Chicago History | Summer 1976 by Chicago History Museum

Chicago History SUMMER 1976

7_J. ).

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Y <;pe~ial reque~t. this Photo~raph was t~ken by l\fr. l\Tosh e r for his h1~torica l cr,1lectaon of l\Iemonal Portraits of prominent men and women, for th e Seco nd C e nte nnial. 1976. When the collec tion is complete they are to he cla-,s, ficd a1Hl deeded, with memoirs and valuable stati,;tics, to Chicago, and prese rve d with the l ll}' arc· haves in a me mo rial snfc in the gre·,t vaults of the Court H o u<;e. ,, he re suita ble !>pate has he ·n provided by th e Coun r al, and approved by J\fayor Harri<;nn Janu a ry 21st, 188u: a a!d th e re ,will he _a request 1.11 !he d eed t<? have the Mayor of Chica~o, in 1976,. c~nft'r \\ 1th th e C entenmal Comm1ss1on to provide a place for these portraits an<l s tat1st1C!, in \l c morial H all, at the Second Centennial Anniversary of American lndeper.dence. ' Ti~ then these portraits and histories will become a priceless treasure, and of grea t value to our descendants and to histori a ns, that we can not now afford to neglect the opportun ity of giving. " \"h v en ot h er men our Ian d s w1·11 ta·11 \Vhen other men our streets will fill, And other birds will sing as gayAs briF:ht the sunshine as to-day, A hundred years from now."

The Ceremonies.

The Sir Knights and all good and accepted Masons will be invited to cond11<·t th~ ~ervices, with the highest honors and sacred rites of their <)rder, as their Brother, ,,1 l 'hicago in 1976 will be requested in thl! deed to unlock the safe, and take charge of the sacred tr.ust with appropriate ceremonies " In .Memoriam" of the honored dead.

Special Price List for Memorial Cabinet Portraits.

Copies may be had 11t duplicate prices. Cabinet size, $;';.00 per dozen: two d0tc11 fnr $9.00: fiftr for$ l fl.00; one hundred for $25.00, if the order i,; given at one time. If ordered soon, the extremely low price will be adhered to.

~. B. Thuoon ls heartily e n - ~ ,lurMt'd by Sen11tor {'ullom. ExJl117or Ht>ath. Hon. David D&Ylll, Clen. Sheridan, and forty other 11romln.-nt n,en of the State.

'-••••1111... •

.CliYON AND FAS~L Fo:a~s <..

National Historical Photographer to Posterity, 125 State Street, Chicago, Ill.

an he made from this 1\femonal_Photograph as good as taken from life.

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Fir t Premium was awarded C. D. l\fosHER, for Artistic Excellence in Art Photography, at the Centennial, 1876. (COPYRIGHT)

The back of one of C. D. Mosher's memorial photographs, explaining his plan for the nation 's Bicentenn ial and informing his customers that, for a limited time only, they could order a dozen duplicates for $3.

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society SUMMER 1976 Volume V, Number 2

Cove r : Our cove r, by Phoebe Moo re, is adapted from the South Shore Coun try Club Magazine of Janu ary 1958. Gift of South Sho re Country Club.

CONTENTS

CHICAGO 'S EXCLUSIVE PLAYGROUND : THE SOUTH SHORE COUNTRY CLUB/66 by Aubrey 0. Cookman

THE CITY NEWS BUREAU/76 by A. A . Dornfeld

Isabe l Grossner, Editor

WILLIAM PERKINS BLACK : HAYMARKET LAWYER/85 by Herman Kogan

Frederick J. Nachman, Assistant Editor

Mary Dawson, Editorial Assistant

CHICAGO 'S BICENTENNIAL PHOTOGRAPHER: CHARLES D. MOSHER/95 by Larry A. Viskochil

MR. WRIGLEY'S CUBS/105

Editori al Advisory Committee Emmett Dedmon James R . Getz Oli ver Jensen R obert W. J oha nnsen Herman Kogan Will Leonard R obert M. Sulton

by Paul M. Angle

FIFTY YEARS AGO / 116 BOOK REVIEWS : ADLAI E. STEVENSON / 121 by Robert E. Kennedy

BRIEF REPORTS / 122 SOCIETY NOTES / 125 LETTERS / 127

Copyright 1976 by the Chicago H istorical Society Clark St reet at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 A rticles appearing in this journal are abst racted and indexed in H is torical Abstracts and A merica: H isto ry and Life All illus t ra t ions, u nless otherwise credited, are from the col l ections of t h e Chicago H istorica l Society.

Chicago's Exclusive Playground: The South Shore Country Club BY AUBREY 0. COOKMAN

Aerial view of the South Shore Country Club In 1936 ahowa an enclave fringed by beach, screened off by rows of tree11 and shrubs, and without access except by private road. The Illinois Central Railroad neatly skirts the edge of the grounds at left.

Chicago History

A privileged way of life disappeared when the South Shore Country Club closed its doors in 1974, leaving behind memories of stately elegance and plush country living on Chicago)s South Side. 1N JANUARY 1 906,

Lawrence H eyworth , the president of the Mutual Bank, wrote Mrs. ,v. " 'Âˇ Kimball, a Prairie Avenue resident of means and social position: Dear Mrs. Kimball: Honore Palmer called me up just now to say you would like to be included in the list o( members of Solllh Shore Country Club. I would like to sketch to you what our club is. ,,ve are intending Lo utilize what is known as the Willard Tract, which is eighty acres more or less on the lake, immediately south o( and adjoining Jackson Park, portions o( which have been washed away by inroads from the lake, but largely we hope to restore even th is. \Ve are hoping that all of the substantial citizens who take an interest in this will subscribe for quite a iiule of the stock in order that our plans may be fully carried out. ... IL will cost $15,000 or $20,000 probably to shape up the Janel itseU and we intend building on the la11d , if the money is subscribed, and we believe it will be, a beautiful club house with all the accessories possible that can make it attractive to citizens. " 'e are hoping to have a number o( features that ha, e not heretofore been embodied in other country clubs, such as: a little building for a grill room; cottages with rooms to rent to members during the hot months; a sort o( casino in addition where entertai11ments can be held; a little building for a libr;iry, with writing and dining rooms for ladies and gentlemen. ,ve hope to embody tennis courts, baths, locker rooms, reception rooms, a beautiful billiard room ancl a music room. It will require probably from $300,000 Lo 500,000 10 do this properly. 0( course, its development is a

Aubrey 0. Cookman, formerly a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and at prese11t a public relations consultant, was a board member and officer of the South Shore Country Club for twelve years.

matter o( several years, but preliminary work can be done, so as to make a very attractive place for the summer. \Ve are hoping to secure subscriptions from wealthy people of 25 to 50 shares each, believing that the stock will enhance in value very much, because the ground is being obtained for 25Â˘ on the dollar, of what could once have been obtained for it. Any subscriptions beyond the share that could be utilized by you and your family would be very gratefully received by the Committee as we believe it will be a good investment. Hoping you will at least be a member Sincerely, The club Heyworth so glowingly described existed only in his fertile imagination. Its siteto-be was a desolate strip at the edge of Lake i\Iichigan, about eight miles from downtown Chicago, owned by a family in Rhode Island and intermittently occupied by gypsy encampments, small wandering bands of friend ly Kickapoo Indians, and city folks who came to sample the fresh perch fried on the spot by Barnes, the local fisherman . Only a scattering of crab-apple and wild orange trees clotted the landscape. The dream of a South Shore Country C l ub had come to Heyworth the year before, while he was president of the Chicago Athletic C l ub (CAC), which is now the Chicago Athlet ic Association . His idea was to establish "an annex country club to the C.A .C. so members cou ld enjoy dining and wining in a beautiful place in the country instead of having to resort to dives and saloons, which at that time were about the only arnilable places." The New York Athletic Club had such an arrangement at Travers Island on Long Island Sound, fifteen miles from New York City, but few CAC members were willing to endorse a similar a n nex in Chicago. Nevertheless, Heyworth d eChica go History

cided on a sLrip of lancl along Lake i\Jichigan beLween 67th and 71sl sLrects and agreed Lo pay $30,000 clown and S245,000 more within t\\Âˇentyfour yea rs for the en tire tracl. He then asked Honore Palmer, the son of i\Irs. Potter Palmer; Harry Honore, her brother; i\Iason B. Starring; and 'i\Tilliam C. ThorneimportanL figures in Chicago business and socieLy-to help him promote the coumry club. Their first leuer, sent to a Lhousand prominent Ch icagoans, brought only twenty-one acceptances, and Heyworth decided that he needed even bigger names on his list of directors. J. Ogden Armour, president of Armour&.: Company, agreed to allmr the use of his name on a letterhead afler Heyworth assured him that acceptance of the honor entaile<l only the purchase of a perpetual membership when the club was organized. 'i\'ith ,\rmour as a backer, Heyworth proceeded to line up seventeen presidents of major Loop banks to list as directors in his second letter soliciting memberships. But before the letter could be mailed, a civic problem surfaced. An irate committee of SouLh Shore-Bryn Mawr residents-including a state senator, an alderman, the city's commissioner of public works, and several prominent lawyersmarched into Heyworth's office to protest his plan. The site he was proposing for the club to occupy meant blocking off 67th, 68th, 69th, and 70th streets, which were scheduled to be extended east to the lake. 68

Chicago History

A properly attired golf twosome and caddie play off in front of the original clubhouse, 1908. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

Heywonh invited the commiuee into the directors' room of his bank and asked each man where he banked. "Are you going lo fight the presidents of your banks where you borrow money and stop the organization of a club of which these gentlemen are directors?" he challenged, showing them Lhe leuer with its imposing list of bank presidents. The committee members saw Lhe light and helped to steer through the City Council an ordinance which Lraded ciLy-owned property along Lhe lake for a fony-foot sLrip of land bordering on the western edge of the site. The strip was eventually med to widen South Shore Drive, then called Bond SLreet, to sixty feel. Thal second, very persuasive letter also brought more Lhan a thousand acceptances, each enLailing an initiation fee of $100. The organiters Lhen moved quickly. Articles of incorporation were filed in Springfield on April 25, 1906, and the follmring day the first board of governors of the South Shore Country Club meL in Room 310 of Chicago's Fine Ans Buil<ling. It was a distinguished crew: along with HeyworLl1, Palmer, Honore, and Thorne, there were Harold F. i\IcCormick, Joseph Leiter, Charles A. Stevens, Harry I. Miller, Edwin F. Brown, Silas H. Strawn, Lawrence A. Young, :\Iason B. Starring, Harry J. Powers, Frederick Bode, Bertram i\I. Âˇwinston, Clarence K. Woos-

South Shore Country Club

ter, Frederic W. Upham, and Albert vV. Goodrich-all leaders of business and society in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Thorne, a Montgomery vVard executive and a son of Wards' cofounder, was elected president, and Heyworth became treasurer and chairman of building and grounds. \\'hen the board next met two weeks later, it accepted Bode's proposal to limit participation to 200 perpetual members who would pay an initiation fee of $1,000, 2,000 active members whose initiation fee would be $100, and 250 nonresident members whose initiation fee would be $50. However, their dues were also badly needed, and these could not be collected until the building and grounds were usable. One prospective member, after viewing the lake-shore site, described it as "a most uninviting patch of sand and coarse weeds." Contracts were therefore immediately signed for a clubhouse and a temporary stable. The golf course was to begin with four holes. Black soil-4,372 cubic yards of it- was brought in by train and wagon from Momence, Illinois.

Heyworth and another board member attended a public sale of the furnishings of the Âˇw ashington Park Club, which was then closing. For -51,273.70, they purchased chairs, tables, sofas, seuees, serving equipment, tablecloths, napkins, and towels. Another -5303.30 bought the defunct club's horse, mowers, rollers, sprinklers, rakes, and pitchforks and, for an additional $68, they also took possession of a decorative fountain and the club's boats. Always a hard bargainer, Heyworth paid a penny per square yard for \,Vashington Park's greens, the finest English turf available at the time, and 50Â˘ each for commodious wooden lockers, many of which were still in use almost seventy years later when the South Shore Country Club closed . A procession of horse-drawn wagons belonging to Loop stores moved the purchases from Washington Park to the new site. The drivers and helpers stayed on; in a few clays, they had sodded the initial four holes of the golf course. The library, a quiet retreat, 1941. This and all following South Shore Country Club photos, gift of South Shore Country Club .

South Shore Country Club

Ed Bruin on a jumper from Mrs. A. C. Thompson's stables in the club's 1952 Horse" ow.

The younger set at the net.

Jo Ann Craig leading the Gag-Net Rockettes in the club's Follies of 1954.

The architectural firm of l\larshall and Fox was engaged to design the clubhouse, although Heyworth had his own ideas. They were to be guided by a picture he had of an old club in l\lexico City, but "leaving out the expensive embellishments." He was obviously still a bit worried about finances, despite the influx of initiation fees. But not overly so; other correspondence confirms that the new club was to be as gracious and elegant as possible. The same architectural firm also designed or collaborated with others on such well-known Chicago hotels as the Blackstone, Drake, Morrison, and Eclge,rnter Beach. Charles Fox, who undertook the assignment for the club, was also an advocate of an emerging style of large apartment house, whose ideas were incorporated into buildings at 199 East Lake Shore Drive, at 999 and 1200 North Lake Shore Drive, and at 1550 1orth State Parkway. He built the clubhouse in two and a half months, at a cost of $90,000. Possibly Fox was the more acceptable member o( the firm. Ben Marshall, it is said, built himself a house equipped with a sliding wall in the bathroom, designed so he could press a button in the living room and reveal the consternated occupant. The South Shore Country Club would not have approved such shenanigans. Fox, on the other hand, though he at first received short shrift and impatient queries from Heyworth, later became a governor of the club, a post he held for many years. As part of the rush program, railroad man Harry I. Miller, a founding member, installed temporary tracks from the nearby Illinois Central right-of-way and provided workers who hauled in the trees and completed the landscaping around the new clubhouse in seven days. Every member was expected to contribute services, material, or time to the project. A vicepresident o( Peoples Gas Company, for instance, assumed personal re ponsibility ror installing the gas pipelines. llc)WOrth wa n ' t going to let anything interfere with the realin1tion of his dream, and he

vigorously attacked any threat to the social and aesthetic accomplishments already under ·way. In August 1906, he wrote a sharp letter to D. F. Cameron, president o( the South Chicago City Railway Company: Dear l\Ir. Cameron: The people south of the South Shore Country Club are complaining of the condition of the street occupied by your track on Yates Avenue, and desire us to remedy this. I understand that it is the Railway Company's place to keep this street in repair, ancl in good condition . Kindly have this attendee! to at once, or we will hal'e entire community vote clown on the South Shore Country Club, and also on the Street Railway Co., and it will be questionable whether you will be able to get any more franchises, or maintain the one you hold on this street. This must be attended to at once, either by you or us. l\Jr. Howell will present this Jetter as the result of a meeting of the vVindsor Park people, represented by the following gentlemen at the meeting: l\Tr. Lutz, Vice Pres. Great Lakes Dredging Co. \\'m. ,\ lcClain, Purchasing Agt. for County Commissioners ·w aller Smith, Secretary to Jno. Hanberg, Co. Treasurer ;\Ir. Colburn, Private Banker of South Chicago C. H . Howell, President 111. Improvement &: Ballast Co. \ \ 1hat we want is immediate action on your part or it must be on our part. He) worth substituted kind words for threats when the person was cooperative. 'iVriting to Samuel lnsull, who later became a member, he thanked him (or expediting some work at the club and added, "Hereafter I will have an entirely different opinion o( the Chicago Ed ison Company," o( ,rhich ]nsull was president. He spared no one, least oE all architect Fox. In June, he complained: Received your letter of June 4th. I was out to the building and found that there were only twenty men working on the 50 ft. building, which seems absolutely absurd. I think some arrangement could be made with the contractor to shove this work, and • put on more men; in other words, I cannot see that you are looking after this building at all. Ch icago History

South Shore Country Club

\Ve want a bath house, and a boat house right off. And also, we want part of the ground laid out by you for tennis courts, want you to do this right away. Fence you promised to have sample of has not shown up yet; in other words, the whole place is dragging along slowly, and the members are all jumping on me wanting to know when they will be able to get into the new club house. Gi \路e this your immediate attemion. By early September, with the club's opening just three weeks off, Heyworth was again ventin g his irritation on Fox: I understand that you are a remarkable and wonderful good talker, and an exceptionally, excellent, spirited testimonial building witness, but I do not notice any results. You were to attend to the building of the piers in front of the club house, and promised to haYe the sand sucker put in at once, and the Great Lakes to pump this in. How do you expect to have this sand covered with black dirt and sods for the opening, unless it is attended to at once. There were to be two arc lights, one reel and one green on the piers. Nothing has been done about these. I have been after the contractors and carpenters to clean up debris around the club house, but have not clone much yet. I notice the club house is full of dirt, and it is up to the painters to get out and gi"e our people chance to clean up. \Vhat have you done regarding flowers for the boxes under the windows' The ard1es under the driYeway and pergola should be paimecl at once. \Vh at ha\路e you clone in regard lo arch at west end of pergola? Is fountain connected on main porch in order to get lime out of concrete? Kindly let me know at once in regard to the above questions. l\feanwhile, the board was busily establishing rules and precedems for the new club. It was decreed that a room with bath would rent for S2 a day and one without bath for S40 a month-provided monthly occupants would "patronize the bar or restaurant to the amount of at least $25 .00 per month." They were ahead of their time in some respects, ruling out discrimination against women, and they shortly thereafter welcomed Mrs. George M. Pullman into the fold. 72

Chicago History

Even though the club was not yet operating, its existence was now assured and its membersh ip grew rapidly. Early additions included _J. Ogden Armour, Thomas E. Wilson, Harold Swift, John .J- Glessner, Iartin Ryerson, banker A. S. Nichols, Louis Kuppenheimer, Franklin Ames, Frank H. Judd, publisher Victor Lawson, George F. Harding, Elliott Durand , Jr., George F. Getz, .John R. Thompson, and James Hamilton Lewis, then Chicago's corporation counsel but later a leader in the U .S. Senate. Author George Ade, a Hoosier, became a nonresident member. The opening party on September 29, 1906, in founder Heyworth's words, "made a regular New Year's Eve celebration look like a tame affair." l\fost of the guests arrived by horse and buggy. Only a daring [ew braved the bad roads in their Pope Toledos, Stanley Steamers, and Thomas Flyers. Because the kitchen was not ready [or the gala occasion, the owners of the Congress Hotel and the Palmer House sent out wagonloads o( food, a manager, and all the necessary waiters and helpers to serve more than a thousand table d 'h6te and bullet dinners. Less than a decade later, the club had outgrown its main building, which was moved about a hundred yards south, closer to the lake' edge, and converted into a golf locker building with an informal dining area. The dining area hacl a t\\路o-tiered, circular screened porch- referred to as the Bird Cage for obvious reasons-to accommodate bathers, women, and children. And modernism die! prove to have its limits-there was a separate grilJ inside the building for men only. The ne"路 clubhouse-also designed by Foxcost more than three times the old one, and some o( the governors swallowed hard when the plans were approved at a board meeting in 1g15. Still the estimated $300,000 would be a steal today. The five-story white stucco structure, still an impressive sight, contains more than a million and a ha][ cubic feet o( space.

A portion of the Passaggio leading onto the dining room, which extends laterally at its rear.

A member receives attention in the club's barbershop , 1962.

The 50 by 104-foot main dining room opens inLo the Greek-columned Passaggio-a spacious corridor approximately 75 feet wide and 375 feel long, covered by a carpet woven for it which was reputed Lo be Lhe longesL in Lhe world. The Passaggio allowed Lhe club to expand iLs sit-clown dining capaciLy from 500 LO more than 1,250; when the main ballroom and oLher adjacent large rooms were pressed into service, Lwo thousand diners could be comfortably sealed. And all that space was used. The club conLinued Lo Lhrive for several more decades, except cl uri ng Lhe Depression years when iLs firsl mongage bonds, like many oLher bonds in Lhose clays, went begging. Those few who were financially able purcha~ed them for 50 or 60¢ on Lhe dollar and, by the mid-195os, redeemed Lhem al full \·,due. AL iLs heighL, membenhip in Lhe club was as ~ought after as a box at Lhe most fashionable opera. One member recalls being high-piessured into selling his membership (inheriLed from his faL11er), so that someone ebe could be admiued. He got quite a good price for it, too.

play on i Ls beach or tennis courts had once themselves toddled over its more than fifty-five acres of lakeside greenery. Until the migration to the suburbs that quickened after World ,var JI, the club's grounds were within easy walking distance of the homes and apartments of many of its members. The club was unique in many other ways. Conveniently located in the city, only a twentyminute drive from the Loop, it offered a wider range of recreational facilities than any country club in the Midwest, perhaps the nat ion. l\fembers could enjoy the beach, a nine-hole golf course, seven tennis courts, a stable, indoor and outdoor riding rings, skeet and trap shooting, lawn bowling, a launching ramp for small boats, and an outdoor basketball court. In its early years, it also had a yacht club (complete with commodore), a croquet team, and even a roque team-which played a more ~killful version of croquet best described as billiards with a mallet. At one time, a giant wooden toboggan slide sent intrepid riders hurtling down a fairway. Ice skating was always popular; later on, the youngsters added hockey. Softball, touch football, volleyball, and badminton were frequently played on its spacious la,1·ns. From the beginning, there was concern about manners and morals. James R. Getz has supplied this amusing account of how his father handled his responsibility as house committee chairman in the early days:

The South Shore Country Club was always more than a club. To the city, it was an institution. To its members, it was a relaxed and enjoyable way of life that now seems to be extinct, at least in a big city. For three or four generations of South Side families, it was a year-round source of pleasure, a second home. i\Iany who later watched their grandchildren

Chicago Hist ory

South Shore Country Club

I have been told that at the Sunday night dances he sat on a small balcony overlooking the dance floor, with a reel-coated page boy at his side holding a silver tray. With an eagle eye, father would survey the floor below. If he observed a couple dancing in an "improper fashion" he would point out the offending "gentleman" to the page boy and hand him a card for the tray requesting that individual's presence in room 101 at his earliest convenience. The culprit would be admoni heel for his improper conduct, which was usually cheek-to-cheek dancing, and warned that a repeat performance would result in a suspension of club privileges.

The club was a glamorous place. It hosted such famous figures as Edward, Prince of , ,vales; King Peter of Yugoslavia; Queen J\farie o( Rumania; Prince Alberto( Belgium; Pres. \Villiam Howard Ta(t; and Buffalo Bill Cody. Important politicos, including J\Iayor Richard J. Daley and many other city, county, and slate officials, were members. Champions played on its grounds-such tennis champions as Bill Tilden; George Lott, the son o( a member; Frank Parker; Bobby Riggs; and Helen Wills. Walter Hagen, Chick Evans, and Patty Berg tested its golf course. On three occasions, the club was the scene of the Grand American Championship shoot. Entertainment was equally regal-Paul \,Vhiteman, the King of Jazz; commedienne Elsie Janis; \'\Till Rogers, fresh from his Broadway and film successes; and Pat O'Brien were among those who entertained on the ballroom stage. Full-length movies were shown every Sunday evening. In summer, dancers could move to the club's outdoor pavilion, swept by cool lake breezes. The cltib's elaborately staged Follies, featuring the talent of its own members, was an annual highlight o( the city's social calendar for almost forty years. Book reviews were a weekly feature. The club's three-day horse shows were worldfamous. The close interest the members took in these events is well exemplified by George Getz, who annually brought a couple of donkeys and two camels-named Hamad and Sada--from 74

Chicago History

his l\Iichigan farm. It seems hard to believe but, when one o( the camels died during the show, its skeleton went to the Field Museum. The day finally came, however, when it was clearly financially unfeasible for the club to continue operating. For many years, many of its members had lived in the immediate neighborhood, and it had become more of a neighborhood club than a city-wide institution. Still, many of the city's wealthier Jews lived on the South Side and, although it is a matter o( record that some of the club's most prominent early members were Jews, somewhere along the line that policy changed. Over the protests of some of its own members, the club steadfastly refused to admit those of the Jewish faith who were financially eligible and apparently desirable in all other respects. Thus the club came to be resented by some not only becau e it represented a way o( life that most Sou th Side residents could not aspire to, but also because it did not admit some o( the relatively few who could. There are those who believe it could have at least prolonged its existence had it been more open. But probably the most important reason for the demise of South Shore Country Club was the change in the neighborhood. During the 1960s, the club's environs steadily became a more black and le s wealthy community. The wealthier residents were moving north-to 1 orth Lake Shore Drive and to the 1 orth Shore suburbs. It was no longer necessary to travel back to 71st Street and South Shore Drive for a taste of country living, especially when suburban clubs were offering more exclusive settings. There were last-ditch efforts to attract new members. During 1967 and 1968, interior and exterior improvements co ting $195,000 were made in the hope that North Side residents wishing recreational facilities would join. The club also realized too late that it had failed to attract younger members during its more popular days. By 1973, resident memberships-which had reached a high of 2,006 in 1956-had

CALENDAR

OF EVENTS

Formal

Members Only Saturday, November 22 Dancing 1 0 to 1 MUSIC BY HENRY BRANDON

NOVEMBER AT THE CLUB ANNUAL CLUB ELECTION-S. tu,d•y. Novembe, 8 Voting from 12 to 6 P.M. Annual meeting 7 P.M.- C olonnt1 d e Room .

Comp limentary Buffe t Supper. MEMBER S ONL Y 8:00 Dancing until

I :00

MUSIC BY CHUCK CAVALLO

LECTURES- Thursdays , Co lonnad e Room 8:30 Nov. b , BATHIE STUART , " POLYNESIAGARDEN OF EDEN" Nov. 13 . COLONEL JOHN D. CRAI G, " ADVENTURE IN EUROPE" Nov. 20, " SINGAPORE JOE" FISHER, " THE DYNAMIC ST. LAWRENCE " Nov. 27. THAYER SOULE. " BERMUDA " DANCING-Sa turdays Nov. I , MUSIC BY HAL ERWIN , Dining Room

Nov.

9:00-12 :00

8, MUSIC BY CHUCK CAVALLO.

Colonnade Room I 0 :00- 1:00 Nov. 15 . MUSIC BY CLAUDE JOHNSON , Dining Room 9 :00 - 12 :00 Nov . 22 , BLACK AND WHITE BALL, Colonnade Room , MUSIC BY HENRY BRANDON 10 :00 -1:00 Nov. 29 , MUSIC BY CLAUDE JOHNSON . Dining Room 9 :00 - 12 :00 CHUCK WAGON BRUNCH-Sund•y, Nov. 2. B;,d C•g• 12 :00-3 :00 CONCERT-Sunday, Nov. 16, Colonnade Room 8:30 MIMI BENZELL, Metropolitan Opera Star LECTURE-Fr iday . Nov. 14, Colonnade Room 10:00 ALVIN W. LONG , Ass 't . Vice PrHident , Chica90 Title and Trust Company" YOU-AND YOUR REAL ESTATE" DANCING CLASSES-Every Fdd•y through Dec. 5 For Sons and Daughters of Members 7:00-9:00 B:00 - 10:00 For Adu lh , Wednesday, Nov. 5 and 19 IOOK REYIEW-1,t •nd 3'd Fdd•y, Colonnad e Room 11 :00 Nov. 7, MARGARET DODD BROWN Nov. 21, PURDIE NELSON MEISSNER

IRIDGE Mondays , ladi es ' luncheon and Bridge 12 :00 8:00 Tuesday, Nov. 11 and 25 , Miied Bridge FRENCH CLASSES-Tue,d•y• 10:00-1 :00 STAILE-Adult R;d;ng Wedne,d•y Even;ng, 7:00-9 :00 Nov. 8, Saturday, Members' Children Hone Show I :00 SHOOTING LODGE-Open all D•y Sunday GOLF HOUSE-Fdday,, Men', N;ght 8:00 MAIN DINING •OOM-THANKSGIVING DAY Thund•y, Nov. 27, Dinner I :00-9 :00 BUFFET eve,y Thu,.day (ucopt Nov. 27) b:00-8 :30 PERCH DINNER every F,;d•y 6:00-9:00

The season in full swing. November 1958 offered formal and in formal dining and dancing , travel lectures, the usual Fre nch lessons, separate dance classes for members and their children, riding and a children's horse show, bridge, shooting, a concert, and book reviews . The special lecture "You-and Your Rea l Estate " was part of a series for women members.

slipped to 731. In this, the final full year of activity, the club's operations lost more than $177,000, despite a special assessment which brought in $ 124,000. After a few agonizing years of debate, the decision to sell was finally reached. After rejecting an offer from the Nation of Isl am, which wished to const ruct a hospital on the site, the South Shore Country Club-the city's last country club-sold its 57.8-acre site and buildings to the Chicago Park District on June 20, 1974, for .$9,775,000. Members were asked to vacate the lockers which some had used for half a century or more. Permanent residents in more than ha][ of its eighty-nine guest rooms-some of whom had lived there for decades- h ad to move out. Only three weeks' notice was given. A traditionally festive party, the Cotton Ball, was the final event in South Shore Country Club's social history. On July 13, 1974, more than sixteen hundred nostalgic members and guests danced in the outdoor dance pavilion, beneath the stars. There were many moist eyes that evening, and it wasn't spray from the lake. In August, a huge public auction was held; like the auction for the defunct ·w ashington Park Club in 1906, over two thousand items were offered. Kitchen and bar equipment, furniture, and lawn tools were among the goods sold to those who purchased the $5 catalog. Ironically, some of the buyers were there to find underpriced treasures for their own, newer country clubs. At the time of this writing, plans for the site are still uncertain. The spacious area will surely provide recreational facilities for the South Shore community, but the clubhouse's fate is in debate. Some favor its destruction; others envision its conversion into a cultural center for musical, dramatic, and educational programs. It could even be used for conventions and meetings. One thing only seems certain-the South Shore Country Club will remain alive in the memory of Chicago as a gracious part of its history. Chicago History

The City News Bureau BY A. A. DORNFELD

Now read all about it-Chicago)s City News Bureau) fondly remembered by its employees as both a sweatshop and a super-school) and certainly a training ground for talent. gather for a bout 0ÂŁ convivial gossip on the newsfronts of the world, from Hollywood to Beirut, it's a safe bet that the talk will turn sooner or later to Chicago's City News Bureau-to its stern discipline, its fanatical emphasis on accuracy and, most of all, to its tightfisteclness. At least one member will turn out to be a Bureau alumnus, and the others will all have heard about it. It is equally unlikely, however, that more than one Chicagoan in a thousand even suspects the Bureau's ex:stence. A hundred years ago, when Chicago supported many more newspapers than it does today, each staff gathered its own news. The duplication of effort "Âˇas very costly, and eventually a bureau came to do the day-to-clay legwork for all the papers. How it was laun ched is misunderstood, even by its O\\'n taff. It is commonly slated that the City News Bureauunder its former name, the City Press Association-was begun in 1891 by two enterprising reporters, Archie Leckie and Harry L. Sayler, and that it flourished from the yery beginning. Other accounts give credit for the Bureau's founding to the city's daily newspapers. But letters written almost forty years ago by the then-retired Leckie to a young City News editor reveal that the Bureau had a forerunner WHEREVER NEWSPAPERMEN

A. A. Dornfeld, a frequent contributor to Chicago History, went to work for the City ?\'ews Bureau in 1926, became night city editor in 1956, and retired in 1970. He is now working on a full-length history of his alma mater. The photos for his article are used by courtesy of the Little Trib, the house organ of the Chicago Tribune. 76

Chicago History

and even a rival as it struggled into existence. In 1881 , a man named John T. Sutor set up an office near \Vashington and La Salle streets, to gather chatty local and suburban items for the doLen-plus papers ,rhich served Chicago's halfmillion residents. Several examples of these early stories remain, among them: The good people, young and old of the Leavitt st. Chmch held an apron social Friday eyening. \Vednesday evening a very novel entertainment was enjoyed by the guests of the \\'oodruff hotel. The affair was a soap bubble party, a pri1e being awarded to the individual who blew the bigge t bubble.

It soon became apparent that coverage of more vital matters was needed and, in 1888, George R. Wright and .John l\I. Russell took over Sutor's bureau and named it the Chicago City Press Association. Reporters were hired to cover City Hall, the County Building, the Federal Building, army headquarters, hotels, coroner' inquests, police stations, races at the \\'est Side dri"ing park, strikes and other union matters, and all the courts-civil, criminal, and justice of the peace. Society events, suburban happenings, City League baseball, and most other sports were also covered. No sports department was set up; each reporter was expected to report on the games in his territory. The oldest surviving specimen of City Press reporting tells of a drunken alderman arrested for recklessly driving his horse and buggy downtown, to the peril of pedestrians. \\Then the alderman's case was called in court the next morning under a fictitious name, he did not appear. A policeman testified that he had been taken in merely for "safe keeping," and the matter was dropped. The judge later declared

that the real identity of the defendant made no difference to him , all of which neatly demonstrates that reckless, drunken driving and the court "fix" are hoary, if not exactly honorable, Chicago practices. In the early days, the news in the home office was written on "flimsies"-sheets of very thin paper, layered between carbon papers. A dozen or more copies were turned out at a time. Suburban reporters sent in their stories by railroad brakemen and "news butchers"-so called because they sold oranges and periodicals in the aisles of the trains. Leckie recalled that the suburbs seemed as remote as Detroit, but reporters had certain advantages which have since di appeared, such as riding gratis on most suburban trains and on horse cars. As the nineteenth century neared its encl, the telephone came into use, and the stories could be phoned in. The phone company' operators helped by listening in and relaying garbled words to City Press editors. Editors often began their clay by calling "centrnl" and asking what matters of interest had come to that lady's attention, but the phone company eventually cut out this rree service. Among the men hired by the City Press as it expanded were ib supposed founders, Harry L. Sayler, freshly arrived from Indianapolis, and Archibald S. Leckie of the Chicago Daily News. Sa)ler went to City Hall, Leckie to the Crimi-

The twelfth-floor headquarters of the City News Bureau, 188 W. Randolph St., in 1959. Larry Mulay, seated at the city desk at right, reviews copy. The rewrite bank is in the left foreground; behind it are the sports desk and the copy room.

nal Court beat. But the expansion was shortlived. In 1890, the newspaper publishers established their own news-gathering service, with a nearly identical name, the City Press Association of Chicago. Only six of sixteen papers remained loyal to the older bureautwo printed in German, another in Swedishbut it doggedly fought on. The publishers' bureau also found the going rough. The older bureau was well liked by news sources; moreover, it managed to score scoop after notable scoop. In one instance, Leckie sold a scoop for $30 to the "outside" Chicago Herald. The prestige helped even more than the money, and Leckie soon began calling on the outside papers to explain the advantages of his service. The turning point in the contest between the two news bureaus came in 1890, as Christmas approached. Leckie wrote in his memoirs: At this season it had been the habit of the bureau to collect a page about the obsenÂˇance o[ the day at various orphan asylums, hospitals and other institutions. It was all rot, of course. Sob stuff about the old Âˇ tramp at the jail who hadn 't tasted turkey since he last ate dinner with his clear old mother and about little crippled Bobbie who fondled the velocipede Chicago History

City News

Santa brought him and said he would ride it next week while the sweet faced nurse behind him shook her head sadly. But the papers printed it. After all, the trustees of the institution were among the best people.

Leckie recalled that he and Sayler had almost decided not to prepare a Christmas story that year, when the assistant editor of the Chicago /11/er Ocean walked into their office to complain that the rival service was not getting out such an epic. Could Leckie and Sayler provide one? After some haggling-which started at S50- they agreed to "cover Christmas" for $30. The Christmas story was duly printed in the /11/er Occa11 and one other daily while the other papers seethed over the inadequacy o[ their own news service. \ Vhen Leckie and Sayler bought the news service in Januray 1891, for $6,000, its tangible assets consisted of a scuffed desk, some chairs, two typewriters, and a stack of flimsies. The unprofitable battle of the news bureaus soon ended , however. The two merged on April 24, reLaining the name City Press Association. Leckie and Sayler received 3,000 for their assets and were placed in charge of the new outfit. At that time, there were thirty-seven persons on the City Press payroll. In 1893, the City Press moved to new quarters at Jackson Boulevard and Plymouth Court to be in the same building as the Associated Press, "·hich it supplied with most of its local news. It "·as also the year of the \Vorld's Columbian Exposition, and the City Press hired ten more reporters to chronicle the fair's scientific marvels, its architectural splendors, and the writhings of the hootchy-kootchy girls on the i\Iidway. Despite constant urging by editors to bear down heavily when writing on the flimsies, many of the carbon copies were barely legible. These were nevel'theless separated and hurried to the newspaper offices by messenger boys who received 5¢ a sheet for their efforts. When the boys struck for better pay, they were all discharged and deliveries were, for a time, en78

Ch icago Histo ry

trusted to a telegraph messenger service. The problem of getting copy to the newspapers speedily was not solved until 1903, when fourteen miles of pneumatic tubes were installed in Chicago's freight tunnel. The initial cost was .$100,000, and later additions brought the value of the system to an estimated S5,ooo,ooo. l\fany unorthodox items sped through these tubes, according to City News legend, including small sums of money, a felt hat, a white mouse, and a can of roach powder. After 1961, when the tubes were replaced by teletypes, they were sold as scrap metal for exactly one dollar. The flimsies' legibility problem had fortunately been solved much earlier. The typewriter was fr1trod uced well before 1goo, causing almost endies moaning among the reporters who had to learn how to hunt and peck. Under Leckie's and Sayler's stern management, the City Press acquired a reputation for accuracy and attention to detail. Of course, some errors crept into City Press copy, and wme very odd-looking stories resulted. Among them was an account of a three-month-old child who ran olT a sidewalk and under the wheels of a streetcar. There " ·as the husband who shot himself to death and then fired at his wife, killing her also. Then there was the policeman who shot twice at a fleeing robber who was found with five punctures when examined at a hospital. Defending the City Press' record for reliability in 1908, Sayler declared that only eight of ninety-one libel suits filed against the dailies in recent years were based on City Press blunders. But when the newspapers retracted errors, they commonly- when possible-stated that the erroneous material had been supplied by the City Press. City Press stories were not acknowledged as such by the papers, except when retracted, so the public may have assumed that the City Press existed only to make mistakes. Hard times in the late 1800s and early 1900 had trimmed the number of papers in the city and sharpened the City Press' financial woes.

City News

Some observers suspected that one or more of the supporting papers refused adequate funding, fearing that a too-effective organization might overshadow their own staffs. These papers, the observers reasoned, wanted the Press to be good enough to prevent other sheets from getting a scoop, but not good enough to prevent them from getting their o\\Âˇn scoops on occasion. After Leckie dropped out in 1901, the City Press continued to grind out a daily grist of ne,vs while the editors of the dailies, who constituted the City Press' board of directors, continued to bicker. The City Press split in two in 1910, both halves remaining under the same management. The original name was retained for the pneumatic tube system which distributed copy to the pa!)ers while the reporting and writing were handled by the other half, which was given the name City ews Bureau. The Bureau was organized as "a corporation not for profit," which seems a most appropriate status. Both halves, naturally, continued to be called City Press by working newspapermen. After Sayler's death in 1913, ,valter B. Brown, who had started at City Press after serving in the Spanish-American ,var, became the director. Brown worked tirelessly to uphold the organization's reputation for accuracy, completeness-and economy. One former employee recalled that Brown once spent a half hour "trying to show me how I could cover all the stations on the Northwest side for seven cents by a judicious use of transfers." In the early days, reporters were writers as well as news gatherers; the practice of splitting the work between reporters and rewrite men did not begin until well into the twentieth century. Newspapers sometimes printed City News stuff exactly as received but, more often, it was revised or completely rewritten. Editors were sensitive in those clays about identical stories appearing in their own sheets and in their rivals', so it was deemed a tribute to a writer's skill if his story appeared verbatim in 80

Chicago Hi st ory

several papers. If he dared boast, however, some sour-faced City News desk man would certainly opine that the story was so badly garbled that it could not be understood and therefore could not have been rewritten. City News performed a worthwhile public service in Jul y 1915 when the excursion ship Eastland capsized. Brown , who recalled the confusion attending the i<lentification of the victims of the Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903, arranged Lo have most of his staff appointed deputy coroners. The temporary deputies attached numbered tags Lo the eight hundred bodies which lay in sheeted rows in an armory, and prepared lists of descriptions. Anxious citizens on the cene picked out descriptions resembling their relatives, the reporters uncovered the corresponding body anc\, if gasps of heartbreaking recognition followed, the name was sent to the ne\\Âˇspapers. By this method, almost half of the victims were identified by 2 A.M. the next day and only seven lay unclaimed twenty-four hours thereafter. The T1Âˇib1111e commented that such . peedy identification had never before been accomplished. Former City ews men recalling their early clays alway, chrell on the singularly grinding police "beat," unavoidably toilsome because the most unimportant-sounding arrest or death might result in a headline story. Typical was the case of James Thomas Kelly, a Skid Row den izen who died of naLUral causes in 1935. Police searching his effects came up with bank books showing entries of S-17,000. The story of "]\[iser Kelly " made the headlines, and the discovery of other assets bro ugh L his estate to Sqo,ooo. A horde of relatives appeared to claim the wealth of the friendless Miser Kelly and, after much litigation, the probate court split the money among eighteen first cousins. Unfortunately, there was only 36,000 left to clivicle-lawyers, court costs, and the funeral had eaten up the rest. The feeling that another Miser Kelly story might lurk among the insignificant data that

The night city desk at work: on the author's right is Fred Thomas, asst. night city editor; Alex Zelchenko, night radio-TV editor, is on his left.

he had to sifL each day haunLed every City News reporter. There is a similar story-an apocryphal one, ,rithout clippings to back it upabout a sociology professor who went to Skid Row to study whaL made it tick. He stayed there until he died as a bum, and his academic pasl came Lo light only when an odd-shaped metal object was found among his effects. A policeman asked a C.:iLy News man what it was; Lhe reporter recogni,ed it as a Phi Beta Kappa key. The CiLy News reporter operated under a peculiar handicap: if he came across a promising nell's lead, he was under orders to noLify his office al once. Staff men there prompLly senL ouL a bulletin to Lhe dailies, who put their own men to work on the matter. Thus, Lhe City News reporter was likely LO be scooped on a story which he him elf had broken . In practice, few reporters who smelled a good story noised it around; Lhey always kepL it secreL until it could be printed. Thus, the hapless CiLy 1 ews reporter, though theoretically obliged to cooperate with his rivals, happily competed instead. City Ne"Âˇs very early acquired the function of training aspirants for better paying jobs on the dailies. The lure of such posts induced young men suffering from the itch to write to

put up with the scanL pay, the long hours, and the ofLen unreasonable demands made by City News editors. Typical of such unreasonableness was the order purportedly given to a beginner as a trial assignment back in the 1920s when a desperate police search was going on for a killer named Tommy O'Connor. O'Connor had escaped from the old County Jail on the Near North Side while awaiting the gallows for shooting a policeman. "Find Tommy O'Connor," the youth was told by the ediLor. "Interview him. Then call in. l\faybe we can find something else for you to do." Diffidently, the beginner asked how he was to reach O'Connor's hideaway, if by some miracle he learned its whereabouts. "Take a streetcar," was the response. " ' hat about a cab, if speed was required? The answer was negative. Cabs cost too much money. But what if the urgency was desperate? "Run!" he was told. Âˇs uch lads, who arrived as eager adventu re seekers, usually became seasoned reporters withChicago History

City News

in a couple of years. One was Âˇwalter Howey, later one of Hearst's most colorful editors. On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, Howey spotted smoke seeping out of a doorway of the Iroquois Theatre and at once turned in a bulletin. The official fire department alarm was not sounded until several minutes later, according to one account. Howey and Hilding Johnson, another noted reporter who began his career at City News, are generally credited with inspmng newspapermen Ben Hecht and Charles l\IacArthur-yet another ex-City News man-to write their play The Front Page. In their expansive moments, newspaper editors tend to hail City News as "the greatest school of journalism in the world." In moments of reflection, recalling their own terms of servitude, the same editors are likely to mutter words like "s,reatshop" and "slave drivers." City News work had it compensations, though. The dailies had a way of demanding that their reporters cover insipid events merely to satisfy some large advertiser. At many papers, also, the facts were all too often adjusted to suit the political views of the owner, the demands of the advertising department, or the whim of an editor. There was no "office policy" at City News to hamper the reporters. Employees could write the truth, if circumstances or their own limitations permitted them to find it. There were no BOi\f's (Business Office Mu ts) at City News. Penny pinching, like a doleful leitmotif in th e more dismal works of Richard "\Vagncr, runs through the history of City 1ews. The country was in the midst of the Great Depression when Isaac Gershman became manager of the Bureau in 1931. Newspapers folded: first the Evening Post, then the Herald and Examiner. Revenues dropped, and budget balancing became an endless headache. In the late 1930s, however, Chicago's reporters began to join the ewspaper Guild. Although the movement made little headway at the Bureau, its effects were pervasive and, with the approval of the 82

Chicago History

directors, Gershman raised pay scales considerably. One reporter's pay was nearly doubled. Further pay ra ises became possible in 1954, when the Bureau began to supp ly radio and television stations with specially written news over a leased teletype wire. Yet another supplement to the Bureau's income was achieved in 1958, with the installation of a leased wire to tran mit the outpourings of press agents to the various news media. Previously, such offerings had been sent out free via the tubes. The profits from these two sources-the radio-TV wire and the public relations wire-increased when Larry Mulay took over management in 196"1l\fulay also expanded the market for the City News regular news copy to the Chicago office of the New York Tim es and to Tim e and Fortun e magazines. The organization's health and retirement program, initiated by Gershman, was likewise enlarged by Mulay. The City News system of tabulating the city vote long before the official returns were compi led dates back to the 1890s. Its first effort failed badly, even though the City Press had been covering suburban elections for years, but Leckie and Sayler devised a system for counting Chicago's vote which is still a model for America's largest cities. After the polls close at 5 P.M . on Tuesday, 800 part-time employee armed with telephones, pencils, ancl adding machines spring into action with the Bureau's 60 reporters. This reportorial army, which takes up almost a whole floor of the County Building, works at totaling the returns far into "\Veclnesday. Political seers from television, radio, and newspapers flock around for the latest data on which to base their inspired guesses, while specially installed teletypes hurry the returns to the various city desks. The reporters' assignment sheets are always marked with an estimated time of departure, usually 2 A.M. or 5 A.M.; but the names of the Bureau manager and his chief deputies are marked with the significant monosyllable "stays." And stay they do, until the last vote is counted.

A few women reporters have been hired at various times. During World War I, a score were taken on to replace men in the service, and \Norld War II saw a much greater influx of women. Gershman always spoke admiringly of women reporters, particularly of their eagerness to take on any assignment. Mary Faith Wilson, for example, was sent to cover a fire at the Illinois Athletic Club. At the scene, she followed a co uple of hose lines which led upstairs into a room whose door was partly open. Inside were a dozen naked men watching the firemen play their hoses on to a blazing locker section in the swimming pool area. A dozen splashes into the pool followed as the reporter coolly asked the smiling battalion chief about the cause of the fire, the extent of the damage, and so forth. At least one woman reporter hired in the days of World vVar II remains active in newspaper work: Pat Leeds is now a feature writer for the Tribun e. :l \farjorie Minsk Kriz, after resigning from the Bureau and settling down to domesticity, returned after her children grew up. Later she turned to press agentry and is now with the Federal Aviation Agency. A few women reporters were again hired in the 1960s, but legwork at the City News Bureau is largely still a man 's job. City News is perhaps best known for its alumni, some of whom we have already mentioned. Clayton Kirkpatrick, a City ews man during the late 1930s, is chief editor of the Chicago

Fred Gutknecht stamps the time on a story in the City Press' basement tube room, from which copy sped through the 15-mile pneumatic tube system to the city rooms of Chicago's dailies, the Board of Trade, and other subscribers in the downtown area. The cannisters bound for the Tribune building dropped into a basket on the fourth floor.

Tribun e; the Tribun e's city editor, Bernie Judge, was also trained at City ews. The metropolitan editors of the other two Chicago dailie, Robert G. Schultz of the News and Joseph Reilly of the Sun-Times, are both graduates of City News, as are columnists Mike Royko, Jack i\Iabley, and Bob \l\'iedrich. Others have written books, among them Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Harlan \\Tare, Jonathan Latimer, and Herman Kogan , editor of the Sun-Times "Show ." ~faureen Daly, who wrote a best seller before she "Âˇorked at City News, later became an editor of a women's magazine. Former Bureau employees have entered widely difiering professions. At least two have become movie actors: ~Ielvyn Douglas, one-time leading man for Greta Garbo, ancl Lyle Talbot. Two others became clergymen-one i\Iethoclist, the other Episcopalian. Another reached affluence as a manufacturer of children's clothing on the \Vest Coast and still another did well as a maker of contraceptive devices. An ex-Bureau employee became a manager in a machine-tool corporation. One particularly level-headed, relaxed young fellow has received world-wide acclaim as the creator of some of the most bizarre art forms of this decade-Claes Oldenburg. Chicago History

City News

cu it, on ,rhich he made a comfortable living. There has been much speculation among newspapermen that \ Veil learned the rud iments of his confidence game while making out City Press expense accounts. In the early 1900s, the City News Bureau had moved to the Ashland Block but, in 1949, when that historic building was razed to make way for a downtown bus station, it moved again to 188 West Randolph Street. The Associated Press, as in the 1890s, is in the same building. James Pencff, a City News alumnus who rose to the rank of city ecl i tor at the Chicago SunTim es, returned as the Bureau's manager after Larry J\Iulay retired in 1974. Reporters begin at $100 a week, but raises are more frequent than they used to be.

Jack McDonnell, asst. midnight editor, operating the radioTV wire in 路1959, as midnight editor Julius Karpen watches.

Some became politicians. Oscar Hewitt, after leaving the Tribune, was Chicago's commissioner of public "路orks; Jack Redding became an assistant postmaster general; and Frank McCloskey "路as elected mayor of Bloomington, Indiana. Talent of still another sort was evinced by Joseph "Yellow Kid" 路weil, the city's most famous and brilliant con man, whose schemes made nationwide news because of their ingenuity and high rate of payoff. \Veil, who lived to be a hundred and has only recently died, reformed decades ago and entered the lecture cir84

Chicago History

Peneff has broadened the scope of the Bureau's coverage to bring it more in line with newspaper practices. " \ Ve're covering political activities, labor management disputes, consumer problems, and other things formerly deemed too controversial," he declared. A small staff directed by sports editor Phil vVeisman covers high-school football, basketball, and minor sports, as well as a few golf tournaments. An evaluation made four decades ago by Junius B. \Vood, a Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent, still seems valid. Speaking of the Bureau's "efficient mediocrity," he commented, "It does not try to produce marvels of literature. It asks only accuracy and constant vigilance." \Vood later added, "In the eight months before I was fired, I learned more about reporting than in the fifty years that have followed." Others have expressed sim il ar sentiments. Dick Griffin, a financial columnist for the Daily News, said, "For months after I left the City News to join the Daily News in 1958, I wondered when the place would get busy. In time I came to realize that after surviving the City Tews experience I'd seldom feel overwhelmed again. The City News was an incredible pressure cooker, but it was one of the most useful and happiest times of my life."

William Perkins Black: Haymarket Lawyer BY HERMAN KOGAN

Long before the American Civil Liberties Union was formed, there were lawyers capable of sacrificing a lucrative career to defend an unpopular cause. You know of Clarence Darrow- now we give you William Perkins Black, attorney for the Haymarket anarchists.

IN THE LATE SPRil\G of 1886, few lawyers in Chicago had as glowing a future as ,,Villi am Perkins Black. A Civil , var hero who h ad been awarded the Congressional l\Ieclal of Honor " 路hen he was on Iy nineteen , he was alert, articulate, popular, aml a partner in a law firm that numbered among its clients many of the city's burgeoning industrialists and most important businessmen. Then he was paid a visit by three men desperate for his services-and his life and career were fore\'er altered. The three were Dr. Ernst Schmidt, a wellknown physician who had once run for mayor on the Socialist ticket, and two young attorneys, Sigmund Zeisler and l\Ioses Salomon. They had come as members of a legal defense committee organized in behalf of eight men who had been charged with involvement in the explosion of a bomb in Haymarket Square on the night of ~Iay ,1-a horrific tragedy that climaxed the struggle between the striking workers of the i\IcCormick Harvester \Vorks, the company, and the police. The workers-who were striking for the eighthour clay-had held a mass meeting on l\Iay 3. Police fired into the crowd and six str ikers were killed. The next night, at the square at Randolph and Desplaines streets, some two thousand persons gathered to hear speakers denounce the murders. Then a bomb was thrown by an

Herma n Kogan, editor of "Show," the Chicago SunTim es arts and amusements section, adapted this article from his book Th e First Century: Th e Chicago Bar Association IBi-1-197-1 (Rand l\!c;\'ally, 1974). His forthcoming Yesterday's Chicago, co-authored by his son Rick, is scheduled for fall publication by Erne,c A. Seemann Company.

unknown person: seven policemen were killed and almost seventy others in the crowd were injured. In the aftermath, the city was gripped by hysterical fear of the strikers and their leaders, some of v.:hom were seH-acknowledged anarchists. Police Capt. Michael J. Schaack, a zealous foe of agitators a nd unionists, ordered a roundup of anarchists, both acknowledged and suspected, of radicals of every hue, and even of laborites who " 路ere opposed to anarchism but who had campaigned for nearly a decade for such daring impro\'ements as the eight-hour clay and sanitary factory conditions. i\lany innocent Chicagoans were taken from their h omes without warrants and held without bail, and [or clays the stat ion-house cells "路ere jammed, some 路with women and children . Ultimately, eight men ll'ere held without bail for the Criminal Court grand jury. Ancl on i\Iay 27, the eight-Albert R. Parsons, a Confederate army veteran, writer, and leader in the Central Labor Un ion, an aggregation of left-wing unions; August Spies, a fiery editor of a German workers' newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung; British-born Samuel Fielden, an avowed anarchist who had been speaking when the fatal bomb burst; Adolph Fischer, a printer; George Engel, a toymaker; Louis Lingg, a carpenter; Oscar ,v. Neebe, a beer-wagon driver; and l\Iichael Schwab, an editorial assistant on the Arbeiter Zeitung-were indicted as accessories to the murder of policeman l\Iathias J. Degan, for murder by pistol shots, and for general conspiracy to murder. The prevailing atmosphere was incredibly tense. Day after clay, the accused were condemned in the nation 's newspapers . The New Chicago History

William Perkin s Black

Civil War Capt. William Perkins Black in 1862.

York Times called for "death for the cowardly savages"; the Philadelphia Inquirer demanded "a mailed hand" to teach anarchists that the United States was not a "shelter for cutthroats and thieves"; and some of Chicago's editors cried out for a public hanging without trial. Even liberal clergymen joined the mob: "We need a careful definition of what freedom is," intoned David Swing of the Central Church of Chicago. "If it means the license to proclaim the gospel of disorder, to preach destruction and scatter the seeds of anarchy and death, the sooner we exchange the Republic for an ironhanded monarchy the better it will be for all of us!" Charles C. Bonney, a lawyer who had for years criticized industrialists and inveighed frequently against "the greed, the selfishness, the neglect and folly of wealth and power," now maintained that labor was responsible for its own ills, that labor and anarchism were genuine allies, and that the use of the bomb, no matter by whom thrown, was Ii terally "a waiver of trial and a plea of guilty." In such an atmosphere, it seemed next to impossible to secure good legal counsel for the accused. Yet, even while the grand jury was in session, Dr. Schmidt, who deplored the use of force in securing workers' gains but who was convinced that Spies and the others had had no part in ca using the Haymarket tragedy, 86

Chicago History

undertook the task of organizing a legal defense committee. Aware that Salomon, the lawyer for the Chicago Labor Union, and his associate Zeisler were too inexperienced for what was certain to be a complex and difficult trial, Dr. Schmidt first sought to retain Luther Laflin Mills, a former state's attorney of Cook County. Mills swiftly declined. William S. Forrest, highly experienced in the technicalities of criminal law, asked a fee that was far beyond the capacity of the committee, most of whose contributors had given from $1 to 5. ow they were in Black's office to ask that he head the defense team. Black seemed an unlikely choice. A charter member of the Chicago Bar Association and a partner in the firm of Dent and Black, his reputation was in corporate law and he was not versed in criminal law. True, he had lectured from time to time on ihilism and on Socialist movements in America, but Black was not at all sympathetic to anarchism or to violence. Born in Woodward County, Kentucky, on November 11, 1842, Black first studied in downstate Danville to be a Presbyterian minister like his father. With the coming of the Civil War, he and his older brother John enlisted in the 11th Indiana Zouaves. Early in 1862, the two organiLed a company of Illinois volunteers in the 37th Illinois Infantry, popularly known as the Fremom Rifles, and within months they were in fierce combat at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, where " ' illiam, a captain, performed so valiantly that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. John's bravery in a later battle, at Prairie Grove, Arkansas, won him the same medal and a promotion to general. After the war, both men studied law. Early in the 1870s, they came to Chicago, where John ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket. John Black later became a wealthy railroad company attorney and also served as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and as chairman of the U.S.

Attention Workingmen! •-•-•·• · --·•• - - O~:JD.A.T •••••••••••·••·•·•-••

MASS-MEETING TO-~IGHT, at 7.30 o'clock,

HAYMARKET, RandolDh St., Bot. IlBSDlainos andHalstad. Civil Service Commission. ·w i!liam turned Democrat after campaigning for Horace Greeley in 1872. In 1882, he ran for Congress and was defeated by only 2,400 votes. His practice with Dent, an old friend from Danville, was rapidly expanding when Dr. Schmidt visited him. Black was cool to the request but promised to secure an expert in defending men accused of serious crimes. But he was unable to do so. And the longer he tried, the more indignant Black became, and the more he feared that the defendants might go to trial without adequate counsel. So he went to see Circuit Court Judge Murray F . Tuley, a former corporation counsel and alderman who was respected and admired as one of the city's learned jurists. "I've been applied to by the friends of the anarchists to undertake their defense," Black said. "I advised them to try to employ someone who made criminal law their specialty. But they came back a second time and said they were still unable to get any such person to undertake their defense because they had very little money and again pleaded with me to take the case. The amount of money they have offered me is not worthy of consideration, but it is their all-all they can raise. I told them I would consider the matter and give them my decision. You know what undertaking their defense means to me or any la\\'yer of position at the bar." "You have counted the cost?" asked Judge Tuley. "Yes, I think I can foresee the result to me if I undertake their defense. I think I can forsee that he who undertakes the defense of these anarchists will be looked upon with at least great disfavor. It means to some extent social ostracism and, I believe, an almost total sacrifice of my business and possibly of my future prospects. Now, .Judge, what shall I do? What would you do? " To this Judge Tuley replied, "Captain Black, your question is a very serious one, and probably one that you should solve yourself. But as

Good Speakers will be present to denounce the lates t atrocious act of the police. the shooting of our fellow-workmen yesterday afternoon .

Workingmen ArmYourselves and Appear in Full Force! TH E EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.

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...-·wrbcilcr, bc111affntt CiudJ unll crfd)rint mnff rn~aft ! ~Ai <f!;«11ti11,U.01111te. Broadside announcing the fateful meeting at Haymarket Square, May 4, 1886.

you ask my opinion, I shall give it to you. As these men have offered a retainer and that to the extent of their ability, I have no hesitation in saying that your duty to your profession, your duty to yourself, demands that you accept it and undertake their defense. I must say to you that you have rather underestimated than overestimated the cost to yourself. But yet, Captain, it is always expedient to do one's duty." "I do feel," said Black, "that it is my duty to take the case, and your advice has encouraged me to do so." It was a courageous decision. "Captain Black's consent to become the leading counsel in the case," Zeisler wrote years later, "was nothing short of an act of heroism." Because he bel ieved that the charge to the grand jury by John G. Rogers, chief justice of the Criminal Court, had been filled with prejudice, one of Black's first moves was to ask for a change of venue, hoping the case might be assigned to Judge Tuley, whose reputation for impartiality and sou nd judgment was of the highest. But the case wen t, instead, to Judge Joseph E. Gary. Elected to the Superior Court in 1863, Gary had practiced Chicago History

William Perkins Black

"The charge of the police after the explosion of the bomb ," drawn by True Williams for the Graphic News , May 15, 1886.

Judge Joseph E. Gary and chief prosecutor Julius S. Grinnell.

law in Chicago for seven years before that and had been a partner of Tuley's. He was a stickler for puncwality and court decorum. He never permitted a lawyer or litigant to see him in his chambers for any reason, explaining that people were already so suspicious of lawyers and judges that he did not want to stimulate public curiosity and stir more suspicion by transacting judicial matters except in open court. The Chicago Legal News wrote of him: Judge Gary is a very independent, experienced, able, impartial, judicial officer. There is no man on the bench in this country that exceeds him in executive ability. He allows no nonsense in his court. He calls things by their right name, proceeds at once to busiâ&#x20AC;˘ ness. He is not flattered at the praise o[ counsel or frightened at their threats. In fact, he allows neither. He governs his court in a quiet way with a strong hand and a clean head, never descending to wrangling with counsel.

Almost immediately, however, Judge Gary began ruling against the defense. Black's motion to delay the opening of the trial-he believed the defendants would not get a fair hearing so close to the actual event-was denied when Gary ruled that it was the government's prerogati,Âˇe to set the date. The judge also refused to grant separate trials for Spies, Schwab, Fielden, and N eebe, 1 equested by Black because he feared that evidence against any one defendant might be construed as evidence against all eight. The trial, unsurpassed in drama and tension in the city's legal annals, began on July 21, 1886. It took 21 days to pick a jury from among 982 talcsmen, during which Parsons, appalled at

11Âˇhat he considered Judge Gary's prejudice in permitting potential jurors to state that they were opposed to anarchism, passed Zeisler a note that read, "In taking a change of venue from .J uclge Rogers to Lord Jeffries, did not the defendants jump from the frying pan into the fire?" Chief prosecutor Julius S. Grinnell was still basking in the fame of his recent convictions of a ring of thieving Cook County commissioners and of Joseph "Chesterfield Joe" Mackin, a powerful Democratic politician, for vote stealing. Through witnesses and evidence, he sought to connect the defendants to Rudolph Schnaubelt, the man who, though still missing, was generally believed to have hurled the bomb. Grinnell argued that even if Schnaubelt were not the actual bomb thrower, the defendants ,l'ere still guilty of engaging in a conspiracy against established society. At one point, he declared that the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 "was nothing compared with the insidious, infamous plot to ruin our laws and our country secretly and in this cowardly way." 1\ml in his final summation, he cried: 1 say lo you, the law demands now, here, its pow-

er. ... [T]l1:1t Jaw which the exponents of anarchy , iolatccl to kill Lincoln and Garfield, that law that ha~ made us strong today and which you have sworn LO obey, clcmancls of you a punishment o[ these men .... Don't try, gentlemen, to shirk the issues. Law is on trial! Anarchy is on trial! The de[enclants arc on trial (or treason and murder!

Black's defense-in which he was aided not only by Zeisler and Salomon but also by a tough, Chicago History

William Perkins Black surrenders one of the accused, A lbert R. Parsons, to J udge Gary shortly after the opening of the trial. Parsons had been in hiding. Rendering by Paul J. Morand.

tobacco-chewing Iowan, ·w illiam A. Fosterwas based on the lack of specific evidence to prove the charges in the indictment. The men were being tried, he asserted, because they were racl_icals: The defendanLs are nol charged wiLh anarchy, they arc not charged with Socialism. They are not charged with the fan that anarchy or Socialism is dangerous or beneficial to the communiLy. . . . They had Lhe right LO gain com·erts. Lo make anarchists and SocialisLs, but whether Sociali m or anarchy shall ever be established never resLecl with these defendanLs, nc,·er rested in a can of dynamiLe or in a dynamite bomb. It rests with the great m ass of people, with Lhc people of Chicago . of Illinois, of Lhe United SLaLes , o( the world. If they, the people, want anarchy, want Socialism, if they want Democracy or Republicanism Lhey can and they will inaugurate it.

Black's closing summation, in which he challenged virtually every point made by prosecuLion witnesses, ended with: "Gentlemen, the last \\'Ords for these eight lives. They are in your hands, with no power to whom you are answerable but Goel and history, and I say to you in closing only the words of that Divine Socialist, 'As ye would that others should do LO you, do you even so to them.' " 90

Chicago History

In his charge. Judge Gary instructed the jury that the defendants could be adjudged guilty i( the evidence showed that they had agreed LO ovenhrow the law by force and also if policeman Degan had been kill ed " in pursuance of such conspiracy." The jury needed only three hours to decide that seven of the defendants were guilty and one hour more to agree that Neebc was guilty, too. The next morning, all but Neebe, who received fifteen years, were sentenced to death and the date of execution was ~ct for December 3. From that point on, a series of legal steps was taken lo sa'll'e the men from the gallows. Leonard D. Swell, Abraham Lincoln's legal associate, replaced Foster early in 1887, in an unsuccessful appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. Foster, \\'hose lack of sympathy with defendants' ideas was obvious, never really regarded his clients as martyrs, and his actions in the trial were critici1ed by some Chicago radicals. Later that year, Swett also appeared with Gen. Ben Butler in a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, bu1 the high court refused to intervene. Agitation for executive clemency for the condemned men, led by Lyman J. Gage, a prominent banker, over the strenuous opposition of such leading citizens as Marshall Field, Cyrus ~IcCormick, George ~r. Pull.man, and Philip D. Armour, prompted Gov. Richard J. Oglesby to commute Fielden's and Schwab's sentences to life imprisonment.

William Perkins Black

The condemned Haymarket defendants. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper , Nov. 12, 1887.

Chicago History

William Perkins Black

William Perkins Black delivering an oration at the funeral of the four executed anarchists at Waldheim Cemetery. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Nov. 26, 1887, from sketches by Will E. Chapin.

Lingg killed himself by exploding a detonating cap in his mouth, and the remaining four-Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel- were hanged on November 11, 1887, in the Cook County Jail yard. On that day, there appeared on the bulletin board of the Palmer House the notice: "Trap fell. Spies Parsons Fischer & Engel expiate their crime & the law Yindicated." But the Haymarket case refused to die. ,\t first, Judge Gary remained aloof from the continuing controversy, but he was increasingly-and irritably-aware of the growing reaction against the trial's outcome. Agitation persisted for clemency for the surviving defendants. A petition bearing sixty thousand names-including many o( Judge Gary's judicial colleagues-was presented to the state's new governor, John Peter Altgeld, shortly after his election in 1892. Although he had a reputation as a man of liberal views and had been urged to action by his close friend George Schilling, a labor union leader, Altgeld had taken no part in any of the earlier moves on behalf of the anarchists. After his election, Altgeld began to study the voluminous trial record. He was still at it when the April 1893 issue of The Ccnl111)' magazine appeared. In it was an article headed THE CHICAGO ANARCHISTS OF 1886. THE CRIME,

cused them of being insincere men who really had little sympathy with the workers they sought to lead. He reiterated the main points of his decision overruling a motion for a new trial. l Te made several misstatements about what the defendants had said and about events at the i\IcCormick Harvester ·works. And, he attacked not only ·w illiam Perkins Black but even Black's wi[e, Hortensia. After Judge Gary had imposed the death sentence on seven of the defendants, Mrs. Black had written a letter to the Daily News in which she expressed sympathy for the anarchists: I have neYcr known an anarchist, did not even know what the tenn meant, until my husband became counsel for the defense .. . . Like everyone I knew, I felt horror for the tragic events of that eventful night. ... But one clay, one came to speak (or that side which so long had been unheard-the accusedand I found out that, as to everything, there were two sides to this. During all that long trial a kind o( soul crucifixion was imposed upon me. Often, as I took up one or the other o( the daily papers, I would recall reverently those words of my Divine ,\ [aster: "For which of my good works do you stone me?" Anarchy is simply a human effort Lo bring about the millenium. ,vhy do we want to hang men for that, when every pulpit has thundered that the time i, near at hand?

Quoting from the letter, Judge Gary implied that i\Irs. Black and her husband were bound by some kind of spell to the anarchists, that they were unduly fascinated by them, and that the ,rnrds they poke and wrote were motivated not by social consciousness or deep feelings about society but by that peculiar fascination. IIe was e\'en rougher on Black for having declared in his funeral oration for the hanged anarchist at \Valdheim Cemetery:

TIIE TRIAL, AND THE PUNISHMENT. BY THE JUDGE WHO PRESIDED AT THE TRIAL. AND THE LAW IS CO:'\L\ION SENSE.

In a startling, embittered article, .Judge Gary asserted that the anarchists were convicted not for their political creed but (or "horrible deeds." He denounced each of the defendants and ac92

Chicago History

I Joyed these men. I knew them not until I came to know them in the time o( their sore travail and anguish. As month went by and I found in the Jiyes of those with whom I talked the witness of their lo,·e [or the people, o( their patience, gentleness and courage, my heart was taken captive in their cause .... I saw that whatever fault may have

Plaque on the present monument at the grave at Waldheim Cemetery enshrines Gov. Altgeld 's pardon .

Chicago History

William Perkins Black

been in them, these, the people whom they loved and in whose cause they died, may well close the \'Olume, and seal up the record, and gi\'e our lips to the praise o( their heroic deeds, and their sublime sacrifice.

.Judge Gary had privately expressed his indignation over these remarks when they were first made, and now, nearly six years later, he was still outraged. He scoffed at such phrases as "sublime sacrifice" and interpreted Black's reference to the men's "cause" to mean "rebellion, to prosecute which they taught, and instigate murder." The Blacks were guilty not only of fa ll ing under the anarchists ' spell, but also of maudlin sympathy. Commenting on the article, the Tribune decreed, "It is timely." But a youthful Clarence Darrow denounced it in a speech to the Law Club of Chicago while Judge Gary sat stonyfaced in a nearby chair. As for Governor Altgeld, the article spurred him to a decision to pardon Fielden, Nee be, and Schwab. His official document, "Reasons for Pardoning," issued on June 26, 1893, was a direct assault on Judge Gary and the conduct of the trial, from the faulty method of picking the jury to the failure of evidence to prove guilt. J uclge Gary, concluded the governor, had conducted the trial "with malicious ferocity," had ruled ,rithout exception on e,Âˇery contested point in favor of the prosecution, had swayed the jurors by making "insinuating remarks," and had made speeches that were "much more damaging" than any by the prosecution. The article in The Centwy , "Tote ,\ ltgelcl, was "full of venom" because of the attacks on the Blacks. "It is urged," the governor wrote toward the conclusion of the statement, "that such ferocity of subservience is without a parallel in all history, that even Jeffries of England contented himself with hanging his victims and did not stoop to berate them after death." Altgelcl's decision aroused considerable furor. Even such staunch admirers as Darrow and Jane Addams deplored Altgeld's personal attack on 94

Chicago History

Judge Gary, although the governor insisted, "I denounced not Gary the man but Garyism." Even \\' illiam Perkins Black derived scant personal or professional satisfaction from the result. His law partner, Thomas P. Dent, continued to thrive and, in 1895, became president of the Chicago Bar Association and later president of the lllinois State Bar Association and of the Chicago Historical Society. Black's partnership with Dent was, however, at an end. Nearly all of his business clients abandoned him and, for a number of years after the Haymarket case, his annual income, which had been between S10,000 and.$ 15,000 shrank by two-thirds. His association with Parsons and the other defendants had radicali7ecl him somewhat. He spoke before various labor groups and especially at meetings memoriali,ing those \l"ho came to be called the "Haymarket martyrs. " On the other hand, he retained an interest in con\'entional politics, ,ealously campaigning for \\'illiam Jennings Bryan in his se,Âˇeral presidential bids and running unsuccessfully for the office of Circuit Court judge, once on the Democratic ticket and later on the United Silver ticket. \\Tith passage of years, the animosity toward Black that had prevailed during and immediately after the Haymarket hysteria dimmed. "He did what he considered his duty,'' "-rote one editorialist, "as dauntlessly as he did " Âˇhen a soldier. " He even managed to rebuild a reasonably successful law practice. By the time he died on January 3, 191G, in the Fulton Stre~t home o( his adopted son, \ Villiam P. E. Black, he was a long-forgotten figure , his death meriting only a twenty-t,rn-line newspaper obituary. Yet even that brief notice could not avoid mentioning his most memorable act as a lawyer of strong convictions and his basic belief in every man's right to fair and equal trial before the law. "He assumed the work of defending the anarchists in the famous Haymarket riot, men charged with murder. And he did so at a time when considerable moral courage was necessary to do such a thing."

Chicago's Bicentennial Photographer: Charles D. Mosher BY LARRY A. VISKOCHIL

C. D. -Jvfosher promoted his city and himself without fear o{ a conflict ~f interests and left us with a marvelous hundred-year-old gallery of photographs of prominent Chicagoans. cmlledcle<l in the wall of City Hall was not to be opened until 1117G. Engraved on the metal doots of the vault wa, the imcription:

·1J11•: SA i 1•.

187(:i-1976 l\femorial Safety Vault, c.ontaining photographs of promin en t 111e11 a nd women, with memoir, and stati~tics. Deed ed to the City of Chicago as an offering for the seco nd centennial, 1976.

On August 12, 1908, howeve1, sixty-eight years before the nation's Bicc1Hennial, those vault doors stood open. City Hall was to be rated, and the time capsule was being moved. The sa(e's contents comisted primarily of more than thirty-five packages carefully encased in pow<lc1 ed charcoal to protect them from the light and ai1 of a futu1e Chicago. Five albums wc1c impe( tccl briefly and Jound to contain elaborately bound photographic albums, but the I est were left alone by 01der of Commissionc1 of Public \V01ks John J. Hanberg, who wa, in charge of the city\ p10pc1 t y. I I is decision was not popular among the cut ious spectators who had gatheicd and who wc1c delighted and impressed with thei1 view of faces from Chicago's past. As Commissione1 Ifanbc1g noted: I he1c arc no men in Chicago now with faces like those. I ,uppose the dri, i11g life we lead prevents it. In these pie.lures there is a sm t of simple courtliness which is rare now, although I do not think we arc an> the lc,s polite in ou1 intentions than were ou1 fathers. J>c1haps the difle1c11ce is that 1hey had time to be courteous and we sometimes think we have not. And, if you notice, nearly every face is pleasant, humorous almost, a nd kindly.

Larry A. Viskochil, reference librarian of the Chicago Hi torical Society, recently added a bachelor of arts in photography to his varied academ ic accomplishments.

AlmosL ten thousand cabi ncL phoLographs or Lhcse cou1 tl y faces had been scaled in the vault, a gifL to Chicago of the photographer, Charles Delevan J\foshcr. By the Lime of his death in 189i, Mosher had become, and st111 is, Lhis city's mosL famous porLraiL phoLOgrapher. C. D. Mosher was born on a farm in New York Stale on February 10, 1829. Ilis parents were relatively well-to-do by local sLandards. /\L six1cen, much to bis father's disappoinLmenL, Chailes D. Mosher left the farm to apprentice himself to a cabineLmakcr in Albany, New York. Four years later, he wrned to photography. This new profession had been c-rcaLecl only Len years earl icr, in 183!), when Frenchman Louis D,tguerre publicly revealed his discoveries for preserving camera-made images. The news or his invention spread quickly to the UniLed SLaLes and, within a year, America's first "dagucneOLype ga ll ery" was opened in New York City. By 1849, techniques and equipment had improved to the point where many cities had at lcasL one photographer who cou ld supply citi7ens with inexpensive portraits. athaniel Smith, C. D. Moshcr's uncle, was one of Lhese new photographic entrepreneurs. Smith hacl learned the art from Mead and Brothers of Albany, 1 cw York, and, as a pioneer daguerreoLyper, had traveled the hinterlands wiLh his portable stud io. He Look three " ·eeks to introduce Mosher Lo the mysteries of photography and then took himself off to Illinois, leaving what remained of his business to his nephew. l\fosher's investment-about $100 for a trunkful of equipment-was to be repaid in ninety days. Confident but cautious, Mosher took his gear to a neighboring small town where, he felt, "none could distinguish me from a first class operator for I had been given to unChicago History

C. D. Mosher

Masher's first studio , on the top floor of 142 (now 120 W.) Lake St., ca. 1869. From Chicago and Its Makers.

derstand that pictures of the kind had never been produced there." His first crude attempts were gratefully and uncritically received. In less time than he thought possible, Mosher repaid his debts and returned in triumph to his doubting parents. During the next decade, J\fosher took his portable studio to an ever-increasing number of small towns in western New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. Iosher married Sarah J. Marsh of DeKalb, Illinois, in 1855, but the sense of financial security that allowed him to begin a family was soon put to the test. Unfortunate specu lations in 1856 and 1857 drastically reduced his fortunes, and he was still struggling when, in 1863, he moved his family to Chicago-a stranger in a strange place. l\Iosher's small-town reputation had not, to his dismay, preceded him, and the proprietors of established Chicago photographic galleries had not heard of him. The city's leading photographers-Alexander Hesler, Samuel Fassett, John Carbutt, Henry Rocher, and others-had already earned their reputations ancl a loyal clientele. Nevertheless, J\fosher immediately opened a gallery at 1 42 (now 120 \Vest) Lake Street, and his business grew as steadily as the demand for photographic portraits. At this time, the carte-de-visi le was the most popular kind of photograph. The process involved the making of eight or twelve different exposures on a single glass plate and produced a negative from which any number of duplicate positives could be made. Named for their sizethe same as a calling card-each paper print was pasted onto a card measuring about 4 by 2Â˝ inches. Customers eagerly purchased these miniature portraits and exchanged them with their friends. By 1866, however, the public's desire for the tiny portraits was fast slackening, and portrait photographers were hoping for an innovation that would breathe life back into the business. They found it in the cabinet photograph, a new format which was first introduced in London in

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C. D. MOSHER, 30 Washington St., CBJ:CAGO ..

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Broadside advertising the various services offered at Masher 's second studio , 30 (now 2 W.} Washington St. , shortly before the Great Chicago Fire.

Chicago History

The Inter-State Industrial Building, site of the annual Inter-State Industrial Exposition, in 1873.

1866. The new size, 4Â˝ by 6Â˝ inches, presented portrait photographers with new opportunities-they could pose subjects differently, use lighting more creatively, and vary the backgrounds and props. The cabinet size allowed them to make full-length pictures of women in their hoop-skirted dresses; even groups could be photographed in one sitting. But the advantages of the new technique were not unalloyed. Imperfections were more visible in the larger cabinet photos. l\1osher's gallery employed "artists"-members of the new profession of retouching-to eliminate these flaws. Such "improvements" cost both the studios and their customers more money; furthermore, the studios required totally new equipment and supplies. The timing of the investment could not have been worse. The Great Chicago Fire swept over the city in 1871, destroying everything in its path, including the new gallery Iosher had opened the previous year at 30 (now 2 'West) " 'ashington Street. Mosher moved some of his equipment to the lakefront, but even that " Âˇas soon destroyed by the spreading flames. His credit was still good, however, and he was able to secure a bank loan of S5,ooo. While the city was being rebuilt, he opened a new gallery at 951 (now 2106 South) "\i\Tabash Avenue. The rebuilding of Chicago also brought new competition to the city. Thirty-eight photographers are listed in the city's 1872 directory. The profession's leaders had formed the Chicago Photographers Association, as a forum for ideas and to advance their interests, and the newspapers followed the organization's activities and reported its debates on such topics as "Art as Applied to Photography." Members of the Asso98

Chicago History

c1at10n included, along with Mosher, such nationally known figures as Hesler, Fassett, Rocher, Thomas and Alexander Copelin, Edwin Brand, and Alfred Hall. Chicago's photographers tested their reputations in national competition at the Inter-State Industrial Exposition in 1873. This Exposition, held annually in Chicago until 1891, was housed in a large exhibition hall near the Art Institute's pre ent site. The 1873 catalogs listed photographic exhibits in the art section between engravings and wax flowers: one noted that Masher's display "occupied a prominent position among the many exhibitors in the photographic line, and attracted much attention. !\Jany of the pictures were excellently well executed, and all elegantly mounted and framed. The specimens of work exhibited bespeaks for this artist more than a passing mention." Still, photography was by no means universally conceded to be "art" and even some members of the Chicago Photographers ,\ssociation ridiculed the idea. Mosher himself had no doubts and, in his advertising, he forcefully spelled out the word for all to see. In 1876, the Centennial Exposition, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, opened in Philadelphia. Inspired partly by patriotism and partly by thoughts of profit, l\Iosher had begun a year earlier to assemble a collection of cabinet photographs of Chicago's prominent citizens. His memorial consisted of 500 portraits of lawyers, judges, editors, clergymen, doctors, merchants, bankers, manufacturers, government officials, and "old settlers"-those who had come to Chi-

C. D. Mosher

cago before 1840. He mounted them in albums and prepared biographical sketches Lo accompany them. With the encouragement of Illinois Gov. John L. Beveridge, Mosher displayed his collection in the Art Building of the Exposition. The advertising, he felt, would well be worth his investment of time, labor, and money-over $2,000. He was right. He won the top award for excellence in art photography. Upon his return, Mosher began to print his medal of honor on the back of his cabinet cards. His adjustable skylight was also well-advertised. One or more sets of glass roof arrangements had been used earlier by other photographers; Mosher's "improved skylight," however, compensated for many of the problems caused by the shifting sunlight and was enthusiastically adopted by gallery owners both here and abroad. His imaginative advertisements also called attention to his new cameras and lenses imported from England's famous Dallmeyer optical works. In acldi tion to the standard portrait, he offered wedding and baby pictures. The value of keepsake photographs of those who had passed on was heavily stressed. Mosher photographed the dying and the dead and, in the event that the corpse was already buried, suggested that photographs of the funeral wreath be substituted. He also pointed out that the Mosher gallery employed more than seven "artists" capable of producing portraits in oils, crayon, india ink, pastels, or water colors copied from or, more commonly, actually applied onto the photographs. In 1877, Mosher moved his studio to the top floor of 125 (now 5 North) State Street. The building had an elevator, a luxury few of his competitors could offer, and it made good advertising copy. l\Iosher spared little expense on his new studio's appointments. Adorning the hall outside the gallery was an elaborately framed set of portraits of all of Chicago's mayors. Each of the

twenty-four portraits was a three-quarter lifesize head from photographs made or copied by Mosher and drawn in crayon by his artists. Most of the photographs had been obtained without great difficulty, but finding the images of some of the earlier executives proved a formidable task. The set, when complete, was unique. Ever the promoter, Mosher offered to sell it to the city for $700, if the portraits would hang in City Hall. Mayor Carter H. Harrison contributed 200, and the city supplied the remaining S500. In a letter to Mosher, Harrison wrote: There are many visitors to City Hall to see the crayon portraits .. .. The mayors whom I had the pleasure of knowing arc most excellent likenesses, those who knew them all say, they are truly a work of art and show chat you have kept in the lead of your profession which has been making rapid strides.

l\fo her advertised the letter, adding that his "specialty is making crayon portraits of mayors for other cities as well as portraits of county and state officials." Those portraits hung in their large gilt frame in City Hall for years; eventually a set was given to the Chicago Historical Society. The project still lives at City Hall, however: metal-plate copies of l\Iosher's portraits, along with portraits of suceedi ng mayors, grace the hall out ide l\fayor Richard J. Daley's office. Housing the five hundred photographs Mosher had taken for the nation's Centennial was a more difficult problem. Âˇwith the memory of the Great Chicago Fire still fresh in his mind, he sought a storage place safe from the clangers of handling and exposure to the elements. Surely, he felt, future Chicagoans should have the opportunity to see what their ancestors looked like. l\Iosher then came up Âˇwith a master plan: the photographs would be placed in a vault-a memorial offering from l\Iosher to his city and to the world-and kept safe until the nation's Bicentennial celebration in 1976. In an interview with a reporter for the Chicago Inter Ocean, Mosher enthusiastically stated: Chicago Hi story

C. D. Mosher

These plans were heartily approved by some of our leading citizens whom I consulted, and they promised to aid me in this enterprise. I felt a pride in Chicago's greatness, and desired to complete the historical collection by adding to it photographs of leading men in all branches of trade and giving short outlines of their lives and the business done by them. The city officials whom I consulted told me that these memorials could be kept with the city records in the new City Hall. You will see how Chicago can by this plan be well represented in 1976. About eight hundred have already responded to my invitation.

Mosher devised an elaborate program to solicit patrons. The very prominent were either written to personally or sent an engraved certificate requesting that they sit for a portrait. Mosher's invitation promised a "second coming" for each dignitary when the memorial was opened in 1976, and the famous and nearfamous eagerly flocked to his State Street studio to have their images preserved for posterity. Those not approached personally were reminded of the importance of the venture in countless newspaper stories. Mosher was quick to point out, however, that the most prominent were not the only ones welcome in his gallery; a reporter who protested that he was not important enough for the memorial was assured by Mosher that his very modesty was enough to make him eligible (or inclusion. Membership in this select fraternity was free, although Mosher estimated that the memorial wou ld cost him more than 525,000. "There never has been one person importuned, who has had a memorial photograph taken, to purchase a dozen or even one; on the contrary every person has been presented with a cabinet memorial portrait of themselves, as a little token of remembrance of the memorial without charges," he declared. It would be hard to believe that Mosher actuailly lost money on the proposition, however. The thousands who visited his gallery to sit for their memorial portraits, while not charged, were surely not refused if they wanted to buy 100

Chicago Hist ory

copies for themselves or their families. The press coverage of his venture was also a unique advertisement. And, as the famous responded to his calls, Mosher printed their names in a series of catalogs for public distribution . Each catalog contained a price list. Although i\Iosher may not have been as great a philanthropist as he Jed people to believe, he was nevertheless a public-spirited citiLen. As public interest in his memorial photographs grew, it became obvious to him that the photographs, once placed in a vault, would no longer be available for public view. He therefore proposed to make a duplicate set for public display. And he further proposed that the duplicates be housed within a great complex or public buildings to be created in "that barren park fronting east on Michigan Avenue between Washington and Randolph Streets." In the catalogs and in letters to newspaper editors, Mosher spelled out his plans in great detail. The memorial home, to be financed by a stock subscription, would "outdo the grand memorial hall at the centennial not only in its architectural elegance and design but in the heaven honored purpose for which it was dedicated and sustained for it will be the pride of the great orthwest." It would provide space, in one central location , for virtually al] of the city's social, cultural, and charitable institutions- the Chicago Historical Society, the Academy of Design in Fine Arts, museums of science and industry and natural history, a public library, and a grand opera house of America. In a flier printed by Mosher and addressed to the Fathers and Mothers of Chicago, he described a midnight cable-car ride he had taken with his family through the city's "famous district of sin." The car soon filled with young men on their way to and from the "gilded halls" and "school houses of sin and misery." Mosher pressed his point: I ask every fat11er and mother in Chicago to reflect well upon the situation ... and ask yoursel[ if it is

not your imperative duty and sacred obligation that you owe your children to build this [emorial Home, this school of intellectual culture, which will improve the morals of society (and counteract these evil influences) and dedicate the Home with all its attending blessings it may bring to your children, wh ere brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, can go and breathe the pure atmosphere o[ good society, and all enjoy life with its pleasures together.

Mosher's memorial photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Gurdon S. Hubbard in the 1870s. The two " old settlers" are posed in traditional fashion , the husband seated and the wife standing slightly back.

The plan was endorsed by national and state political figures, religious and business leaders, judges, and many others whose names made good newspaper copy. Mosher was very aware of the power of the press. When, for example, he held a reception for Chicago's Apollo Commandery of the Knights Templars, to present them with albums of memorial photographs, he simultaneously held a reception for the Chicago Press Club in the next room. The dual event was reported in detail in the city's newspapers. Masher's reputation, which continued to grow as news of his memorial projects spread beyond Illinois, was further enhanced by the nation's leaders. President Abraham Lincoln had sat for him. General Ulysses S. Grant often visited his Chicago studio, as had generals William T. Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan and other Civil War leaders. Mosher had also provided James A. Garfield with photographs for his presidential campaigns. The nation's famous and near-famous began to stop at Masher's studio while in Chicago, and he was particularly effective in attracting the leaders of reform groups. Over the years, he repeatedly photographed the founders of the fledgling women's movement-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances 'Willard, Susan B. Anthony, and others-and he made it easy for their followers to order copies. Each portrait was named and numbered in one of the catalogs describing his memorial offering. On May 18, 1889, Mosher deposited about eight thousand photographs-with the promise of another two thousand within two monthsChicago History

101

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TO CHICAGO, FOR THE CENTENNIAL, 1976.

fj;,l,i{J COJIPLJJIEKTARY INVITA nq.v ancZ CERT/FICA TE

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I am engageti in Cl)mplelin c: a seric~ or Historical Alhum•, of Representative Men and \\"omen, which

are to. be cla ss,ticJ, amt .will coutaiu, w ith th,• likeness , a hrie f history of e:toh pe rson ' s life, th e ir auto• graph and oc.: u patio11. 11·hen co111µ:eterl, I am to deed th e m to t he Otty of Chicago , togeth e r with other HLluable statist ics or interest, wbictJ are to be presc n·c,l 111 " ~l e mnri:LI Safe , in the i,: re.,t \'ault, witll the city archive~, in the Court House, with spec i,Ll rclereoce, for lllcir historical iuformauou, until the second Cc11tcn11ia.l, and afte r . A r PcorJ will be ke pt of el"cry person's coutrih 11 1ion, with their auto1?r,1pb and occupation, au<l placed in , he Hi•tori cal Society fur future r e feren ce, as the ~temorinl Safe is to be opened only once in every quRrter of " ceutury, from the 4th of July, lbrn, "itb ap11rupriate and imro,iug eeremonie~. The Photographs will be pli1ced in the art gallery, together w1tll u11y cuntrioutlons th a t may t.,e given Rt the seco11,t Centennial. Prizes from ume to time wi:J be award ed by compe tent, jurors for the rarest gems in )Jechanlsm, Literature, Music and .I.rt, and will be preserved a.s" souveuir•" of talent.

Tg,s r r M O- N UU. . $. 'l'hc ff,lli11ciny u,,uu'cl !lt ntl ,uc:,l /,ure e11d0Hcd cwd d.., J,~arfU!J up prov.-• < f the Offa i113: l l.J:-.1m1; JI!' 11'11, ~la1·or, :--. !II, CUJ,!.0\1, nu,crrior. J OII I•• 111.\"~;HJIJ(,V 1;1•,0.: H: II. II lltl,ll\\. \I'll.BL!. 1-'.:--.'IIH(\" t:1-... 1'1111,IP fl., ,n:1: I P .A:-", H U.\' . D.l \'l,> ll\ \ ' l . .u ux J1111:-,; A, 1.o u .1:-.

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LEO.\'AhD \\'f,TT, ·,u1·t,.\I,,, 'Kil:J:SO ~ . T. W. IIAl{\'hY, l'O'fTI-:! l'Al,lll-:1! , Joli. U, DltA. ,

la:\'. !WBl.l-1 t"Ol,1,Yl-.lt, .S. 'I', U.l. ::-1.T'l 10,;v, JI. n . 'rHO\lAS, A:-.DIU.W .·uu I, :,.. J• r y J:•••1 , ct_foll!J l "c,ura,

Ple<1se presen:e this in your Album

for future lleference.

ArUstic l'hotographer to Postority, 125 ::irATE S-r., Chicago.

Kotered according to Act or Congre~s by C. D. Mo~hcr In the oflice of the Librarian or Cuogrt'sS, at Wasllington.

LE G A L .., t ,...S P l'l N T

A formal invitation to participate in Mosher's Memorial Offering to the Bicentennial. Highly decorated , it contains a photograph of his Centennial medal, a list of endorsers, and the promise that the photograph will be safely preserved at the Historical Society.

102

Chicago History

C. D. Mosher

in the new vault in City Hall. The city's only contribution was a marble framework for the vault in the wall near the La Salle Street entrance. Newspapers and periodicals of major American and European cities, statistical data, lectures, sermons, family records, reminiscences, and other materials were also deposited. Many of the photos were accompanied by an autograph and biographical sketch. In 1976, the deed stipulated, the vault was to be opened by a committee of three appointed by the mayor; until then, it was to remain sealed. His memorial thus safeguarded, Mosher felt free to pursue other interests. In 1890, he sold his State Street gallery to Alfred Brisbois, a photographer from Leadville, Colorado, and settled down to a financially secure retirement. Actually, his was more of a semi-retirement. fosher continued to see and photograph the famous persons who had sat for him earlier; now, however, they came to his home at 6455 South Ingleside Avenue on the South Side, which he named Clara Villa a[ter his second wife. He also continued to be active in civic affairs. His wife Clara shared many o[ his interests and involved him in hers. Clara Villa was the locale for receptions for the Young Âˇwoman's Christian Temperance Union and other reformers. They shared an involvement in politics: she published poetry espousing Republican solutions to "Disease, Democracy, and Hard Times" and he issued broadsides promoting the Republicans' tariff position, as well as plans [or civic improvement. Mosher felt an almost religious duty to participate in the life of the city. He was a frequent writer o[ letters to the editor, proposing and commenting on any number o[ pet schemes. City planning was of great interest to him, especially the problems of urban transportation. He urged that the '\'oriel's Columbian Exposition o[ 1893 be planned as a permanent landmark that could ~erve the city in a fashion similar to his now-forgotten grand memorial home.

GOV[R/YH[I/T BICYGU WI/UL [LtVAT[D !l[GTR/l RAILROAD 1/IAT WILL Rlllf /00 11llt5 Alf

HOUR AHO GA/f lfOT 8[ T/IROW/f

The "bicycle wheel elevated electric railroad," Masher's answer to Chicago 's transportation problem. Mosher called for joint city and federal financing to replace the sale of franchises to private companies . From his Chicago as an Object Lesson.

Chicago History

103

The Chicago Historical Society in 1911. A framed set of Masher's portraits of the mayors of Chicago hangs on the rear wall of the gallery.

Before Chicago could become a great ciLy, Josher fell, it had Lo improve iL sewerage sysLem and clean up its 11·aterways. His grand plan included a ship canal from Lake Calumet around the city to Lake Michigan. Railroads would run into Lhe city on elevated Lracks so a Lo noL obstruct sLreeL Lraffic. The Chicago River could be drained and iLs bed arched over in brick. SLores and offices could be builL on top of Lhis brick platform, and Lhe railroads could run into the city unclerneaL11 on the old riverbed. Sewage that had once empLied into the river could be deposited into railroad cars and taken Lo Lhe prairies, where it would be baled and sold to farmers. Mosher's dreams and schemes finally came to an encl on June 7, 1897, when he died in a lunchroom al 61 (now 18 ·west) \Vashington Street, in the shadow of his old studio. He 11·as buried in Oak ·w oods Cemetery, mourned by his 11·ife Clara and his sons C. \V. ;\fosher, a former bank president of Lincoln , l\ebraska; and Edwin l\Iosher, a St. Louis stockbroker. The memorial picLUres were moved to the new City Hall when it was completed in 1911, placed in a large trunk, and again stored in the 104

Chicago History

office o[ the commissioner of public works. In 1915, after an unauthori1ecl opening by a curious clerk, the trunk was sent Lo the Municipal Reference Library, in the same building, for safekeeping. Later thaL year, the City Council resolved thaL, since the photographs were "of no use or value while in the vault" o[ City Hall, Lhey were dispatched to the Chicago Historical Society. Thus, Mosher's plans to lock away his memorial photographs unLil Lhe BicenLennial were Lhwanecl. His other dream, however-Lo have a set of his porLraits available for public usewas parLially realized when Lhe SocieLy made his ponraiLs aYailable to sLUdents o[ his city's history. Such limited availability was not, however, whaL Mosher had intended. He had stipulated Lhat every twenty-five years, from July 4, 1876, on, a "quarterly memorial reunion" be held in memory of Lhe citizens whose likenesses he had recorded. The occasion was forgotten in 1901 but, in response to public demand, the Society displayed them in 1926, the nation's Sesquicentennial. And now, the Bicentennial year, they are being shown again. fosher himseH looked ahead: "After this exhibition," he told an Inter Ocean reporter in 1879, "they will be replaced in the memorial safe until the third centennial in 2076, then to be exhibited as before."

Mr. Wrigley's Cubs BY PAUL M. ANGLE

Don)t think he)s not interested- Philip K. Wrigley) an executive who has tried everything but night baseballis still in there pitching. so MANY of his other responsibilities, the Chicago Cubs were Philip K. Wrigley's inheritance from his father. When William Wrigley, Jr., died, he provided that his estate should go to his widow, his son, and various other legatees- with one exception: his stock in the Chicago National League Ball Club was bequeathed to Philip. The reason, in all probability, lay in the fact that all through the 1920s the younger Wrigley had been buying Cub stock on his own account as it came on the market. And why? Years later, he explained: "My father was very much interested in the team, and so was I. The club appealed to me because the customers of the Cubs were exactly the same people that we sold most of our chewing gum to." Phil Wrigley took over a successful, smoothly functioning baseball organization. In 1931, the Cubs, under Rogers Hornsby as manager, had finished in third place. William L. Veeck, the club president, enjoyed the full confidence of the owner and his son. As soon as William \Vrigley, Jr., died, sports writers besieged Phil Wrigley. All asked the same question: "What changes are you going to make?" To all he gave the same answer: 'Tm not making any changes. Things will go along exactly the same." I( \'\'rigley had been endowed with foresight, he would have qualified his answer. In midseason of 1932, his first year as owner, he reLIKE

The late Paul ;\!. Angle was director of the Chicago Historical Society and Illinois State Historian. On a l'an ely of S11bjecls , a collection of his writings published as a tribute to him, unfortunately did not include any of his sports writing. This article, excerpted from Philip K. Wrigley: A Memoir of a Modest Man (Rand l\fcNally, 1975), repairs the omission.

ceived a telephone call late at night from Veeck in Philadelphia, where the Cubs were then playing. "We've absolutely reached the limit as far as Hornsby is concerned," Veeck told him. "He has no patience with the younger players, and they resent it. I recommend that we make a change: put Hornsby out and put Charlie Grimm in as manager. The players have confidence in him, and I think we can pull the team together and win a pennant." Âˇw rigley answered: "Bill, you're on the job. You know what you're doing, and I'll back you up." Veeck's forecast was right. Under Grimm, the Cubs went on to win the National League pennant but lost to the Yankees in the Âˇworld Series. As soon as the news broke that Jolly Cholly was replacing Hornsby, the sports writers went after \'\Trigley. They asked i( he knew about this and i( he approved. Wrigley answered, "Mr. Veeck is running the ball club, and I have the utmost confidence in him." And, as he puts it, "because I kept referring them to Mr. Veeck, they turned around and said: 'We've talked to the owner, and he has no interest in the ball club. He's leaving it all up to Mr. Veeck, and he doesn't care who they have for manager. He inherited his interest and control anyhow.' " To this day Wrigley believes that this episode was the origin of the widespread belief that he has no real interest in the Cubs, an allegation that he has been trying to combat for more than forty years with Ii ttle success. As a matter of fact, from the beginning Wrigley has taken a far more active part in the management of the team than outsiders realize. No player trade has ever been made without h is knowledge and approval, and that statement stands for the year 1974. Of his role in this crucial phase of the baseball operation, he says: Chicago Hi sto ry

105

Cubs

I don't pass on it [a trade] on my knowledge of the ball player any more than I do on a legal matter with the Wrigley Company. But I know my people. I know their shortcomings and their strong points. When the question of a trade comes up, I talk to them about it. I listen to what they say, and iE I can see that they are unduly influenced by something that I don't think should be in the picture, I will say no, that trade is off. That happens very seldom. I don't go out and watch this fellow and keep score on him. \\'e have scouts that do that. All I have to do is gather all the information together from all these different sources and then decide whether they agree enough on the guy's good points or bad points, whether they have done a fair job of evaluating him. If l feel that they have done a good job, I'll tell them to go ahead.

William L. Veeck, president of the Cubs and father of the White Sox' present owner. Chicago Daily News photo, 1932, gift of Field Enterprises.

106

Chicago History

A few months later, to a reponer for the Chicago Daily News, he explained the reasons for his interest in the Cubs. In the first place, he himself was a fan. Because of other re pon ibilities, he could not go to the park every afternoon as his father had, but that did not mean he lacked interest. In the second place, he was deeply involved sentimentally. "The club and the park stand as memorials to my father, and they _represent the sincere and unselfish idea ls that actuated him in all his public contacts," he said. "J want to keep those memorials in the family because they are not trifling testimonial . I will never dispose of my holdings in the club as long as the chewing gum business remains profitable enough for me to retain them." In that same year, "'rigley confirmed his father's commitment to the broadcasting of games. Radio had come to stay. He was convinced that it was beneficial in Chicago and Los Angeles, where he owned the minor-league Angels, but each club owner should be allowed to do as he chose. Characteristically he said, "I do not care to have others tell me how to conduct my business, nor do I wish to meddle in theirs." He did believe, however, that clubs might make more advantageous arrangements for broadcasting and derive some advertising benefit from it. Late in 1933, " ' illiam L. Veeck, Sr., died very suddenly. In his place, Wrigley installed Wil-

liam M. Walker, one of the former owners of the Cubs. Under his presidency, the team simply fell apart, dropping from first place to third in the National League; players, manager, and owner were all unhappy. Wrigley's dissatisfaction was largely the result of frustration. Every time he had suggested an innovation-reduced admission prices for children, for example-he was told that it couldn't be clone. But he was convinced, as he put it, that "baseball can't stand still and watch the parade pass its windows. v\Te've got to merchandise our stuff, just like the gum business." So at the end of the season, Wrigley asked for, and received, Walker's resignation because, owning 63 percent of the stock and controlling most of the remainder, he could do what he pleased with the presidency. Then he bought Walker's interest, paying $150 a share for 1,274 shares. Reluctantly Wrigley took over the presidency. "God knows, I don't want the job," he said. "If I could find another Bill Veeck [senior], I'd put him in there in a minute, but he doesn't seem to be available. No matter who's in there, if anything goes wrong, I'm going to get blamed for it, so I might as well take the job myself." He has held it ever since. Soon afterward, the new president decided to admit children for half price. This was a policy which all the other owners in the league adamantly opposed, so Wrigley decided to go it alone. "This half-price thing," he told James T. Gallagher of the Chicago American, " is designed to help those parents who want to take their children to a ball game and don't feel like paying $1.10 for a grandstand seat. I think they will come, and bring their boys and girls, if offered a reasonable rate for the youngsters." Even if they came in numbers, it would mean no financial advantage for the Cubs, who had to pay visiting teams a fiat rate on the number of admis ions rather than a percentage of receipts. One innovation \,Vrigley rejected. For several years, the International and Pacifiic Coast leagues had been playing baseball under lights.

In 1934, at the request of Larry l\fcPhail, owner of the last-place Cincinnati Reds, the ational League voted to permit each team to play seven night games at home each season. Wrigley supported McPhail. To Jim Gallagher, his favorite sports writer, he said, "I don't believe in interfering with another man's right to operate his own business as he sees fit, so I voted for the resolution." But there would be no night baseball at v\Trigley Field, no matter how successful the experiment proved to be elsewhere. "I firmly believe that baseball is primarily a clay time sport, valuable largely because it brings people out into the air and sunlight. I think we can do many things to increase attendance at \ 1\Trigley Field before resorting to night baseball." Perhaps this is as good a place as any to note a fact not generally known: seven years later Wrigley changed his mind and ordered lights installed at Wrigley Field. The year was 1941, and the defense industry was humming night and day. In President Roosevelt's opinion, factory workers needed relaxation. Among other things, he suggested an increase in night baseball so that workers on day shifts would have an opportunity to see more games. vVrigley responded by ordering the necessary equipment. By December 1, it was all assembled and ready for instaliation. On Sunday, December 7, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The next clay the Cub management offered everythingtowers, lights, cables-to the U.S. government, which immediately accepted the offer. So the lights which were to bring night baseball to Wrigley Field ended up floodlighting a freight yard or two or perhaps a factory turning out munitions. In 1938, vVrigley embarked upon one of his most famous innovations. He had worried about rookie pitchers throwing balls in batting practice to the team's heaviest hitters, who wanted above all else to drive the ball back through the box as hard as they could. vVrigley thought there must be a better way Chicago History

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A moment in the 1932 World Series: Cubs vs . Yankees, the Cubs at bat, the stands and bleachers packed with loyal customers. Chicago Daily News photo , gift of Field Enterprises.

108

Chicago History

to train young ballplayers. Someone told h im about a professor at the University of Illinois, Dr. Coleman Roberts Griffith, who was reputed to have achieved remarkable results through tests applied to the university football squad. Wrigley asked Griffith: "Can't we take an established ballplayer and in some way measure his skills, his reactions, reflexes, or what have you so that we can chart them? Then if we find a young player with the same skills and reflexes, we will know that he has the raw material and with training and practice has a good chance of being a first-rate ball player." Griffith thought it would be very simple: he was successfully using the same procedures with the football team. ,vrigley persuaded Griffith and an assistant to accompany the team to Santa Catalina Island for spring training. The testing team ran into trouble at once. The older players treated them as if they were typhoid carriers. The sports writers had a circus: it was fun to write about GabbJ Hartnett undergoing tests with a ball on the end of a string. But the professor stuck through the season although, as ,vrigley remembers, by October he was a wreck. Perhaps the crowning blow came near the encl of the season when the psychologists picked a team from the youngsters with whom they had been working all summer, while the scouts chose a team of their own. The scouts' team clobbered the one selected by the psychologists. Perhaps the classic comment on the experiment came from Gabby Hartnett. Stan Hack, the Cubs ' heaviest slugger, was mired in a hitting slump. For weeks the psychologists studied his every movement only to report that they could come to no conclusion. Soon after their report, \\'rigley encoumerecl Hartnett at the park. "About Stan Hack," ,vrigley said, "I can't figure out what's happened LO him." "I know what's the matter with him," Hartnett replied. "You clo?"' Wrigley asked.

"Sure. He ain't hittin '." Perhaps the most spectacular event in the history of the Cubs in the 1930s was the purchase of the great Cardinal pitcher, Diay Dean. At St. Louis, Dean had turned out to be one of the game's greatest pitchers. In 6 years with the Cardinals, he had won 133 games and lost 75, but 1937 had been his poorest season. In the All-Star Game that year, he had broken a toe and had had to change his stance and delivery. As a result he developed, so he thought, a sore arm, but the club physician diagnosed the trouble as bursitis. For the last several weeks of the season, he sat on the bench. Even so, he turned in a record of thirteen wins and ten losses for the year-not bad, but far below his previous performances. In the spring of 1938, Wrigley called a Cub conference at his office on Catalina. Present were Charlie Grimm, Gabby Hartnett, three coaches, and Clarence Rowland, former manager of the Chicago White Sox and now on the Cub staff. The group agreed that Dean was the pitcher the team needed. Rowland approached Branch Rickey, the Cardinal vice-president in charge of trades. Rickey agreed that a deal could be made if the price was right. But Rickey, a Christian gentleman, stressed the fact that the Cardinal organization didn't know any more about Dean's arm than could be read in the newspapers. R ickey added that so far this year, 1938, Dean hadn't been able to put anything on the ball. Regardless, Rickey wanted a high price for Dean: $200,000 and several promising players. The two men agreed generally, but not on specific terms. In the middle of April, Rickey told Rowland: ''I'll make a deal under one condition. You get Mr. Âˇwrigley on the telephone ancl read to him an agreement which I will dictate to you. If he gives you authority to sign it for the Chicago club, I will sign it for the St. Louis club, and the deal will be made." Ri.ckey dictated: "Each club to this agreement knows all the conditions of players Dean, Chicago History

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Davis, and Shoun [Cub players that Rickey wanted], assumes all the risks and hazards of recovery of the players concerned." Wrigley agreed. Even today, almost forty years later, the financial details of the transaction are in dispute. At the time, the newspapers reported a payment by the Cubs of between S185 ,000 and $200,000 plus t\lÂˇo players, Curt Davis and Clyde Shoun. Phil Âˇwrigley remembers the sum as $150,000. vVhatever the amount, it was a handsome price in 1938. To Bill Veeck, [Jr.,] the Dizzy Dean episode was "easily the weirdest deal I have ever run across in my long and checkered career." Dean's arm was gone, and everyone knew it. But the Dean deal did work out. He pitched infrequently, but he ended the season with a record of seven wins and one loss. And on the clays he pitched, the management had to put on extra ticket sellers and extra ushers. That year the Cubs paid a dividend. But it was not a happy year for Wrigley. In midseason he released Charlie Grimm as manager and gave the job to Gabby Hartnett, Cub catcher. \Vrigley had a warm feeling for Grimm (and still does), but he concluded that the team lacked spirit and the will to win and that a change at the top was imperative. To Chicago Herald-American sports writer Warren Brown, he explained: "The main reason patrons go to ball games is to see baseball played with spirit and with hustle. They like to see their own team win, naturally. But they will accept defeat with better grace if they leave the park conscious that their team has given its darnde t. \\'hen they see that lack of spirit and don't-give-a-darn attitude, they have a right to be sore. When I see it, as I have seen it, I have a right to make changes." The change worked, at least for the rest of the season. The team snapped out of the doldrums and won the National League pennant. But the Cubs lost the World Series to the New York Yankees in four straight games. 110

Chi cago Hist ory

Two poor seasons followed 1938. In 1939, the Cubs finished fourth and lost the city series to the White Sox. To Irving Vaughan of the Chicago Tri/Jun e, Wrigley disclosed his dissatisfaction with Hartnett. The manager's aloofness disturbed him. "I would like to have a manager," he said, "who would work with me at least to the extent that if he thought he needed help he would ask for it." Wrigley was al~o unhappy about trades made by the club. "They say we need a farm club," he told Vaughan. "That's what we have now. A lot of our players have gone elsewhere and done surprisingly well." Nevertheless, he calmed down and renewed Hartnett's contract for another year. There was trouble, too, with Dizzy Dean. In 1939, the old star, drawing a salary of $20,000 a year, had won six games. But he had made no comeback. On that point even he had no illusions. For some time, the club physician had been giving him injections to ease the pain in his right shoulder. One day, after Dean warmed up before a game, the doctor asked him, "Feel anything in the arm, Diz?" "No," Dean replied, "but the ball ain't cloin' nothin' either." Even so, he wanted more money. He knew that he was finished as a pitcher, but in his elemental shrewdness, he also knew that he brought customers by the thousands into vVrigley Field. This, to Phil Wrigley, was no longer enough. "From now on," he told Warren Brown, "all that I, and I am sure that all the fans, want to know is whether he can pitch .. . . \Ve expect him to be a pitcher from now on and not a side-show attraction." So Dean received a contract for 1940 at a much lower salary, pitched in only ten games with an earned-run average of 5.17, and, for all practical purposes, ended his major league career. The 1 940 season dragged to a dismal close. For the first time in fifteen years, the club finished in the second division. For the sixth time in ten years, it lost money. At the end of the season, Wrigley said: "When a team doesn't

Two of the zaniest characters ever to don the Cubs' uniform: Dizzy Dean, left, and Lou Novikoff, the Mad Russian.

click, the manager benches a few players and tries some others. Now we'll bench a few executives." "\,Vrigley knew that he would have to find a manager to replace Gabby Hartnett. Three times he had tried promoting players to the top job: Rogers Hornsby, Charlie Grimm, and Gabby Hartnett. 1one had worked out, although Grimm had done far better than the others. Now Wrigley would go outside the Cub organ iLation. He decided he had found his man in Jimmy Wilson of the Cincinnati Reels. While Wilson considered the offer, Wrigley made another change at the top. Since the death of William L. Veeck, Sr., no general manager had ever quite met Wrigley's expectations. The incumbent, Boots Weber, wanted to retire, and the owner was willing to have him do so as soon as a replacement could be found. He turned to a sports writer, James T. Gallagher of the Chicago Herald-A 111crica11. Wrigley has never had a very high opinion of newspapermen, and Gallagher had on occasion been a sharp critic. But "\Vrigley knew him to be both honest and capable. Gallagher accepted the position. And so the Cubs, with a new general manager and a new field manager, faced the war years, imminent though still in the future. They would be years of ragged baseball, but they would also be years of innovations, abysmal failure, and triumph. The Cubs were the first in the major leagues to install an organ in the ball park. The first notes startled the fans on April 26, 19..p, when R oy Nelson at the console played a pregame program of "classical and sou Hui compositions."

The year 1941 also saw the Cubs bow to the demands of their faltering hitters and block off the center-field bleachers. The players contended that they could not hit because the white shirts of the center-field fans kept them from seeing the ball. Gallagher didn't believe it. He admitted that the players were sincere but considered them the victims of seH-hypnosis. On .July 1, after the Cubs had lost eight of their last ten home games and had made only eight earned runs in seventy-eight innings, Gallagher decided to find out the truth. He assembled a crew of experts who finally recommended that the center-field bleachers be blocked off and the empty seats be painted seal brown. Wrigley accepted the verdict, although it meant a considerable loss of revenue. Ironically, on the second clay the area was roped off, the Cubs drew an overflow crowd and much grumbl ing from fans who had to stand while looking at hundreds of empty seats. But above all else, 1g..p was the year of the l\fad Russian. In the minor leagues, Lou Novikoff had been another Babe Ruth, hitting anything he could reach with his bat. He was an inept fielder, but if he cou ld only hit in "\Vrigley Field, the Cubs were willing to overlook a few errors in the outfield. It soon became apparent, however, that Novikoff was missing more balls than even a lenient manager could put up ,rith. The l\Iad Ru ssian seemed to have a mortal fear of the vine-covered walls of "\Vrigley Field and would let a long fly drop to the With a "this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you" look Philip K. Wrigley, left, informs manager Gabby Hartnett that 1940 was his last season with the team.

Cubs

ground rather than go near it. Charlie Grimm, Cub coach, tried to convince him that the vines were not goldenrod, which could lead to hay feyer, or poison ivy, but the Russ ian still kept his distance. As much trouble for him as flies were ground balls, which rolled between his legs as i[ he were only a phantom. 'Worst of all, the :\Iad Russian simply could not hit in 'Wrigley Field or in any other major league park. Phil ,vrigley has an explanation for his failure. In the minor leagues, ovikoff was notorious as a bad-ball hitter. He didn't care whether the ball was over the plate or not as long as he could reach it. But when he came to the Cubs, he thought he had to decide whether the pitch was a ball or a strike, an act of judgment of Âˇwhich he was incapable. As a result, he was tak ing more and more strikes with his bat on his shoulder. \ Vrigley came up with a solution: a bonus of 5 every time he struck out swinging, but nothing on a called third strike. To a degree it worked, and Novikoff's average went up. But there were some weird results. Charlie Grimm recalls one incident. Novi koff came to bat with two outs and the bases loaded. With two strikes, he swung at a ball a foot above his head-and missed. Grimm walked over to the crestfallen Russian and said, "You must be awful short of dough!" Before the end of the season, the Cubs sent Novikoff back to the minors. The 19.p season turned out to be an indifferent one, or worse, for the Cubs. Attendance rose only a little-from 536,443 in 1940 to 545, 159 in 1941. And the team finished in sixth place, the second time it had ended up in the second division in sixteen years. The foll owi ng year saw no improvement. 194 2 was a bad year for the Cubs. Again they finished in sixth place and barely drew six hundred thousand paid admissions. But the season had not lacked color, for Novikoff was back on the club roster, and Novikoff was the darling of the fa ns a nd the favorite of the sports writers. 112

Ch icago History

Part o[ 1ov ikoff's appeal came from his wellpubliciLecl eccentricities. The clock did not concern him. H he were told to report to the field at 9: 30 A.M. for spec ial batting practice, he might be there-or he might not show up until noon. Reprimands and fines meant nothing to him. He had a good tenor voice and loved to sing. Even at a hint of an invitation, he would break out his harmonica, which he played quite competently. He bolted beer and food in huge quantities. Bob Elson , the sportscaster, had dinner at Lou's home when ovikoff was hitting under .200. Elson saw his host eat thirteen plates of chicken. When E lson remarked that he had never seen such an appetite, Novikoff snorted: "Humph! You should see me eat when I'm hittin'!'' During the season, ovikoff pulled his average up to .300, which was below his and the fans' expectations, but was sufficiently high to keep him in the lineup. For the Cubs, 1943 started out dismally. By midseason the team stood in the second division, and all signs indicated that a season auendance of five hundred thousand was the most that could be hoped for. At this stage, Stanley Frank, in an article in the Saturday Evening Post (September 11, 1943), undertook to describe and analyze the Cubs' troubles. He began with the team's proud background. Between 1929 and 1938, the Cubs not only won four pennants but were also the financial mainstay o[ the National League. In 1927 and through 1931, lhey played to more than one million fans each year. Now they were fortunate when they drew six hundred thousand. The Cubs' slump, Frank maintained, could be traced to , ,vrigley's inability to find a man who could replace \ Villiam L. Veeck, Sr., who died in 1933, as general manager. 1 either William M. Âˇw alker, who succeeded Veeck, nor Boots Weber quite filled the bill. In 1940, when the Cubs slipped into the second division for the first time in fifteen years, Jim Gallagher came in as general manager and Jimmy Wi lson

as field manager. This move-"Trigley's ownthe critics blamed for the Cubs' predicament. According to Frank, Gallagher presented the pennant to Brooklyn in 1911 by trading Billy Herman, the best second baseman in the league, for Charlie Gilbert and Johnny Hudson and $12,500. either Gilbert nor Hudson finished the season. Frank wrote: The trade's regard for the ability of the James boys [Gallagher and Wilson] is, frankly, not too high. Insiders claim Gallagher is not too adroit in the delicate matter o[ juggling talent and temperament; opponents point to his three-year tenure as proof that a big league team cannot be run on an inflexible budget. Wilson was considered the best "second man ," or coach, in the business, but the players say he lacks patience with young men and tends to panic in a jam. They suspect that the five black years he spent with the Phillies ruined him as a winning manager .... The honeymoon is over for the Cubs. The happy days, when fifteen-game pitchers received $20,000 a year and good, but not great, infielders got S17,500. are gone. Such benevolence ended with the Gallagher appointment. The Cubs no longer are the plutocrats of the profession; they are paid on the same scale observed by all teams but the perennial weak sisters. Gallagher has been blasted for adhering to the budget too slavishly, but he has clone an out• standing job of creating a farm sy tern, something the Cubs never had, and which made it necessary to spend huge sums for good players.

Frank may or may not have been right as far as Gallagher was concerned, but he called the turn on Jimmy Wilson. In 194.J, a[ter a victory on opening day, the Cubs lost nine straight games. On May 1, ·w ilson resigned. On May 7, the Cubs announced that Charlie Grimm would take 'Wilson's place. May 8, hi fir t day, was cold and raw, but 20,108 Cans welcomed him back to Chicago. The Pittsburgh Pirates, however, refused to cooperate and took the double-header played on that day. About Grimm, Phil ·w rigley said: "I never had anybody else in mind for the job. I always regretted that we let him go in 1938. A[ter all, he was the best manager this club ha ever had ."

With Jolly Cholly in charge again, the fans began to fill more o[ the empty seats in ,vrigley Field. In fact, their attendance " ·as at times phenomenal. On a June clay in 19.1.J, with the team in last place, --.1.0,222 Cans pa ssed through the turns ti !es. " Thy? Sporting News came up with an ans\\·er: There is overwhelming evidence that i\Ir. \\'rigley's foresight in demanding neatness. comfort, and beauty as an essential (and profitable) adjunct of baseball entertainment has proven a grand success. The success will be even more apparent when those responsible are able to again assemble a winning team in the National League .... Perhaps there have been those who haYe scofled at Mr. Wrigley's vine-covered outfield wall, his terraced bleachers with the Chinese elms. Perhaps some have wondered that the largest pre-war bu)er of ach·ertising signboards has no signboards in his ball park. Perhaps others have thought him foolish for throwing out hundreds of chairs to install wider and more comfortable ones. ;\fr. "\Vrigley is not in the paint business, but he uses hundreds of gallons for his ball parks. Help is scarce, but the Cub prexy manages to find enough employees LO maintain the "\Vrigley Field rest rooms at a sanitary peak.

By the end o[ the 19.14 season, Grimm had managed to put together a good team by prevailing standards, finishing in fourth place and very nearly breaking even in games won and lost. The Cubs had played to 6.10,110 customers on their home grounds-Car below the high marks of the plush years but a gain of 132,000 over 1943. The Cubs made plans for a new season. First of all, they finally gave up on Lou Novikoff who, since 19.p, had been the subject of more words on sports pages than all other baseball players combined. On February 21, after all other major league teams had waived on him , he was shipped to Los .-\ngeles. To this day, Charlie Grimm has a soft spot in his heart for the eccentric Russian, who died in 1970. "He was a terrific showman," Grimm said recently. " People wanted to see a ball go through his legs, and he led every minor league that he played in, Chicago History

113

In 1940, the Cubs finished in second division for the first time in 15 years, but the season had its moments. Here, Brooklyn Dodger Joe Gallagher tries to finish off Cub Claude Passeau after beaning him with a pitched ball. As Stan Hack goes to Passeau's aid, manager Gabby Hartnett, center left, leads additional men to the rescue.

but unfortunately he was just one of those guys that could never do a job in the major leagues. He was a very erratic fielder-defensively he was a bad ball player, but he put on a show for you. The fans loved it." Superficially the war years of the Cubs may have belonged to Lou 1ovikoff, but the man who deserved the accolades was Charlie Grimm. In the i945 season, the St. Louis Cardinals, who had won the National League pennant in 1944, 114

Chicago History

started as favorites. Gallagher believed, and said, that the Cubs could take first place. The early weeks of the season seemed to belie his prophecy, but by mid-July the Cubs were out in front, and it was apparent that if they could maintain the pace they could win. It was then, by some kind of necromancy and .$92,000 of Phil Âˇw rigley's money, that Gallagher managed to acquire Hank Borowy, a fine pitcher, from the New York Yankees. Borowy won eleven straight games and literally pitched the Cubs to a pennant. If Gallagher had been at fault in the Billy Herman trade, he more than made up for the lapse with the Borowy deal. Of almost equal importance was the fact that the Cubs ended the year with a paid attendance of 1,036,386 .

Cubs

Once rnore Lhe Cubs set out to win the \\' oriel Series, a feaL Lhey had not accomplished since 1908, when Frank Chance 's team had turned Lhe Lrick. Their opponenLs would be the DeLroiL Tigers. But everyone knew that neither Leam could play firsL-class baseball and LhaL Lhe resulL would probably depend on which team made the fewer errors and bonehead plays. Perhaps Lhe series was besl charaneri,ed, in advance, by a remark recorded by \,Varren Brown in his book Tfl(, Chicago Cubs. -when an AssociaLed Press reporter asked a Chicago sporLs w1 iLer which Leam he tltoughL would win, Lhe Chicagoan replied, "J don'L Lhink eiLher one o( L11em can win iL." Also according Lo Brown- and perhaps Lhis is all LhaL need be said: IL [the 19.15 series] went the full se,en games before the Tigers t0ok the odd c.ontest and became the world's champions. Long bdore that point was reached, even the players themselves had given up trying to figure out what might happen next. Fly balls were dropping beside fielders who made no effort to catch 1hem. Players were tumbling going around the bases. The baseball was as far remol'ed

Opposing managers of the 1935 World Series teams : Charlie Grimm of the Cubs and Mickey Cochrane of the Detroit Tigers. Grimm also led the Cubs to National League pennants in 1932 and 1945. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

from previous major league sta ndanls as was pos sible without its perpetrators ha,ing themselves arrested for obtaining money under false pretenses.

Paid aLLendance for Lhe series was ,333,157 , Lhe largesL ever. TickeL sales of $1,19:1 ,.151 and .$100,000 for radio righLs yielded a record gross revenue. When Lhe firsl game began in Briggs Stadium, DeLroiL, \Vrigley was not Lhere. He had sLayed in Chicago Lo do whaL he could LO sLraigl1Len oul Lhe LickeL mess caused by scalpers. One resulL was a paid advenisement in Chicago newspapers: WE'RE BURNED UP, TOO, CUil !ÂˇANS, AllOUT >CALPING OF WORLD SERIES TICKETS.

The Cubs went to a Jot of Lroublc and extra expense to engage outside office space and a large force of bank tellers and clerks to try and do an extra good job of distributing evenly and fairly the comparatively limited supply of \Vorld Series tickets , the sale of which , because the proceeds go into a special account of the Commissioner of Baseball, have to balance out to the penny; to say nothing of settling up with Uncle Sam for the exact tax 011 the printed price of each ticket. H owevcr, once the tickets are i11 the hands of the public, there is notl1ing- to prevent individuals from selling their scats at a neat profit through scalpers. Unfortunately, there arc always a few people who prefer a quick profit to anything cbc. \Ve all know this to be true, but as we said to start wi1h- wc still do not like it. CHICAGO NATIONAL LEAGUE BALL CLUll

Perhaps we should end wiLh a brief reference Lo a subjecL o( perennial illleresL to Cub Lins and criLics. Shonly arter Lhe end of Lhe 1915 seaÂˇon, Lhe New York Yankees announced that the) would inslall lights in 19-16. Thal would leave only Wrigley Field, Boston's Fenll'ay Park, and DeLroit's Briggs Stadium without equipmenl for night baseball. "\Ve believe Lhal baseball is a daytime sport," Phil Wrigley LOkl Lhe Chicago Tribune, "and will continue to play it in the sunshine as long as we can." He also intimated that the Cubs might end up as the only club wiLhout a lighting planl. He was right. Chicago History

115

Fifty Yea rs Ago

The Norshore Theatre at 1673 W. Howard St., a Balaban & Katz theater that came under control of Famous Players-Lasky on June 5.

As recorded by newspapers in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society

1926 June 4. Samuel Insull and Britton I. Budd host 200 guests on a trial run over the North Shore Line's new suburban route, which opens to the public tomorrow. The train, which will serve Libertyville and Mundelein, hits speeds exceeding 63 miles per hour. "There is no reason why chemical reactions among genes that take an undesirable turn should not be altered and corrected by other means," Prof. Herbert .Jennings of Johns Hopkins University tells a Chicago audience. Heredity, Jennings believes, is still the most important factor in determining individual behavior, but he expresses the hope that science will one day be able to alter the genes of a hereditary criminal and make him into an honest man. Smiling Cook County Sheriff Peter M. Hoffman wasn't happy about going to jail on June 12. This, and all following "50 Years Ago" pix, a Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

.June 5. Famous Players-Lasky Corporation purchases a majority interest in Balaban & Katz. The combined operation will include over 500 movie theaters across the country and several film-production companies. June 12. Cook County Sheriff Peter l\I. Hoffman enters Du Page County Jail to begin a onemonth sentence for contempt of court incurred during an investigation of special favors granted to bootleggers Terry Druggan and Frankie Lake during their stay at Cook County Jail. The U.S. Supreme Court recently turned down Hoffman 's request for a new trial.

.June 15. Chicago's bricklayers receive a 12 ½¢ an hour raise to $ 1.62 ½¢ an hour under a new contract through 1929. The bricklayers, who had previously seuled with the builders at their old wage rate, receive the pay hike to bring their wages in line with increases won by other building trade unions. June 17. The Board of Local Improvements finally begins work on Chicago's antiquated sewer S)'.Stem. Board Pres. John J. Sloan reports that 50 percent of the city needs new sewers and that the situation is extremely acute in the Loop, Streeterville, and Lincoln Park. Plans call for twenty projects costing over $10,000,000.

••

June 19. Prohibition agents find illicit alcohol stufTecl inside hundreds of froLen dressed hogs headed for Chicago from a combination slaughterhouse-still near Aurora. Officials estimate that $72,000 worth of alcohol has been shipped from the plant weekly. .June 20. The 28th International Eucharistic Congress opens at midnight. During the clay, each church in the Chicago archdiocese offers 15 sermons-a total of 6,000--and over a million persons receive communion.

One of the many meetings at Soldier Field during the 28th International Eucharistic Congress, which opened on June 20 .

50 Years Ago

June 22. Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil is sentenced lo five years in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, for dealing in bonds and postage stamps stolen in the Rondout train robbery. The Kid is allowed to choose Leavenworth over Atlanta because of his hay fever. The Chicago Cubs sell pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander to the St. Louis Cardinals for the $4,000 waiver price. Alexander was put on indefinite suspension last week for reporting to the ball park "out of condition" on six out of ten clays. Cubs' manager Joe l\IcCarthy said at the time, "Any player may drink and get away with it if he is winning ... . But no player can drink and get away with it if he isn't winning." June 23. The 17th annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People begins at the Bethesda Baptist Church on the South Side. Pres. Moorfield Storey, calling for unity among the nation's Negroes, states, "'\Ve ask no charity, no privilege, only the rights of American citizens." As for politics, Storey declares, "For Negroes in America, there are no Democrats and no Republicans. There are only friends and opponents."

June 24. The Eucharistic Congress closes with the largest gathering of Catholic worshippers in history-possibly a half-million-al l\fundelein. Meetings in Soldier Field during the week also attracted huge crowds. June 30. Circuit Court Judge 0. 1\f. Torrison rules that Chicago gas consumers are entitled to a .510,000,000 refund of an illegal rate hike by the Peoples Gas Light and Coke Company from 19u to 1917. Lengthy appeals are expected, however, and Chicagoans may never receive the money. July 3. Almost 16,000 fans brave the rain in Comiskey Park lo watch Sammy l\Ianclell of Rockford capture the world's lightweight championship from Rocky Kansas in Chicago's first legal boxing match in lwemy-five years. July 4. The city's sesq uicenlenn ial tribute, "The Birth of Chicago," opens at Soldier Field before 40,000 spectators. The pageant depicts the lives of the area's Indians to the time of the fall of Fort Dearborn. Several hundred Indians are laking part in the weeklong performance. State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe agrees to permit parimutuel betting on the horse races at '\Vashington Park in suburban Homewood after ignoring a court order and arresting five clerks for selling betting slips at yesterday's opening. Crowe claims that only bookmaking, or "pral" betting, is legal in Cook County.

Sammy Mandell, left, and Rocky Kansas square off at Comiskey Park on July 3, in Chicago's first legal boxing match in 25 years.

The Elks memorial headquarters, dedicated on July 14. Photo by E. L. Fowler.

July 5. Protesting his innocence but bowing to public pressure, \,Vill Colvin, supervisor of paroles and pardons for the state department of public welfare, resigns. Colvin has been ac• cusecl of selling pardons by grand juries in Cook and Will counties. July 10. l\fartin J. Durkin is found guilty of the murder of federal agent Edwin Shanahan and sentenced to 35 years in prison. The subject of a nationwide manhunt last year, he could have received the death penalty. .July 14. The Benevolent Protective Order of Elks dedicates its war memorial headquarters at Diversey Pkwy. and Lake View Ave. The domed building cost S3,ooo,ooo. .July 21. Radio station WCFL, owned and oper· atecl by the Chicago Federation of Labor, pre• mieres with two hour of music. The station will use performers furnished by the Chicago Federation of Musicians and Actors' Equity. July 26. Samuel Insull tells a U.S. Senate com· mittee meeting in Chicago that he donated · 158,735 to Frank L. Smith 's senatorial primary campaign. Smith is head of the state

commerce comm1ss1on, which fixes utility rates and grants permits to build or extend transportation lines . .July 29. Indictments by a special grand jury, impaneled on June 5 to investigate vote fraud, beer running, and other related crime in Chicago, now total 158. l\Iost stem from ballot• box stuffing in the 20th \\Tard during the April primary. Al Capone, who surrendered to government authorities yesterday, is released from Cook County Jail because three grand juries have refused to indict him for the Apr. 27 murder of Asst. State's Attorney ·w illiam H. McSwig· gen. Anthony McSwiggen, the father of the slain prosecutor, watches Capone walk out and bitterly remarks, "They pi nned a medal on him and turned him loose." .July 31. Wheat prices at the Board of Trade jump 15¢ in 10 minutes as frenzied brokers seek to fulfill their July contracts. l\Iany had adopted short positions in hopes that large ·shipments of grain this month would drive prices clown. Chicago History

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50 Years Ago

Aug. 3. Morris Markowitz, a contractor who refused to have his men join the Machinery, Safe Movers and Riggers Union, is murdered before several witnesses at a W. 37th St. construction site. Police are seeking Roy Tagney, the union's business agent, in this first laborrelated murder in Chicago in two years. Aug. 5. The U.S. Senate commiuee investigating campaign spending in Chicago adjourns after disclosing that more than $935,000 was spent in Cook County's April primary for senatorial and local offices. Samuel Insull and State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe are among those facing contempt citations for failure to answer all questions. Aug. 8. Movies in Chicago this week include Son of the Sheik, with Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Banky; So This is Paris, with

Jiddu Krishnamurti and Dr. Annie Besant in Chicago. The young guru took a dim view of American youth on Aug. 28.

Monte Blue and Patsy Ruth Miller; The Battling Butler, with Buster Keaton; and Pals First, with Lloyd Hughes and Delores Del Rio. On stage are Sophie Tucker and Ted Lewis in LeMaire's Affairs, .Joe Laurie, Jr., in If l Was Rich, and James Rennie in Th e Great Gatsby. Elisabeth Rethberg performs in Andrea Chenier, LaBoheme, and Lohengrin at Ravinia. Conducting this week's operas are Gennaro Papi and Louis Hasselmans. Aug. 16. Julius Rosenwald donates $3,000,000 to establish an industrial museum in .Jackson Park's Fine Arts Building, currently undergoing renovation. The museum will be designed after the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which features a working miniature coal mine. Aug. 20. "The automobile moron is Chicago's deadliest criminal," declares Chief of Police Morgan A. Collins after several more attacks on young girls and women are reported. "Street corner flirtations are dangerous. If an automobile driver stops and asks you to ride ... pay no attention, or you are in clanger of being kidnapped," warns Collins. Aug. 23. Chicagoans pay tribute in many ways to Rudolph Valentino, who died today in New York City at age 31. Felicia Sorel, who appeared with Valentino in one of his first films, refuses to dance at a local theater, saying "Valentino might not even remembered my name, but I will always remember him. " The t:horus at one Loop show interrupts its rehearsal to face east for two minutes. Aug. 28 . .Jiddu Krishnamurti, considered by some a "messenger of divinity," arrives in Chicago with his eighty-year-old discoverer, Dr. Annie Besant, to speak at the annual convention of the American Theosophical Society. Of American youth, the young Hindu says, "Girls and boys are . . . merely contented with jazz, with clothes, with money, with an automobile." F.J.N.

Books Adlai six WEEKS after publication, John Bartlow Martin's Adlai Stevenson of Illinois appeared on the New York Times list of best sellers. Since Stevenson died July 14, 1965, a dozen books about him have been published, in addition to six of eight planned volumes of Stevenson's papers edited by historian Walter Johnson. None has had the popularity of the first volume of Martin's biography, which takes the Stevenson story from his beginnings in Bloomington, Illinois, through his defeat for the presidency in 1952. It is an alternate selection of the Book of the Month Club. It went into a third printing after 38,000 copies were distributed to book stores. By the time the second volume, already written, covering Stevenson's final thirteen years is published next year, some kind of record for a book of this type may be set. Even Professor Johnson's scholarly volumes of the Stevenson papers have proved more popular than similar tomes concerning many men who did not become president. Volume I sold six thousand copies, the others a respectable three thousand. Sales of two thousand are normal for such books. The Stevenson papers are not dry and dull. Stevenson was a prolific writer and virtually a compulsive letter and note writer. In many communications, he poured o~t his innermost thoughts. His biographers have a rich lode to mine; today's readers can get inside Stevenson, they can compare him with today's crop of candidates. This may be what's behind the obvious interest in a man who was the twice-defeated Democratic candidate for the presidency. Americans usually forget their losers; something different is going on here. Were it not for .the erroneous Chicago Tribune headline in 1948, which keeps popping up in the news, who would remember Thomas E. Dewey or that he also was a two-time loser? How much paper, print, and binding-not to mention scholarshiphave been devoted to Dewey, who came closer to the presidency than Stevenson? Dewey wrote a book on the two-party system in 1966, but there is not one book in print about him. True, Stevenson did perform in the public arena until his death. President Kennedy and President Johnson appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. If they had accepted his policies, the course of recent history might have been changed. The assignment was a thankless one, and Stevenson was contemplating resigning when death struck him clown on a London street. (Richard J. \Valton's The Remnants of Power is an eyewitness account of the UN clays. Greater detail, particularly

Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, by John Bartlow Martin, Doubleday, 1976, 15; The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson: Toward a New America, 1955-1957, Volume VI, ed. Walter Johnson, Little, Brown, 1976, 20.

the documentation of Stevenson's effort, with UN Sec. Gen. U Thant, to effect a settlement in Vietnam, will be in subsequent volumes of the papers.) At the moment at least, it seems to Martin and Johnson, both of whom were associated with Stevenson's presidential campaigns, and to his son, Sen. Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois, that the interest in Ste~enson is not so much in his last frustrating years as m the decade of the 1950s, when he tried to change the direction and tone of American politics. Those years are recalled with nostalgia and wistfulness by those who remember them, even many who voted against Stevenson. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now possible to perceive that a lot of what was co~sidered political rhetoric in those clays (good rhetoric, for Stevenson was a great worclsmith) turned out to be more than that. He spoke from conviction, not from a study of public opinion polls, a~d he let the political chips fall where they may. His program of reforms in domestic and foreign policies, given in unambiguous detail, have since been largely adopted by both parties and by nations overseas. Three quick examples of this: cletente with the Soviet Union; the ban on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, now universally acknowledged as imperative for the environment but then considered radical; and the replacement of the draft with a professional, volunteer army. A draft might not have been needed if Stevenson had been elected pr:sident _or even if President Kennedy had appointed him secretary of state and listened to him; there probably would have been no armed intervention in Vietnam. _ "People are interested in one of the first-rate polit1c_al lea~ers of our time," says l\lartin. "They are disappointed and distressed by our more recent political experience and political leaders." But are the books creating the interest or are they, especially l\lartin's, benefiting from a growing interest in Stevenson? Stevenson's son believes the sales of the books reflect some change in public opinion. He says: In _the last two _or three years, I ha,路e been sensing a renved rnterest 111 my father and more expressions of respect for him as I mo,路e around. People are displaying old Ste,路enson buttons, like the silver shoe with a hole in it. This all goes back before the publication of Marlin's book. I assume all this has much to do with the grossness that overtook our politics in the years that followed him. My father did not recede as much as one might expect, qwte the contrary. It's a phenomenon such as is working in the case of Harry Truman. I have not found this interest among the young, in the universities at least. They are too young to ha,路e experienced this. But Johnson, who was chairman of the Department of Hmory at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and moved to the University of Hawaii in 1~66, finds intense interest in Stevenson among history teacl1ers and students who write to him for help in preparing papers. "Adlai has great appeal to most of those who will be writing U.S. history in the next generation," he says. Two years ago, Johnson del ivered a forty-five minute paper to the Organization of American Chicago History

121

Books Historians. There were questions from the audience for an hour and a half-until 11 P.M. Later, he asked his colleagues: "How come?" A pattern emerged: the historians felt as disgruntled and full of dismay at what is happening to our country as anyone else. Stevenson was a person who articulated the best in the American tradition and at the same time he knew-and said so-when we as a nation violated that tradition. Johnson will do a repeat performance this November at a meeting of the Southern Historical Society, presenting the only paper. l\fany politicians write him for appropriate quotations. Environmentalists ask for Stevenson speeches in which he anticipated space travel, referring to "the fragile, space ship, Earth." \,Vriters find Stevenson quotes usable, from his humorous gubernatorial veto of an Illinois bill to restrict the roaming of cats to his definition of patriotism: "[It) is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime." Twenty years ago, television comm en ta tor Eric Severeid wrote to Stevenson that he might be a "prophet without office but prophets always live longest in history." Prophetic words. So were these, de livered at Stevenson's funeral by Judge Carl l\fcGowan, a long-time friend: "That voice is still now . But its ed1oes are l ikely to be sounding down the corridors of history for a long time." Despite public acclaim, Stevenson's private life was " hard and lonely"-words used to describe him by his son, Adlai III, in the Foreward to As We Knew Adlai, recollections of twenty-two friends (Harper &: Row, 1966). l\lartin's book goes deeply and unsparingly into Stevenson's problems with his mentally unstable wife (they were divorced in 1949) and with his possessive mother. l\Iartin has unearthed many persona l documents and letters not found in the volumes of the papers. The books, then , are complementary, not competitive. ]\Jade public for the first time in l\fanin's book are highly emotional love letters that Stevenson wrote to newspaper publisher Alicia Patterson , who died in 1963, and to Dorothy Fosdick, recently in the news as a member of Sen. Henry Jackson 's staff. Although Stevenson had great appeal to intellecwals, l\Iartin reports that he flunked out of Harvard Law School. Beh ind Stevenson's lifetime habit of deprecating himse][ and desp ite h is appearance of indecisiveness, there was a hard desire for public office and a firm bel ief in_ his convictions. A sociable person, he had a strong need for friends and sought advice and counsel from virtually everyone-but sometimes, it appeared, he did so to bring himself closer to people. His reluctance to run for president in 1952-he was "drafted"-stemmed from his belief that Eisenhower was probably unbeatable and it was time for Republicans to assume responsibility after twenty years of carping. But, as Volume VI of the papers shows, Stevenson went eagerly into the campaign of 1956 because he was convinced the country was in deep trouble with Eisenhower and R ichard Nixon in charge. 122

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Martin's book took twice as long to write as he expected. He is a painstaking questor after detail, as his eleven other books also prove. The wealth of available material about Stevenson is monumental, and i\Iartin's zeal for minutiae was certainly rewarded. And even though immensely detailed, his biography is never dragging. Although his is the most penetrating and complete biography of Stevenson to elate, l\fartin's work suffers from his journalistic, rather than historical, approach. This makes for more interesting reading, sometimes like a Sunday supplement, but there is a tendency to treat almost all incidents the same way. Interpretation is sometimes superficial. l\fartin makes much of a childhood incident in which Stevenson accidently shot a neighbor girl. He sees this as influencing many of Stevenson's later states of mind, although admitting it may be a wrong guess. He fails to note that the child's mother assured young Adlai that the accident was not his fault, a detail that Johnson included in his work. If interest in Stevenson continues clown through the years-a not unlikely phenomenon considering historian and poet Carl Sandburg's comment that S~evenson's speeches were " the best since Lincoln"l\lartin's biography, complete and detailed as it is, may well not be the last. There is still a need for a biography of Stevenson written by an historian , with the perspective and value judgements of an historian rather than a journalist. For now, l\lartin has provided an immense storehouse of facts and a superlative story about Stevenson. It is possibly the best biography of anyone written in the last decade and comes at a moment when it can be best appreciated.

Robert E. Kenn edy, retired associate editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, directed the paper's editorial page for twenty-nine years and covered the career of Adlai Ste1Âˇenson from the beginning.

Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald's

by Max Boa; and Steve Chain Dutton , 1976. 9.95. the man who made the name l\fcDonalcl's famous, was born in Oak Park, and his training srnool, Hamburger University, complete with think tank (don't laugh), is in Elk Grove Village. Don't laugh because selling McDonald 's hamburgers is a serious business: for e,Âˇery two billion burgers soldwhich takes about four months-a hundred thousand cows must be slaughtered; the company's real estate holdings are huge, currently about 3,500 stands and other property; and l\fcDonalcl's is also the country's largest retailer of fish and buyer of RAY KROC,

processed potatoes. In 1972, the company's stock. was worth about as much as U.S. Steel's. f\JcDonald's has begun to circle the globe. The authors seem torn between admiration for Kroc, a Horatio Alger type, and the need to disclose some of the more obvious public dangers of his business. Kroc was 52, and not prospering, when he met the i\IcDonald brothers in California in 1954. They owned one hamburger stand, but Kroc liked their way of doing business, their name, and their golden arches. He convinced them to let him sell franchises and pro~eeded to buy them out. Boas and Chain contrast his success with the poorer luck of Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Fried Chicken entrepreneur who allowed others to buy lii111 out. Franchising, of course, did not begin with McDonald's. Possibly the first in the field was the Singer Sewing ]\[achine Company, which sold franchises internationally before I goo; perhaps the first twentieth-century giant was General Motors, with its dealerships; and the king of them all is probably still Coca-Cola. Even in the restaurant business, Howard Johnson was doing well long before Ray Kroc came along. vVhat Kroc had was the 1 percent inspiration and gg percent perspiration of which Thomas Alva Edison spoke-plus a terrific sense of timing. He knew when to start buying back his franchises: about 40 percent of the McDonald outlets are now operated directly from suburban Oak Brook, according to the authors, and Hamburger University supplies the managers with the know-how to run them. Kroc also knew when to let go of active management and allow younger men with more sophisticated ideas to run his enterprise. And he even became a philanthropist, giving money to the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Adler Planetarium, Passavant ]\[emorial Hospital, and other institutions. Now, the problems: the famous quarter-pound hamburger doesn't weigh nearly that much and the meal served up by your local .t\fcDonald's is not nutritionally adequate; the young employee who serves up the food is working hard for a sub-minimum wage; the company has fought fiercely, unfairly, and cleverly against unionization; it forces its franchisees to use standard supplies, sometimes at exorbitant prices; and among the contributions Kroc so grandly supplied was a campaign gift of 250,000 to Richard 'ixon. \Vho can say it did not help influence the president to veto a labor bill that would have included f\(cDonald's young workers in the minimum wage act? f\(oreover, although Kroc chose suburban locations and highway intersections for his stands early on, the company later pressed into the cities. In poor neighborhoods, a f\IcDonald's meal is often the main meal of the day and not healthful; in wealthier neighborhoods, the places are regarded as unwelcome eyesores. ]\[cDonald's can summon a lot of influence, however, and it has won out in city after city over the protests of the citizens. Only in i\[anhattan, at a location at 66th Street and Lexington Avenue, did f\IcDonald's lose a rezoning battle. The social and corporate brass of the country Jives in that neighborhood, and they stopped McDonald's cold at "the Battle of Lexington." The authors conclude with an account of the

franchise fever that has been sweeping the country in recent decades. f\[ost Jicencees, it turns out, get rooked; you have to be pretty well-financed to buy a McDonald's franchise or any other that is known to be able to bring you a profit. You also have to be willing to work hard, go to training school, take orders, buy only from authorized suppliers, submit to unannounced "inspections," and then sell back when the day comes. Not a pleasant prospect for one who wants to succeed in The American \Vay. Big Mac is not a big book, it is easy to read but not particularly well written, its information doesn't always jibe with the annual reports issued by the company, and it is not indexed. The authors' grounds for admiring Kroc and their description of Hamburger University seem fairly well documented in this "unauthorized" biography: most o[ the information appears to have been made available by the principals themselves. The unfavorable material contains no exposes: it is all stuff that has been printed before, although it is at least gathered together. In sum, this is not what one would call "investigative reporting." McDonald's is a homegrown titan and most of us eat enough of their hamburgers to take an interest in this book, but this reviewer, who has raised five children and never wants to see another hamburger ever aga in , would prefer something meatier. Wait for the paperback. ISABEL S. GROSSNER

Settlement Houses and the Great Depression

by Judith Trolander Wayne State University, 1975. 12.95. Al\IERICA's social reformers faced a serious problem when the nation's economy disintegrated during the late 1920s. Settlement houses, which had transformed the philanthropy of the wealthy into innovative help programs, faced bankruptcy. Federal financing, which enlarged local and state relief efforts, was not available to privately funded establishments. As a result, most reformers turned to larger, city-wide sources of money, primarily the Community Chest. Only in Chicago and New York were there enough resources to continue funding settlement houses in traditional ways. According to Trolander, the result was that more radical and innovative activities were possible in the nation's two largest cities. There, reformers encouraged rent strikes, labor picketing, and welfare demonstrations, while their counterparts in smaller placesÂˇ had to contend with the inbred conservatism of Community Chest directors. Chicago and New York settlement houses continued to capture public attenti.on, much as they had at the turn of the century, while those in other places became invisible. This finding is the central theme of Trolander's well-researched and tightly organized book. Unfortunately, it is the only theme. There is no real discussion of the programs the settlement houses provided for their neighborhoods and how these differed from earlier decades. Nor is there any sense of historical change through the decade of the Depres;sion; the topical approach becomes confusing at times. Chicago History

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Books Despite its shortcomings, this is an important book, a national study with enough information about Chicago to warrant its perusal by any serious scholar of Chicago's history. PERRY DUIS

Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840-1914

ed. H. Arnold Barton Uni,·ersity of Minnesota, 19i5 · 16.50. what immigrants were like is to ask what Americans are like, since in this country all save the Indians are immigrants. Professor Barton gives us an impressive answer. Rather than having someone else's view of what newly arrived foreigners ought to have felt, or might have felt , we have the delight o( reading their actual words. The reader has the vivid impression of tearing open an envelope and seeing for the first time the exact words of a distant relative or friend . Letters bring us closer to the truth than even a clever historian can manage, but even these do not penetrate deeply into the dark closet of the past. Only a few letters can be found, and so the sampl ing has a random quality. Some of the letters reflect disappointment with the new land. The trauma of leaving familiar farmlands for new and hostile settlements prompted a few correspondents to bitter complaints. But most of the writers erred on the other side, depicting the new country as a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. Their purpose seems to have been to relieve apprehension back home and to make the emigration seem like a wise choice. The bitter letters must have caused some steamer trunks to be unpacked, but the overenthusiastic ones must have helped to stimulate the great fo lk movements of the nineteenth century. Professor Barton deserves our thanks for assembling an intrigu ing collection and for the background information and explanatory notes which give this mail call the coherence of a single absorbing story. TO ASK

PAUL ELME:>:

City Dogs

by William Brashier Harper & Row, 19i6. $8.95. in Wrigley Field and ending in the North-Clybourn subway station, Brashler's novel fo llows a trad ition rooted in the people and places of Chicago. Set primarily in Uptown, City Dogs is as much Wilson Avenue and Broadway as Studs Lanigan was 58th Street and Prairie Avenue, or Native Son was 47th Street and South Parkway, or The Man with the Golden Arm was Darnen Avenue and Division Street. Brashler's street-savvy story lets us look over the shoulders of policemen, prostitutes, petty crim inals, and derelicts all toughing it out in Uptown . It excels in accurate description of places and encountersand especially in authentic rendering of the combiBEGINNING

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nation of street talk, ethnic accent, and phraseology that we can only call Chicagoese. With all his surface veracity, however, Brashier does not depict much complexity of character. We are not enabled to understand his people as we do James Farrell's Studs, Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas, and Nelson Algren's frankie Jachine. Although he attempts to establish some depth in two of his city dogs, Brashier seems to agree with his homicide detective about Uptowners: "what they did to each other they did for simple, sLUpid, paperthin reasons, without schemes or convoluted emotions, layered relationships, or complicated plots." Unquestionably, City Dogs is a vivid portrayal of the hard surface of life in Uptown. Whether we learn much about the motives of the people who live there is another question. ANTHONY R. GROSCH

The Torture Doctor

by David Franke Hawthorn, 1975. $8.95. has written an exceptionally good book about the man the Guinness Book of W01·/cl Records calls "the most prolific murderer known in recent criminal history." Herman W. Mudgett, alias Henry H. Holmes, came to Chicago around 1886, where he soon acquired a reputation as being charming, audacious, and a poor credit risk. In 1894, when he was arrested in Boston as an insurance swindler, the true nature of Holmes' activities came to light. Some first-rate detective work established that he had murdered his insurance partner and three of the man's children. An ensuing investigation o( his "castle" in Chicago revealed a laboratory for torture and murder where untold numbers of people had met their deaths. Franke, while giving us an accurate and restrained account o[ this grisly business, has also portrayed the public excitement and sensationalism that accompanied the revelation of Holmes' crimes, his trial, and his subsequent confessions. NEAL J. NEY DAVID FRANKE

Psychic City: Chicago, Doorway to Another Dimension

by Brad Steiger Doubleday, 1976. 6.95 . THERE 1s A LACK of information on the growth of the Chicago area as a psychic and spiritual center. And although Brad Steiger's brief Psychic City: Chicago admittedly serves only as an introductory text, he has interviewed various practitioners and his eclectic book suggests several ways in which researchers might approach this broad field. vVhether or not Chicago is th e psychic city, as Steiger believes it to be, he feels it is unique. ln addition to supporting a large number of organized religions and their many seminaries, Chicago's large ethnic communities have long sustained a vast number 0£ readers, healers, palmists, and astrologers. The city has also attracted, over the years, many spiritual, mystical, and meditative groups which

have developed alongside of its old-world traditions, creating a "balanced" and "correlated energy," And then there are some even more esoteric reasons. Dr. J. Gordon Melton lists the individuals and groups active during the summer of 1975 in his excellent Appendix, "The Chicago Psychic / Metaphysical/Occult/New Age Community: A Directory and Guide." Dr. Melton's guide deserves an expanded historical treatment using old city directories. The text itself touches base with many forms 0£ spiritual and psychic activity, examining none in depth but containing suprising assertions throughout. It will convince no unbelievers and raises more questions than it attempts to answer, but some of those questions are intriguing. PAUL W. PETRAITIS

The Long Thirst: Prohibition in America, 1920-1933

by Thomas M. Coffey Norton, 1975. '.$9.95. COFFEY'S emphasis is on the scandals and the scandalous individuals that made the Prohibition era such good newspaper copy, but he does not neglect the political intrigue and the various passions and ambitions that underlay the whole mess. I[ you already know about the chief actors----the enforcement agents who sold out, the gangsters, the lawbreakers who seized their opportunities to do some "honest" bootlegging or private drinking, the religionists who were not without sin, the candidates who straddled or used the issue-you will learn little new or important. If you don't, we would like to recommend instead that you buy a slightly older book (John Kohler's Ardent Spirits, Putnam, $8.95) which has a larger perspective on the whole fight for and against alcohol in America, beginning with the colonists and the Indians, and which contains a goodly amount 0£ material from first-hand interviews. Kobler's might even be considered a treatment in the Bicentennial mood-he looks backward and forward even though he concentrates on the Prohibition years. Coffey's is the kind of rehash we so often get. The bibliogTaphics, by the way, are strikingly similar. I. S. G.

The Illinois and Indiana Indians by Hiram W. Beckwith Arno, 1975 (reprint of 1884 ed.) .., 7.

IN A YEAR when things Indian have achieved their most recent zenith of popularity, it is no accident that Beckwith's antique little book has finally been reissued. The market is guaranteed, if uncritical, and the cost of reprinting out-of-copyright material is relatively small. But this slim volume-unedited, uncorrected, and without annotations-is dangerous. On library shelves, where it can be used as a reference by the unsuspecting, it could remain a source of confusion for generations. This reprint is only for the collector, the aficionado, or the cautious scholar. Others interested in the Indians of Illinois and Indiana must wait for more reliable material. JAMES A. CLIFTON

Society Notes

New Exhibitions c. o. MOSHER'S BICENTENNIAL GIFT TO CIIICAGO, an exhibit of photographs and other material, is now open. From 1875 through the early 1890s, Mosher was photographer to the locally and nationally fa mous. An article about Mosher and his Bicenten nial gift appears in this issue. SUMMER DRESSES, an exhibit of fashionable, hotweather wear in the 19th century, opens July 12. The fresh, nuffy, airy look of the silk and cotton costumes, delightful to the eye, is in reality a well -designed illusion, created by the use of white and pastel , straw hats with flowers and feathers, white gloves, and parasols, opaque silk stockings, and shoes dyed to match the long dresses. Underneath, the mannequins arc wearing bloomers, chemises, corsets, corset covers, and as many petticoats as necessary to give the dresses the correct silhouette. By popular demand, the exhibit of Chicago Daily News photos from the Society's collection continues to adorn our lobby. Spectacular use is also made of some of the Society's rare photos in the new ArchiCenter of the Illinois Arts Council, 111 South Dearborn Street.

Program. Activi ties TIIE JULY JUBILEE-a series of films, gallery talks, and music-is scheduled for every Tuesday in July. Featured will be the Civil War exhibit; the Pioneer, Chicago's first locomotive; Creating a New Nation, the Society's first major Bicentennial exhibit; and the Illinois Pioneer Life Gallery. Programs are continuous from IO to 2 and no reservations are required. Bring the family. The library and museum research collections will be open i\fonclay through Friday, 9:30 to 4:30, during the summer. Please continue to call ahead for an appointment to see particular materials. For a possible exhibit, the Society is gathering information a bout work clone in the Chicago area under the auspices of the Illinois Ans Project of the i\lorks Projects Administration during the Thirties. The Society's Lincoln Dioramas, one such project, have been refurbished and are on view on the Lincoln Gallery. Anyone associated with the projects or having knowledge 0£ other works of art or 0£ records is asked to telephone or write Julia iVesterberg, assistant curator of graphics.

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Society Notes

New Publication The Pioneer: Chicago's First Locomotive, a monograph by John H. White, Jr., curator o[ transportation at the Smithsonian's i\Iuseum o[ History and Technology, has just been published by the Society. Illustrated with photographs and drawings, the work is a history of the locomotive and an inquiry into its origins. Included are short histories o[ the Baldwin Locomotive Works and the Chicago and 1orth Western Railway, as well as Baldwin, Vail and Hu[ty's 1840 catalog and George Sellers' "Early Engineering Reminiscences ." A must for train buffs, on sale in the museum store for $2. Acid 50Â˘ for mail orders .

Recent Accessions Among the manuscripts recently acquired by the Society are 126 letter books, from 1871 to 1925, records of the law firm of Rosenthal & Hamill and other partnerships which were predecessors to the law firm of King, Robin, Gale, & Pillinger, a gift of Willard L. King. Other legal papers include the stillclosed files of the late Chicago attorney and civil libertarian, Pearl Hart, first installments of papers of the Open Lands Project and of Dempsey .J. Travis, Chicago mortgage banker and black community leader. Collections augmented include the papers of the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago and of Irene i\IcCoy Gaines, prominent black social worker aÂˇnd club woman . The costume collection has acquired l\[rs. John J. Glessner's wedding dress, 18io, gift of J\frs. Charles F. Batd1elder, and J\Irs. Chauncey I\IcCormick's wed-

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Ch icago History

ding dress, worn in 1914, the gi[t o[ I\Irs. Brooks l\lcCormick. J\Irs. Glessner is best remembered as a resident of Chicago's elite Prairie Avenue; l\[rs. i\IcConnick succeeded Mrs. Potter Palmer as the leader of Chicago society. The costume library also received 142 fashion plates chronicling the evolution o[ la dies' and men 's daytime wear from 1794 to I goo. The prints, given by I\Iildred Davison in memory of Phyllis Healy, the Society's former curator of costumes, depict the emergence o[ bustles, hoop skirts, leg-o'-mutton sleeves, and our pompadour hairstyle. The Chicago decorative arts collection has acquired the complete furnishings o[ an art deco dining room which graced the Gold Coast apartment o[ I\Irs. James Hopkins in the Thirties. l\frs. Robert D. Graff, of Far Hills, New Jersey, gave the blacklacquered dining room set inlaid with pewter, pewter light fixtures, paintings in shades of silver, screen with pewter dado, and pewter wall trim, all designed by Hal Periera, later of Hollywood , when he worked with Holabird and Roche of Chicago. An addition to the museum's collection of Chicago metalwork is a pair of brass andirons designed by George \V. I\Iaher, noted Prairie School architect, for the.James Patton house in Evanston. The andirons arc adorn ed with the Scotch thistle, which l\[aher chose as the motif for the house and which still ornaments th e Ridge Avenue gates on the mansion 's former grounds. Rarely do we receive or come across an object that does not duplicate an item already in our important 1933 World's Fair collection, so it was with pleasure that we accepted a panoramic view of the Fair painted in oil by Harry I\I. Pettit and given to the Society by the estate of l\frs. Harry J\I. Pettit through Lillian Woodworth.

Stone, Kimball, and The Chap-Book i\Iy very special appreciation goes to you for the Summer 1975 issue. . . . fr. Regnery's truly excellent article about my father and the m:rnner in which you illustrated it and featured the posters on the covers have given great pleasure. I thank you very much. With respect to the Lautrec poster, I submit the following: The Irish and American Bar was in the Rue Royale and the proprietor was Achille. Lautrec took many of his friends there including May Belfort, May l\Iilton , the famous clowns-Footit and his partner Chocolat. The subjects are Randolphe (Ralph), the Chinese-American Indian bartender who was born in San Francisco, Monsieur Tom, who was the Rothschild coachman, who resembles John Bull, and a fellow coachman, who looks like Uncle Sam. The bartender and l\I. Tom appear in many T-L drawings and paintings. One hundred proofs of th is poster were produced without the lettering. It was the only poster produced by Lautrec for an American publication and was called by Gerstle Mack "Lautrec's favorite." HERBERT STUART STONE, JR.

Guilf orcl, Connecticut

The interesting article by Henry Regnery on "Stone, Kimball, and The Chap-Book" is inaccurate in its count of the books published by Way & Williams, Stone & Kimball's friendly competitor. Way & Williams published sixty books, not twenty-six. Apparently Mr. Regnery simply counted the list of titles taken over by Stone & Kimball which appears in Kramer's History. The Papers o[ the Bibliographical Society of America will publish my history and bibliography of Way & Williams whenever it works its way through its backlog. I'll send you a reprint when it appears.

Chicago History is such an expertly produced and edited publication that I am delighted at the appearance o[ my stuff about early Chicago goH in the Winter edition. The photos help a great deal to give the spirit o[ the times a nice boost, and I am particularly pleased by the Currier & Ives o[ Charles Macdonald in action inasmuch as I had never seen it before and didn't even know that it existed . ... You people put out a fine, outstanding publication. It is good to see such rare quality maintained. HERBERT WARREN WIND

Editorial Office, The New Yorker

The editor replies: Thank you both, very much. In response to Mr. Wind's interest, our curator o[ broadsides traced the history of the full-color print of Macdonald in action, which we reproduced in black-and-white, and came up with a brief but fascinating history. The original firm o[ Currier & Ives went out of business in 1907; in 1930, two descendants of these gentlemen founded a new firm, called Currier & Ives, Inc., with the announced purpose o[ carrying on their ancestors' tradition . Their first catalog lists a series of eight sporting prints, but only four were printed, in an edition of 999 copies each, before the business failed. The golfing print was the fourth and last, and was printed by E. Curr ier alone. The Society acquired the Macdonald print, and the other three sporting prints, when Charles B. Pike, its former president and a noted collector of American prints, donated his collection. Mr. Whitâ&#x20AC;˘ ney's generous offer exemplifies our members' continuing interest in helping the Society build its collections.

Oops ! I hate to do this to you, but on November 6, 1925, the silent movie The 1vlerry Widow came to Ch icago with Mae Murray and John Gilbert in the lead roles (page 178, Fall 1975 issue). I know many Murphys who would like to cla im the winsome Mae, but a Murphy she was not. WILLIAM K. RYA

Oak Park, Ill.

JOE W. KRAUS

Director of Libraries, Illinois State University Normal, Ill.

Golf Your Winter 1975-1976 issue is marvelous. There is so much new in it, and yet so much that I recall. Maybe I have some old photos that would interest you. Re golf: I attended the Western Open Golf tournament at ldlewild Country Club on August 28, 1912, and have a shot of J. T. Lingo[ Evanston, Ill., making the first drive. It is not a close-up, so that a general scene is included. I also have a [ew shots taken around the course, all general scenes with greens numbered and some players' names cited, and a close-up of l\fcDonald Smith, the winner, taken on August 30th. ALAN D. WHITNEY

TVinnetka, Ill.

The editor replies: By some corollary of Murphy's law known only to those in publishing, printing errors come in pairs. So we stared hard at the "Fifty Years Ago" item in which Mae l\[urray mysteriously became Mae Murphy and, sure enough, Norma Talmadge had been transformed into a man named Norman in the very same entry. Thanks for helping us set the record straight.

NOTE:

James A. Clifton , who is preparing a biography of Bi ll y Caldwell, requests that anyone having documented information write him at 2827 St. Ann, Green Bay, Wisconsin, 54301. Professor Clifton will be pleased to exchange information and copies of Caldwe ll 's correspondence. Ch icago History

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THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY Clark Street at North Avenue , Chica go, Illinois 60 6 14 Telephone : Michigan 2- 4 600

OFFICERS

Theodore Tieken, President Stewar t S. Dixon, Isl Vice-President J ames R. Getz, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary DIRECTOR

Harold K. Skramstacl, Jr.

MEMBER SHIP

TRUSTEES

Bowen Blair Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon J arn es R. Getz Ph ilip W. H ummer Willard L. King Andrew i\Icl\'ally III i\Irs. C. Ph illip J\iiller

The Chicago Historical Society is a privately supported institution devoted to research and interpretation of the history of the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and selected areas of American history. It must look Lo its members and friends for financial support. Contributions LO the Soc iety are tax-deductible and appropriate recognition is accorded major gifts. The Society encourages potential contributors to phone or write the clirecwr's office to discuss the Society's needs.

Bryan S. Reid, Jr . Gilbert H. Scribner, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Hermon Dunlap Smith Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken i\ lrs. Philip K. Wrigley

HONORARY TRUSTEES

R ichard J. Daley, Mayor, City of Chicago Patrick L. O ' i\falley, President, Chicago Park District

i\Iembership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of membership and clues are as fo llows: Annual, S20 a year; Governing Annual, $1 oo a year; Life, $500; and Patron, $1,000 or more. i\ lembers rece ive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago History; a quarterly Calendar of Events, listing Society programs; invitations to special programs ; free ad mis ion to the building at all times: reserved seats at movies and concerts in our auditorium; and a 10% discount on books and other merchandise purchased in the museum store. HOURS Exhibition galleries are open daily from 9:30 to 4:30; Sunday, from 12:00 to 5:00. Library and museum research collections are open Monday through Friday from g: 30 to 4:30 in.July and August (Tuesday through Saturday the rest of the year). The Society is closed on Christmas, 1ew Year's, and Thanksgiv ing. THE EDUCATION OFFIC E offers guided tours, assemblies, slide talks, gallery talks, craft demonstrations, and a variety of special progams for groups of all ages, from pre-school through senior citizen . ADMISSION FEES FOR NON -M EMBERS

Adults 1; Children (6-17), 50Â˘; Senior CitiLens, 25Â˘. Admission is free on Mondays. Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are $2.25 by mail; 2 at newsstands, bookshops, and the museum store.

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