I stumbled onto another friend, Judge Edward P. Coyne, whose biography is so rich that it won't all fit into my book about Jack and Blanca. The relevant parts are where their lives intersect: when Judge Coyne is the reason that Jack went to Chile, and when the judge stood up as best man at the wedding.
Born in upstate New York to Irish immigrants, the family all lived together on one big farm. He had several sisters and 2 brothers named John Henry Coyne (who also became a lawyer - judge) and Pascal Coyne. His father James died between the 1870 and the 1880 census, when Edward was between 10 and 20 years old. He continued living on the farm with his Uncle John until he was old enough to go off to college.
He became a lawyer with a flair for litigation, and eventually worked his way up to being a judge. In 1895 he married Elizabeth Haskell Doty, daughter of a local minister, and a descendant of Mayflower immigrants. They had one daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Coyne, born in 1898 and by the 1900 census he's doing quite well for himself. He's the boss judge. He's got a couple servants. He lives in a very nice house at 15 Main Street in the little town of Geneseo, NY. Now owned by the State University College at Geneseo, the house serves as the official residence of the College President. It's a short walk to the court house.
Then, something awful happened. I don't know what became of his first wife, but she drops out of the picture. I have an email in to the local history dude in Geneseo, but for now, all I know is that Judge Coyne marries a second time in 1908 to Miss Mary Gatins, the daughter of a stock broker who came up from Atlanta, Georgia to make a fortune in the big city. She was 21, and he was 48. They lasted about a year, and then she took off for Reno, Nevada to get a quick-and-dirty divorce. There's a wonderful quote in the newspaper from the girl's father, that he has nothing against the judge personally but these marriages between a younger girl and an older man just never work out!! Jack should have listened to that advice!!
He ain't a bad looking guy, though. His passport says he's 6 feet tall and has blue eyes. He's got kind of a Woodrow Wilson thing going on, which I guess was popular in those days.
From there, the judge gets his name in the papers as an attorney representing the London corporation (syndicate) investing in the gigantic construction project to connect Argentina and Chile with a railroad. He does international contracts and has tens of millions of dollars to account for. That's in 1910... millions.
Jack de Saulles travels to Chile with Judge Coyne, for the adventure of it all (like his friend the lion hunter) and to work on something really big and exciting. This is a once in a country's lifetime project - as big as the transcontinental railroad here in the U.S. or maybe more so. The Andes Mountains are 10,000 feet high and it took 2 years to dynamite a tunnel through those icy rocks.
Yesterday, on Ancestry.com, I found one of Judge Coyne's US passport applications from 1915. In those days, you had to get a friend to sign an affidavit to vouch for you. They didn't have FBI background checks. It looks like they just took anybody's word for it. Guess who signed off, that he had personally known the judge for about 15 years, etc.? Yup. My boy Jack. I just love finding another sample of his big, splashy signature.
When Jack gets killed in 1917, the judge is in Europe doing whatever... I suppose he got involved with supplying the British military during World War One, but I don't know.
I found the judge's obituary from 1927, he died at home in New York of tuberculosis. In his will (according to the newspaper) he left everything to his brother Pascal and his daughter who by then had married a fellow named Frost and lived in Florida. His other brother John Henry (also a lawyer) had died in May 1900 of diphtheria fever and had a lovely eulogy written in the published proceedings of the 24th annual meeting of the New York State Bar Association.
One more newspaper article from June 1930 paints the sorry picture of ruin and despair. The judge left nothing but a life insurance policy. All the millions that he handled during his career, and the thousands that he was paid by the race tracks to defend them from "hostile legislation" was gone. In his final years, he was dependent on his younger brother Pascal for support, and Pascal Coyne died also shortly after the judge died. His daughter Sarah Frost lives in Jackson Heights, Long Island and will be inheriting $1,429 now that the estate is finally being settled. It's not the $50K that the judge hoped to leave for her, but it's something... and now that the stock market crashed and the Great Depression is sinking in, that's not half bad.
