare time, Grandpa read H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard, all known for their romantic fiction. His interest in the written word grew, and he wrote for the now defunct San Jose Morning Times while taking classes at the local high school. However, he was fired from the Times and began shoemaking in the San Jose shop owned by his brother, Charles. He wrote a monthly column for a shoemakers' magazine.

I have two photographs showing Charles and Grandpa in the long, narrow, crowded shoe shop. From what I can tell, the only window is a high, narrow one over the back door. A sign above shelves filled with shoes reads, We Live on Old Shoes. Both men are wearing