Who Was Peggy Moorehead
On the face of it, it is a very simple question. Who was Margaret Ann Moorehead? Who was Peggy Moorehead? Who was Peg Moorehead? Three questions, one young woman, and finding the answer to it all is just as nerve-wracking as trying to find out who her sister was. What you don’t have when you look at this young woman is any kind of backup whatsoever. Some tiny mentions in newspapers and letters to her sister from old friends, but no “This is Peggy Moorehead” documents. Finding anything about her means reading between the lines of the only letter we have, addressed directly to Peggy by her sister, written after Peg’s death. It also means spending hours reading newspapers and yearbooks while simultaneously tracking where Peggy ended up and why she reached the emotional point she was at in 1929.
Peggy’s pathway to 1929 is littered with bumps and hiccups. She began the school year in January of 1921 at Cleveland High in St. Louis. By November of 1921, she was in Reedsburg attending Reedsburg High. She remained at Reedsburg until 1923. In 1923, Peg went back to Cleveland High and appears in the January 1923 Cleveland High yearbook but appears nowhere in the June 1923 yearbook. Yet she goes to St. Louis in 1923 and is literally brought home by a delegation in September. From December of 1923 to April of 1924, Peggy is completely out of sight. She reemerges in the 1925 Cleveland yearbook, apparently never having finished 11th grade because she doesn’t become a senior until June of 1925. Where was she? It demands answers given her tragic end. How is it that her parents ever allowed any of this to happen? Did her sister wise up and bail out of the house immediately after College?
Margaret Ann Moorehead was every bit as complex as her sister, but she was never taught the restraint that had been forced upon her. Because Agnes was six years older, she was the original child-rearing experiment of John and Molly Moorehead. By the time Peg came along, both John and Molly were far more occupied with outside projects than they had been with Agnes. As a result, Agnes was left to manage Peg, and Peg was left to educate her sister about the pros and cons of being a free spirit. A state of being that Agnes was never able to achieve except during performances. We know that both sisters were artistic in multiple ways. They played the piano, the violin, the ukulele, and the harp. They both sang with Agnes the alto/counter tenor and Peg the sparkling soprano. Agnes was a magnificent artist, and several of her sketches survive today in her archive at the University of Wisconsin. Both sisters were colorful and master storytellers. In fact, you would think they were so similar you couldn’t tell them apart by behavior, but you would be 100 percent wrong.
Peggy was a petite young woman with golden red hair. Agnes was not tall but far from petite, with dark auburn hair and olive skin. Peggy feared nothing. Agnes feared everything. Peggy was essentially the anti-Agnes. Pale, delicate, soft-spoken, and drew men like a magnet. Agnes was, as she once described herself, the angel with the cockeyed halo. When Peg entered Reedsburg High during the 1921-1922 school year, she brought the goods. Peg had begun the school year at Cleveland High School but finished it in Reedsburg. She appears everywhere. Peg is at every function, either dancing, singing, or parading her 11th-grade boyfriend around. If there is an activity at school, Peg participates. She begins to bloom like a rare flower, and then she dies on the vine. It wasn’t a quick death either. It took years for her to die seven of them, to be exact. Her fate was sealed the minute she entered Reedsburg High and slid rapidly downhill after that. Agnes was away from home most of the time, either teaching or studying. Then, in 1927, Agnes moved from Wisconsin to New York on the path that would eventually make her a household name. She came home often, but the entire dynamic of the home changed when she left. Suddenly, there was nobody to run interference for Peg, and Peg had no idea how to cope with any of it. Many years later, Agnes would insist that psychiatrists or psychologists were a waste of time; the irony lies in the fact that those very same people might, I stress might, have saved her sister from herself.
Peg O’My Heart
In 1913, a pair of writers coined the phrase “Peg O’My Heart.” It was the title of a song, and the song was full of the saccharinity of a golden age gone by and a testament to the way men thought they ought to behave with a woman. Women were meant to be beautiful, tragic, feminine creatures in need of protection and rescuing. What the song brought us was yet another unfortunate ditty on the fragility of the female sex and the instruction that a man would enfold us in his arms and take us away from the everyday banality of life—utter balderdash but popular nonetheless.
Margaret Ann Moorehead was seven years old when that song came out. Her family had just moved from Hamilton, Ohio, to St. Louis, Missouri. Peg was slowly adjusting to the new environment while her sister Agnes jumped in with both feet and took off swimming. Peg wandered around the shoreline, dipping a toe in here and there. Peg had just become very comfortable when her Mother and Father uprooted the family and bundled them off to Reedsburg, Wisconsin. Reedsburg was nothing like St Louis, and Peg was again faced with the prospect of meeting new people and making new friends. She did not want to do that at all.
Words by Alfred Bryan
Music by Fred Fisher
New York: Leo Feist Inc. (1913)
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
Oh! my heart’s in a whirl,
Over one little girl,
I love her, I love her, yes, I do,
Altho’ her heart is far away,
I hope to make her mine someday.
Ev’ry beautiful rose, ev’ry violet knows,
I love her, I love her fond and true,
And her heart fondly sighs, as I sing to her eyes,
Her eyes of blue, Sweet eyes of blue, my darling!
[Chorus]
Peg O’ My Heart,
I love you,
We’ll never part,
I love you, hear little girl,
Sweet little girl,
Sweeter than the rose of Erin, are your winning smiles endearin’,
Peg O’ My Heart,
Your glances with Irish art entrance us,
Come, be my own,
Come, make your home in my heart.
[Verse 2]
When your heart’s full of fears,
And your eyes full of tears,
I’ll kiss the, I’ll kiss them all away;
For, like the gold that’s in your hair,
Is all the love for you I bear,
O’ believe in me, do,
I’m as lonesome as you,
I miss you, I miss you all the day,
Let the light of love shine from your eyes into mine,
And shine for aye, Sweetheart for aye, my darling!
[Chorus]
Quit Vamping Me
It looks like an innocent school picture, doesn’t it? You know what, though, it isn’t. The young woman on the left end of this lineup is Peggy Moorehead. The word "vamp " today is far from what it was then. In the 20s, Vamp wasn’t something you aspired to. Yet so many young women like Peggy did aspire to it. They saw Theda Bara vamp men with regularity, but Peggy wasn’t Theda Bara, or was she?
While Margaret Ann Moorehead was a preacher's daughter, she lived a life full of boys and men. It’s not normal, and when you compare her to her sister, Agnes was a nun. This is about Peggy’s men. It’s a story that could be a real tear-jerker. It begins full of light and beauty, but it ends in disillusionment, which drives Peggy to suicide. One of my favorite quotes about suicide: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Peg’s problem was men. Poorly
chosen men, and in that respect, she was just like Aggie. Peggy was a total free spirit. Her worship of Isadora Duncan was fervent. According to a man who lived behind the Moorehead family as a child in Reedsburg, Peggy would dance in their backyard practically naked, in sheer material, etc. This man, who reached out to me, said that when he was a young boy, he used to climb a tree in his backyard to watch Peg do her imitation of Isadora Duncan, letting it all, and I mean ALL, hang out. So Peggy was the rebel. Peggy didn’t care that she was being watched. I think she rather liked it because it spoke to who she felt she was inside. Agnes called herself an exhibitionist, but clearly, the exhibitionist was Peg.
Peggy’s Boys
Peggy played loose and fast when it came to the opposite sex. Her first known romantic conquest is in 1921/22, when she begins going steady with a young man named Marden Arthur Phillips.
Marden Arthur Phillips: Marden was a clean-cut, all-American boy. He played basketball and football, was the Prom King, and married in 1929. There is no indication of what caused their breakup, but November 1922 is the last time you see their names together in the paper, when they attended a soiree.
Marden’s relationship with Peggy was desperately close. Peg wore him like a charm bracelet. She was young, pretty, petite, soft-spoken, and talented. Peg and Marden had known each other since 1920. He was two grades ahead of Peg. While it appears they started going together in 1922, I suspect the relationship was a year older than that. On every date Peggy went on, she was chaperoned, and therefore, it was perfectly acceptable that she was seeing a young man slightly older than herself. There is one surviving picture of Marden and Peggy together. It comes from the 1922 yearbook for Reedsburg High School. It shows him gazing down on her while she leans into him. She seems to be smiling at him, and he looks as if he were about to kiss her. High school relationships these days are often temporary at best, but in the twenties, it wasn’t unusual for a young woman to marry her high school sweetheart. Alas, it was not to be, and the next thing you know, she’s right back in St. Louis, attending Cleveland High, and subsequently graduating from there in 1925. What drove that, I don’t know for sure, but I would bet you that either she got way too serious too fast with Marden or they broke up. Normally, you wouldn’t change a school for that reason unless there was a hint of scandal attached to it all. Preachers have to have the “perfect” family. Peg was not built for that. She was passionate, headstrong, determined, and unfortunately blessed with Depression.
Peggy saw herself as emotionally mature, and quite frankly, nothing could have been further from the truth. Margaret Ann Moorehead was naive in the worst way possible. She believed that if she were in love with a man, nobody could compete with her. That man was hers and hers alone. When things went sideways, she came apart at the seams.
Peg was what you might call today “boy crazy” in an extremely deep way. She was not above throwing herself at a man, and in the 1922 yearbook that contains the photo below, Margaret was listed as a champion Vamp, while the local newspaper in 1921 asked, “Has Margaret Moorehead?” It may not have meant what it means now, but it is highly provocative. In the same yearbook as the photo on page 92, it mentions that Marden was seen without his Peg and that “Peg O’My Heart was his favorite song.
While Peggy may have been only fifteen or sixteen when she started dating Marden, she was living Isadora Duncan's bohemian lifestyle in her head. I have no doubt this drove Molly to distraction because Molly was all about everything looking clean and about avoiding the possibility of getting caught up in a public disgrace with Peg at the center of it. This may have been the catalyst for what happened in St. Louis in 1923. Whatever the cause, the explosion from it was heard around the world.
Ray Brunner: Attended Cleveland High with Peg and later moved to Los Angeles. This is where the house party was, and it fits with Agnes’ note that Ray called from California and that he was another man who pushed Peg down the road to ruin. Attended the “Rose Fanning School” until 1920 and graduated from Cleveland High.
Who was Ray Brunner? What did he do to push Peg down the road to ruin? From what I can tell
Ray was your average guy. He was good-looking, and he moved to California after graduation. It is really all there is to know about Ray Brunner. He was one of the guys. Agnes, however, knew a great deal more about him because sisters talk. How else would she have known that Ray helped push Peg down the road to ruin? I bet that, like anything involving Peggy, initially it had to do with romance of some sort.
Raymond William Brunner was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1905. He lived his entire young life there. He attended Cleveland High at the same time Peggy was in and out of the school between 1922 and 1925. Ray graduated the year before Peg. He went on to attend the Missouri University of Science and Technology. By 1927, he was in Arkansas and obtained a license to marry his first wife, Betty Leonard, but, according to Betty, no marriage took place. It’s worth mentioning that Peggy attended a “house party” in the West after her graduation, and given Peggy’s penchant for picking the lame horse, Ray was likely “dating” her and then dumped her.
In any case, we know that Ray “called from California,” which is exactly where Ray Brunner ended up. A little over a month after Peg’s passing, Ray got married in California, and this one did happen. Ray was a salesman for a soap company in 1930. By 1940, he fell into the advertising business. Ray and Leona, his California wife, were still married in 1950, and they had no children.
July 19, 1925
St Louis, Missouri
Sunday
On this day and date, a photograph of Peggy appears in the St Louis Globe-Democrat along with a short paragraph reading “Miss Margaret Ann Moorehead, daughter of Reverend and Mrs. J.H. Moorehead of 535 Dover Place, who left to attend a house party in the West.” It is purposely vague but utterly unnecessary since it merely announces she is going West. One must assume that, being out of high school, Peggy took it upon herself to go; therefore, her Mother chose to announce it in the paper as if it were a debutante ball. The accompanying photograph is Peggy's profile picture, but she is done up like a silent film star. Peggy is nineteen and no longer under her parents' thumb, or so she believes. I believe the purpose of the trip was to celebrate high school graduation. It is the first positive presentation of Peggy in public media since 1922. She was not a newsworthy subject, and this was more than likely done by her Mother. It was her way of wiping the public slate clean for Peggy. This trip put her in another position that would end badly. Only one of Peggy’s boys fits the locale of this trip, and I’m going to assume that he went to the same house party. His name was Ray Brunner. The Ray mentioned in the letter Agnes wrote post-mortem as having phoned from California, and the one worthy of these words from Peggy’s sister: “Ray called from California, another hurt that helped turn your life.”
Mr. Washauer lived 1.8 miles from Jacob Lashley. There is no indication that Peg stayed with anyone else. Mr. Washauer was the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman in St Louis. He grew up in a wealthy household with a brother and sister. His sister died very young, leaving just the two boys. In 1920, the family was living on Waterman Boulevard, which is 4.5 miles from Cleveland High. While they moved in the same social circles as the Lashley family, they did not with the Moorehead family. Ask yourself: how did Peggy get involved with Washauer? The answer is 4.5 miles. Whether she took a bus or walked, she would have either gone past his home on a bus or a trolley, or walked home that way—pure speculation on my part. What I do know is that Peggy started her training to become a nurse at The Jewish Hospital, and the Washauer family were involved with that hospital. Coincidence, I think not. I believe that is the aftermath of the Don Washauer affair. She went there to have some contact with the man. I would also speculate that when her parents realized it, they pulled stakes and moved to Dayton, forcing Peg to leave that situation behind. It is my firm belief that an argument of some type occurred between Peggy and Molly, hence the remark about apologizing for being crass. From 1923 to her death, Peggy dealt with this hollowness. She gave up dancing and singing; her smile is nonexistent. She was broken.
In 1923, Peggy went quietly back to St.Louis and Cleveland High for whatever reason. Once again, she was photographed with members of the Alethinae Club. She looks very different. This is a semi-profile, but she looks thin and drawn, as if staring at nothing. The peaceful expression of the year before is gone. She is once again a little fish in a big pond. Did she ask to return to St.Louis, or was she sent? Arguably, it could be either. Here is where the twist begins. On Saturday, September 1, 1923, the Moorehead family had a set of the most intriguing visitors. The newspaper announced that they were there on the Friday following their departure. These were family attorney Jacob Lashley and his wife, with Judge O’Halloran and his wife. What makes them intriguing is the odd timing of the visit. The other intriguing thing is who Judge Anthony O’Halloran is.
Furthermore, what is his business with the Mooreheads? Why is it necessary to be there? What the hell is going on????
Peggy was nowhere to be found from September 21, 1923, to July 11, 1924. She existed, to be sure, but she was nowhere. Our only clue comes from the newspaper, which says she is in Aurora, Illinois, but what is there in that town that could educate Peggy?
I have looked through every yearbook in Aurora, Illinois, and Peggy is not in any of them. I’ve looked in Chicago and Lake Bluff, and nothing from north to south and east to West could be a learning institution with yearbooks that Peggy could have attended. She isn’t there. Naturally, it makes you wonder if you are an average human; you come to one of two conclusions. The first is that she cracked up and had to be institutionalized, but there’s no evidence to support that. If Agnes was willing to infer suicide in her letter to Peggy post-mortem, and willing to mention an indiscretion with a don ( Mr.) Washauer, Agnes would certainly mention a stint in a hospital. She wouldn’t have used the word "asylum," but she would have used "hospital." No such reference exists in her letter. That leads to the second conclusion: Margaret Ann Moorehead found herself in a family way.
“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
Fact: Peggy cannot be traced for seven months.
Fact: Peggy does not rejoin society until July 11, 1924.
Fact: Peggy stopped playing the violin and dancing publicly after September 1923. When she finally returned to singing in 1925, she was in the Choral Club at Cleveland High.
Fact: Peggy committed an indiscretion with Mr. Washauer, although the timing is not explicitly stated.
Fact: There is a Mr. Washauer in St. Louis when Peggy is there.
Fact: This man got a marriage license on June 2, 1923, to marry another woman, but there is no record of when the marriage took place.
Fact: When the math is done, Peggy, if she got in a family way, it would have had to have happened around the end of May or the beginning of June 1923. If the child had been delivered in late March and Peggy had returned to Reedsburg on April 8, 1924, she would have needed 6 to 8 weeks to lose some of the baby weight, which would have gotten us to June 1924. By the time of her outing on July 11th, 1924, she would have looked maybe plump but not like a girl who had delivered a baby. In September of 1924, Peggy returns to St. Louis to begin her senior year of high school, but she doesn’t look the same. The yearbooks prove that. She has the look of someone who has survived a harrowing event.
Without Agnes, we would not know that she firmly believed that Don (Mr. Washauer was ultimately the cause of Peggy’s suicide. Since we have no written record of any of this, it comes down to reading everything you can find about every person involved in the situation. Having a last name has brought me here, and now I will throw a few more darts at the board. The picture it creates is incredible and outrageously sad.
On September 7, 1923, Jacob Lashley and Judge Anthony O’Halloran, along with their wives, went to Reedsburg from St. Louis as guests of Rev. Moorehead. Their departure is never noted, nor was their arrival announced. Lashley had not visited the Mooreheads in Reedsburg for the last three years, and yet here he is, arriving without public announcement, with a judge in tow who appears not to have known the Moorehead family at all. It’s no accident that Peggy is discreetly removed from St. Louis and delivered to Reedsburg; I know this is when the Washauer incident occurs.
The incredibly interesting thing is this: Judge O'Halloran is Catholic, and I mean Catholic. When you get to poking and prodding, you find in a 1923 telephone directory the reason he may have been involved. A Catholic home for girls. It’s called St. Catherine's, and if you are a young woman who is pregnant, you might just end up there before being taken to Misericordia Hospital, which delivered babies of unmarried young women. These babies were adopted out via the Catholic Church. This is why you need a Catholic Judge. He would have had the power to get her into both of these institutions. It was the only way to guarantee that the child would have a strict religious upbringing.
Whatever happened in St. Louis with Don Washauer broke Peggy deeply. She was straight up shattered for life. Peg never really got back on her feet after this event. Was it a child? Yes, maybe it was, and maybe it occurred in 1927 rather than 1923, but the fact remains that, whatever the event, Peggy carried it with her for the rest of her life.
Frank Powell:
Frank Powell is four years younger than Peggy, unmarried in 1929, and lived at 455 Wyoming in 1930. His parents' home was less than ½ a mile from Stone Mill. This is Frank. He was a Presbyterian who attended John Moorehead’s church and later joined Northminster Presbyterian; he was a Mason and the owner of the Davue Coffee Shop.
This is Frank, the Frank from the letter. How do I know this? Deductive reasoning, my dears. What do we absolutely know about Frank? Primarily that he was a jerk, or at least appears as such. He is the man who dumped Peggy and left her to die on the floor of her parents' home. The only thing that didn’t happen was Peggy dying on her parents' floor. She died in a hospital. Her pain would have driven a lesser person insane. Frank walked out on Peg with no discernible explanation other than because I said so.
His name was Frank Andrew Powell. He was born in 1908 in Dayton, Ohio. Frank was the son of William Clarence Powell and Josie Earnhart. His Father, William, worked for National Cash Register and was well off in his own right. By the time Frank married, he was established at NCR. Frank got married on August 24, 1929, forty days after he dumped Peggy and she committed suicide. Clearly, Frank was spreading the love around because you are unlikely to meet someone and get to know them well enough in forty days to marry them. Peg was “the other woman” in this scenario. The marriage of Frank Power and Pansy Lanning was one of the strangest marriages, though right from the start.
Frank married Pansy in August of 1929; that is undeniable; however, where it gets supremely weird is that Frank and Pansy told nobody they had married until December 24, 1929. Was this an attempt at being sensitive to the Moorehead family’s loss? Yeah, well, epic fail, Frank, epic fail. You see, the marriage is plastered all over the paper in August. How is that keeping it a secret from everyone for no apparent reason other than you don’t want to seem like a jerk, but you are, in point of fact, that jerk. He was two-timing Peg from the start, and she had no idea. Frank and Pansy attended the Steele school from which they had graduated together in 1926.
They were well acquainted with one another. Then, in 1928, in wanders Peg Moorehead, landing smack in the middle of Casanova Frank’s already full love life. Peggy trusted too much in so many things, including the idea that someone you care about isn’t lying to you about everything. If this breakup happened the way Molly describes it, Frank had likely been leaving Peg a little at a time the length of their relationship. Peg just didn’t see it coming.
Jacob Lashley: While there was never anything untoward between Peg and Uncle Jake, his home was 1.8 miles from the Washauer home, and Cleveland High was 10 miles away, which would involve public transport. Cleveland High is right next to Carondelet, where John had been pastor. It may have been the current pastor of Carondelet who housed Peg. They would have trusted a pastor. However, given Uncle Jake’s proximity to both of these things, it is likely that whatever went down between Peg and Irving happened either here or very near here. It clearly involved Uncle Jake, as it is his wife, Judge O’Halloran, and Jake who took Peg back to Reedsburg in September of 1923
Jacob Mark Lashley was born in 1882 in Illinois. He was married to Bessie Henderson, a cousin of John Moorehead. The girls referred to him as Uncle Jake, and he handled the family’s legal business until he died in 1967. After that, his firm handled it all until Agnes turned from the firm to Franklin Rohner when she was getting her affairs in order after being diagnosed as terminal. The only explanation I can find is that she was attempting to hide extensive debt from her family and wanted someone with no association to her Mother.
Lashley was very well known in St Louis, having worked as a lawyer there since 1910. He married Bessie Henderson on December 22, 1911, in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Her Father was John Henderson, after whom John Moorehead and their own son were named. They settled there and raised their four children there. Now it seems they did some raising of Peggy Moorehead. Peggy was attending Cleveland High in Jan 1921 but disappeared by June of that year. The Lashley home was four miles from Cleveland High School. Peggy returned to Cleveland by January of 1923, where she remained until September of that year. Peggy disappeared from the Cleveland yearbook before June of 1923. Her residence in the Lashley home is what involved Jacob Lashley in the mess that began with her trip home in September of 1923 and ended with the mystery of Aurora in 1924. Peggy did not return to the Lashley home nor Cleveland High until 1925. Her parents were forced to move again, returning to St. Louis to keep an eye on their daughter.
In the end, even that didn’t help. Peggy was so broken and should have been under the care of a physician, but her parents' concern over appearances stifled any chance she might have had to get help. Peggy’s final act was years in the making. She was worldly and extraordinarily naive at the same time. Actions have consequences, and if you’re the child of a minister, your actions have triple the consequence. Peggy, like Agnes, was expected to be the perfect child in a perfect family. But Peg never did anything that was expected. Her Mother’s letter to Agnes is absolute proof of that.
Transcript of Molly’s Letter to Agnes, 1929
My Dearest Agnes,
I didn’t intend to have Dwight frighten you so last night, and it’s a shame he did, for I didn’t want that word to go over the telephone, but as you know what happened, you are prepared for the worst if things don’t go on well. I came down early, and Margaret is sleeping and had a fair night. They kept her doped, and we have two good nurses. This could all have been avoided if Frank had used his head and kept still, and this is what happened. You keep things to yourself, and we will send for you if we think things are going against us. Mother came and is at the house we can; Dad and I can take turns being here. I in the morning and he in the afternoon. Peg now realizes what a mistake she made, says she is to blame, and wants me to forget all the trouble, which I told her I would, and asks me to forgive her for being so crass and unreasonable. I told her she and you were the only things we had in the world, and we couldn’t lose her. She said she would fight and has been. She says she took care of a girl who was worse than she is, and she pulled through.
Agnes, I think Frank was cruel to her, for out of a clear sky, he said they would quit, and she fainted, and he never called me, and if he had, I could have watched her. I’ll try and keep calm and keep your dad cheered up. Please think of us, and be on your guard, for if anything happens, we are in a jam, sure. Howard Egbert came to say he would do all he could to keep it out of the papers, but if D tells any more people publicly, we will be in a jam. He has been a peach, and he directed things when we needed a cool head around. Let us hear from you. We all send love.
Lovingly
Your Mother.
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