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out from behind the even more enormous mansions of his neighbors across the street on East Wisconsin Avenue: John A. Kimberly Sr., John A. Kimberly Jr., and perhaps the area’s most powerful individual, the lumberman and politician F. J. Sensenbrenner.
    Money was the sole arbiter of socialstanding in this boom town, and if Charles Howard, now known as C.W., could afford a grand home on Park Row, the most fashionable strip of East Wisconsin Avenue, facing the park and lake, he was entitled to it. Nevertheless, C.W. was something of a pariah even among this city’s generation of nouveau riche. By one local account,he “was unfavorably known as a braggart, drunkard, and bully. A habituéof the Russell House barroom, C.W. was prone to wild exaggerations and fistfights. On more than one occasion he publicly announced that he had made more than $500,000 buying and selling a single Menasha paper mill. After a trip around the world he also informed the local residents that the world was flat: “This idea that the world is round,” he told lumberman Henry Sherry, “is all damn nonsense.”

    Unlike his more fastidious neighbors, C.W. also had a taste for the stage, and he sometimes starred in local theatricals, where he could bellow away to his heart’s content in the most extravagant Victorian-era fashion. His reputation for pulling hoaxes reached its peak in 1883, when “he shattered his office window with a marble, lodged a bullet in the soft plaster of the opposite wall, and thenexcitedly told the police [his wife’s brother, J. W. Brown, was chief of police] that some mysterious assassin had nearly killed him while sitting at his desk, leaving the sleepy little town in a complete uproar for more than a month.” (Charles Coburn comes to mind as the actor who most ideally could have played C. W. Howard.)
    But his wife tolerated her husband’s excesses, and C.W. doted on hisdaughters Helen, born in 1872, and Bernice, born four years later. A first child had died in infancy, and although it was never discussed, there was almost certainly another daughter, Emily, who died very shortly after her birth in 1873. The tragedy that most marked the family, however, was the accidental death of the couple’s only son, Neil. Born in 1879, Neil was just four or five when he drownedin Lake Winnebago.
    Helen and Bernice were both smart and curious, and Helen and Theda Clark became best friends very young when they began attending the tiny Point School, the last of the city’s one-room country schoolhouses. Still renowned locally because of the outstanding Theda Clark Medical Center and other facilities bearing her name, Theda was Neenah’s golden child, a bright, high-mindedprincess of wealth and refinement whose noble goals were to cultivate her mind and help others. As Theda and Helen hit their teens, they began organizing elaborate socials and dinners, and then decided to attend college together, thus becoming part of the first generation of American women to pursue advanced education rather than “finishing schools.”
    Henry Wells, who had made his fortune withhis Wells Fargo Stagecoach Lines, founded Wells College in 1866 in Aurora, New York, intending it to offer women an Ivy League–level education, on a par with what men received at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. The school never grew largeenough to become a significant force, but in 1888, when Theda and Helen enrolled as freshmen, Wells was still one of the most desirable, exclusive schools youngAmerican women could consider. It was also about to enjoy a particular cachet as the alma mater of Mrs. Grover Cleveland, the new First Lady. Their graduating class in June 1892 consisted of seven women, and the commencement address was entitled “Free Individuality, the Goal of Civilization,” which promoted “a desire for higher ideals and for characters free from selfishness and contaminating viceswhich lead to divorce, suicide, and often living death.”
    For quite some time