Chicago History | Summer 2004

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Summer 2004 VOLUME XXXIII, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 26 50 58

Stunned with Sorrow Suellen Hoy

Girls, We Must Enlist!

Virginia R. Boynton

Departments Chicago’s Global Communities Peter T. Alter

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Stunned with Sorrow The sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary were among both the victims and the heroes of the horrific 1958 Our Lady of the Angels school fire.

S U E L L E N H OY “Stunned with sorrow. Words cannot express.

We suffer anguish with all of you in your tragedy.

We pray God give you strength and support.”

—Telegram to BVM Sisters in Chicago from Sister Mary Editha Brown and Sisters, BVM, Washington, Iowa, December 2, 1958

F

orty-six years after Chicago’s most disastrous school fire, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs) remember December 1, 1958 with sadness—and sometimes tears. The sisters recall those whose lives were altered forever by the destructive flames that broke out on the clear, cold winter day at Our Lady of the Angels (OLA) elementary school at 909 North Avers Avenue on the city’s West Side. They mourn the loss of ninety-two children and three of their own: Sister Mary Clare Therese (Eloise Carmelite) Champagne, Sister Mary Seraphica (Anna Virginia) Kelley, and Sister Mary St. Canice (Mary Ellen) Lyng. Although the BVM Sisters are no longer “stunned with sorrow,” the memory of that day remains very much alive.

Prior to the 1960s, few professionally active women voiced their opinions in public. If seen at all, they were seldom heard. This was especially true of Catholic women who knew and accepted their place in a traditional church that was both patriarchal and hierarchical.

Nevertheless, from a current point of view, it is striking that the BVM Sisters, so intimately involved in the 1958 crisis and its aftermath, remained so invisible and so silent. In Monsignor William E. McManus’s sermon during the funeral mass for the three nuns on December 4, 1958, he referred to them as “professional women and experienced teachers” and praised “the Sisters’ gallant heroism.” But he chose not to name them, believing that they “would want to be remembered simply as the BVM Sisters who died with their pupils in the fire.” Perhaps so, perhaps not. But whatever the case then, it is appropriate now, almost fifty years after the fire, to piece together the sisters’ story.

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Although the area around Our Lady of the Angels had once been predominantly Irish, it had become largely Italian by 1958. Yet the Catholic sisters who taught in the school since it first opened in 1904 remained mostly Irish or Irish American. The BVMs, about 2,200 strong in the post–World War II years, trace their origins to nineteenth-century Dublin and the beneficent works of a small group of women led by Mary Frances Clarke. In 1833, they immigrated to Philadelphia where they formed a religious community dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ten years later, they relocated to the small

On December 1, 1958, a horrific fire at Our Lady of the Angels (OLA) school took the lives of ninety-two children and three Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mar y (BVMs). Above: Firemen work to extinguish the fire and rescue the students and teachers.

Above: At the nuns’ visitation, a sister kneels in prayer. The three simple, black coffins were arranged in a square U-form in the small parlor of the convent on Iowa Street. Below: A large crowd gathered at the church to honor the memory of the BVM Sisters who lost their lives in the fire. Mayor Richard J. Daley led a delegation of city leaders, including the fire and police commissioners.

Stunned with Sorrow | 5

6 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

As the school burned nearby, an unidentified BVM Sister comforted an injured student.

Stunned with Sorrow | 7

Thousands of mourners attended funerals for both the sisters and the students. Above: During the sisters’ funeral, the coffins were placed endto-end in the center aisle. Archbishop Albert G. Meyer gave the requiem mass, and Monsignor William E. McManus delivered the homily.

Below: A grieving crowd honors twenty-six of the children who died in the OLA fire.

8 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

Mississippi River town of Dubuque, Iowa, and built their first motherhouse (Dubuque remains their headquarters today). By the 1950s, the BVMs operated, in Chicago alone, thirty grade schools, three high schools, and Mundelein College.

December 1, 1958, “the day Chicago wept,” began like every other day at Our Lady of the Angels, a large school offering kindergarten and elementary instruction to about fourteen hundred children. The fire reportedly started between 2:00 and 2:20 P.M. near the base of a stairwell in the north wing of the U-shaped, two-story building. For approximately thirty minutes, the fire burned undetected and filled the stairwell with suffocating smoke and heat. The north wing, on the first floor, held 234 students in four classrooms; on the second floor, in six rooms, were 329 students. No one on the first floor (grades one through four) was injured or killed.

But the flames, which spread to the second floor with startling swiftness, left many victims in their wake. The hallway proved impassable, and the windows posed an uninviting prospect—the sills were high off the classroom floors, and the ground outside (of concrete and crushed rock) was twenty-five feet below. The third alternative was for students and their teachers to remain calm, hoping and praying that they would be rescued.

Built in 1910, OLA’s north wing had been renovated several times but was never brought up to modern fire codes. Although it had passed a fire department inspection a few weeks before the fire, the parish had not been forced to comply with all of the safety guidelines in the most recent municipal code (1949) because the guidelines were not retroactive. In hindsight, the old brick building, with a wood interior and without up-to-date features, such as smoke detectors, sprinklers, an automatic fire alarm, and fire-safe doors, was an accident waiting to happen. But, as Newsweek reported two weeks after the tragedy, these conditions were hardly unusual.

A national survey published by the U.S. Office of Education had discovered that “nearly one school building in five [was] a potential fire trap [and that] another one in five [was] on the borderline.”

Immediately after the fire, school systems across the country cracked down, responding to parents “who had suddenly realized . . . that it could have been their own children trapped in those classrooms.”

None of the BVM Sisters remained inactive in the face of the fire, nor did they all respond in the same way.

Alone and in their classrooms, some attempted to prevent a stampede or panic by encouraging their students to stay seated and pray while waiting for assistance. Others immediately, or eventually, urged the children to jump out the windows. Such was the case of Sister Davidis (Lenore) Devine, a native Chicagoan and an experienced teacher of thirty-two years. At the time of the fire, she was

At a news conference following her release from St. Anne’s Hospital, Sister Davidis described the events in her eighth-grade classroom on the afternoon of December 1.

fifty-five years old and had been teaching eighth grade at Our Lady of the Angels since 1956. She survived the flames with visible scars on her hands and face. Although the sisters were not encouraged to speak publicly, Sister Davidis’s voice was heard. During an impromptu news conference at the convent on December 7, the day she was released from St. Anne’s Hospital, she explained what had happened in her classroom.

Sister Davidis complimented her students and recalled that a boy first smelled something burning. She then discovered smoke from floor to ceiling in the hallway. The smoke was so black, she said, that it looked “like huge rolls of black cotton.” To keep it out, she instructed several boys to cram their arithmetic books in the cracks around the door. She also moved her pupils to the windows and led them in the rosary. At the window, one smart boy figured out that he could jump safely to a firstfloor roof and then to the ground. Others, who by then could barely see each other, followed his lead until all were out—or so Sister Davidis thought. As she descended a ladder, provided by a fireman, she looked back. With a voice broken in grief, she confessed: “That’s when I saw the little one, the one I missed.”

Beverly Ann Burda failed to escape from room 209.

Months later, Valerie Ann Thomas, another student of Sister Davidis, died of burn injuries.

Stunned with Sorrow | 9

On December 11, 1958, a distressed Sister Mary St. Florence Casey, school principal, told the sixteen-man panel of investigators what she 10 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

remembered of the afternoon of the fire. Seated to her left are Walter E. McCarron, city coroner, and Harold E. Marks, deputy coroner.

Stunned with Sorrow | 11

The three nuns who taught across the hall from Sister Davidis also lost their lives in the fire. Their classrooms—rooms 208, 210, and 212—were located adjacent to the stairwell where the fire reportedly began.

Sister Mary St. Canice Lyng was fortyfour years old and taught forty-seven seventh graders in room 208. She was born in Chicago but her parents, Michael and Bridget Butler Lyng, were Irish immigrants from County Kilkenny. In Chicago, Michael Lyng joined the police department and eventually became a sergeant at the Rogers Park Station. He and his wife and their two children, Mary and John, belonged to the neighborhood’s St. Gertrude’s parish.

Mary attended St. Gertrude’s BVM-staffed parish school. There she first met Monsignor Joseph Cussen, future pastor of Our Lady of the Angels. When Mary and her classmates graduated from eighth grade in 1928, Monsignor Cussen awarded them their diplomas. She then enrolled in Immaculata, a BVM high school that had opened in 1921 and a popular choice for Catholic girls who lived on the city’s North Side.

While at Immaculata, she decided to become a BVM. For her, the decision was easy: “Since first grade,” she wrote in her application letter, “I have been taught by our [BVM] Sisters and it is the only order that appeals to me.” The sisters had made a profound impression upon her, but, above all, she believed her choice was “what God wants of me, and I want to dedicate my life to Christ.” In 1941, a year after making her final profession as a religious, she offered her services for the BVM mission in China but was assigned locally instead.

Sister St. Canice taught at Our Lady of the Angels from 1937 to 1944 and 1956 to 1958.

By the time she returned to OLA in 1956, she was an accomplished teacher and a former principal of St. Mary’s in rural DeKalb, Illinois (1950–56).

Serious and scholarly, she liked literature and Irish history; she had also spent several summers studying theology at Marquette University. In the classroom, she demanded order and discipline. On the day of her funeral, one seventh grader, Thomas Handshiegel, who came to pay his respects, admitted that he 12 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

liked her: “She was real good to us—most of the time.” Handshiegel said Sister St. Canice helped him onto a ladder, then fled back into the room. Serge Uccetta, another student, agreed: “She was trying so hard to help everybody.” Sister St. Canice remained until the end and died with twelve of her students. She suffered burns over 90 percent of her body.

Sister Mary Seraphica Kelley was forty-three years old and taught in room 210 at OLA. Similar to Sister St. Canice, she was a native Chicagoan and a graduate of Immaculata High School. Anna Virginia Kelley, known to family and friends as Virginia, was the daughter of James and Anna Laing Kelley, Irish American Catholics and Midwesterners. Virginia’s mother grew up in Chicago, but her father, who worked as a night watchman, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Both of them had died within a year or two of the fire, but Virginia’s only brother James and his family were living in Peoria, Illinois, at the time.

The Kelleys were longtime parishioners of St. Ita’s, at the corner of Broadway and Catalpa Avenue, where Virginia was baptized and confirmed. As a girl, she went to the parish school, which was staffed by the Sisters of Mercy. Virginia was not acquainted with the BVMs until she enrolled in Immaculata. A good student, Virginia especially loved music and was a member of the high school orchestra. In July 1933, shortly after graduation, she acknowledged in a letter that “for many years” she had desired “to be a religious.”

This choice never disappointed her. In September 1958, less than three months before her death, Sister Seraphica wrote to a sister-friend of “the richness that is ours in the blessings of Community living.” She taught for twelve years at Annunciation parish school at Wabansia Avenue and Paulina Street before coming to OLA in 1952.

Mary Ellen Lyng (top) graduated from Chicago’s Immaculata High School in 1932. While in high school, she decided to join the BVMs. By 1958, Sister Mary St. Canice Lyng (above) was an accomplished teacher. Her charred crucifix (left) was recovered from the fire.

The statue of the Sacred Heart stood before and after the fire in the second-floor hallway of Our Lady of the Angels.

Stunned with Sorrow | 13

Sister Mary Seraphica Kelley (above) taught fourth grade in room 210. As a young girl (above right), she attended Chicago’s Immaculata High School. Below: Sister Seraphica’s death certificate states her cause of death as “asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation” and “3rd and 4th degree burns 90% of body area.”

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Sister Seraphica also suffered burns over 90 percent of her body. Sister Frances Jerome Sykora identified Sister Seraphica’s charred body at the morgue by her number in the community, #2764, found on her cincture.

Twenty-eight of her fiftyseven students died with her—more died in her classroom than in any other. When the firemen finally reached room 210, they found many of the fourth-graders wrapped around her, clinging to her for protection. In the face of so few options, she apparently tried to keep these children calm by leading them in prayer until they could be rescued. Trapped by the smoke and flames that quickly engulfed and darkened the classroom, only those terrified children who were able to find the windows and climb onto the high sills survived. Most of them, however, were badly burned.

The youngest of the three nuns to die in the fire was Sister Mary Clare Therese Champagne. At twenty-seven, she was young, pretty, had an easy way about her, along with a slight southern drawl, and was a favorite among many of the schoolchildren. An unfounded rumor even circulated that she had been a Mardi Gras queen in New Orleans. On the day of her funeral, an eleven-year-old student remarked: “I liked her so much. All the kids felt that way about her.” The BVM Sisters who remember her recall her playful sense of humor and her creative flair.

Eloise Carmelite Champagne was born and baptized in New Orleans, Louisiana, in May 1931. Her parents, Louis and Carmelite Martinez Champagne, were born into strong Cajun Catholic families in the small Louisiana towns of Bourg and Chackbay. Eloise had one brother, Hugh, who today practices dentistry in New Orleans. Eloise and Hugh attended grammar school at Holy Name of Mary School in Algiers (now a suburb of New Orleans) until their family moved to San Francisco in 1944. As an employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad, their father had accepted the transfer and accompanying promotion during World War II. The family returned to Louisiana in 1952.

Eloise graduated from St. Paul’s High School in San Francisco in 1949. At St. Paul’s, she first encountered the BVM Sisters and flourished under their tutelage. Her favorite subjects were art and music, and she enjoyed the instruction and attention she received from her music teacher, Sister Jean Helene Ward, an “energetic, passionate, and artistic” young nun. Eloise always loved to draw and over time, according to her brother, she

In 1949, Eloise Champagne (from left) and her friends, Mary Lande and Arlene De Barr, posed for a picture on the grounds of St. Paul High School in San Francisco.

learned to play both the accordion and piano. She also liked movies and movie stars, particularly Gloria de Haven, Van Johnson, and Frank Sinatra.

During her senior year of high school, Eloise decided to become a nun. She wanted, as she noted on her application form, “to love God more,” and was attracted to the teaching profession. But to please her parents, she did not enter the BVM community immediately after high school. During the summer and fall of 1949, she worked as a file clerk at Getz Bros. in San Francisco. Her brother remembers that Eloise’s decision to join a religious community was particularly difficult for their mother, who had lost her parents before she was six and grown up in the homes of relatives. She was “very close to Eloise” and did not want to lose her. But Eloise remained determined, and her mother allowed her to enter the BVMs in February 1950.

Sister Clare Therese (Eloise) Champagne began her career as a first-grade teacher at St. Joseph’s in Wichita, Kansas. She continued teaching first grade after she

arrived at Our Lady of the Angels in 1955. Three years later, her superiors assigned her to the fifth grade. Her new classroom (room 212) was a short distance from her friend’s, Sister Mary Geraldita Ennis. During the summer months, Sister Clare Therese continued her education at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa. In August 1956, she returned home for the first time since entering the convent six years earlier. It was an especially joyous occasion, her brother remembers, because she met her newborn nephew. After the fire, her sister-in-law commented to a local newspaper that Sister Clare Therese “was so happy when she visited us in 1956, so glad to be a nun.”

Unlike the other two nuns, Sister Clare Therese did not suffer from third- and fourth-degree burns. A policeman who arrived early at the fire scene reported that he saw Sister Clare Therese from the street in the smoke-filled room, “calmly talking to the children [trying] to prevent hysteria” as she helped them climb on to a window ledge. A fifth-grade boy who survived because of her efforts told the Chicago Daily News, “She Stunned with Sorrow | 15

Above: In 1952, the Champagnes visited Sister Clare Therese in Wichita, Kansas. At the time, Sister Clare Therese taught first grade at St. Joseph’s Elementary School. Below: Sister Clare Therese sought to make learning to read fun for her first graders.

16 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

was as cool as a cucumber.” Nevertheless, she and twenty-six of her fifty-five students failed to escape; almost all of them were asphyxiated.

Sister Clare Therese’s death devastated her family. In New Orleans, early on the evening of December 1, Hugh Champagne heard about the fire while watching a national television news report. Much later, he received word of his sister’s death via telephone and immediately called his parents. Although the entire family was griefstricken, Hugh believes his mother suffered the most.

According to people who knew her, she was never really the same. Hugh has not forgotten his sister or the disaster that took her life. His third child, a girl born in February 1959, is named Mary Clare Therese, and nearly fifty years later, he readily admits that he dreads both the first Monday after Thanksgiving and December 1.

As the fire smoldered in the late afternoon of December 1, the nuns who lived at Our Lady of the Angels convent gathered around the dining room table.

Several nearby BVM Sisters joined them. All were in a state of shock and disbelief. Sister Mary Donatus DeCock arrived on the scene shortly after the fire had been extinguished. She remembers that Sister Mary St. Florence (Miriam) Casey, the sixty-five-year-old convent superior and school principal, sat at the head of the table. As the sisters choked back tears, they tried to con-

Rosaleen June Ennis (later Sister Geraldita) graduated from St. Mary’s High School on Chicago’s West Side, c. 1939.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Sisters Clare Therese (left) and Geraldita enjoyed the company of the O’Connor family in Riverside, Illinois, c. 1957.

Stunned with Sorrow | 17

sole one another, come to terms with what had happened, and decide what to do next.

Sister Donatus stood at the convent door and refused entrance to reporters. She believes that Monsignor McManus, the Catholic schools’ superintendent, wanted to protect the sisters as well as the archdiocese and its new head; only weeks before the fire, Milwaukee’s Albert G. Meyer had been installed as Chicago’s archbishop.

(An honest Monsignor John “Jack” Egan admitted years later to his biographer that he was “relieved when they carried the body of a nun out. . . . It would have been a greater tragedy if no nuns had died along with their students.”) But stepping into the spotlight and speaking publicly to the press was not something Catholic sisters were inclined to do. Sister Mary Andrienne Carolan is a case in point.

“Heroine Hides Her Name: How Nun Rescued 40 from Flames” read the front-page headline of the Chicago Daily News on December 3, 1958. Although she “elected silence rather than give her name,” others identified the small woman bent on saving the students as Irish-born Sister Andrienne of room 201. She admitted that she “felt untold strength” during three trips into the burning building, but said little more. Because of her quick response to smoke in the south wing hallway, all seventy of her seventh graders escaped. Telling them not to be afraid, she led some youngsters out in hand-by-hand chains, rolled others down the stairs, and carried a few to safety. She remarked that she did not “want to be a hero” since “there were so many sisters trying to help.”

Sister Andrienne continued to teach in Chicago (at Our Lady of the Angels and at Presentation) until 1963.

Months later, in June 1959, Sister Mary Helaine (Nora) O’Neill of room 211 received the Illinois Veterans of Foreign Wars’ “Citizen of the Year Award.” The heroic actions described in the citation resembled those attributed to Sister Andrienne in the wake of the fire.

Although Sister Helaine’s comings and goings during the tragedy were not mentioned in newspaper accounts, her slow recovery received notice. Severely burned and suffering from intense shock, she was not expected to live for more than a week. She gradually improved and, after undergoing several skin grafts, was released from St. Anne’s Hospital in February 1959. She went immediately to the BVM motherhouse in Dubuque, where she convalesced during the spring and summer. In the fall, she accepted a new assignment at Gesu Elementary School in Milwaukee. Although she had no recollection of what happened during the fire, she accepted the VFW Award in the name of Our Lady of the Angels and the BVM Sisters.

In the face of such a horrific disaster, few people found consolation in awards or commendations. John Cogley, an OLA graduate and at the time a columnist for 18 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

Commonweal, a national Catholic magazine located in New York City, wrote about the fire. Calling it “one of the greatest tragedies of modern history,” he summed up what so many felt: Words were “too cheap” to offer to “the stricken parents, the valiant nuns, and the children who have survived.” Each faced an immense challenge, “to believe that the hand of God ha[d] not been withdrawn from the world.” The alternative, Cogley pointed out, was to find “only bitter meaninglessness in the universe.” The BVM Sisters chose to rely on their faith despite the difficulties before them.

Chicago’s nuns tried to cope with the tragedy as they attended wakes and burials and attempted to console grieving parents. The sisters at OLA lived together in close association, and they had lost three friends and colleagues. Each morning, wrote Sister Donatus in March 1959, they “gathered around the breakfast table in a silence made eloquent by three empty places.”

Sister Geraldita suffered the loss of one of her closest friends, Sister Clare Therese. On several occasions, the two had visited Sister Geraldita’s sister and her family in Riverside, Illinois. Her niece, June O’Connor, recalls that neither her aunt nor Sister Clare Therese was “overly formal or religious” and that on these visits everyone had fun with them, singing or making fudge or toffee from scratch. When the O’Connor family learned of the loss of Sister Clare Therese, they were “shocked and burdened by the details of her death” and were also worried about Sister Geraldita.

Petite with a round face and fair complexion, Sister Geraldita is remembered as a people person with a good sense of humor. Born in Chicago in 1921, Rosaleen June Ennis—called June—was the youngest of four children.

Her parents, Gerald and Rose Dempsey Ennis, both Irish immigrants, had met and married in Chicago, where Gerald worked as a streetcar conductor. The Ennis family belonged to the Our Lady Help of Christians parish, and June attended the parish elementary school. In 1939, she graduated from St. Mary’s, a BVM high school on the city’s West Side.

First a student and later a friend, Jacqueline Powers Doud remarked that Sister Geraldita was a bright woman who “lived with a lot of odds.” The first of which was the loss of her mother on her twelfth birthday, June 2, 1933.

Then in 1947, while teaching in Phoenix, Arizona, Sister Geraldita became seriously ill with tuberculosis and had a lung removed. Although only twenty-eight, she was hospitalized for an extended period, during which she suffered bouts of depression. When she recovered, Sister Geraldita returned to teaching in Glendale, California, where she became Doud’s fourth-grade teacher. Doud believes Sister Geraldita took a special interest in her, because she had lost her own mother. Whatever the reason, Doud grew attached to Sister Geraldita and

Above: A week after the fire, the OLA students took buses to Our Lady Help of Christians, where they attended class in the afternoons. As they stepped off the buses, Sister Savina Schroeder, principal (right, in front), and Sister Giles Mehren, teacher, met them. Below: At Our Lady Help of Christians, Sister Celia Prendergast (right) and Sister St. Adele Aaron greeted eleven of the surviving pupils of Sister Seraphica Kelley’s fourth-grade class. Fourteen of her fifty-seven students escaped the fire unharmed.

Stunned with Sorrow | 19

Above: Representatives of World Book Encyclopedia donated five sets of encyclopedias to OLA to replace those lost in the fire. Receiving them (middle, from left to right): Sister Jean Cecile, Monsignor William E. McManus, and Sister Mary St. Florence. Below: Before entering religious life, Sister Mary Andrienne Carolan worked at a telephone company. In January 1959, her former coworkers presented her with a fivethousand-dollar check for the fire victims from the Chicago Telephone Traffic Union.

20 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

laughingly admits becoming fascinated with Chicago, a place she had never seen.

In 1958, Sister Geraldita had been at Our Lady of the Angels for two years. She taught forty fifth and sixth graders in room 207, a room by chance with an emergency exit door. Although no one in her room died, Sister Geraldita had forgotten to carry the key to the door. For the rest of her life, she lived with the realization that she had inadvertently endangered her pupils’ lives. According to one of her students, Matt Plovanich, Sister Geraldita “acted in a truly heroic fashion that day.” She and two boys made several attempts to break through the locked solid oak door. When they failed, she gathered the class near the door, ordered them to the floor, and led them in the rosary. Plovanich compares her to “a captain going down with the ship. She was steadfast. She never wavered and was an inspiration to us.” To those who criticize her for leading the children in prayer, Plovanich responds that Sister Geraldita was a woman of faith. “When she felt she had done everything physically possible to get us out of the room,” he insists, “she wanted to get us spiritually ready for what she and we all felt was inevitable.” With the fortunate assistance of the janitor and associate pastor, Sister Geraldita and her students escaped the deadly blaze through the emergency exit.

Sister Geraldita healed over time or, as one BVM Sister suggested, became adept at using “her wit and her charm . . . to cover her pain.” Following her rescue, she spent three days in St. Anne’s Hospital, where she was treated for smoke inhalation. Following her release and according to convent records, she suffered a nervous collapse and spent a short time in Loretto Hospital, the only Catholic hospital in Chicago with a psychiatric unit.

In early 1959, Sister Geraldita returned to teaching at Cameron Elementary School, one of three public schools used temporarily by OLA faculty and students. The following year, she was assigned to St. Joseph’s in New Hampton, Iowa, a small farming community approximately forty miles north of Waterloo.

Sister Geraldita (or Sister June, as she came to be called) lived and taught in New Hampton for seventeen years. Her nieces believe the change from Chicago “did her a world of good,” and a former superior, Sister Lorraine Tierney, observed that Sister June lived a normal life; even during fire drills, she “remained calm and very much in control.” In 1977, Sister June began teaching and conducting parish visits at St. Anthony’s in Dubuque, from which she officially retired in 1988.

During the thirty-year period from the fire to her retirement, she was at times knocked off balance, but she managed to lead a productive life and overcome many odds, including breast cancer.

In the dark days and months following the fire, the BVM Sisters at Our Lady of the Angels solaced their grief

Eva Ennis O’Connor and Sister Geraldita Ennis visit the gravesite of their mother at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois, c. 1947.

through prayer and quiet acts of kindness. Almost immediately, the sisters attended to the needs of specific families. Until then, as customary, they had kept their distance from parishioners and students—never entering their homes, sharing meals, or displaying signs of affection or compassion. In the fire’s aftermath, those practices changed quickly. Several sisters recall that in pairs they accompanied heartbroken families to wakes and funerals and visited with them in their homes and hospital rooms after school, during weekends, and on Christmas Eve. Sister Mary Remi (Rose) Caldwell, who had taught kindergarten at OLA since 1950, said the nuns spent most of their visiting hours listening and holding hands. They often helped bewildered and griefstricken parents recall incidents from happier times. In a letter to the Catholic New World, Sister St. Florence Stunned with Sorrow | 21

Above: In the wake of the tragedy, school safety became a national priority. Within days, fire commissioners and school officials ordered unannounced inspections, special drills, and immediate hazard removal. Right: A large number of BVM Sisters attended the dedication of the new school, walking in procession. Sister Mary Eduardus Flaherty, provincial superior (front, left), and Sister Mary St. Florence, principal (front, right), led them through the street.

wrote, “the courage, the patience under intense pain, and the tremendous loyalty” of injured children and parents whose children had died inspired the sisters to carry on.

The burden of the tasks at hand fell most heavily on Sister St. Florence, OLA superior and principal since 1954. Those who remember her describe her as both competent and kind. Sister Remi remarked that the nuns “really appreciated her” (which, she confided, was not true of all superiors) and that in the long months after the fire Sister St. Florence “absorbed the sorrow of us all.” At the same time, she secured classrooms and teachers for the thousand-plus OLA students without a school. She became the essential link holding everyone and everything together—so necessary that her six-year term ending in 1960 was extended for an additional year. Monsignor Cussen, OLA pastor, initiated the extension request, acknowledging his “dependence on Sister Mary St. Florence to organize and supervise” in the temporary schools and help with building plans for the new one.

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Almost immediately after the fire, Sister St. Florence began working with Sister Mary Savina (Cecilia) Schroeder, principal at Our Lady Help of Christians, a large BVM-staffed school located less than two miles from Our Lady of the Angels. The two principals developed a schedule of double-shift classes and arranged for buses to transport OLA students to and from school.

On December 9, 1958, one week after the fire, approximately twelve hundred OLA students attended afternoon sessions at Our Lady Help of Christians (its own 1,665 pupils attended classes in the morning). To supplement the teaching staff, several young sisters in training replaced those who died or were incapacitated by the fire.

Sister Ruth Schiffler, the seventh-grade teacher at Our Lady Help of Christians, recalls her first encounter with the twenty-two survivors of Sister St. Canice’s seventh grade. When she walked into the classroom on December 9, they were “scattered throughout the room.”

She asked them if they would like to move toward the

front, not understanding that they had taken “their old or former seats.” The empty places belonged to classmates who had died or were unable to return to school.

Sister Ruth remembers that those who had survived the fire, children and sisters alike, tended to be quiet and fragile “almost as if they were in shock or a daze.”

As the sisters resumed teaching and caring for those outside the bounds of official interest, local newspapers paid them little notice. Instead they focused on the sixteen-man coroner’s jury investigating the cause of the fire, which was never determined. Regular headlines also announced “Fire Fund Totals” and reported on the operations of the sevenman advisory committee named by Mayor Richard J. Daley to oversee the spending of relief money. A good deal of coverage also focused on revisions in state and city fire codes and the City Council’s deliberations over an ordinance requiring schools to install automatic sprinklers and fire alarm systems. Catholic Charities’ relief operations also received an occasional story. The sisters’ efforts, however, similar to centuries of women’s household and charitable

work, remained hidden from public view and generally taken for granted.

In late January 1959, thirty-seven classrooms in three nearby public schools—Cameron, Hay, and Orr—officially became the temporary site of Our Lady of the Angels. Sister St. Florence remained principal of the three OLA branches and rotated among them daily in a fervent attempt to keep the school functioning as a unit. To assist her and help with plans and purchases for the new school, Sister St. Florence appointed three vice-principals, who also taught eighth grade in each branch: Sister Madeleine (Kathryn) Maher at Cameron, Sister Joachim (Marcelline) Niemann at Hay, and Sister Agnes Loretta (Alice) McElligott at Orr. Through their efforts, science exhibits, art contests, team sports, May crowning, and graduation all resembled those held before the fire.

Less than two years after the fire, a gleaming, milliondollar building rose from the ashes of OLA. The school, located at 3814 West Iowa Street, was fireproof and outfitted with the latest safety equipment: it was conStunned with Sorrow | 23

Cardinal Albert G. Meyer dedicated the new parish school (above) on October 2, 1960. Monsignor Jack Egan recorded that “a good crowd was on hand and everything went smoothly,” but that the cardinal “gave a rather bland talk . . . on the whole question of the Providence of God.”

structed of steel, glass, and reinforced concrete, and all of the desks, lockers, and furniture were metal. On September 7, 1960, excited youngsters and their parents entered the school for the first time. Monsignor Cussen and Sister St. Florence waited to greet them. For Sister St. Florence, as for many others, the occasion was bittersweet. As she welcomed the students, she remarked only that everyone “was happy to be back together again.” In the dedication booklet, she again stated that the parents and children of Our Lady of the Angels—their faith, devotion to one another, and thoughtfulness to the sisters—had been a wellspring of inspiration.

Sister St. Florence appeared calm and steadfast during the twenty-one months following the fire. Yet, the tragedy and its aftermath took its toll. Except for a few brief periods, she spent almost no time away from OLA. Some believed that she never completely reconciled herself to the fact that she was absent from her office, substituting for a sick teacher, and unable to ring the alarm on the afternoon of December 1, 1958. She completed her extended term as principal, but she retired at its end in 24 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

1961. Four years later, after a series of heart attacks, she died at Immaculata convent in Chicago at age seventy-two.

Sister St. Florence’s funeral took place at Our Lady of the Angels on May 29, 1961. Monsignor Egan celebrated the mass, parishioners served as pallbearers, and eighthgrade girls and boys formed an honor guard. As she requested, Sister St. Florence was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery, “close to those dear Sisters who gave their lives in the line of duty.” Her grave lies directly in front of those of Sister Mary Clare Therese Champagne, Sister Mary Seraphica Kelley, and Sister Mary St. Canice Lyng. May they rest in peace.

Suellen Hoy is a guest professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. A collection of her essays, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

After spending time with the Champagne family in New Orleans in 1965, Sister Geraldita Ennis visited the gravesite of her friend, Sister Clare Therese Champagne.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 4, CHS, ICHi-26742; 5–8 top, courtesy of the Catholic New World; 8 bottom, CHS, ICHI-34980; 9, courtesy of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary Archives, Dubuque, Iowa; 10–11, reprinted with permission from the Chicago Sun-Times; 12 top, courtesy of the Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University Chicago; 12 middle and bottom, courtesy of the BVM Archives; 13, reprinted with permission from the Chicago Sun-Times; 14 top left and bottom, courtesy of the BVM Archives; 14 top right, courtesy of the Women and Leadership Archives; 15–16, courtesy of Hugh P. Champagne, New Orleans, Louisiana; 17 top, courtesy of June O’Connor, Riverside, California; 17 bottom, courtesy of Hugh P. Champagne; 19, courtesy of the BVM Archives; 20 top, reprinted with permission from the Chicago Sun-Times; 20 bottom, courtesy of the BVM Archives; 21, courtesy of June O’Connor; 22 left, courtesy of the Catholic New World; 22–24, courtesy of the BVM Archives; 25, courtesy of Hugh P. Champagne.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the fire at Our Lady of the Angels, see Eric Morgan’s website www.olafire.com, along with David Cowan and John Kuenster’s To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) and Nicholas Faith, Blaze: The Forensics of Fire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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During World War I, women participated in the war effort by conserving home items, such as food and coal.

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Girls, We Must Enlist!

Many Chicago women fought World War I on the homefront, in their kitchens and neighborhoods.

V I R G I N I A R . B OY N T O N

D

uring World War I, women volunteered in considerable numbers for war-related service.

Chicago women, already active in reform-oriented women’s clubs, led Illinois’s wartime organizing effort. To coordinate the various aspects of women’s wartime volunteer activity, the state and national governments created the Illinois Woman’s Committee (IWC). In Chicago, the IWC units were organized along the city’s wards. Chicago’s IWC participants frequently cooperated with state committee leaders on programs related to their homes, families, and neighborhoods. These programs dealt with home heating, child welfare, girls’ recreation, food conservation, support for servicemen and their families, and assistance during the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918.

The IWC served both as Illinois’s division of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense and the Woman’s Committee of Illinois’s State Council of Defense (SCD), appointed by Governor Frank Lowden. State leaders of the IWC, many of them members of the reform-oriented Woman’s City Club of Chicago or the Chicago Woman’s Club, used opportunities provided by the war to further their long-standing municipal reform agenda. While the IWC’s self-defined official purpose, as reported in the SCD’s Final Report, was “to give every woman in Illinois an opportunity for patriotic service,” the postwar assessment of its accomplishments, as listed in the IWC’s own Final Report, described “a more deeply rooted desire to see social justice done and to force our democracy really to function in terms of a better community life.” The Chicago women in the IWC’s grassroots ward-level units focused on both patriotic service and social justice, striving above all to create a better community life in their Chicago neighborhoods.

Above: In 1917, Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden made an impassioned plea to women to volunteer during the war. Below: Mrs. Mildred Aubrey (below) helped support the registration drive.

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Many members of the Illinois Woman’s Committee came from the reform-minded Chicago Woman’s Club, which highlighted the importance of “housewifely thrift” in its May 1918 bulletin (above). Each of Chicago’s thirty-five wards had its own female IWC leader, as listed in this poster (below).

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From its beginnings in the spring of 1917, the IWC’s state leadership was dominated by women from Chicago, where the organization was headquartered. Chicago women comprised virtually the entire IWC Executive Committee, including all of its officers, as well as almost its entire Advisory Committee (which consisted of representatives of Illinois women’s organizations).

Consequently, state leaders tended to involve themselves in Chicago-area IWC programs more so than in activities conducted elsewhere in the state.

One of the IWC’s first activities was to coordinate a statewide registration of women interested in wartime volunteer service. More than 150,000 Chicago women registered with the IWC in 1917. Although IWC leaders had hoped for even greater numbers in the state’s premier city, most realized there were limits to what they could accomplish. When one Executive Committee member “asked whether it would be possible for the police to go to each house on the beat [in Chicago] and tell the women to register,” the committee vetoed the suggestion as so intrusive it “would tend to antagonize the foreign women.” Nonetheless, tens of thousands of Chicago women registered and participated in a wide range of IWC activities, frequently coordinating their efforts with those of state IWC leaders and other organizations, such as women’s clubs, settlement houses, government agencies, and private charities.

The women volunteers in the IWC’s ward units played an active part in many wartime programs that touched close to home. During the coal shortage of early 1918, U.S. Fuel Administration officials in Illinois requested that the IWC appoint a “fuel distributor” in each ward to help Chicago families obtain coal. After newspapers published the names of these thirty-five women, they were quickly besieged by families in their wards “who crowded their houses and looked to them as their one source of relief,” according to one Fuel Administration official. Some of these fuel distributors went to great lengths to do their duty; the Thirteenth Ward leader reported that her distributor provided coal “in tubs and wash-boilers on sleds” to families in her West Wide ward. Other distributors bought coal in large lots at discounted prices to sell at cost to neighborhood families who had previously been forced to purchase small quantities of coal daily at exorbitant prices from commercial yards and “cart the coal home on sleds, wagons and in baby carriages,” the IWC’s Fuel Conservation Department reported. During the shortage, IWC fuel distributors received and filled 16,339 orders for coal from families in their wards.

While the war exacerbated the coal shortage, the wartime connection to another IWC concern—child welfare—was more tenuous. IWC leaders argued that “the care of the nation’s children was, in reality, a war measure”

Chicago women participated in the war effort in a variety of ways. Above: Women tend a large Chicago victory garden, 1918.

Below: A supporter collects donations from city drivers, 1918.

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When the war caused a national coal shortage in 1918, the IWC organized a fuel distribution program for Chicago families. This poster (above) urges coal conservation by keeping thermostats at 68 degrees. Opposite: An unexpected task for the IWC erupted when the draft revealed that many of the country’s young men were undernourished. In response, the IWC developed a “child welfare” effort, beginning with weighing and measuring Chicago’s babies, assisted by the Infant Welfare Society.

because so many of the young men drafted had proven to be in poor condition due to inadequate childhood health care. “The war and its emergencies,” stated Alice Wood, the head of the IWC child welfare program, caused the nation to realize that “not one of our concerns can be regarded individually, but as they contribute to or take from the well being of the Nation.” Thus, she believed, societal causes of children’s health problems “can no longer be looked upon as mere individual difficulties, but as serious factors which rob the Nation of its vitality.” This perspective underscored the design of the IWC Child Welfare Department’s float in the city’s October 1918 Liberty Loan parade. On the float, “Motherhood sat enthroned, surrounded by children of various ages, and holding the infant in her arms, while Uncle Sam stood at the rear, proud of his children and protecting the motherhood and childhood of the Nation.” Lest anyone miss the point, signs on either side of the float proclaimed, “The Hope of America—Her Children” and “The Chief Asset of the Nation—the Child.”

IWC members embraced every opportunity to educate Chicagoans about children’s health care. They displayed educational child welfare exhibits at locations around Chicago, including stores, parks, government buildings, and settlement houses, and put up posters in downtown stores, Western Union stations, hotels, elevated train sta30 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

tions, banks, and libraries. The IWC’s Second Ward unit, located south of the Loop, sponsored a child welfare exhibit in the Eighth Regiment Armory in June 1918, while members of the Fourteenth Ward unit distributed childcare literature to families in their West Side neighborhoods. In the Sixth Ward, home of the University of Chicago, the women took a more personal approach, meeting with neighborhood mothers to demonstrate and discuss children’s nutritional needs. They concluded that because “the discussion lasted two hours . . . it is evident that the mothers were being helped, or they would not have lingered so long.” IWC volunteers later helped several of the mothers obtain free medical care for undernourished children.

In 1918, Chicago women participated in a national “Children’s Year” campaign organized by the U.S. Children’s Bureau to weigh and measure all children under six years old to help identify those who were malnourished. In Chicago, the campaign was aided by the city’s Infant Welfare Society, Department of Health, the Visiting Nurse Association, Parent-Teacher Organizations, the Federation of Day Nurseries, and the Settlement Association of Chicago, among others. In some cases, the women took their campaign to central locations where they expected to find families. Weighing and measuring was done “at the Lion house in Lincoln

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Women collect books for U.S. soldiers at the Chicago Public Library, 1917.

Park,” according to IWC leaders; “here, right in the neighborhood of the wild beasts from the forests, mothers sought to know the real condition of their small children from the trained nurse who was in attendance.”

The campaign also appeared at the September 1918 War Exposition organized by the State Council of Defense.

Although exposition organizers initially asked the IWC Child Welfare Department to provide only brief demonstrations of the weighing and measuring test during the two-week military exhibition at Grant Park, “the moment the crowd in front of the stage realized what was going on,” Wood reported, “there was an enthusiastic response and everybody’s child was being handed up to be weighed and measured.” She continued, “Surprising though it may seem, even amidst the attractions of the War Exposition, the mock battle with its booming of cannon and the flights of the airplanes,” the IWC “constantly [had] an interested crowd in front of the stage during these demonstrations.” Before long, “We were asked to have a demonstration every day and finally, to have it continuously during the entire afternoon” each day for the remainder of the two weeks. IWC volunteers weighed and measured nearly six hundred children at the War Exposition.

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The women in Chicago’s thirty-five IWC ward units carried out most of the work in this campaign. Each ward unit’s child welfare committee set up weighing and measuring stations (usually at schools, churches, settlement houses, or IWC ward offices) and arranged for volunteers to help. After the volunteers had weighed and measured tens of thousands of Chicago children, the women in a number of ward units scheduled follow-up conferences with the parents of undernourished children.

The IWC units took their responsibility for promoting the health of the city’s preschool children seriously. The women of the Twenty-first Ward conducted a “house-tohouse canvass of thirty precincts” just north of the Loop “to secure information and advertise the weighing and measuring stations.” According to their report, fifteen hundred children were recorded. In the West Side’s Twentieth Ward, volunteers reported undertaking “a canvass of the homes of all children under par” and arranging follow-up visits with health care professionals.

In the Seventh Ward, south of Hyde Park, volunteers from the IWC maintained “Child Welfare Stations” in two schools for two days each week throughout the summer of 1918. The IWC was particularly pleased when the efforts of its volunteers led the city’s Infant

Welfare Society to expand its permanent charitable program to include health care for children from two to six years old.

The IWC’s concern with the city’s youth did not end at age six. In July 1917, the IWC Executive Committee expressed concern about “objectionable or idle women and indiscreet girls” consorting with trainees at Chicago’s several military training camps. Women’s health care reformer Dr. Rachelle Yarros, who led the IWC’s Social Hygiene Department, visited a Chicagoarea military facility and reported that she “found several girls sitting on the bunks in the tents with the soldiers reclining, and some coarse women were walking around teasing and calling out to the soldiers who were in the process of shaving or washing.” She was appalled that these young women had “every opportunity for flirting and making engagements for evening rendezvous.” Early in 1918, the IWC decided to “mobilize the young woman power of Illinois for profitable use of their leisure time,” according to the organization’s Final Report.

IWC leaders attempted to prevent consorting in the camps by educating Chicago’s young working women about the “prevalence and dangers of venereal diseases and their underlying cause, prostitution.” Convinced that “in order to uphold a single and high standard of morals, women and girls must learn more about themselves physically, morally, [and] mentally,” Yarros arranged for IWC-sponsored presentations on “Social Morality in War Time” to groups of working women.

More than twenty-two thousand young women attended these programs at their places of employment. IWC leaders made similar presentations at schools, churches, women’s clubs, and settlements, as well as a few IWC ward offices.

IWC ward unit leaders also created subsections of the IWC’s Patriotic Service League (PSL) to organize and supervise service, educational, and recreational activities for young women during the war. In Chicago, more than forty-five hundred teenage girls participated in twentynine units of the IWC’s PSL. Service activities included

The War Department launched a major campaign to help prevent soldiers from contracting venereal diseases. This brochure calls these diseases “the greatest menace to the vitality and fighting vigor of any army.” The IWC educated Chicago’s young working women about these same threats in presentations on “Social Morality in War Time.”

Girls, We Must Enlist! | 33

knitting and sewing for the Red Cross, holding patriotic rallies, and raising money for various drives. They also took first aid and home nursing classes and attended the IWC lectures on the dangers of venereal disease. Their recreational activities included folk dancing, dramatics, and community singing. According to Mary L. Langworthy, who chaired the IWC’s Girls’ Recreation Department and supervised the PSL citywide, “Military drill proved a splendid thing for the girls, both from the physical standpoint and that of discipline.”

One PSL ward leader reported that her two hundred members “assisted in the different drives, established a barrel for fruit pits and nut shells [for use in gas masks], bought a $50 Liberty Bond, made scrap books for Base Hospitals, [and] collected graphophone [sic] records for Home army Hospitals.” The young women of this northwest Chicago ward also gathered information on men asking to be excused from the draft for the local exemption board. In the First Ward, located downtown, the three-hundred-member PSL unit “raised a service flag at Hardin Square,” which IWC leaders saw as particularly “significant because of the participation of many nationalities” at a time when many of their homelands were at war with each other. To show their support for the war, The Patriotic Service League focused on younger women’s efforts during the war. This PSL recruitment poster (left) offered health talks and recreational classes for the patriotic volunteers. Below: Margaret Pirie and C. Dunham roll bandages, 1916. Opposite: Posters such as this one from the U.S. Food Administration encouraged homefront participation in the war effort.

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The slogan “Food Will Win the War� appeared on posters and billboards throughout the city.

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four thousand teenage girls representing PSL units from across the city attended a mass rally in May 1918 at Chicago’s two-year-old Municipal Pier (later renamed Navy Pier). Later that year, four hundred PSL members marched in the city’s Liberty Loan parade. In a 1918 pamphlet, IWC leaders expressed their conviction that “wholesome recreation” for young women was a “splendid substitute for flirtation.” Their approach seemed vindicated when “the most interesting thing” they observed at a 1918 community songfest attended by three thousand PSL members was “that in no instance did any girl stay to talk or flirt with the boys.”

More mature Chicago women became involved in the IWC’s wartime food conservation program. In the words of a 1918 IWC pamphlet, “Women can do no greater work than they can do in their homes” to support the war by conserving food to help feed the country’s military and its allies. Since IWC state leaders considered Illinois “essentially a corn producing state,” they organized a variety of temporary educational programs and demonstrations in Chicago, including “Corn Kitchens” and “Corn Shows,” to help women use corn to conserve wheat. The IWC sponsored a citywide Corn Show in a vacant Loop store for six days in early November 1917, attended by more than thirty thousand people, followed by neighborhood Corn Shows in several schools, stores, and a local hall.

Eventually, Corn Kitchens grew into more general “Food Shows,” with exhibits illustrating the conservation of meat, fat, and sugar, as well as wheat. In January 1918, the IWC cooperated with the State Council of Defense’s Food Production and Conservation Committee on a citywide “Patriotic Food Show” held in the Chicago Coliseum, where the IWC exhibited different wartime food substitutes. Despite two large snowstorms during the show, approximately 125,000 people watched the demonstrations and visited the displays. Later that year, the IWC Finance Department spread the food conservation message by making and selling five-cent bags of “Liberty Chips” (sliced potatoes fried in vegetable oil), reporting to the IWC’s Advisory Committee that “the absorption of the vegetable oil by the potatoe [sic] makes a most nutritious food and is said to be a perfect substitute for wheat.” The women raised more than seven thousand dollars in just three days during their citywide Liberty Chip campaign; Louise deKoven Bowen, the statewide leader of the IWC, recalled that her photograph was taken as she “wheeled a peddler’s cart full of Liberty Chips up and down the block” on LaSalle Street.

Other programs targeted specific audiences. Reflecting her upper-class perspective, Bowen claimed, “Many of us had found that we had great difficulty with our cooks” in regard to conserving food. As a result, the IWC held a meeting at the Auditorium Theater “exclusively for the

As a corn-producing state, Illinois featured a campaign to save wheat by planning to “Eat More Corn” (above). Below: Advertising campaigns appealed to women’s patriotism and encouraged them to fight the war in their homes.

cooks of the city” at which “patriotic speeches were made concerning the necessity of conserving certain foods.” She noted, “The effect of this meeting was most gratifying. Cooks, after all, are as patriotic as anyone else, and when the part they could play in the conservation of food was put before them, they arose to the occasion and Girls, We Must Enlist! | 37

Many kitchen demonstration fairs featured food preservation methods to help the war effort. This Patriotic Food Show in 1918 offered tips on canning.

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Girls, We Must Enlist! | 39

Women packed demonstration booths at Food Show events to learn how to save food for the war effort.

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did their very best to use the substitutes recommended” by the IWC and U.S. Food Administration.

In July 1918, the IWC kicked off a weeklong citywide “food conservation drive” aimed at immigrant women with a parade through the Loop district, including “fifty workers in Hoover Costume” (named for U.S. Food Administrator Herbert Hoover) followed by “four model kitchen trucks, fully equipped for demonstrating and manned by domestic science experts.” One IWC leader reported, “Speeches were made on the busiest corners from the model kitchen trucks, and pamphlets and recipes were distributed by the workers” to parade watchers. After the parade, the IWC drove three of the trucks to settlement houses in “the poorer districts of the City” to continue the demonstrations, with translations when necessary. At Hull-House, the demonstrations continued weekly for some time after the citywide drive ended. Bowen later estimated that in “the foreign parts of the city” the IWC “reached hundreds of thousands of women who tasted our corn bread and took away our little pamphlets with the recipes for making bread out of materials other than . . . flour.” An estimated six hundred thousand people visited the September 1918 War

Exposition food conservation booth, where IWC demonstrations, its Americanization Department reported, included nine programs “given in costume while various foreign-language groups demonstrated war food cooked by native recipes.”

In addition to these occasional short-term programs, the IWC established an ongoing Food Conservation Bureau (FCB) in downtown Chicago, which operated at the Carson Pirie Scott store during the summer and fall of 1918. This free public demonstration center included an “Experimental Kitchen,” in which “new sugarless and wheatless recipes were worked out almost every day by the clever baker in full view of the public,” according to FCB organizer Mae Press Hodgkins, so that “many people were for the first time convinced that conservation food could be made palatable.” She also noted that the Woman’s Committee gave away thousands of recipes, “all thoroughly tested in the Experimental Kitchen,” to the thousands of people who visited the FCB each week. Twice each day the FCB’s “Model Kitchen” demonstrated how to prepare such delicacies as “wheatless pastry” and “sugarless confections” as well as how to use “meat extenders” and other wartime substi-

This display at the 1918 Patriotic Food Show stressed cooperation between the United States and its allies as a way to diminish the hardships and burdens of war.

Girls, We Must Enlist! | 41

tute ingredients. Meanwhile, the Bureau’s Bake Shop, selling conservation products made at the FCB, proved unexpectedly profitable because of the high demand for its patriotic concoctions. In total, approximately sixty thousand people visited the Food Conservation Bureau during its six-month existence.

Women in many of Chicago’s IWC ward units also participated in neighborhood food conservation activities by distributing literature, demonstrating cooking with wartime substitute ingredients, or sponsoring “graphic food exhibits showing the substitute food rations, [and] canning, drying and salting” techniques at ward offices, stores, settlement houses, and women’s clubs, according to Elizabeth Allen, head of the IWC’s food conservation program in Chicago. Louise deKoven Bowen estimated that these ward unit programs reached 205,000 women. The Sixth Ward, home to the University of Chicago, sponsored a food show that included posters made by local schoolchildren; the unit also installed a kitchen in its office “where canning was done for the community with the help of University students,” the ward leader reported, and “community dinners were supplied bi-weekly to 38 families.” According to the IWC’s weekly report to the State Council of Defense, the Woman’s Committee ward units also distributed hundreds of thousands of “Hoover pledge cards” for the U.S. Food Administration; women signing the cards promised to follow Hoover’s food conservation directions and advice. In the Twenty-second Ward, northwest of the Loop, IWC volunteers helped explain the meaning and purpose of the pledge cards to immigrant homemakers and provided war-time cooking demonstrations and classes. When ward units offered food conservation cooking classes to immigrant mothers at their neighborhood schools, the women often “came in large numbers and with them their children,”

Department stores offered their windows to promote the food conservation effort. Above: This 1918 Carson Pirie Scott window display highlights a soldier’s rations for one year. Right: A State Street window featuring Uncle Sam displays the need for sugar, meat, and wheat.

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Girls, We Must Enlist! | 43

Recipe books offered new ways to cook food without commodities such as wheat or meat.

Two Red Cross volunteers sell recipe books, 1917.

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Defense Councils distributed food conservation recipes, including how to make bread from potatoes and how to use trimmed fat from meat.

according to IWC leaders. At one school, “The result was chaos,” with more than one hundred children “of assorted ages and sizes playing around underfoot while the distracted Domestic Science teacher with the aid of an interpreter tried to teach cooking to these Italian, Polish, and Lithowanian [sic] mothers.”

The women in the IWC’s Chicago ward units also volunteered for projects not directly supervised by statelevel IWC departments. Many sought opportunities to support neighborhood servicemen and their families.

Women in many ward units provided hospitality for soldiers and sailors, knit clothing items for them, visited their families, and helped neighborhood women secure their husbands’ and sons’ military allotments. In the stockyards district, the Thirty-second Ward’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Committee reported that it “placed many boys in homes for the week-end” and especially “for Sunday dinners,” while in the neighboring Thirty-third Ward “lunches were supplied to soldiers; their families assisted; dinners given in their honor; Christmas presents sent them.” These women also reported sending Girls, We Must Enlist! | 45

Longtime Chicago activist and statewide leader of the IWC Louise deKoven Bowen estimated that the IWC ward programs reached more than two hundred thousand women.

“Victrola records and magazines” to soldiers in a nearby training camp and delivering Christmas baskets to the ward’s “needy widows.” The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Committee of the IWC’s West Side Eleventh Ward unit “took as its chief work the writing of letters to men in the service for families who could not write English.” These women also gave local families information on military allotments and life insurance, and, when necessary, referred them to the appropriate government or charitable agency for further assistance. The members of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Committee in the Thirtieth Ward, west of Hyde Park, “called on the families of men whose names appeared in the casualty lists, and wrote letters for families to men in service.” In the Twenty-first Ward, just north of the Loop, the women’s Service Flag Committee paid a “Call of Honor” on all “families of men in the service.”

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Toward the end of the war, IWC members provided vital assistance to the city’s residents during the horrific and deadly influenza epidemic of 1918. Influenza struck down hundreds of thousands of Americans and tens of millions worldwide. The IWC mobilized several of its state-level departments to help the city cope with the terrifying emergency. The IWC Registration Department used Chicago women’s wartime volunteer registration cards to identify women who could help its Volunteer Placement Department prepare and mail ten thousand letters “asking for help in the care of those ill with influenza.” The latter department reported in October 1918 that “fully half of this month has been taken up getting nurses, nurses aids [sic], visiting housekeepers and automobiles for the different relief agencies in their efforts to combat the epidemic of influenza.” The IWC’s Motor Corps provided the city’s Visiting Nurse Association with extra cars and drivers during the flu epidemic. The IWC Social Service Department sent thirtyfive women to the Woman’s City Club for “Influenza Work” in November, and the Child Welfare Department fielded requests for volunteers to cook, clean, and provide child care. The Food Conservation Bureau ran an emergency soup kitchen, sending soup “in large quantities to the Settlements and to individual families,” according to the FCB’s Hodgkins. During the two weeks when the epidemic was at its worst, “about 35 families a day were taken care of,” Hodgkins reported, stressing that “in many instances the workers went into the homes and administered personally to the patients,” which was considered particularly heroic, since the contagious influenza ultimately killed more than eighty-five hundred Chicagoans in less than two months.

Meanwhile, the Food Conservation Department reported that IWC ward units were using their headquarters offices to cook and distribute food to families fighting the flu, and women in at least twenty Woman’s Committee ward units operated canteens, provided soup, gave nursing care to the ill and dying, or lent automobiles to transport people and supplies. In the Fourteenth Ward, for example, West Side women “supplied food to the influenza sufferers, and also furnished people who went into the homes to assist with the care of the sick,” while to the east in the Seventeenth Ward, home of both Chicago Commons and the Northwestern University Settlement, “soup and other nourishing food was delivered to the neighbors, and a corps of volunteers went into the homes to care for the patients.” In the city’s Thirty-second Ward, Woman’s Committee members in the stockyards district “helped with the hospital and soup kitchen at the University of Chicago Settlement” and provided automobiles to help with food distribution; they also helped care for the infants of their ward’s ill mothers.

The IWC mobilized once again to help the city during the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918. Red Cross women volunteers in Chicago made influenza masks.

Girls, We Must Enlist! | 47

48 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

After the war, the IWC encouraged continued patriotic involvement. Opposite: IWC leader Louise deKoven Bowen solicited “Victory Loan” contributions to help the defense fund. Above: An advertisement for a 1919 reconstruction lecture at the Congress Hotel.

After the epidemic abated and the fighting ended, the IWC remained active in Chicago until March 1919, when virtually all of its ward units decided to join the Woman’s City Club (WCC), the municipal reform organization to which most IWC ward and state leaders already belonged. The ward-based organization of the city’s women continued through that club, with the former head of the IWC Girls’ Recreation Department, Mary L. Langworthy, chairing the WCC’s “ward work” in the postwar period.

According to reformer Hannah J. Solomon, wartime coordinator of Chicago’s IWC ward units, “the spur of war made possible a new degree and a new kind of organization, unlimited in potentialities” of the women in Chicago’s wards. Teresa Mellender, who chaired the IWC’s Eleventh Ward unit, agreed, observing that “in many respects” her West Side ward, which had been “before the war unworked territory” had, as a result of the Woman’s Committee’s wartime organizing, “developed a civic consciousness which bids fair to be permanent.” Echoing the thoughts of many other ward leaders, Mrs. C. C. Broomell commented that the women in her Thirty-third Ward, “not only worked for national undertakings but also took a keen interest in conditions in the ward,” an interest that did not end with the war. Throughout the postwar era, increasing numbers of Chicago women continued to work through their ward organizations, now folded into the Woman’s City Club, to create “a better community life” in their city.

Virginia R. Boynton is an associate professor of history at Western Illinois University.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 26 and 27 top, courtesy of Illinois State Archives; 27 bottom, CHS, DN-0069337; 28 top, CHS, The Chicago Women’s Club Bulletin, May 1918; 28 bottom, courtesy of Illinois State Archives; 29 top, CHS, DN-0070398; 29 bottom, CHS, DN-0070564; 30, courtesy of Illinois State Archives; 31, CHS, ICHi-007350; 32, CHS, DN-0068144; 33 left and right, courtesy of Illinois State Archives; 34 top, courtesy of Illinois State Archives; 34 bottom, CHS, DN-0066635; 35–43, courtesy of Illinois State Archives; 44, CHS, DN0069507; 45, courtesy of the Illinois State Archives; 46, CHS, ICHi-09570; 47, CHS, DN-070539; 48–49, courtesy of the Illinois State Archives.

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the

women’s war effort during World War I, see Rosie’s Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of the First World War by Carrie Brown (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002); American Women in World War I: They Also Served by Lettie Gavin (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1997); and Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars by Margaret R. Higonnet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). The archives of the Illinois Woman’s Club are located in the Illinois State Archives in Springfield. The records of the Chicago Woman’s Club can be accessed in the Chicago Historical Society Research Center.

Girls, We Must Enlist! | 49

Chicago’s Global Communities P E T E R T. A LT E R Editor’s Note: As part of a project titled Global Communities, more than fifty recent immigrants were interviewed for the Chicago Historical Society. These interviews offer a glimpse into the lives of various men and women from India, Mexico, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam. Dr. Nhi T. Lieu conducted this interview for the Global Communities project.

Tam Van Nguyen

T

am Van Nguyen was born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1943 and grew up there.

Starting in 1962, Van Nguyen attended universities in Saigon and Da Lat. He graduated with a degree in business administration and was mobilized into the South Vietnamese military and became an officer. In 1971, after serving for two years, Van Nguyen took military leave and became a professor at a university in Long Xuyen. He worked at this university until 1975 when the North Vietnamese communists captured Saigon. Currently, he works at the Vietnamese Association of Illinois where he runs the Community Economic Development Program.

50 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

CHS: What happened to you after the fall of Saigon in 1975?

The Vietnamese communist government called all of the former Vietnamese military officers to come for reeducation. If you didn’t go, you were living illegally.

They brought me to the camp in Tay Ninh province, west of Saigon by about 100 kilometers. I spent about four years in different camps in Tay Ninh. That was lucky for me. Some of my friends moved from Tay Ninh to another camp to another camp to the islands in the North. It was very hard. Myself, I was very lucky. They just let me stay in different camps around Tay Ninh, even though they put me in the forest, a very, very dense jungle.

Tam Van Nguyen in his office at the Vietnamese Association of Illinois, a nonprofit community-based mutual assistance association founded by and for the Vietnamese people.

These decorative musical instruments, donated to the Chicago Historical Society by Ly Pham, are miniature representations of ones that have been popular in classical Vietnamese music for centuries.

Van Nguyen received less than one day’s leave from the military to attend his graduation from Da Lat University in 1968. He wore his army khakis and boots under his cap and gown. Shortly after graduation, he then participated in the defense against the North Vietnamese attack known as the Tet Offensive.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 51

What was the purpose of these reeducation camps?

My understanding of the reeducation camps was to try to concentrate all former military officers in the camps and to exact revenge for some of the fighting.

Government officials thought if they didn’t do that, then maybe the former military officers would have this tie: they could get together again. This would make it very hard to maintain the security for the nation and to govern the country. They tried to filter who was good and who was the best. Most of us were highly educated.

They thought they could use our brains, our intelligence, our backgrounds for the government, but to select us they used the camps. In the camps, the government decided who the good guys for them to use were and who weren’t the good guys for them to use.

What were these reeducation camps like?

These lacquer panels with mother of pearl inlay represent the four fundamental activities in Vietnamese culture: fishing, cutting wood, rice farming, and herding livestock.

They didn’t set the time for release. It was unlimited, infinite. They would say, “We don’t know when we can release you.” That was very, very terrible. The first time they’d come, and they’d say, “About ten days or one month until you will be released.” Then we’d still believe that. Then after that they’d say, “Okay, up until you are a good detainee.” I didn’t know what the definition of a good detainee was. They had two things in the camp. One was labor. The other looked like meetings. They brainwashed us with the ideology of Karl Marx, Lenin, communism, socialism, many things. Almost every month, they called us, and everyone went into the auditorium or the hall. And they talked about everything.

How long were you in the reeducation camps?

Four years, then I escaped. After four years, we waited for release. I felt hopeless so I had to make a choice.

Either I die or I survive outside. I made the decision, so I said, “Okay, the time has come.” But before that I learned from many different prisoners who had escaped, and they survived outside easily. Every month relatives came to the camps to visit and to supply food for the detainees in the camp. Every month my sister came, and I asked her to study for me how to escape and survive outside in Saigon and how to get transportation from the camp to Saigon.

And to find out who could help us to escape from the camp, and what papers we would need. Because when we escaped from the camp, we tried to change our identities. That means, how could we get the papers for a new identity? So I asked my sister, and she said “Oh easy, just pay ten dollars for illegal identification papers.” I also asked my sister if she could look for some location where I could stay. The com-

52 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

Above: The Administrative Committee Election in Pulau Tengah Refugee Camp in Malaysia, August 30, 1980. Van Nguyen (in the center in a striped shirt) was “chairman of the council of camp leaders” for about three-and-half months. Below: Van Nguyen with his friends at the Malaysian refugee camp. All of the refugees in this photograph eventually reached the United States.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 53

munist government would go house to house and maybe arrest the owner of a house where escaped prisoners stayed.

How did you escape?

One day my sister said, “I met four people who agree to give refuge after you escape. That is a certainty.”

My sister had a friend who lived in Tay Ninh, and he knew much about the streets in Tay Ninh, and he agreed to meet me in front of the camp to pick me up and take me to Saigon. I had to make a decision. I said, “Okay, next month.” I told my sister the day and time I would be going from inside the camp to the front of the camp to wait for my sister’s friend to come to pick me up to go to Saigon. In the early morning, everyone would be going outside for labor.

Lucky for me, I was the leader of one group. The chief of the camp let me go in and out freely, no escort. Therefore, I relied on that to help me make my decision. At that time when I came in front of the gate, I just looked around. My sister’s friend saw me and we went on to Saigon. At that time, I changed my

clothes too. I wore those clothes on the way to Saigon. I escaped, and I lived in my sister’s friend’s house for most of the month, then another house for one month. Then I moved around, living for one week, two weeks, you know. I didn’t stay long. One week, two weeks, one month.

When did you leave Vietnam?

After about six months, one day about five in the afternoon, my sister came to me, and told me, “Tam, you prepare to leave at about 6:00 tonight. I will come back to pick you up to go to the river, and we will go down to the boat to escape from Vietnam.” She had a connection with her friend and his group. That group organized many different boats to leave Saigon, very successfully. We had to pay the organizer. At 6:00, my sister came to pick me up. Then about half an hour later the organizer came and said, “Now, we are ready to go!” And he took me to the boat on the Saigon River. Then, they put me down at the bottom of the boat. About nine or ten o’clock in the evening they started to leave. Then they stopped again.

Van Nguyen (left) in a processing camp in Malaysia in 1980, where he waited for “papers for the airfare, for tickets, and for new clothing for going to the U.S.A.” 54 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

In the morning, they started to go to the ocean. They went straight from Saigon to Vung Tau, and then to the ocean. But sometimes the police caught the boats. And all the people in the boat were very scared, because all of us could be arrested. But they covered us. On the top of the boat, they put furniture and vegetables, fruit, everything. Then they let the police know our boat was for transportation. We were the transportation for the food. “Okay, go ahead,” the police said. And we went.

We went to Vung Tau to go to the ocean, then we cleared everything out from the top, the furniture for the trip, and dumped it into the ocean.

What was the boat journey like?

We spent about three nights and four days on the ocean from Vung Tau to Malaysia. And sometimes we had hurricanes and typhoons! When I lay down on the bottom of the boat, I heard the sound of the wood: crack, crack. I said, “Oh, it is broken!” And that was very scary. In the nighttime, when you go to the platform of the boat, the sky is dark, very, very dark. And you look out at the sky and the sea, very dark too. High waves. And the boat follows the waves. Sometimes the boat went down in the bottom of the wave and then went up like that. High above, ten meters, twenty meters, high like that. And the boat, pop, pop, pop went the wood. Very scary. And we went to breathe the fresh air and use the bathroom. Every trip you use the night with no moon so the communist police cannot find you so it’s very dark in the sky and dark on the sea too. Crazy. My boat had about seventy to seventy-five people. The boat was about eleven meters long and about four meters wide, very small. On the bottom of the boat, sometimes we could not lie down. I was scared up until I came to the islands near the refugee camp in Malaysia. Then I sent mail back to my family. I wrote my sister, “Never, never do it. Very dangerous. Just wait in Vietnam. I will find another way.”

What did you do in the refugee camp in Malaysia?

The refugees did many different things. It depended on what your profession was. If you were a doctor, they had a medical clinic. You worked in there, but no salary. They gave you extra food. At that time, my friend was the president of the camp. They had a committee to run the camp, for food, logistics, papers, interviews, for everything. He told me, “I am leaving next week for the U.S.A. I will try to promote you to my position. You can do that?” I said, “No problem, I am not tired out. If I have something to do, that is okay for me.” Then they called a committee meeting, and they interviewed me for the

committee. I was elected chairman of the refugee camp. I worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I worked with other delegations from other countries. I also had power. If someone violated camp rules, I would sit as the judge.

How did you leave the refugee camp in Malaysia?

I spent about one year in the [relocation] camp, just waiting for interviews, for paperwork in order to come to this country. Many delegations from different countries came to the camp for interviews to see who was eligible to come and live in their countries: France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, the U.S.A., and some other small countries, like Belgium.

At that time, I just had a relative in the U.S.A., my aunt. And also when I went to the camp, the refugee camp, many Vietnamese military people told me, “If you were an officer, you will have the first priority to go to the U.S.A. You should also go to be with your relative.” But I waited too long.

Living in the camp was very terrible. I tried to leave early to start a new life. The process took a long time, too long. The Canadian delegation came to the refugee camp, and I changed my mind. I wanted to go to Canada, not the U.S.A. They told me “No, you should be sponsored by the U.S.A.” But I told them, “I waited too long. Even though I have a relative in the U.S.A.” One month later, the delegation from the U.S.A. came, and they interviewed me, and said then I could go. That’s very lucky for me. I spent another two months in another camp, a processing camp, papers for the airfare, for tickets, and for new clothing for going to the U.S.A. Where did you settle in the United States?

I first came to Santa Ana, in southern California. My aunt sponsored me, so I came there first. I stayed with her for about five months. At that time, I was just single, no family. I needed rest. But I didn’t have direction. Which way should I go? I had many friends in California. They met with me. They came to southern California in 1975 immediately after the fall of Saigon. They had a business there too. They recommended me to do that. But I said I didn’t want to work. My goal at that time was not to work. I wanted to go back to school.

You moved to Pittsburgh and then Chicago. Why did you move to Chicago?

When I moved to Pittsburgh, I heard about an education program called the National Education Coalition. They had a special program for refugees.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 55

Then I came here. And my friend who already lived in Chicago asked, “Why did you come here?” And I said, “Oh, I came here for this program.” I met many different friends who came to this program too. My friend also said, “The program is good for you. But you cannot survive on just that.” I did many different jobs, cleaning and work-study in school. The work was janitorial, cleaning up, vacuuming, picking up, cleaning the windows, something like that. Almost two and half years until I finished. I graduated from Northeastern Illinois University in 1987. Then the Vietnamese Association of Illinois job opened up.

In the early to mid-1980s, many Vietnamese refugees settled in Chicago’s Uptown community. What was Uptown like then?

Van Nguyen received a Thomas Jefferson Award in 2002, sponsored by the American Institute for Public Service and local partners. These awards honor those who work to better their communities through volunteer and area services. Below: At the ceremony, Van Nguyen (right) posed with his family and Art Norman (second from left) of NBC-5 WMAQ-TV.

Lucky for us, there was little business competition for local people here. The reason was that no one wanted to live in this area. Everyone was scared of this area.

When we came here, whatever we did, whenever we did it, nobody cared. The city government thinks, “Okay, you just go ahead, because that looks like a vacant area. You develop that.” We were doing business here because we didn’t know much about the whole city. We just settled here, and we knew that the rent was cheap and the location was good. When most of the Vietnamese community came here, most of the resettlement agencies settled us around here. This made it easy for us to communicate, to walk around, to shop around. If we were spread out, that would be much harder. That’s the reason why the Vietnamese people made the decision to start in this area.

How do you feel about your life in Vietnam compared to your life in Chicago?

This is not our country. At least at the time that I came, it was not my language. I have to accept the new situation that we have now. Who are you where you are standing over here? You should define who you are [by] where you are standing. I define myself.

I forget the old memory in the past. That’s a different story. This is a new beginning, a new story. That’s how I define my life. My sister, when she came here, she was depressed all the time. She had a lot in Vietnam. When she came here she lost everything, and now she’s depressed.

If you want to stay here, you should define again for yourself, who are you? What are you in this country?

Sometimes, I advise in my orientation class people who are in the United States for the first time. I tell them, “Your story is my story. You come here today like me ten years ago. Today, I stand before you after

56 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

The Vietnamese New Year comes at the beginning of the Western year. Chicago’s Tet New Year Celebration has taken place at the Broadway Armory for the last several years and features entertainment, including martial arts demonstrations, lion dancing (above), and gambling.

ten years of hard work with struggling. You were luckier than me. You were a military official; so was I. You were in a reeducation camp; so was I, but you are luckier than me. You come from Vietnam over here with your whole family on a plane. I came from Vietnam over here as a boat person, very dangerous and risky. And I came by myself, leaving my family behind, and I escaped from prison. You were not foolish like that. I was, but you should forget everything in the past like myself. Now, you start from the beginning to build your new life.”

Peter T. Alter is a curator at the Chicago Historical Society and the project coordinator for Global Communities.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 50, CHS; 51, courtesy of Tam Van Nguyen; 52, CHS; 53–54, courtesy of Tam Van Nguyen; 56 top, article reprint courtesy of Harris Bank, sponsor of the 2002 Jefferson Awards; 56 bottom, courtesy of Tam Van Nguyen; 57, CHS.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 57

Chicago Natives: Interviews with Edward A. Brennan and Carole Simpson T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

B

orn in Chicago and reared in modest, middle-class families, Edward A. Brennan and Carole Simpson both rose to the pinnacles of their professions. Simpson is regarded as the first African American woman television reporter in Chicago and the first woman of color to perform anchor duties on a major television network.

Behind the television screen, she has proven to be equally influential by challenging national media outlets to make policy changes regarding employee relations, hiring, and pay equity. Brennan, now the chairman of AMR Corporation (the holding company of American Airlines), personified Sears, Roebuck & Company, the American retail giant for most of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1956, selling furniture at a Sears store in Wisconsin, Brennan moved almost a dozen times to other Sears positions and stores before ascending to the chairmanship of the firm from 1986 to 1997. He is, in the words of former Sears president A. Dean Swift, “the last of a kind.”

Edward A. Brennan was born in Chicago on January 16, 1934, at Lewis Memorial Maternity Hospital on South Michigan Avenue, the son of native Chicagoans Edward J. and Margaret (Bourget) Brennan. Growing up in suburban Oak Park, Brennan initially resided at 503 South Lyman Avenue and then 732 South Elmwood Avenue. The house on Lyman was just two blocks west of Austin Boulevard. “We were right on the streetcar line,” remembers Brennan, “so that you could get on the Chicago streetcar and come downtown.” Like many middle-class, Catholic children, Brennan attended the local parochial schools, St. Catherine of Siena for elementary school and then Fenwick High School.

58 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

Edward A. Brennan received the Marshall Field History Maker Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation in 2003.

Carole Simpson received the Joseph Medill History Maker Award for Distinction in Journalism and Communications in 2003.

Brennan describes a childhood with a high level of physical freedom. “We were very mobile. We spent a lot of time wandering around the city. In those days, it was common.” His mobility eventually extended far beyond Chicago.

After his parents divorced, his mother moved to Mexico. “My brother and I did go to Mexico a number of times for a month or so in the summer,” recounts Brennan. “The first time, we went we took the train from Chicago.

The next four times, we took the Greyhound Bus, so we learned a lot about the world. Mexico is a long way away, but in those days, it looked like the other side of the moon.”

Carole Simpson was born in St. Luke’s Hospital on December 7, 1940, to Lytle Ray and Doretha Viola (Wilbon) Simpson. “I was born on the South Side of Chicago,” recounts Simpson. “My mother was from a small town— Washington, Georgia—and my father was from Terre Haute, Indiana.” The Simpson family resided at Sixty-fourth Street and Maryland Avenue in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Simpson attended local public schools Wadsworth Elementary School and Hyde Park High School. Simpson remem-

Simpson grew up in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Above: South Maryland Avenue, c. 1985.

Making History | 59

bers how both her neighborhood and schools were integrated. “I had Chinese friends. I had Jewish friends. Growing up in an integrated environment in those times—in the forties and fifties—gave me a whole different perspective than that of my relatives in the South, who were frightened of white people,” she explains. “They couldn’t—and I couldn’t—understand it.”

Simpson credits her parents with providing the foundation for her success.

“I came from working-class parents, informally educated, but with a strong sense of education for their two daughters.” Simpson’s father worked for the postal service and her mother took in sewing. “I can remember sitting at her feet—she had an old Singer sewing machine—pumping that pedal,” Simpson remembers. “I would sit at her feet, and she had me write my ABCs. Before I went to school, I knew how to spell my name and knew my ABCs and could write them.” Simpson’s parents impressed upon her the importance of education early on. “We were going to have the chance they never had. There was never any question of going to college. I’m very grateful to have had parents that saw the value of education and how it could change circumstances in life.”

When it came time for college, Brennan chose Marquette University in Milwaukee. “I wanted to leave Chicago,” Brennan admits. “I wanted to get away from home. My father was a buyer for Sears, and we didn’t have a lot of money.” Marquette also allowed him to work part-time while attending college. In high school, Brennan had worked for Benson & Rixon, a local department store in Oak Park. “They bought a store in Milwaukee just at the time I went to Marquette, so I ended up going to work there.” Brennan says that he probably spent more time in the store than the classroom, working throughout the summer and at Christmas.

Brennan’s work experience proved instrumental for his future. “The sixand-one-half years I spent with Benson & Rixon was the best education that I had,” he bluntly states. “That was far more important than going to college.”

Brennan carried the lessons he learned at Benson & Rixon with him for the rest of his career. “I learned from the grassroots,” he explains, “watching professional salesmen, clothing salesmen sell; interacting with customers; seeing problems that had to be solved.”

Brennan also realized retail was his vocation: “The essence of retailing is personal interaction, and I saw that and I liked it. They say that some people have fingertips for the business and I believe that. I think a lot of people in retailing are there because it’s a job. It’s long hours. It’s nights. It’s Saturdays and Sundays. It’s a fairly consuming profession, and, frankly, there are a lot of other businesses that are a lot easier in terms of the time demands on people.

But there’s also an incredible sense of satisfaction in retailing because you see the results immediately. You see them every day. At Christmastime, you see them every hour.”

Similar to Brennan, Simpson’s introduction to her future profession came in high school. At the encouragement of one of her teachers, she joined the school newspaper. “I enjoyed the process of asking questions, and then trying to put it in a fashion that people would want to read,” remembers Simpson.

“At that time, I decided I wanted to be a journalist.”

Simpson was also involved with drama, an activity that later proved instrumental in her broadcasting career. “I acted all through high school,” she explains, “And thank God I did, because it’s where I learned how to use my voice, how to project it, how to get in front of a lot of people and not be afraid to get in front of them. It helped me in a way I didn’t appreciate until much later.”

By her senior year, Simpson had compiled a 3.5 grade point average and was determined to go into journalism. “I applied to Northwestern,” she 60 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

remembers. “I knew the Medill School of Journalism was one of the best in the countr y at that time.” But when she went to Northwestern for her admission interview, she received a less-than-welcoming response. “The admissions counselor said, ‘You’re wasting your time. You’re not going to get into Medill.’” When Simpson inquired why, the admissions counselor bluntly told her, “You’re a Negro, and you’re a woman. You’re not going to be able to get a job anywhere but Ebony magazine or Jet.” When Simpson told him that her goal was to work for the Chicago Tribune, he simply replied, “I think you ought to go to the Chicago Teachers’ College and become a nice English teacher.”

Shortly after graduating from Marquette in 1955, Brennan took a job at the Sears store in Madison, Wisconsin. This was hardly surprising, for it was hard to separate company and family when it came to Sears and the Brennans.

Brennan’s grandfather Luke J. Brennan worked with founder Richard Sears at the company’s headquarters on Chicago’s West Side in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Brennan’s father, mother, and four uncles also worked for Sears.

Brennan quickly advanced up the Sears corporate ladder. In 1958, he became an assistant manager in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Two years later, he returned to Chicago as an assistant buyer at the Sears headquarters on the West Side. Over the next seven years, he held several positions in buying and marketing. In 1967, he was named manager of the Baltimore store. A year later, he was promoted to assistant manager in the New York region and moved to New Jersey.

Brennan works the cash register in the men’s department at the Sears Store in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1957.

Making History | 61

In 1972, he was charged with reviving the western New York district headquartered in Buffalo; he turned it around by the end of the year. A few years later, Brennan moved to Philadelphia. By 1977, he was doing the same in Boston.

Shortly thereafter, he was elected executive vice president of Sears’s southern territory in Atlanta and a company director. In 1980, the Sears board of directors elected Brennan president, primarily responsible for the day-to-day operations of Sears’s merchandising operations.

Simpson’s rejection from Northwestern University only hardened her resolve. She enrolled in the University of Illinois at Chicago (then located at Navy Pier) from 1958 to 1960, before transferring to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1962. At Michigan, she continued acting and worked on the Michigan Daily, then edited by Tom Hayden. But after graduation, she was the only one of her sixty classmates unable to find a job. Journalism dean Wesley Maurer intervened and arranged a job for her in the university relations office at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Simpson swallowed her disappointment, telling herself, “Well, that’s all I got. I got to go. I got to start somewhere.”

Tuskegee proved to be a blessing in disguise. In the early 1960s, Alabama was one of the hotbeds of the Civil Rights movement. Governor George Wallace had confronted federal authorities at the University of Alabama over integrating that institution, and Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters were organizing demonstrations in Birmingham and elsewhere. “It was an incredible experience,” Simpson remembers. “I had to go to Montgomery, Alabama, to buy clothes, and black people were not allowed to try them on.

You had to guess if clothes fit you.” Looking back, she remains incredulous of the patterns of segregation. “There was one little theater, and black people were not allowed on the first floor of the theater,” recalls Simpson, “and you couldn’t buy things at the concession stand. You had to sit up in the balcony and bring your own popcorn and candy. I tell people this now, and my children just can’t fathom it. And it wasn’t that long ago.”

62 | Chicago History | Summer 2004

Simpson attended the University of IllinoisChicago from 1958 to 1960, when it was located on Navy Pier. Below: The college campus in 1958.

Simpson’s career began in Alabama in the early 1960s, when the state became a focus for Civil Rights involvement. This photograph depicts a gathering after the Sixteenth Street Church bombing in Birmingham, 1963.

Photograph by Declan Haun.

Making History | 63

After two years in Alabama, Simpson received a graduate fellowship in journalism from the University of Iowa. “I still wanted to be a newspaper reporter,” remembers Simpson. A course on radio broadcasting, however, proved revelatory. “I could go out with my tape recorder, interview people, and come back, write around it, and deliver my own story,” Simpson realized. In retrospect, she admits, “That’s what I kind of miss about radio today. It’s just an intimate medium. In TV, you’re relying on cameramen, sound men, lighting men, directors, and producers.” Simpson decided to audition for the radio station. “There had never been a woman who had done broadcast news on WSUI in Iowa City, and they took me. I started doing a ten-minute newscast two nights a week that I would put together and write, and I really liked that.”

Throughout most of Edward Brennan’s ascendancy at Sears, the store was one of the largest corporations in the United States. Sears furnished the goods that adorned many middle-class homes: electric refrigerators, washers and driers, freezers, color televisions, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Sears workers repeated an old company mantra: “All we want is our 80,” a reference to the belief that the middle 80 percent of Americans shopped at Sears, while the richest 10 percent went to expensive department stores and the poorest 10 percent went to discount merchants. In fact, by the 1970s, nearly all Americans shopped at Sears every three months, and more than 50 percent of all United States households had a Sears credit card. As the nation’s largest retailer, Sears was more than just one of the ten largest corporations in the world. Many identified the company as the “central warehouse” for American culture.

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Brennan displays a sweater from the Arnold Palmer Collection at a Sears store opening in Dallas, 1963.

In the 1980s, Sears chief executive officer Ed Telling embarked on transforming Sears into a giant supermarket of both goods and services. In addition to owning Allstate Insurance (which Sears established in 1950s), Sears acquired the Dean Witter Reynolds Organization and the Coldwell Banker Real Estate Group in 1981; four years later, Sears launched the Discover credit card. Telling even entertained forming a partnership with Chevron and creating a global enterprise called Sears World Trade. With this “stocks and socks” strategy, Sears’ executives envisioned customers who would be able to buy a house, finance it, insure it, and fill it with furniture—all with services and products provided by Sears. When Brennan ascended to the chairmanship of the newly formed Sears Merchandising Group in 1981, Telling ordered him to create a new retail-based Sears.

By 1965, Simpson’s job prospects were transformed. In wake of the Civil Rights movement and the Watts riot in Los Angeles, she became an attractive journalist to the media outlets. “Now I was getting job offers from all over,” she explains. “Newspapers wanted to hire me in a minute. I was just turning down offers because they were looking for reporters that could get that story.” When WCFL Radio in Chicago offered her a job as a reporter, she jumped at the chance to return to her native city. She remained at WCFL until 1968 when she moved to WBBM Radio as a special correspondent and weekend anchor.

By this time, Simpson notes, the Civil Rights movement was affecting Chicago. “It was the black organizations who ended up telling news organizations, ‘You can’t cover our news conferences unless you have black reporters and black cameramen and black soundmen,’” explains Simpson.

Union resistance to racial integration was strong, she remembers. “No black people could join the unions to shoot T.V. film in those days.” At the same time, news directors realized media outlets needed to change. “They knew to get that story, they were going to have to get some black people that could go to these news conferences and find out what’s going on.”

While working part-time at WBBM, Simpson began appearing as a commentator on Our People, a minority affairs television program on WTTW, Chicago’s public television station. This led to a news correspondent position at WMAQ-TV from 1970 to 1974, making Simpson Chicago’s first African American woman television newsperson.

Simpson soon realized television reporting was her calling. “I liked that intimacy that I could develop with the audience by coming into their homes,” she explains, “and tell them in a compelling fashion what they needed to know about that happened that day.” Simpson also enjoyed the freedom associated with television journalism. “I liked the fact that I could go do the stories as well.” To date, television has allowed Simpson to travel to forty-eight states, twentyseven countries, and five continents. “The job has just been amazing in terms of the things I’ve learned, the things I’ve seen, how much I feel I know about this country and about the people in this country,” she proclaims.

This WBBM Newsradio 78 flyer from the late 1960s promotes Simpson as special correspondent and Saturday anchorman.

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The 1985 Sears Annual Report announced Brennan’s promotion to chief executive.

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Brennan’s retail acumen finally led to his election as the eleventh CEO of Sears in 1986, which he held until 1997. Unfortunately, he assumed the position during Sears’s rockiest days, suffering from poor earnings, a weak economy, and shareholder unrest. Sears financial services performed well from 1984 to 1990, improving the company’s earnings by 55 percent. But the retail department failed badly, with income declining at an annual rate of 7.7 percent.

From 1984 to 1990, Sears had a total annual return, including dividends, of a mere 0.7 percent. In 1990, earnings and stock prices fell to 1983 levels and in the first nine months, the company lost $119 million. One Dean Witter executive described Sears as “an organization in chaos.” By then, Wal-Mart had passed Sears as the nation’s leading retailer. Brennan announced in 1988 that the corporation was selling the iconic Sears Tower, then the world’s tallest building. The next year, he announced that the firm was leaving Chicago for a new corporate campus in suburban Hoffman Estates.

Sears’s economic turbulence was not unique. The final two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a vast transformation in the American retail landscape. Nationally known stores such as B. Altman, Kmart, W. T. Grant, and Korvette’s went out of business. Local chains such as Goldblatt’s and Wieboldt’s disappeared. Even beleaguered survivors such as Bloomingdale’s and Marshall Field’s were sold to large international conglomerates.

Appropriately, some refer to the period as the “chain store massacre.”

To help balance the company’s budget, Brennan eliminated the Sears catalog (left, in 1901; above, in 1991), a staple for decades.

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In 1988, in Steve Daley’s Chicago Tribune column, Simpson announced her new ABC News job in Washington.

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Critics labeled Sears as an ungainly, bureaucratic giant. Brennan agreed in part, admitting that Sears’s retail business maintained such a high profile that it buried the values of other units. So from 1990 to 1993, Brennan slashed fifty thousand jobs, eliminated the famed Sears catalogue, and closed 113 unprofitable stores. Brennan also abandoned the “stocks and socks” approach because, he believed, investors and financial markets failed to accurately assess the worth of Sears’s multiple assets. Consequently, Sears sold parts of subsidiaries Allstate, Dean Witter, and Coldwell Banker.

“We never got credit for what we had done in financial services,” notes Brennan in retrospect. “The stock was Sears, so you had to buy a retailer in order to get an insurance company, an investment banker, a real estate company, a development company.” Historically, Brennan believes that such strategies worked for only a few companies. “What the investor, especially the institutional investor, really wants is a pure play,” he explains. “They don’t want to have to own a retailer in order to get an investment banker, or they don’t want to have to own an investment banker to get into a real estate company.” By the early 1990s, the problem was clear to Brennan: “We were undervalued.”

Brennan’s strategy of selling subsidiaries worked. In 1993, Sears achieved record earnings of $2.37 billion net profits on sales of $50 billion. The spinoffs unlocked the value of each business and made the individual companies easier to understand. From 1990 to 1995, the common stock value of Sears more than tripled, rising from $22 to about $80 per share, while the market capitalization (the total value of its outstanding shares) grew from $7.5 billion to more than $30 billion. When Brennan announced his retirement as CEO and president of Sears in 1995, the combined value of all current and former Sears assets was approximately $80 billion. For the first time since 1931, the firm was primarily a retailer.

In 1974, Carole Simpson received an invitation to join the Washington bureau of NBC-TV, first working on a public affairs show and then serving as a substitute anchor for NBC Nightly News and weekend anchor for Newsbreak (1974–82). Over the next seven years, Simpson covered Capitol Hill, health care, the environment, and the 1980 presidential campaign. “What I had wanted to do was do Washington news,” she remembers. “That’s where the laws were being changed; that’s where they were being written; that’s where the action was. I wanted to be there.”

In 1982, ABC News president Roone Arledge called Simpson. He was trying to build ABC into a leading network. “When I was at NBC, we used to call [ABC] the Almost Broadcasting Company, because it was small and pitiful,” jokes Simpson. The joke didn’t last long. “Arledge came in and changed everything,” claims Simpson. “He started hiring people from all the networks to build up a strong bench of people. I now think we have the strongest bench of any of the networks.”

Simpson moved to ABC as a general assignment correspondent in 1982, covering Vice President George Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign. Her talent quickly impressed ABC executives. In 1988, she was named anchorperson for ABC’s World News Saturday. A year later, when she substituted for Peter Jennings on August 9, 1989, she became the first African American woman to anchor a major network newscast during the week.

Simpson’s new visibility made her a national figure. In 1992, she was invited to serve as the moderator of the presidential debate held in Richmond, Virginia, with President George Bush and his challengers Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.

This was the first debate with a town-meeting format, allowing 209 uncommitted voters to ask questions while Simpson moderated.

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Even though Simpson was professionally indebted to Arledge, she was willing to raise sensitive issues. In 1985, she publicly confronted Arledge and demanded changes. “ABC had no women covering a major beat, no women heading up bureaus, no women at the level of the network vice president.”

Arledge listened and instituted progressive changes at ABC. In 1991, at the Radio-Television News Directors Association’s annual convention, Simpson again she spoke out: “There’s a growing concern among many black Americans that there is racial bias and racial insensitivity in our news coverage.”

Brennan is grateful for the wide range of experiences his career has brought him. “One of the great satisfactions of my career is that I ended up running not Sears the merchandise company,” claims Brennan, “but Sears the corporation, which was Allstate, Dean Witter, Coldwell Banker, and Sears. I ended up in the financial services business, in the investment banking business, in the credit card business, in the insurance business—both property casualty and life insurance, in the real estate business, in the shopping center development business, in the residential real estate business. We took Coldwell Banker, then a California company, and made it a national company. We merged Dean Witter with Morgan Stanley. Today, I am blessed with having the opportunity to oversee very diversified businesses.”

Simpson’s journalism has resulted in numerous awards: a Dupont Award for stories on children at risk, the Outstanding Woman in Communication award from the YWCA of Metro Chicago (1974) for her documentaries on sickle cell anemia and SIDS, the Award of Courage from the Los Angeles chapter of NOW Education Fund (1987), the Milestone Award in Broadcast Journalism from the National Commission on Working Women (1988), and Journalist of the Year from the National Association of Black Journalists (1992). Her most memorable journalistic accomplishment, however, remains covering the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa for Nightline. “That was just incredible,” exclaims Simpson. “South Africa had become this huge thing with the sanctions and the demonstrations and the arrests. So I was sent down to cover the black side of the story.”

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Brennan and his wife Lois pose with President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

In the course of events, Simpson became part of the story. “I was injured in a melee,” she remembers. “We had gone to a church in Johannesburg to celebrate the fact that Mandela was going to be released. We didn’t know that the police had surrounded the square outside the church and had declared [it] an unauthorized event. So as people are leaving the church, [the police] start beating with clubs. I was just caught up with the rest of the people and was beaten. I can remember seeing people all around me—their heads split open. I was hit on the back and had a bruised kidney, but nothing like I saw with [other] people. I saw an old woman about seventy being dragged by her ear by the police. It was so horrifying.” At some point, Simpson reached a nearby bus bench. “I was sitting down and trying to get myself together, and I noticed everybody got up,” she remembers. “They had put me at a white bus stop instead of the black one. I was sitting on the bench with white people, and they all had gotten up with disgust.” Simpson later received an Emmy Award (1990) for her coverage of Mandela’s release.

For Simpson and Brennan, Chicago will always remain a place of nostalgia and pride. “The experience that I had as a news reporter here, I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world,” exclaims Simpson. “Everybody talks about Chicago as still the best news town. I mean, there isn’t anything you won’t be covering.” Similarly, Brennan expounds upon Chicago’s virtues.

“I’ve lived in ten different cities—from New York to Oshkosh,” Brennan points out. “Of the medium to large cities, Chicago has the best infrastructure of community leaders and business people that work together and really devote their time.” Simply put, “It’s a terrific community.”

Simpson was the keynote speaker at the Fifth Annual Midwest Women’s Center’s Tribute to Chicago Women in 1990.

Carole Simpson (right) with her award presenter Carol Marin and CHS president Lonnie G. Bunch at the 2003 Making History Awards.

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Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 58–59, CHS; 61, courtesy of Edward A. Brennan; 62, CHS; 63, CHS, photograph by Declan Haun, ICHi-36732; 64, courtesy of Edward A. Brennan; 65, courtesy of WBBM Newsradio 780; 66, reprinted by arrangement with Sears, Roebuck and Co.; 67 left, CHS, ICHi-29623; 67 right, reprinted by arrangement with Sears, Roebuck and Co.; 68, “Anchor eyes an inside job in D.C.,” by Steve Daley, copyrighted August 18, 1988, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved.

Used with permission.; 70, courtesy of Edward A. Brennan; 71 top, “Applauding successes, facing challenge,” “Womanews,” copyrighted June 24, 1990, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 71 bottom, CHS; 72, CHS. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The lives and careers of both Edward Brennan and Carole Simpson await more detailed study. The history of Sears and Brennan’s early career are described in vivid detail in The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears by Donald R. Katz (New York: Viking, 1987), especially chapter 9, entitled “The Kid.” Brief biographies of Simpson appear in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993), 1037; Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 30 (Detroit: Group, 2001); and Who’s Who Among African Americans (Detroit: Gale, 2002), 1,170.

T H E 2 0 0 3 M A K I N G H I S T O R Y AWA R D S were underwritten through a generous grant from The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust. The Trust honors the memory of Elizabeth Morse Genius (right), daughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, a nineteenth-century Chicago industrialist and land developer. The Trust supports programs that encourage self-reliance, foster self-esteem, and promote the arts, with an emphasis on helping children, youth, and the elderly of Chicago’s disadvantaged communities.

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Richard Thomas (right) presents Edward A. Brennan (left) with his award at the 2003 Making History Awards.