One of the things about writing a biography is knowing when to stop. I published Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty in 2020, but I keep learning things about Edward Dilworth Cumming and his family.
Just now, online, I found a news brief from the Tunkhannock Republican (Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania), 10 Apr 1891. p. 2.
This newspaper issue announced that the showman P.T. Barnum had died the previous evening. The column to the left of the news brief has the Barnum obituary.
I did already know that George Miller Cumming had been appointed Professor of Law on April 6, 1891, reappointed on April 2, 1894 and resigned effective June 30, 1897. From this news brief, however, I learn that he had three colleagues at least for his first year: Francis Marion Burdick (who was on an anti-vice squad, the Committee of Fourteen, in New York City), George Washington Kirchwey, and John Bassett Moore. It is interesting to me that today, in 2023, G. M. Cumming is the only one who doesn't have a Wikipedia page. He wasn't notable enough.
Another thing I've learned is that when Ben "Felix" Kittredge reported playing a game called "Canfield" with the Canfield family, it wasn't a game they'd made up and named after the Canfields (as I assumed). George Folger Canfield was married to G. M. Cumming's wife's sister, Sarah Kittredge, and after Sarah died, he married back into the Kittredge family. There's a solitaire card game called Canfield, named after Richard Albert Canfield (1855–1914). He ran a casino in Saratoga Springs, New York, and in the first few years of the 20th century, he ran a card game he called Klondike. A similar game is today called Canfield in the United States and Demon Patience in the UK. Canfield died after falling and hitting his head in the New York City Subway station on 14th Street.
You can learn more about G. M. Cumming and especially his son, Edward Dilworth Cumming, in Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.
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