I received a remarkable letter from Chi Carmody, a law professor in Ontario, Canada, who recently came across a cache of photographs while preparing his father’s house for sale. In doing research, he came across my book and sent me photographs with a letter describing the unusual way in which our two families are connected, while also revealing details I had not known about my own family.
The first photograph shows the wedding of Jim Helm to Elizabeth Wiedemann in Yokohama in 1909. Jim Helm, as I describe in Yokohama Yankee, was the tall, athletic old brother of my grandfather Julie. It was Jim’s wife, Elizabeth, who introduced my grandfather Julie to my grandmother Betty in Brooklyn. Carmody reveals an aspect of that relationship I had not known. I had always wondered how Jim met Elizabeth. Well it turns out Elizabeth’s father worked for New York Life Insurance in Yokohama, and the two families likely knew each other.
The second picture shows my grandfather Julie with Elizabeth’s brother’s son, Fred–that is, Elizabeth Wiedemann’s nephew. The picture was taken in the summer of 1923. That may have been the summer Julie first met Betty, or it could have been a subsequent trip. But he would returned from that trip to be faced, soon afterward, with the great Kanto earthquake of September 1923. (I’ll have to check to see if Helm brothers was insured by New York Life. I think they were.)
The fascinating part of the story is how Chi Carmody ended up with all these pictures of the Wiedemanns that he sent me. It turns out that Elizabeth Wiedemann’s brother, Ernst, who had also lived in Yokohama, returned to New York and married Ella Hendrickson (the employee of a printing company), became active in Brooklyn politics and probably got to know George Carmoody, Chi’s grandfather. Ernst and Ella had a single son named Fred who was born about 1916. Fred is the one in the picture with my grandfather, Julie. Ernst died of pneumonia in 1929 at age 47.
Sometime in the mid-1930s, Fred Wiedemann met Charles, the son of George Carmody, the Brooklyn politician who was Chi’s uncle. Charles and Fred lived together and shared a bed, relatives confirm. They both also work for New York Life Insurance Co., like Fred’s father, Ernst. They buy a bungalow at Breezy Point in Brooklyn, then called the “Irish Riviera.” Chi says there are many pictures of the couple enjoying themselves at Breezy Point.
According to family lore, Chi writes, Fred was on one of the U.S. naval vessels that docked at Hiroshima right after the atomic bomb blast. Story has it that the radiation was so strong, many of the men in the ship vomited overboard and later got cancer.
Fred returned to New York after the war and lived with his mother. On weekends Charles and Fred slept together in the front bedroom while Fred’s mother, Ella, occupied the rear of the house. In the summer Charles and Fred lived together at their home at Breezy Point.
In 1950, Fred contracted lung cancer. It’s unclear if the disease was related to his exposure to radiation at Hiroshima. Charles looked after Fred in his dying days and took care of the funeral arrangements. After Fred’s death, Ella invited Charlie to move in with her and informally adopted him.