By all accounts, Marion was popular in high school. He was in the drama, public speaking, and commercial clubs, and he played on the girls’ basketball team. His graduating class was small, at 46 students, almost evenly split between the academic and commercial tracks. Although classmates would later say that he didn’t socialize much with his peers, he maintained the type of organizational activities that were expected of middle-class kids.
With a car saleman for a father, Marion was one of the most auto-oriented teenagers in town. He was a high-achieving graduate in 1928, and his tentative plans were to study law by attending Dickinson College after enrolling in a prep school in 1929. The Bodmers sent Marion to the Allentown Preparatory School for summer work in economics, history, and Spanish. For twenty-five years, Allentown Prep had been a well-regarded boarding and day school for boys. The cost for boarders was $500 (the equivalent of $7,400 in 2019)—this was within the Bodmers’ means.
But, of course, Allentown Prep was a boys’ school.
The Bodmers had to know that this decision threatened to bring the facade crashing down. Perhaps Gus, Mary, and Marion thought that by sending him away to Allentown, he could start a new life and escape the old. Perhaps they weren’t thinking that far into the future at all but knew that the status quo couldn’t hold. It must have been with a mixture of fear and relief that they applied for Marion to attend Allentown Prep. He was accepted, and they left for Allentown on June 29. Anonymous Selinsgrove residents would later say that Marion was dressed as a man when the family left town. He spent a quiet two weeks with his new classmates. At least once, they went swimming at the pool in Dorney Park.
Still, it wasn’t a clean break. The school’s administrators soon began to ask questions. What must have started in the registrar’s office at Allentown Prep somehow jumped to a local reporter, who got to work during the second week of July. The Allentown Morning Call claimed that a “nosy neighbor” from Selinsgrove had gone to Allentown with suspicions about Marion and had leaked the story. However it started, tt was just a matter of time…
The news broke on Saturday, July 13, 1929, in an Associated Press wire story with a Selinsgrove dateline which was picked up by several regional newspapers. The Harrisburg Telegraph was the largest paper to run the original story that day, with a front-page headline “YOUTH POSES 19 YEARS AS GIRL” that featured a font just slightly smaller than the main headline about the fate of a transatlantic airplane race. By the next day, Sunday, July 14, the story was everywhere. Local headline editors worked their magic to frame the AP story:
| CITY | HEADLINE |
|---|---|
| Eugene, OR | YOUTH ESSAYS GARB OF FLAPPER FOR 19 YEARS |
| Albuquerque, NM | ENTERS LAW SCHOOL AFTER MASQUERADING AS GIRL 19 YEARS |
| Brooklyn, NY | “GIRL” FOR 19 YEARS, YOUTH DONS TROUSERS TO STUDY LAW |
| Salt Lake City, UT | YOUTH WILL ASSUME MALE ATTIRE AFTER DRESSING AS GIRL FOR 19 YEARS |
| Decatur, IL | PARENTS ADMIT SON POSES AS GIRL FOR YEARS |
The wire story generated many of the themes that appeared throughout the nation in the next two weeks:
- “masquerade“: the writer noted that Marion had been “masquerading for nineteen years as a girl.” Presenting the story this way made the townspeople of Selinsgrove the victims of a hoax. Rather than focusing on the strain that must have come with maintaining the act, the writer emphasized the outer display that fooled locals.
- prep school: the immediate cause of the revelation, the writer explained, was Marion’s enrollment at Allentown Prep. This fact was seized upon by media outlets fascinated by the notion that it was the irresistible lure of a legal career that brought about the revelation. (Buried here was the uncontested assumption that to be a lawyer, one had to be a man.) There had actually been an earlier moment of near-revelation when an official at the Bellefonte Academy had called the Selinsgrove High School to ask about Marion’s application to study there. This, apparently, started rumors about Marion in Selinsgrove in the few weeks leading up to July 13.
- basketball: Marion’s involvement in girls’ basketball at Selinsgrove was noted widely, especially with details about his skill at the game, his domination of female opponents, and his captaincy of the team. These would have been easy entryways for readers, who could reduce the story in their minds to the image of a boy playing against girls on a basketball court.
- ambiguous origin story: the writer didn’t attempt to clear up the motivations behind the deception, noting only that Gus and Mary chose to announce the wrong sex and to dress Marion as a girl. This was the way in which newspaper readers were introduced to the story. So the mystery lingered for a few days, until many of those same newspapers around the nation ran a second AP story that provided more details.
At 223 North Market Street, the phone rang all weekend, and telegrams were delivered from journalists asking for comment from the family. The viewpoint of the Bodmer parents came out slowly. Gus spoke for the family, stating vaguely at first that they had wanted a girl in 1910. It wasn’t until Tuesday—three days after the news broke—that Gus released a full statement. Over sixteen paragraphs, he described a painful, stressful nineteen years during which the parents lived in terror of the secret getting out. Here are a few examples of the sentiments that Gus conveyed:
We are relieved that we have taken off Marion’s dresses and revealed him as a boy, but if only we had done it nineteen years ago, a few days after he was born, for then our first doubts were dissipated and we knew he was a boy.
As time passed he began to shun girls and wanted to play with the boys, but they wouldn’t have him, he used to sob to us, because he wore dresses. He never had the chance to play as other boys and girls, because he was so far apart from them, he found.
Marion’s mother is a nervous wreck and my heart is breaking. I hope Marion will prove strong enough to bear up under this terrible ordeal. It was he, brave boy that he is, who volunteered to face the world with the truth about himself.
These last ten years especially have been a horrible nightmare for the boy, his mother, and me. Mrs. Bodmer and I cried ourselves to sleep many nights since Marion was born, and then when he became a lad and understood his girlish clothes were a masquerade, Marion shared our grief with us.
We did not want to consult anyone, but thought the time might soon come when we would muster up sufficient courage to reveal that Marion was not a girl. However the longer Mrs. Bodmer and I kept our secret, the more difficult it became for us even to think of telling.
June of last year came his graduation night from the high school. We bought him an orchid Georgette dress and all the other fine pieces of clothing that one would want for the graduating child of whom they were so proud. We were so proud and yet so sad. Our little boy had become a full fledged youth, keen, alert, and very good looking.