This strange little experience probably doesn’t signify very much to those who were there but I think it gives us an insight into some fascinations that are almost genetic to the human psyche.
My Aunt Joyce Kienzle, who was married to my father’s younger brother Lester, had a male cousin who was known in the family as having some sort of mental problem. He had been in and out of institutions in the late 40s and early 50s, and we all know the reputation of such institutions in those days. They probably destroyed as many people as they helped, and it was common for people to be locked in such institutions who were there solely because no one wanted the responsibility of helping them recover their mental health, or had the ability to do so.
At some point in the early 1950s, Aunt Joyce’s cousin was reported missing from his home and the search was on. I am not sure how many days it went on, but no trace of him was found. Somehow, the authorities got the idea that he had drowned in the Delaware Canal in the vicinity of the Easton Sewage Treatment Plant on South Delaware Drive. As the canal was slack water with no current, anything or anyone who fell in and didn’t get out more or less stayed where they fell in. This would have been a few years before the Hurricane Diane Flood in August of 1955, of that I am sure.
I’m sure we have all heard of people bringing there families out to see executions, in other countries, as well as in the USA, at least until executions were put behind prison walls. Getters Island, north of the mouth of the Bushkill Creek on the Delaware river, was named after the condemned man who was hanged there many years ago, and history tells us that people took their families and had picnic lunches that day, on the island as well as on the nearby shoreline. I remember our father taking my brother and I and that the road in that area was lined with the cars and trucks of a large number of curious people who came to see a body pulled from the canal after it had been drained.
No body was found, no doubt disappointing a lot of people. Several weeks later, a person walking in the woods on the western end of Morgan’s hill near the present day site of the Chrin Landfill found Aunt Joyce’s cousin, who had hanged himself from a tree, playing to an audience of none rather than the throng that had gathered previously.