"In the Prime of Life"

It never ceases to amaze me how much can be learned about an "average" life, just by picking up a photograph of a stranger and researching his life's story. We've already seen that when I found an entire photo album in an local antique shop—discovering enough information to send the photo collection home to family in County Cork, Ireland—and we will certainly have the same type of experience while exploring the details in another found photo, this time of a man with a moustache from Walnut, Kansas, known as John Blain.

By the time the man with the moustache was forty four—what some would consider the prime of his life—he and his family had moved from Walnut, Kansas, to a smaller town to the north, known as Centerville. John was in the lumber and furniture business, which had apparently brought him to Centerville in the first place. He had been there since a year or two after the 1900 census. At the point of the 1905 state census, he and his wife Harriet were living in a Centerville home with their two daughters, Emma and Rozella. Within a year, the family was joined by twin daughters Vera and Vida.

By June of 1908, whether for business reasons or for visits to family in other parts of the state, John Blain would pass through the little town of Paola, a stop where he needed to change trains on his way to or from Centerville, about once a month.

On one particular day, arriving at Paola about noontime, John stepped off his train and headed down the sidewalk to cross the tracks to make his train change. When he was barely two feet from the tracks, for whatever reason, someone hollered to him, and he turned to see who it was. Just at that moment, a passing train on the parallel line for the Missouri Pacific Railway struck him and knocked him twenty feet.

Such a trajectory from the sudden blow caused injuries to John's head, back and chest, all of which were treated by a local physician in the doctor's own office.

When he was deemed able to be moved—and one can only imagine in what shape that might have been—John was transported home to Centerville to recuperate from his injuries. His recovery period, however, was cut short: within three days, and after considerable agony, John Blain succumbed to both internal and external injuries sustained from the incident in Paola. Following his unfortunate death on June 20, 1908, his body was returned to his childhood home in Walnut, where he was buried in the same cemetery where his mother had been laid to rest only four years before.

Left with four daughters under the age of ten, John's widow, undoubtedly with the encouragement of legal counsel, filed suit against the Missouri Pacific Railway Company, a process which did not finally get resolved for another eight years.