Lights, Camera, Action: Oliver Smith

By Susan Zehnder, Education Director

Recently, Kelsey Jones, the Chemung County historian, passed along the name of someone buried in Woodlawn Cemetery with impressive Hollywood ties. It’s not Hal Roach, who comes first to mind, but Oliver Lemuel Smith. His story was hidden because he doesn’t have an individual headstone. He is also interred in a family plot that has a different last name. With a little digging, here’s part of his story.

Oliver Lemeul Smith

Oliver Lemeul Smith was born on February 13, 1918, in Waupun, Wisconsin. He was the second of four children, having arrived seven years after an older brother. His father, Larue Free Smith, was a high school principal. His mother, Nina Kincaid, had graduated from Oberlin College and was the only child and heir to a wealthy family who owned a corset-making business with factories around the world. In 1908, the young couple had a lavish marriage ceremony at her parents’ home in Pennsylvania.

After Oliver, two more boys were born, and not ten years later, the couple divorced. Sometime before 1933, Nina married Ivan Max Bernkopf, from Waverly, NY, and moved to Corning. Bernkopf was a co-owner of successful department stores in Waverly and Corning and was active in local civic organizations including the Elks Club.

Despite the Great Depression, Oliver went to Penn State, then moved to New York City. In 1940 he joined other creative people living in Brooklyn Heights in a Victorian brownstone located at 7 Meddagh Street. Since all its residents had been born in February, it became known as the February House. Under the loose leadership of literary critic George Davis, it was to be a utopian commune offering its members a balance between spontaneity and creativity, and structure and domestic routine.

In addition to Oliver Smith, residents included writers A. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Jane and Paul Bowles; composer Benjamin Britten; and performer Gypsy Rose Lee. Frequent visitors to the house included Salvador Dali, Anais Nin, and Thomas Mann’s son, Klaus. Smith was apparently responsible for tending the furnace, washing dishes, and generally helping keep various creative tempers calm. Unfortunately, when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, vehement disagreements about U.S. entry into the war fractured relationships beyond repair and the commune was disbanded.

Around this time Smith found his career on the rise. He designed sets for the ballets Saratoga (1941) and Rodeo (1942), and his work caught the eye of choreographer Jerome Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein. Soon he was designing for Broadway and the movies.

My Fair Lady, Sketch and Photo

Like many artists associated with the February House group, Smith was openly homosexual, and his name is connected to many creative men of the time. Eventually he found his life partner, Richard “Dick” D’Arcy, a Broadway dancer, and they would be together until Smith’s death.

In 1944 Smith was hired to be co-director of the American Ballet Theater, a position he held until 1980. He was reappointed co-director again from 1990 to 1992, before being named director emeritus. Over the span of his design career, Smith received more than twenty-five Tony nominations for his work on plays and musicals, and he won ten. This made him the most recognized designer of his time. Shows he worked on included My Fair Lady (1957), West Side Story (1958), The Sound of Music (1960), Becket (1961), Camelot (1961), Hello, Dolly! (1964), and Baker Street (1965). He also designed for the movies, notably On the Town (1949), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Guys and Dolls (1955). He was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Art Direction (Color) for Guys and Dolls, but lost to the designer for the movie Picnic.

Guys and Dolls, sketch and photo

In addition to his professional work, Smith was on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. For over 23 years, he taught and mentored many young students who went on to become influential designers. In 1981 Oliver Smith was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. The Library of Congress archives contain 305 boxes of his design sketches and notes.

In the studio

In 1994 Oliver Lemuel Smith died of emphysema in Brooklyn at the age of 76. His body was cremated and his ashes were placed with his mother’s grave in Woodlawn. Near her grave is a headstone for his youngest brother, who had died in 1982. Smith’s partner, dancer Richard D’Arcy, lived another eight years. He was cremated and interred elsewhere.

It is curious that Oliver Smith ended up in Woodlawn. His ties seem to be through his mother’s second husband’s family, the Bernkopfs. They were related to the Rosenbaum family, who also owned a department store. When Oliver’s stepfather Ivan Max Bernkopf died in 1951, he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, not far from the Rosenbaum family plot. Two weeks after his death, Nina lost her mother as well. She moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she died in 1979. She was buried near her husband in the Bernkopf plot at Woodlawn, though no obituary was published. So, no marker for Oliver Smith exists, but at the very least, some of his story can now be retold.

Some of these photos came from a profile on Oliver Smith published by the Waupun, WI, Historical Society. When I contacted them about using the photos, they shared that they do a Ghost Walk and one year, Smith had been a featured character.

The Tale of Katie Bredehoft or How to Conduct an Investigation

 By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

Bredehoft marker, 2026

 

On April 14, 2026, the Chemung County Historical Society unveiled our latest historic marker on Bancroft Road. It marks the spot where a group of boys found the body of Katie Bredehoft in the creek under a bridge on January 6, 1884. She had been murdered there by her fiancé William Menken two days earlier. Bredehoft was a German immigrant and resident of New York City. She had been in Elmira for less than a week at the time of her murder. Upon learning of her story, I wondered how the police had ever identified her, let alone solved her murder.

 

Sketch of crime scene from Elmira Advertiser, 1884

Police today have a number of advantages when it comes to identifying unknown victims. For fresher finds, there are fingerprints. They were first used in 1882 as part of a wider system of biometric data on people being arrested collected by the Paris police department by clerk Alphonse Bertillon. By 1892, a detective in Buenos Aires, Argentina, had successfully used fingerprints found at a crime scene to identify a suspect. By the 1900s, fingerprinting became widely used. In 1999, the United States introduced the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). The database, which is maintained by the FBI, contains fingerprints from convicted criminals, as well as anyone fingerprinted for employment, immigration, or other purposes. Today, one out of every six Americans is in the IAFIS database. As an immigrant, Katie Bredehoft would have been in the database if she were murdered today.

DNA is another valuable tool. Like fingerprints, everyone’s DNA is distinct. Unlike fingerprints, however, the DNA of related individuals is similar enough that unidentified victims can be identified through their relatives. In 1998, the FBI launched CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), a national DNA database that includes convicted criminals, missing persons, and families of missing persons. Since 2020, immigrants have also been required to submit DNA samples for CODIS. In addition to using governmental databases, there are a couple of cases where police departments across the nation have turned to commercial DNA databases to identify both victims and criminals. In 2017, investigators used the personal genomics website GEDmatch to identify the family of the Golden State Killer, eventually leading to the conviction of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. In 2023, police in San Diego used 23andme to find the relatives of an unidentified woman killed in 1986.

In addition to fingerprints and DNA, since 2005, the FBI has maintained a database of dental records called the National Dental Image/Information Repository (NDIR). The database contains dental records of known missing persons and unidentified remains. When someone is reported missing by their family, the police request their records and upload them to the database. When an unidentified body is found, x-rays of their teeth are crosschecked against the database. While a modern Katie Bredehoft would have been in IAFIS and CODIS, she was never reported missing. She and her killer, William Menken, were supposed to be heading to their wedding in Baltimore.

Of course, the detectives handling the Bredehoft investigation in 1884 didn’t have access to any of those technologies and database. Instead, they relied on the public to help identify her. On the Monday after her body was removed from the ice, it was taken to the morgue where literally hundreds of people were invited to come view it. She was placed, frozen, in a doorway adjacent to a hallway through which the viewers would pass. On the Wednesday following her discovery, local photographer Charles Tomlinson took a series of photographs of her face and body.

In the end, the method bore fruit. Mrs. Tubbs, a housekeeper at the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western train depot, recognized Bredehoft as one half of a couple that she had seen getting off a train the morning of January 2nd. Another woman, Mrs. Kelly, who ran an eatery where the couple had stopped for lunch on the day of the murder, also recognized Bredehoft. Moreover, she provided the clue that lead to the identification of her killer. William Menken had a nasty scar and glass eye. While at Kelly’s eatery, he asked her if Norton still lived in the area.

Sketch of Menken & Bredehoft from Sunday Tidings, 1884

 

As it turned out, William Menken had been imprisoned at the Elmira Reformatory for burglary until 1882 when he was paroled to work under supervision at the nearby Norton farm. Thanks to the carefully maintained records at the Reformatory, officials were able to quickly identify Menken as the man seen with their unidentified victim. They tracked him to his sister’s home in Flatbush, New York. Detectives in New York City quickly learned that Menken had been courting a Miss Katie Bredehoft. Using Tomlinson’s photographs, her younger sister, Mary, confirmed that the body found in Elmira was that of her sister. Within four days after the discovery of her body, the police had found her killer and successfully identified her body thanks, not to forensic technologies or databases, but to the power of crowd sourcing.

Menken was tried and convicted twice for the murder. The first time was in Elmira, but verdict was thrown out when it was learned that the jury had gone to inspect the crime scene themselves. A new jury was impaneled in December 1884 in Binghamton. They too found him guilty. He was hanged on July 2, 1885.