On a wintry evening in early 1922, Chauncey and Edith Brainerd settled into the warm comfort of the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington, D.C., to watch the silent film Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. Little did the two pulp fictioneers know that the week’s blizzard would lead to their deaths before the evening was through.
Around 9 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 28, the theater’s roof gave way under the weight of nearly 30 inches of accumulated snow, killing 98 and injuring 133. Estimates put from 300 to 1,000 people in the auditorium.
Multiple days of snow from the blizzard culminated in the worst disaster in Washington, D.C., history.
The husband and wife’s deaths will be noted in the Jan. 28 list in ThePulp.Net’s On This Date. He was 47; she was 36.
Back when I was first putting together my list of pulpsters’ births and deaths years ago, I was curious about why the couple had died on the same date. A bit of research turned up reports of their unfortunate evening described above.
Chauncey Corey “Bud” Brainerd — who is often referred to incorrectly as J. Chauncey Brainerd — began his newspaper career around 1890 at age 15 as a stenographer for the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By the time he was 20, he was a reporter covering crime and courts in the New York area for the newspaper.
In 1911, Bud Brainerd was put in charge of the newspaper’s Washington, D.C., bureau, where he would remain until his death.
The newspaper quotes Brainerd as prophetically saying, as he looked out of the Washington bureau’s windows at the city five hours before the disaster: “Washington roofs aren’t built to stand such a weight of snow. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them collapse before it stops snowing. They would cave in like matchwood once they started to fall.”
He had married Edith Rathbone Jacobs in 1903. Within a few years, the husband and wife team was writing under the pen name E.J. Rath. They produced over three dozen stories and novels for pulp magazines including Argosy, The Scrap Book, Adventure, and All-Story.
In their obituary, the newspaper said, “Mr. Brainerd and his wife wrote quite extensively for magazines and periodicals under the pen name of E.J. Rath. Mr. Brainerd was the author of several volumes of fiction and his magazine stories displayed a remarkable inventive genius for plots and a real ability in the field of fiction such as it is not generally known he possessed.”
Several of their works were adapted for plays and silent films, including “The Wreck,” a six-part serial that had begun in the Dec. 3, 1921, number of Argosy All-Story Weekly and had wrapped up publication just a few weeks before the two died.
“The Wreck” would be staged as The Nervous Wreck in 1923. A silent film adaptation, starring Harrison Ford (not that one), was released in fall 1926. It would have two loose remakes: Whoopee! (1930) starring Eddie Cantor and Up in Arms (1944) with Danny Kaye. Whoopee! was revived as a stage musical in 1979.
One of his last news reports appeared in the same Jan. 20, 1922, edition of the Daily Eagle that also reported his and his wife’s deaths.
