House built: ?
Woodlawn Add to Green Lake N 35 FT
Plat Block: 61
Plat Lot: 7-8
1910 address: 6509 10th Ave NE
Current address: 6509 Roosevelt Way NE
Vera Grace Glazier was born in Michigan in 1884 to Henrietta (Geddes) Glazier and Frank Porter Glazier. Frank served one term as Michigan state senator and two terms as Michigan state treasurer. In 1907 he went bankrupt, and in 1908 he was indicted on 3 counts of embezzlement.
Rice Alva Howell was born in 1884, also in Michigan, to Lucy (Mapes) Howell and Floyd P. Howell. Floyd was a farmer.
Rice married Vera in Wenatchee on June 16, 1909. Vera's brother Harold, a fruit farmer, served as witness to the marriage. It's intriguing to wonder ... had Rice and Vera known each other in Michigan? Did Rice move to Seattle with the intention of removing Vera from the turmoil of her father's disgrace?
Rice worked as a floor man (per the 1910 Seattle Directory) or executive (per the 1910 Census) at the MacDougall & Southwick department store at 2nd and Pine. The young couple lived at 6509 10th Avenue NE (now Roosevelt Way - the house long demolished, the site is now home to the Bengal Tiger restaurant).
Vera gave birth to Geraldine Elizabeth on March 9, 1910. Her mother had come from Michigan to attend her. On May 11, Rice, Vera, Mrs. Glazier, and the baby traveled to Wenatchee to stay with Harold.
Vera died on June 30, 1910, at her brother's house. "A happy, lovable baby, three months old, is in the grief-stricken home, destined now to face the world without a mother's love"1.
The Yale Expositor (Yale, MI) printed the following lurid and possibly wholly fictional article on July 8, 1910: Glazier Disgrace Kills Daughter. "After reading a reference to the imprisonment of her father, Frank P. Glazier, former state treasurer, in a newspaper a few days after the birth of her child, Mrs. Rice Howell, of Wenatchee, Wash., formerly Vera Glazier, died of the shock."2 Frank Glazier had been sentenced in February of 1910, but Vera's family, the Expositor explained, had kept the news from her.
Vera's father, sentenced to five to ten years in Jackson prison, only served two. The governor parolled him after Frank developed diabetes.
Rice had returned to Michigan. By the 1920 census, he had remarried, had a 3-month-old daughter, and was living on Colorado Avenue in Highland Park.
Geraldine lived with her grandparents and great-grandmother, also in HIghland Park, on Ford Street, about a mile away from her father.
To read more about Frank Glazier, see Less than immortal: the rise and fall of Frank Porter Glazier of Chelsea, Michigan, by Louis William Doll.
1 "BABY'S MOTHER DIES - Grim Reaper Visits Happy Home Near Lewis and Clark School", The Wenatchee Daily World, June 30, 1910, page 5, column 2↩
2 "Glazier Disgrace Kills Daughter", The Yale Expositor, July 8, 1910, column 5↩
Discovering the people of Seattle's Roosevelt neighborhood in the 1910 Census
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