Marion Bodmer was born on June 19, 1910, to Mary and George “Gus” Bodmer.
In 1910 Gus was a thirty-six-year-old baker and liquor wholesaler; he held one of three wholesale liquor licenses in Snyder County at a time when community voices against alcohol sales were becoming louder. He came from the Harrisburg area, where he had worked as a baker before moving to Selinsgrove. In fact, baking brought him to Selinsgrove; both the Selinsgrove and Middleburg newspapers noted his arrival, and the Selinsgrove paper referred to him as a “first-class baker from Harrisburg.” He bought his own bakery in 1907 and a bottling works in 1909. Gus got out of the liquor trade in the build-up toward the Prohibition era and kept baking, employed by the Sunbury Baking Company in Sunbury.
In 1910, Mary Kantner was thirty-three. She was the daughter of a tombstone cutter, Victor Kantner. His Selinsgrove Marble Works was the premier stone works in town in the late 1870s and early 1880s. He died in the 1880s, leaving Mary’s mother to raise her and her three younger siblings. In the 1890s, in her teen years, Mary assisted her mother in hosting large town parties and selling confections. By 1900 when she was twenty-three years old, Mary lived with her grandfather, a Selinsgrove dentist, and worked in a shoe factory in town. All of the kids worked by that time: sister Lettie in the post office and brothers William and Robert in the same shoe factory.
Gus and Mary married in 1900 in Selinsgrove. It’s not clear how they met, although the arrival of the young Harrisburg baker in the small town certainly would have been known by the town’s twenty-somethings. They had a boy, Eugene, in 1904 and had Marion six years later.
At this point, let’s look at Marion’s birth certificate. The form reveals two things: (1) the amended sex listing for Marion and (2) the name of the attending doctor. While the first piece of information tells us little, the second takes us deeper into the beginning of the deception.
Someone, possibly the doctor on the scene or an assistant, filled in the “Sex of Child” field with “Female.” That entry was then crossed out with a single stroke, and “Male” was written above the deletion at a slight angle. It’s most likely that the entry was changed AFTER the revelations of 1929, when Gus and Mary claimed that the doctor was initially unsure of Marion’s sex but decided on “female.” Even though that explanation raises more questions than it answers, it’s more difficult to imagine a scenario in which the doctor mistakenly ascribed one sex, corrected it shortly thereafter, and the parents chose to adopt the first ascription. Without any other evidence, we shouldn’t take the correction as a sign of ambiguity in June 1910.
Dr. Cyril Haas was thirty-one in 1910. He had graduated from Selinsgrove High School and had been deeply involved in the local missionary movement. The son of reverend, Cyril was in the same church as Gus and Mary Bodmer, the First Reformed Church. Haas grew interested in medical missionary work in the late 1890s, and he attended medical school at the University of Michigan. Through the Reformed Church, Haas took missionary trips after graduation. He was back in Selinsgrove by 1908, when he opened a medical practice. He was elected to the Snyder County Board of Health in March 1910. Two months after Marion’s birth, Dr. Haas and family left Selinsgrove for missionary work in Turkey. He stayed there for the next nine years, even as Europe was besieged by the Great War. After a brief visit to Selinsgrove in 1920, he went back to Turkey.
