A few days after the call from Ms. Cahill, I was back in my hotel room in Springfield, making notes for a rough draft of the speech while watching a basketball game.

“The power lines have gone down — we can’t reach anyone there, ” Bill Davis, a meteorologist at the Springfield, Mo., office of the National Weather Service, said in a telephone interview.

She spent the next four years in Europe, returning in late 1880 to Springfield, where she remained in declining health until her death in 1882.

Forest Park is a 700 acre-oasis of calm, quiet and green less than a mile from downtown Springfield, Massachusetts - a peaceful retreat from urban life, and a relaxing place to start the day.

Carpluk spent several days in a head collar in the intensive care unit of Springfield's Baystate Medical Center with an array of bruises, two black eyes, and a thick red welt circling her neck.