Lee Shippey
After the death of his father on July 24, 1899,[3] Lee left Central High School to begin his working life as a laborer in a meat packing-house, then started his career in journalism as a night-shift copyholder — somebody who reads written material aloud to a proofreader — on the Kansas City Times, going to high school during the day.
[5]: 21–22 As a young man, he was poisoned by the wood alcohol he had been using over a period of weeks to clean a meerschaum pipe, resulting in the loss of most of his sight.
[5]: 40–47 "As he lay helpless in bed, thinking life held nothing in the future for him, he was astounded to hear his sister reading some of his own humorous writings which he had surreptitiously left on the desk of the associate editor of the Kansas City Star."
[15][16] At this point, the Babins — a mother and two daughters — had lost the father of the family, Georges, who died after being discharged as a private in the French army.
Shippey helped Madeleine and her younger sister by two years, Georgette, get jobs as interpreters for the YMCA, and "Every Sunday and holiday and many a long summer evening they visited historic or beautiful places in or near Paris.
"[17] In a column that was later published in newspapers across the country "that the real and ungarbled truth may be known of the famous 'war triangle,' " Shippey wrote that: For ten months our friendship grew.
He wrote that he met Georges Babin while the latter was a hospital patient and that Madeleine and Babette had been trapped for two years in a convent school behind the German lines in Belgium.
Finally, the girls came home to Paris, via England, and Shippey and a fellow American writer, Homer Croy, went with Mrs. Babin to the train station to meet them.
The next day Croy arranged for the two young women to work as interpreters in the organization for which he was the Paris production manager, the Community Motion Picture Bureau.
[5]: 65, 71–75 After the war ended on November 11, 1918, Shippey found his income so reduced "that I could not afford to keep the hotel room Croy and I had shared unless I could get another roommate."
[5]: 99 The end of Shippey's feelings for "the girl back home" came when he received a furious letter from her "full of violent accusations .
He felt "strangely buoyant" and gay and, when just about to part from the Babins for the train station to begin his trip back home, Madeleine suddenly "took my face in both her hands and kissed me full on the lips.
On January 12 of that year Mary Shippey sued Lee for divorce in a Kansas City, Missouri, court, mentioning the name of Madeleine Babin in the complaint.
[2][23] They moved to Del Mar, California, where Shippey struggled as a free-lance writer and was on the contributing staff of the old Life humor magazine.
" President Paul Wellman cited Shippey's "astonishing array" of published works and lauded him as a man of "good humor, discernment and, above all, sympathy."
He was survived by his five children by his second wife — Henry George, Charles Stuart III, John James, Francis Robert and Sylvia Georgette Thomas.
