by Geoff Fox
In 1926, Charles Baum, known by many as Bunk, left his wife and four children for work in Baltimore on the streetcar line. He never returned home.
No clues about what happened to Bunk have been found.
The youngest child was Charles Baum, Jr., Jeanne Ward’s father.
Ward, a former Hancock teacher, has spent time researching her grandfather and what happened to him. Last year, she put pen to paper and wrote a book called This Man Called Bunk about him and what might have happened to him.
The picture on the cover is the only picture she had of her grandfather.
The book is Ward’s first. She is the author of plays and other creative writing, however.
Ward said she never knew her grandfather, who left the family in 1926, leaving her grandmother and four children. Ward’s father was only two years old at the time.
“So he never knew him either,” she said.
Ward’s grandmother always talked well of her grandfather and “never said one bad thing about him.” However, the children weren’t too happy about him leaving them.
There had to be more to it, Ward thought, with people saying he left for another woman or “this or that.”
“I didn’t think that, so I started to research,” Ward said. She went to various genealogy websites looking for her grandfather.
In looking at those sites, Ward said she found interesting things about her grandfather no one in the family knew.
Gathering information over the years, Ward recently realized she had enough information to write a book.
From the time she started writing the book, it took Ward a year to put it all together.
As she was writing the book, Ward continued research and found more information in newspaper archives in Baltimore. Ward said she put out advertisements and feelers looking for information on her grandfather.
“I came up with some interesting things that I think I know now what happened to him,” she said.
Some of the things she found out about her grandfather included the fact that he had been in jail, the Pinkerton Detectives looking for him, and the family’s car was found by a river in Virginia.
She hasn’t had to worry about family’s reaction to her discoveries, as Ward said she only has a cousin living and the other relatives have passed away.
Ward said her cousin did not agree with what she found in her research and wanted to dismiss it.
A lot of the story is true, such as names of streets in Baltimore and places where they lived.
Among the writings about her grandfather are poems about each person in the book and their picture.
Ward said the book was self-published through a website called Book Baby. The people at Book Baby walked Ward through the steps to put it all together.
She then sent everything to the publishing company and they put it in book form.
This Man Called Bunk is available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes and Noble’s website. A Kindle version is already available from Amazon.
