Volume 15 , Issue 24

1889 - The Lost Found

In the Oklahoma City Daily Times, Vol. 1, No. 88, Thursday, October 10, 1889, located in Oklahoma City, Indian Territory, sported this front page headline: "The Lost Found!" Who was lost, and who was found? After twenty years' absence, a lost son was found in a Kansas City drug store.

Kansas City, Mo., Oct. 9, 1889 -- Nearly twenty years (1869) a. M. Lytle, a prescription clerk in Frank Price's drug store on Union avenue, ran away from his home in Woodbury, New Jersey and shipped as cabin boy on an East India merchantman. For many years he followed a sea faring life, finally shipping on the steamship Salparaiso, where a pupil of the ships surgeon, he learned the drug business. In the course of his travels, he had visited nearly every country in the world. Finally he settled in Kansas city and invested his savings in a small property there.

The article goes on to report, "Last night Mrs. J. R. Lytle, his aunt, went to the drug store where the wanderer was employed to buy medicine. She recognized her nephew in the drug clerk. Mutual explanations followed."

Lytle returned to his home and received his share of the property of his father, who died a short time before. The search for the missing boy had been prosecuted by his parents with unflagging zeal up to the time the father died and his last request was the search be not given up, and directed in his will that a portion of his fortune, $30,000 be expended in continuing it.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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