Louis Philip Trutter Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

in theaters and. ..do you want to hear all this? Anyway, I think; this is an in~esting story fibout
Kitty. Her father would have none of it that she wanted to go to the Universh of Iowa because
they had such a wonderful speech and theater department there. "No fifteen apd a half daughter of
mine is going to a state university." His only child, tough old German guy ,a)d so on and not
terribly German, oh God, he hated the Germans. He had a record, I have it hqre someplacq, of
Madame Schurnann Hetl. Ever hear of her? She was a great, great German $nger and it was a
twelve inch platter and he wrapped it and wrote on it. . .this was World War 4. . ,When the war
is over, break it and destroy it." (Chuckle) He was a Captain in World War
He was older and
he was here and it's a long story about how he saved a lot of lives. He was i charge of. . .not
getting away from going to the university . .but he was in the National Guarf a Captain in the
National Guard and it was very close to the end of World War I and they weIp still gathering in
the draftees and stuff you know and they were shipping them up to Rockfordi Camp Grant or
something, up at RocHord, and about that h e the flue epidemic was beginag to break out and
I don't know, I don't think they ever knew what it was, and the guys would wme down with
these lung things and they'd die in two or three or four days and it got so bad, I even got this
fiom one of the doctors in the Army up there, he said, "They didn't know wlqat to do with it.
They were dying like flies there in the camp. The only thing they could do was get garaged and
lay them out in there like cord wood and so on. And here came orders to sed up a new batch of
draftees to Rockford to Kitty's father and he countermanded the order for thqm to be shipped,
three or four hundred anyway, ship them right into that mess, and he said, "I'm going to
countermand that order, They're not going, they're not going up into that mqss, and they can
court marshal1 me if they want to but they are not going." And he sent the oqders out that he was
not going and I guess he got into a Little bit of trouble and then they woke ua to how, and so
those guys were not exposed to all this mess up there. Well anyway that's a 'ttle story on the
!
side. Most people don't know about Kitty's dad. Well anyway, he said Kitt will go down to
Montecello down in Godfrey there. And I used to tease her, she went to Mo+tecello Penitentiary
for Women, and she went two years there and after two years there, he let h$. go over there for
her junior and senior year in Iowa and she piled into the theater over there, dhe took astranomy,
she took advanced mathematics, everything and theater, and she was in a play in her senior year
written by her professor, a guy by the name of. . .the play was called "Green Grow the Lilacs" and
by, his name has slipped me and I know it just as well as. . .anyway she was in that play with dress
rehersals every day and every night after classes, and he would change the lines. "Well now Kitty,
maybe if you'd say it this way maybe it would sound better." Well that would change the queue
for the rest of them or maybe he would say to somebody else. . .they did thatright up to the last .
.His name, I think his name was Glenn Riggs. "Green Grow the Lilacs" and right up till the night
of dress rehearsal, they were still changing their lines and Kitty had one of th~
two female leads,
so they got through the play and not too many years later a couple of guys pqt it together a
musical and it became. . .
Q. Same name?
A. No. Oklahoma. Kitty would never go see Oklahoma in a movie on the stage or anything.
She wanted no part of it. (Chuckle) As much as she loved the theater.
I