Cline's First Wife: Louise Smurthwaite

Louise Cline in 1927

Cline's first wife was born Mary Louise Smurthwaite (1893-1980), but she was always known familiarly as Louise. Cline seems to have met her in Ann Arbor, in the early 1910s, when Cline and at least one of Louise's sisters were students at the University of Michigan.  Louise was perhaps a student there as well, but apparently only for a short time (her name does not appear in the contemporary University of Michigan registers). She and Cline were married in her native town of Manistee, Michigan on 28 October 1913.  They had one daughter and one son.

In March 1922 Cline joined the staff of The Baltimore Sun, and the family moved to Maryland. In 1924 Louise divorced Cline on the charge of adultery.  In Baltimore Louise became a radio singer at WBAL, and originated a popular annual Christmas carol program at a local department store. She taught singing at the Peabody Conservatory's Preparatory School for forty-four years.

Hazelton Spencer

She and Cline reconciled in 1928, and they planned to remarry, but Cline died suddenly in January 1929. Around 1932 or 1933, Louise became the second wife of the literary scholar Hazelton Spencer (1893-1944), who had been educated at Boston University (A.B. 1915) and Harvard University (A.M. 1920; Ph.D. 1923). Hazelton began to teach English at Johns Hopkins University in 1927 and became a Professor of English there in 1937. He authored books on Shakespeare, and edited The Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay (1931) and Elizabethan Plays (1933). 

Louise Spencer died at the age of 87 in Alexandria, Virginia, in May 1980.