John Douglas Jenkins is my 2x great grandfather on my paternal grandfather’s side. A first generation American, he married Irene Rose Pfiffner around 1913 and had four children with her; Elizabeth (my great grandmother), Harold “Harry”, Dorothy May, and Kenneth Floyd. The two divorced in about 1921, after which time. Elizabeth and Dorothy lived with Irene in Chicago, Cook, Illinois, Harry lived with John in Edwardsville, Madison, Illinois, and Kenneth was raised by his maternal grandmother Emily Anderson Pfiffner in Bellville, St. Clair, Illinois and East St. Louis, St. Clair, Illinois. It appears that John never remarried, he lived in Edwardsville with his mother Elizabeth Jenkins from 1930 until her death in 1940 working at the family service station.
In June 29 1931, the Decatur Evening Herald of Decatur, Illinois reported that two men were being held for the beating of a hitchhiker named John D. Jenkins, 35, a service station attendant who lived in Edwardsville.
The men picked up a man who, according to them attacked them with a hammer. A witness claimed that one of the men; Othal Ivy, of Huston, Texas struck Jenkins on the head. Witnesses said that the car pulled to a stop, where a man got out of the back seat and another man wielding a hammer got out of the front seat and struck the man from the back seat in the head before reentering the vehicle which then sped away leaving Jenkins behind with a fractured skull and a satchel. The satchel was found to be containing identifying papers for the driver of the car, Robert Craig, WWI Veteran from Long Beach, California whom Jenkins was originally identified as.
On July 3, 1931 more of the story ran in the Decatur Herald. In this article, both men (the afformentioned Ivy along with the driver, a WWI Veteran named Robert Craig of Long Beach, California) claimed that when they picked Jenkins up he was intoxicated and quarrelsome and that Ivy had only struck Jenkins to prevent the theft of Craig’s satchel. Jenkins had told police that the men stole $271 dollars from him, but the police only found $27 on the proposed assailants. The paper claimed that the idea that Jenkins could attack two able-bodied men with a hammer was fantastic.
Jenkins’ side of the story was reported by his hometown newspaper, The Edwardsville Intelligencer. He claimed that the men picked him up in St. Louis, and he paid $4 to ride with them to Chicago. He claimed that on the way the two strangers purchased liquor and that he personally only took one drink and that in Pana, Illinois the men threw the bottle out of the car before attacking him in an alley.
This was not Jenkins’ first or last encounter with violence… according to their youngest child, Kenneth Jenkins, his parents divorced because of John’s anger problems. And In 1936 in Edwardsville, John was found guilty of assaulting an Illinois Power & Light Company worker named Harold Gunter. Gunter entered the Jenkins Service Station (which John’s mother Elizabeth owned) to check power levels and believing that no one was there, he turned to leave. The two began speaking to one another, and soon after that is when John struck him.
Resurrecting Memories 