♂Sereno Watson Schneck

Sereno Watson Schneck (4 February 1875 – 21 April 1953) was a physician who practised in his home town of Mount Carmel, Illinois, for half a century, and who, at the age of 75, was still working 48 hours a week as a doctor when the 1950 census was taken. He was the grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968). A family narrative adds that he was a keen motorist, and that he owned the Buick that Bob Burman drove to victory in the first feature race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909, two years before the first Indianapolis 500.

Early life

He was born at Mount Carmel, in Wabash County, Illinois, the son of Dr. Jacob Schneck (1843–1906) and Mary Hartman (1850–1920). His father was a serious amateur botanist, then preparing a catalogue of the flora of the Wabash Valley for the Indiana geological survey, and the boy’s unusual given names were almost certainly taken from the American botanist Sereno Watson (1826–1892), perhaps a man his father knew or admired; no record of the choice has been found. His father, born in Indiana to immigrant parents, was a Civil War veteran who had studied medicine after the war and settled at Mount Carmel as a physician; a county history of 1883 says Jacob had one child, a son. The 1880 census finds Sereno, aged five, in his parents’ Mount Carmel household, with a teenage servant boy living with them.

He went to school in Mount Carmel, then spent 1892–93 as a special student at the University of Illinois and 1893–94 in its preparatory academy. He took his medical degree at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1898 and returned to Mount Carmel to practise. With his father before him and his son after him, he made three generations of physicians in the family.

Marriage and family

On 4 April 1899, at Mount Carmel, he married Mabel Wilkinson (1875–1954), who had been born at Friendsville in the same county and had gone on to Oxford College in Ohio. By the census of June 1900 the couple had been married a year and had a baby daughter, Mary Esther, and he was already listed as a physician. A son, Robert Jacob, followed in 1901; he also became a doctor and later practised in Detroit. Mabel was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution and served as Regent of the Mount Carmel chapter in 1927–28. Their daughter Mary Esther married Kenneth Blanchard at Mount Carmel in November 1926.

Practice

Sereno Schneck spent his whole working life in Mount Carmel. His draft registration of September 1918, which he signed in full in his own hand, gives his home as 431 Cherry Street and his office as 319 Market Street. The family lived at the Cherry Street house for decades: the 1930 census shows him owning it, describes his work as “physician and surgeon, general practice”, and finds his widowed mother-in-law, Julia Wilkinson, living with the couple. She was still in his household in 1940, when he reported working 60 hours a week at the age of 65, and in 1950, when she was 93. A family narrative records that he was also a surgeon for the Illinois Central Railroad and later for the Southern and New York Central railroads, that he belonged to the national, state and county medical societies, and that he was a Methodist and a charter member of the Elks lodge.

Cars

The same family narrative, which says his grandchildren called him “Pappy”, describes a lifelong love of fast cars and fine horses. Besides the 1909 Indianapolis Buick, a local list of automobile owners in 1912 gives him a Buick Model 16B. He raced his own cars until his wife insisted that he stop, and he was known to push the speed limit on ordinary roads. A Mount Carmel newspaper recalled that mechanics at a local garage tuned a 1937 Ford for him so that it would run at over one hundred miles an hour, because he wanted the fastest car in town. As a young man he had owned a high-wheel bicycle, which he later traded for a shotgun; it ended up on display in the children’s room of the public library.

Death

He died of a heart ailment on 21 April 1953 at his home at 431 Cherry Street, and the Mount Carmel Register carried his obituary on its front page the next day. He was buried on 24 April at Rose Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel. The family narrative says that the only mausoleum in the cemetery was the Schneck family mausoleum, built by Sereno for his parents, and that he was laid there; it adds that in 1968 the graves were moved to the ground just west of the mausoleum. Mabel died a year later, in May 1954, at Great Falls, Montana, near the home of their daughter, and was brought back to Mount Carmel for burial.

Notes

The Indianapolis car, the railroad appointments, the motoring stories and the statement that he built the mausoleum all come from a family narrative, not from contemporary records (cemetery memorials separately confirm a Schneck family mausoleum at Rose Hill); the narrative quotes a local newspaper and a 1993 Chicago Tribune article for the racing background, but those articles have not themselves been found. His wife’s obituary, quoted in the same narrative, gives the marriage year as 1898; the narrative itself, a DAR state history and the 1900 census (“married one year”) all point to 1899.