Sketch by H.M. Naglee. From Tales of Naglee Park by Jack Douglas.

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"A slayer of innocence and a robber of chastity." - San Jose press.

The illustration, drawn by Henry Naglee himself, depicts his technique of doing push-ups in a bathtub after bathing, to build up his arms. In a letter to Mary Schell he writes, "I had not discovered, when I recommended the tub so strongly, the grand combination tub, uniting the gymnastic exercise with bathing. The inventive genius of the Yankee nation is truly astonishing and unlimited."

Love scandal #1
The General was involved in two great love scandals during his life, both of which made the papers. The first involved the woman mentioned above, Mary Schell. Henry met Mary, a San Francisco woman, in 1858. For six years, as Henry was gallivanting about Europe studying viticulture and later fending off rebels at the Battle of Fair Oaks, he continued a steady stream of torrid love correspondence with Mary.

When he returned to San Jose in 1865, he gave her the cold shoulder.

Having waited six years for the General, only to be rebuffed in the most cavalier of fashions, Mary enacted revenge by having Henry's love letters printed in a book titled The Love Life of Brigadier General Henry M. Naglee, Consisting of a correspondence on Love, War and Politics. Therein was the self-portrait-in-bathtub, as well as purple prose such as, "I want again to feel that sweet, dear little heart against mine, and to hear you once breath, in flattering words: Dear, dear darling Harry, how very, very excessively, excessively happy we are; we were made for each other."

Love scandal #2
Henry married Marie Antoinette Ringgold shortly after the unfortunate Mary Schell affair. He had two children with Marie, but unhappily, Marie died in childbirth of their second daughter. Henry employed nursemaid Emily Hanks in 1871 to take care of the children.

In 1877, Emily filed a breach of promise suit, claiming that the General had proposed matrimony and had then seduced her. This would be the first of two trials, the first one finding in her favor, the second against. It was an irresistible San Jose soap-opera fraught with lurid details of the General's "life of sin," described in court and then in the front pages of the local newspapers. It would be three years before people got sick of it.


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