The Magic of Random Connections

(A postscript to 'Love on Shaky Grounds')

The following is a postscript to Love On Shaky Grounds, which I published a couple of days ago. That story was about a heartbreaking tragedy almost 120 years ago. This story is about the magic of coincidence, and how this one conjured fascinating but forgotten spirits.

My niece Crystal moved to Phoenix while in high school, to one of the worst neighborhoods in that sprawling hot city. We lost touch with one another for a decade or so back then, and I imagine it must have been a scary time for her, trying to make her way in a new town as a teenager. 

These days I think of Crystal as the coolest person I know, though she adamantly self-identifies to me as a “dork.” She and her partner now live in Hawaii. They’ve worked hard to make a home for themselves in paradise, and the two of them are known to drop everything for weeks at a time to explore exotic corners of this earth. That’s the definition of cool to me.

But thirty years ago that Phoenix neighborhood was a fright. Crystal said she found her safe space in the cemetery across the street from her house. Greenwood Cemetery, just off Interstate 10, surrounded by Circle Ks and trailer parks.

“The cemetery was a respite of calm greenery in the ghetto,” she wrote to me in a text on Friday, “so I walked it often — nearly daily.”

Reading the memorial markers and gravestones became a pastime. Crystal would spend hours with the dead, try to guess what their forgotten lives were like, who they were, what they accomplished. 

“I'm weird, this I know,” she wrote. “I love something about this activity, something about people with stories that are so old they are forgotten.” Her graveyard visits morphed into a dorky interest in history and in the great big world around her.

While at Greenwood Cemetery, she often lingered over the Smith Family plot. She was especially fascinated with the marker identifying someone named “Lieut. John Y.T. ‘Yours Truly’ Smith.” 

“I definitely remember ‘Yours Truly Smith’,” she wrote. “I mean, it’s memorable.” Yours Truly spurred her imagination. She often wondered how he had become Yours Truly. 

Crystal reached out to me after reading my story Friday about the cruel fate of a couple of honeymooners from Arizona who were crushed under the weight of a chimney at Hotel Del Monte that collapsed during the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. They were the only earthquake fatalities recorded in Monterey County on that horrible day. The victims were named Ed and Mary Rouzer, and Mary’s maiden name was Smith.

In her text to me, Crystal told me that the final line in my story gave her goosebumps. After the bodies of the unlucky lovebirds were initially buried in a Masonic cemetery in Arizona, I wrote, they were later moved to nearby Greenwood Cemetery and re-interred in the Smith family plot. I’m not sure why I included that useless little tidbit to end the story. It really isn’t that pertinent to the narrative. 

But after reading it and after the goosebumps, Crystal did a quick find-a-grave Google search. She discovered that Mary Rouzer was Yours Truly’s daughter. She learned that the hapless Rouzers I had written about were buried adjacent to the Yours Truly who had sparked her imagination 30 years earlier. 

“I can't tell you how many graves I have speculated over … and I really can't explain the satisfaction your story has given me,” she wrote. “But to get information about someone who’s grave I saw so regularly some 30 years ago is pretty awesome. It really is a small world.”

Final note: Lieut. John Y.T. ‘Yours Truly’ Smith was a prominent citizen of Phoenix back in the day. His biography notes that he married Phoenix’s first school teacher and he built a flour mill in town. He was also a Republican politician in the region at a time when Republicans were considered a pox on Arizona. His death in 1903 was noted in newspapers throughout the west, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1879 he changed his name legally to John Y. T. Smith by act of the territorial legislature; alas, the public records I found don’t indicate how “Y.T.” translated to the “Yours Truly” on his gravestone. 

Illustration (above) of Lt. John Y.T. Yours Truly Smith

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