Clara Kuck

 

Clara Elizabeth Kuck Foot

Clara Kuck was the youngest daughter of my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck. As a quick refresher, John Kuck's first wife Mary was my direct ancestor but she and five of her children died of diphtheria within months of each other between December 1878 and May 1879. John would remarry to the younger sister of his younger brother's wife and have three more children, the middle being Clara seen above. Note, until recently, this is the only picture I had of Clara as an adult.

Clara graduated high school and took up teaching nearby in Sibley, Iowa, still living in her parent's house in Charles City, Iowa. Unlike the rest of her full and half siblings, Clara wasn't in a rush to get married and start a family and was still single at age 27 when her mother died in 1910. But the death of her mother definitely spurred her into action and the following year she obtained a passport to go to Germany and sometime in 1911 left. According to her passport, she was planning on studying at Berlin University though of what subject, I do not know. I do know she traveled outside of Germany during her time as she would give talks later in life on her travels in Italy as well as Germany. She arrived back home in July of the following year and took a temporary job as a bookkeeper until she could find other work.

That work arrived in the form of a teaching job so she packed up and left her home of Charles City, Iowa and moved to Great Falls, Montana. There she taught languages, German, Latin, French and of course English as well as teaching drama and acting. Her father, my 3rd great grandfather, died midway through her time in Great Falls in 1916 but she remained rooted there for another four years before her adventuresome spirit told her to move on at the age of 36 and still very much single.

Clara headed about as far as one can get from Great Falls, Montana and moved to Boston, Massachusetts where for the next decade or so, she became scarce in history's paper trail. During that time however, she attended the Curry School of Expression and honed her speaking, diction and acting skills and even taught there for a period of three years. I only know this due to some newspaper articles and her obituary.

At the age of 41, she once again packed up her bags and headed about as far as she could in the opposite direction again, this time landing in Salt Lake City, Utah where she opened up a private studio for teaching the dramatic arts. She remained there for five or so years before heading further west to San Francisco, California. Once again she taught in the school system, this time at a college and offered classes that took advantage of her years and training in Boston. 

Finally, sometime in the 1930's already in her mid 50's, Clara finally decided to settle down and married a ship designer named Herbert Foot who worked for the Navy near Los Angeles, California. Perhaps because of him and the times she was living in, or perhaps for other reasons, she stopped working and became a homemaker for the remainder of her life. 

She was a prolific writer throughout her life and papers nationwide carried some of her poetry, short stories and mentioned her writing a play or two.

Husband Herbert Foot would die in Apr of 1966 at 78 and Clara died in August of the same year at age 83. Both were buried near her father, my third great grandfather John Kuck in Charles City.

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These were bulk of the facts that I knew about Clara Kuck before I was contacted by a kind Samaritan in Colorado Springs, Colorado asking what I knew about her. That Samaritan had found Clara's personal photo album and postcard collection in a architectural salvage shop there and rescued it, hoping to find a better home. I later learned that the owner of the architectural salvage shop is a historian herself and had found the albums and boxes of other important family artifacts in a house that she had bought and was in the process of fixing up. Instead of tossing them in the dumpster, she recognized the significance and boxed them all up and put them in the corner of her shop until she could go through them and find homes for them herself. The Good Samaritan came along first though. The shop owner has promised to keep me in mind when she looks through the remaining boxes at some point in the future and will notify me if anything more of interest shows up. 

In my previous post, I didn't know for sure who would end up with the album but I am proud to say that I was selected and the Good Samaritan graciously mailed it to me late last week and I graciously compensated her for her purchase and mailing costs. Hopefully in a couple more days as I write this, that album will arrive at my doorstep and the real adventure begins. I had pondered what I would have to write about this winter with no big projects in store but fate has ensured that I wouldn't go without plenty of writing subjects. 

Edited to add that the parcel arrived with not one album but two along with a large college sorority print and some sort of school album. I am already in the process of preserving them and trying to understand what information they contain.