Polk-Ing Around San Francisco: Anton LaVey in the City Directories

According to Blanche Barton's The Secret Life of a Satanist, after his September 4, 1951 marriage to Carole Lansing

Anton... combined his education in Criminology with his talents in photography in a job with the San Francisco Police Department as a police photographer. Once again, he was faced with the worst side of human nature on a daily basis. On call 24 hours a day, he would race across town to photograph a murder site, suicide, auto accident, explosion – anything that required an investigation because of the gravity of the situation.

This claim (like many others) has been disputed. Lawrence Wright found:

According to the San Francisco Police Department, no one named Howard or Anton LaVey or Levey ever worked for the force, nor does City College have a record of his enrollment. Frank Moser, a retired police officer who worked in the photo department during that time, says that LaVey was never in that department under any name.

Though I have not yet contacted the SFPD or San Francisco City College, I have examined some contemporary San Francisco city directories.  (The SFPL has kindly made a near-complete collection of directories from 1850 to 1982 available online).  Here are two listings for Anton S  LaVey: I've emphasized his stated career for each year.

While the 1952 directory is unavailable, I found this listing on page 719 of the 1953 directory.

LaVey
Anton S (Carole) photographer h729 47th Ave  

And though there's no listing for Anton S or Carole LaVey in 1954,  page 750 of the 1955-6 city directory has:

LaVey
Anton S (Carole) legal photographer h729 47th Ave 

So why were there no SFPD employee records for an Anton LaVey, Tony Levey, Howard Levey, etc.? One possible answer can be found in The Black Pope, Burton Wolfe's second edition of 1974's Devil's Avenger.  In the account LaVey gave Wolfe, after his marriage to Carole and the birth of his daughter Karla in 1952

Anton survived financially through part-time jobs playing organ and piano, and by shooting photos of damage caused in traffic accidents, fires, and street brawls... 

As Anton traveled around San Francisco looking for opportunities to sell photographs to insurance companies and the police, he sometimes came upon the results of humanity at its worst: homicides, suicides, damage from arson-caused fires, wrecked vehicles with injured or dead drivers or passengers immersed in blood, bodies hauled out of the San Francisco Bay where they had been tossed after murders or where they had wound up in a submerged automobile, the bodies of women maimed or killed by jealous lovers, men stabbed or shot by their “best friends,” children whose bodies were splattered on the sidewalk or street after being blasted by hit-run drivers. What sickened Anton almost as much as the disgusting scenes were the usual hordes of gawkers sucking sadistic pleasure out of the tragedies: sometimes after they had the opportunity to help prevent the outcome, but did nothing.  

While many police departments did and still do use freelance photographers, I do not know if the San Francisco Police Department ever did.  Even if they worked with freelancers I could not tell you how many pictures, if any, the SFPD purchased from a young Anton LaVey. And the directory publishers stated that they "cannot and do not guarantee the correctness of all information furnished to them." But what I do know is this: from 1953 to 1956 Anton LaVey listed himself as a "photographer" and then a "legal photographer" in the San Francisco City Directory. And I wonder why, more than fifteen years before The Satanic Bible saw print, he would lie about such a thing repeatedly.  Especially since there's abundant evidence that he was telling the truth when he later listed himself as an "organist" and then "organist at the Lost Week-End."

Were he not deceased, I'd talk to retired SFPD Inspector Jack Webb.  Inspector Webb told Lawrence Wright he "knew LaVey in the late forties or early fifties." It is a pity Wright didn't ask him about LaVey's early photography career or about his criminology courses. (If Webb's obituary was any indication, he would have been taking classes around the same time as LaVey). I wonder what that conversation might have revealed.

LaVey and Reich: More for Chas Clifton

In a response to my earlier post on Existentialism, Archetypes and Anton LaVey, Chas Clifton said:

I would say that Pagans of the 1960-1970s were all over the map,from the vaguely pantheistic Reformed Druids of North America to the new Witches, some of whom felt that their gods were two among many, while others clung to Dion Fortune's statement that "All the gods are one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess."  

And there were a few reconstructionists about too, though not a lot.

What you're describing is a range from polytheism to duotheism with some reconstructionism and pantheism thrown in. LaVey's practices were avowedly atheistic. He didn't see the gods and goddesses as symbols of a higher Being/s but as tools to be used for personal betterment and gratification. In that, for better or for worse, he was several decades ahead of the Pagan curve.  

Confusion about LaVey's atheism is understandable.  He talked about curses decades after he stopped doing Black Masses and suggested that many seemingly unconnected events were more than "coincidence."  LaVey certainly wasn't a hard atheist whose worldview was free of supernatural and mystical elements like the Brights.  But he repeatedly rejects the idea of Satan as a personal being and consistently shoows contempt for "wooly-headed mysticism" and "occultniks."

Many of these seeming contradictions can be resolved by studying an important but oft-neglected influence on Satanism.  In the first edition of The Satanic Bible we find a dedication to, among others, "Wilhelm Reich, who knew more than cabinet‐making." In 1990's Secret Life of a Satanist we find:

An interesting sidelight to LaVey’s humanoid creations is that many human replicas of his "people" have suddenly appeared, Pygmalion-like, some time after LaVey already constructed his creation. Instead of modeling the humanoid after a person, the person seems to have been modeled after the humanoid. Anton doesn’t try to explain these "conjurings" beyond referring to a method he uses in magical rituals which he terms "cosmic superimposition," a phrase borrowed from Wilhelm Reich.

According to The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, in Cosmic Superimposition (1951), Reich "steps out of our current framework of mechanistic-mystical thinking and comes to a radically different understanding of how man is rooted in nature. " Compare LaVey's efforts to remove Christian conditioning via the Black Mass to Reich's work on "character armor." Reich sought to bridge the mind/body duality, while LaVey commented in The Satanic Bible that man:

... no longer can view himself in two parts, the carnal and the spiritual, but sees them merge as one, and then to his abysmal horror, discovers that they are only the carnal—AND ALWAYS WERE! Then he either hates himself to death, day by day—or rejoices that he is what he is!

And of course the "dark force in nature" bears more than a passing resemblance to orgone.  This is especially important when considering LaVey's theology.  Whether you find Reich's ideas  to be genius, quackery or some combination thereof is unimportant. What matters is that orgone is impersonal. Orgone does not hold conversations or deliver cosmic mandates: it is more like light, magnetism or electricity than any kind of spiritual entity.

Reich would certainly have been trendy enough in the 50s and 60s: orgone accumulators were used by (among others) Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs. His work combined psychotherapy and bodywork to help patients achieve full emotional expression and rid themselves of sexual repression, or, in sixties-speak, "hang-ups."  LaVey thought liberation from self-loathing and socially induced guilt was a worthy cause: his rituals used occult imagery toward that end for psychodramatic effect.  (Note that he moved away from and ultimately dumped the ceremonial magic trappings altogether when too many people started taking them literally).

But LaVey was far less impressed with Reich as a prophet of sexual liberation and "free love." He rather enjoyed a little bit of shame, saying in 1969:

I would rather be “hung-up.” It’s a lot more fun. This is why the Satanist revels in what are considered to be sins. We Satanists consider “hang-ups” to be “hang-ONS”—the very foundations of what makes our personality, our likes and dislikes what they are. We like our fetishes and resent any attempt to remove them. 

Like the carnival, LaVey's rituals exist on the edge of the orderly world.  They are a Dionysian celebration of the flesh, a multi-sensory experience designed to touch the participant on deep levels. But when the carnival moves on and the ritual chamber closes, everyone goes home empowered, or hopefully at least entertained.  Where Reich and his devotees sought an aeon-changing sexual revolution, LaVey never dreamed we would fuck ourselves into utopia.  He understood the Church was Satan's best friend too: he knew everything was nicer with a little sin sprinkled on top.  And his innate distrust of utopian philosophies only became stronger as he grew increasingly bitter.

More LaVey: The Mystery of the Second Oboe

Throughout his career as Black Pope Anton LaVey swore that he had played second oboe for the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.  Yet in 1991 Lawrence Wright found:

By the time he was fifteen, [LaVey] said, he was sufficiently accomplished to play second oboe with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.  (According to the San Francisco Performing Arts Library, there was no such orchestra in 1945. The ballet employed the local symphony for its performances, and none of the three oboists was named LaVey or Levey).

In the introduction to the first edition of The Satanic Bible (which appeared from 1969-1972) Burton H. Wolfe stated "At sixteen [LaVey] became second oboist in the San Francisco Ballet Symphony Orchestra." He repeated that in his 1974 book The Devil's Avenger (which he edited and re-released in 2008 as The Black Pope).  Only later did LaVey change that number to fifteen.

Is this proof he was lying? Or is it proof he was born on April 11, 1930.

I wonder what the local symphony's employment records might reveal for the first half of 1946.  I also wonder how many ballet companies were active in San Francisco at the time.  And given that LaVey was living in Mill Valley in 1945-1946, I'd like to see if contemporary local papers mention a young "Howard Levey" playing oboe in San Francisco.

The oboe's tone is frequently associated with Orientalism and the exotic, so it would appeal to a teen steeped in 1940s pulp fiction. And given his resume there's no reason to think he wouldn't be up to playing a double reed instrument.  By 1969 Anton LaVey had spent over a decade as a professional musician. Why make up a story about "playing second oboe at 15" when he could point to several years manning the Civic Auditorium's pipe organ or the Lost Weekend's Wurlitzer?  And why keep talking about that particular instrument and that particular position for decades?

This night, I believe, was a pivotal experience in LaVey's life.  It was so important that he went back and corrected a misunderstanding ("Yes, I said 1946 but I was fifteen, damn it, fifteen.").  For a suburban kid San Francisco was the big leagues.  It was that glorious first gig that sealed his fate, that moment when "musician" became a real career possibility.  And even when he put his oboe aside and took up the organ, he never forgot it.  So no, I don't think he made the second oboe story up or embellished it in any significant way. If anything, I'd bet it was honesty that got the Black Pope in trouble.

Can I prove that with documentation? No. (Anybody with access to 1940s Marin County newspapers might want to give it a shot).  But given how often LaVey repeated this story, and how tenuous the case against him is, I'm reasonably certain he was telling the unvarnished truth here.

The Satanic Bible's first edition also contained a very interesting dedication. But that's for another post.

More for Chas Clifton: Existentialism, Archetypes and Anton LaVey

On G+ Chas Clifton said in response to my previous post:

I would comment on your blog if you just had the name/URL option. Or if WordPress ID worked, the failure of which is not your fault.

I've allowed anonymous quoting, which should allow you to quote with name/url. Let me know if that works. 

 
I would definitely appreciate hearing your thoughts on this subject, especially on the 60s-70s Pagan and "white light/occultnik" religions. I am curious as to how many Pagans in the 1960s had a similar pantheistic-atheistic-archetypistic worldview. At present I think a fair number of Neopagans, maybe even a majority, would have no problem saying that "the God and the Goddess represent the forces of nature and are symbolic rather than actual anthropomorphized entities." But I'm not sure if that was the standard view in the 1960s or if most of the community believed they were contacting the actual Old Gods and Goddesses. Was LaVey ahead of the curve in 1966 with this worldview, or was he was following a contemporary trend? I honestly don't know.

(Although I suspect that if I show a LaVeyan influence on contemporary Neopagan thought Isaac Bonewits will spin in his grave so fast that he breaks the sound barrier ;) ).

One thing I'm finding is that LaVey was a lot smarter than people think. They forget that before he was Anton Szandor LaVey he was a kid named Howard who spent his days reading everything he could get his hands on and remained a lifelong voracious bibliophile. I definitely see a Reichean influence in LaVey's conception of a "dark force in nature," for example. (Considering LaVey dedicated the first edition of The Satanic Bible to Reich among others, I think that's a pretty safe assumption). A lot of times I think what his enemies call "plagiarism" is him using ideas and phrases which caught his attention and which he internalized. Keep in mind he was an autodidact with no college education: it's not surprising that his attributions sometimes didn't measure up to academic standards.

I'd like to bone up on contemporary Existentialist texts to see if there's any influence there. While I don't think Sartre or Camus would necessarily disagree with many of his thoughts on the human condition or his proposed solutions therefor, I would like to make sure first that LaVey actually had some interest in Existentialism.  It wouldn't be implausible: plenty of intellectuals in the 1950s were reading Sartre, or at least leaving his books lying around on their coffee table. But I'd like to get something more to solidify any linkage.  And I'd also note that for somebody who hated "occultniks" so much, he had at least a passing familiarity with most of the material available to a mid-20th century scholar of the occult. I've come to suspect the Doc hated occultniks so much not because they were interested in magic but because their magic was ineffective.  

Will the real Papa Levey Please Stand Up?

My new publicist

After extensive research and frank, candid conversations with people who knew and loved Anton LaVey I have stumbled upon a most interesting fact.  What I found seemed impossible and earth-shattering. I spent days trying to disprove it, combing over documents from various sources and checking and cross-checking everything.  All this work only corroborated my discovery.  And so I was forced to acknowledge that the man commonly believed to be Howard Stanton Levey's father is not in fact his biological parent.

What happened, you may ask? Did Gertrude find out about Michael Levy's second family in Nebraska and decide turnabout was fair play? Is there more to that oft-repeated claim of "Gypsy blood" than meets the eye? Was the cantankerous old bastard really a cantankerous old bastard after all? What Freudian dramas lie behind the philosophy we know today as Satanism?

The answers to these and many other questions are to be found in my upcoming book. By the time you're done with the first chapter you will know the real, never-before-told story of Anton Szandor LaVey's parentage.  Hell keeps many secrets but I've managed to pry this one loose. And soon it will be available worldwide to those with the courage (and the funds) to purchase Satanism: the Story of a Reluctant Antichrist and the Hell he Raised. 

Coming soon, friends. Coming soon. In the meantime, read carefully and trust no one. 

For Chas Clifton: Questions for the Devil

While I puzzle out some conundrums in the Lineage of Hell, I thought I'd reply to this comment from Chas Clifton regarding my new book project.

Love the Saturday Night Live fantasy. 

Oh, I think it would have been the coolest thing ever. And the huffy complaints about how he was cheapening his contract with the Prince of Darkness would have made it even cooler.  Now imagine a skit where Dennis Spade does his "And you are...?" to Anton LaVey, who pushed ahead of Jesus in line.  Jesus, of course, would say "Get thee behind me, Satan" to which Anton could quote something suitably bitchy. LaVey had a natural sense of humor and could have easily played the cowl and horns for laughs. He could have become Uncle Anton, your Host for Satan's Monster Mania. But he didn't do that.  He was happy to tell a joke but he never let himself become the joke.

I think Tony Levey (his preferred monicker among friends) had a complex relationship with Anton Szandor LaVey. ASL brought Tony fame and attention while simultaneously providing a shield against too much intimacy.  Like many entertainers ASL was at heart a very private man. And yet ultimately his shield became his prison. He couldn't go back to being Tony tickling the ivories down at the local watering hole.  Because people wouldn't be going to see Tony anymore, to put tips in his jar and maybe engage in some idle chit-chat before heading home for the night.

No, they'd be coming to see the Black Pope. And they wouldn't care that he was an excellent keyboard player -- an assessment made by friends and enemies alike, btw -- and they wouldn't listen to the music. All they would hear is Anton Szandor LaVey. Then they would all come up to talk, to shake his hand and call him the Antichrist or sneer at him and call him a fraud. And so he grew increasingly reclusive and increasingly misanthropic: I'd imagine a few years of dealing with dumbshits in black will do that to a person.

I never had any dealings with LaVey, although I knew people who did. It would be hard to assign percentages to "con man" and "prophet," but perhaps he was one more visionary who tried something, saw that it impressed the rubes, chuckled to himself, and then wondered, "Maybe there really is something to this."  

We need to clarify two terms here.  First, when I said "prophet" I did not mean to imply that Anton LaVey had any kind of direct contact with an entity answering to "Satan."  In fact, he repeatedly stated that he did not and that he had synthesized these ideas on his own.  But he believed in those ideas and he lived those ideas and he introduced those ideas into the mainstream. And so he, as sure as Karl Marx, wound up a prophet.  Both tapped into "dark forces" in the zeitgeist of their times and set stuff in motion without any claim of divine inspiration.

I've also heard Anton LaVey called a "con man" a lot. They generally point to Lawrence Wright's article and burning questions about LaVey's oboe skill and whether or not his Tab A ever went into Marilyn Monroe's Slot B.  A few others point to Zeena's FAQ, which adds allegations of animal abuse and domestic violence in an effort to prove Anton LaVey is a bad, bad, bad person.  But amidst all these allegations I've never seen anyone say that Anton LaVey bilked a nice little old lady out of her life savings.  Or that he took tens of thousands from a bored San Francisco socialite to teach her "the Darkest of Dark Arts." Or that he extorted money from his flock. Or that he ever did any of the things you'd expect a con man to do.

I think LaVey was a true skeptic and willing to admit he had seen and experienced things which he could not explain.  For all his contempt of occultniks, he read an awful lot of obscure and esoteric occult texts.  It's also telling that he gave his son the middle name "Carnaki."  William Hope Hodgson's Carnaki more often than not finds a rational answer for strange findings, but those where he actually encounters the Outside are among the most chilling tales in 19th century horror.  (Try "The Whistling Room" right before you go to sleep.  Preferably facing a brick fireplace).  Please note that "things he could not explain" does not mean "things that spoke to him and declared him Satan's Emissary on Earth."  What it means is acknowledging and accepting that the world is a weird place and sometimes weird things happen.

It took Aquino, of course, to make it more of a self-conscious religion, instead of a . . . entertaining self-help movement, shall we call it?

Making LaVey's movement a "self-conscious religion" is rather like improving the Mona Lisa by splashing it with house paint until it resembles a Jackson Pollack. The absolute LAST thing Anton LaVey ever wanted was a self-conscious religion: "Say unto myself I am my own redeemer" and all that.  And you say "entertaining self-help movement" like it's a bad thing.   That's exactly what LaVey was aiming for: he even called it "spooky psychodrama."

(Question: how many of the Pagan writers of the mid-60s and early-70s were talking about the God and Goddess as archetypes, symbols or something other than actual deities? I am honestly not sure: I've noticed that among most modern Pagans I encounter nowadays, his ideas on "the nonanthropomorphic dark force in nature" and "ritual as psychodrama" are pretty much the norm).

My take on LaVey and his work is like my take on New Orleans Voodoo.  I'm well aware that a good bit of New Orleans Voodoo started out as a publicity stunt to bilk tourists.  But people are still finding meaning in New Orleans Voodoo and getting something out of practices they call New Orleans Voodoo.  And I'd say the same thing about Satanism, only LaVey's influence is arguably a whole lot bigger.  New Orleans Voodoo has a central area and is presently becoming more popular in America: there are death metal fests throughout the world with kids wearing baphomets and screaming "Hail Satan!" You may not like the music but once again a lot of people are getting something out of it.

I don't see a comparable influence with Setianism.  I see a few intelligent people within the ToS who have written thought-provoking books (i.e.  Don Webb and Edred Thorsson). But I don't see where the Aeon of Xeper is Remanifesting on this poor material plane.  Never mind black metal: I don't see a Setian artist whose images are as widely recognizable as Coopgirls nor do I see any indication that a New and Better Human has Come Into Being within or without the Temple of Set.

I'm not saying that Setianism isn't a perfectly fine spiritual path for those who wish to follow it.  But at this point it bears far more resemblance to Thelema or other initiatory occult orders than the philosophy expounded by LaVey. Covering Setianism in a book on Satanism would be like covering Haitian Evangelical Christianity when writing a book on Vodou: it is important only insofar as it interacts with the primary subject.

The Secret Life of a Satanist's Grandparents: Leon Levy

I begin with the Anton LaVey genealogy prepared by noted amateur genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner.  Reitweisner cautions that this material "should not be considered either exhaustive or authoritative, but rather as a first draft." Accordingly, I've done as much checking and cross-checking as possible.  Genealogy generally involves a whole lot of speculating, a good bit of informed guessing, and occasional wild leaps of faith.   This is especially true when dealing with Anton LaVey. Dates can be off by a decade or more: we frequently run into spelling variants and multiple addresses which may be residences or offices.  So like Reitweisner I must consider these efforts a work in progress: I welcome any corrections or additions by knowledgeable people.

On October 7, 1888 the Omaha Daily Bee informs us "Miss Emma R.H. Goldsmith is to be married to Leon Levy on Tuesday, October 23." The October 28, 1888 edition contains this wedding announcement:

LEVY-GOLDSMITH
Leon Levy, of Bennett, and Miss Emma R.N. Goldsmith were married at the synagogue on Tuesday evening. The reception and supper were given at the Esmond hotel, and dancing continued until 2 a.m.

Bennett was approximately 50 miles (80km) west of Omaha, and is presently a suburb of Lincoln. Was Leon just passing through on his way to visit relatives when he met the pretty young girl from Louisville, Kentucky?  (There are Levys, Levis and Leveys located throughout the region, many from the sizable Jewish community in Metz, France).   Did the sophisticated man with the adorable French accent sweep the young girl off her feet?  We can imagine all sorts of romantic scenarios but the exact story of their meeting will likely remain one of those mysteries Leon's grandson so treasured.

Instead of moving on, Leon and his new bride stayed in Omaha. The city had seen a dramatic boom as settlers flooded Nebraska. Leopold Goldsmith, Emma's father, had been a junk dealer back in Kentucky before moving to Nebraska at some point in the 1880s.  There the Goldsmiths had thrived. The 1914 Omaha city directory lists his sons Louis and Samuel (d/b/a Goldsmith Brothers) as partners in several business ventures, including dry goods and real estate.  There were fortunes to be made on the prairie and so Leon and Emma Levy settled down to the business of making theirs.

Based on the census evidence, they did quite well.  In 1900 the U.S. census lists Leon Levy as a "cigar merchant" (and lists an eight-year old student named Michael, better known today as Anton LaVey's father).  The 1910 census lists him as a "Retail Merchant/Grocery Store:" his son Michael is listed as a clerk in a real estate office while his older son Ike (a graduate of the Creighton University School of Pharmacy) is listed as a "druggist."

But perhaps Leon's most profitable sideline was as a liquor merchant.  And here he ran headlong into a midwestern phenomenon which was big and only getting bigger -- the Temperance Movement.  When crusaders against the evils of drink couldn't ban Demon Rum outright, they set out to harass tavern keepers, pharmacists and other Agents of Drunkenness with taxes, regulations and measures designed to drive them out of business.   In Nebraska the Anti-Saloon League lobbied for Sunday closure of taverns throughout the Commonwealth.  On November 25, 1908 we find this article in the Omaha Daily Bee:

"23" FOR SALOON KEEPERS

-- 

That Number of Indictments Returned on Twenty-Third Day of Month by Grand Jury 

Twenty-three indictments on the twenty-third day of the month against saloon-keepers, druggists and keepers of houses of ill fame for alleged illegal sales of liquor, were returned by the county grand jury yesterday. The saloon keepers were all charged with selling liquor on Sunday: the druggists with failing to keep a register for the recording of liquor sales, and the keepers of houses of ill fame, for selling without a license... 

George McArdle, William Silk, Leon Levy, William Hartman, William C. Paulsen, William Burke, Mrs. L. Burke, Max Grim, Charles Palmtag and Frank Bauer are in the list of saloon keepers.

On January 6, 1909 Leon Levy's saloon license was revoked.  He returned to his original job as a cigar merchant... more or less.  On December 10, 1910 we see Leon Levy (spelled "Levi" in this article) back in the news:

GOES TO JAIL IN LIEU OF FINE

---

Leon Levi Gets Ninety Days When He Fails to Pay Fine for Lid Lifting 

Upon his faiure to pay a $200 fine which was imposed by Judge Crawford, Leon Levi, who conducts a cigar store at 709 North Sixteenth Street, was sentenced to ninety days in jail Tuesday on the charge of selling liquor without a license.  Levi was arrested Friday night, when the police raided his place of business and confiscated a quantity of liquor.

Things weren't going so well for Leon at home either.  In a May 1911 divorce hearing Emma Levy testified loudly "I would rather go to the pen for twenty years than stay with my husband one day!" The divorce decree was finally signed in late May. Leon left to spend some time in Salt Lake City, where his brother Adolph owned the Vienna Bakery.  Perhaps he was hoping to make a new start: perhaps he wanted to take some time to recoup from what had obviously been a rough year.  Whatever his plans, they were cut suddenly short.  On July 5, 1911, at the age of 54 years, Leon Levy died suddenly of an unexplained disease.

Because Leon died before the sixty-day period in which the decree was to be finalized, Emma Levy's attorneys were able to get a decree abating the divorce. This put her in line to inherit Leon Levy's property, which consisted primarily of some real estate and a $2,000 life insurance policy from the fraternal order Woodmen of the World. (Both Levy and his wife were members of WoW: Emma Levy belonged to the auxiliary "Woodmen Circle").  But for whatever reason Emma did not live long to enjoy her inheritance: by April of 1912 she was also dead and at 21 years old, Michael Levy found himself an orphan.

1914 finds Michael Levy still in Nebraska, working as a travel agent in Grand Island.  Sometime after that he moves to Chicago, where he meets a news stand owner's daughter named Gertrude.  But that is a story for another time.