The Emporia Gazette, 29 Jul 1937, Thu

Mrs. Clara Biddle Davis, of Philadelphia, Pa., who was born and reared in Emporia, has been chosen a member of the executive commission of the fashion congress in that town. Her picture is appearing in the Philadelphia papers.

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The Emporia Gazette, 14 Feb 1938, Mon

MRS. SEYMOUR DAVIS DEAD

News has been received by Emporia friends of the death last Monday of Clara Biddle Davis, widow of Seymour Davis, of Philadelphia, Pa. Her death followed a 2-days' illness. The funeral services and burial were at Philadelphia Thursday.

Mrs. Davis was the only daughter of the late Dr. G. A. Biddle, prominent early day physician in Emporia, and Mrs. Biddle. She grew up in this town, and was educated in the east. Dr. Biddle died many years ago, and Mrs. Biddle died in 1934. Mrs. Davis was in her middle sixties. She leaves no immediate relatives.

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The Emporia Gazette, 17 Feb 1938, Thu

GOLDEN GIRL

This town in all its 81 years of life has produced but one golden girl, Clara Biddle. From the day she rolled out of her cradle until the day she was lowered into her grave, she lived, in her own heart at least, and somewhat in the memory of those who loved her in this town, a purely romantic figure. It was as though her destiny had marched under a star that set its course in irresponsible joy and felicitous adventure. Now she is dead, having passed away in that narrowing circle which lone city dwelling women in their sixties find as their inheritance. She went leaving no chick or child, brother or sister, so her story may be told.

She was a beautiful child when she was a toddler. She had a milk-white skin and happy brown eyes and flaxen curls. Her mother kept her in sunbonnets to shield her skin (and they were gay, lively sunbonnets). But freckles came, not big, splashy, pancake freckles but little dotty freckles that accentuated the bleached ivory and rose of her complexion. She must have known about her beauty in her early childish consciousness. For it began to infect her life at its very roots. Certainly the infection brought no sorrow. She began early to dramatize herself in her heart as a person of consequence because, primarily, she was beautiful. She took honors like a princess in her childhood, and in her girlhood she began to imagine gorgeous things about herself. From that point it was easy for her to realize that she was a creature destined to be loved. When most little girls were interested in skipping ropes and tom-boy adventures, pull-away, playing tag, and shameless tree climbing, and when others were putting away their dolls with secret sorrow, Clara Biddle, in her middle teens, was falling in love, terribly, and with desperate excitement. She was blowing bubbles in her life, irridescent (sic) bubbles which she thought were real. But plain littles girls and mothers of girls who were busy with high school, and home duties, learning their algebra and their sewing, their cooking and their homely duties, said, "Well, you just can't believe a thing that child says." For she built gaudy fairy stories about herself in all her daily doings.

Then she met Joe King, a good looking young man a few years her senior, and the whole town, the little village that was Emporia in the late Eighties and early Nineties, buzzed with the love story of Joe and Clara. How glamorous she made it! And then, of course--it just had to end one beautiful way. So--tragic as it was--Joe died. They had to hold Clara from fainting into his grave. She put on black and it was an emotional time. Everyone on the street turned toward her and said, "That is the girl whose lover died." And did she know it and revel in it? But she didn't let her weeping redden her eyes nor dull her complexion. Her hair glowed like an aura. And so she went away to school and came back--and going away to school was a great adventure in this town 50 years ago or so. And in the shimmering nature of things she had to have that, too. She had to have every giddy adventure that there could be in a young girl's life.

Then following her star, she met Frank Miller. Frank was a tall, heavy, almost fat, swarthy, devil-may-care young blade about town, who drove an oil wagon when the delivery of gasoline and kerosene in this town was in its infancy. Gasoline was used for cook stoves and kerosene for lamps. But Frank had a spanking good gray team and a richly rumbling wagon. He dressed in overalls and was greasy by day and proud of it. At night he bloomed in one of the first dress suits the younger generation sported, was a good dancer as fat men are who are light on their feet, and the other girls all knew that he was a grand lover. Naturally Clara was proud of herself. And what a handsome couple they made on the dance floor. And it was a grand affair between Clara and Frank, one of those hot, passionate, gleaming affairs, and State street where Clara lived in the days when it was the center of fashion, heard all about it. The girls to whom she told the story of her intrigues and amours stared at her with an envy slightly tinged by the fact that they didn't believe a word she said. They were deeply wrong. For it was all true even if it was not exactly factual. It was the sort of story that was set in the stars, whether it happened on earth or not.

Clara had the loveliest clothes and she wore them like a princess with an air. No petite and debonair figure was she. She was regal, five feet eight or nine in height and never skinny, with curves everywhere where they belonged and where most girls couldn't get them, but never a pound overweight. A Neosho valley Venus, and she knew that, too! How her brown eyes glowed. How her lips arched in smiles that told too much and really meant too little. For she was a teaser, not a light woman. The girls used to say she loved herself in her underclothes--minual Psyche, reflecting her image in the pool was no more delighted with what she saw than was Clara at her mirror. In those days she needed little make-up. She was, indeed, a splendid creature.

She extended her sphere of influence a little. The Neosho valley could not hold her. She was known in Topeka, Kansas City, Wichita, and people turned their heads when she passed them. That did not leave her cold, either. She lived for her beauty and as beauty is ethereal, intangible, vague and hazy, so she floated above the earth, and all earthly things, in her thoughts, in her imaginings and in her conversation. She lived in a dream world where romance was her flesh and blood. In Topeka she ran across Seymour Davis, a slim, sophisticated young architect from the East, brought here by the Populists as state architect, who had been around the world and who had an eye for beauty. He seemed to have rather too much experience for his own good with the ladies, God bless 'em. He and Clara had one of those short, sharp, catastrophic love affairs which ended in a sudden marriage--of course it was an elopement. Clara would have had nothing less! Her smart young Lochinvar of a husband took her on a honeymoon to the twilight's purple rim, and Frank Miller was left stranded for a few months, and heart-broken. He and the boys around town drowned his sorrow together in the flowing bowl. Thus Clara left Emporia and went out into the big world.

Seymour Davis quit his job as state architect. He had some money, plenty, apparently, for a life of artistic leisure, and the happy couple roamed over the earth, Paris, Egypt, India. Such lovely letters as Clara wrote to the girls! And sometimes she came like a sunrise back into the town with her handsome young husband. It was like the visit of royalty. She was still beautiful. Not until her mid-fifties did time ever begin to dent her.

Like the warrior bold in an old song she lived for love and died! But living in the hazy sunshine of a romantic life, stories of her adventures did not grow leaden. They also glowed. She was always sending postcards to the home of girls. One time she sent a postcard showing a lovely garden party in Bermuda where she and her husband were sitting were sitting under the palms and a fashionable, glittering company of soldiers, sailors and armor plated diplomats were surrounding her. The legend on the postcard was: "Here we are in the Governor's garden, guests of honor at a luncheon," and the girls who received the cards batted their eyes and said, "Well, that certainly looks authentic." And then a year or so later, when one of the Emporia girls was walking along the streets of Bermuda, she saw a familiar sight, the big tourist hotel garden at luncheon time. The hometown girl remembered the postcards and the scene in the governor's garden. The picture at the luncheon was exactly the same, the ordinary, mill-run luncheon of the big tourist hotel. But Clara did not lose caste or standing. She really thought it was the Governor's luncheon, or thought she thought of it. She lived it in reality and it was true--to her.

Twenty years or so ago her husband took sick. His years began to pile up on him. His legs began to fail him and he was taken to his bed. She was devoted wife and nurse, still beautiful in her forties, still with a slight vague air of the angelic Christian martyr, never complaining, always smiling, showing her best points, preening as the romantic, hovering, devoted ministering fairy over a stricken man. Which was also a picture which delighted her heart. When her husband died she brought him home here for burial and the funeral was an artistic triumph.

Clara did well in Philadelphia society, in the really best society. She was a Biddle, a Kansas Biddle it is true, but in Philadelphia a Biddle is a Biddle, a consecrated creature in the inner social realms. Certainly Clara was not one to neglect the Biddleiferous character of her Emporia background. Her father, a well-to-do Emporia doctor, died 30 years ago and more. Her mother lived on here, a prosperous, kindly, sensible, good looking widow even in her sixties and seventies. Clara came back from time to time while her mother lived, to visit her and her husband's grave. She told many tales of her Philadelphia life. She really did live beautifully, in an apartment, a fashionable apartment, furnished with exquisite if rather dramatic taste; adorned with trophies from the ends of the earth. Her windows overlooked Rittenhouse Square, a most proper neighborhood. There she retained to the last her ineffable charm. Life and the years were gentle with her. Her face changed a bit with passing time, but it faded slowly, gracefully, leaving her in her sixties a handsome woman. Her height, her color, her animation, her lovely brown amorous eyes, her melliflous voice and her bell-like laugh--indeed, all her superb female charm still hovered like an echo around her as she walked through the twilight of maturity into the early dusk of age. Before decay reached her she died.

She lived for more than 50 years a romantic person. In all that time she never spoke a bitter word, never uttered an unkind word. With all her iridescent imaginings about life she was never envious, never spiteful, always sweet, always lovely, to the end--a figure out of a book. And never, through all its lovely, lively pages, which were life to her, did she step out of her character, for a hard moment. Never was she untrue to the childish vision in her heart--the golden girl. She will need very little redecorating to be the angel she always thought she was. And maybe really was? W.A.W. [William Allen White]

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The Emporia Gazette, 13 Jul 1938, Wed

CLARA BIDDLE DAVIS WILL RECORDED HERE

A transcript of the will of the late Clara Biddle Davis, who died in Philadelphia February 7 and who had property in Lyon county, has been filed at the office of Robert Hudkins, probate judge, by Robert L. Huggins, Emporia lawyer. The will of the former Emporian provided that Charles Grant Mitchell, Hollywood movie actor, receive Mrs. Davis' 153-acre Lakeside farm No. 1, near Emporia.

In June Mitchell came to Emporia to claim his inheritance. Mrs. Davis bequeathed her Lakeside farm, No. 2, to Eileen Vogel, of Milwaukee, Wis. Filing of the transcript of the will, which was probated in Philadelphia, in the Lyon county probate court is a formal step to show that the will has been probated and to prove title of the heirs to the Lyon county real estate.

WANTED NO PUBLICITY

In her will, Mrs. Davis asked that no inventories, appraisals or reports on her estate be required by the executors and specifically directed "no public accounts or inventory of my will be made public in any way by newspapers or printed reports."

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Her parents, Dr. Biddle and Alice Long Biddle, were disinterred from Maplewood Memorial Lawn Cemetery in Emporia, KS on 08 Dec 1936 and reinterred in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, PA. Her husband, Seymour Davis, was also disinterred from Maplewood Memorial Lawn Cemetery in 1936 and moved to Laurel Hill Cemetery.