Missing a Man I Never Knew
This is a picture of my great uncle, William F. Madden. When he was a teenager, Uncle Bill left home in Manchester (CT) to serve in the army during the Spanish-American War. When he returned home, he enrolled at Trinity College in Hartford where he was an excellent student and an outstanding athlete, earning letters in football, baseball, basketball and track. After his playing days for local amateur teams were over, he coached teams at the Storrs Agricultural School, later known as the University of Connecticut. Uncle Bill had been a captain in the Manchester Police Department but left there for the better pay as security supervisor at Manchester’s Cheney Brothers Silk Mill Complex, the largest and wealthiest of its kind in the country.
While working at Cheney Brothers on the night of January 30, 1919, he was shot and killed by would-be silk thieves from New Jersey. He died at the age of 39, the only Manchester law enforcement officer to lose his life in the line of duty. His funeral, the largest in Manchester’s history, was held five days later on February 4. My father once told me that when the police honor guard entered Saint James Cemetery at Griswold Street, the end of the procession still hadn’t left Saint James Church on Main Street, a distance of about a mile and a half. My uncle, well-known and well-respected by many in town as he was, might have had a distinguished career in politics had he lived. He would have been 69 when I was born in 1949, an age that might have made it possible for me to know him well into my teens. Like many people in his family and town, I’m sure I would have been all the better for it if I had. It’s strange, I suppose, to now find myself missing a man I never knew.
Dad also told me that Uncle Bill’s wife, Almina, died of a broken heart at the age of 36, a little over a year after her husband’s murder. She left behind two daughters, Katherine, who was one year old when her father died, and Alice, born on February 5, 1919, the day after her father was laid to rest.
