In mid-July, the local newspaper coverage of Marion’s revelation was intense. As regional reporters toured Selinsgrove to gather information, they found mixed reactions from residents. Several reports mentioned how little locals wanted to talk about Marion, seemingly thinking that media coverage would depict Selinsgrove as a freakish or suspect place to live. Numerous quotes from anonymous classmates or neighbors filled subsequent articles. Also consulted were new classmates at Allentown Prep. Although Marion left the school on Saturday and didn’t return until Tuesday, reporters sought other students who had interactions with him in the last two weeks. One alleged classmate said that he saw Marion hit nine consecutive shots on a basketball court and outsprint classmates across campus.
As reporters swarmed the Allentown Prep campus on Monday, July 15, Marion’s classmates—including several “husky football players”—formed a phalanx around him to protect him from scrutiny. All signs pointed to the fact that he was welcome to finish his studies there.
It seems a pity that this story got out. I know nothing more than what I read in the papers and we at the school are going to do our utmost to make young Bodmer feel at home.
—Irwin Shalter, Allentown Prep headmaster
Marion’s hometown paper, the Selinsgrove Times, was one of the last outlets to report on the story, gven that it published once a week on Thursdays and had just missed the revelation the week before. The writer for the Times summed up the state of affairs, five days in: “[Marion] has created a sensation running first page from coast to coast, one that has trickled over the cables and flashed thru the ether thruout the world—to the amazement of all who read.”
As might be expected from a newspaper whose editor was well acquainted with the Bodmer family, the Times showed restraint and a desire to move on, despite the story being less than a week old. The paper declared: “heartfelt interest centers in the perplexity how is Marion going to fare the rest of his life.” Accompanying this short note was the Bodmers’ sixteen-paragraph statement. All other newspapers introduced the statement with a few editorial remarks. But not the Selinsgrove Times. Editor Marion Schnure Schoch printed the statement without commentary and with quotation marks, to emphasize its direct nature. It was Gus and Mary Bodmer explaining to their neighbors the bizarre turn of events that had made a sensation out of their town.
In the middle of the media storm, as if on cue, Cyril Haas returned to Selinsgrove. This was rare; he had been in Turkey for the better part of eighteen years and had visited the town only twice since departing in 1910. No evidence exists to suggest that he was in any way brought into the media drama while in town, though writers were busy speculating about how he could have made such an error. One anonymous physician referenced by the Reading Times theorized that Marion was born “a trifle closer to the borderline between the sexes than most persons,” but had forced his masculine traits (and even his anatomy) to the foreground through his passion for “sports and boyish pursuits.” Most newspapers accepted Gus’s explanation that (1) the Bodmer parents had wanted a girl, that (2) the doctor had difficulty identifying Marion’s sex and made a best guess, that (3) within three weeks of birth, the Bodmer parents knew that Marion was a boy, and that (4) Dr. Haas had left town, and they were too embarrassed to correct the announcement themselves.
A photo from the Waxahachie Daily Light in Waxahachie, TX
The story continued to trickle down the media food chain throughout August and into September. By mid-September, the story died. One of the last instances of Marion’s tale came in a single sentence in the Feather River Bulletin in Quincy, California, 2,200 miles from Selinsgrove: “Marion Bodmer, 19, of Selinsgrove, Pa., whose parents caused him to dress as a girl since birth and educated him at a girls’ school, is now revealed to be a boy.” The confused facts, the lack of context, and the casual intimacy of the blurb were a good encapsulation of the newspaper blitz in the summer of 1929. This was essentially the end of the public frenzy over Marion’s life. Due to the varied ways in which newspaper editors found content for their publications, a few outlets ran the story long after the rest of the nation had stopped paying attention. One of the last mentions of the summer of 1929 came almost three years later, when the Culver Citizen, of Culver, IN, published a blurb that made it sound as if the news had broken just yesterday.
Click on the highlighted box to see the Bodmer blurb