Cline's Son: Leonard Lanson Cline III

Louise with her two children 1922

Cline's son was Leonard Lanson Cline III, born in Detroit, Michigan, on 21 November 1916.  As Cline had done for his daughter, so did he also write a poem for his son, probably in 1921, just before the family moved to Baltimore.  The poem reads in part:

Gemini: Castor

That night Dick* came, and first you heard him play,
Did Beauty speak that night, and did you hear?
We saw you falter in your mimic fray,
Let fall your toys, and turn your eyes away,
Enchanted, yet abashed, and venture near;

We saw you stand, and saw your spirit rise
As winged to strange new heights, a little boy
With towsled yellow hair and wondering eyes,
And in them what a trouble of surprise,
What rapture of inexplicable joy! 

After his parent's divorce in 1924, young Leonard occasionally sent his father some poems he had written.  His father responded to one of these with a poem of his own, later printed in After-Walker (1930) as "Variation on a Theme of My Son's."

In January 1929, young Leonard's father died. In March, his maternal grandfather Thomas Smurthwaite died in Manistee, Michigan. Louise and the children went to Manistee to grieve and to recuperate. But young Leonard contracted spinal meningitis and died in Manistee on 25 July 1929, aged twelve. Louise and Mary Louise felt that their entire world had been shattered. 


* Dick was Dick Mount, a family friend and fellow newspaperman in Detroit.