Edward Laning:

     Edward Laning was born in Petersburg, IL, in 1906 to Mable Smoot and John Lane Laning; in 1908 his sister Olivia was born.  The city of Petersburg would provide Laning with two significant male figures, one a family patriarch and the other a renowned lawyer and author.  In an article appearing in American Heritage magazine in June 1971 entitled “Spoon River Revisited: An Artist recalls his Midwestern home town and the poet who made it famous,” Laning reminisced about his maternal grandfather, John Milam “Papa” Smoot, as well as the famed poet of his home region, Edgar Lee Masters.   

     Laning stated that Papa and Mama Moot had always been his second parents.  Upon the death of his mother in 1923 and his father’s subsequent abandonment of the two children (per Laning, "He ran away."), his grandparents “were simply Mama and Papa to my sister and me.”  Per Laning, Papa Smoot’s “great goodness hadn’t been difficult to achieve” due to his inheritance of fertile Illinois farmland.  While Laning described Papa Smoot as intelligent and educated, he also mentioned that “his goodness was marred by self-righteousness.”  Papa Smoot enjoyed his status as a leading citizen of Petersburg, one whose lineage included an association with a young future President:  Papa Smoot’s grandfather had acquired a large tract of government land in Illinois, and Abe Lincoln had worked for him as a hired hand.  Politics would drive Lincoln onto Springfield, IL, and ultimately, Washington, D.C. while “the Smoots stayed put and lived comfortably off the fat of the land.”  

     In addition to owning farmland, Papa Smoot practiced law from an office on the courthouse square.  Laning remembered that “Papa didn’t need to make money from his profession and he never tried to.  There were endless questions of property rights, and everyone in the county trusted him, and his law practice was an exercise in civic virtue.”      

     As he grew up in Petersburg, Laning never crossed paths with Edgar Lee Masters; during this time, Masters lived in Chicago where he practiced law and wrote books, biographies, and poetry.  However, Masters’ presence in Petersburg was ever constant due to the 1915 publication of his Spoon River Anthology, a collection of short verse poems that collectively narrate the epitaphs of the residents of the Spoon River community.  (Coincidentally, a very real Spoon River runs near Masters’ home of Lewiston, IL, within 30 miles of Petersburg.)  

     The citizens of Petersburg, including Papa Smoot, were quick to surmise that they served as the subjects for many of the more than 200 fictional characters contained in the anthology: while Masters sought to capture the lives and deaths in a small community, local residents felt that he had violated their privacy and mocked their existence.  When Laning would visit Masters in Chicago in the 1930s, they would invariably speak about shared experiences from Petersburg and life along the Spoon River: “what Edgar Lee and I had in common more deeply than anything else was not the people, but the place.”