Only two months later, the investor sold the house to Carl Boltie. Boltie moved in with his wife, Marie; brother, Bill; 19-year-old daughter, Hazel; and 12-year-old son, Ernie, in July, 1952. They had lived on a rural stretch of Montgomery Road for many years because his oldest daughter, Helen, had childhood health problems which were supposed to be cured by country living, but now that Helen was grown and married, they felt free to move into town. A year later, Hazel married Will Schwickert and moved back to the rural Aurora. Schwickert, an 84-year-old retired livestock and grain farmer, is one of family's few survivors, and he provided much of the information on the Boltie family during an interview at my home.
The Boltie era strikes me as a rather dark chapter in the history of the Lincoln manor, because the research I have done on the family reveals a consistent line of tragedy (the Kennedy syndrome?) An infant son, Carl Boltie Jr., died of pneumonia, and Helen was a sickly child. She overcame her early troubles, but contracted polio while pregnant with her second child and developed a permanent physical disability. Carl injured his back during the late 1940's and, even though he kept his job at Lyon Metal Corporation, he was no longer able to share a bedroom with his wife because of the muscular tics and sleeping problems which ensued. He had to wear a custom-built shoe, and he depended on brother Bill for rides to work. Almost all of his brothers died of heart disease, and Carl, himself, died of a heart attack suffered at work in 1963, a year after he and Marie moved out. Ernie developed heart disease by age 50 and died in Texas in October, 2008. Most tragic, though, was the untimely death of Hazel in 1980, when her car rode onto a hidden guardrail and flipped upside down in Big Rock Creek, on her way to work at Kaneville Seed Company. She stayed upside down in the creek for nearly four hours before police recovered her body. She was only 47.
In spite of their dark undertones, though, the Boltie family had some good times in the home. Schwickert still remembers that the family kept parrots in the basement, sometimes setting them free to fly around. Carl taught his parrot to swear, so he always draped a towel over the cage when the grandchildren came to visit so they would not be subjected to unsavory influences. Ernie collected several macaws, also, and would sometimes trade birds with his friends when he came home from college.
Helen, the immediate family's only survivor, has had two strokes and can no longer talk, but her husband, Tom Hoffman, claims that Carl made little improvement to the property. He said that Carl replaced the siding and furnace, and did nothing else. Schwickert remembered little about the upper floor, and when we looked at the bedrooms, he remarked that when he took a girl out, he didn't spend much time upstairs--a man of principle! Neither Schwickert or Hoffman remembers the barn, and both claim to have parked cars in the garage, so it appears that the barn was demolished between the time of Harold Christian's death and the Boltie's moving in. Perhaps the investors, who owned it for the two month interim, tore it down. Marie filed for a building permit to replace the garage in 1961, but apparently she never followed through on it because she sold the house for only $16,000 the following year. She never offered it to Tom and Helen, an oversight which Tom remembers with apparent bitterness. “Helen and I could have bought the d--- thing and rented it out!” he said.
It is interesting to note that Marie Boltie later met Charlotte Christian while playing Bingo, and discovered that they had both lived in the same house. Another interesting sidenote is that Carl changed his name from "Bolte" to "Boltie" early in adulthood, which is why I found almost no information about the family through genealogical sites.
Bill Bolte died of a heart attack in 1961, and Carl and Marie moved out a year later.
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