In this article for Atlas Obscura, I tell the story of E. P. Janes, a fast-talking huckster whose Coldswold-inspired cottages in Altadena, CA, are as charming now as they were in the early 1920s–as implied by the title, “Many Houses in LA Were Part of a Scam by A Con Artist Who Disappeared…Yet the Homes are Still in High Demand.” I’ve spent several years tracing the catch-me-if-you-can escapades of Elisha Paul Janes, the youngest of the five siblings whose remarkable story I am chronicling in a forthcoming book. His oldest sister was the novelist Elizabeth Dejeans (see my post “Do Tell”), who was living in Hollywood when he embarked on his building spree. And yet, as far as I can tell, the two never acknowledged their relationship in public. What was up with that?? You might have noticed the “It Will Cure You” photo on my home page. He art-directed that shot during his Soap-Lake-miracle-cure period, which I will discuss in a future post. The portrait shown here was taken in 1925 during his relentlessly hyped Homes Beautiful Exposition. Why the Frankenstein arms, I don’t know, but perhaps he was planning to embellish the image by inserting a promotional sign with his catch phrase, “Why Pay Rent?”

The recent passing of Bob Barker made me remember how, as a young Navy Brat in the 1960s, I was obsessed with him. To my impressionable mind, he was not just some grinning pompadour orchestrating nightly hijinks on Truth or Consequences. He was a genie–and his microphone, a magic wand–with the power to bring men in uniform back home from Over There. And I desperately wanted him to pick my dad to magically appear on the show.

We didn’t tune in to Truth or Consequences often. There was a lot of competition for the 7:30 time slot on our black-and-white Zenith: The Monkees, Gentle Ben, Gilligan’s Island, The Wild Wild West, Daktari, Lost In Space, and, when my mother had her say, The French Chef. But I happened to watch Bob Barker enough times to catch one of his reoccurring schticks: the tearful reunion of a military man with his family who had been pining for his return. My father, a naval flight officer, was often deployed overseas during those years, and I thought this little gambit to get him back might just work. But the logistics stumped me. I was too naive to understand who was surprising whom. Was the family in on it? Was the serviceman? How did they get so lucky? My know-it-all brother scoffed that the whole thing was rigged. Like, this guy’s family just happened to be sitting in the studio audience? Or he was AWOL on national television?

I understood on some level that it was theater, but I was ready for my close up. In first grade, my friend and I had played adorable twins–with matching pixie cuts and striped bathrobes–in our elementary school’s Christmas play. We delivered our only line on cue, in unison, and with deep pathos: “Read us one more, Daddy! Read us one more!” (Acting!) We were then marched offstage, ostensibly to dream of sugar plums, never to be seen again. If there was a typecasting god, I was ready to take my shot as an overwrought and utterly astonished Daddy’s girl on Truth or Consequences.

Inspired by My Favorite Martian, I’d squint at Bob Barker’s square forehead and send him telepathic messages. Pick me! Pick me! But deep down I knew that I would never see my old man emerge from behind those shimmering curtains. I had to admit that my brother was right. The whole thing felt contrived. I could not imagine my clench-jawed, duty-bound, mission-minded, suffer-no-fools-gladly father putting up with the phony baloney of a wacky game show when he was on an aircraft carrier somewhere, fighting “this goddamned war.” Far from being happy to be there, he would have been embarrassed and felt like an “alpha hotel” (phonetic-alphabet-speak for “asshole.”) His scowl would have made us all feel embarrassed and made Bob Barker look like a scolded puppy, which I am certain would never have gotten past the censors.

Bob Barker had served in the naval reserve in World War II, and his hokey reunion stunts harkened to a bygone era. These bits were military propaganda, to be sure. But they also sort of backfired as people were reminded of all the young men who were being drafted as “contestants,” selected at random to play a Kafkaesque game in which truth was elusive and consequences deadly. Years later I learned that only enlisted personnel had been eligible for the show, so we would have been out of luck anyway. I was too young to understand anything about rank or war, of course. All I knew was that seeing those families embrace on stage made me feel that we were not alone. Those reunions planted an image in my wee brain of what a homecoming could look like. They gave me hope, and for that I was grateful to Bob Barker. (He will always be a two-name entity to me, like Pop-Tarts or Kool-Aid.) Now that he has flown home, may his big-hearted, perpetually tanned, pet-neutering soul rest in peace.

This sketch of coquettish actress Alyce Mills was a promotional piece for The Romance of a Million Dollars, a 1926 silent film based on a novel by Elizabeth Dejeans, whose birth name was Frances Elizabeth Janes. The author chose her nom de plume in case her somewhat racy books “upset staid relatives.” As Elizabeth was my cousin, her staid relatives were my staid relatives. So, naturally, when it came to choosing a cover for my Family Vault category, I couldn’t resist using this image. Not only was this fictional character birthed by my writer-cousin (making us practically kin), but she also looks like she’s dying to spill the tea.

Not that this blog is all about dishing family secrets. More like setting the record straight. Or at least as accurately as I am able to reconstruct it at any given moment. (Corrections welcomed!) I grew up not knowing much about my ancestors. I didn’t even know my grandparents. What little was passed down was often like a game of telephone, garbled by the time it got to me. Illustrious deeds were exaggerated or blindly revered, and dastardly ones soft-pedaled or expunged altogether. A lot of important context was distorted or forgotten, even for public figures, and we had our share of those, including Elizabeth.

A celebrated author in the Sister Carrie mode, Elizabeth Dejeans was a most impressive creature of self-invention. Indeed, her dust jacket bio was one of her most creative works of fiction. She was 40 when she sold her first novel in 1909, and she went on to publish a dozen more books and twice as many short stories, several of which were adapted to the silver screen. When producer B. P. Schulberg bought the screen rights to The Romance of a Million Dollars in 1925, she was on a Hollywood hot streak. Three years later, broke and alone, she put a bullet through her head. I can find nobody in my extended family who’s heard of her. The silence is telling. The hazy distance between a life lived and a life remembered fascinates me, for therein lies the biographer’s hidden trail. In my quest to find out who Elizabeth Dejeans really was, I’ve come to realize that she based some of her outlandish plots on scandals and peccadilloes that happened within our own family. Perhaps that explains the ancestral amnesia. And maybe she was right about those staid relatives.

To behold my ancestor’s 19th-century handwritten manuscript was thrilling. And tucked inside the pages was an even bigger surprise.

When I first happened upon the scuffed leather-bound volume in Princeton Theological Seminary’s Special Collections and Archives, I noticed that although the cover bore no title, it did have gorgeously marbled endpapers and heavyweight cotton bond pages. It was not an actual book, but rather a journal that contained the manuscript of a book.

Inside there was an explanatory note written with a flourish (see right). The author was my great-great-great-great grandfather, the Rev. Dr. John Scudder (1793-1855), who sailed from New York City to India in 1819 as the very first American medical missionary. The American Tract Society published his Provision for Passing Over Jordan in 1846, the year that John returned to India after a four-year furlough in America to recover his health. As a miniature devotional, the book became a popular farewell gift pressed into the palms of travelers to wish them godspeed and give them something to ponder on the journey (and spend hours deciphering the tiny mouse-type.)

This oversized version harkened back to an era when books were composed in longhand and then manually set in type, letter by painstaking letter. I assume that he took this copy to India to have the mission press reproduce it as a religious tract, which he distributed far and wide by the tens of thousands in his Quixotic quest to spread Christianity. Before me lay not only a connection to my family’s distant past but also the practical 19th-century version of backing up to the Cloud. 

As I browsed the stiff volume, careful not to crack the spine, the pages fanned open to reveal two unusual bookmarks: a large ovate leaf with a khaki-green patina; and a fern, brown with age. 

Was this John’s doing?

Quite possibly, yes. He was naturally curious and a naturalist by training. His preceptor at the (Columbia) College of Physicians and Surgeons had been the extraordinary Dr. David Hosack, who founded the nation’s first botanical garden on land that is now home to Rockefeller Center. When John first arrived in India, he had been mesmerized by the versatility of the palmyra palm and the ingenious ways the Tamils used every ounce of the tree for food, clothing, shelter, furniture, baskets, medicine, and, to his teetotaling disgust, potent toddy recipes.

Perhaps he plucked these leaves from up in the lush Nilgiri Mountains, where he went to escape the blazing heat of the plains. A friend of mine, who is both a master naturalist and a master gardener, thinks the ovate leaf might be cassia, also known as Indian cinnamon, based on its long vertical veins. That makes sense; John did wax poetic about the cinnamon-infused “spicy breeze” that greeted their ship as they neared the subcontinent, as promising a sign as the olive leaf in the mouth of the dove in the tale of Noah’s Ark. As for the fern, it looks to be a Nilgiri tree fern (Cyathea nilgirensis). And if John was not the one who preserved these botanical specimens, it could have been another family member–several dozen of whom followed in his missionary footsteps–caught up in the Victorian fad of Pteridomania. 

I stared in wonder at these artifacts for several minutes, afraid that they would disintegrate into dust if I so much as breathed on them. Without thinking, I bent close to the page and inhaled deeply through my nose. I thought I detected the faintest of aromas, more bay leaf then cinnamon, something as old as the India ink dried on the page and as evocative as the idea of a long journey to the great beyond.

Artist Idris Khan’s timely and timeless Integration of Hope, 2021 is a site-specific installation that transcends its materials and painstaking technique to stir the soul. As I report in my latest piece for Interior Design, the work was commissioned by LSM for the London office of international law firm Milbank: “Composed of 15 layers of hand-mixed gesso—consisting of slate and marble dust, Prussian blue, and ultramarine pigments—the result is a violet tone so intense that it can only be described as sonorous. What looks like a color study from afar takes on new meaning as one draws closer and realizes that Khan has used oil paint to hand-stamp overlapping words and phrases that express his ideas about diversity and inclusion into an abstract, universal language.” For a cool 3D perspective, click here.