A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [169]
King was devoted to his adoptive mother, Sarah, who outlived her husband by thirty-five years. She and her son lived together until her death in 1923. No matter the sinful manner by which the Kings came to adopt James, they were good parents to him.
King married once, in 1910 when he was thirty-five. His bride was Rose Weber, a German-born divorcee who had a seventeen-year-old son. The marriage did not last the decade, and they had no children, but King went on to live a full if lonely life. He enjoyed horseback riding, a favorite pastime, loved opera, and had an excellent art collection. Dr. King traveled to Europe seven times during his life, chiefly to attend lectures and medical conventions. For fourteen years, he was a professor of gynecology at the University of Buffalo School of Medicine.
The doctor had a devoted household staff that attended to all his comforts, but as an employer, he had some quirks. Saimi Pratt worked as his cook and live-in housekeeper for five years, but when she got married, he told her that her services were no longer required. It was King’s policy to have only single women working for him. The cook bore him no hard feelings and in fact thought so highly of him that his picture hung in her house long after he had dismissed her. The feeling was mutual; James King generously gave her $500 for her son’s education.
Dr. Milton Kahn, a promising young gynecologist, became King’s protégé. He and his bride, Ruth, were favored Sunday guests at King’s stately home at 1255 Delaware Avenue, a fivebedroom colonial decorated in high-end Kittinger furniture. Sunday dinners with King were formal events, with the fullcourse meal starting at one in the afternoon. Ruth Kahn found herself somewhat intimidated in his presence. “I was a new bride and very nervous. I listened more than I talked,” she recalled. Back in 1938, when the Kahns were newlyweds, there were rumors that King was Grover Cleveland’s out-of-wedlock son, but understandably, the couple never once raised the subject with him. Gossip about James King’s heritage persisted into his old age. It is an interesting footnote that notwithstanding his biological father’s historic importance to the Democratic Party, King was a Republican.
King was active until the end. In 1946, at age seventy, he attended a medical conference in faraway Peru. On March 9, 1947, he died at home. Preserving his privacy to the end, he told his nurse the day before his death, “If anyone calls, just say I am improving.” A funeral procession took his coffin to the King family plot in Warren, Pennsylvania, where he was buried next to his adoptive parents. So far as is known, he never reached out to Maria Halpin, or she to him.
Dr. King’s will was a carefully thought out document. All his possessions were doled out with a purpose. To his medical school he left the considerable sum of $480,000, plus Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the world’s first encyclopedia. The treasured work remains at Buffalo University to this day. King also remembered Dr. Kahn, bequeathing his protégé ten needles of radium. In those days, gynecologists in private practice had to have their own source of radium, which was used to treat ovarian cancer by injection of the radioactive element directly into the cancerous tissue.
King showed remarkable generosity to Mary Meek, a nurse who cared for Sarah King in the final years of her life. In recognition of her devotion to his mother, he