The Tragic End of 'Old Despair'
A local musician, known to the town as 'Old Despair,' dies in a dance hall, leaving behind his only treasure—a violin—to a man he barely knew.
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.
Harry received a visit from a lawyer who brought him a battered violin. The lawyer explained that the violin belonged to an old man who died the previous night in a dance hall. The town had nicknamed him 'Old Despair,' and though the man had a mysterious and tragic past—once conducting an orchestra in San Francisco—he had spent his final years on Smoky Mountain. It was the old man's express wish that the instrument be given to Harry, who had shown him the first real kindness he had known in years.
“The town has always called him 'Old Despair.' You, perhaps, are the first real kindness he has ever known at the hands of men.”
This story highlights the often-invisible lives of transients and social outcasts in small mining towns, a dynamic that persists as modern communities grapple with how to support unhoused and marginalized neighbors. The 'smoky mountains' near Oroville served as a site of both refuge and isolation for those on the fringes of the early 20th-century boom.
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