Kenneth MacNichol was born 3 November 1887.  (There’s some confusion about the exact year, but this seems the normal  kind of inexactitude, rather than the systematic obfuscation of Robert Barbour Johnson.  He is listed in the 1890 census as having been born about 1886; his WWI registration card gives the year as 1888.  But all of his other records give the year 1887).  His father, Frank MacNichol (or McNichols), was born New Jersey in 1849.  By 1880, he was living in Shreve, Ohio, where he was the landlord of a hotel. According to the 1880 census, six other people lived in the hotel, three men in their twenties and thirties and three women in their late teens and twenties.  The oldest of the women was Emma Young, 23, who was listed as Frank’s cousin and landlady of the hotel.  She also became his wife.

Frank and Emma had two sons, Kenneth, born in 1887 and Rodney, born two years later.  In a passport application from the 1920s, Kenneth said that his father died in 1904.  But the Canton City directory from 1900 already lists Emma as a widow; and the 1900 census lists Emma as living with her two sons and two boarders, which is probably how she paid her bills, since no occupation is otherwise listed.

For reasons unknown, the family had relocated to Farmington, New Mexico by 1910; their living arrangements are hard to decipher from the census.  Emma’s age is given as 46, rather than 53.  She’s also listed as married (with a superscript notation indicating a second marriage) and her surname is given as McAlpine, but no husband is listed for the family; she is the head, and existed on her “own income,” whatever that meant.  Rodney was still with her, his occupation a cowboy.  Kenneth, by now twenty-three, said he was an “author” of “special articles.”

It seems likely that the MacNichols—or, at least Kenneth—did not move straight from Ohio to New Mexico.  In a biography he wrote—I found it in Who Was Who among North American Authors 1921-1939—he said that he had early newspaper training with the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers which, if true, would have occurred around this time, as the rest of his life is more easily tracked.  As well, he is referenced in the San Francisco Call 17 January 1909 as being among a literary circle in Carmel, California.  It is also worth noting that the earliest writing of his I could identify—although I have not read it yet—is “The Petaluma Product” from All Story Magazine, August 1909—Petaluma being a town in northern California.

At any rate, he was writing by the late aughts, not only “The Petaluma Product” but also The King’s Idol, from the same magazine’s October 1909 issue as well as a couple of articles for Arizona Magazine, “Harnessing the Colorado” (May 1912), “An Arizona Inventor and His Work (July 1912), and “Phoenix—The Growing City” (September 1912), plus, most likely, a number of others that remain unknown to me. 

Life in Arizona proved pivotal for Macnichol.  On 1 September 1913, he married Louise Eckel in Prescott, Arizona.  It was Hetta Louise Eckel’s twenty-fourth birthday.  She had been born in Arkansas City, Kansas, where her father worked as a carpenter; they had moved to Arizona and bought a farm.  Presumably, Kenneth and Louise met while he was working as a writer in the Phoenix area.  It seems likely that he also met Louis Eytinge here, probably while writing “An Arizona Inventor and His Work,” although I haven’t yet seen that article so can’t be sure.