It Would Take an Act of Congress: The Life and Death of Linnie Love

As far as I know, there is only one monument in the Cornelius Methodist Cemetery that was paid for by an act of the United States Congress. On April 19, 1928, Representative Fiorello La Guardia of New York introduced H.R. 13172: “That the sum of $1,000 is hereby authorized for the purpose of erecting a tablet or monument on the grave of Linnie Love as a tribute for her patriotism and loyalty.”

Ten years earlier, on a cot in a quarantined army hospital ward, a 25-year-old singer from Seattle had died of pneumonia, a complication of the influenza that was sweeping the country. Congress would eventually agree that she had given her life for her country as surely as any soldier felled by enemy fire. But by the time lawmakers took up her cause, almost no one outside her hometown remembered who she had been before that final tour of the army camps: a girl who had spent most of her short life fighting to keep, and then to save, her eyesight.

A Portland Girl, a Seattle Childhood

Linnie Lucille Love was born February 26, 1893, in Portland, Oregon, to Royal Fred Love (1871–1956) and Claribel Buford Love (1874–1956). The Loves lived in the Lents neighborhood of Southeast Portland, where Royal worked as a clerk at the Routledge Seed and Flower Company. Claribel was the daughter of John Alexander Buford (a Mexican War veteran who had joined the 1849 California gold rush before settling in Portland in 1863) and Mary J. McCurdy Buford.

John Alexander Buford’s own story is, in its way, as sturdy as the trade he worked. Born in Bedford County, Virginia, on January 27, 1827, his family emigrated to Missouri while he was young, and as a youth he moved on to western Illinois, where he thoroughly learned the blacksmith’s trade. Before he came of age, he enlisted and served through the Mexican War, his skills as a mechanic making him especially useful. After the war he visited his old Virginia home once more, then went west to California in 1849, where he worked his trade and engaged in mining, often with much success, for about twelve years. From there he moved briefly to southern Oregon before reaching Portland in 1863, working the forge at the good wages of the day. In 1865 he settled in Centerville, the small Washington County community that would later be renamed Cornelius, where he served as the village blacksmith for thirty years. He married Mary McCurdy in 1868; two married daughters survived him. He spent his final four years in Portland, where he died at 9:45 on the morning of Tuesday, February 28, 1899, of what the era’s doctors called “fatty degeneration of the heart.” One obituary remembered him as “a sturdy, outspoken, honest man, most generous in his impulses, and with many traits of true nobility… industrious, intelligent and independent,” who had won the respect of the thousands who had known him over a third of a century. He was buried that Saturday in the Cornelius cemetery. His monument there is unmistakable even now: a marble headstone carved in the shape of a blacksmith’s anvil, inscribed simply “Gone but not forgotten.” In 1899 the Loves had a second daughter, Ruby, but the marriage did not last. By 1900, Claribel had taken Linnie and moved north to Seattle, which would be her home for the rest of her life.

She grew up on Spring Street, attending Central School, where in the spring of 1906 a classmate’s write-up in the school column noted that “Miss Linnie Love of the Seventh grade” had sung at a Washington’s Birthday program in room after room, earning the verdict that “Miss Love has a very sweet voice.” She was already, by then, no stranger to a stage. As early as 1902, at eight or nine years old, she was appearing with Willson’s Big Juvenile Minstrels, a forty-child touring extravaganza that played the Marquam Grand Theater in Portland that February billed alongside “Baby Ethel” Hawkins and young Norman Margeson, its cast of children praised in the Seattle Daily Times for a number called “Goo-Goo Eyes.” That same year she danced solo at Seattle’s La Petit Theatre and the Star Theatre, working the city’s cheap vaudeville circuit for a dime a seat.

She was, by every account, a genuinely popular local figure. In the spring and early summer of 1905, twelve-year-old Linnie ran a close, extended race for the lead in the Bon Marché department store’s “School Girls” voting contest, trading first place with a girl named Dolly Cremer week after week, until finally pulling ahead for good with over 94,000 votes.

The Darkness Coming On

What almost no one watching her career unfold in these years fully understood was that Linnie was slowly going blind. According to a 1910 interview, the trouble had begun more than eight years earlier, meaning it had started when she was scarcely more than a toddler, long before her first minstrel tour. One eye dimmed and went fully dark for months; when some sight returned, the other eye began to fail as well. By the time she was a teenager, she could not recognize a face from six feet away, or tell whether a stranger nearby was a man or a woman.

She kept working anyway. Around 1906 and again in 1910 she performed in Port Townsend with her cousin Harry Love as the vaudeville duo “Love and Love.” She advanced from song-and-dance vaudeville into legitimate stock company work with the Frawley and Aileen May companies at Seattle’s Lois Theatre, and in 1909 played “Rainbow,” described in a Portland review as “the half-breed girl who saves Bob’s life,” in a Russell & Drew stock production of Charles A. Taylor’s frontier melodrama The Queen of the Highway (the role reflects the casual racial stereotyping common to stock-company westerns of the era, not any particular claim about Linnie’s own background). She spent time on the road in a touring “doll act” with Daphne Pollard, work that closed in Los Angeles only weeks before doctors told her plainly what she was facing: within six weeks, without treatment, the darkness might close in for good.

“He Is My Angel of Good Hope”

It was the Seattle vaudeville magnate Alexander Pantages who intervened. He bought train tickets to New York for Linnie and for her cousin Harry, promised to cover the cost of any operation, and told her he would see to it she did not want for food or shelter while she sought help. “I am sure I will love it there,” she told a Seattle Times reporter the night before she left, in December 1910, crying as she spoke of what lay ahead. “He is my angel of good hope.”

In New York, actress Laurette Taylor took Linnie in, sheltering her at 127 West Fifty-Sixth Street and, in Linnie’s own words, acting as her “guardian angel.” Linnie began treatment under Dr. Frank Parker, one of the city’s leading eye specialists, who used the still-new therapy of X-ray treatment on her eyes. She toured briefly with Taylor in a production of Seven Sisters, singing a small part from behind the scenes, and it was there, singing “Ah! So Pure” from Flotow’s Martha, that a voice was, in the words of one Seattle paper, “found lurking in her throat.”

Word of that voice traveled fast. Andreas Dippel, director of the Metropolitan Opera House, heard her sing and took an interest. Lillian Nordica, one of the era’s great sopranos, gave her a lesson in person and offered to help finance her further study. She sang for Milka Ternina, the celebrated Croatian soprano who headed the vocal department at the New York Institute of Musical Art, and for conductor Walter Damrosch, after which his brother Frank Damrosch, the Institute’s director, wrote asking her to audition. She was awarded a free scholarship on the spot, with the promise of a four-year scholarship to follow if she proved she had “the energy to study hard.”

She had. By June 1912, in an examination judged by eight of New York’s leading music critics, Linnie scored the highest average in her school: 98⅔ percent. She was, by then, also studying under “Madame Ziegler” at the Ziegler Institute, and giving a recital under Laurette Taylor’s direction at Carnegie Lyceum, where she sang the Robert aria from Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable and won real praise. She helped pay her own way in New York by giving dancing lessons (one of her pupils was the well-known aviator Clifford B. Harmon) and sang at events in the homes of society families like the Payne Whitneys, and at dances at the Waldorf-Astoria. Through it all, Pantages kept his word from three thousand miles away. “Mr. Pantages is still my true friend,” she wrote home in 1911. “He sends me a nice check every time I need it.”

And the treatment worked. By 1913, the papers back home reported that Linnie’s sight had been “completely restored” by the X-ray treatments, a genuinely remarkable outcome for the era. That same year she was cast in a small part in Romance, Edward Sheldon’s Broadway hit at the Maxine Elliott Theatre, and it was around this time that she sang for Thomas Edison, who called her voice the most perfect he had ever heard and reportedly planned to record her at his East Orange laboratory using his experimental “kinetophone” sound-film process, though whether that recording was ever made, or survives, is not known. In 1914, the noted producer Winthrop Ames engaged her to sing from the orchestra pit between acts of The Truth at his Little Theatre. By 1915, her voice had even been recruited for an unusual academic experiment: a Columbia University art professor named Alon Bement had his impressionist students paint the “color” of her singing, alongside a contralto named Isa Macguire, to see how music translated into visual art.

Linnie and Lorna

It was also during these New York years that Linnie found her closest professional partner: a contralto named Lorna Lea (sometimes rendered Lee, even within her own lifetime). By December 1915, the two were performing together daily in schools throughout the city in an operetta called Jack and the Beanstalk, billed through the Institute of Normal Training. They would go on to bill themselves as the “Metropolitan Opera Quartet” and, in their concert appearances, simply as “Lovelee.” By October 1917, the New York Tribune could report that “Linnie Love, voice instructor, and Lorna Lea, teacher of piano and coach and accompanist of singers, have returned to New York and opened their new studios.” The two of them were now teachers as well as performers, each running her own practice, still active in concert and church work, and still appearing together with the Metropolitan Opera Quartet, by then in its third year.

That autumn and into the following spring, they kept up a steady run of New York engagements. In November 1917, they sang together at the Unity Society on West 72nd Street, under the topic “Dreams That Come True.” In March 1918, they assisted at the public debut of the new Red Triangle Symphony Orchestra, a YMCA ensemble drawn from two Manhattan and two Brooklyn branches, at the Central Y.M.C.A. in Brooklyn, alongside violinist Fred F. Kampol. The YMCA connection, in other words, predates their army camp tours by several months; by the time they joined the wartime entertainment program in earnest that year, they were already working within its orbit.

“The Show Must Go On”

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Linnie and Lorna joined the YMCA’s entertainment program and began touring military training camps up and down the West Coast: Fort Stevens, Vancouver Barracks, the Puget Sound Navy Yard at Bremerton, Fort Flagler, Fort Canby, Fort Worden, Fort Lawton. By August 1918, a Seattle paper could already describe them as “two young artists of national fame” who had, since the beginning of the war, entertained thousands of servicemen. Even in that final summer, alongside the camp tours, they kept up ordinary local engagements: singing at a Unitarian church fundraiser in Seattle that July, at an armory entertainment in August, always billed together, always as a pair.

In October 1918, the two arrived at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma, just as the camp went into quarantine against the influenza epidemic then devastating the country. They were offered the chance to leave. They stayed instead, performing seven shows on a Saturday, seven on Sunday, six on Monday and six on Tuesday, working their way through all thirty-eight hospital wards on the base. As the newspaperman Charles D. Isaacson would later put it, “the show must go on” was more than an expression to them; it was the reason they went into the quarantine at all, and the reason Lorna, hand in hand with Linnie, insisted on staying with her.

Both women fell ill. Lorna recovered. Linnie did not. She died of pneumonia on the morning of November 12, 1918, the day after the Armistice that ended the war she had spent a year and a half entertaining soldiers for. She was one of 164 servicemen and camp workers claimed by the outbreak at Camp Lewis, among the last of them, dying just as the guns of the war itself finally fell silent.

The news made the front page of the Seattle Daily Times the next day, under the headline “Gave Life for Soldiers,” the same argument, made in the raw immediacy of the moment, that Congress would eventually be asked to formalize a decade later. Her body lay in state at the undertaking establishment of Johnson & Hamilton, at Broadway and East Union Street in Seattle, before being brought south. She was buried the following Sunday, November 17, in the Cornelius, Oregon, cemetery, beside her Buford grandparents, laid to rest within sight of her grandfather’s anvil-shaped headstone, in the same small community where he had worked his forge for thirty years.

Ten Years Later

For a decade, Linnie’s grave went unmarked. Then, in 1928, the New York music critic Charles D. Isaacson took up her case in the pages of the New York Morning Telegraph. “There is a grave on a hill in Portland,” he wrote, “and not a marker has been placed upon it to recite, modestly, her deed.” He argued for more than a headstone: he wanted Congress to consider a Distinguished Service Cross for Linnie and for Lorna Lea alike, and some measure of relief for Linnie’s mother and for Lorna, described by then as a young mother herself. Major General J. H. McRae of the U.S. Army, Rear Admiral R. E. Coontz of the Navy’s Fifth Naval District, and even Cornelius Vanderbilt lent their names to the campaign. Oregon Senator Frederick Steiwer carried the cause in the Senate; Fiorello La Guardia introduced the House bill.

The Portland papers took up the story too. The Sunday Oregonian, on April 22, 1928, ran a photograph of the two performers together under the headline “Monument for Linnie Love, War Camp Singer, Planned,” quoting a Camp Lewis-era Oregonian editorial that had marked her death with three minutes of silence in every YMCA hut in the camp, then training the 13th Division, and closing with a line that has stayed with the story ever since: “The sunny combination is broken, and Miss Lea must go on alone.” The article confirmed her mother, by then Mrs. Claribel Love, was living at 960 Denny Way in Seattle, and that the campaign sought not only a monument but a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross for Linnie, a similar medal for Lorna, and some award for Linnie’s mother as well.

Congress did not grant Linnie a Distinguished Service Cross. But it did authorize $1,000 for a monument, “as a tribute for her patriotism and loyalty,” a private citizen honored, in the end, not so differently from a soldier. A simple black marble urn on a granite base was placed at her grave in the Cornelius Methodist Cemetery, where it stands today: a small, easy-to-miss marker for a girl who had spent most of her twenty-five years fighting simply to see, and who gave the last of them making sure a hospital ward full of dying soldiers had a reason, for a few minutes at a time, to smile.

Lorna Lea, Afterward

Lorna Lea lived on, and the record of her later years, though thin, is real. In April 1922, she was singing contralto in a church quartet (alongside soprano Miss Du Val, tenor J. Richard Laut, and bass Ralph Tomlinson), broadcasting Sunday sacred music over Newark’s Station WJZ as part of radio chapel services for New York’s Greenwich Presbyterian Church. By September 1923, Radio News, the magazine published by radio pioneer Hugo Gernsback, was listing her among the medium’s recognizable on-air personalities, under a nickname of her own: “The Love Song Girl,” Lorna Lea. Through 1924 she kept a busy, freelance radio schedule across more than one station: that March she turned up on Station WJY as the accompanist for a soprano now identified by her full name, Clara Du Val, and later that year she appeared on Station WOR in Newark alongside coloratura soprano Helen Oshea, tenor William Berkheimer, and violinist Dorothy Hoyle. By November 1925 she was a regular on Gernsback’s own station WRNY (the same station whose founding, in 1925, this piece’s earlier chapters barely miss), billed there again in April, May, and June of 1926, sometimes solo and sometimes alongside other performers, still carrying the same nickname she’d apparently earned years before: “the Love Song Girl.”

After that June 1926 broadcast, her trail runs cold. No later performance listing, marriage record, or obituary has surfaced under either “Lorna Lea” or “Lorna Lee.” The likeliest explanations are the ordinary ones: marriage under a new name, a quiet retirement from public performing, or a move away from the New York radio market that had carried her name for most of a decade. What is certain is that for at least eight years after Linnie’s death, through a shared studio, a teaching practice, church work, and a genuinely busy run of radio appearances stretching from the medium’s infancy into its first commercial boom, Lorna Lea kept singing.