After Brian Leno’s stunning eBay coup of a signed — and seemingly previously unseen — photograph of Dr. Isaac Howard, people (you know people) are getting in on the action. Some think the signature is authentic. Some feel it can’t possibly be the autograph of Robert E. Howard’s father.
Gary Romeo of the blog spraguedecampfan even sent along the image of a 1981 letter from Vera Baker to L. Sprague de Camp where she mentions just coming across the photo. De Camp’s letter in which he returns the original to her was in with the group of items Brian bought.
But he was after the photo, not a note from de Camp.
Rob Roehm commented, “Long time no see. Great find! I’m not sure about the signature, either, but it could be. Attached are a couple of samples.”
The holograph on stationery from The West Texas Clinic dates from March 8, 1943. The note in blue ink dates closer to the creation of the photo — January 22, 1940. The end letters “rd” of Howard match the signature on the photo, or match as closely as any individual signature matches another.
Rob adds, “The car in the background looks like it has ‘suicide doors’ on the back doors, which REH’s last car, a 1935 4-door Chevy Standard, had. Not to be confused with the 1935 Chevy Master, that had ‘suicide doors’ on all four doors. So, another could be. Still, super cool find. Congratulations!”
How Rob doped out the suicide door angle amazed me for a minute, but then he first burst on the scene in the magazine The Cimmerian by tracking down the specific site in the extensive ruins of Fort McKavett where Robert E. Howard once had a snap taken. I mean, you can barely see the car in the background.
I checked it more carefully and spotted the clew: the door handles. The handle in front is like any you’d find today, but there’s a small visual break and then the next handle, placed at the front of the door frame — meaning it swung open with the inside of the door facing oncoming traffic.
Even Brian could not quite make the boast of grabbing off eBay a shot of Doc and the car in which REH killed himself with a bullet to the brain. He may have wanted to believe it, sure. “After Rob’s letter I can see the suicide doors, so who knows? Picture raises a lot of questions.”
The Vera Baker letter from Gary Romeo did bring Brian to a stop for a moment. Flat-out, she says the autograph IDing Dr. Howard on the front of the photo was done by either her mother or by Hester Howard.
“Well, I guess that takes care of that,” Brian stated.
“Yeah, but Brian,” I chimed in, “the only problem is that the signature is by Doc Howard.”
Obviously Vera Baker doesn’t know who signed the snap. Her mother or Hester Howard? Confidence returning, Brian noted, “If Vera is not so sure who wrote it, how can we be sure it was anybody but Doc? Apparently she doesn’t know for sure, she wasn’t there when the photo was signed. So why could it not have been the Doc himself?”
And chances of Hester Howard signing it are more than remote, at best. REH committed suicide because she was at death’s door. She died the next day. Doc had the car cleaned up and the hole in the roof patched and drove it around for awhile. If he took REH’s car over to Coleman, Texas to visit the Baker family on their farm, odds are strongest that the date followed the deaths of his son and wife.
So don’t worry much about Brian, he’s hanging tough. “I have a photo that so far no one has ever said they’ve seen before, which was my main worry. Rob Roehm does so much with the genealogy stuff that if he hasn’t seen it, it ain’t been seen.”
