Marion Bodmer enrolled at Dickinson in the fall of 1929, though it’s not clear if he actually went to Carlisle. The local press pivoted quickly.
In the spring after the revelation, the Snyder County Tribune reported that Marion and a friend had completed a three-day fishing trip along Penn’s Creek. “Mr. Marion Bodmer” was now an established resident of Selinsgrove.
Marion attended Susquehanna University and Penn State’s forestry program, graduating from the latter in June 1933. His timing was good; Congress and President Roosevelt had just created the Civilian Conservation Corps Two months earlier. He quickly found a position as the forester in charge of CCC camp 85 in Emporium, PA. The camp was less than thirty days old.
Marion married Lillian Layton, of Allentown a year later, in June 1934. Layton, six years older than Marion, came from a family just as affluent as the Bodmers. She attended the Allentown Dramatic School while in high school and received a roadster as a graduation gift. We know this because, as with the Bodmers, the highlights of the Laytons’ lives were published in the town gossip sections of Allentown’s newspapers. Lillian worked in the clerical department of the Bethlehem Steel Works upon graduation in 1923.
She enrolled at Susquehanna University in 1924. At the time, she was 20 years old; Marion, living less than a mile away, was 14. Lillian graduated from Susquehanna’s two-year business course in 1926 and, a year later, began teaching English, shorthand, and typewriting at Selinsgrove High. Lillian was there for Marion’s final year of school. Given that he was in the commercial club, it’s likely that they knew each other while he was a student. The best evidence for interactions between the two comes from a single story printed during the media storm of 1929. The Shamokin Dispatch published a story on July 18, 1929, titled “THINK TEACHER INFLUENCED BOY TO REVEAL SEX,” and it based the reporting on anonymous classmates of Marion’s. The gist was that Lillian had counseled Marion to reveal the truth, after learning the truth herself at some point that year. The story explained:
Schoolmates of the young man declared today that his closest companion was one of his teachers in the Selinsgrove high school, an attractive girl from near Allentown, Spanish in type, who taught in the commercial course.
Two things give pause about the story. First, it seems like such an intimacy should have attracted more attention. Classmates said that the teacher “was frequently with him on motor rides.” That would have raised some eyebrows, even without the opposite sex factor. Second, if Marion’s “close friends” knew that the influence of the teacher had caused the revelation, as the paper reported, then that would have meant that those close friends had known about Marion as well. There were no claims that anyone had anything but vague suspicions about his sex. The same article quoted a classmate as saying, “To the students he seemed to be of neither sex.” So the rumor about the influential teacher is not to be believed without skepticism. Still, there must have been some grain of truth to the rumor; the fact that Marion married a woman from Allentown who taught at his school during his senior year is more than a coincidence.
Lillian resigned from the teaching position in Selinsgrove at the end of the 1929-30 school year and moved to New York to enroll in an NYU course on commercial teaching. In 1931 and 1932, the Selinsgrove Times reported on her visits to town to see friends, and she moved back to town in 1933 to teach in the commercial program at Northumberland High School.
Lillian resigned from that position in June 1934, right before she and Marion got married quietly before a justice of the peace in Middleburg. There were no attendees and seemingly no public notice of the bond. When the Snyder County courthouse staff updated their records in November, 1934, three newspapers jumped at the news that Marion and Lillian were married five months earlier. By that time, they had already bolted back to the CCC camp in Emporium.
Mr. Bodmer is the son of Mr. and Mrs. G.A. Bodmer of North Market Street, Selinsgrove. He graduated from Selinsgrove High School and last year completed his work in a business college.
—Daily Item [Sunbury], 6 November 1934
In 1938, Bodmer was appointed a Pennsylvania state forest ranger. He was listed in the 1940 census as “Kanter Bodmer.” He and Lillian lived in Emporium until the early 1940s. They moved back to Selinsgrove in 1943. The details of their everyday lives are lost to us, but the lack of notoriety would have suited the couple.
Meanwhile, his parents turned their Market Street house into the Hotel Selin, with its bar commonly known around town as “Gus’s Place.” Gus ran for Associate Judge in 1943 and lost by a landslide to a reverend from Middleburg. Mary was active in the Snyder County Republican Women’s organization. Gus bought land throughout the county in the 1930s and 1940s. Neither of them seem to have paid a real social cost for the nineteen years of deception. Gus decided not to run for a third term as chief burgess of Selinsgrove, as the election was just six weeks after the revelations about Marion broke in 1929. Apart from that, there is no visible evidence that the revelation and media scrutiny had lasting effects on the Bodmers’ public lives.
Marion worked as a Forest Assistant for the Elk Forest District before resigning to work briefly in the lumber industry in central Pennsylvania. He worked in the 1940s and 1950s for the Firestone Rubber Company, as a rubber plantation supervisor in Liberia. He traveled to Brazil in 1943 to learn about the management of Brazilian rubber plantations. Between stints in Africa, Marion and Lillian ran a farm in Neitz Valley south of Selinsgrove, which they bought in 1942.
In 1944, when he killed a water buffalo with a shotgun after it had cornered workers on a plantation in Liberia, the Selinsgrove Times hailed him as a hometown hero. The paper mentioned Bodmer’s training as a hunter during his youth in Snyder County. When he killed a 12-foot boa constrictor a year later, that, too, made the local paper.
The 1944 Selinsgrove Times article said nothing about Bodmer’s first nineteen years of life. Like the newspaper’s announcement of his marriage a decade earlier, this article avoided the scandal that had been front-page news in 1929.
The next decade saw Marion and Lillian mostly in Liberia, with several months-long stretches between contracts during which they lived in Selinsgrove. In 1958, Marion resigned from Firestone to take a position as the superintendent of Pennsylvania’s Cook Forest State Park and then the new Gifford Pinchot State Park. He resigned from both positions within months of accepting them. The next year was difficult. Marion’s father, Gus, died in October 1959. Lillian died of breast cancer one month later.
In 1961, Marion married Meral Altug, a Turkish-born doctor who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s. She worked in hospitals in Iowa City, and Baltimore before taking a position at the Danville State Hospital, 35 miles from Ricketts Glen State Park, where Marion worked in 1960. The couple lived together in Dushore, PA in 1966, before they relocated to Selinsgrove in 1967. Dr. Bodmer opened a general practice on Market Street, which she maintained for decades. They lived on the farm in Neitz Valley, where Marion grew evergreens for sale as Christmas trees.
Marion Bodmer died in 1981, after three years of failing health.