Words from the Past

     On Saturday, in one of those serendipitous events that every newspaper reporter dreams of, I received an out-of-the-blue phone call with ‘new’ information about the 1890 Frederiksen murder case.  It’s a story that I have been working on for my current series in the Chinook Observer and, in fact, had already turned in for publication.
      The phone call was from Eric Wiegardt.  He had found a box of papers in the attic of his gallery on Bay Avenue in Ocean Park.  Some of those documents relate to the estate settlement of long-ago murder victims Jens and Neilsine Frederiksen.
     “My great-grandmother Wiegardt was Neilsine Frederiksen’s sister,” Eric said.  “This [the Wiegardt Gallery] was her house.”
     I was flabbergasted at that bit of information.  It was another of those generational small world revelations that happens here in Pacific County.  You never know when you’ll find a friend related to or descended from someone you know or have heard of.
     It seems that Eric had run across a number of documents, many in Danish, when he was restoring the old house in preparation for its tenure as the Gallery some twenty-six years ago.  He set them aside in a cardboard box to be read “later” and it was not until last week that he and his dad, Dobby, sat down and began to look at what the box contained.
     When the papers concerning the Frederiksens surfaced, Eric remembered that I had referred to the murdered couple in the most recent of my ‘Jail Book’ series, “1887-1990: “…Peculiarities as to Prisoner History” published in the Observer on February 9^th.  So he gave me a call.
     I wasted no time in arranging to see exactly what Eric and Dobby had discovered and then immediately got in touch with Observer editor Matt Winters to tell him of the “late breaking news.”  He responded that, although he had planned to run the first of the Frederiksen articles (it’s a two-parter) this week, he would substitute something else and start it the following week to give me time to rework the story.
     Of course, even though that’s what I’d hoped would happen, ‘reworking’ is easier said than done.  But, what an opportunity!  I am so grateful that Eric reads the paper and, specifically, that he had read that particular article of mine.  And, I am grateful  that he and his dad just happened to look over that box full of documents when they did and that both of them are so willing to share the information.  I hope I can do it justice.   Stay tuned…