Walter “Curly” Green died in 1978 without having made a will. No relative was found and his estate, for many years Nebraska’s largest unclaimed inheritance, remains unresolved.

If a kin to Curly Green is ever identified, he or she stands to inherit a substantial amount of green.

Walter “Curly” Green

Having little more than the clothes he was wearing, Curly Green arrived in east-central Nebraska in 1914.  Finding him walking along a rural road near Schuyler, a small farming town approximately seventy miles west of Omaha, local tavern keeper Al Rominger secured him work as a mechanic at the local Kopac Garage, where he initially slept. As Curly proved adept at fixing the automobile, a still relatively new phenomenon, he soon saved enough money to move into a boarding house.

Curly said he was nearly seventeen-years-old and had hopped a train to the Cornhusker State after leaving his Denver, Colorado, home following multiple disputes with his stepfather. Beyond that, he offered little about his past.

Young Curly

Al Rominger and his wife, Ida, AKA Maudie, had a son, Donald, and four daughters, Edna, Jessamine, Catheryn, and Gertrude. Curly was instantly smitten with fourteen-year-old Jessamine, and they dated until he was sent overseas in 1917 during the latter part of World War I. Having enlisted in the army, Curly served on the Western Front in France, where he drove the dead and wounded to makeshift hospitals and transported supplies to the front lines.

Returning to Nebraska following the war, Curly and Jessamine resumed dating. He followed her to Omaha in 1923 where she began her nursing career at the Lord Lister Hospital while he briefly worked again as a mechanic and in the garage of the now defunct Omaha Bee News before becoming a night watchman for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1931.

Curly progressed to courting Jessamine, but she ultimately chose another, marrying a man named Arden Hargrove in 1938.

Jessamine Rominger

Curly subsequently lived for a time in Richland, ten miles west of Schuyler, before returning to Omaha. He retired from Union Pacific in 1971, all the while having kept in touch with the Romingers and with several of his fellow World War I veterans. He had a small circle of friends, but he never married and is not known to have dated any other women.

With all those he had come in contact, Curly rarely discussed his early life or family.

Still Secretive

On April 24, 1978, Curly Green suffered a fatal heart attack while doing yard work outside the small apartment building he owned. He was believed to have been eighty-three-years-old.

As he had died intestate, Curly’s friend and fellow Masonic Lodge member Frank Burbridge, an attorney with the Omaha frim Kutak, Rock & Huie, was appointed administrator of his surprisingly sizable estate of nearly $200,000, equivalent to approximately $1.1 million today. His assets consisted primarily of cash, bonds, real estate, stocks, and collections of jewelry, stamps, and gold coins, some which may have been acquired in Mexico.

No Kin Of Curly Is Found

A birth certificate found among Curly’s belongings stated he was born on March 22, 1895, in the now ghost town of Kendall, Montana, in Fergus County in the central part of the state. The document listed his parents as Albert Harry Green, born in England in 1855, and Ann Mauren Green, born in Latvia in 1865. Curly had mentioned that his mother had remarried after his father had died when he was young.

The birth certificate was issued in 1941 on the basis of affidavits from three of Curly’s longtime acquaintances, to whom the information was conveyed from Curly himself. For unknown reasons, he is believed to have lied to them as a search of immigration records from 1845-1900 produced no information on either purported parent.

Other documents show that as a teenager, Curly had worked for an auto agency in Denver, where he had said he was living prior to coming to Nebraska. At his funeral, a wreath of flowers was sent with a card signed “Mrs. Joe Greener, Denver, Colorado.” No one could recall Curly having ever mentioning the name and she was never located.

Curly’s Supposed Birth Certificate

Curly had also mentioned of having a brother who was killed in a shootout in Montana.

A forty-one-year-old rancher named Albert Green, originally from England, had been shot to death on July 5, 1921, near Rocky Point, AKA Wilder, Montana, another now ghost town. Professional heir tracker Josh Butler believes, however, this man’s father was Joseph Green, and that he was Curly Green’s cousin instead of brother. The late brother Curly had mentioned is believed to have been killed several years earlier.

Through his research, Josh Butler believes Walter “Curly” Green was likely raised with seven siblings in a Wisconsin orphanage that had failed to keep records. This, along with his service records has been destroyed in a 1973 fire at the Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, have made it difficult, if not virtually impossible, to locate any heirs.

A Man Without A Past

For whatever reasons, Curly Green appears to have fibbed about his upbringing and to have taken the secrets of his early life, whatever their nature, to his grave.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/20494541/walter-green

In 1981, three years after Curly Green’s death and with no heirs having been found, a Douglas County judge ordered his possessions sold and the money turned over to the Nebraska State Treasurer’s office. The proceeds from the coins, jewelry, stamps, and stocks were deposited in the Permanent School Fund, similar to a trust, with the interest funding public school districts across the state. The amount of tangible money afterwards was $164,906.66.

Over four-hundred claims have been made to Curly Green’s assets, but as no heir has been found by the Nebraska State Treasurer’s Office or by a genealogy specialist,  his estate remains unclaimed nearly half-a-century after his death. Nebraska state law, however, stipulates that the original value of a decedent’s estate must be given to any heirs regardless of when they are found.

If a kin to Curly Green is ever established, he or she, barring any changes in the state law, will be entitled to his estate.

I did not find a picture of Al Rominger, the man who picked up young Curly Green near Schuyler, Nebraska, but I found an amusing account involving him.

In 1931, while Prohibition was in effect, state and federal officers found a small amount of liquor when raiding the seventy-two-year-old Rominger’s “soft drink parlor” in Richland. He defended himself in federal court, admitting to possession of half a pint of liquor while pleading not guilty to two counts of selling the illegal product and of being a public nuisance.

Rominger’s “gentlemanly conduct” in court earned him only a suspended sentence.

SOURCES:

• Alliance Times-Herald
• Beatrice Daily Sun
• Fremont Tribune
• Grand Island Independent
• Lincoln Journal Star
• Schuyler Sun
• Unsolved Mysteries