When Darger became friends with William Schloeder, whom Darger called “Whillie” throughout his autobiography, he met and began to interact with Whillie’s entire family, and he would eventually become an accepted part of the family, often visiting the Schloeder home. It was only a block and a half away from where Darger was then living—at the Workingmen’s House, a dormitory-like situation for employees of St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Whillie’s parents must have given Darger a good sense of what he had missed out on throughout his early life. Whillie had grown up in a two-parent home. Michael and Susanna Schloeder, Whillie’s parents, were married on August 12, 1872. Like Henry’s father, Michael was born in Germany (on February 24, 1837), the son of Mathiae and Catharina Schloeder. He had moved to Chicago almost directly from Germany in 1864, the year before the U.S. Civil War ended. Susanna, often called Susie, was born January 2, 1846 in Luxembourg, the daughter of Nicholas and Elizabeth Braun, and immigrated in 1871—the year of the Great Chicago Fire and close to the time that Henry’s father had arrived from Germany.
Darger met Whillie only a short time before Michael Schloeder, who had been ill for two and a half months, died of chronic bronchitis on December 14, 1911. The 1900 Federal Census reveals that he and Susanna had had seven children, but listed only six. And in 1911, only five were still living: Elizabeth, aged thirty-six; William (called “Bill” by the family, but “Whillie” by Darger), aged thirty; Henry, aged twenty-eight; Susan, aged twenty-three; and Katherine (or “Catherine”), the baby, aged twenty-one. Another daughter, Lucy, was born in 1875, but died between the 1900 and the 1910 censuses. The whereabouts of the seventh child was never disclosed.
As it turns out, Darger named one of his most important characters after Whillie’s older sister. She plays an important role in both his first novel (In the Realms of the Unreal….) and an even more important one in his second (Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House). In Crazy House, she is an obvious stand-in for Darger. Many of her experiences in the novel are actually what he experienced during his childhood on the streets of Chicago’s notorious vice district, West Madison Street, now the very gentrified Near West Side. But why would he incorporate Whillie’s sister, someone he’d never met, into his first two novels and give her such an important role in Crazy House?
For the answer to this and other mysteries surrounding the life of outsider artist Henry Darger, be on the lookout for Throw-Away Boy: A Life of Henry Darger…
