Olga Foreman

From the Busse autograph collection.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

If these lines are not original, I haven't been able to identify their source, and perhaps the poet's obscurity is well earned, since I'm able to believe that the 14-year-old Olga made this up herself.

She was the daughter of William and Emma Foreman. The 1910 Census found them living on Front Street, sharing a home with Emma's parents, Julius and Augusta Manteuffel.

I believe Olga married Fred Rossow in 1916 (Indiana Marriage Collection) and the 1920 Census shows them running a dairy farm in Porter County, with a baby daughter who was not named after Olga's dead friend.

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Since I can't find a picture of Olga, you'll just have to make do with a picture of her father: William Foreman was a long-serving school engineer — or janitor, as the 1910 censustaker puts it plainly — and so beloved that one of Hobart's elementary schools was named for him after his death. Of course, native Hobartites know the story better than I do. Here he is in the Hobart High School Aurora yearbook of 1927:




And here is the Foreman school — photo undated, but probably near the time of its demolition, since I think that's the newly built Joan Martin school in the background.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.