2409 S. Vine Urbana, Illinois 61801 - Richard R. Grayson, MD

Missouri. She lived in a half-way house in Farmington. About 1970 she was in Elgin State Mental Hospital
in Elgin, Illinois.
It was hard for relatives to make contact with Emilie - she insisted on being loved, but gave no love in
return. She found fault with everybody and everything, even her own daughters, who tried hard to take care
of her and suffered from the rejection. Birthday presents would be criticized and discarded or given away. It
was clear to those who loved her that this behavior was entirely due to her illness, and without it she would
have been a lovable person with a good sense of humor and an appreciation of the beauties of nature and
joys of close companionship. Later, in the nursing home, she fed the birds every day.
Eventually she was released from the institutions and was able to live on her own in Iowa. She had a
fairly nice subsidized apartment in Woolstock, but eventually ended up in a single room occupancy hotel in
Iowa Falls. Her single room was packed with mementos of her relatives, old clothes, and her furniture was
relegated to a storage locker on the north side of town. Her room was not clean, and it was easy to imagine
her on the street as a bag lady were it not for her family and her income from social security.
During the 19807s, June cared for her long distance - for example, when she was hit by a car and had a
compound fracture of the arm, it was June's job to drive from St. Charles to Iowa, pick her up, and bring
her to a doctor in Illinois for treatment, because Emilie couldn't trust any of the doctors or hospitals in
Iowa. She visited St. Charles frequently, but could never stay there comfortably for more than a few weeks.
Emilie loved music, and she knew how to play the piano, mostly hymns and popular tunes. She also knew
how to play the harmonica. She loved to listen to June play hymns on the organ and piano, and said that
June played hymns more sweetly than anyone else she had heard. Later she managed to scrape together
$5000 to donate to the music program of Concordia College, a small mid-western liberal arts college. The
money went toward scholarships for undergraduate music majors, and she received word of concerts they
eventually gave.
Dead relatives would appear to her in hallucinations. She idolized her dead relatives, and felt an urgent
need to remain in Iowa, and to be buried in Iowa. She loved the Iowa countryside, the Iowa people, and the
Iowa weather, especially the snowy cold Iowa winters.
After June died in 1991, Emilie's medical condition declined, and her fear of neighbors and doctors
prevented her from getting prompt medical treatment.
Emilie had hallucinations. She believed that she had been abducted and tortured with laser beams, leaving
wounds on her skin which appeared to others as nothing more than age spots. She read newspaper accounts
of torture in Argentina, and saw advertisements for infrared remote control devices, and concluded that her
torture was conducted by remote control. Then she wrote letters to the FBI begging for investigation and
apprehension of those unknown persons who were beating and torturing her by remote control.
Eventually she wound up in a Des Moines hospital psychological ward suffering from congestive heart
failure, but demanding to be treated for laser beam torture. The family was concerned that if she were
released, she would ignore her medications, and decline again, so daughter Janice took her to her home in
Houston, Texas. Eventually she ended up in a nursing home there, where she spent the last of her days.
There she continued her habit of scanning the Fort Dodge and Dayton newspapers for items of interest to
her; these were either announcements concerning relatives, or political items of interest. She was a good
letter writer, and would accompany each letter with several newspaper clippings, with the interesting parts
underlined. She was truly intelligent, and always kept her wits. She was able to complete most newspaper
crossword puzzles.
She objected strongly to me researching the Kinne family tree, and claimed that her beloved Kinne
realtives belonged to her alone. When Jan, Lisa, and I visited her mother's birthplace, Grafenhainichen, in
1995, we discovered that Emilie's mother had no father listed on her birth record in 1865. Perhaps Emilie
felt ashamed of this, and was trying to hide it from us. It is still a mystery to us how Emilie's mother arrived
in this country as a child, and who William Reichenbach really was, if he wasn't Emilie's mother's father.
We also have Sophie Miller [5] - her husband is supposedly William Reichenbach. Is it the same William
Reichenbach?
Recent magazine articles tell us that you can live much longer if you are underweight. Janice thinks
Emilie was anorexic and bulimic, and that this explained her being underweight. It might even explain her
longevity. Near the end, she even survived pneumonia, despite declining to take the penicillin offered by the
doctors.