Wife For a Day Is Seeking Divorce - Newsworthy Knowable

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

You’re getting an extra post this week because I ran across a head-shaking newspaper clipping and it fits right in with the Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge: NEWSWORTHY KNOWABLES Due by October 28, 2025.

The Tribune, Ames, Iowa. August 9, 1933. p. 7. Available at Newspapers.com

Norma Juanita “June” Loper was the daughter of Samuel Leslie Loper (1859-1929) and Eva Clare Lincoln (1857-1942). She was born in Iowa in 1895, the 6th of 7 children. Her marriage to Griswold in New York City was happily announced by her mother in the Des Moines Tribune in May 1932:

Mrs. S.L. Loper of Indianola announces the marriage of her daughter, Norma Juanita, to Roger Griswold which took place May 2 in Union Church in New York City. The Rev. C. S. Gillespie, pastor of the First Methodist Episcopal of Hoboken, N.J. officiated. Mrs. Griswold is a graduate of Iowa State university and for the past two years taught English in the high school at Winterset. Mr. Griswold is a graduate of the Electrical Engineering college of the University of California at Los Angeles. He is a member of Sigma Phi fraternity. The couple will make its home in Oklahoma City, Okla.

But Norma’s death certificate in 1939 lists a different husband.

Which is how I happened upon the divorce notice above. I was expecting to find an obituary in Oklahoma, not an extortion claim.

In the petition filed in the Story county district court at Nevada, Mrs. Griswold stated her husband induced her to leave her Iowa home and go to New York where they were married May 2, 1932. The same day on pretense of having a job in Oklahoma, Mr. Griswold induced his wife to loan him money for the trip and prevailed upon her to return to Iowa and await his call to come to Oklahoma.

Upon her return to Iowa, instead of sending for his wife, Mr. Griswold wired repeatedly for funds which she sent him. As the requests for financial aid increased Mrs. Griswold finally refused further assistance and requested her husband to return to Iowa which he would not do.

In her petition Mrs. Griswold charges that the marriage was not in good faith on the part of the husband, but was for the purpose of extorting money and for that purpose only. She asks a decree of divorce and permission of the court to marry again within the year, providing she so desires.

So a teacher in Iowa meets a charming smarmy man who promises the world, takes her cross country alone to the big city to show off and legally bind themselves (among other things, I’m sure), then dumps her at her mother’s and keeps requesting money while he’s off God knows where doing who knows what.

I couldn’t confirm that Griswold had given his real name when he extorted the young Miss Loper or who he was, where he went, and what he did.

But this newspaper clipping was just the start of understanding the course this poor woman’s life took. Her second husband was a railroad engineer who died in 1938 after being struck by a train when he stepped from the cab of his locomotive into the path of the tracks (Mount Ayr-Record News, Dec. 1, 1938).

Norma and Howard are both buried in Indian Valley Cemetery, Indianola, Iowa, in separate plots.

Howard Clare Loper was born in 1887, the son of Osborn Loper (1853-1936) and Mary C. Porter (1855-1913). He lived in Iowa his whole life but wasn’t stuck there. A social interest piece in the local paper of Mulvane, Kansas, in 1907 tells how Howard traveled there to escort his sister home to Iowa after she spent the winter at their grandparents’ to attend school.

Despite the same surnames, Howard and Norma were not first or second cousins, but I have only been able to reliably trace back to their grandparents in regard to the Loper name. When exactly they married I also have not been able to find.

But the original news article was an intriguing twist on the usual “married 1st, married 2nd” lineage and shed light on Norma’s short adult life.