Another Unsolicited Family Story Where Someone Dies

Just had lunch with my aunt, who told me that while helping Grandma and Grandpa pack up their house in preparation for the move to assisted living, they came upon a scrapbook about my Grandfather's older brother. I've always been curious about him because his name was John Winthrop Fowler, which is also my father's name. My father has a sailing trophy, dated 1927 or something, that the first John Winthrop Fowler won, and I always used to look at it and wonder about the first Win.

He died when he was 19, on his way down from Tuckerman's Ravine. His companion and he had climbed to the top with their skis and found it to be too icy. So they descended a bit and were traversing a narrow trail on the edge of a steep incline. It got suddenly really windy on their way down. My great-uncle was ahead of the companion when suddenly the companion slipped and fell, banging onto things, blacking out, and coming to rest about 300 feet below. The companion came to sometime later, with a broken rib and a bloody face, and Win was nowhere to be found. Eventually the companion dragged himself down the mountain and found help, who went off to search for Win. When they found him, he had fallen 1500 feet, and hit his head on a rock -- he never regained consciousness.

The scrapbook contained the messages from all the sympathy cards that were sent to the family after he died. I guess my great great grandmother typed them all up and put them in this scrapbook, along with the obituary that appeared after his death. My aunt told me about reading the book, how sad it was. I imagine the scrapbook will go to my father, and although I guess it's creepy I hope it does. My own curiosity about his namesake is pretty strong; I imagine my father has an even more complicated set of feelings about it.

Comments

[ted]

Your post made me think of Nicholas Howe's book NOT WITHOUT PERIL. It covers 150 years of misadventures on the Presidential Range. It's not terribly well written, but boasts fascinating tales of human struggle and bizarre turn of the century dreams of industrializing everything.