Vega by Leonard Cline

Thomas Smurthwaite

The short poem "Vega" appeared in the December 1920 issue of The Liberator. It is dedicated to Thomas Smurthwaite (1850-1929), who was Cline's father-in-law, the mother of Cline's wife Louise Smurthwaite, whom he married in Manistee, Michigan, in October 1913. Thomas Smurthwaite was born in Toronto, but came to Michigan in 1865 and settled in Manistee in 1886, where he was an attorney and, for a time in the late 1890s, the mayor. The Smurthwaite house and hills, referred to in the poem, were on 160 acres purchased in 1895 for a summer home, located north of Manistee proper, at a high point on the south side of Portage Lake.