Our Stories

Ouida Hood & Franklin Prikryl Story

OUIDA ESTELLE EMERY HOOD 1883-1930
FRANKLIN STANLEY PRIKRYL 1886-1962
TOGETHER FOREVER LOVE STORY

A PORTION OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN AT OAKWOOD
[FORREST SECTION, LOT X-1]
Ouida Estelle Emery Hood died in Michigan in 1930. Her bereaved and devoted admirer, Franklin Stanley Prikryl, erected a magnificent and costly monument as a testament in her honor with both names boldly engraved in the granite base. Franklin professed his undying admiration for Ouida by announcing his desire to someday be interred next to the most important woman in his life. However, Franklin’s grave beside Ouida remains empty to this day as Franklin, for reasons unknown, even to family members, chose to be buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glen Dale, California, destined never to be reunited with Ouida.

In all, Ouida Hood has waited for more than 70 years for the love of her life to join her in the empty grave next to her at Oakwood Cemetery. An event that will never occur.

On a green, tree-crowned knoll in Oakwood Cemetery, rises one of the most beautiful and elaborate monuments in all the southland. Upon this monument focuses a story— a strange story of love, devotion, unselfishness and an unfulfilled promise of love.

It is a story that ties together the lives of three unusual persons. It spins a connecting web between two widely separated communities as Raleigh, North Carolina and Frenchtown, Michigan, a small, peaceful, quite town, some 30 miles south of Detroit.

During the 1930s, questions regarding the mystery of the magnificent memorial at Oakwood Cemetery became insistent in Raleigh. However, only the residents of Frenchtown in Michigan knew the answers. Beneath the monument lies the body of Ouida Estelle Emery Hood, heroine of this story and known to many as Lady Bountiful of Frenchtown.

The story begins in Raleigh where Ouida Emery was born, September 19, 1883, and where she blossomed into the sort of Southern belle story books tell us about. However, her beauty was not the passive kind; it had a kinetic quality in that the energy of her personality appeared to be contagious.

There were many admirers but Ouida Emery finally married Wallace Hood, a successful automobile designer who returned to North Carolina, his native state, from time to time during interludes in his professional career in the automobile and truck factories of the North.

Then came the World War and the amazing drama of Ouida Emery’s life began to unfold. During this period there was an army training camp near Raleigh. Stationed at this base was a man from Michigan, Franklin Stanley Prikryl (born in Chicago, May 4, 1886), a prospering real estate developer from near Detroit. Prikryl took a liking to Hood who introduced Prikryl to his beautiful wife, Ouida.

Prikryl and the Hoods quickly became friends and Prikryl offered to give Wallace a job if the two would move to Michigan after the war.

And so it happened. The Hoods went to Detroit and two or three years later they moved to the small farming community of Frenchtown, Michigan, about 30 miles south of Detroit. There the Hoods established themselves in a comfortable country home on Hurd Road. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Prikryl moved in and made his home with the couple.

For the first time, Ouida was truly happy. She could root herself in a fixed community. She had grown tired of the deluxe apartments and the ‘surface’ friends she had met in her previous locales. Mr. Hood had held high engineering positions in various automobile and truck plants. Over time he had been connected with the Thomas B. Jeffery Company, of Kenosha, Wisconsin; the Thomas Company of Buffalo, New York; the Thomas-Detroit Company, Detroit; the Chalmer’s Motor Company, Detroit; and the Metzger Motor Car Company, Detroit, among others. The Hoods had moved often, though Ouida’s instincts were strongly inclined toward a settled residence with strong community ties. In that setting alone, she believed, could she find her niche.

Now, in her comfortable country home about a half-mile west of Brest, Michigan on the Dixie Highway and among her flowers and new ‘sincere’ friends, Ouida Hood believed all her dreams had finally come true.

Mr. Hood , with several Detroit and Monroe investors formed a company to build motor trucks in nearby Monroe. The newly formed company was called the Hood Motor Truck Company. One truck was built and tested. It stood up well and passed the scrutiny of company evaluators with flying colors. However, the Hood Motor Truck Company went bankrupt. When stockholders were asked for additional money to put the truck into production in a price range that would compete with others of its class, they hesitated. The truck might be first-rate, they figured, but it would be too much of a gamble to invest large sums of cash in tools and plants.

Meanwhile, his friend Prikryl was more fortunate. His real estate promotions had a way of succeeding. He was president and general manager of four companies and they all were doing extremely well. He soon became known as the most affluent man in Frenchtown. The money that came in was not used for selfish show but spent generously for community activities. Prikryl and the Hoods began to be noted throughout the little farming community for their generosity and community spirit.

Mrs. Hood in particular seemed always anxious to do things for her neighbors. She took a prominent part in the activities of the Frenchtown Grange and had a hall built for the organization — one of the most attractive buildings of its kind in Michigan, tastefully furnished and landscaped with beautiful flowers and shrubs. She spent much time and money to keep the place looking nice.

Mrs. Hood organized the Juvenile Grange and the 4-H Clubs for the farmer’s children. Her boys and girls regularly took top prizes in the annual competition at the Lansing Fair. When a smallpox epidemic came to Frenchtown, she saw to it that baskets of foods and toys for children were placed on the porches of the quarantined homes. Ouida was loved by all in Frenchtown.

At every Easter, Ouida gave elaborate parties for the town’s children. Usually, the parties ended with a ‘grand’ Easter egg hunt held in a five-acre field near the Hood house. One of the parties that was especially remembered by area residents used more than 1,000 colored eggs hidden about the field for children to find plus a special prize of a chocolate egg for every youngster who took part in the hunt and another prize for the children who found the most eggs in various categories.

Ouida also was known to bring lecturers to Frenchtown to talk about nutrition and home keeping. She formed ‘circles’ for the town’s women and booked engagements of extensions workers connected with the State Agriculture Bureau and Michigan State College to appear before the groups and speak on popular homemaking topics. For many years Frenchtown needlework took the top prize at the State Fair.

Ouida gave parties and entertained constantly. She was, as a neighbor put it, “always doing something for somebody.” Then came a break in the Hood-Prikryl household. Mr. Hood left the state. Before going however, he deeded ownership to the house to his wife. Ouida helped him gather his belongings and pack his bags for travel. There was no hint of hard feelings, separation, or divorce. On the contrary, Mr. Hood quietly departed Frenchtown and its residents never saw him again. (Where Mr. Hood went is unknown to this day.)

Mr. Prikryl stayed on, paying for his room and board in Ouida’s home. As time passed he interested himself more and more in her activities and took an active part in Ouida’s daily life. He spent large sums of money to further the work of the Grange, the Juvenile Grange and other organizations in which Ouida was keenly interested. Like her, Prikryl became locally famous for his generosity. In an interview in 1931, neighbors recalled the time he chartered a bus and took a large group of farmers into Detroit to the Moslem Shrines’ Circus.

Residents often wondered why Mrs. Hood stayed in their little community of Frenchtown. She was a women of means, a women of great charm and broad outlook; why they asked, did she not live in some metropolitan center where (presumably) she would find people a little nearer her own kind. But the questions went unanswered. The joy of living and being loved by the farmers and their families and of spending her time and money to bring happiness to the little farming village meant more than anything else to Ouida.

Unfortunately, her life-style was destined not to endure. On Sunday evening, February 23, 1930, Mrs. Hood, was, as usual, the center of a chatting group of callers at her home. Suddenly, without warning, and for the first time in her life, Ouida suffered a severe attack of nose-bleed. The next day there were several bouts of the same affliction. Now under a doctor’s care, a blood transfusion was administered, only to be followed by a fatal repetition of nose-bleed on February 27, 1930.

And then began the chain of events that culminated in the erection of the Hood-Prikryl memorial at Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh.

Mr. Prikryl took Ouida Hood’s body back to the “City of Oaks” and purchased two large adjoining lots on a tree studded hill in the most beautiful part of Oakwood Cemetery, known as the Forrest Section.

According to Mrs. Hood’s will, her house on Hurd Road in Frenchtown was left to Prikryl and numerous mementoes, furniture, and personal articles were distributed to friends throughout Frenchtown. Prikryl quickly sold the house and the funds were used to help defray the cost of the memorial.

Ouida Estelle Emery Hood was thus buried, as she had wished, in the city of her birth. However, Ouida lies beneath Michigan soil just the same. At the time of her death, Prikryl hired a young neighbor boy to fill 80 wooden kegs with rich soil from her own flower garden in Frenchtown and shipped it to Raleigh. The Michigan soil, upon its arrival in Raleigh, was spread over Ouida’s grave site so that flowers and grass might flourish as they had in her garden on Hurd Road in Frenchtown.

Mr. Prikryl commissioned the best known local carver he could find to craft a granite memorial. Through research, he learned that a group of bronze workers in Germany were reported to be the most skillful in the world at constructing life-size statues in bronze. He commissioned the foreign craftsmen to execute three life-size bronze figures and a center “bust” plaque for the memorial. It is reported that nearly $75,000 was spent in 1932 to complete the artistic masterpiece which is quite distinctive among other elaborate memorials at Oakwood Cemetery.

Franklin had inscribed on a bronze tablet attached to the memorial the ending lines; ‘...Placing my trust in God, I wait, setting my face to the dawn of that new day when the shadows will lift and we shall be again united.’ Franklin went so far as to have his name inscribed in the base of the monument next to Ouida’s in preparation for their eternal reunion.

In all this expenditure, it was apparent Prikryl idolized Mrs. Hood and took this means to make her memory immortal. There was nothing too good for her.

Apparently, Frenchtown residents felt the same way. Donated pennies of the community’s school children and dollars of the grownups went to pay for a large bronze tablet installed at the foot of Ouida’s grave.

Following her death, Prikryl remained in Frenchtown and roomed with a Mr. Edward Havekost in his home across the road from the former Hood— Prikryl residence. “I’ll never leave here,” he told his friends, “this community is the only place I shall ever be happy.”

Over the next several years Prikryl often returned to the grave-site at Oakwood to mourn the loss of the love of his life. Emery family members say he would sit for hours by her grave on a small stone bench he erected there, lost in thought. The death of Ouida had a devastating effect on Franklin. As a result of her death he seemed to lose interest in almost everything, including his real estate business which he soon lost. He eventually went to live with a sister in Los Angeles where he died July 17, 1962. Franklin Stanley Prikryl was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles County, 2,600 miles from his only love.

“You ask why my brother is not buried at Oakwood. I do not know and I feel no one else knows either. About five years before my brother (Franklin Stanley Prikryl) died, I ask him what arrangements he had made pertaining to his burial at Oakwood. His reply was ‘none, I do not desire to be buried there. I want to be buried at Forest Lawn where the rest of the Prikryl family is. I do not want to talk further about the matter.’”

“So he took his secret and the reasons for his decision with him. I cared for him in his last illness, and buried him, as he requested, in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glen Dale, California.”

/s/ Elizabeth D. Prikryl

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING: On November 9, 2001, I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Daniel M. Bialko of Monroe, Michigan. Mr. Bialko had traveled to Hillsborough, North Carolina to attend a reunion of his shipmates who had served on the submarine, USS Growler during World War II. Mr. Bialko came to Raleigh in search of Ouida and Mr. Prikryl’s burial site. He related that as a young boy growing up in Frenchtown, Michigan, he lived next door to the Hoods and upon the death of Mrs. Hood, Mr. Prikryl hired him to fill barrels with soil from Ouida’s flower bed. He stated that in addition to the dirt, Mr. Prikryl directed him to grind peat-moss found growing on the Hood property and blend it with the dirt, thereby providing the best possible mixture for plant growth in Raleigh. The 80 kegs of earth and moss were shipped to Raleigh by rail and spread over the burial site by cemetery workers. He was shocked and saddened to learn that Mr. Prikryl was not interred beside Mrs. Hood.

/s/ Joseph E. Freed
Executive Director, Oakwood Cemetery