Hi, how goes it? It’s been a while since we last chatted. I’m still researching a bunch of questions in Tammen world and beyond, but I thought…what the hey? Why not provide you with an update regarding a relatively small question to help kick off the weekend? Why not rule out one possible theory in a vexingly long list of them?
This post has to do with Dorothy Craig, the long-time Champion Paper and Fibre employee who’d written a check to Ron Tammen shortly before he disappeared. We don’t know the date of the check. We don’t know the amount of the check. Most significantly, we don’t know why the check was written. However, what we can be sure of is that a representative of Oxford National Bank had told Carl Knox about said check and with that new bit of intel, Carl had scribbled the following question at the top of the ridiculously small notepad that he was using to conduct his investigation: “Where was it cashed?”
Those four words told us that Dorothy had written the check to Ron and not the other way around. So as mad as I am at Carl for not providing any more of the details that he’d no doubt been hearing on the other end of the phone line, he at least managed to put that into writing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: thanks, Carl!
When I presented this information for the first time in April 2023, a few of us threw out some possible reasons for the check, and one of the more popular ideas was that perhaps Dorothy had hired Ron and a few of his musician friends for a gig—maybe she’d rented out a hall for a bash she was throwing or perhaps she hired them for a church thing. Because that was something else we’d learned about Dorothy—in addition to her family and her friends and her job at Champion Paper, she was all about her church.
Dorothy and her husband Henry were members of the St. Paul Evangelical and Reformed Church, located on Campbell Avenue, between North 7th and 8th Streets, in Hamilton. (The building’s still there, but it’s now being used by another congregation.) But Dorothy was no “strictly Sundays” kind of congregant. Church was front and center in her life, and she was called upon frequently to serve.
In 1950, Dorothy was president of their adult Bible study group, which also hosted fundraisers to help pay for the church’s Sunday school equipment and building repairs. For one of the fundraisers, she oversaw the publication of a church cookbook, which couldn’t have been easy, what with her needing to corral content providers, dole out tasks, and make sure deadlines were being met—not to mention, after it was in print, having to get out there and sell sell sell. She planned the group’s annual picnic too. In February of 1953, not long before she wrote the check to Ron, she was elected to the church’s Board of Trustees.
The two take-homes from that previous paragraph are: 1) Dorothy Craig helped write a church cookbook in 1950, and if you happen to see it on eBay or anywhere else, could you pulleeeze let me know so that I can buy it and post it on this website?; and 2) People who attended St. Paul would have known Dorothy Craig quite well—so well, in fact, that many probably called her by her nickname…Dot.
If you’re thinking that that might be how Ron would have known Dorothy, alas, no. I’m not sure how much church Ron attended, but when he did attend, he went to the Presbyterian church in Oxford.
But there was someone else who attended St. Paul—someone whom Dorothy would have been far more inclined to contact if she ever needed to book a band. That person was Franz E. Klaber, a German immigrant who’d made a very big name for himself in Hamilton and throughout the region with his eight-piece Franz Klaber Orchestra. Their forte was polkas and other German folk music, but Franz wasn’t afraid to try other genres too.
The Klaber family had been members of St. Paul beginning at least in the late 1930s, and the family remained members after Franz Sr. passed away in 1963. Of course they’d play for church events. In fact, Franz and his family played at the St. Paul Church lawn social in August 1953. Therefore, hiring a band would have been a no-brainer for Dorothy Craig. I’m quite sure that Franz would be the first person she would’ve asked. To be honest, I think he would have been hurt if she hadn’t.
Franz Klaber’s sons, daughter, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren are active in the band—now known as the Klaberheads. You can listen to them here. https://youtu.be/PTCO3isgPv8
And where does that leave us regarding Ron Tammen? We still don’t know how a middle-aged woman whose life revolved around family, church, and work at a paper mill 12 miles from Oxford would have intersected with a sophomore business major who was about to become one of the biggest Ohio mysteries of the century.
Nevertheless, this helps us narrow our options with regards to how they might have met. Our only problem is that the one explanation that seemed most feasible of all—the explanation that seemed most reasonable and logical—is no longer on the table.
