2 2                   Joseph Katz and TJllian B. Gilkes

newspapers, directories, and othet records housed in Jacksonville.
iMore exciting potentially was our shared belief that there were
Crane things Cora left in Jacksonville when she died sixty years
ago, that never readied Columbia, and that we intended to try
to find.

This story is worth telling only because we were right. We
were not immediately or completely right, but ultimately and
mainly we were right. More than six decades in the history of a
Southern port city desperately striving to remain vital is a long
time. No trace remains of Cora's night club, the Hotel de Dream,
where she and Stephen met in September 1896, nor of her later
demimonde establishment. The Court, which she opened when
their life together closed and she had to support herself again. The
overgrown commercial city has obliterated all of the Cranes' land¬
marks and we suspect that even ghosts would have difficulty in
maneuvering through the traffic-jammed downtown streets along
which we had to pick our way to find the hidden sites. So to some
extent our sentimental expectations were frustrated. It is next to
impossible to recover the past in reality; it lives in memory, tradi¬
tions, books, papers, and people. There are always the graves, and
we visited Cora's and the one in which she buried Harry Parker,
the boy who worked for the railroads until he made up stories
about his relationship with her and was murdered by Hammond
P. McNeil, her third husband, in a fit of sodden jealousy. On the
morning of the one hundred and first anniversary of Stephen's
birth we marked it by teaching a class of undergraduates at Jack¬
sonville University, talking about his writings, his years with Cora,
and their association with the city. We thought that appropriate.
All this time, of course, we also were hunting for those submerged
things that might tell us more about Cora and Stephen. In a car
loaned by friends, following contacts and leads supplied by them
and other friends, we haunted the city.^ Nothing turned up. The

3 It is no exaggeration to say that without Phil May, Jr., this article could not
have been written; he gave us his car, his hospitality, and his advice on where to