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industries was falling into the hands of Cephas’s eldest son, Frank E. C. Hawks, who was now forty-three.
    With his father dead and living with his grieving, inconsolable, unreasonable mother at the large frame house on Fifth and Jefferson, young Frank Winchester Hawks was atsixes and sevens throughout 1891, faithfully tending to his mother as best he could but increasingly looking for a place for himself in the Hawks’s well-built, well-to-do, insular universe. Destined to become the first Hawks to leave Goshen, he would meet the woman who would give him a way out the following year.
    The leading lights of young society in Neenah, Wisconsin, in the early 1890s wereunquestionably Theda Clark and Helen Howard. Theda, born in 1871, was the daughter of Charles B. Clark, cofounder, in 1872, of Kimberly, Clark & Co., which was on its way to becoming one of the most successful paper companies in the United States and, as the inventor of Kleenex, certainly the most famous. Helen, born the following year, was the daughter of Charles W. Howard, also from impoverishedorigins, who had similarly worked his way up to an exalted position in the paper business. In east-central Wisconsin at the southern, upriver end of the Fox River and the northwest tip of Lake Winnebago, Neenah was one of the economic miracles of the 1890s, a town with a local industry so strong that it barely felt the terrible depression of 1893–97. During this period, there were twenty largepaper mills along thirty-seven miles of the Fox River—all successful. Like the city-building pioneers of New England, the founders of the factory towns of the Fox River Valley used as their models the industrial giants of Great Britain, Birmingham and Manchester. When their communities didn’t reach those proportions, they scaled back their ambitions, settling for contented, Republican, enormouslyprofitable, immensely comfortablestability at a time when—before the sweeping democratic reforms of Governor Robert La Follette in the 1900s—power in Wisconsin was completely in the corrupt hands of the few men at the top of the state’s leading industries.
    Charles W. Howard arrived at this growing community in 1862, when he was seventeen. The son of Charles Howard, a native of the Isle of Man,and Hannah Hopkins, of Maine, he was born in Gardiner, Maine, on May 7, 1845. No other information has come down about his parents or early life, perhaps by his own design, as he set the style his famous grandson was to emulate in the fabrication of tall tales and outrageous lies that everyone knew were phony but no one dared challenge to his face. In 1866, he married Euphemia Brown, who was bornMarch 10, 1844, to Scottish natives. During his twenties, Charles ran a harness shop, one of several catering to the extensive horse-and-buggy trade and located on the working-class western end of Wisconsin Avenue, a world away from the affluent eastern section of the avenue, to which he would eventually rise. As of 1870, the Howards still lived at 19 Boarding Street, and the value of their personalestate totaled a mere three hundred dollars.
    But Charles kept saving and looking for angles, and by 1874 he was able to become a partner in the A. W. Patten Mill, where he learned the business and reaped the benefits of the mill’s unique system of using old paper stock for its raw material; for a while, its capacity of three tons of paper every twenty-four hours bested by fifty percent even whatKimberly-Clark’s Globe Mill was producing. In 1877, Charles bought Patten’s flour mill and started up a new business with John R. Davis Jr., called Howard & Davis. Through the 1880s, Charles’s mills were so successful that he emerged as one of Neenah’s leading industrialists, building a large, three-story Victorian house sporting gray shingles, three gables on the roof, a porch stretching acrossthe entire front expanse, and enormous picture windows, from which he could see bits of the Fox River peeking