Central Christian Church

29 July 1923: The gray building just behind the church was the Warrington Apartments, one of many downtown apartment complexes catering to workers who had not yet been lured to suburban enclaves (see also Oxford Apartments one block up to the left where Laura Koppe lived). On the right the two-story residence at 1509 Main was the home of Emma Applebaum, widow of Louis, her daughter Gertrude and son Benjamin. Gertrude was Vice President of Beaman Applebaum, drug wholesaler and retailer, and Benjamin L. was secretary-treasurer of the firm. Accountant Samuel H. Abbot and his wife Doris also lived in this house, as well as Clarence A. Durkee, director of the First Baptist Church. Behind the viewer at 1502-1506 Main was Joseph Weingarten’s downtown grocery store.   

22 January 2014: Ground was being broken for Alliance Residential Downtown Apartment complex as this photograph was made, but by 9 September 2016 the 5-story apartment complex, christened Block 334, had risen from the erased parking lot. The site of Weingarten’s Grocery Store across the street behind the viewer at 1502-1506 Main has become a similar parking lot serving downtown workers and visitors.  

Postmarked: 29 July 1923; Houston, Tex. Stamp: 2c Carmine George Washington #554 

To: Marguerite Cook 
520 – 13th Ave. 
Rock Island Illinois 

​Message: 7/29/’23 
​Dear:- Surely you are recovering so nicely – Hope you’ll be “all well” right soon. Will answer your letter in a day or two. “Take keep yourself,” Better take a long rest – during hot weather anyway 

The author of the postcard is completely anonymous, leaving no clue as to their identity. The recipient, Marguerite Cook, was the daughter of Herbert Edgar Cook, a grocer in Rock Island, IL and Daisy Grace Strupp. Marguerite Rose was twenty years old when she received this postcard, living at home with her three brothers Harold Phillip, five years older, Clifford C, three years older, and Donald Jack, eleven years younger. She married Fred Boles, a streetcar operator, in 1930, who moved in with her family. Marguerite worked as a stenographer in a law office through about 1940 as Fred was a traveling salesman for bakery equipment with a home base in Rock Island.  

Frank Daniel Torrey was also from Rock Island, he married a Belgian immigrant, Madeline de Martelaere in 1922 and had a son Arthur Charles in 1925. At an early age Frank was apprenticed as a toolmaker and continued this throughout his working career. Some time between 1922 and 1939 he moved to Pontiac, Oakland County, MI where he worked in a truck plant. He divorced Madeline in 1939 and less than six weeks after the divorce was finalized he married Edna O. Fehser, while Madeline worked as a housemaid to support herself and their 14 year old son. Unfortunately Frank’s second marriage ended in divorce on 23 October 1944. 

​Marguerite Cook Boles divorced Fred Boles after 1940, and on 10 July 1948 in Pontiac, Oakland County, MI she married Frank Torrey. They lived in Michigan for some time but moved to Memphis, Shelby County, TN where Frank died in 1966 and was buried there in Forest Hill Cemetery. Marguerite died there 11 years later.