Francis Van Wie was born in 1886 in Madison, Wisconsin. His first marriage was in 1904 when he was 18. After divorcing his first wife he remarried in 1913 and then began marrying women without divorcing the previous ones. He moved to California in 1932 with Wife #5 and found a job shoveling coal. Too old to be drafted in World War II[1], Van Wie got a job as a rear conductor for Market Street Railway’s F-line where he met and married single middle-aged women along his route. Wife #8 lived at 8 Sanchez in Lower Haight. By 1945 Van Wie had married thirteen times.
In January 1945 when Wife #5 filed for divorce, his other wives came forward. A warrant was issued for Van Wie’s arrest and he fled the City only to be captured a day later in Los Angeles. He would be charged with 9 counts of polygamy (of his thirteen marriages, he was divorced twice, had one marriage annulled, and Wife #3 was dead).
Despite working on the F-line, San Francisco Chronicle[2] reporter Stan Delaplane gave Van Wie the nickname “Ding Dong Daddy of the D-Line”, based on a song with that title made popular by Louis Armstrong. When the story was picked up nationwide, Delaplane was awarded the 1946 National Headliner Award.
It must be said that Francis Van Wie was not an attractive man. At the time of his trial he was 58 years old, 5’2”, balding, and sporting a beer belly: not what one would envision as a lothario. But in his own words: “I know how to make a woman feel as if she’s the only woman in the world.” He was painted by the press as being a gentle, kind, middle-aged man who married for love; however, it would be learned during trial that after a couple of weeks of marriage Van Wie would become jealous and abusive, tell his wife that he was off to war or an undercover agent for the FBI, and disappear for months at a time before eventually abandoning the relationship altogether. It took the jury 10 minutes to convict Van Wie and he was sentenced to ten years at San Quentin.
With good behavior Van Wie was released from prison after serving only two years and found work as a janitor. One of the conditions of his parole was that he not marry for five years. But, finding his soul mate and with the court’s consent, he married Wife #14 within the year.
In 1952 he was starring in the Oakland burlesque show My True Love Story, a musical based on his life complete with a conductor’s hat, when he was arrested mid-performance for marrying Wife #16 without having divorced Wife #14 and before it was discovered that there was a Wife #15. Van Wie was arrested again in 1958 for violating his parole when he married Wife #18 after abandoning Wife #17. He was 73 years old and would serve no additional jail time, dying in 1973 at the age of 88 in the town of Lake Elsinore, California.
In 1997 the musical group Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, a swing band, released a song about Van Wie that goes in part:
The Ding Dong Daddy of the D-Car line
Had a thing for the ladies for which he did time
He reaped a little more than he could sew
Of the pleasures the Mormons in Utah know
He could not restrain himself when he saw
A nice caboose
Say Ding
Say Dong
That Ding-Dong Daddy he did
Sixteen women wrong
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[1] World War II: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=4222 [2] San Francisco Chronicle: story coming January 16th
