Now in her fifties, Grace Humiston was still taking cases, speaking at club luncheons, and writing the odd article here and there, but she was not nearly as popular as she had been. She was having money problems, too. Real estate deals and overspending on staff had thinned her resources. The Grace Club was now operating at 147 East 21st Street in Gramercy Park, where businesswomen and girls could rent comfortably furnished rooms for eight to twelve dollars a week. The building itself had thirteen bathrooms. But running such a facility had frequent unforeseen costs, and the club, Grace’s great idea, had to close. In late March, Grace petitioned the New York State Court to be paid for having represented Stielow all those years ago. She was seeking compensation for all the old business she had never had the time—or the need—to request before.
Grace never stopped reading the papers. In the summer of 1926, she saw a case that gave her pause. George Bittle was a taxicab driver condemned to the electric chair for the murder of Rufus Eller, a Buffalo jeweler. A man named Frank Minnick had hired Bittle’s cab. He was already dead for the crime. Grace quietly checked into the case. She then took a ride to visit Bittle in prison. The old excitement seized her again. She would set this man free. When she arrived, she told the man behind bars that she had new evidence that might help his case. But George Bittle knew who Grace Humiston was. He refused her help and sent her packing.
Grace disappeared into the shadows after that. Though she mostly stayed out of the crime limelight of the dailies, Grace was still outspoken about the city she loved. She railed against the city’s night court system, where judges had the power to imprison anyone who walked through the courtroom doors. She worked with the Morality League and the Girls’ Vocational Club, which had just two rules: Never mention your past, and Never stay out all night. She continued to express her strong thoughts on the police who had embraced and then abandoned her. The same went for the federal lawmen. When Hoover said that the nation should conserve food, Grace fired back that they should instead conserve girlhood. When a columnist asked her if smoking lowered the morals of a woman, Grace said no, and that any woman had a right to do so, though privacy would be ideal. “I do not like to set any standards for women,” Grace said, “for I think there should be a single standard in everything for men and women. But then, on the other hand, a ‘womanly woman’ is somehow more universally convincing and more admired by the best of both men and women.”
Grace was still getting mail from mothers whose daughters had gone missing. “How can girls disappear from the face of the earth in these days of civilization, Mrs. Humiston?” wrote one anguished mother. Grace quickly realized that she could not answer every letter. So she began a series of columns, titled “Our Missing Girls,” hoping to tell the rest of the nation what she had learned. As always, Grace fell back on stories—on cases—to get her ideas across. She wrote of a “well dressed confident Western mother” who walked into Grace’s office seeking help for her lost daughter. “You are the average American mother,” Grace said, “the woman who doesn’t know a tenth of what is going on around you in this very world you and your girls live in.” That is why she wrote.
“Every day of the 365 in the year,” Grace wrote, “two hundred and seventy-seven girls shut the doors of their parents’ homes in the United States and turn their back on the places where for years their lives have been molded. Two girls a day from Chicago. Two every three days from Detroit and Cleveland. One a day from St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and scores of other larger cities in the country. They leave no word. It is the last time. Whether the door which shuts be the white-painted wood one of the country farmhouse or the iron-grilled gate of the city apartment. For one of every three of these girls will never return. In many cases these girls are of striking personality, initiative, and business ability.”
Some of the papers printed photos of artifacts from Grace’s personal collection, including letters from girls begging for help along with actual missing person reports. One was for Esther L. from Akron, Ohio, a stenographer who was last seen at the Strand Motion Picture House in New York. She wore a dress from the May Company and had a graduation ring. She was sixteen years old. Some wanted Grace to find Dorothy Arnold next. The wealthy heiress disappeared on December 12, 1910, when she left a Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. Grace said she would search out all possible clues.
Grace warned of the lure of the photography studios, where phrases—“Wonderful! Such poise! Such command! Who is the girl!”—could weaken a young girl’s resolve. She spoke of nightclubs and bungalows and “blackout parties.” Her “Rules for Avoiding Trouble” included “Don’t go out to dinner with your boss” and “Be a little cruel to yourself—remember that the movies are only reel life, not real life.”
Grace had files upon files of information on girls gone missing from five-and-ten stores, coin-in-the-slot restaurants, and the waiting rooms of large department stores. Sometimes, she got letters from the girls themselves, too terrified to come home. “Has anybody been looking for me in the last twenty years, do you know?” one girl asked. “Not a day passes,” said Grace, “but someone is seeking someone else. The search for the missing girls is an endless search.”
On holidays and odd Sundays, Grace would leave her apartment at the Vanderbilt at Thirty-fourth and Park and step over to the Osborne, on Fifty-seventh and Seventh, right across from Carnegie Hall. She would ride up the open shaft elevator to her sister Jessie’s new apartment. She went alone. Her nieces and nephews would stare and consider their Auntie Grace, a black figure framed against the high, corniced ceiling. Jessie, who always smiled and laughed, would welcome her in and talk about her plans to organize a trip to Connecticut to see the family sites or to travel by car across the country. Grace was a lawyer and detective; Jessie, a church lady whose husband, Harry, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and blood ties to the founders of the Baptist Church in America.
Sometime after Christmas, during one of these family visits, Jessie pulled Grace into a room and sat her down. This was a reversal of roles. Jessie had always been the helper, investing in real estate with Grace and cosigning loans for Grace’s many-titled ventures. But Grace could tell immediately that something was wrong. This wasn’t about money. Grace listened quietly to what her sister had to say. What Grace heard from Jessie that day were the kind of whispers she had heard during her entire career. This was a subject matter she had to approach very delicately. But Grace’s sister needed her help. That was all that mattered.