"Gee, but I wish I was your girl"

One of the weirder trips in all his thousands of miles of traveling took Dr. Winters to Arkansas, then quickly on to Middleport, Ohio, after a $1,000 reward offer from The Cincinnati Post in February 1914 brought in more than 100 letters.

The little girl he went to identify there was not his Catherine—but she was a kidnap victim. A man, one report said a bank robber, had taken and traveled with her for four years, abusing her along the way. "Gee, but I wish I was your girl," she told Dr. Winters. 

He left her with the authorities and started for home, but not before his train stopped in Columbus, Ohio. There some 700 people waited at the station just to get a glimpse of the sad, dogged father from the newspaper account. 

Posted on February 21, 2014 .