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When Werner Would Rather Have Died

Jackson Tel

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And death was nigh impossible.

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1917, Wernersville, Pennsylvania

Werner Tannenbaum was one of six children born into an established, well-to-do, deeply religious family that owned and operated Lofty Springs, a mid-sized resort hotel with 75 guest rooms, in Wernersville, Pennsylvania.

Yes, Werner was from Wernersville, which almost always elicited a raised eyebrow and an amused upturned corner of the lip from any city clerk, administrative official, or borough policeman who had to document his name and place of birth.

Werner’s parents, both of German descent, were fastidious, efficient, disciplined, hardworking, and honest, all complementary personal attributes for successfully managing a popular hotel and dining room like theirs. They believed that children should be taught to respect and obey their elders, toe the line, follow the teachings of the church, and seek redemption because “we are all burdened by Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God and are therefore unable to avoid sinful acts.

As each of the Tannenbaum siblings, who were all expected to help with the family business, matured, they settled into one particular aspect of the operation: culinary arts, staff administration, property management, or even decorating and promotional design. And, naturally, their preferences tended to reflect their personalities, interests, and innate abilities. Werner gravitated towards accounting. In people’s estimation, he scored high in math ability, reliability, and honesty, but not so well in warmth and hospitality, the beating heart of the family business.

You see, the operation at Lofty Springs ran seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. If you couldn’t arrange for someone else to take your shift and could somehow pull yourself out of bed, you went to work – period -- full stop.

That credo especially applied to managing the accounting office, which was Werner’s responsibility. No one else in the family, except his father, knew how to do it correctly or had the authority to sign checks and money orders. Nor were they allowed to deliver the daily deposit to the bank, accompanied by the humorless, hidden-shoulder-holstered hotel security man, Harold Sunderland.

Werner’s experiences handling the cash and keeping the books inspired him to pursue a Bachelor of Accounts Degree from the Susquehanna University School of Business, starting in the fall of 1917, at the age of eighteen.

It was a rarity for Werner Tannenbaum to miss work for any reason. At an early age, he learned that faking an illness to get time off was much harder than he thought. And death was nigh impossible, as this one particular incident illustrated:

Around one o’clock on a slow Monday afternoon, before going off to college, the hormonal eighteen-year-old was caught masturbating in the Accounting Office by the wealthy middle-aged widow, Mrs. Mimi Crawley, a frequent guest of the hotel.

Mrs. Crawley was a well-endowed forty-two-year-old gold digger, married previously to the geriatric Pennsylvania mining magnate, James Preston Crawley, who had refused to die for twelve long years.

The impatient, entitled widow had always been able to secure her valuables in the hotel safe at the snap of her fingers. However, that day, after checking into her room at the Lofty Springs, she returned to the lobby with her recently acquired Buccellati diamond necklace to find the front desk temporarily unmanned. So she marched indignantly past it down the staff-only hallway without permission and, without bothering to knock, barged through the Accounting Office’s closed door. You can imagine how stunned both she and Werner were at that moment.

Someone else was also shocked by the incident: Werner’s older sister, Anna, the hotel scheduling coordinator. At that moment, she was sitting in her office across the hallway from Werner’s, puzzling over the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone instructions on how to operate the newfangled communication device installed during her lunch break.

Bothered by the stuffiness in her windowless office, Anna had turned on the Westinghouse Whirlwind fan sitting atop the filing cabinet, left the door ajar, and opened the transom window above it. So, as it happened, she had a box seat to the whole foofaraw. She looked up from the pamphlet to see Mrs. Crawley charging into the Accounting Office and, bing-bang-boom, coming shooting back out like a startled cat fleeing back up the hallway toward the lobby.

Moments later, Werner rushed out, struggling to get his suspenders buttoned back onto the waistband of his pants. Then he ran in shame up the private back stairs to his room, where he stayed in hiding for the rest of the day and night.

The wealthy widow immediately headed out past the front desk, straight through the lobby, to the hotel bar, where she ordered up a stiff one from the handsome young bartender and, on second thought, demanded, “Make it a double!”

That was a rare instance of Werner taking an entire afternoon off from his job, and the only time he would rather have died than go to work the next morning. Werner dreaded facing his parents’ shocked and embarrassed disapproval and the snickers of his brothers and sisters. But only his untimely demise would have been an acceptable excuse not to show up.

In due time, Werner managed to put that humiliating experience behind him. Nevertheless, the trauma of it forever after put the kibosh on any self-pleasuring activity that Werner might have been tempted into by the indulgence of sinful thoughts.

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TINY STORY-1975-Remains of Missing Bicycle Boy Discovered Near Reading PA

By Jackson Tel

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1975, Sunshine, Maryland

The remains of ‘The Bicycle Boy’ were discovered twelve years after Charlie Mann took a taxi to West Reading to buy a Buick Skylark as a surprise birthday present for his grandson, Travis. One evening, Charlie was watching TV, on a good memory day, when he saw a report on the evening news that the skeleton of an adolescent boy was found buried, along with a mangled bicycle, in the woods near Reading, Pennsylvania. The body was believed to be that of an eleven-year-old ‘colored’ boy gone missing from Sunshine, Maryland, in August of 1963.

Back in those days, why did they always call out someone as being ‘colored,’ but never as someone being ‘white?

Anyway, the missing boy, named Ricky Bossley, had set out after an afternoon shower on his banana-seat bicycle to go to a friend’s house, but never showed up. An extensive, prolonged search of the area by police, dogs, volunteer search parties, and even by helicopter turned up nothing, except a pocket knife found at the edge of the narrow, shoulder-less, two-lane country road; the same route the boy would have taken to his friend’s house. His panicked parents, desperate for any shred of hope they could hang onto, identified the knife as belonging to their son and pleaded to the public for help to find him.

His father owned a small construction company. His mother, a pediatrician for a nearby health clinic, in an on-camera press briefing said, “Ricky is a good boy with a smile that lights up a room. We love him dearly, and everyone who knows him likes him. He has a small birthmark shaped like Florida on the side of his neck, and he is wearing blue jeans and a Disneyland T-shirt.”

Two weeks after that, Charlie, having yet another relatively good day, read in the paper that his friend, Big Benjamin, the taxicab driver who drove him to West Reading, had been arrested in what the press called ‘The Missing Bicycle Boy Case.”

However, just three days later, when detectives showed up at Chestnut Point to question Charlie about Benjamin, he was unable to remember who Benjamin was or provide even a single fact about their cab trip from Sunshine to West Reading on August 24th, 1964. (That happened on one of Charlie’s bad memory days.)

Meanwhile, in West Reading, Dorothy Hamel, speaking to investigators, could only remember that the taxi driver had been very obese and that after Charlie got out of the taxi, he removed bags from the back seat, but none from the trunk.

Big Benjamin was unable to make bail and spent a year in jail awaiting trial. But in the end, Benjamin was convicted only of involuntary manslaughter, failing to report an accident, and improper burial of a deceased person.

According to Benjamin’s own testimony on the stand, it was an accident. He only took his eyes off the road for a second. Then, when he saw the boy on the bicycle, the road was so narrow he had no place to go. He put on the brakes as hard as he could and turned the wheel, but the road was slick from the rain shower that afternoon, and his cab skidded sideways right into him. The boy must have hit his head on the pavement hard enough to kill him, because there wasn’t even a mark on him, no blood or anything. Other than the back wheel of the bike getting caught underneath the cab when Benjamin backed up to find out if the kid was alright, you couldn’t even tell that the boy had been hit by a car.

The pathologist who conducted a post-mortem examination of the child’s remains testified that he found evidence of trauma to the side of the skull. This fractured wrist was consistent with a hard fall from a bicycle.

With tears in his eyes, Benjamin said he didn’t report the accident because he was afraid of losing his taxi license, which, because of his weight, was his only means of income and the only way to provide for his sick mother. So he put the boy’s body in a deer hunting freezer out in an outbuilding, on his parents’ property, and hid the bike in the falling-down tobacco barn, next to it. He intended to give the poor child a decent burial, with prayers and a cross, as soon as he could, when things blew over. But then the call came in for the fare to West Reading, Pennsylvania, Benjamin saw it as an opportunity to take the boy’s body out of state and find some place to bury it there. He knew what he did was wrong. And a day doesn’t go by that he isn’t deeply, deeply sorry and ashamed of what he did.

The lenient verdict came as a shock to young Ricky’s parents, who wanted him to be executed or, at the very least, spend the rest of his life in jail for what he did. But the Judge decided to give Benjamin only probation, with time served. The parents claimed, to the press, that the only reason Benjamin received such a light sentence was that their son was black. (Maybe, maybe not. But, the fact that white people committing crimes against black people were judged less harshly than black people committing crimes against white people was a pervasive pattern in the criminal justice system of the day.)

And when his probation was up and after his mother died, Benjamin sold out and moved away from the area. He becomes homeless. No one seemed to know what happened to him after that.

So on August 24th, 1964, when Big Benjamin showed up at Chestnut Point in his taxicab to take Charlie to West Reading, and Charlie joked to himself about the broken trunk lock, thinking, …or maybe there is a dead body in there. It turns out there actually was one, for real.

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A Tiny Story

When Martin Jr. Took Jackie Jean to the Prom

By Jackson Tel

Copyright 2026, Curtis Kaltsukis, All Rights Reserved

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1924-Havre d Grace, Maryland

The ‘supposed’ father of Martin Cooley Jr., Martin Cooley, Sr., was the lifelong chauffer for the Vincent Estate, a thoroughbred stables, equestrian training facility, and stud farm located in the wealthy fox-hunt countryside near Havre de Grace, Maryland.

In 1908 when Martin Jr. was born, the local busybodies gossiped that Martin Cooley Sr. was not his father at all. On the contrary, they maintained that Denise Cooley, his wife, had an affair with the eldest Vincent son, Aubrey. Therefore, the senior Cooley was a cuckold or, more accurately, ‘wittol.’

I use the word wittol because the quiet, well-mannered, dutiful chauffeur knew all about the Vincent family scion’s dalliance with his wife, but sadly, he acquiesced to it for complicated reasons.

You must understand that Martin Cooley Sr. had everything to lose if he made a stink about his wife’s infidelity. He had spent his entire life in the service of the Vincent Estate. His roots were there, it was his home, and he loved it. His father and grandfather before him were coachmen for the Vincent family. And all three generations of Cooleys had lived with their families in the same modest Coachman’s house attached to the colonial stone carriage barn. He was supporting a mentally disabled brother residing in the old tack room, which had been converted into a tiny apartment when the large fieldstone structure was turned into an automobile garage. Most of Martin Cooley Sr.’s friends and relatives either worked at the Vincent Estate or lived nearby. And not only that, he was a vestryman of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Havre de Grace.

Growing up as an errand boy, then as the chauffeur, Martin Cooley Sr. had always felt valued and appreciated by the Vincent family. He was treated kindly and with respect by the venerable Elliot Vincent, his wife, Katherine, and all the Vincent children except Aubrey. So, any confrontation with a member of the Vincent family would have been anathema to who he was as a person and loyal servant, not to mention entirely contrary to his quiet, humble, make-the-best-of-it personality. Therefore, in keeping with his heritage and being a good Christian, Martin Sr. made peace with his wife and vowed to raise Martin Jr. with love as if he were his own.

However, Martin Jr. turned out to be a difficult, selfish child. As they say, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’

Frankly, his birth father Aubrey Vincent was an entitled, pompous, excuse the language, shit who didn’t care a wit about anyone other than himself. And his dirty little-secret son, Martin Cooley Jr., was very much like him, without the money, social standing, Harvard education, entitled highbrow demeanor, or good looks, despite a passing resemblance.

Then, in 1924, in the middle of the roaring twenties, both Elliot and his wife Katherine died in a tragic boating accident. While taking their new Chris Craft 26-foot Runabout for a spin on the Chesapeake, a massive, fast-approaching, dark bank of storm clouds illuminated by intermittent lightning bolts appeared on the horizon. They had almost made it back to the safety of Havre de Grace when they were overtaken by a torrent of pelting rain and hail driven by gale-force winds, which drove them into the rocks along the shoreline. Both drowned.

Subsequently, the eldest son, Aubrey, took possession of the Vincent estate. And breaking abruptly with the storied history of the property, Aubrey went on a renovation binge. He immediately had a new spacious International Style House built for himself to live in, inspired by the famous architect Le Corbusier, with an entire wing devoted to a collection of modern art and an expansive garden by the modernist landscape designer Thomas Dolliver Church. He then had the old colonial gambrel-roofed, ballast brick Vincent House converted into the headquarters for a brand new stable and equestrian training facility sprawling out behind it.

Luckily for the Cooleys, Aubrey completely ignored the antiquated stone carriage barn cum automobile garage & attached Coachman’s house. The iconic structure was the only one on the property that could be seen from the road when people pulled over to read and photograph the historical marker describing the estate dating back to 1768 and the merchant Joshua Vincent who made his fortune by way of the East India trade. And the stiffs at the Historical Society would have gotten bent way out of shape if Aubrey had even glanced sideways at it.

At that time, Martin Cooley Jr. was a seventeen-year-old senior at the segregated public high school in Havre de Grace. From the time he was a freshman, he had been driven to school, most mornings, by his quote-unquote ‘father,’ the chauffeur, in one of the Vincent family limousines. But Aubrey Vincent promptly put a stop to that, which infuriated Martin Jr. because by that time, he had figured out who his birth father was from random bits and pieces picked up here and there throughout the years. And he vowed to get revenge. He didn’t know how yet, but have no doubt that someday he would make good on that promise when the opportunity presented itself.

You see, one of the things young Martin reveled in was riding in the backseat of the Vincent Estate limousine as if he were somebody important. He especially liked being dropped off at the entrance to the Havre de Grace High School with the teachers and all the other kids watching. And each morning, while on the way to Havre de Grace, Martin would look for the prettiest girl in school, Jackie Jean Osterman riding on her horse to get there along Chapel Road. He wanted to have her as his girlfriend and pursued her relentlessly.

Immediately after Aubrey Vincent put the kibosh on his daily ride to school Martin Jr. got himself a Harley Davidson 61 motorcycle with a sidecar so he could roar into the parking lot every morning with Jackie Jean riding along as his passenger. For her, it was a welcome relief from having to saddle up and care for the horse every day just to get to her classes. Besides, she was going through a bit of a rebellious streak her senior year and thoroughly enjoyed the thrill of it all.

Those efforts by Martin Cooley Jr. to make Jackie Jean ‘his girl’ came to a culmination on prom night in a ‘borrowed’ Vincent Estate automobile. After plying Jackie Jean with Southern Comfort, he took a detour down a dark, secluded lane and attempted to get to home plate with her. That didn’t go well for him because Jackie Jean scratched him across the face, bit him on the wrist, and ran away into the darkness to tell her father what had happened.

The Cooleys asleep in Coachman’s House were shocked when the Chapel Road farmer, Eberhard Osterman, came banging on the door with a loaded shotgun looking for Martin Jr. At which time, they were bluntly apprised by Eberhard of Martin Jr.’s attempt to sully his daughter’s reputation. They also learned to their surprise, that he had taken one of the estate’s Rolls Royces from the garage, without permission, to go on the prom date with Jackie Jean. And it was exceedingly hurtful because Martin Jr. had misled them about the exact date of the prom to exclude them from any involvement in the festivities.

Later that night, when the coast was clear, Martin Jr. showed back up at the Coachman’s House ninety percent sobered up and effusively contrite. He begged for forgiveness and promised never to do anything like that again. The next day, fearing that Mr. Osterman might report the incident to the police, he went with Martin Cooley Sr. to the Osterman farm to apologize and make amends. And afterward, he buckled down to his chores, went to church with the family on Sundays, and generally tried to demonstrate that he could be a good person. That lasted until the end of the summer when he went away to college to get a major in business management and a minor in debauchery.

But anyway, it seems that Jackie Jean had aspirations other than being Martin Cooley Jr.’s show-and-tell girlfriend. Because of her stunning good looks, to use a Charlie-ism, ‘She got the pretty-girl-discount wherever she went. Complete strangers would smile at her when she walked by. The clerk at the country store would stick an extra piece of hard candy into her bag. She was always cast in the lead female role for the school theatrical productions. More than once, the director called her “My little star” and said, “Remember me when you become famous.”

After Jackie Jean started driving, a young policeman writing her a parking ticket took it off the windshield and tore it up when he saw her coming. So Jackie Jean had expectations for her future beyond being a country-bumpkin farm girl. After high school, she packed her bags and took off for New York to act on Broadway. But things didn’t work out the way she planned.

As it turned out, becoming a successful Broadway actress wasn’t an easy thing to do. For starters, Jackie Jean had zero connections in show biz. Pretty faces with talent were a dime a dozen. It was costly to live in New York. And a naive small-town girl like her was an easy mark for every smarmy theater producer, director, and talent agent up and down the length of ‘The Great White Way.’ In less than one humiliating year in the Big Apple, she abandoned her dreams of celebrity, hightailed it back home to Chapel Road, and blissfully resumed her starring role as the best-looking farmer’s daughter in Havre de Grace.

But, as it also turned out, Martin Cooley Jr. had no intention of giving up on possessing Jackie Jean Osterman as his own.

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