Jessie Bond (1894-1991)

Jessie C. Bond Munroe
Aka Bonnie Bee, Bonnie Bond, Bonnie Munroe
Fashion Artist, Illustrator, Poet, Painter
Born January 4, 1894, Decatur, Illinois
Died January 20, 1991, Palm Beach County, Florida

She was born in January, married in January, and died in January, and so in January I will write about artist and poet Jessie Bond. She was born on January 4, 1894, in Decatur, Illinois. Her father, William Branham Bond (1853-1913), was a millwright. Younger than her husband by a generation, Jessie's mother, Flora Etta (Williams) Bond (1871-1949), was a solicitor of public houses and later kept boarders. (Maybe those two things are the same.) Jessie Bond lived in and received her schooling in Decatur, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri. By 1920, she and her mother were in Indianapolis. Flora Bond lived on Massachusetts Avenue in that census year. In 1930, she resided on 30th Street, just west of Meridian Avenue. By then her daughter had gone far from home and would soon be herself a mother.

Jessie Bond is someone new to me. Her last name is in Jaffery & Cook's Collector's Index to Weird Tales. I found her first name in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Jessie Bond had six known illustrations in Weird Tales, from December 1924 to March 1925. These were in Farnsworth Wright's first half-year as editor of the magazine. I pretty quickly found an artist named Jessie Bond who lived in Florida. But was she the same Jessie Bond? What could her connection have been to Weird Tales? Then I found that Jessie Bond had moved to Florida in late 1924 from Indianapolis. I also found that she had studied at the John Herron School of Art in that same city. Remember that the editorial offices of Weird Tales magazine were in Indianapolis from 1923 to 1926. Farnsworth Wright had an address in the Circle City during those years, and he found artists among its residents, including William F. Heitman and George O. Olinick. Jessie Bond was one of them, too.

To start again, Jessie Bond went to school in St. Louis. In 1918-1919, she studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. (One of her classmates was Hoosier cartoonist Russell Berg [1901-1966].) Jessie worked as a staff artist at the William H. Block Company department store in Indianapolis. Founded in 1874 by an Austro-Hungarian immigrant, Wilhelm Herman Bloch (1855-1928), the Wm. H. Block Co., or Block's, was a mainstay in downtown Indianapolis for many decades. I remember going there with my mother when we were children. Maybe that was the first time I ever rode in an elevator. I remember full-page, hand-drawn fashion advertisements for Block's clothing in the Indianapolis Star. These were a mainstay, too. The Block's building, located at the corner of Illinois and Market streets, was designed by architects Vonnegut & Bohn, the Vonnegut part for Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. (1884-1957). He was the father of author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007), who found success early on in the pages of slick magazines and probably never had to turn to the pulps for income. I wouldn't rule out that he read Weird Tales as a child. I wonder if he knew that "The Unique Magazine" had originated in the city of his birth.

About the time that October turned into November 1924, Jessie Bond moved from Indianapolis to Miami, Florida. She must have been joyous in her move from a midwestern November to an eternal far southern summer. In a contemporaneous newspaper feature article, she was quoted as saying, "I find that I go at my work here with a different spirit. Miami is a playground, and that spirit seems to unconsciously enter into one, until one ceases to take even work seriously, and one does it more for the joy of accomplishment."

By the time she moved, Jessie must have already established a connection to Farnsworth Wright and Weird Tales. He was brand new as editor in November 1924. She had one or two drawings in each issue from December 1924 until March 1925, including two in the January 1925 issue. One of these was for "The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright. Herman F. Wright is an unknown author. I wonder now if he was actually Farnsworth Wright--F. Wright--in disguise. Wright had another work, a poem called "Two Crows," in that same issue. This was published under his pseudonym Francis Hard.

For five years Jessie Bond worked as a fashion artist for William M. Burdine's Sons department store in Miami. She also conducted the fashion page at the Miami Herald for one season. On January 11, 1928, she married New York native Robert Morris "Bob" Munroe (1896-1971) in Broward County, Florida. He worked as a newspaper columnist and as the director of advertising and publicity for the city of Coral Gables. Their son, John Macgregor Munroe, Ph.D., born on February 2, 1931, died just three years and three months ago, on November 4, 2021, at age ninety. He was a musician, educator, and choir director. He named one of his own daughters Bonnie, presumably after her grandmother . . .

Bob Munroe was a humorist and poet. His wife was a poet, too. Jessie Bond wrote under a pen name, "Bonnie Bee." She was also called Bonnie Bond and Bonnie Munroe, and she had poems in the New York World, the Tampa Morning Tribune, and Florida Poets--1931, edited by Henry Harrison. Bob and Jessie Munroe were acquainted with Vivian Yeiser Laramore (1892-1975), the first and only female poet laureate of the State of Florida. Vivian wrote about both of them in her column "Miami Muse," about Florida poets, in the Miami Daily News. Imagine a time when there was poetry in newspapers and a newspaper column was devoted every week to poets and their work.

After the birth of her son, Jessie became a portrait painter. She liked to collect seashells, and she loved the subtropics of Florida and the Bahamas. She seems to have lived in Florida for the rest of her blessedly long life. Jessie C. Bond Munroe died on January 20, 1991, in Palm Beach County, Florida. She was ninety-seven years old.

Jessie Bond's Illustrations in Weird Tales
"Fairy Gossamer" by Harry Harrison Kroll (Dec. 1924)
"Phantoms" by Laurence R. D'Orsay (Jan. 1925)
"The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright (Jan. 1925)
"An Unclaimed Reward" by Strickland Gillilan (Feb. 1925)
"The Magic of Dai Nippon" by J.U. Giesy (Feb. 1925)
"Black Curtains" by G. Frederick Montefiore (Mar. 1925)

(Of the six authors listed above, two--Harry Harrison Kroll and Strickland Gillilan--can be classed as Hoosiers. If Herman F. Wright was Farnsworth Wright, then that would make three. The FictionMags Index lists another credit for Jessie Bond, illustrations for "New Stories of Gilbert and Sullivan," with Rupert D'Oyly Carte, J. M. Gordon, Isabel Jay, Henry A. Lytton, and Courtice Pounds, published in The Strand Magazine in December 1925.)

Further Reading

• "Business Girls Sound Praises of Work and Recreation in Miami" by Isabel Stone, The Herald (Miami, Florida), November 15, 1924, page 4-B.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, March 26, 1933, Society Section, page 11.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, September 22, 1935, page 7, which includes some of her poems.

• "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19. 

Jessie Bond Munroe, aka Bonnie Munroe, in a newspaper photo accompanying the feature article "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, in the Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley