MISSING FATHER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 235, 3 October 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

MISSING FATHER.

YEARS DEFY SOLUTION ROCKEFELLER FAMILY SKELETON. A PEDLAR gesticulating in the deaf and dumb language surprised busy Riehford housewives who opened their doors to his vigorous knocks. And because he was so young, so tall, so virile, so handsome, his affliction readily struck enough, pity to make them buy whatever he might dangle before their eyes. It was in the year 1833. Riehford was a modest New York village that lay up near Cayuga Lake. This pedlar, appearing suddenly at its doors,

During the next 32 years the deserter's patient wife waited vainly for his return. Then she died, in utter ignorance of the fate that had overtaken him. Luckily, her sons had a passion for money-making. The wolf did not lurk long at her door. Disappearance Overlooked. The mystery of William Avery Rockefeller's disappearance continued, oddly enough, to be overlooked by Press and public alike until a long time after his son John D. had flashed into the financial firmament as a luminary of the first magnitude. Then some chance writer sounded the alarm, and scribes and detectives, professional and amateur, sallied forth to beat every bush for the lost father of America's most conspicuous citizen. In the years that have since followed America and Canada have both been scoured and a fortune has been spent in hunting down false clues as to his whereabouts. The late editor, Joseph Pulitzer, put a big price on the lost man's head and is said to have lavished £1600 on the mystery. At one time rival newspaper sleuths assigned to the case waged an exciting war of wits, necessitating the employment of I telegraphic codes such as those used by great military forces in the field. In the exciting hunt for the missing man detectives employed by the Rockefeller family crossed the paths of the newspaper sleuths. The apparent secrecy cloaking operations of the family's agents aroused suspicion that the vanished man's sons dreaded his discovery by outside interests that might reveal the secret back of his disapjiearance. Theories. The most persistent theories as to William Avery Rockefeller's career, after he left his wife, locate him, variously, as a wealthy lumber magnate of Canada, as a ranchman of North-western United States, a« "Dr. Lavering," of Madison, Wis., and as "Dr. Levingston" of Freeport, 111. The first two theories were but vague from the outset. The Madison address at which he was said to reside was found to be non-existent, and the sleuth who hunted "Dr. Levingston" to his lair in Freeport arrived there some time after that, gentleman had died. Skeletons rattle louder in the full closets of the rich than in the empty closets of the poor. America's wealthiest citizen has been called by a distinguished biographer "the world's most tragic figure." Has his deep melancholy been due to the riddle of his father's fate or to fear that some tragedy connected therewith might one day be revealed to a pitiless public?