The Tragedy of an Eccentric Father
A son in Los Angeles reflects on his father's final days in North Seattle following a tragic suicide.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A Los Angeles, Cal., correspondent of the Post-Intelligencer sends the following interview with Frank D. Elder, son of the late T. B. Elder, who committed suicide last week in North Seattle. Mr. Elder is a pressman by trade and lives at 1410 Pike Street in that city: 'My father has been mentally failing for some years. He always was an eccentric character, had odd ideas, was irritable and easily vexed, and I was never able to get along very well with him. I lived in Seattle for a while, but I concluded to come south with my family to preserve harmony. I first heard of his death from a telegram from my mother, which I received at night. I was very much shocked, for I had not even heard that he was sick, and only last week my father had written that his health was fine and asked me to write back to him to tell him all about the country.'
“He always was an eccentric character, had odd ideas, was irritable and easily vexed.”
Mental health struggles were often dismissed as 'eccentricity' in 1893, leaving families like the Elders to navigate the crisis in isolation. Today's Seattle, with its evolving mental health infrastructure, continues to grapple with the same difficulty of supporting those in the grip of such deep, hidden distress.
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