Mabel Elizabeth Schmitz Obenchain (1903-2001)
Mabel Schmitz Obenchain was a 20th-century version of a "gentlewoman in reduced circumstances," the term used for once-well-to-do women forced to seek employment outside the home. The daughter of a prosperous family in Evanston, Illinois (her father was Weigh Master at Chicago's Board of Trade) she graduated from Northwestern University in 1924 and soon after married a handsome Evanston lawyer named Ralph Riley Obenchain. After three children and fifteen years of marriage Ralph died rather suddenly in 1939.
Ralph Riley Obenchain (1890-1939)
About the time Mabel married him
The Great Depression was almost over but Mabel had no assets. As her daughter has written at the Find A Grave site:
According to her Find-A-Grave obituary she joined with Louise Roote, editor of Capper's Weekly in Topeka, to write her first quilt book, All-Time Quilt Favorites in 1971.
The Obenchain case influenced another film. Cecil B. DeMille's 1922 Manslaughter starred Leatrice Joy who said she based her character on Madalynne Obenchain after observing in court during the many trials.
His film career on hold, Ralph returned to Evanston, where he married again in 1924.
"When Mabel was growing up in the early part of the 20th century, young women were never expected to work outside the home. But in 1939 Ralph died leaving her with three young children to support. Although a graduate of Northwestern University, as a widow with no income, circumstances forced her to attend night school in order to learn shorthand and typing. She secured a job working in the steno pool at Esquire magazine."
Smart enough to move up the journalism ladder, she found a job with the Famous Features Syndicate where she edited, wrote and publicized features for women, including quilts. Mabel wrote several quilt pattern booklets.
Her booklets published in the 1970s & '80s
must have sold many copies in dimestores around the country.
You can find them on Ebay and Etsy.
The design and the quilts reflect that Bicentennial era when
quilts were once-again popular.
The artist was Vera Lengel (1932-1997) whose spare modern style
defined the Famous Features booklets.
Mabel worked for Famous Features from 1943 until the 1980s, continuing to contribute quilting ideas after she retired to Rogers, Arkansas, where she was a founding member of the guild. She died in 2001 at the age of 97. Mabel who never remarried was buried next to Ralph in Indiana. Ralph must have been something, a "man in a million."
Madalynne Donna Connor Obenchain (1893- )
Any search for Ralph's name reveals that he was a famous feature himself in the 1920s. His first wife Madalynne Obenchain was a femme fatale flapper, accused of conspiring with one boyfriend to murder another boyfriend in Los Angeles in August, 1921.
Wedding announcement in the Northwestern alumni magazine
By that time she and Ralph had divorced after a short marriage in 1919 lasting four days before she told him she was in love with someone else. She was tried three (?) times for John Belton Kennedy's murder but never convicted.
Ex-husband Ralph was on her legal team during her first trial after quitting his job in Chicago to help her out. He paid for the lawyer for the second.
From a recent book on Madalynne's trials:
"Ralph Obenchain, handsome, athletic, and charismatic, gallantly turned up in court as a witness to defend her name and reputation...[He] became America's hero; even Madalynne's love letters to [the victim], read in court and causing Ralph to sink his head in his hand, did not shake his loyal assertion of her innocence. Few in court knew that his purpose in acting the forgiving husband was to pave the way for a film on the case in which he appeared...."Madalynne called the loyal ex-husband and incipient film star "a man in a million," a name that stuck. The movie starring Ralph as himself was A Man In a Million produced by Charles R. Seeling, which left few impressions. Apparently L.A. theaters refused to show it as too sensational. No word on Evanston movie houses.
The Obenchain case influenced another film. Cecil B. DeMille's 1922 Manslaughter starred Leatrice Joy who said she based her character on Madalynne Obenchain after observing in court during the many trials.
Both women's names are spelled wrong in this 1924 article.
You have to hand it to Mabel. Not only did she manage to raise their children well in Evanston on what she could earn herself, she kept that scandalous name until no one remembered Madalynne or Ralph and she was the only Obenchain in the newspapers.
Read about Ralph's first wife here:
Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press By Gordon Morris Bakken & Brenda Farrington:
What a woman!
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