Regarding the Anonymous Post
Just recently I took up the challenge of locating this man…My Dad, your old flame Johnny from Muskingum days, is also interred at the same Dayton mausoleum and quite near to you. He never forgot you, his first “first lady”.
I did it with logic. I took the 1924 yearbook from Muskingum and started reading. It would only figure that Agnes would “date” someone or be close to someone that she saw with regularity. Considering that she spent the majority of her spare time doing plays or singing it would have to be have to be someone she did one of those two things with. She sang with the Glee Club, all girls but dramatics, different story! She performed with two men named John. John Fred Bell and John Collins Ballentyne were their names. I continued to read the yearbook and what do I find in the back? This:
Muskingum Diamond Ring Club…it lists charter members all were young women who were graduating and engaged, no Agnes wasn’t on that list but she is listed below as a “pledge” with the statement “notice their pins.” The only way you got “pinned” is to go with a young man who was in an group, like a fraternity, that issued pins. That dropped the list of potential “Johnny’s” to five and of those five only one died in Dayton Ohio and is buried in the same mausoleum with Agnes. He would be John Collins Ballentyne who married and had two children,both of whom are still living, before his death in 1959 in the same hospital where Agnes’ sister had died thirty years before. John Collins Ballentyne was born to American parents in Punjab India in 1899, probably missionaries.
Johnny is no longer a mystery…………
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