Joe Davis and "the Most Notorious"

Left: my Great-Great-Great-Uncle Joe Davis, Right: Rose Zettler 

Sometimes the most horrible lives make for fine genealogical treasures. My great-great-great-uncle Joe Davis (c.1852-1934) was a black sheep extraordinaire: married four times with at least three divorces, possibly a bigamist, definitely an abusive spouse, probably a middleman for thieves, certainly a con artist who profited off dubious goods, and likely a robber of jewelry and other fineries. Corporate digitization of historical newspapers allowed me to string together dozens of clips spanning decades and trace Joe Davis’s peripatetic struggles to scrape together a buck, seemingly by any means necessary. 

Yet Uncle Joe was also a victim of circumstances. He picked one of the most generic Anglicized names to hide his Jewish identity, his original surname Divinsky, his patronyms Iosif Zusov and Yosef bar Yekutiel Zusman, and his possible nickname Yossel. His occupations of peddling, pawning, and selling and auctioning second-hand goods were trades readily available to recently arrived Eastern European Jews, and jobs that easily invited criticism from a broader American society run by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant prejudice and “melting pot” assimilation. 

All this to say, it’s hard sometimes to tell whether a “Joe Davis” or “Joseph Davis” in the records is my distant uncle. I found two fascinating stories through Newspapers.com that may be about my family’s Joe Davis, but at present I can’t say with certainty whether they involve the “right” Joe Davis. If these are a match, then one story shares how Joe came to the United States and seduced women, and another tale provides a peek into his scheming and somewhat squandered brain.

The Seduced Woman

The first story began way back in June 1891 in Seattle, Washington, when a younger Russian Jewish woman named Esther Feigle accused Harry Zettler (or Harry Zetler), an older Russian Jewish man, of seduction and criminal assault. Esther, described in The Tacoma News as a 19-year-old “handsome blonde of German [sic] descent,” said two months before in New York she had answered a newspaper ad seeking a nurse. Harry Zettler and his wife Rose brought Esther back to their home in Seattle, and as quick as a melodrama, Harry began eyeing Esther. Rose told Esther they were “placing her in a house of shame,” and they made their living by selling women into prostitution. Harry sexually assaulted Esther, and in florid Victorian writing, Esther had “accomplished her ruin” because “she was penniless and practically in Zeitler [sic] and his wife’s power.” 

Then in swooped a hero. Esther’s parents, not having heard from her since her departure, wrote their cousin in nearby Fairhaven [now Bellingham], Washington: Joe Diorski. When Joe came to Seattle for business a few days later, “Little did he dream of meeting Esther Feigle, his cousin, as he did Monday on the streets in the lower part of town. The young girl did not recognize him, but he did her. Diorski was still greater surprised when the young girl told him her sad story. He immediately took the girl from the house in which she living and to a respectable hotel.”

Diorski helped Esther pursue charges against the Zettlers, and The Tacoma News ended its article with a thunderous moral: “The people who lured [Esther] from her home should be hunted down and punished.”  

Three articles on Harry Zettler's case, 1891.

However, a rival paper, The Tacoma Daily Ledger, came out two days later with “Zetler’s Strange Tale,” with the startling subheading, "How He Sold His Servant to a Lecherous Bilk for $35." This apparent translation of Harry Zettler’s court statement pointed out many conflicting details in the initial reporting. According to Harry Zettler, Esther was a worldly 25-year-old who told the Zettlers she wanted to leave New York because “her ‘feller’ had deserted her.” The Zettlers met Esther through an employment agency, rather than a newspaper ad, and bought her dresses and underwear. 

Harry Zettler claimed Joe Diorski asked to take away Esther, and reimbursed Harry’s expenses for Esther with a $35 check that bounced. But most intriguingly, Zettler said Diorski’s real identity was... Joe Davis:  

“Last Sunday, Joe Davis – and not Diorski, as he calls himself in the papers – learning of my address, called at the store, and asked the girl to see me. He was sent up stairs to my room, and there I recognized him as a Jew who came over from Russia with me nine years ago. The government sent us to Manitoba, and there Joe Davis remained two years and then cleared out, and last Sunday was the first time I saw him since that time. Davis is a bigamist and has a bad record. When he left Manitoba he returned to Russia, taking back with him his wife and two children. These he deserted there and came back to the states, bringing with him wife number two. This one he also deserted and the woman is now living in Montana. Wife number one came back to the United States looking for Davis and is now located in Chicago, while Davis is now here running this woman Esther with a view to making her wife number three.” 

After Joe Davis’s check bounced, Harry “went to Fairhaven where I learned that Davis has a brother keeping a second-hand store, but that Joe Davis had no business there and no means. I returned to Seattle Wednesday night and was astonished to find that the officers were after me on the charge of seducing that woman. I was arrested too late to furnish bail and was locked up all night.” 

There was no follow-up to the initial lurid reporting on Harry Zettler’s case, and his charges were dismissed that September. It’s not clear what became of Esther Feigle, and there is no other mention of “Joe Diorski” outside of this court case. 

So was Joe Diorski really Joe Davis, and does this mean Uncle Joe was a bigamist? Several factors make me suspect this is one and the same man: 

The timing: As mentioned in my Davis family blog, Joe Davis had separated from his second wife Bettie in December 1890 in Missoula, Montana, and moved to Spokane, Washington the following month. Shortly after Joe’s move, Bettie accused him of stealing her jewelry, and he was arrested in Spokane. The charges were dropped shortly afterward, and Joe Davis returned to Missoula by September 1892. Joe certainly could have moved across Washington State, from Spokane to the Bellingham area, by June 1891. 

The assumed name: When Joe Davis was arrested in Spokane in January 1891, he was using the alias “I. Schlossberg,” which he bizarrely claimed to authorities was the Hebrew name for “jeweler.” He could have used another strange alias, “Diorski,” later that year. 

The brother: One write-up of Joe’s separation in December 1890 said he had a brother in Spokane “recently over from Russia.” This was probably Ike Davis, who had arrived in New York that September. Joe and Ike would later live in Missoula and Spokane at the same time, and they ran second-hand stores in both locations. Among Fairhaven records on FamilySearch.org, “Jos. Davis” does appear in Fairhaven’s 1891 personal property tax rolls, owning a second-hand store worth $150, and not surprisingly he also appeared on the town’s “Delinquent Personal Property Assessment Roll.” Joseph Davis is missing from the 1892 property tax rolls.  

The two wives: Joe had indeed been married twice by 1891, and his second wife Bettie, then separated, was living in Montana. I had assumed that the first Mrs. Joe Davis had died in Russia, but maybe that's not the case… I know her name, “Rebecca Rabanow,” from the marriage record of her daughter, Ida Davis (who I previously wrote about in this blog). 

If Harry Zettler’s backstory on Joe Davis is true (which is a huge if), the migration story of Joe’s family is much clearer. Joe is said to have come to Canada in mid-1882 with his wife and two children, and then around 1884 brought them back to Russia and brought a new wife to the United States. This roughly coincides with the earliest date I have for my distant uncle Joe Davis in the U.S. His daughter Rose was said to have been born on June 15, 1884 in Spokane, and another daughter, Sade, was born in 1885 in Butte, Montana. The girls' mother was Joe's second wife, Bettie (Goldberg) Benedict, a native of Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now L’viv, Ukraine). Perhaps Joe and Bettie met and married in a European port city, rather than the United States? 

The gossipy news coverage on Joe and Bettie Davis’s second separation in 1894 in Missoula included the tidbits that 15-year-old Ida lived with her father and stepmother, and only one article mentions Joe had “a boy, Alex, a bright lad about 14 years old.” It could be that Ida and maybe Alex (who, again, only appears in one article) are the two children who immigrated with “Rebecca,” the first Mrs. Joe Davis? Ida claimed in later censuses that she immigrated in 1885 or 1889, trailing her father by a number of years.   

The timing is tight, but perhaps Joe Davis crossed the Atlantic twice within two years with two separate wives. 

Refugees in Canada

Harry Zettler claims he immigrated from Russia with Joe Davis around 1882, and included the fascinating detail: “The government sent us to Manitoba.” This most likely means they were part of a group of 340 Russian Jews permitted to settle in Winnipeg, Canada in May and June 1882, following the previous year’s pogroms and right as Russia’s anti-Semitic May Laws took effect. Rabbi Arthur Chiel describes the refugees’ history in great detail in his book “The Jews in Manitoba.” 

Following the 1881 pogroms, the Anglo-Jewish Association put pressure on London’s Mansion House (the mayoral office) to set up a “special Russo-Jewish Committee,” which sponsored the Canadian resettlement effort. Many of these Jewish refugees intended to farm, but the Mansion House Committee took two years to secure Canadian farmland. In the meantime, new arrivals stayed in “emigrant sheds” and the town’s existing Jewish population, numbering around 100, gave the refugees limited material support. Some of the Jewish men worked jobs like unloading boats and rail-splitting, and that summer 150 men joined crews building the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was racing towards its 1885 completion. 

Winnipeg's main street, c.1880 (source)

About 20 Jewish refugee families were forced to brave Winnipeg's winter of 1882-1883 in the “emigration sheds.” The Manitoba Free Press reported on the refugees shivering through a cold winter Shabbat in January 1883: “A stove, a bench, and in some instances a small table constituted the sole articles of furniture. The beds were made on the tops of boxes which at one time constituted the whole of their possessions. It being the Jewish Sabbath several of the children were to be seen poring over parts of the Scriptures, written in the Hebrew tongue, and the individual members of the families were all assembled together, each family in its own apartment. Fire was seen only in one or two of the stoves, the children being in bed, and the older folks huddled together for warmth, their scanty clothing offering slim protection from the intense cold.” 

One settler in Winnipeg, S.F. Rodin, wrote to a Russian Jewish paper in September 1882, “Our living conditions during the first few months of our arrival were unendurable. Thank God, the situation has improved somewhat. We have gradually accustomed our selves to the hard work. Here, in this new country, even the cultivated and well-bred among us have had to discard our starched shirts and shined shoes and have gotten down to work.”

Rodin also described the refugees’ moment of unity as they celebrated Rosh Hashana: “We observed the New Year Holiday fully and completely, worshipping in a tent at a railway station forty miles from Winnipeg. We collected from among us contributions of three dollars each, a total of one hundred dollars and ordered from New York City a fine Sefer Torah and a Shofar. On the New Year days we ceased from our labors and we gathered in a large tent. We prayed and read out of the Sefer Torah. The local residents looked on with wonder and admiration, commenting: ‘Look! though far removed from their homes and their people they nevertheless make every effort to worship in the manner known to them.’"

Harry Zettler was definitely part of this wave of Russian Jewish migration – he appears on a Quebec passenger list as “Hersch Zettler,” a 28-year-old laborer, with a 29-year-old wife named Taube Zettler (clearly a marriage prior to Rose Zettler), aboard the S.S. Lake Manitoba, which sailed from Liverpool on June 1, 1882 and arrived in Quebec on June 14. So far, I have not found Joe Davis in the Canadian passenger lists of 1882. 

Given the hardships the Jewish refugees faced in Winnipeg, one can understand how Harry Zettler gave in to the temptation of illicit money. A Seattle news article from 1895 claimed that Harry “had been tarred and feathered in Winnipeg for being a pimp,” indicating that he turned to a life of crime early on in Canada.   

Harry Zettler said Joe Davis “remained two years [in Manitoba] and then cleared out,” and indeed many of Winnipeg’s Russian Jews left during those two hard years. By the time the Mansion House Committee offered homesteads in May 1884, only 27 refugee Jewish families remained to take up the offer. Their agriculture settlement, which was nicknamed “New Jerusalem” by mocking gentile neighbors, was declared a failure by Mansion House in 1888. Jewish life continued in Winnipeg to the present day, but not as an agricultural colony.  

Photo supposedly showing Seattle prostitutes around 1900, including Madame Lou Graham, 

In February 1886, Harry Zettler was naturalized in Seattle, and within a few years he and his family had received a pretty bad reputation in the city. Harry’s second wife, Rose Zettler (or Rose Zetler), and sister-in-law Alice Zetler (a.k.a. “Alice Black” and “Camille Musang”), were accused multiple times in the 1890s of running fruit and candy stands that were fronts for brothels. Harry and his brother, Solomon Zettler, were accused and convicted of financially benefiting from their wives’ prostitution. The Zettler women first ran brothels in Seattle’s Whitechapel District, an infamous “tenderloin district," but an 1893 article noted when the Zettlers “moved into the heart of a respectable neighborhood to ply their shameless vocation a protest was made.”

"These Women Had Other Business" - The Seattle Star's 1901 article on the Zettlers' prostitution ring.

Rose Zettler was found guilty of prostitution in January 1895, and then faced grand larceny charges that October, after she robbed $185 (some articles say in cash, others say in $20 gold pieces) from a stone cutter that she met at a dance hall and led to an upstairs room for the night. 

As the grand larceny case made its way up to higher courts, Rose was yet again arrested and charged with prostitution in February 1896. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer didn’t hold back in its article: “Rose Zetler, the most notorious of all notorious women in this city, who was arrested night before last for using her persuasive powers with passers-by, will be tried next Tuesday afternoon. One of the members of the police force said that it was not a half hour after her release from jail on cash bail that she was peeking out of the doorway of her abode on Washington street, near the water front, in just as bold a manner as customary.”

Rose Zettler's mugshot and prisoner record, 1897.

The Washington Supreme Court ruled in November 1896 that Rose Zettler was indeed guilty of grand larceny and had to serve 18 months in a penitentiary in Walla Walla. Amazingly, Ancestry.com has access to Rose Zettler’s prison processing papers from January 1897, which includes a mugshot. She was 28 years old and only 4 feet, ¾ inches tall, with black hair and blue eyes, and the form said she was temperate and orphaned at age 11. 

Rose’s awful lot in life continued after her prison release in February 1898. One night in March 1899, she was stabbed in the throat and hand by a client. The Seattle Star said her assailant was “following in the footsteps of ‘Jack the Ripper’”, because Rose’s “bedding and [bedroom] walls were sprinkled with blood,” and Rose would survive but was “painfully wounded.” She faced prostitution charges at least one more time, in August 1901. 

News article on the stabbing of Rose Zettler, 1899.

Returning once more to the 1891 court case over Esther Feigle's assault, one article understandably called it “A Mixed Up Case.” On the one hand, Harry and Rose Zettler were longtime practitioners of prostitution, and it’s probable that they were pressuring Esther into sex work. But it also seems likely that Joe Davis was trying to seduce Esther as well. Only a few months before, Joe had separated from but not divorced his second wife in Montana, and it’s possible his first wife was still his legal spouse, living in Chicago. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem that Esther married Joe Davis, as all his marriages eventually decayed into abusive misery. His third wife Margaret divorced him due to physical abuse and his fourth and final wife Emma divorced him over grounds of “desertion.” 

The Zettler family mellowed with the passage of time, as Harry appeared in the 1910 and 1920 censuses as a fruit farmer outside Seattle. Rose died at age 55 in 1924 after battling kidney disease (and possibly diabetes), and Harry died at age 73 in 1927. Their only child, Hyman Zettler, graduated from the University of Washington in 1910 and became a lawyer. Joe Davis settled in his 50s in San Francisco, the setting of another story that possibly shows his quirky side. 

The Checkers Champion

Not to downplay Joe Davis’s serious (and sometimes criminal) flaws, but he had a comical sense of grandeur that he often used to hoodwink people. A write-up on his daughter Ida’s wedding described his first wife as “a lady who was [from] one of the noble families of Russia,” when ironically this may have been the woman that Joe abandoned. When police caught him using the alias “Schlossberg,” he gave the strange excuse that it was the Hebrew word for “jeweler.” Ads for his jewelry store in Spokane boasted that he sold “the only stone that can not be detected from diamonds. Truly it may be said that the Ural Diamond is 'the poor man's diamond and the rich man's substitute.'”

Joe’s strange charisma and a reported penchant for gambling while playing checkers seem to come together in the press coverage of Joseph Davis, a man in the Bay Area in the 1910s who claimed to be the “champion checkers player of the United States,” and even the world. I’ve found no mention of Davis’s title outside of the Bay Area papers.

Joseph Davis, champion of checkers, 1914.

Nevertheless, this Joseph Davis pulled impressive stunts. His photograph appeared in the Oakland Tribune on May 3, 1914, after he played and defeated eight men at checkers at once: “Eight players matched at once against him yesterday at the Commercial Club, went down to defeat in the club ‘Checkers’ tournament at the hands of Joseph Davis, champion ‘Checkers’ player of the world, who offers to play all comers at once, and who yesterday far out stripped any in the contest. The player faced eight boards, lined before him. Each man made a ‘move,’ and, in turn, Davis paused before each board, ‘moving’ in his play, and then returning to the first board to repeat the process. Each player was beaten while Davis still had several ‘kings’ on the boards. 

“Davis began his “game against eight” shortly after 2 o’clock, and was finished before 3. The game was nearly eight times as slow as a regular game, due to the fact that the player was forced to make eight moves for each single play of the other side… 

“Davis, who is well known in San Francisco and Oakland club circles, has played the game, he declares, for 20 years. He recently met noted players in eastern clubs, defeating them in practically every instance. 

“‘I have played as many as 20 men at once,’ declared Davis, ‘but that takes more time than is interesting. It makes a game too slow. Seven or eight players make a good showing, and make a good contest for the spectator to watch.’” 

And as much as Davis claimed to dislike playing against 20 men, he organized another match against 20 players, including two professors, at the Oakland Y.M.C.A. on May 12, 1914. One of the competitors ended up beating Davis, and then Davis lost again to him in a rematch. An article from January 1916 gave Davis’ percentage of wins as .833, well ahead of the next-ranking player’s percentage of .788. 

Around this time, my “Uncle” Joe was listed in San Francisco directories as running a second-hand store but he called it a “music store” in the 1920 census. Classified ads for his business offer used victrolas and three used records for $1. His youngest child, Jeanette, started to play the violin in concerts across San Francisco starting in 1920, and was billed in local papers as a child prodigy. 

 

The second-hand goods salesman in his 60s fancying himself as a music store owner and winning big in local checkers tournaments is a poignant image. What could Joe Davis have done with a college education or beyond? Did he have an artistic streak that he tamped down as he hustled to earn a living? Did this self-proclaimed “champion” ever feel like he was truly winning? 

There’s a family story that when Joe Davis lived in a rest home during his last years, he played chess with visiting movie stars. It fits with the rest of the life of Joe Davis, this hardscrabble shvitzer who used his gifts of chutzpah, schmoozing, and his yiddisher kop to try to prove he was no greenhorn mit gornisht, but an all-American macher mit gelt.

Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.