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EDWIN JOSEPH & MARY DECOURSEY
Eddie was Ed & Mary's third son. He was sickly as a child and spent the winters in Leadville with his aunts.1 In the warmer months he was in Alma engaged in the various family activities.
While in Leadville and attending grade school he became enamored with the theater. At that time the most important projects were school plays.
When the family departed Alma he, as well as the others, arrived in Leavenworth. He was probably 13 or 14. After finishing grade school he attended St. Mary's College theater production.
After old Jim's death, the estate sold the Farm and Ed and Mary moved to Kansas City.
Eddie stayed in Kansas City a few years and then headed for New York City. There he attended a acting school and had many movie parts in stage productions. For a few years he was on a road with the Buffalo Bill show. He would go months without writing home and then all of a sudden they would hear form him from some distant location nothing surprised them as much as a telegram one day asking them to send him a can of pop corn to the Panama Canal.
Eddie spent all the time of building the Canal, selling all kinds of things and came out of there a fairly wealthy man.
He spent a few years in Kansas City. He again played in some theaters and fooled around the ice-cream parlors where if they sold 50 gallons on Sat & Sun they were doing well.
After a while he got restless and went to the Yukon. He tried his same program there but it wasn't anywhere near as lucrative as Panama had been.
One day a telegram came. Eddie said meet me at the Cathedral at 12:00 noon on Saturday. The family gathered and here was Eddie and Mary and her two brothers. They were married and after a few days headed for Mexia, Texas.
The Poffs were German immigrants who settled on a farm west of Leavenworth near the DeCoursey family. She attended school with Eddie & Will. They went to town in good weather to the Catholic School and in bad weather they attended school near the farm called Possum Hollow.
Eddie loved to go where the action was. So Texas was his next stop. He bought a Pool Hall and had a bar and snack business. This was probably 1916 or so. Mexia was on the Southern Pacific and trains of those days had no diners. Eddie soon had a contract with the rail road to put an employee of the train with sandwiches, fruit and drinks to sell the passengers.
It is not known whether he took any interest in oil wells or not.
He did very well for 7 or 8 years. He had a pass on the rail road. One time he was riding on it and passed through Casa Grande. Arizona had just received statehood and had been promised they would receive 2 dams. One had already been finished and was serving the Phoenix area. It was very successful and was collecting all the run off as expected. The next dam was to be started in a few years and would service the Casa Grande Valley. Eddie said this is it. He sold out in Mexia and received the John Deere Agency for the entire valley.
For some reason the Coolidge Dam never worked out as well as the Roosevelt Dam, not that it wasn't a success, just not as much.
Eddie probably lived in Casa Grande 12-15 yrs. He made a good living selling tractors. Again he was active in the theater in Casa Grande as well as his oldest son Bill. Casa Grande soon became a target for all the DeCourseys. Grandpa Ed and his wife Catherine spent their winters there. Frank's family were there for a couple of years. Pat Kilduff 2 was not well and he came out for several years in between other members of the family dragging in.
Besides the weather the U.S. was undergoing prohibition and Nogales Mexico was a 2-3 hour drive. They would all head there for 2-3 days as well as bring back a good supply.
Somewhere around 1928 Ed and Mary were tired of the desert and wanted to give their children a better education and they felt Bill had enough ability to take a crack at the movies. After selling their business they moved to Los Angeles where they established a super market, the Loyola. They were in the neighborhood of 2 good Catholic high schools.
They were to operate the market for 8 years or so and Ed died in 1937. His wife Mary died 2 years later.
They left three children William, Mary Ann and Bob.
1 Several of Edwin's McCormick aunts and uncles are known to have lived in Leadville.
2 Pat Kilduff is Edwin's cousin, the son of Edward Kilduff and his mother's sister Fanny McCormick. He died in Colorado in 1932.
William B.'s family visits Edwin J.'s family in Los Angeles, 1933.
Vincent, Edwin, Bill, Aileen, Regina, Mary Poff, Mary Ann, Mary, Bob, Will, Jack and Bill DeCoursey.
