Linked from A Most Horrible Tragedy! Wichita Businessman Shoots His Wife and Himself
Transcribed from https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-wichita-beacon/136550133/
Johnnie Johnston’s Passing at Kansas City Revives Memory of Black Residence
Reports from Kansas City Monday telling of the death of Johnnie Johnston revived in Wichita many memories of the Johnston and Robert Black families.
Johnnie Johnston was a grandson of Robert Black. The Blacks were very wealthy in the early days and their progression across the pages of Wichita’s history is lined in glamour and tragedy.
It is not definitely recalled when Mr. Black and his wife came here but it was quite early. Mr. Black possessed then of considerable wealth, bought a farm with a big house located on Douglas between Hydraulic and Kansas.
From the wealth possessed and that gained from the farm he founded a sizeable fortune, indeed, and built, among other ventures here, the Manhattan hotel which he owned and operated at the time of his death shortly after the turn of the century.
Not much data is available concerning the elder Mr. Johnston before he married a daughter of the Blacks. In fact not much ever was known of the man until he and his family were cast tragically upon the consciousness of the town and countryside…it was sometime in the spring, either of 1886 or 1887, that he entered the Black mansion where he and his wife and four children lived and fatally wounded his wife, then shot himself to death.
That event rocked the city from its top-flight society circles to the run of the street, the two families moving with equal ease and frequency in the encompassed stratas.
Johnnie and his brother Kirk and the two sisters were cared for then by the rich and indulgent grandfather. The two sons occupied a place in the city, as they matured, that was unique…they had plenty of money, were always immaculately dressed and never worked. They trained with the sporting element of the city, a factor that formed the setting for Johnnie’s death in Kansas City last week.
The Black mansion became something of a specter following the murder and suicide. It was of brick, huge, dark and foreboding. Tenants were hard to find, and, strangely, ranged from Tom Mahan, Anhauser-Busch agent here, to the Sisters of St. Joseph who lived there while they were rebuilding their convent on Mt. St. Mary’s which had been destroyed by fire.
Fire also took its toil on the old Black mansion. That event is recalled by Capt. Bus Baldwin, 901 Litchfield. It was not a very disastrous fire, but led to the demolition of the house which, as Dave Leahy, dean of Kansas newspaper men recalls, gave way to a fine settlement of cottages long before the McKnight family came to build up the estate from which the East high school grounds were taken.
Cap. Baldwin said his department, whose chief was A. G. Walden, got out there (that was quite a spell from town then) with their horse-drawn equipment in time to save the house from being burned to the ground. But occupancy thereon out was sketchy to say the least.
Johnnie and Kirk, also dead, left Wichita for Kansas City about 1905 or 1906.
Of the death of Johnnie and the services, the Kansas City Times yesterday said:
Johnnie Johnston was dead, friendly Johnnie Johnston.
The preacher mulled over what he should say of this man whose thirty years in Kansas City had centered so logically and utterly at Twelfth and Baltimore, in the strata of that intersection where horse races are run in short, pithy sentences from a loudspeaker, where baseball is played on tickers, not diamonds, and football is a matter of mathematics, not cheering sections.
Racing Form His Literature
The Facing Form was tops in literature to Johnnie Johnston, this little, short, fat man with blue eyes and rosy cheeks, always immaculate beneath the lights of Twelfth street. Even when he reached the early 50’s, there still was a matter of two or three manicures a week.
Not a big splash on Twelfth street. No part in the rackets that some times intruded into that chance-calculating neighborhood. Nothing shady about Johnston at all. His smile was hearty and genuine. His respectability by all the unaltering standards of appraising neighbors, was never denied.
There were no relatives for the preacher to interview and console. Johnnie Johnston lived alone at the Aladdin hotel. His brother, Kirk Johnston, once a druggist of that neighborhood and before prohibition a partner in the McMahon saloon, was dead. Not a relative anywhere.
Happy in the Throng
With a partner, Johnston ran a liquor store on Baltimore avenue across from the Hotel Baltimore. You were likely to see the stout little man out on the sidewalk, happy to be in the throngs, rather than back in the shop.
That was the key to Johnnie Johnston; he liked people, all sorts of people. He always was watching the crowds go by, the crowds that were not a mass, but changing groups of actual, real individuals.
The Rev. Earl A. Blackman, wondering just what he should say over Johnnie Johnston, recalled in his mind a strange funeral he had preached within the month, recalled himself standing in a chapel, facing rows of empty chairs, waiting twenty minutes, five more. Still no living man or woman in the chapel but the two men of the funeral director’s staff. Then the preacher had gone ahead with a service in the still empty chapel. It was a formal service, for he knew naught to say of the dead man, save he had amassed some money, but of friends none.
Different at This Funeral
Pondering, the preacher reached the Eylar chapel on Linwood boulevard at Woodland avenue. Already the chapel was crowded. Twelfth street had put its charts and racing forms aside. There were the pallbearers, men of substance by all the measurements of that world, whose day begins two hours before the downtown banks close.
The Rev. Earl A. Blackman had no hesitancy this time. He preached a funeral sermon with eloquence and his theme was friendship. Johnnie Johnston wasn’t a millionaire, not a “big shot” by any stretch of the imagination, but in his own way, in the town spot of his own choosing, he had been a success.