Episode 15: Author Laurie Marr Wasmund Talks about the American West, WWI and Colorado Hero Philip Van Cise

Our guest today is author Laurie Marr Wasmund. Laurie loves the American West and has written five novels having ties to it including My Heart Lies Here, A Novel of the Ludlow Massacre; Clean Cut, A Romance of the Western Heart; and three books in the White Winter Trilogy, To Do Justice, To Love Kindness and To Walk Humbly, which chronicle America's involvement in the First World War and the aftermath in the 1920’s.

Today Laurie talks about her favorite history which is anchored in turn of the century Colorado, WWI and the taking down of the infamous Denver Bunco Ring by Philip Van Cise who, it is believed, the award winning 1970's movie The Sting, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman is based on.

For more on Laurie:

https://lauriemarrwasmund.com/

https://lauriemarrwasmund.com/white-winter-trilogy-to-do-justice/

https://lauriemarrwasmund.com/white-winter-trilogy-to-love-kindness/

https://lauriemarrwasmund.com/white-winter-to-walk-humbly/

For more on Philip Van Cise and the KKK in Colorado in the 1920s:

https://www.westword.com/news/phil-van-cise-scourge-of-denvers-underworld-5097432

https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/photos-ku-klux-klan-in-colorado-in-the-1920s#id9

http://www.blongerbros.com/VanCise/bio.asp

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

Thank you for joining us today for Armchair Historians. I'm your host, Ann Marie Cannon. Armchair Historians is Belgian Rabbit Productions. Stay up to date with us through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Wherever you listen to your podcast, that is where you'll find us. You can also find us at Armchairhistorians.com. Armchair Historians is an independent, commercial-free podcast. If you would like to support the show, you can buy us a cup of coffee through Kofi, or you can become a subscribing member through Patreon. You can find links to both in the episode notes. Our guest today is Lori Meyer Wiseman. She is an author, editor, presenter, and teacher who loves the American West. Lori has written five novels, including My Heart Lies Here, A Novel of the Lovely Massacre, Clean Cut, A Romance of the Western Heart, and three books in the White Winter Trilogy, To Do Justice, To Love Kindness, and To Walk Humbly, which chronicle America's involvement in the First World War and the Aftermath in the 1920s. She has worked as a freelance writer and editor. Her short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Cimmeren Review, Weber Studies and South Dakota Review, and her articles on Colorado history have been published in True West and Old West. To find out more about Lori and her novels, be sure to check out the links in our episode notes. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_02: 2:10

Thank you, Anne-Marie. It's a pleasure to be here and an honor to.

SPEAKER_00: 2:14

Well, thank you. So my first question that I ask all guests, what's your favorite history?

SPEAKER_02: 2:21

Since you asked that, and and I knew you were going to ask that today, I have been thinking about it, and it has to be that time in between about 1900 and the 1920s and 25, somewhere in there. Those 25 years when it seemed like the entire world went through some sort of metamorphosis change that that brought in another type of living. And it's it sort of reminds me of what's happening to us today, where we are going to come out of this and it's going to be something completely different. But I think with World War I, wars had been fairly contained before then. You know, we'd had the Civil War, there had been the Napoleonic Wars, uh, the Crimean War. But with World War I, it really was truly a world event. And it was an event in which not only America, but Britain, France, so many countries lost their innocence and sort of lost their um, I want to say, I almost want to say heritage, because then they had to rebuild something different. And especially for America, with all our young men rushing to sign up for the war and then going over there and finding out that it wasn't just you know the lyrics from the song Over There, you know, and finding out how really horrible it was. And so much was going on in America as well. Things were changing so rapidly in America with um women's suffrage suffrage and the union movements. And so it seems like it was a complete rebuilding, or even an awakening of um America and the rest of the world. And so I think that's that's what makes it my favorite time in history.

SPEAKER_00: 4:12

Wow, that is a you just gave a perspective I had never thought about in that way before. So I know as I said in the um the introduction, you are an author and you write about uh different periods in history, including World War One.

SPEAKER_02: 4:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 4:32

I was just gonna ask you what what have you written about at the names of your books and maybe a little you know synopsis.

SPEAKER_02: 4:38

All right. Um, so that my trilogy starts out with the first two books are about World War I. The first book is really sort of an introductory book. It's called To Do Justice. The title is taken from the Bible verse, Micah 6:8, What Does the Lord Require of You but To Do Justice, To Love Kindness, and To Walk Humbly. So the three books are to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly. And I have something from each in each book. But the first book, To Do Justice, starts out with America going into war. It literally starts just a few days before America declares war on Germany, and then the buildup and what happened when America, which had been isolationist, which had been only concerned with itself, suddenly became involved in the European war, as they called it. President Wilson asked on April 6th for a million men to send to Europe for the war. And that didn't happen right away, but indeed, we went from becoming an isolationist country to um uh a superpower in really the just that year and a half. And then of course it went on to continue to uh move in in terms of power up through the cold war and until recently.

SPEAKER_00: 6:00

Are these historicals, historical fiction?

SPEAKER_02: 6:04

They are historical fiction, they are historical fiction, however, a lot of the incidents in the book are taken from uh primary sources and are taken from the history itself, from the stories that I found. Um, I have on my website, which is laurymarwazman.com, a list of the sources that I use for each one of the books. And so you can go on there and you can look up at everything. But um for the first book, To Do Justice, I did I did research on Fort Riley, which was where my young man from Denver goes when he is when he enlists in uh the American Expeditionary Force. I did um research on the US Air Service, which of course in 1947 would become the the Air Force, but it was truly just this sort of put-together force of these young men who could fly. In America, there were very few people who could afford to fly. Most of these young men came from Harvard and Yale because they had the money to have their own airplanes, they had learned how to fly. Yeah. And so the Lapia Escadrille, which was the sort of the beginning of the United States Air Force, the Lafay Escadrille was a group of young men from Harvard, and they decided that America was not moving fast enough to enter the war, and they wanted to enter the war. And so they took their own planes, they they went over to Belgium and they volunteered with the French and attached themselves to the French Air Force. And um, they were called the Lafayette Escadrille, obviously, because Lafayette had helped us during the Revolutionary War. They felt that they were repaying something that we owed to France. They flew mostly bombing missions along the coast of Belgium and bombing where the Germans had entrenched themselves. But they were the first, and then their first yale unit, which is the one that I I look at in my books. The first yale unit was made up of young men from Yale, and they they felt that once again America wasn't going to enter the war quickly enough to suit them, so they went over on their own and started the first yale unit, and then they really are the ones who became.

SPEAKER_00: 8:29

See, that's why I like doing this. I learn all kinds of new history. I love this. Are they store connected stories? Do we file the same characters?

SPEAKER_02: 8:40

The same character throughout all three. Oh and so um I have I have a young woman who volunteers to go overseas with the Red Cross. And so she goes over and she believes, they all believe, um, that it's going to be hanging around the canteens and serving cocoa and um reading poetry and the evenings and entertaining the young men and all of that. And what she finds, they're first attached to the French, and what she finds is that they are expected to do everything. They work 18-hour days, they work seven days a week. Um, because they're only quasi-military, they don't have the same rules for leave and for relaxation that the soldiers do. So they actually work harder than the soldiers. They do everything. They're nurses, they administer eye drops after the men have been gassed, they um work in the hospitals, they carry food to the young men, they serve thousands of sandwiches in an afternoon when the men come back from the front. It's just amazing what those young women did. And for that experience, I used the diary of Doris Kellogg, and the last name, Kellogg, indicates what kind of woman went with the Red Cross. It was mostly society girls, debutantes, who had enough money to pay for their way to France and could afford not to work and to go and volunteer in the war. Doris Kellogg, of course, of the Kellogg family, went over there and she was based mostly in Cray, in the in the sort of the southern part. And so she wasn't up near Paris, she was about nine, I think it's about 90 to 100 miles south of Paris. And she worked in the hospitals, and so I used a lot of her stories for my Red Cross workers.

SPEAKER_00: 10:35

So is that a um resource that's that's available in book form?

SPEAKER_02: 10:40

Actually, it's available online. A lot of these um primary sources, diaries, there's one by a woman by the name of Marian Baldwin, and she was a YMCA worker in France during that time. Doris Kellab was with the Rick Cross, and they're both of their diaries are online, and you can just download them.

SPEAKER_00: 11:00

And so if um I send every episode has its own webpage. So on the webpage, I'll obviously have your website, anything else that you want me to put on it. Okay. Um, but if I send, I'd rather have people go to your website and find these different resources. Can they find them on your website?

SPEAKER_02: 11:19

They can, yes. Okay. Everything is listed on my list of sources.

SPEAKER_00: 11:23

You have obviously put a lot of time and energy into researching. Has this been like a lifelong acquiring of knowledge? And then at one point you decide to become an author and write about this. And you know, how do how is that process for you? Is it something that you've all is always kind of been on your radar, or is it something more, you know, recent?

SPEAKER_02: 11:50

Well, you know, someone else just sent me an email and said, Why did you decide to become an author? Which I I assume every author is asked. And I started thinking about it. I really don't know. But um I know by the time I was in first grade, I changed my name from Lori to Laura with an A on the end, because I thought Laura Ma was a far more distinguished name for an author than Lori. And I told my first grade teacher to call me Laura, and I told my mom to call me Laura, and neither one of them could remember to call me Laura, so I went back to being Lori.

SPEAKER_00: 12:25

That's great. That is a brilliant story. I love it.

SPEAKER_02: 12:29

But I did I've always wanted to write, I've always wanted to be an author, and it was really um the story of the Ludlow Massacre, which was in Colorado in 1914, that started me on my journey through World War I, which happened just uh three years later, of course, and was happening in Europe at the time. But the same people who were to me heroes in the time of the Ludlow massacre when the the women and children of the Union uh strikers were killed, those people who were heroes who sought to see the truth of that come out, who wanted to do good things for the strikers instead of just destroy them and make sure that they didn't cause any more trouble, their names continued through World War I as heroes. They went to war, they did heroic things in the war, and then they continued into the 1920s as the people who came out against the Ku Klux Klan.

SPEAKER_00: 13:29

And so those names that just now as you're talking telling me all this because you know I I know bits and pieces of things you're talking about, but I didn't realize the continuity of the this, you know, these people that you're talking about. And that just you gotta love somebody with integrity who fights for what they believe in. And yeah, that's a that's a beautiful story.

SPEAKER_02: 13:55

Yes, yeah. And the the main person I'm talking about is Philip Van Seiss, whose name is now on the detention center that's downtown, the big jail that they built very recently downtown. It's the Van Seiss Detention Center. And um, he was a captain in the Colorado National Guard when it was called out to go down to Trinidad and keep peace in the strike zone. And he was in charge of something called Company K, which was made up of young lawyers, bank clerks, young college students, sort of an upper class group of uh Colorado National Guardsmen. And they were very kind and they were very good to the strikers. And once the tent colony at Ludlow was destroyed and the women and children were killed, then it was Philip Van Sys who went back down there to uh research what had happened and to try to do it, investigate. And he found, you know, he found the Colorado National Guard was at fault, but it was hushed up.

SPEAKER_00: 14:56

Could you just give us a little bit more of a background about the Ludlow massacre? Because I'm afraid that there might be people who don't have any frame of reference for what that is.

SPEAKER_02: 15:07

Okay. All right. The Ludlow Massacre occurred in 1914 and April on April 20th of 1914, which is April 20th seems to reoccur in our history quite a bit. In 1913, the United Mine Workers of America decided to take John D. Rockefeller's coal miners and the employees of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company out on strike. It had been tried before by the Western Federation of Miners, but they could never, they could never get the support. They could never get what they needed to take those strikers out. But the UMWA realized that the strikers were made up of all sorts of ethnicities. Um third uh sort of the third wave immigrants had come in and taken those jobs. And so there was there were Italians, Greek, um, lots of Slavic uh miners, um, Swedish, Norwegian, um, there was a group of from Mexico, they came from all over the world. They were Chinese, there were Japanese uh miners. And they'd always been told by the company that they should stay away from each other. You know, the Italians were told, oh, don't don't don't get involved with the Greeks because they're they're dirty and you know, they they're not not people you want to know. And then the Italians or the Greeks were told the same thing about the Italians. And so the company had had uh fomented division throughout the miners, and nobody had been able to bring them together and to say, hey, you know, these guys are okay, and and you can, if we all get together, we can do this. And the United Mine Workers of America had an incredible Greek organizer by the name of Louis Tikas, T-I-K-A-S, and he came in and managed to organize the Greeks who sort of argued among themselves, they weren't even a cohesive group themselves. And then um there were other organized uh organizers, Charlie Costa, C-O-S T-A, from um, and he was Italian, and he he managed to get the Italians together, and then they started to you know introduce the groups to one another. And the UMWA managed to take them out on strike um in September of 1913. And they came out of the coal canyons, which were these canyons that be could be closed off and had been closed off by the companies, so nobody could go up there. There was no access to it. So they came out of the coal canyons and then they were just out on the prairie out outside of Trinidad, Colorado. They were living on the prairie in tents. It was the worst winter in Colorado history. You've probably heard about the snowstorm of 1913 when six feet of snow fell in Denver, and it was it was terrible down in Trinidad. So the 10th colony was it was smashed at that point. And then they rebuilt it, and there was all sorts of escalating violence, all sorts of um human rights violations, just everything. They weren't allowed on the trains, uh, the strikers weren't, and all sorts of things were starting to happen. And finally, the Colorado National Guard was called in to keep peace, and uh, that was in November actually of 1913. They threw shenanigans, in which um the governor was involved, Governor Elias Ammons, and the company, uh Colorado Fuel and Iron, were involved. The Colorado National Guardsmen were replaced by mine guards. They were inducted into the Colorado National Guard. So these men who had always been brutal and had always hated the miners were suddenly the Colorado National Guardsmen who were guarding them and keeping peace in the tent colony. And the violence escalated until on April 20th, 1914, the Colorado National Guard um burned the tent colony. And the miners had built pits underneath the tents where the women and children could go so that when there was gunfire and there were snipers outside the tent colony, they could go down below and be safe. And they were also used for storage, they were used for cold storage as well. And actually, you know, it's it's a good idea. But there were two women and they had between them 11 children, not all theirs, some of them were children that had been left with them. And they went down into this one pit, and when the fire went over them, they were suffocated to death.

SPEAKER_00: 19:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 19:42

And so that happened, and it sparked a civil war in the in Trinidad, between the Colorado National Guard, the CFNI uh uh guards on one side, and then of course the miners on the other side. And around 64 people were killed during that next year. 10 days, including the Greek organizer Louis Tigas. It also brought about some changes. Rockefeller was forced to become a therapist philanthropist because he um had such a bad dimension at that time. And other things happened. Um, there was a woman by the name of Josephine Roche who took over her her father's coal company, which is called Rocky Mountain Coal, and she she decided to give them eight-hour days. She decided to pay them in money, she decided to provide decent living for them, decent equipment. She decided to do the things that the miners had been asking for for over 50 years. And so things did change. But the Ludlow Massacre was this terrible incident in U.S. history, U.S. labor history, Colorado labor history as well.

SPEAKER_00: 20:49

Yeah, so you sew in the local uh Colorado history, but you also sew it into the greater context of World War I. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_02: 21:00

Yes, yeah. Now that book stands alone. Um it's called My Heart Lies Here, and it stands alone, and it's it's a book just about the Ludlow Massacre. Then I moved to the trilogy, which is about how many books have you written? I've written five books at this point. I've published five. That's prolific. It's taken me 30 years, so it's not that prolific.

SPEAKER_00: 21:22

Okay. I don't feel so bad about the past 11 years. Well, no, it's been about nine years since I started writing the book I'm working on. Okay. It takes a long time. Yeah, it does. So wow, that was brilliant. That was a lot of information. Um and so there was that one particular character you started talking about. What was his name?

SPEAKER_02: 21:46

Oh, uh Philip Van Syth. Uh I have his book right here. I'm probably all right. Yes, this isn't this isn't uh video, is it?

SPEAKER_00: 21:54

But it is video. It is video. It is video, okay. It's actually uh I do the video with the idea of eventually using clips for it, probably developing a uh YouTube page and taking clips from the video the video interview and posting it. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 22:12

Philip Van Sice, and it's spelled uh V A. Well, here's the book. Philip Sydney Van Sice. Can you see that? Fighting the underworld. And it's spelled V-A-N-C-I-S E. He, as I said, he was he was a captain at the time of the Little Massacre, wanted to investigate it, it was basically hushed up. And then during World War I, he was an observer. Um, and he went up in the hot air balloons and did observations from the hot air balloons, which is an incredibly dangerous thing to do because the Germans were, of course, after the hot air balloons. They were slow moving, they were tethered to the ground, so they weren't they weren't autonomous, and so they were basically sitting decks. And he did that and um came back a colonel after that. So he was Colonel Van Syze. Once he returned, he became Denver District DA. He managed to take down what was called the Bunko Ring or the Bunko uh group, and um, these were a group of con men who came, they worked between Palm Springs, Palm Springs, no, Palm Beach, excuse me, Florida, and Denver for some reason. And they had an they worked somewhere in Arkansas as well. But they'd go to they'd go to um Palm Beach during the winter, and then they'd come to Denver during the summer and they'd hit on tourists. They had all sorts of brackets, including one called um with the stock exchange. Not very many people understood the stock exchange at that time. And so they would go out and they'd find a guy that looked like he was a tourist and looked like he had money, and and they'd say, Hey, I know somebody who, if you have 2,000, if you have$1,000 and you put it down on a stock exchange with an hour, you'll get$2,000 back. And so they do that and they keep going up and up. If you have$10,000, I know somebody who can get you$20,000. And then of course the$10,000 never came back to these guys. It was, it was, it was a scam. And they had a fake stock exchange set up. Um, they they would go in a back room and they'd hear you'd hear telephones, and the guys would answer the telephones and say, Yes, yeah, that stock's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, your stock is going up. And these people would fall for it because they really didn't understand that these stocks aren't going to go up that much in an hour. Wow. But they managed to build people out of incredible amounts, including uh um a minister from Michigan who was visiting and who later committed suicide because he lost his church's entire budget to these con men. And so there are there are these tragic stories around it. But Philip Van Seis decided decided to take them on, and he decided to break the bunko ring, which no one had managed to do. The police were in on it, so he had to work alone. The Denver DA's office was not funded at that time, so he had to um he enlisted the Colorado Rangers, who were the young men who went out on the roads and and police the roads in Colorado. So obviously the Colorado State Patrol, the precursor of the Colorado State Patrol. And the the Rangers would go out and round up these these. They decided that huge raid. They went out and they rounded up these con men, brought them all into the Universalist Church, and put them in the basement of the Universalist Church because Philip Vance didn't have the jail because that would involve the police. So he had to find his own place.

SPEAKER_00: 25:51

The police were dirty. The police were in on it. The police were dirty.

SPEAKER_02: 25:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 25:57

So, but not all the police. Were all the police in on it, or was it a thing where I think enough?

SPEAKER_02: 26:04

Yeah, he couldn't trust him, but he knew who he could trust in the Colorado Rangers. But he brought all these guys in and he put them down in the kindergarten room of the Universalist Church. And so they were interrogated while they were sitting in these child-sized chairs, red chairs in the kindergarten room. Are there pictures? Yes, actually, um, there are. I did it, I actually interviewed Cindy Van Sys, who is Philip Van Syß's granddaughter. Oh, and she brought me pictures and showed me one of the pictures of the little chairs. Wow. But then he after that, he was he was known as a hero after that because he managed to put away uh 45 of them into uh Canyon City, into the Pennsylvania City.

SPEAKER_00: 26:48

Did he catch any of the cops?

SPEAKER_02: 26:51

Um the cops sort of they worked themselves out. The the um the police chief was replaced, and and that sort of work itself out. But um Philip Van Seis actually had to ask for funding from the the businessmen of Denver in order to get funding to pay the Colorado Rangers and to rent through the Universalist Church and all this stuff. So it was just this incredible. Um so how long did that process take? Well, he started working on it in um I think you know in 18, and then I think the arrests were made in 2021, 21 or 22.

SPEAKER_00: 27:31

Wow, that's a big thing.

SPEAKER_02: 27:32

It took a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he he would put dictaphones into places where he knew they met. The con men met. And the dictaphones at that time were like these three, they had 300-pound batteries. So these guys had to get up in attics. The guys from the DA's office had to get up in attics and take these dictaphones across. And the batteries were very um susceptible to changes of weather and cold and that kind of thing, and they leaked, and all of a sudden, this chandelier would start leaking down in the room underneath, and it would tell the con minute or something going on. It's it's this wild story that is told in his book Um Fighting the Underworld. He was a hero, he was a legend in Denver, and then in 1921, when the Ku Klux Klan came in to clean out Denver, to clean up Denver, to get rid of all the bootleggers and all the brothels and all the sinners and the criminals and all that, and as well as a few minorities, of course. Um, then um he was he was the Denver district EA still, and he started to fight against the Klan because he recognized the corruption that was in the Klan, that it was just a pyramid scheme for the the big guys to make money off of the guys who really believed um in what they were doing and burning the crosses and destroying the homes of of African Americans and and defiling the synagogues of the Jewish people on Colfax and the Catholics.

SPEAKER_00: 29:00

I feel like I I I feel I'm having like this boy, this all sounds so familiar. You know, there's something about what you're talking about that feels it's completely different circumstances, and yet it's the same right now. And it's it's it's like, yeah, I don't know if that makes any sense whatsoever, but as you're talking, that's what I'm seeing. It's like a lot of the things that are going on today with our uh administration in the way that Trump is playing different uh factions and people who believe wholeheartedly in certain things, it's like he's manipulating all that, and it's all just bad, and the outcomes are bad, and people are destroyed. Anyways, that's okay. Let me get off my soapbox.

SPEAKER_02: 29:48

No, okay, your soapbox is is very warranted because that indeed is when I was writing this book. I was writing it, it came out in 2019, but I started it really in 2017 and was writing it. And Trump was coming into office, and the things that he was saying, I was writing in my book.

SPEAKER_00: 30:07

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_02: 30:08

You know, like let's clean the Catholics out of Denver, you know, obviously different, uh, a different group of people, but that's exactly what Stapleton was saying. And that's exactly what the the Grand Dragon, who was a brilliant man named uh John Galen Locke, who knew how to manipulate the uh population, that's exactly what he was saying. At the same time that he was just amassing money from the the membership fees that were coming.

SPEAKER_00: 30:36

Right, right. Oh wow, and yet this particular uh character, Philip Van Sis, he's going through all these different situations, and you know, you I never heard of him until you told me about him the other day, but you really have to admire his integrity and his strength of character because he was from my where I stand, he was able to see right in all these different situations and to you know bring justice, and that that's pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_02: 31:13

It is he he he really was an incredible person, an incredible force until his death in 1969. Um all the way through. He left the office of district attorney in 1924, and then he went back into private practice. But in private practice, he kept, you know, he kept involved in in things and he kept fighting for the right side, and that's what makes him my local historical hero. And in 1924, he actually started his a third party. He uh, because the Republican Party was all KKK and all of their um candidates were were KKK and the Democratic Party How did that happen?

SPEAKER_00: 32:00

How did that happen? Like weren't the Republicans uh you know abolitionists, the party of uh Party of Lincoln, yes, yeah. Is that incredible?

SPEAKER_02: 32:11

Yeah, it's it was the Republican Party that was behind the KKK in the 1920s in in every state. There were Democrats too, there were plenty of Democrats who were as well, but it was mostly Republicans. But he he started a third party and he put up candidates to run against. He tried to split the Republican vote, it it didn't work. The KKK voted in their own candidates anyway. But yeah, he was the one who was the name of the third party. He called it the or he called it the visible government league because of the um KKK. Sounds like superheroes, like the superhero, some kind of league. I know it sounds like Star Wars or something, the Visible Government League.

unknown: 32:59

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 33:00

Yeah. One of the questions I'm curious about is where is he depicted? Is he depicted in pop culture then or now? You know, history books. Obviously, he's in history books, but where do we find him?

SPEAKER_02: 33:15

Well, we find him. Well, this book, um, the book I have, and this is this is a sort of a funny story. I found this online. I found it for uh$20. It says on the bottom that it's from Texas Eastern University Library and it's been discarded, withdrawn. But when I showed this to his granddaughter, it's some kind of a bootleg copy. She said this is oh, my light is showing. Um, this isn't the copy that um she knows of, and it's not any of the editions that she knows of. This is some kind of bootleg copy that she'd never seen before, because the cover is completely different on the actual.

SPEAKER_00: 33:55

And the name of the book is Fighting the Underworld, and it's written by uh P. uh Philip Van Seiss.

SPEAKER_02: 34:03

Yes, Philip S. Van Sice, yes.

SPEAKER_00: 34:06

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 34:08

And um, so where did you find there?

SPEAKER_00: 34:11

Where did you find that book?

SPEAKER_02: 34:13

I had picked it up years and years and years ago at the Denver Public Library before the internet, when I was down there um researching the Ludlow Massacre. I would go down on Saturdays when my husband kept the children and and uh researched the Ludlow Massacre, and I found it down there when I started becoming interested in his name. And then now that we have the internet and we can find just about everything, I was looking for it online and I managed to find it. Most of the copies sell for hundreds of dollars. Well, as I said, I got this one for like I think it was 20 or 25, something like that. Wow. I was very lucky to get it. But um I found him there. Um, Alan Prender Prendergast from Westward has written um a very interesting article about him for Westward. He's been mentioned and written about in the Denver Post, of course. And there's a website, um, and it's actually Lou Belanger's website. He was the guy who was in charge of the Bunko ring that Philip Van Size broke. That family is also collecting information about Philip Van Size. It's sort of an they have equal billing on that side. All of that's written, but there's never been a distinctive biography written of him. And I think that's a shame because I think he really deserves one.

SPEAKER_00: 35:39

Is he fictionalized in any movies or anything?

SPEAKER_02: 35:43

I don't think so. Uh of course I have him in in my third, well, I have him in all my books, but um So yeah, he's fictionalized in your books. In my books, yeah. And to Walk Humbly, which is the third one. He's fictionalized in here because this is the one that's about the KKK. And this is where I have him starting his own political party, and also one of my characters works for the DA's office and so works for him. So um, yes, he's he's fictionalized there. One of the things that he did to take down the Bunko ring was to create a fake office of his own, just as they created fake offices to to lure in these these guys. He created one and he created a fake racehorse betting establishment. And they would they would uh delay the the races just a little bit so that they knew who won the race. And um I don't know if this is starting to sound familiar, but they'd place their bets and then the races would be delayed so that they already knew who was going to win the race, and they managed to get a lot of the Bunko guys that way because they started to come in and bring in their clients and and play that, and then it was run by the DA's office. I when I was reading it in in Philip Van Syß's book, I started thinking, this is the sting.

SPEAKER_00: 37:10

This is the sting, the sting. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 37:14

Oh, that was it was yeah. Yes, and I talked to Cindy Van Syß, I said, I was reading his book and I kept thinking, this is the plot of the sting. And she said, My grandfather sold that story to Paramount at one time in the 1940s.

SPEAKER_00: 37:31

I thought, oh my god they sat on it for another 30 years because that was in the 70s, right? 1970s. Yeah, it was made in the 70s.

SPEAKER_02: 37:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 37:39

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02: 37:40

She said too that he must have sold it for a pittance because you know the family never saw anybody.

SPEAKER_00: 37:48

I gotta go back and watch that now. So, what is it about this character, Philip Van Syß, that resonates with you?

SPEAKER_02: 37:57

I think it's just the unstoppable integrity. It's in everything he does. He put off his own wedding to go down and research the Ludlow massacre. He he fought so hard to try to get the truth out. And instead, um, Elias Ammons and the powers that be, they dismissed all the charges against the Nick Colorado National Guardsmen while they pursued 400 charges against strikers and put them in jail. And so, and but he kept saying, you know, this is wrong, and he stayed with it and he saw it through. And he never gave up on the fight for justice, and he gave never gave up on the fight for right. And that's what makes him so fascinating, fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_00: 38:45

What do you want people who are listening to know? What's the most important thing you want them to know about him?

SPEAKER_02: 38:54

About him or about about my books?

SPEAKER_00: 38:57

About him particularly, because I know that that was the you know, this character in history was somebody that you wanted to talk about. Um then that's also a good follow-up question. So keep that one for next. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 39:11

Well, first of all, I just wish people knew that he had existed and and they recognized that name because that name should have a higher recognition. Um, as I said, you know, the detention center is named that now, but I don't I don't think people connect it, and I don't think people have any idea. And I'm sure there's a plaque inside the detention center that that tells something. However, detention centers aren't exactly places that you go to visit, you know, unless you're to read history plaques, not usually.

unknown: 39:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 39:43

So I I want people to know um who he was and how much he contributed to the state of Colorado and to Denver. Because I think that's important. I think it's important that we realize these people who built this state were really made of a certain kind of block that was just.

SPEAKER_00: 40:00

I I you know I keep thinking when you're talking about this, uh Clara Brown, Aunt Clara, she's another undervalued character on the um historical landscape of Colorado. And there are a lot of people like that here from Colorado. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 40:20

Colorado was the first in many things. It was the first state to send a woman to the Democratic National Convention in 1908. It was the first state to have a superintendent of public schools. Mary C. C. Bradley was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools in the 1918, 1920, somewhere around in there. And also she became the president of the National Education Association. We were the first state to come up with the juvenile uh court system. Judge Ben Lindsay invented that, and I'm not going to be able to remember her name off the top of my head, but his assistant also sat on the bench, and she was the first woman to sit on the bench to hear cases. And she did that through the juvenile courts in Colorado. There are so many firsts that happen in Colorado.

SPEAKER_00: 41:18

I think we have the first gay governor. Yes, overly gay governor. I think we're still there's still a lot of things like that. It does seem to be part of our uh character, our historical and present-day character.

SPEAKER_02: 41:32

Yeah. But um, yeah, I'd I want people to know that. And then as far as my books go, I write these books with a set of fictional characters, but I try to bring in the historical characters in a fair and just way so that I am I'm presenting them in the light in which they actually acted historically. I try not to make judgments, but I try to bring them in and have them actually say things that they said or something that's very similar to what they said. And what I want my readers to do is to go and look at the history, go and see who Philip Van Syß was, read the Westward article, read the Denver Post article, um, look up the KKK in the 1920s, read Robert Goldberg's wonderful book called Um The Hooded Empire, um, The Hooded Empire by Robert Goldberg, which tells all about who was in the KKK and how it was built and and and um how it it got as much political force as it did and power. And I want people to do that, I want them to understand history so that we don't do it again, so that we don't hear these same um same things again.

SPEAKER_00: 42:49

I wonder what he would think now if he saw what was going on. And you know, we need so it's almost like we need somebody like like him right now to fight for justice and to you know, because I worry that all the momentum that has been gained is gonna, you know, uh slowly stop. When I hear these stories, I think we're here again.

SPEAKER_02: 43:15

Yeah, um, it's the same conversation 100 years later. And that that to me is just tragic. And it isn't just the KKK in 1920 and uh the white supremacist movement now. It's things like birth control, it's things like the role of women in politics and in the workplace. Um, it's things like saving the environment. Teddy Roosevelt said we have to, and Teddy Roosevelt's, you know, a checkered character, but all the same. He said we have to conserve the earth, we have to preserve the environment. He said exactly the same things we're hearing now from the environmental movement and have been hearing since the 70s, the 60s, 70s. And so I just keep thinking, why aren't we learning from our history? Why why don't we we stop this and and say this has happened before, let's look at it and then let's learn from it. But we don't.

SPEAKER_00: 44:10

It seems like we don't. Oh, on that note. Yes, but you know, I don't want to leave it on that note. I'm trying to pull something out that's optimistic. And you know, at any given point in time, we do have that ability to recognize the truth, and maybe that's all that we can do is have people have those epiphenal moments, and there is a way to to recognize what is right and what isn't. And I think that your character in history today that we talked about is an example of one of those people that I so admire that I wish I had whatever they're whatever they had. I wish I was more like that. And so, you know, maybe that's it. It's all about your character and the essential part of him, which is the truth. What is the truth? And I think we all recognize it when we see it.

SPEAKER_02: 45:03

Right, yes, yeah. I do tend to deal with that in the trilogy. What's the truth and what's right, and how do we react to these horrible situations in which we're sometimes put? I I do that with my Red Cross woman with my with the my young man in the trenches with the American Expeditionary Force. I do that with my uh politician. I have a politician that I've created who runs for governor during the 1920s and runs actually against the KKK governor for a while, but it doesn't make it through the primary because I have to keep with history. But um, I have these characters who who wrestle with right and with wrong and with trying to make things right and trying to do what's right and trying to put aside their self-interest. At times they manage it and at times they half manage it, and even half managing it, I think that's a step forward. That's a positive thing.

SPEAKER_00: 45:58

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 45:59

So that's one of the things I try to do is to make make my characters come to truth.

SPEAKER_00: 46:04

Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about that maybe we didn't discuss or I didn't ask you?

SPEAKER_02: 46:11

Well, um what I'm going to be working on now, uh, my next next project, writing project, I'm actually taking the women in my family who came to Colorado and arrived in Colorado between the year 1866, and then um I'm I'm going to end it around the 1940s. But these are women who truly built something out of their lives. The first woman who came, my great-great-grandmother, uh Jane, she left Arboreth Scotland and got on a boat to America and came to Chicago in 1860, 1866, and um she had a two-week-old baby. So you talk about somebody who's who's got guts.

SPEAKER_00: 47:06

Yeah, right. That that wasn't an easy journey, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 47:10

No, no, and then they ended up in Chicago and they were there until the Chicago fire, and that's when they came to Colorado in night in 1871. They came to Colorado in 1872 and homestead it. But I want to write about her. I want to write about my my aunt Jessie McGregor, my great aunt Jessie McGregor, who was the first woman to graduate from the Royal Uh Medical College in um the University of Edinburgh with a degree in surgery. And was uh the partner of the famous Elsie Inglis, who went on in World War I to set up the Scottish Women's Hospital units um in Croatia during World War I.

SPEAKER_00: 47:50

So let's go back to um your ancestor, your great-great-grandmother, who comes over from Scotland, and you talk about she ends up in Colorado um as a homesteader. Now, Lost Ranch, um, is it Lost Ranch books? That's my publishing imprint.

SPEAKER_02: 48:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 48:09

Yeah, your publishing imprint. And that that hails back because I did read your um a little bit on your website about the fact that that's where you came from. That's where you started, that that's where your roots were, and it was that homestead.

SPEAKER_02: 48:24

Yes, yes, that homestead. And that's I'm writing.

SPEAKER_00: 48:27

I love that kind of continuity. I love that connection to history when we have something as tangible as that. Is the um is it still there? Is the ranch still there?

SPEAKER_02: 48:36

No, not no, it's it's a housing development.

SPEAKER_00: 48:40

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 48:44

That's why it's called Lost Ranch.

SPEAKER_00: 48:47

Okay, that there you go. That makes sense. But you can still go there and say this is where it was over there. If we want to be covered households over there, that was where the barn was.

SPEAKER_02: 48:59

Ah, yes, yes, yes, but yeah, I want to I want to continue with those women because my my great aunt or my great-grandmother Martha was incredible. She she built up a lot of that ranch. She was a she was a dealer, a wheeler dealer in terms of land, and she also bought her own property. My grandmother worked with the March of Dimes and was honored on the national level for her work with charity. My grandfather, who was married to her, um, was the soil conservation head of soil conservation um for a long time. And then um one of my distant cousins worked in an aircraft factory during World War II and um helped build for the military. And so there are all these women who have these interesting lives. There are more, there are others too throughout there, including my own mom. And they have these interesting lives. And, you know, these are just regular, these are just plain women. Their names aren't recognized anywhere they aren't detention center or any sort of other building. These are women who who've store whose stories have not been told yet.

SPEAKER_00: 50:03

And I want to so is this gonna be a collection of short stories? Is it gonna be a novel? Is it gonna be a series of novels?

SPEAKER_02: 50:11

It's gonna be, I think right now I'm looking at a series of short stories or vignettes, sort of a vignette thing that focuses in on each woman. Um, but I'm not sure. Since some of these women, for example, my great-grandmother, her story runs from um the 1890s when she married my great-grandfather all the way up to uh 1940, and some interesting things happen all along. I don't know that I can tell it in one sitting. It may be, you know, she may crop up in two or three of the vignettes or something like that. I don't quite have the structure, but I have most of the stories.

SPEAKER_00: 50:47

That's awesome. I know we have that in common, but you are a great writer. I'm more of a I like to tell stories in multimedia different ways, which is how the podcast has come up because I like to hear other people's stories too, uh, especially historical stories. They everything you told me today was I was gripped. I was like in the whole time. And these are real people that you know populated our history, our historical landscape. And you know, I love that. And so we have that in common. We like to connect to our histories and tell those stories. Um, I'm not a prolific writer, I've been writing the same book for 11 years. Or actually, yeah, probably it's a series.

SPEAKER_01: 51:31

That's my speed.

SPEAKER_00: 51:34

But I I think that yeah, I'm really impressed with with what you've done and and how you continue to move forward and to be driven by that. Thank you so much for sharing these stories. And uh thank you, Anne-Marie. Yeah, and I I you know I would love to have you back when you're maybe a little bit deeper into or or done with this project that you're working on now about the uh women in your family. Lori Mar Wasman, thank you so much for being here today.

SPEAKER_02: 52:04

Thank you, Anne-Marie. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00: 52:08

There you have it, friends. To find out more about Lori, her work, where to find her books, Philip Van Sice, and the movie Fashioned After His Takedown of the Bunko Ring, be sure to check out our episode notes. Thanks for joining us. Have a great week.