LIVING HISTORY
25
arrive in Fort Pierce with quit claims for
R.R. to sign, and in the process a check
would be handed over to his father.
Bob Gladwin’s memoirs said that Stephen
worked in the Jackson-Luce-Gladwin
store and also worked at Mim’s
Blacksmith shop and was a volunteer
firefighter. Bob also recalled that his
brother was mechanically inclined and
was good at working on Fords.
Stephen was eight years older than
Bob, and Bob wrote that he remembered
little else about him, except for his generosity
as a gift-giver. My grandmother
for years kept a vase Stephen had given
her, refusing to throw it away even after
it had broken, my aunt, Susan Gladwin
Enns Stans, recalls. Also passed along
in the family was a small table-top
bookcase Stephen had hand-built for
his mother, Florence.
“I do remember him giving me an
erector set on Christmas,’’ Bob Gladwin
wrote in his memoir of his brother. “He
couldn’t have given me anything better.’’
In his memoir, Bob also mentioned
a change in the family’s fortunes that
altered the family’s dynamic around
1915: Jackson-Luce-Gladwin went bust,
with R.R. losing almost everything. Reinventing
himself, R.R. bought property
in a deal brokered by Rupert “Pop’’
Koblegard at Fort Pierce Farms, north
of Indrio Road, where R.R. set about
planting citrus groves. The change in
fortunes meant that the family moved
away from the heart of downtown to
remote woods nine miles away, living
first in what Bob Gladwin described as
a shack until a larger home was eventually
built.
Stephen Gladwin apparently didn’t
make the move to Fort Pierce Farms,
with Bob Gladwin writing that the last
time he had seen him, he was living at
a boarding house on Second Street. My
search for documents or newspaper accounts
of Stephen Gladwin pretty much
end at that time as well. For years, I had
assumed that he went straight into the
service from Fort Pierce. But another
discovery changed that narrative.
Besides Bob Gladwin’s memoir, the
only family documents my search for
family relics related to Stephen Gladwin
yielded were a photo of him in
his Army uniform squatting, a plaque
given to his parents on his death, now
owned by my cousin, Stephen Enns,
57, who was named after the soldier,
and most puzzling of all — a $1,000 life
insurance policy he took out in 1916.
The Army photo, which was later made
into a painting by Nataly Nijinsky that
still hangs at the American Legion, is >>
A life insurance policy Stephen Gladwin purchased
when he was 19 revealed that he had
moved away from Fort Pierce before he enlisted
in the U.S. Army. The policy was likely sold to
him by William Augustine Shands, after whom
Shands Teaching Hospital is named
Stephen Gladwin’s death certificate revealed the cause of his demise as influenza.
Stephen Gladwin’s siblings a few months before his death: Bob, 14, Margaret, 16, and, far right,
Marion, 19. The girl second from right is only known as ‘Helen S.’