Francis Van Wie

Francis Harrison Van Wie (Born 1886 - Died 1973) was a streetcar conductor for the Market Street Railway and its successor, the Municipal Railway in San Francisco, who was famed for romancing and marrying as many as twelve women without divorce by the time he was arrested in 1945 for bigamy. Local press coverage of his arrest and trial gave him colorful, alliterative nicknames, including the Ding Dong Daddy of the D-car Line, the Trolley Toreador, and the Car Barn Casanova. Van Wie stated his first marriage was in 1904 or 1905 to Elizabeth Kexel in Wisconsin. He had one daughter, Mabel Josephine, with Kexel and was told in 1912 that he could not have any more children, so he encouraged his next wives to adopt. His second marriage was to Clara Heise in 1913. From an early age, Van Wie said that he had a poor memory because of chronic headaches. In 1915, Heise had him arrested in Chicago for non-support of his son; after discovering he had not divorced Kexel, the two wives jointly had him arrested for bigamy that July. That year, Van Wie also was arrested in Kenosha, Wisconsin for telling the state legislature that a chiropractor had cured his amnesia, according to a telegram from his son; the senior Van Wie claimed he had forgotten about his first wife and child because of his faulty memory. Later, Van Wie said that Kexel had abandoned him after six or seven years of marriage: "She said she was going to get a divorce and I assumed she had." He said that he served in the Army from 1917 to 1918, when he received a medical discharge. Van Wie also claimed to have worked as a lion tamer and house painter. Reportedly, he had been discovered asleep and unharmed one morning in the cage of a lion named "Old Mary" during his 14-year career with the Ringling Brothers Circus. At the time, he was married to his fifth wife, Mabel Joyce, since 1922, and together they had a mindreading act for the circus. Mabel was described as a beautiful redhead who worked as an artist's model and sideshow performer, but Van Wie claimed she "wasn't particularly pretty and we just drifted apart.