John Shearer: Remembering The Forgotten 1927 Local Kidnapping, Part 3 – The Gilman Family’s Memories

When Chattanoogan Virginia Josephine Frazier Gilman was kidnapped as a two-year-old way back in March 1927 and held for four days before successfully being freed after a ransom was paid, thousands in Chattanooga and elsewhere followed the news with much concern.

But one who did not was the victim herself, simply because of her young age. Nor did she have any recollections of the horrifying events as she grew older, her family said.

However, it certainly became a large part of her life story, including after she died this May 2 in her late 90s.

The latter is because the newspaper obituary put together by the family mentioned the mostly forgotten incident, bringing it back into the city’s collective consciousness.

Her only surviving child, Betsy Gilman, said in a phone interview in recent days from Atlanta where she now lives that her mother did regularly reference the near tragedy over the years.

“She talked about it,” she said, adding that she has some laminated original newspaper clippings about the kidnapping that the family had held onto over the years. “We’ve always referenced it going through life. It’s always been a conversation piece.”

As this series is concluding with a look at Ms. Gilman’s long life she enjoyed in light of the somewhat tough way it started, her daughter, who kindly offered family memories of the kidnapping, said her mother always had a sunny disposition.

“She was very social,” she recalled. “She was a native of Chattanooga and had lots of circles of friends from when she was growing up. She had old friends, college friends, and others. She didn’t work but she was always doing volunteer work with the Girl Scouts, the Junior League and others.

“Even right before she died, everybody at Alexian (Village) loved her because she would crack a joke or laugh at herself.”

At the time of the 1927 kidnapping, the family was certainly in a much more somber mood, however. They were living at 701 Greenwood Ave. in Highland Park in a still-standing home near Holtzclaw Avenue when the incident occurred during the night of March 23-24.

Someone had come into the home through an open window and initially hid in the basement before taking the young girl, who was discovered missing the next morning.

Her parents, City Commissioner Fred and Virginia Benham Frazier, were in Florida, although some family had been staying with her along with a young nanny, Johnnie Peale, and her older brother, French Frazier.

While Ms. Peale and a man and a woman were initially held for questioning, an older teenager name Lewis Willis later confessed to taking her.

And with some apparent help from his younger brother, Arthur, he held the young girl at his now-razed home on Third Street across from Erlanger Hospital until a ransom was paid. She was then safely dropped off at the home of First Presbyterian Church pastor the Rev. Joseph Venable at 921 Vine St. in Fort Wood and reunited with her family.

Mr. Lewis was arrested several days later, after he had spent some time in Cincinnati and was tracked down in part due to where he had spent the marked bills.

“They had hired him as a yard man,” Betsy Gilman said she was told later by her family of the abductor. “They fired him.”

While the old news reports say he had randomly picked out the ransom amount of $3,333, which Commissioner Frazier paid him in a back alley near Central and McCallie avenues, Betsy Gilman believes that was the amount paid in a movie the suspect had seen about a kidnapping.

There was a popular 1926 silent movie, “Sparrows,” which dealt with a kidnapping and starred Mary Pickford, but it is not known if this was the movie he had seen.

The elder Ms. Gilman was fortunate not only that the kidnapping did not occur at a later age, when she might have been left with more of a mental scar, but that she survived. A happy ending was not always the outcome in those days when a rash of kidnappings of youngsters occurred.

The most famous, the 1932 kidnapping of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 1-year-old son also from a family home, had ended tragically in death. That case later resulted in law authorities making kidnappings serious felonies punishable by death.

The Chattanooga kidnapping did leave some emotional scars on other members of the Frazier family and their close acquaintances. Betsy Gilman said Virginia Jo’s mother had a temporary nervous breakdown as a result of the traumatic event.

The nanny, Johnnie Peale, who had attended Central High and was taken in by the family in part to help her, was left with even longer scars after being wrongly questioned and held initially, Betsy said.

“She was a poor person from the back of the mountain and they kept her as a nanny and put her through school,” she said. “She was devastated. The police were not nice, and it traumatized her.”

Nowadays, civil lawsuits over wrongful accusations or imprisonment might have resulted, but no recourse could apparently be taken at that time.

Betsy Gilman said Ms. Peale later moved up to Oak Ridge by Knoxville, and her mother kept in touch with her over the years. “It almost ruined her life and mental health,” she said of Ms. Peale.

Virginia Jo’s father, Commissioner Frazier, had died in 1963, so Ms. Gilman, who was then just starting elementary school, does not remember a whole lot about him. But she did get to know Virginia Jo’s mother a little better.

“She died when I turned 16 and I got her car,” she said of her grandmother, who passed in 1971. “She was a lot younger than Grandfather.”

She said the family story was that her grandfather had once held her on his knees when she was quite young and she was so cute that he told people he would one day marry her. She later became an accomplished dancer and was in New York making plans to go to Los Angeles while they were courting.

“He said, ‘If you go, we’re not going to get married,’ ” Betsy recalled hearing from the family.

They did get married and had French in 1920 several years before Virginia Jo was born. French went on to serve in the Navy during World War II and became an attorney and title insurance agency owner. He died in 2003 at the age of 82.

Virginia Jo – who went by Jo – went on to attend Lookout Mountain Elementary after the family moved up to a still-standing home on the lower side of Scenic Highway on the mountain. It sits at a location just past where an ascending vehicle crosses the bridge over the Incline Railway.

After graduating from Girls Preparatory School in 1942, she attended Stephens College – a women’s school in Columbia, Mo. – before finishing at the University of Chattanooga. She later married Henry B. Gilman, and Betsy believes they met and courted through the various dances popular at the time right after World War II, including at the old Lookout Mountain Hotel where Covenant College is now.

They were married at her home on Lookout Mountain due to its scenic location and nice balcony. Some other Frazier family members also lived in that area.

Betsy said her mother also had some other family places where she spent time early in her life after the kidnapping, including Hiwassee Island in Meigs County.

“Her mom had inherited Hiwassee Island -- also called Jolly’s Island -- and they had a house there and she always spoke fondly of being there and I think they entertained there,” Betsy said. “It was only accessible by boat. No electricity. I don't think it had plumbing, either. TVA took it over when they built the (Chickamauga) dam. Much of it is under water now, and the house is completely gone.”

Her father, former Commissioner Frazier, also had a farm near Dayton, Tn., in the Cottonport area, and the family entertained there a lot, Betsy remembered. “It is on the river, too. Guests came by boat, and they were transported to the house by horse drawn cart or horses or mules,” she said, adding that the two-story farmhouse also had no electricity. 

Regarding her father’s work as one of several extended members of the family involved in the well-known Gilman paint firm, Betsy said the company had different divisions that ranged from paint sold in hardware stores to varnish for golf woods, and different family members worked in different areas. Her father, who lived until 2000, worked primarily with the wallcoverings division, she said.

“He traveled around to the Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama areas,” she recalled. “When they would build a new Holiday Inn (using Gilman wallcoverings), he would check to make sure everything went well.”

A family horse was even named after one of the names of the wallcoverings, Betsy recalled with a laugh.

Henry and Virginia Jo had two other daughters, Virginia “Ginnie” Harris, a former Baylor School French teacher who died in 2018, and Julie Petroutson, who also lived in Atlanta and just died this April 7. Betsy Gilman ended up in Atlanta in 1982 four years after graduating with an art history degree from the University of Georgia and eight years after finishing at GPS.

She worked at what was known as Edmondson Junior College in Chattanooga before working in Atlanta for such businesses as Richway. She now works for a large construction company, she said.

Her mother had gone on to do such work as teach Bible in the schools and was an active member of Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church.

In recent years, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Ms. Gilman had an opportunity to see her old Lookout Mountain home now lived in by artist Eve Oldham, her daughter said.

Life at the former Greenwood Avenue home in Chattanooga was also remembered in later years in sort of a roundabout way, too.

Betsy Gilman said her sister, Ginnie, was at a dedicatory event on M.L. King Boulevard when she began conversing with someone and later realized the person had an unusual connection to her mother. “She found out a lady she was talking to was named after her,” she recalled, remembering how pleased the family was to hear of that honor.

From a bad incident that could have been even worse, a positive legacy had resulted.

To see the previous story in this series, read here.

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net