Chicago History | Fall 2012

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Senior Editor Emily H. Nordstrom Assistant Editor Lydia C. Carr Designer Bill Van Nimwegen On the cover: A still from the 1927 film Chicago.

Hulton Archive/Moviepix/ Getty Images 3290543.

Photography John Alderson Shelby Silvernell

Copyright 2012 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago History Museum’s Publications Office.

C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS

Sharon Gist Gilliam Chair John W. Rowe Chairman Emeritus John W. Croghan Vice Chair Walter C. Carlson Vice Chair Patrick W. Dolan Treasurer Paul H. Dykstra Secretary Gary T. Johnson President Russell L. Lewis Executive Vice President and Chief Historian

HONORARY T R U S T E E

Rahm Emanuel Mayor, City of Chicago TRUSTEES

James L. Alexander David H. Blake David P. Bolger Warren K. Chapman Patrick F. Daly T. Bondurant French Timothy J. Gilfoyle Mary Lou Gorno Barbara A. Hamel David D. Hiller Dennis H. Holtschneider Tobin E. Hopkins Nena Ivon Daniel S. Jaffee Falona Joy Randye A. Kogan Judith Konen Paul R. Lovejoy Timothy P. Moen Ralph G. Moore Michael A. Nemeroff M. Bridget Reidy

Jesse H. Ruiz Larry Selander Joseph Seliga Peggy Snorf Samuel J. Tinaglia Ali Velshi Jeffrey W. Yingling HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEE

Richard M. Daley LIFE TRUSTEES

Lerone Bennett Jr. Philip D. Block III Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon Alison Campbell de Frise Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner M. Hill Hammock Susan S. Higinbotham Henry W. Howell Jr. Philip W. Hummer Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss

Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy Jr. Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Potter Palmer Bryan S. Reid Jr. Gordon I. Segal Paul L. Snyder TRUSTEES EMERITUS

Jonathan Fanton Sallie L. Gaines Thomas M. Goldstein Cynthia Greenleaf David A. Gupta Jean Haider Erica C. Meyer Robert J. Moore Eboo Patel Nancy K. Robinson April T. Schink Noren Ungaretti Joan Werhane

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The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Museum’s activities.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Fall 2012 VOLUME XXXVIII, NUMBER 2

Contents

4 24 40 64

The Burning Hive Gary Krist

Jailhouse Makeovers Douglas Perry

Departments Yesterday’s City Raymond Schmidt

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

The Burning Hive During a summer that saw labor unrest, race riots, and the tragic disappearance of a young girl, Chicagoans also witnessed a devastating air disaster.

G A RY K R I S T

T

he Spanish influenza had nearly killed Carl Otto that summer, but now the young bank telegrapher, clearly on the mend, was eager to return to work.

On the warm, sunny morning of Monday, July 21, therefore, he rose early to prepare for his commute. His wife, Elsie, was concerned about his health and tried to discourage him. Carl was still not well, she insisted, and his extended sick leave didn’t officially end until tomorrow.

Couldn’t he put off work for just one more day?

But Carl was adamant. He truly enjoyed his job at the bank and valued his reputation as a conscientious worker.

And although he knew better than to make light of his illness (the recent flu epidemic had already killed more people than the Great War had), he felt he should delay his return no longer. He was, after all, an employee of one of Chicago’s premier financial institutions: the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, located right in the heart of the downtown Loop district. Standing at the foot of the Chicago Board of Trade Building on the corner of LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard, the bank was an important conduit for the countless transactions generated each day by the largest and most significant commodities exchange in the world. New York’s Wall Street may have been the center for the trading of company shares, but it was in the pits of the Chicago Board of Trade that the fate of real things—of wheat, corn, hogs, lumber, cattle, and oats—was determined. Populations worldwide were dependent on it for the raw fuel of civilization itself.

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As telegrapher and “all-around utility man” for the Illinois Trust, Carl Otto was a vital cog in the complex machinery of that market. From his telegraph desk in the bank’s central courtyard, right under the building’s distinctive two-story skylight, he kept his employers and their clients in close communication with the financial centers of the East Coast. As a translator for the Foreign Department (Carl had been born in Germany and spoke several languages), he also facilitated transactions with companies in the grain-importing countries of Europe and Asia. Besides, Monday was usually the bank’s busiest day of the week. Carl felt that he had to go back.

The couple discussed the matter over breakfast. In Elsie Otto’s opinion, the worldwide commodities market could surely survive without her husband until Tuesday.

She argued that their son, Stanley, a sixyear-old orphan whom the couple had adopted some time before, would appreciate another day of his father’s company.

But Carl would not be dissuaded. Determined to be punctual on his first day back, the telegrapher said good-bye to his wife and son, left their little cottage at 4219 North Lincoln Street on the city’s far North Side, and headed for the Loop.

One of the first victims of the Wingfoot crash, Carl Otto (left) was the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank’s telegrapher, translator, and “all-around utility man.”

At roughly the same hour about twelve miles south— at 5448 Calumet Avenue, in the city’s Washington Park neighborhood—Earl H. Davenport was also just leaving home for his morning commute. After years of working as a sportswriter for various newspapers around town, Davenport had recently switched careers. He had taken on a public relations job representing the White City Amusement Park, South Side Chicago’s most popular summer recreation center. Named after the world’s fair that had done so much to boost Chicago’s image a generation earlier—the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the White City—the park was an entertainment extravaganza, a thirteen-acre playground of bowling alleys, shooting galleries, roller coasters, ballrooms, and novelty attractions such as the Midget City and a walk-through diorama depicting the famous Johnstown Flood. Handling the publicity for such a place was Davenport’s idea of fun.

Huge crowds gathered to watch the Wingfoot Express depart from Grant Park. It made several exhibition flights successfully before the events of the late afternoon.

This week, though, Earl was working on a special assignment. White City’s aerodrome, leased by the navy during the recent war for the construction of B-class dirigibles, was now being used for commercial purposes again. A crew from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron had arrived on the site several weeks earlier to assemble one of their already fabled blimps, an airship called the Wingfoot Express. Davenport was using the opportunity to launch a major promotion. Even as the Wingfoot was being put together and tested, he was busy urging newspaper photographers and city dignitaries to come down to the White City and take a ride. Just last week, in fact, he had asked Frederick Proctor, a former sportswriting colleague who now worked for the Board of The Burning Hive | 5

At the White City, a trench was cut in the hanger floor to permit work on the craft’s car, or gondola.

6 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Trade, to issue invitations to the board’s president and several of its other members to make a flight as official guests of the amusement park.

Davenport, a plump, balding man of unfailing good nature, planned to go up himself on one of the airship’s maiden flights. As he’d written in that week’s edition of the White City News, he felt just “like a kid with his first pair of red-top boots” anticipating his airborne adventure. Technical problems with the bag’s carrier mechanism had postponed the blimp’s debut several times, but now, on this bright Monday morning, Davenport was hoping that his luck would change. The weather was good, and the engineers had had the whole weekend to put the Wingfoot in top flying condition. Confident that he’d finally be taking to the skies, Davenport pulled on an old pair of tennis shoes—appropriate footwear for a blimp ride, he thought—and set out on his one-mile trip south to the park.

Another person hoping to get on the blimp that day was Roger J. Adams, president of the Adams Aerial Transportation Company. Having arrived in Chicago on Sunday via the overnight train from New York, Adams had quickly made arrangements with Goodyear representatives for a demonstration of the Wingfoot. His eponymous company, which had recently inaugurated a passengercarrying hydroplane service between Albany and New York City, was now in negotiations with a consortium of

Italian capitalists to start a transatlantic dirigible service.

The group was considering buying the Wingfoot Express or another craft of the same type for this purpose, so Adams was eager to see the blimp in action.

Knowing the value of good publicity for his nascent business, Adams had that morning contacted the Chicago Daily News to offer himself as an aviation expert qualified to comment on this exciting new technology. The paper had sent over a reporter to interview him. Dirigibles (the terms “dirigible” and “blimp” were used interchangeably in 1919) had been employed with some success on scouting missions during the war, and now many people hoped that the airships could revolutionize long-distance passenger travel and mail delivery.

During his talk with the Daily News reporter, Adams waxed eloquent on the unlimited possibilities for Chicago as a center of national and international air services. “Chicago,” he opined to the reporter, “will be the Blimpopolis of the Western World!” He predicted that transatlantic flights from London would end in Illinois rather than in New York, which would be merely “a crossroads aerial station” where pilots might make a whistle-stop en route. “There is no reason why passenger blimps cannot go direct from Chicago to London and vice versa,” Adams concluded. “The seacoast city as a ‘port’ will become obsolete in the day of aerial travel.”

Smooth, clean lines made the design of the dirigible modern and attractive.

The Burning Hive | 7

8 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

The Daily News reporter had taken all of this down, promising that an article would appear in that afternoon’s edition. This was, after all, just the kind of news the local papers loved to print. Always sensitive to their status as residents of the nation’s second city, Chicagoans liked to disparage New York and tout their own town as the city of the future, the true American metropolis of the still-young twentieth century. Having an expert like Adams say that Chicago—rather than the old and hidebound cities of the East—would soon be the world’s “Blimpopolis” was just what readers wanted to hear.

But now Adams was eager to see the blimp itself. With the time of his afternoon appointment approaching, he found a taxi and headed down to the White City aerodrome. After a short drive, they passed the amusement park at Sixty-Third Street and South Parkway, its landmark electric tower, brilliantly illuminated at night by thousands of lights, looming above in the sunshine of a quiet weekday afternoon. As the cab approached the aerodrome at the other end of the park, however, Adams could see that something was wrong. There was no blimp tethered outside the enormous hangar. Could it somehow still be inside, not yet inflated?

Adams got out of the cab and inquired at the hangar. No, he was told, the blimp was already gone. It had left shortly after noon, heading for the airfield in Grant Park, from which point it would make several exhibition flights around the city. Adams mentioned his appointment for a ride that day, but no one seemed to know anything about it.

Frustrated, the entrepreneur got back into his cab and directed the driver to take him north again to Grant Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan just east of the Loop. If he was going to get his blimp ride that day, Roger Adams was apparently going to have to chase the airship down.

In the meantime, the entire city of Chicago had begun to take notice of the Wingfoot Express. Visible from many parts of the city on its flight from White City, the giant silver lozenge was attracting crowds of gawkers on street corners citywide. Chicagoans had seen plenty of aeroplanes during the war, but blimps were still something of a novelty in the city skies. Some people were even telephoning the newspapers, trying to find out exactly what it was and what it was doing.

Around midafternoon, a telephone rang at the Madison Street offices of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, another of the city’s six English-language dailies. The call was transferred to the desk of the city editor, who listened for a moment before hanging up and calling down to N. M. Meissner, head of the paper’s film department.

The Wingfoot Express was assembled and tested at Chicago’s White City Amusement Park (inset). Left: A balloon race at the park’s Fourth of July festivities, 1908. Photograph by Fred M. Tuckerman.

The Burning Hive | 9

Norton to come

“Have you got a camera man ready?” the editor asked.

Meissner looked around the cluttered room. The only photographer in sight was Milton G. Norton, who was just then loading up his camera case with photographic plates and extra lenses. At forty-five, Norton was significantly older than most of his colleagues—newspaper work was very much a young man’s game in 1919—but he was an able cameraman, especially good with a portrait. Meissner called out to him, asking whether he was ready for an assignment.

“All set,” Norton replied. “What’s the story?”

Meissner sent him to the city editor, who said he’d just had a report about the blimp that had been flying over the city all day. The ship was supposed to land at the airfield in Grand Park within minutes. Norton was to go over there to get a few pictures of it for the next morning’s edition—and to hurry, because a photographer from a rival newspaper was supposedly also on his way over.

Norton returned to the film department, grabbed his photography kit, and left immediately.

As Milton Norton rushed across town from the Hearst Building, his path was thus converging with that of the other three men: Carl Otto, now sitting at his desk in the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank; Roger Adams, speeding north in his taxicab from White City; and Earl Davenport, already at Grant Park, trying to get his promised ride on the Wingfoot.

The blimp had landed some minutes earlier at the lakeside aerodrome, where Davenport was waiting for it.

The publicist had already been thwarted twice that day.

He was unable to get on the blimp’s first run from White City to Grant Park—as the inaugural flight, it was considered experimental, and so Goodyear insisted that only its own pilots and mechanics ride. Davenport was also shut out of a two-thirty flight from Grant Park north to Diversey Avenue and back, since the seats on that run were taken by military personnel—among them a Colonel Joesph C. Morrow, who had been sent to Chicago to evaluate the blimp for the government—and two writers from the Chicago Evening Post.

And now, as five o’clock approached and the Wingfoot was being prepared for what would probably be its last flight of the day, there was another difficulty. So much hydrogen gas had been valved out of the blimp’s bag on the first two flights that the ship could now safely carry only five people. The pilot had already reserved three of those places for himself and two mechanics, Harry Wacker and Carl Weaver. Undeterred, Earl was angling to get at least one of the remaining seats for himself.

Left: Milton Norton was a veteran photographer at the Chicago Herald and Examiner. He rushed from the newspaper’s Madison Street offices to Grant Park just in time to get the fifth seat on the Wingfoot’s last, fateful run.

10 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Captain Jack Boettner, however, was reluctant. This had not been an easy assignment for him. The pilot had had his hands full all day, fending off crowds of spectators while trying to test-fly a new blimp in difficult circumstances. Having come to Chicago from Goodyear headquarters in Akron for the test, he knew little about the geography of the city he was flying over. And though he was an experienced dirigible pilot, he was unfamiliar with the Wingfoot’s engines. The twin Le Rhône rotary motors mounted above and behind the gondola were still experimental; as far as he knew, rotary engines had never before been used to power an airship, and he had no experience running them. True, the engines had behaved well on the first two flights, but Boettner was still learning their eccentricities.

Above: The Wingfoot’s envelope, or balloon, was filled with hydrogen gas, lighter-than-air and a very volatile explosive. A single static spark could—and did—ignite it. In response to the 1919 disaster, Goodyear developed safer blimps using nonflammable helium.

Modern airships evolved from these later helium blimps.

Although aviation was a very new industry, twenty-seven-year-old Captain John A. “Jack” Boettner (above) was already a well-respected pilot, the thirteenth man in the country licensed to fly airships.

What’s more, the attention attracted by the Wingfoot was becoming oppressive. Every time the blimp moored, thousands of people would gather around it. Local dignitaries and self-proclaimed aviation experts would materialize to present their credentials, ask questions, and try to cadge a ride. Since Goodyear regarded this project in Chicago as a publicity opportunity, Boettner had to be agreeable to these people, willing to act as tour guide even as he was supposed to be testing a blimp. The Wingfoot crew had received a letter to this effect from E. R. Preston, the company’s advertising manager, indicating that prominent men should be encouraged to ride the blimp. (Preston had mentioned Henry Ford as an ideal candidate.)

So when Earl Davenport appeared at Grant Park asking for his long-promised ride, Boettner was inclined to oblige. He and the entire crew had come to like the genial publicity man in the days they’d been working at the White City aerodrome. So Boettner finally agreed to take him along. He kidded his passenger about his choice of footwear, and Davenport answered in kind, insisting that the tennis shoes would help him get a running start in The Burning Hive | 11

case anything happened in the air. Laughing, Boettner replied that “a running start would be no good, that what he wanted to practice was a standing jump.”

Meanwhile, the pilot and his crew continued their preparations for the day’s final flight. They primed the engines and made adjustments to the controls. They checked the rigging that held the bag to the gondola.

Mechanic Weaver burned a bit of stray oil off the twin engine propellers with a blowtorch.

Just before they were ready to board, another figure emerged from the crowd—Milton Norton, with his camera kit on his shoulder. Seeing him, Davenport asked Boettner if the photographer could join them as the fifth person in the gondola. He pointed out that aerial pictures in the next day’s Herald and Examiner would certainly be good publicity for Goodyear.

Boettner agreed and allowed the photographer to ride.

But given the amount of hydrogen gas left in the bag, he decided that no one else would be taken aboard on that flight.

The pilot issued each of his passengers a parachute harness belt. He demonstrated how a rope tied to the belt’s D-buckle was fastened to one of the parachute packs attached to the outside of the fifty-foot gondola. If for some reason the passengers and crew were forced to jump ship, the ropes would pull their parachutes away from the packs and open them automatically. “All you have to do is jump,” Boettner explained. “The parachute takes care of itself.”

The two passengers made light of the idea of being tied to these glorified silk parasols. Parachutes were supposed to be for aeroplane pilots headed off into battle. How likely was it that a photographer and a publicist would need them on a joyride over the streets of Chicago?

At exactly 4:50 P.M., Jack Boettner sounded a warning blast from his siren. The taut lines tethering the Wingfoot Express sprang loose, releasing the sleek gray blimp into a partly cloudy Chicago sky. The passengers in the gondola looked down, watching as the milling crowd of spectators in Grant Park seemed to recede, the throbbing pointillism of upturned faces and white straw boaters losing distinctness as it dropped away beneath them.

Shrinking rapidly, the oblong shadow of the airship slid silently across the ground toward the glittering surface of Lake Michigan.

Captain Boettner, seated at the wheel in the prow of the gondola, turned the ship immediately to the east, toward the lake. The wind was steady. Twin American flags secured to the bow and stern of the bag rippled calmly as the engines purred and the two propellers spun in the warm early-evening air.

The men sat single file in the leather-covered wicker seats of the gondola. To those on the ground, they would have looked like oarsmen in a five-man canoe: first 12 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Davenport, seated directly behind Boettner; then Norton with his cameras and plates; and then mechanics Wacker and Weaver abaft, just under the whirring propellers.

When the blimp had gained some altitude, Boettner turned it north. The 150-foot-long airship, its bag enclosing ten thousand cubic feet of hydrogen, responded well. Each movement of the rudder was answered by a corresponding turn of the nose to port or starboard.

Finally, Boettner wheeled the airship west, toward the crenellated wall of buildings that lined Michigan Avenue like a rampart at the edge of the park. The pilot had decided that they would fly over the downtown Loop before heading south back to White City. That would give Norton an opportunity to take some spectacular photographs of the city’s skyscrapers from above. It would also mean that the Wingfoot would be seen by thousands and thousands of Chicagoans as they left their offices at the 5 P.M. close of business. No one could ask for better publicity than that.

Norton leaned over the edge of the gondola, snapping pictures. It was certain that no other newspaper would have anything like these photos tomorrow. From 1,200 feet up, the view of Chicago was magnificent. The entire city lay at their feet, humming like a fabulously complex machine, its miscellaneous components spreading out northward, westward, and southward from the shores of Lake Michigan and far into the distance. Directly below was the dense, teeming core of the downtown business district, a checkerboard of brooding modern skyscrapers and grim two- and three-story commercial buildings.

Streets clotted with trucks, automobiles, and horse-drawn wagons threaded through these blocks of stone, intersected by silvery railway lines and, to the north and west, the snakelike curve of the Chicago River. And around this hub, its center enclosed by the rounded rectangle of the elevated Loop tracks, clustered the dozens of individual neighborhoods that together formed this huge and diverse metropolis. Here was Little Poland, Little Italy, the Black Belt, and Greektown, the silk-stocking districts and the New World shtetls, each one of which—whether made up of crumbling tenements, luxurious mansions, or neat little worker cottages—stood in many ways apart from the others, a self-contained enclave with its own ethos and mores. From this height, one could also see the engines that kept this collection of urban villages in operation—the interlocking feed-lots and slaughterhouses of the stockyards district to the southwest, the enormous steel mills to the far south, the reaper works, the railcar factories, the gasworks, the warehouses and merchandise marts of the retailing trade, and the endless railyards full of trains that connected the city to the rest of the world.

To call this conglomeration by a single name—Chicago— seemed wildly inappropriate. It was less like a city than a

From the ground, the profiles of the men aboard the Wingfoot could be clearly seen, as could its twin Le Rhone rotary motors.

The Burning Hive | 13

world unto itself, bringing together the artifacts and energies of a vast multitude.

The Wingfoot Express continued westward and southward over this cluttered assemblage, attracting ever more attention as it sailed through the Loop. Automobiles pulled to the side of the road; commuters pointed at it from the platforms of the L; office workers stopped typing and hung up phones to watch it from the windows of their buildings.

But then, just as the airship crossed over busy State Street, Boettner felt something strange—a tremor in the fuselage, a shudder of the steel cables that held the gondola suspended beneath the blimp. He looked up and saw smoke and flames licking the bag just above its equator, and he knew immediately that the situation was dire. The pilot stood up and started waving his arms at the men behind him. “Over the top, everybody,” he yelled as loudly as he could. “Jump or you’ll burn alive!”

The other occupants of the blimp seemed confused at first, but then, looking up themselves, they comprehended the gravity of the situation. As they scrambled to heave themselves over the side, Boettner could see the flames moving rapidly above. The bag was crackling noisily as the fire spread out to consume the whole blimp. Just as the airship buckled in the middle and started to fold in on itself, Boettner jumped.

People all around Chicago’s central district watched in awed disbelief as the silver blimp in the sky crumpled and began to fall.

Roger Adams, the entrepreneur, was now at the airfield at Grant Park. His taxi from White City had been just a little too slow. “I got there just as [the Wingfoot] went up again,” he would later say, “and I was too late to get on.”

Annoyed at the missed connection, he had been forced to content himself with taking pictures of the blimp as it floated away. But then he heard something troubling. “I heard both engines starting to backfire,” he reported.

“There was too much gasoline flowing through the carburetors…and I knew that [the blimp] was in trouble.” He was horrified to see the distant airship burst into flames.

C. M. Kletzker and L. B. Blake, employees of the Horton Engraving Company, were looking on from the twelfthfloor windows of the Lees Building on South Wells Street.

They had been watching the blimp when it first approached the Loop, but then returned to their desks to get back to work. A few minutes later, a colleague came into the office and asked to be shown the dirigible that everyone was talking about. “We went to the window to look again,” Kletzker said. “We had barely located the airship when there was a flash of flame. . . . With the first The Wingfoot Express began its final fatal flight at 4:50 P.M. on July 21, 1919, taking off from the Grant Park airfield. Right: Aerial view of Grant Park, 1919.

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The Burning Hive | 15

Downtown Chicago, 1914. Into this congested environment, the Wingfoot crashed. Photograph by Charles R. Clark.

flare, five [figures] jumped and their parachutes opened.”

Realizing that they were watching a tragedy in the making, they began to sketch the scene, hoping to create an eyewitness record of what was happening.

Much closer to the action, in the halls of the Board of Trade Building, Frederick Proctor was in the process of delivering one of Earl Davenport’s invitations to fly.

Proctor had moments before entered the office of Warren A. Lamson and asked the young broker whether he “craved a sensation.” He explained that the publicity director of White City had offered Lamson and other board members an opportunity to take a ride in a blimp.

Lamson demurred. “Exmoor and my Marmon are enough for me,” he said, referring to his favorite golf course and his sporty automobile. At that moment, the two men heard a terrific crash just outside the office windows.

At Comiskey Park, not far south of downtown, thousands of baseball fans gasped and jumped to their feet when they saw flames erupt from the blimp hovering over the Loop. They had just watched their hometown White Sox with the first game of a doubleheader against the Yankees. Ace infielder Buck Weaver had singled in the decisive run in the bottom of the ninth inning, leading the Sox to a 7–6 win. Now, three innings into the second game, all action stopped as players and spectators alike anxiously watched the catastrophe unfolding in the distance. Reporters in the press stand immediately reached for their telegraph keys. “It was the most quickly reported accident that ever occurred,” Sherman Duffy, the Chicago Daily Journal’s sportswriter, later reported.

“The blazing balloon had not reached the ground before its fall had been telegraphed to newspaper offices both here and in New York.”

16 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Witnesses could see the five tiny figures falling away from the flaming blimp. They saw four parachutes start to open—like long ribbons fluttering out of a magician’s hat—as the ropes pulled the chute packs from the side of the gondola. One ribbon caught fire before it opened completely. This was Carl Weaver’s chute. As the silk fabric dissolved in tongues of flame, the mechanic fell “like a rocket,” crashing through the glass skylight of the two-story building below.

At least two of the other parachutes also seemed to be afire, though they were burning more slowly. Harry Wacker was able to control his descent somewhat, though he fell faster and faster as each square inch of silk above him was consumed. Plunging toward the street, he struck a ledge on the Insurance Exchanging Building, nearly gained his footing on the masonry, but then fell again.

Milton Norton, who had delayed jumping from the gondola as he worried over his camera and plates, was descending just as fast, spinning wildly round and round.

He was thrown violently against a window of the Western Union Building. The window smashed, and Norton was snagged momentarily on the sill, but his momentum was too great and he, too, continued falling to the street.

Jack Boettner, being a trained pilot, had known to jump as far as possible from the flaming bag, and so his parachute had just been licked by the spreading flames as it opened. Even so, one edge caught fire. The pilot began to whirl in the air as he dropped. He couldn’t see where he was going, but his feet soon struck the roof of a high building. Jolted by the impact, he rolled a few times and found himself peering over the edge of the roof, down into the street far below. Boettner didn’t know it at the time, but he had landed safely on top of the Board of Trade Building, one of the tallest in the city.

Only one of the five figures did not fall away from the gondola. Earl Davenport had tried to jump with the others, but his rope had somehow become entangled in the blimp’s rigging. He fell only about fifty feet and then just hung there, upside down, swinging back and forth.

According to witnesses, he was kicking and struggling, but couldn’t free himself from the tangle. All he could do was hang there helplessly as the flaming blimp collapsed in on itself, losing all buoyancy and then plummeting toward the roof of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank below.

Carl Otto sat at his telegraph desk, finishing up work for the day. Many of his colleagues had been surprised to see him when he showed up that morning. They had heard about his bout with influenza and knew he wasn’t scheduled to return until Tuesday. But there he was, still busy at a few minutes before five, having put in a full day’s work despite his lingering illness.

A number of the bank’s other employees were also still hard at work on their tasks. The bank had closed to the public some time before, but there were still about 150

clerks, bookkeepers, and stenographers moving about the bank’s central court, closing the ledgers for the day, finishing up their correspondence, and locking away bonds and other securities. Bank president John Mitchell had just left the building a few minutes earlier to go home.

The Illinois Trust, a small Greek Revival building tucked in among much higher skyscrapers in the southern Loop, was considered one of the most beautiful banks in the city, fronted by tall Corinthian columns that made it look more like a temple than a place of business.

The ornate interior was just as grand. A magnificent central rotunda, rising two stories to a huge glass skylight, was surrounded on three sides by teller cages. Business with the public was conducted around the outside perimeter of these teller windows. The rotunda’s central court, directly under the skylight and overlooked by a balcony, was reserved for the bank’s internal business.

Here were the telegraph stations and the stenographer pool, as well as the desks where clerks and bank officers did their work. As a security measure, this area could be entered only through one of two entrances in the perimeter of teller cages.

As the five o’clock hour approached, activity on the floor was waning. The women in the stenographic pool were finishing up for the day, pecking out a few last lines before pulling the covers over their typewriters and getting ready to leave. Helen Berger, the stout but ever-energetic chief stenographer, was attending to last-minute details with teller Marcus Callopy. Assistant cashier F. I. Cooper

had left his desk and was accompanying a messenger to the vault area with some records.

A few people noticed a change in the light around them as a shadow passed over the skylight above. This was followed by a sudden flash, which made some think that a photographer was taking a picture. Cooper the cashier, standing at the entrance to the bank’s large time vault, heard a sound of breaking glass overhead and turned around to investigate. What happened next was horrifying: “The body of a man,” he later said, “so badly burned and mangled that I could not tell at first that it was a man, came hurtling through the air and fell at my very feet.” It was the body of mechanic Carl Weaver.

That was when the entire bank seemed to detonate.

“I thought a bomb had been exploded,” one man said.

Bombings had been in the news all year, and many bank employees worried that the Illinois Trust might be a target. But it instantly became clear that this was no ordinary explosive device.

A. W. Hiltabel was working in one of the teller cages at the south end of the room: “The first thing I heard was the breaking of the skylight,” he said. “I looked up and saw fire raining down from the roof. There seemed to be a stream of liquid fire pouring down into the room.”

Debris was suddenly falling everywhere. A huge engine and fuel tank slammed to the marble floor in front of him. “They exploded,” Hiltabel said. “Flames shot high into the room and all over the place. I ducked under my desk.”

Around 4:55 P.M., workers at the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank prepared to go home. This image shows a typical 1919 working day at the bank.

The Burning Hive | 17

The remains of the Wingfoot went straight through the bank’s skylight (above), splashing flaming fuel along with chunks of metal.

Chief stenographer Helen L. Berger (below) burned alive as her colleagues tried frantically to save her.

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Carl Otto and his colleague Edward Nelson were in conference at the telegraph desk when they heard the terrific explosion above them. Suddenly they found themselves showered by “an avalanche of shattered window panes and twisted iron.” Something sharp and heavy struck Nelson in the knee, throwing him to the ground. As hot sheets of flame billowed around him, he managed to crawl across the floor to an open teller cage.

He scrambled up over the marble counter and out of the teller window to the lobby outside.

Carl Otto was not so lucky. The telegrapher took a direct hit from the falling engine and was instantly, horribly, crushed.

The initial shattering of the skylight had brought C. C. Hayford out of his office in the credit department. “I ran out and an explosion . . . hurled me over,” he later explained. “I got up and someone ran into me, screaming, ‘Oh my God, it’s raining hell!’” Then Hayford saw great columns of fire rising almost majestically above the line of teller cages before him. He could make out silhouetted figures struggling in the flames.

“The screams were indescribable,” he said. “I turned sick. A man—I don’t know his name—staggered out of the cage carrying the body of a girl. His own face was covered with blood.”

By this time, the central court was, according to workers in the balcony, “a well of fire, a seething fur-

In the aftermath of the event, the bank was gutted. Teller cages, desks, and furnishings were all destroyed by the gasoline-fed fire.

nace.” Clerks, stenographers, and bookkeepers, many of them with clothes ablaze, were clawing toward the two exits; others managed to escape through the narrow teller windows. “I saw women and men burning,” said Joseph Dries, a clerk in the bond department. “I saw everybody trying to get out through the doors of the cages.”

But many didn’t move fast enough. Stenographer Maria Hosfield looked on in horror as her boss was burned alive: “I was sitting next to Helen Berger and saw her become enveloped in flames,” she said. Several men ran to the chief stenographer and tried to extinguish her burning clothes. “She was saturated with gasoline,” said bank guard William Elliott. “Everything was so confused . . . but I heard the screams, and I looked and saw flames eating her.” He took off his coat and wrapped it around her. Pushing her to the ground, he rolled her on the floor to douse the flames, severely burning his hands. But he knew he had been too late.

By now, police and firefighters were arriving on the scene. The intense heat of the fire, however, made it difficult for them to enter the caged rotunda. People were pouring out of the bank’s windows like bees escaping a burning hive. Half-naked, dazed, and bloodied, many were now wandering numbly through the streets of the financial district. “When I got to the street,” bank

employee W. A. Woodward said, “I noticed that my face, head, and arms were covered with blood. . . . A man I had never seen before rushed up to me and said, ‘Man, don’t you know that you are badly hurt?’ There was no ambulance near, so this man hustled me into a taxicab and took me to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

A crowd estimated at twenty thousand people had been drawn to the streets of the southern Loop to watch the disaster. Many were trying to help the victims. Several gathered around Milton Norton. The photographer lay in the street in front of the Board of Trade Building, still attached by rope to his smoldering parachute. By all appearances, the man seemed dead. But someone flagged down a passing automobile and ordered the driver to take the battered man to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Jack Boettner had made his way to the street. After detaching himself from his burning chute on the roof of the Board of Trade Building, the pilot had found a fire escape and started down. It took a long time for him to reach street level. Amazed to find himself only slightly injured, he set off amid the confusion to search for his men. He was intercepted on the street by two police detectives, and when he told them who he was, they immediately arrested him and took him away for questioning.

The Burning Hive | 19

20 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Back at the Illinois Trust Building, firemen struggled to bring the blaze under control. Charred and bloody bodies were now being removed from the rotunda.

Friends and relatives of bank employees ran frantically around the streets, looking for their loved ones.

Bystanders were doing what they could, wrapping the injured in their own jackets and helping them to waiting automobiles. Even those people who had only witnessed the disaster were stunned, incredulous. No one could quite take in the reality of what had happened.

How had this experimental blimp—this enormous, floating firebomb—been allowed to fly over one of the most densely populated square miles on Earth?

Shouldn’t someone have recognized the potential disaster and prevented it?

It was a question that would be asked numerous times over the next days, as the people of Chicago learned the details of what had happened that afternoon. The crash of the Wingfoot Express—the first major aviation disaster in the nation’s history—had taken the lives of more than a dozen people, while injuring dozens more, and had brought utter panic to the heart of the second largest city in the country. To many, it was unthinkable that such a thing could occur, that people quietly conducting their business in a downtown bank could suddenly find themselves in the midst of a hydrogen-fueled inferno. Chicago had recently come through a world war and an influenza epidemic relatively unscathed. But in the new age of twentieth-century technology, there were exotic new dangers to fear, new sources of turmoil to be reckoned with.

What no one could possibly realize at the time, however, was that the turmoil of the summer of 1919 had just begun. Over the next weeks, Chicago would plunge headlong into a crisis of almost unprecedented proportions, suffering an appalling series of trials that would push the entire city to the edge of civic disintegration. A population so recently preoccupied with fighting an enemy abroad would suddenly find no shortage of enemies within its own ranks, threatening residents’ homes, their jobs, even their children. The result would be widespread violence in the streets, turning neighbor against neighbor, white against black, worker against coworker, while rendering the city’s leaders helpless to maintain order. The Red Summer, as it would later be called, would leave Chicago a changed and chastened city, its greatest ambitions for the future suddenly threatened by the spectacle of a community hopelessly at war with itself.

The scene outside the bank. Crowds quickly ran to the building, alerted by the initial explosion in the sky over the Loop.

The Burning Hive | 21

Above: Forces quickly mobilized to drag a hose to the still-smoking hole in the bank’s skylight. From inside the building (below), fragments of the car and airship frame could be seen against the sky.

22 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

The Columns (left) was the bank’s house newsletter. A memorial issue featured information on injured colleagues, numerous photographs of the airship and events before and after the accident, and obituaries and pictures of those killed, including messenger boy Joseph Scanlan (right).

All of this would happen over just twelve days. In retrospect, the crash of the Wingfoot Express—as horrifying as it may have seemed on that warm July evening—would come to be regarded as the least of the city’s woes.

From City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster that Gave Birth to Modern Chicago by Gary Krist, copyright © 2012 by Gary Krist. Used by permission of Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | A history of safe blimp technology can be found in Zenon Hansen’s The Goodyear Airships (Bloomington, IL: Airship International Press, c. 1977). A more general examination of the aviation industry in this region is given by David M. Young in Chicago Aviation: An Illustrated History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 2003), while Don Glassman’s Jump! Tales of the Caterpillar Club (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1930) offers eyewitness accounts of the acts of death-defying pilots. Perry R. Duis discusses daily life in 1919 in Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837–1920 (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1983).

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum collection, unless otherwise noted. 4, i65990; 5, i65983; 6, i65984; 7, i65982; and 13, i65985, reproduced from The Goodyear Airships courtesy of Airship International Press; 8–9, inset: i40506, center: i03628; 10, Chicago Daily Tribune, June 23, 1919; 11, left: i66952, right: i66950; 14–15, i20578; 16, i65323; 17, i65989; 18, top: i34595, bottom: i66949; 19, i65987; 20–21, i25508; 22, top: i66953, bottom: i65988; 23, left: i65986, right: i66951.

The Burning Hive | 23

Jailhouse Makeovers In 1924, two beautiful defendants accused of murder captured the attention of Chicagoans—and the sympathy of jurors.

D O U G L A S P E R RY EDITOR’S NOTE: Chicago’s reputation as the stomping grounds of Al Capone and his associates during the Roaring

Twenties is legendary, but there is more to the city’s crime past than Scarface and his henchmen. During this era of increasing visibility for women, new attention focused on their activities in the courtroom as defendants, lawyers, and journalists. So riveting were the stories of two glamorous defendants that they inspired reporter Maurine Watkins to write the play Chicago. In addition, attorney Helen Ciersi learned that the more attractive a woman looked, the more likely she was to win an acquittal. Douglas Perry explores this latter aspect in this excerpt from his book The Girls of Murder City.

T

he Evening Post announced that April 21, the day after Easter, was “ladies day” in the Criminal Courts Building. The reason: Beulah Annan, Belva Gaertner, and Sabella Nitti were making an appearance before Judge William Lindsay.

The courts building, two blocks north of the Chicago River, wasn’t anything special. It sulked at the corner of Dearborn and Austin like an emptied fireplug, square and uninspired, with the exception of an understated arched entrance at street level. But the three women didn’t get to come through that lovely entrance like everyone else; they walked across the “bridge of sighs”— an enclosed span facetiously named after the canal crossing in Venice that Byron made famous in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This bridge connected the courthouse to the jail behind it, allowing for the safe, stressfree transport of prisoners to court. Judge Lindsay’s courtroom was usually sparsely populated with defendants’ family members, but this Monday morning found it packed with reporters and other observers, filling up the benches and spilling out into the marble-floored hall.

There hadn’t been this kind of crowd since Kitty Malm’s trial in February.

Surrounded by deputies, Beulah and Belva swept into the courtroom like exiled royals being returned to power.

They knew what to expect. They’d read every line of copy about themselves and seemed to have internalized the coverage. The real reality—the hard jail beds, the daily chores, the skittering vermin, the threat of execution—had been replaced by the newspapers’ reality: the romance of their struggle. They now believed, like the newspapers, in innocent womanhood. They believed that modern life degraded values and that bootlegging was evil.

24 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Above: Poster for the 1927 movie Chicago, based on Maurine Watkins’s play. Right: Kitty Malm and her daughter, Tootsie.

Described as the “hardest woman to ever walk into a courtroom,” Malm’s murder conviction signaled a change in how all-male juries treated female defendants.

Maurine Watkins (above) traded her graduate studies for a stint as a police reporter at the male-dominated Chicago Tribune. She later adapted real-life stories of women accused of killing the men in their lives into the play Chicago.

Beulah, as expected, received the most attention. The reporters still wanted to know about “Hula Lou.” Had she really danced with her dead lover to her favorite song, holding his heavy, cold head in her hands? The question was insulting, stupid, inevitable. She did love “Hula Lou,” though. The song got in your bones and stayed there. You couldn’t help but smile and move to it.

The Broadway star Mae West had been hired to pose for the song’s cover in 1923, and for good reason. West’s signature dance was the shimmy, which she’d picked up during her time in Chicago before the war. She’d discovered the clubs in the black neighborhoods of the South Side, just a few blocks from where Beulah and Al now lived. West had never seen anyone move like those black couples moved. “They got up from the tables, got out to the dance floor, and stood in one spot with hardly any movement of the feet, just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises,” she said after witnessing the dance for the first time and falling in love with its “naked, aching, sensual agony.” Was it the shimmy that Beulah Annan had danced over the dying body of her boyfriend eighteen days before? She wasn’t saying.

26 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Beulah, Belva, and Sabella, who’d trailed behind, sat on benches and wooden chairs in the courtroom, looking around for recognizable faces, reporters’ faces.

Spectators stood in clusters near them and at the back of the room, hoping to get a good look at Beulah’s pleasing ankles when she stepped up in front of the judge. The scene was something new and strange. Mae West wasn’t a Broadway star anymore. She’d been relegated to a minor-league vaudeville circuit after a string of rapid-fire setbacks and right now was in Texas, appearing fourth on the bill, one slot below “Marcel and his Trained Seal.”

Beulah Annan, a complete unknown just three weeks ago, an assistant bookkeeper at a laundry, was a bigger star. Love and understanding shone down on her. “I think in most cases where a man is shot by a woman, he has it coming to him,” one fan told a reporter. Many likeminded men were in the courtroom supporting the beautiful young woman whose lover had it coming. No one seemed to blame Beulah for her predicament. “A woman has to be pretty bad to be as bad as the best men,” a café owner said. Maurine Watkins, witnessing this response to Beulah, decided that, for women, Chicago was “the ideal locale for getting away with murder.” She would floridly reference Beulah’s looks over and over in her articles as a snide dig at the limitations of the male mind and predominant mores.

As the three women waited, a dour family, the Montanas, stepped before the judge. Five people—three generations of the family—stood accused of killing a policeman during a liquor raid on their home. Normally, a cop killing was page-one news, but the reporters paid little attention to the clan. Photographers surrounded Beulah, Belva, and Sabella and asked them to pose together. They were directed to sit behind a long wooden table, next to each other but fanned out just so—Belva, then Beulah, and finally Sabella.

The women had come prepared. Belva wore a black Easter bonnet with a blue chinstrap ribbons streaming down her back, a blue suit, and a summer fur around her neck. A small smile wormed across her lips at the camera caught her. Beulah, in the center, was as composed as President Coolidge, the famously stoic “Silent Cal” who’d replaced the late Warren Harding last fall.

She wore a more modern hat than Belva, which certainly pleased her (although she didn’t let her pleasure show).

She was decked out in a fawn-colored suit and, like Belva, had a light fur lying over her shoulder like a napping pet, its snout nuzzling happily in her collar. While Belva and Beulah attempted to strike dignified poses— the poses of proper women rudely detained against their will—Sabella, the third wheel, beamed like a child. She couldn’t help herself. It was a good day. She wasn’t going to be hanged today. A week after standing before the state Supreme Court, she was now seeking bail.

Above: Beulah Annan and her husband, Al (right), sitting with her attorney, William Scott Stewart in 1924. Right: Beulah’s case made for sensational reading.

Below: Phyllis Haver as Roxie Hart in the 1927 film Chicago. Roxie was an amalgam of several women defendants.

27

Opposite: Belva Gaertner in her cell in 1924 while awaiting her trial. Charged with shooting her boyfriend, she, along with Beulah Annan, inspired the play Chicago. Both women were acquitted.

Left: Hollywood’s version of a jailhouse scene. Below: Belva in court with her defense attorney, Thomas D. Nash (right).

Jailhouse Makeovers | 29

Newspapers showed little sympathy for plain, poor Sabella Nitti, describing the convicted murderer as a “dumb, crouching, animal-like Italian peasant.”

She received the death sentence, the first woman in Illinois history to do so.

Men and women had stared as Sabella Nitti entered the courtroom right behind Belva and Beulah. There was no way to know if it was in admiration of the company she was keeping or in disgust that a convicted murderess might soon be set free.

Belva and Beulah were in court to ask that their cases be held on call. Their respective lawyers had other cases to complete. But Sabella had already had her day in court.

Chicagoans, fed a diet of news stories over the past nine months that characterized Sabella as “dirty,” “repulsive,” and “animal-like,” found themselves conflicted about the Italian woman’s fate.

Sabella had never received the kind of coverage her two companions enjoyed.

Even when indicating their likely guilt, 30 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

reporters lauded Beulah and Belva for their beauty and bearing, attributes that opened the door to the possibility of innocence. Not so Sabella. No reporter ever entertained the thought that she might be innocent. After a four-day trial in the summer of 1923, she was convicted by a jury of twelve respectable men and sentenced to die.

Yet “ladies day” at the court belonged to Sabella Nitti anyway.

“Beulah has been told she’s beautiful. Belva knows she’s stylish,” pointed out the Tribune. “Sabelle is neither—and she’s happy.”

It was so unlikely, and yet it was true. Sabella Nitti walked into the courthouse with her two more glamorous cellmates, and she felt as if she were walking on clouds.

Her joy expressed itself in her dress as well as her attitude. During her trial, she went to court in the rags she’d been wearing when arrested, the makeshift clothing of a poor farm woman. She looked worn, old, pathetic. Today, following Belva and Beulah, Sabella stepped before Judge Lindsay in a tailored black dress, her hair professionally curled, and with a small gray hat fixed tot the top of her head. The transformation was amazing—and completely unexpected. It may have saved her life.

The most responsible for Sabella Nitti’s makeover was a twenty-three-year-old attorney who had recently set up her own practice because no law firm would hire her.

Nine months before Sabella made her bravura Easter Monday court appearance, Helen Cirese had walked into the women’s section of the Cook County Jail for the first time to meet her new client. The steel door closed behind her, and the wheel handle turned and then caught with an echoing thuck. She stared, mesmerized, at the two rows of cramped, ill-lit cells, one on each side of her, and at the cracked cement floor that rolled into a shimmering nothingness. Before “stylish” Belva Gaertner, before “beautiful” Beulah Annan, Cirese made an impression on the reporters who trawled the downtown jail for news. Tall and slender, she wore a white blouse under a long, thin vest that was pinned to her hips by a belt. A large feathered cloche sat low against her brow, giving her face a childlike cast. She was a dear sight standing there, nervous, holding her bag in front of her.

Her photo appeared in the Tribune the next day, and she cut it out and saved it.

It was late summer of 1923, and Cirese had every reason to believe that powerful men were arrayed against her. She and five other young Italian lawyers had just taken on Sabella Nitti’s appeal, pro bono. The state’s attorney and the police were determined to make sure the new defense team failed. It embarrassed them that some 90 percent of the women ever tried for murder in the jurisdiction had walked free. And none—until Sabella—had ever been sentenced to death. Chicago’s police chief declared that when women “kill wantonly, no effort should be spared in the interest of justice.”

The lawyers who’d volunteered for Sabella’s case had decided that Cirese, the lone woman among them, would be the best emissary to the scared, bereft inmate, who spoke barely any English. Sabella, who was somewhere in her forties, had been convicted of helping Peter Attorney Helen Cirese (right) determined that Sabella Nitti’s biggest challenge was not her guilt or innocence, but her image.

With a new hairstyle and fashionable clothing, the defendant looked “beautiful and innocent. . . . You wouldn’t have known her.”

Jailhouse Makeovers | 31

Crudelle, a farmhand and possibly her lover at the time, murder her husband. In early July of 1922, Sabella had reported Frank Nitti missing to the police in Stickney, a town on the edge of Cook County. The next day, when the police told her they could not find her husband, “she wept and pulled her hair and scratched her face.” The father of children ranging in age from three to twenty-five never returned to his little farm. In March 1923, Sabella married Crudelle, but they would not live happily together for long. Two months after the marriage, police found a badly decomposed body in a sewer catch basin and identified it as Frank Nitti. Sabella and her fifteenyear-old son, Charlie, were brought in for questioning.

After a long inquisition, Charlie told police that Crudelle had murdered his father on Sabella’s orders and that he and Crudelle had disposed of the body. Sabella, not understanding what her son was saying in English, said that whatever Charlie told them was true. On May 25, 1923, the state indicted Sabella Nitti, Peter Crudelle, and Charlie Nitti for murder. Sabella and Peter Crudelle were convicted. (After Charlie testified, charges against him were dropped.) Sabella didn’t comprehend the verdict when it was read. The next day, when an interpreter informed her that she had been condemned to hang, she cried out in terror and fainted.

Then a strange thing happened. People throughout the country became interested in Sabella. The Los Angeles Times put her on the front page: For the first time in the history of Illinois, a woman has been given the death penalty for murder. More than thirty woman have been tried for slaying their husbands or lovers and some have been convicted— three rare cases in which the defendants were unattractive and one a negress. In every case where the murderess was young and pretty, she was acquitted.

The death penalty in Illinois is carried out by hanging.

For months Sabella had been reviled in Chicago as a dirty, vicious killer. Now, almost overnight, the death sentence had made her a national cause célèbre. Those in favor of the sentence argued it was past time for Illinois to treat its women criminals in the same manner as its men, and who better than this grotesque foreigner to be the first to swing? New York, they pointed out, had executed a woman more than twenty years before, in 1899. But humanitarians used the sentence as a rallying cry. The wife of one of the jurors soon announced she would “go home to mother” if the Italian woman was hanged. Religious leaders made impassioned pleas for mercy. After weeks of being ignored by her fellow inmates, Sabella suddenly was “a woman of importance in the jail,” wrote Genevieve Forbes. “All those others who were waiting trial for robbery with a gun, for accessory to burglary and other more or less pallid charges, 32 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

became, almost unconsciously, willing handmaidens ministering to this nationally famous woman.”

Sabella didn’t realize any of this. Twice she tried to commit suicide, first by choking herself, and then, when that failed, by ramming her head repeatedly into a cell wall, leaving spatters of blood on the wall and red rivers coursing down her face.

For days after the verdict, Sabella sobbed and moaned and tore at her hair, until finally she managed to calm herself and come to terms with her terrible fate. “Me choke,” she told anyone who’d listen, a doleful look on her face. With her limited English she got it just right.

Hanging made it past the “cruel and unusual punishment” restriction in the Constitution in part because the neck was supposed to be broken by the body’s drop from the trapdoor. As often as not, though, the noose didn’t catch just right, and instead the condemned prisoner choked to death—a ghastly, protracted, drydrowning spectacle. “This takes from eight to fourteen minutes,” pointed out Daily News reporter Ben Hecht, who’d witnessed a fair number of hangings in Chicago.

While he hangs choking, the white-covered body begins to spin slowly. The white-hooded head tilts to one side and a stretch of purpled neck becomes visible. Then the rope begins to vibrate and hum like a hive of bees. After this the white robe begins to expand and deflate as if it were being blown up by a leaky bicycle pump. Following the turning, spinning, humming, and pumping up of the white robe comes the climax of the hanging. This is the throat of the hanging man letting out a last strangled cry or moan of life.

Hecht referred to the hanging man not simply out of linguistic convention; he did so because when he wrote the passage, it was almost inconceivable that a responsible prosecutor would seek the ultimate penalty for a woman or that a civilized jury would impose it. There had been more than a hundred executions in Cook County since 1840, when records began being kept. Leaders in the Italian community did not think it a coincidence that the first woman so condemned would be a poor, unattractive, non-English-speaking Italian immigrant. Faced with one of their own being put to death, Cirese and the other five lawyers (an attorney named Rocco de Stefano would serve as lead counsel) stepped forward.

The court agreed to hear a motion to set aside the verdict. Judge Joseph B. David postponed the execution, which had been schedules for October 12, 1923— Columbus Day. But Judge David didn’t put much stock in Sabella’s chances. “This is a grave matter,” he said. “I will consent to hear you, but there is not a chance in one hundred that the sentence will be vacated and a new trial granted.”

Helen Cirese’s strategy saved Sabella Nitt’s life. Soon afterward, she successfully defended another woman accused of murder, and her law practiced thrived. Cirese is shown here in 1928.

The defense team’s argument before the state Supreme Court wasn’t going to be original. The lawyers planned to prove that Sabella’s trial attorney, Eugene Moran, had been incompetent. They insisted that Sabella, whose court request for new counsel was signed with an X, “could not understand Mr. Moran, he could not understand her, and they had great difficulty in making themselves understood even through interpreters.” They also planned to show that the evidence the prosecution used to convict was suspect. The lawyers believed the identification of the body had been a sham—there was good reason to doubt that the corpse found in the catch basin was Frank Nitti. They planned to argue that the testimony of Charlie Nitti, Sabella’s son, had been coerced, and that the motive put forwards by the prosecution, namely the subsequent marriage of Sabella and Peter Crudelle, hardly constituted proof of anything.

Sabella’s conviction, her defense team believed, had been assured by the ethnic and class biases commonplace in the country. Much of the reporting on the case, especially Forbes’s coverage in the Tribune, had been offensive, showing the kind of vicious stereotyping that had led to U.S. immigration laws being changed to limit the numbers of southern Europeans coming into the country. Sabella’s poverty, illiteracy, and inability to speak English had fatally wounded her case. Who she was, in the eyes of your typical Cook County juror, showed in her face and dress and posture. Sabella herself understood this, having watched

two pretty blonde sisters—Mrs. Anna McGinnis and Mrs. Myrna Pioch—walk out the jail door a month before she was convicted. “Nice face—swell clothes—shoot man— go home,” she said in despair to her fellow inmates. “Me do nothing—me choke.”

The fact one’s gender was a valuable piece of “evidence” for any woman charged with a violent crime in Illinois. But Sabella Nitti, derided by Forbes as a “repulsive animal,” was barely granted even that qualification.

Sabella had sat in court during her trial, quietly moaning, utterly uncomprehending. In the eyes of decent society in general and of Forbes in particular, she was like a demon in physical form: different, alien, dangerous.

“Her cheap, faded blouse hikes up from her sagging black skirt, in spite of the sturdy safety pin,” Forbes wrote during the trial. “Her hair, lots of it, is matted into a festoon of snails, hairpins and side combs.”

Forbes’s coverage of the trial shocked Cirese, who read the Tribune every day. Even Sabella’s fellow prisoners were outraged. A group of them wrote a letter to the Tribune in defense of Sabella, signing it “Comrades of Mrs. Nitti.” They took exception to descriptions of Sabella as a “dirty, disheveled woman,” insisting that she was in fact “one of the cleanest women in the department, in her cell and her personal appearance. Therefore, Mrs. Nitti cannot be classed as a ‘dirty, repulsive woman.’ She is the mother of two small girls and has shown her motherly spirit here with the girls always.”

After her jailhouse makeover, Nitti won a retrial; eventually, the state dropped the case entirely.

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A motherly spirit, of course, mattered not a whit if you were viewed as little better than an animal. Helen Cirese knew what she had to do. She knew what meant the most to Illinois’ all-male juries—everyone did. “A jury isn’t blind, and a pretty woman’s never been convicted in Cook County,” one of the women inmates told Maurine Watkins at the jail. (“Gallant old Cook County!” Maurine responded in print.) It was easy to mock the typical jury’s predilection for pretty women, but it would be unwise—and poor lawyering—to ignore it. Cirese’s most important job on Sabella’s case would have nothing to do with writing briefs or making courtroom arguments.

It was to make sure Sabella Nitti was as pretty and demure as she could be.

Cirese came to the jail every week, sat with Sabella, gained her trust, and slowly began to turn her into a new person. By March 1924, Ione Quinby noticed the transformation under way. “If Mrs. Sabella Nitti-Crudelle ever gets out of prison, she will go forth a wonderfully improved woman,” the Post reporter wrote. “Hers is probably one of the few cases on record where it has been established beyond all doubt that long confinement behind bars did the prisoner any good.” Sabella had never had store-bought shoes before going to jail. She’d never had a mirror or a pillow. If she could have her two youngest children with her, Sabella told Quinby in halting English, she’d never want to leave.

“We simply reconditioned her,” Cirese later said. “I got a hairdresser to fix her up every day. We bought her a blue suit and a flesh colored silk blouse. We taught her to speak English, and when she walked into the courtroom she was beautiful—beautiful and innocent. I’ll never forget how she looked. You wouldn’t have known her.”

After a year behind bars, Sabella Nitti looked and felt great, better than ever in her whole life. And the one chance in a hundred came through. Early in April, six months after Sabella was supposed to have swung from the gallows, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the trial verdict and remanded the case to the Cook County court, insisting on “a further investigation with competent counsel representing the accused. Safety and justice require that this cause be submitted to another jury.”

Many court observers believed this decision had more than a little to do with Sabella’s new look. “When she came to the country jail, she appeared to be fully capable of murder,” observed Quinby. “But she doesn’t now.”

With the Sabella Nitti case, Helen Cirese began building a unique law practice—a woman criminaldefense attorney, a rare enough thing, specializing in women clients. In the spring of 1924, as she waited for Sabella’s retrial to be scheduled, she took up another, even more hopeless case, this one without the assistance of a team of lawyers. In December, Mrs. Lela Foster had been arrested and charged with the murder of her hus-

Prosecutors claimed that after Beulah Annan (pictured here in 1924) shot her boyfriend, she sat listening to the song “Hula Lou” over and over. The accused’s winsome good looks won her sympathy from the jury, which acquitted her of murder.

band. Just before the victim died, the man told police his wife had done it. Lela, in an account that mirrored Beulah Annan’s, said her husband had threatened her with a revolver and that she shot him after they struggled for possession of the gun. She said that he regularly beat her up and that she had the bruises to prove it. Still, Lela couldn’t expect to get much sympathy from jurors or the newspapers. (The press almost entirely ignored the case.)

This was because Lela, who was white, had married a Negro. Maybe the dead man got what he deserved, went the popular thinking, but so did she. What did she expect from marrying a “coon”? The fear of miscegenation was so great that the state could boast of witnesses who claimed Mrs. Foster “chewed the end of lead bullets to make the wounds bigger.” Up to this point, the only mention of the case in the papers was a brief item stating Jailhouse Makeovers | 35

that it was “believed to be the first time that an alleged murderess has been represented by a woman attorney.”

The prospect of women attorneys representing women murder suspects before all-male juries was almost as terrifying as interracial coupling. One Virginia newspaper, commenting on the situation in Chicago after the state Supreme Court’s ruling on Sabella’s case, wrote that “now that fair women attorneys, full of feminine wiles, have been added to the equation, conviction of pretty lady killers is hardly even hoped for.”

That was fine with Cirese. She would take all the help she could get. She was young and unconsciously graceful, with an imperious Roman nose and preternaturally full lips. If that counted as feminine wiles, she’d happily used them to help get clients out of jail. After all, nothing had come easily in her young professional life so far, which was no reflection on her skills. Too many lawyers and judges simply didn’t believe women belonged in the courtroom in any official capacity. Most female lawyers could, at best, land jobs as court stenographers. “Women make good law students . . . They can pass the examinations, including the Bar examinations, with honors and flying colors,” opined William Scott Stewart, Beulah’s attorney. “But conditions are such that they do not seem to me equipped for the actual knockdown and drag-out fight required in the actual trial of lawsuits.” Stewart’s opinion was entirely ordinary and uncontroversial in the legal community.

Cirese, less than three years out of DePaul University’s law school, was determined to prove Stewart wrong.

Sabella’s retrial would be soon, likely in May, before Lela Foster’s trial. Of course, Sabella, in a very real way, already could be counted as a success. Now that she could communicate to a fair degree with her fellow inmates, she was noticeably happier. Of the women on the cellblock, Kitty Malm was the nicest to the Italian woman; she always made an effort to get a smile out of her. One of the girls dubbed Kitty the Girl with the Big Heart. Elizabeth Unkafer, who had shot down her boyfriend in February, would also smile at Sabella, but Elizabeth would smile at the wall and her big toe. She scrubbed the jail floor day after day, her matted mop of red hair in her eyes, flabby cheeks flapping, mumbling to herself, having a conversation. Her attorneys planned to have the forty-six-year-old woman plead insanity at her trial. She had, after all, said she’d killed her beau “because it was in the Bible that I had to.” Belva Gaertner, meanwhile, gave Sabella coins for making up her bed every morning and doing other chores for her.

She seemed to genuinely like Sabella. When the good news came down about the Italian woman winning a retrial, Kitty and Belva were the first to meet her when she returned to the jail. Belva organized a celebratory party and led the festivities.

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Best of all, Sabella Nitti wasn’t just innocent—that was how the women of the jail interpreted the higher court decision—she was also beautiful now, or at least presentable. If it helped sway Supreme Court justices, it would surely make the difference in a new trial. After the American photographer took a “ladies day” portrait with the three women inmates, he positioned Sabella for her own picture. Her changed appearance was dramatic enough to warrant it. The inmate the American had derided as a “bent old woman, with a face like sandpaper,” is sitting erect and smiling in the photograph.

She looks like a respectable suburban housewife on a pleasant spring outing. In the background, in the corner of the frame, Beulah gazes blandly off into the distance.

Genevieve Forbes, for one, didn’t like the precedent Sabella Nitti and Helen Cirese had established. Sabella had learned how to dress with style, how to apply makeup, how to give herself a manicure. She had also begun to learn how to speak English. This hardly should have been considered ground-breaking trial preparation, but it helped change the atmosphere at the jail. It changed the whole point of the inmates being there. Many of the women at Cook County Jail didn’t really have lawyers.

Judges assigned private defense attorneys to cases with indigent defendants. It wasn’t unusual for a lawyer, if unable to extract a fee from the defendant’s relatives, to put up a token defense at best or persuade his client to plead guilty. But now the inmates in the women’s quarters realized that they didn’t have to just helplessly wait around for a sentence to be imposed on them. They could do something. They could learn. They could go to what Forbes derisively labeled jail school. If Sabella could do it, any of them could. “A horrible looking creature she was,” Forbes wrote with her typical sensitivity, “with skin like elephant hide, nails split to the quick and the dirt ingrained deep in the cracks of her hands. Her hair was matted; her skirt sagged to a big safety pin.” Then, Forbes wrote, “Sabelle went to the jail school. She learned to understand English, then to speak it, presently to write it.”

She learned beauty tips, the reporter went on, such as “the value of lemon juice to whiten skin.”

Influenced by Sabella’s success before the Supreme Court and the wave of press attention bestowed on Belva and Beulah, the other women prisoners enrolled in jail school, too. They cut each other’s hair in the latest style.

They discussed how to wear cosmetics. They gave themselves and each other manicures. Friends and lawyers brought in new outfits for the inmates, and the women conducted impromptu fashion shows on the block to choose the best clothing for their trials. “They study every effect, turn, and change,” Maurine Watkins noted, “and who can say it’s time wasted?” Maurine certainly didn’t think it was. In court, even more than in life, clothes made the woman, especially the woman murder defen-

William Scott Stewart, c. 1926. The attorney successfully defended Beulah Annan. He, too, inspired a character in Chicago.

Jailhouse Makeovers | 37

In the 1942 remake of Chicago, titled Roxie Hart, Ginger Rogers played a showgirl who confesses to a murder for the publicity. Her Roxie was not actually guilty; Hollywood’s restrictive Hays Code prohibited a heroine from benefiting from a crime.

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dant. “Colorful clothes would mark her as a brazen hussy flaunting herself in the public eye and black would be interpreted as a hypocritical pose,” Maurine later wrote.

“Yes, there’s need for an Emily Post on murder etiquette.”

Maurine was joking—but she was also right. For just that reason, a spirit of sisterhood now prevailed among the inmates. The women, “all man-killers,” wrote one New York newspaper, had become “Chicago’s most picturesque group.” Belva offered fashion tips and gave comportment lessons to girls who were about to go before judge and jury. She was “a good stage manager,” Forbes wrote. “When the girl in cell No. 4 was informed that her trial would be the following Tuesday, Belva gave her some really good ideas on costuming, coiffure and general chic.

It helped the girl in No.4, and it whiled away otherwise lonely hours for Belva, with the ‘clothes sense.’”

It was too good to last, of course. Three days after Sabella, Belva, and Beulah walked over to the courthouse together, the Evening Post splashed a headline in massive 96-point type across its front page: LOVE-FOILED GIRL SEEKS MAN’S LIFE; KILLS CARETAKER BEAUTIFUL EX-DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY SLAYS AN OUTSIDER IN DEATH STALK FOR AD MAN All of the city’s newspapers had similar front-page headlines that Thursday afternoon. Unwilling to be trumped on a guaranteed newsstand seller, the morning papers cranked out special evening bulletins about this latest “beautiful girl slayer,” a young Polish lawyer named Wanda Stopa. Only an hour after the unfortunate caretaker fell, with the girl still on the loose, “bankers, professional and laboring men, and even housewives were reading descriptions of the murderess,” Ione Quinby recalled. The story was an instant sensation, the excitement heightened by the fact that the drama was ongoing, with a massive police search that “for morbid interest and mystery held the attention of the public as no other murder hunt had done in years.”

The mood at the jail changed at once. The recent camaraderie in the women’s quarters had surprised the guards, who were accustomed to frequent arguments and even physical fights among their charges. The atmosphere had been remarkably placid and supportive for weeks, but there was an unmistakable pecking order underpinning it, with Belva and Beulah at the top and Sabella in her own special category. Now the leading ladies suddenly felt threatened. On April 24, the newspapers only had one subject, page after page, photograph after photograph: the breathtaking love-foiled girl. The jail matrons weren’t at all sure that cellblock harmony could withstand a new beautiful woman on Murderess’ Row.

Reprinted by arrangement in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry. Copyright © Douglas Perry, 2010.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 24, Buyenlarge/ Moviepix/Getty Images 129633791; 25, DN-076739; 26, Vandamm Studio/© Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; 27, top: DN-076803, bottom left: Hulton Archive/Moviepix/Getty Images 3290650, bottom right: Chicago Daily Tribune, April 5, 1924; 28, DN0076749; 29, top: Hulton Archive/Moviepix/Getty Images 3290543, bottom: DN-077649; 30, top left: Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1922, top middle: Chicago Daily Tribune, July 10, 1923, top right: Chicago Daily Tribune, July 10, 1923, center: Chicago Daily Tribune, July 10, 1923, bottom: Chicago Daily Tribune, April 22, 1924; 31, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 15, 1929; 33: DN-086927; 34, back: Chicago Daily Tribune, April 15, 1924, front: Chicago Daily Tribune, December 2, 1924; 35, DN-076797; 37, DN-081521; 38, Hulton Archive/Moviepix/Getty Images 3282571.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Maurine Watkin’s play Chicago, originally published by Knopf in 1928, is now available in a critical edition incorporating the Chicago Daily Tribune articles she used as source materials (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997). For a more general look at Chicago’s murders and criminal prosecutions in this period, see Michael Lesy’s Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson explore another notorious case in The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Jailhouse Makeovers | 39

Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y I

Golf and the Chicago Girl R AY M O N D S C H M I D T

I

n 1924, Chicago celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first municipal golf course as the links sport boomed across the city. The game—a healthy outdoor activity and sociable athletic competition with few age restrictions—had been popular among local women since the beginning of the 1900s.

The city, in fact, was regarded as one of the major centers of American women’s golf from World War I to the mid-1930s. As such, competitive women’s golf in Chicago mirrored the changes evolving on the national links scene: improving skill levels of the better players, growing media coverage, and increasing spectator attendance.

Golf at the time was divided between the public course and private country club versions of the sport, which exemplified much about Chicago’s social structure. Prior to 1920, the majority of local courses were the province of either private country clubs or golf clubs with dues-paying memberships. American Golfer magazine reported in early 1919 that Chicago and its immediate vicinity featured fifty-two golf courses—of which only six were open to the public.

The first star of Chicago women’s golf was Elaine Rosenthal, who at age eighteen stunned the sport by taking second place in the increasingly prestigious US National Women’s Championship in 1914. Rosenthal was a member of the private Ravisloe Country Club, a primarily Jewish club founded in 1901 south of the city in Homewood. Ravisloe was part of a steadily growing circle of local private country clubs, ten of which joined together in 1899 to organize the Western Golf Association (WGA); the Women’s Western Golf Association (WWGA) was formed two years later.

In 1915, Rosenthal quickly established herself as the top player in Chicago when she won the Women’s Western championship, which had first been played in 1901 and quickly became the second most important women’s golf tournament in America, behind only the US National. After winning the 40 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

In 1925, golfers logged more than 600,000 rounds on Chicago’s five municipal courses, including Garfield Park (below in 1929).

The Women’s Western Golf Association (logo at lower left) sponsored events for country club players.

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Golfers (from left) Mrs. C. O. Gillette, Miss Corella Lukens, Miss Frances Hadfield, and Miss Elaine Rosenthal on the grounds of an unidentified club, 1918. Rosenthal played out of Ravisloe Country Club in Homewood, Illinois.

A Note on Tournaments and Scoring

F

or many decades in the early history of women’s golf, virtually all of the tournaments were contested at “match play,” meaning that each match—usually eighteen holes—was decided by which player won the most holes. The winner then advanced to the next round of play. As soon as one player had mathematically clinched a match, play ended; hence in golf notation, a 3 and 2 decision, or 3 and 2 tally, meant that one player was three holes ahead with just two left to play and so was victorious. If a match was tied at the end of eighteen (or thirty-six) holes, the contest went into extra holes until one player won a hole to end the match, resulting in a final score such as “1 up, 20 holes.” A qualifying round of “medal play” often preceded match-play tournaments. In medal play, the player with the lowest total score, typically over eighteen holes, wins.

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1916 Florida Women’s State championship, Rosenthal reached the quarterfinals of the US National. There she played the eventual champion, Alexa Stirling, and dropped a 2 and 1 decision. One prominent sportswriter described the match as “in many respects, one of the best played ever seen in a championship.”

Rosenthal noticeably improved her game in 1916, with added distance on her tee shots and much better play with her fairway woods, prompting American Golfer to place her among the top five women players in the United States. In 1917, she won the increasingly prominent North and South Tournament in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and took second place in the Women’s Western.

American involvement in World War I soon began to curtail the top women’s tournaments. With the US National canceled, Rosenthal began to tour the East Coast and Midwest in the summer of 1917, playing benefit exhibition matches on behalf of various wartime charities, including the Red Cross Fund. Rosenthal’s charity exhibition travels continued through the 1918 golf season, and after the war, the Red Cross recognized her and two other women players with its meritorious service medal. Although the US National was again canceled in 1918, Rosenthal captured another Women’s Western title over a large field of players—surprising given the wartime conditions.

Edith Cummings and Virginia Wilson, arguably two of the top players in Chicago’s women’s golf history, belonged to the socially elite Onwentsia Club (above in 1911) in Lake Forest, Illinois.

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Chicago’s municipal golf courses were exceedingly popular and increasingly overcrowded in the early 1900s. Above: Spectators on a Jackson Park sand bunker in 1908. Below: A group at the Garfield Park Club in 1910.

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Miss Elaine Rosenthal (from left), Mrs. M. Goldschmidt, Miss Inez Ridgeway, Mrs. Harry Sloan, and Mrs. D. R. Day stand in a Chicago office in 1918. The bull’s-eye patches on their jackets may indicate the uniforms of Red Cross nurses.

Yet if Elaine Rosenthal was the most prominent Chicago player prior to 1920, other local golfers had begun to establish reputations on area courses.

Cincinnati-native Miss Marjorie Dodd became a transplant to the Windy City after she qualified for the 1915 US National at the Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest, where she met a local young man named Fred Letts; the two married after a short courtship.

Now playing as Mrs. F. C. Letts, she won the Women’s Western in 1916, 1917, and 1920; she had sat out the 1918 golf season while living in New York, where her husband was in government service, but returned to finish runner-up in 1919. By 1920, Letts was number ten in the New York Times rankings of American women players.

By the close of World War I, the Women’s Chicago District championship was considered the top local tournament. The Chicago District Golf Association (CDGA) was organized in 1914 with an initial lineup of twentyfive area country clubs. In 1915, the CDGA sponsored four tournaments for players from its member clubs, all

of them men’s events, including a tournament for caddies. In 1916, women players from the member clubs began to stage their own annual Chicago District championship. The first was played at the Glen View Club and won by Mrs. Melvin Jones, who went on to win the prestigious event six times. The Chicago Women’s District Golf Association was formed in 1930 and took over operation of the tournament.

Early in the golf craze, playing on a regulation course was largely beyond the realm of possibility for the less than financially well-to-do. All that began to change in 1899, when the city’s South Park Board initiated the construction of a nine-hole course in Jackson Park on the South Side—the first open to the general public west of New York. The course was free, with golfers teeing off in the order of their arrival. Water hazards were numerous, not to mention the considerable ruins from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition that remained in the park and guaranteed a lost ball for any shot that drifted into the debris.

Yesterday’s City | 45

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Mrs. Melvin Jones (above) putts while her caddie stands nearby.

This photograph is from 1916, the year Jones captured the title of the first-ever Chicago District championship.

The opening of the Jackson Park course in May 1899 foreshadowed the future of the links sport in Chicago.

As the Inter Ocean reporter covering the course’s dedication ceremony wrote: “The course at Jackson Park is a long stride forward to the popularizing of the royal game. . . . When first imported to America . . . golf was called a fad of the upper ten. . . . Today the progressive policy of the South Park board has put it within the reach of the plain people.”

Indeed, golf became an instant sensation among the masses. Soon the course was packed from sunrise to sunset every day (except for Sundays when play was initially not permitted). The board expanded the Jackson Park links to eighteen holes in 1900 and added a third nine the following year in a largely unsuccessful attempt to ease the crowded conditions.

It did not take long for park officials to realize that the course would never be able to accommodate all of the so-called “public links” players wanting to play. So, they opened a short nine-hole course in Garfield Park on August 17, 1908. The initial layout was little more than a par three, yet it was immediately popular and always crowded. Within a year’s time, the Garfield course was also proving “prodigiously inadequate” to handle the large number of players. In the spring of 1913, the city opened a new eighteen-hole course in Marquette Park at approximately Sixty-Seventh Street and Kedzie Avenue.

Despite the new courses, Jackson Park remained the The area’s first public golf course—Jackson Park—remained its most popular. Left: Spectators cross a water feature on the Jackson Park course in 1907.

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Above: Mrs. Lee W. Mida, pictured here in 1922, became notorious for setting scoring records on area courses in the 1920s and 1930s.

Below: Golfers at Edgebrook in 1926.

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Golf clubs, c. 1922, used by Mrs. Paul Rhymer and donated to the Museum in 1956 (pictured from left: driver, mashie, and mid-iron).

most popular. For the 1914 season, American Golfer magazine reported that 260,400 players had taken out tickets for play, adding that it was “doubtful any course in the world gets a larger patronage.”

In September 1916, the city park commissioners sought to provide a more convenient municipal layout for North Side golfers with the opening of a nine-hole course in Lincoln Park near Diversey Avenue. Then in 1919, the recently formed Cook County Forest Preserve acquired an existing nine-hole, formerly private course called Edgebrook, located on the far North Side near Central and Elston Avenues, and reopened it as a public course (they added another nine holes to the layout in 1922). The West Park Commission also moved ahead with plans to build a municipal course in Columbus Park, located at approximately Central Avenue and Congress Street. With nationally prominent Chicago amateur golfer Chick Evans involved in the design of the course, it opened in August 1921.

Chicago’s municipal courses produced plenty of good players, yet seldom would any of them achieve competitive equality with the top players coming out of the country clubs. With their extremely crowded conditions and far-from-challenging layouts, the city courses limited player development and prevented the acquiring of a well-rounded game. In the 1920s, the opening of a substantial number of semiprivate and daily-fee courses helped alleviate some of the crowded playing conditions.

And, beginning in 1921, many of the area’s private country clubs began to occasionally offer “playing memberships” to talented young municipal players to assist in their development.

With the growing number of municipal golf courses available, it was only natural that a limited number of citywide tournaments would be organized for women players from the city’s public courses. Women’s clubs at many of the municipal courses were already staging their own tournaments, but beginning in the 1920s, the annual calendars for the top municipal players included the Chicago City Parks championship and the Cook County women’s championship.

Initially the City Parks championship was staged as an open event, allowing players from private clubs to enter.

In 1920, the first City Parks tournament was played at Marquette Park and the title won by Mrs. Lee Mida from Edgewood Valley in La Grange. During the second half of the 1920s and into the 1930s, Mida became one of the top players in Chicago and notorious for setting scoring records at local courses. She returned in 1921 to successfully defend her City Parks championship with a victory over Ruth Shults, a young player who soon became the center of attention in Chicago women’s municipal golf.

Shults was a student at Hyde Park High School and lived at 1505 East Sixty-Fifth Place. She belonged to the Yesterday’s City | 49

Country club golfer Dorothy Klotz (right in 1925) sparked controversy when she won the first Illinois Public Parks championship in 1923. In that tournament, the young and talented Ruth Shults (left in 1921) suffered an unexpected defeat in the semifinals.

women’s clubs at both the Jackson and Marquette Park courses. In 1920, at age fourteen, she amazingly advanced to the semifinals of the City Parks tournament before Mida defeated her in a tight match by the score of 3 and 1. In 1921, Shults won the Marquette Park women’s club championship and advanced to the final round of the City Parks tournament before she lost to Mida in a thirty-six-hole match.

In the 1922 Cook County championship, played at Jackson Park, the sixteen-year-old Shults advanced to the final round where Mida again awaited. Their match went into extra holes: Shults winning on the nineteenth, taking the title with a 1-up decision. The following year, Shults successfully defended her Cook County title and shot a round of 68 on her way to winning a fifty-four-hole medal play tournament on the short Garfield Park course.

A new major tournament debuted in Chicago in 1923 with the first women’s Illinois Public Parks championship, which was played at the relatively new Columbus Park course. Dorothy Klotz from the private Indian Hill Club won the title after Shults suffered an upset defeat in the semifinals. Klotz was already beginning to play in top women’s tournaments outside of Illinois, and her victory in the Public Parks champi50 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

onship sparked controversy among local golfers. By 1924, the Women’s Public Parks Golf Association of Illinois ruled that the Public Parks tournament would thereafter be closed to members of private clubs.

Shults came back in 1924 and—at age eighteen— compiled the most successful season of her public links days, beginning with the championship of the Illinois Public Parks tournament at Columbus Park. Later in the summer in the Cook County championship she advanced to the semifinals where, before an extremely large gallery that occasionally delayed play, she suffered a surprising 1-up defeat in a tense match against Mrs. Ralph Smalley of the Jackson Park Club. A few weeks later Shults was back in the winner’s circle as she captured the City Parks championship with a convincing 7 and 5 victory in the final match at Jackson Park.

That summer closed out the public links days of Ruth Shults, as she became a member at Edgewood Valley. In 1925, she demonstrated that she could hold her own with the country club players as she shot a two-underpar 81 to win a one-day WWGA tournament at the Beverly Club. In 1926, Shults advanced to the quarterfinals of the Chicago District tournament. Two months later, she married longtime friend and former schoolmate

Mrs. F. C. Letts (left) and Miss Edith Cummings in 1920, the year they met in the final round of the prestigious Women’s Western.

Letts emerged victorious.

William Ferguson at the Bryn Mawr Community Church, and as a member of the Edgewood Club, she continued to play in Chicago District events.

While the municipal course tournaments were gaining in popularity, the top players from Chicago’s country club scene were making an impression on the national golf landscape and establishing Chicago as a top locale for women’s golf. In 1921, Mrs. Melvin Jones, now a member at Olympia Fields in the south suburbs, where she won the women’s club championship for eight consecutive years (1921 to 1928), captured her second Chicago District title. She then broke into the national scene, winning the Women’s Western championship over a solid field. American Golfer magazine noted that Jones’s victory “proved conclusively that she deserves to be ranked as the leading woman exponent of the Royal and Ancient game in the west.”

Yet the top story surrounding Chicago women’s golf in 1921 came at the US National, where six local players qualified for the thirty-two-spot field out of a record entry of 181. It was expected to be a historic tournament in the relatively young American women’s sport, as defending champion Alexa Stirling of Atlanta was seeking her fourth consecutive national title. Adding to the

drama was the presence of Miss Cecil Leitch of England, considered the top women’s golfer in the world, who had already won the British, French, and Canadian national championships that year.

After cruising through the first round, Leitch met Mrs. Letts of Chicago. When Letts lost the first three holes, the rest seemed a formality, and after the first nine holes, Leitch held a 2-up lead. But Letts then won the thirteenth and fifteenth holes with pars and suddenly the match was even. As word spread across the course, spectators ran to catch up with the players. With the match still even, both players reached the eighteenth green in two shots. Leitch three-putted. Letts then holed a fivefoot putt for par, securing a shocking 1-up victory over the world’s number one woman player.

At the time, American Golfer ranked Letts’s victory with those of Walter Travis at the 1904 British Amateur and Francis Ouimet in the 1913 US Open as the three greatest moments to date in United States golf. Having carved her place in golf history, Letts lost in the third round to Marion Hollins from Long Island, runner-up in the 1913 US National and one of the top three women players in the country in 1921. Yet more drama was to come for the Chicago players.

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Elaine Rosenthal, who had played a tremendous match against Stirling in the 1920 US National, proceeded to win three matches on her way to the 1921 semifinals where she met Hollins. Rosenthal moved into a 1-up lead, which she held through the fourteenth hole, but Hollins caught up on the fifteenth and the two then battled into extra holes. Hollins won the match on the nineteenth hole, advancing to the finals where she defeated Stirling to win the championship.

Later that fall, Rosenthal married Louis “Spider” Reinhardt, a former Yale football player. Upon returning from their honeymoon in Europe, the new Mrs. Reinhardt announced that she would not be playing competitive golf in 1922, and the couple soon moved to Dallas. She returned to the Women’s Western in 1923, where she reached the semifinals. Then in 1925, she won the match play Western championship—her third title in the tournament—along with her second straight victory in the annual fifty-four-hole Western medal play tournament at Chicago’s Riverside Club. In the late 1920s, the Reinhardts moved back to Chicago, joining Northmoor Country Club on the North Shore, from where Elaine regularly competed in Chicago District events.

Early in the summer of 1922, American Golfer magazine issued a ranking of the top ten American women players, based upon the previous season. Chicagoans held three of the slots—Jones (#5), Letts (#6), and Rosenthal (#8).

Later that summer, Jones won her third Chicago District championship with a victory over Letts in the final. Then, in 1923, Letts won her last Chicago District championship with a 1-up victory over Edith Cummings, soon to be the sensation of American women’s golf.

Cummings, age twenty-three, played out of the socially elite Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest and had been challenging for a spot in the top echelon of American women’s golf since 1920. Her 1922 match play victories over nationally ranked Alexa Stirling, Glenna Collett, and Dorothy Campbell Hurd—and her spot in the semifinals of the US National—warned of a dangerous young player who had reached the top sooner than anyone expected.

The child of a wealthy Chicago capitalist, Cummings grew up involved in all of the things expected of daughters of the financially elite. From the time she was a preteen, her name regularly appeared in the society columns as she rode horses, watched polo matches, played tennis, and attended dances and debutante parties—including her own. Cummings was frequently pictured with her closest friends, including Ginevra King, who is largely Top: Mrs. Melvin Jones in 1922, around the time American Golfer ranked her as the fifth best player in the nation. She would serve as WWGA president in 1938 and 1939. Right: Alexa Stirling, the longtime queen of American golf, plays at Onwentsia in 1915.

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remembered as the love of the young F. Scott Fitzgerald while he was a student at Princeton. Literary scholars widely accept that Fitzgerald used Edith Cummings— tall, slim, athletic, and beautiful with warm brown hair— as his model for the enchanting Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby.

Cummings’s father was an avid golfer, and he soon had his children equally devoted to the game. At age sixteen, Edith won Onwentsia’s annual women’s Pow-Wow tournament, and at age nineteen, she shot a 79 on her home course. Later in the summer of 1919, she shot the lowest score in qualifying for the Chicago District tournament and won the women’s club championship at Onwentsia with a victory over Mrs. H. Arnold Jackson, a two-time US National champion.

At the 1923 US National, Collett, the defending champion, and Stirling were seen as the favorites, but it soon became clear that Cummings was playing the most consistent golf of the field. She won her first three matches and advanced to the semifinals, driving long and straight off the tees and hitting her irons crisply and accurately.

She also had an outstanding short game, American Golfer describing her as “generally considered to be the best putter of all the feminine players in the country.”

In the third round, former national champion Mrs. C. H. Vanderbeck unexpectedly knocked out Collett. Then in the semifinals Cummings and Vanderbeck hooked up in a classic struggle. After sixteen holes of play Vanderbeck was holding a lead of two holes. To make matters worse, Vanderbeck’s two booming wood shots on the sevenGlenna Collett published Ladies in the Rough in 1928. The text includes a foreword by famed golfer Bobby Jones and instructive illustrations, such as Collett’s demonstrations of “addressing the ball” (right) and “the various stages of the drive” (below).

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Edith Cummings was a media darling, especially during her playing career. On August 25, 1924, she became the first woman to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Above: Her portrait in Collett’s Ladies in the Rough.

teenth had her on the green in two, while Cummings was fifteen feet over the green and facing a dangerous downhill chip shot. But here Cummings chipped to within three feet of the hole to eventually get her par, and her rival nervously three-putted. The margin was now one hole. On the eighteenth green, Cummings rolled in a downhill putt from nine feet for another par to even the match. The Chicago socialite finally wore down Vanderbeck on the twentieth hole, advancing to the final with a 1-up victory.

Waiting in the thirty-six-hole championship match was Stirling, the longtime queen of American golf. Yet Cummings was ready, and the two excellent players struggled through a tense match on a cold, windy day. At the end of the morning eighteen, Stirling held a two-hole lead and most observers were ready to concede her the championship. Yet in the afternoon round Cummings came out firing and over the first seven holes—many of 54 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

them more than four hundred yards in length—she posted scores of 4-3-5-4-5-4-4 to win five of them and swing into a 3-up lead. Stirling came fighting back and narrowed the deficit to one hole, but the Chicago player’s continued pars finally brought the match to a close with Cummings becoming the 1923 US National champion with a brilliant 3 and 2 victory.

In 1924, Cummings won the Southern California championship and captured the Women’s Western crown with an overwhelming 12 and 10 victory over Miriam Burns, the defending champion. In 1925, she made another serious run at the US National championship, advancing to the semifinals before losing a dramatic 1-up decision to Collett, the eventual champion.

After that point—although she still played competitive golf on occasion—she increasingly turned her interests to other areas. In later years, the news of Edith Cummings dealt more with her exploits as a big-game hunter, her travels throughout Europe, and her accomplishments as a prominent horsewoman. After her marriage in 1934 to Curtis Munson, a mining engineer from a wealthy New York family, the heiress and her husband traveled widely and became extremely involved in philanthropic affairs.

During this time, Chicago’s two other top-ranked female players—Letts and Jones—continued to hold their own. In 1925, Letts claimed match play victories over Dorothy Campbell Hurd and Helen Paget, the Canadian champion, prompting the media to dub her the “giant killer.” Golf Illustrated noted that Letts “has a short game that is inferior to none, and a fighting spirit that is becoming historic.” In 1928, to cap off her career, she won the Bahamas Women’s National championship.

Jones finished runner-up in the 1926 and 1928 Chicago District championships, before winning her fifth and sixth titles in the prestigious local tournament in 1929 and 1930. In the qualifying round in 1928, Jones shot an amazing 73 at Olympia Fields, just one over men’s par. She also won the 1927 Pebble Beach tournament and the 1930 Pan-American championship.

By the mid-1920s, women’s golf—in part influenced

by Chicago players—had experienced significant developments and advances. Gone were the long, flowing, often cumbersome dresses, blouses, and sweaters that women players wore in the years before World War I. By 1925, players sported knee-length skirts, short-sleeve blouses, casual loose-fitting sweaters, and all manner of stylish hats, a combination that remained the basic model for women’s golf attire into the 1960s.

Improvements in golf equipment and teaching techniques had also produced higher skill levels. The result was an increasingly popular spectator sport that attracted significant crowds. The growing number of golf courses being constructed also helped.

Two of the most interesting players to emerge from the city’s public parks courses during the late 1920s were the Beebe sisters. The first, and elder by four years, was Florence, who initially played out of the Edgebrook course. In the spring of 1925, she won the girls’ individual title in the Chicago Public High School league tournament and helped Schurz High to the team championship.

At the Cook County tournament at Jackson Park in July 1925, Beebe, just shy of age sixteen, began her firstround match with a gallery of approximately two hundred spectators. The high-school champion was soon pounding out long, straight tee shots: her drive on the fifth hole carrying a stunning 310 yards. By the back nine, the gallery had grown to nearly two thousand spectators. In the second round, Beebe met Smalley, the defending champion. The Tribune described the estimated outpouring of more than seven thousand spectators as “the greatest crowd that ever followed a golf match in the Chicago district,” and they were not disappointed: the veteran player and the prep star matched

women’s par for the eighteen holes. The match was finally decided on the first extra hole as Smalley triumphed 1 up.

In early 1926, Beebe repeated as the girls’ champion of the Chicago Public High School league, the final year of interscholastic girls’ golf in Chicago until the 1970s. In July, she advanced to the semifinals of the Illinois State Parks tournament at Lincoln Park where she met Mrs. Florence Jacobs in a close, tensely fought match; but regrettably, Beebe was followed by a crowd of rowdy, youthful fans oblivious to golf-course etiquette. Their inappropriate behavior reached a peak on the eighteenth green. When Jacobs missed a putt that would have won the match, Beebe’s fans burst out with a loud “razzberry” in the words of a Tribune reporter, who noted, “Another tradition of the links crumbled before the advance of Americanism and Chicago enthusiasm.”

Tournament officials escorted the young fans off the course, and the match continued to the first extra hole, where Jacobs promptly claimed victory.

By the mid-1920s, women’s golf attire had changed radically. Left: Mrs. F. A. Colburn plays in a cumbersome skirt in 1910. Right: Mrs. J. S. Cassriel sports a modern ensemble in 1925.

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Olympia Fields was among the private clubs that offered playing memberships to talented municipal golfers. Above: Water hazard and sixteenth-hole putting green at Olympia Fields, 1929.

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Florence Beebe (above in 1925) was among the most promising— and disruptive—players to emerge from the city’s public courses.

Below: Beebe follows through after a swing, 1924.

After a serious wrist injury suffered while playing volleyball prematurely ended her 1926 golf season, Beebe won the Illinois State Parks and Cook County championships in 1927, her long tee shots and the continued rowdiness of her friends still in evidence. The Cook County championship match against Mrs. Rose Marshall, in particular, held plenty of controversy.

On the seventh fairway, Beebe’s caddie accidently kicked her opponent’s ball. The error should have at once given the hole to Marshall, but in an act of sportsmanship, Marshall refused to accept the forfeit; and the two proceeded to tie the hole. Once again, some of Beebe’s fans demonstrated a complete disregard for golf etiquette as they repeatedly talked among themselves and with Beebe’s caddie while shots were being played.

After issuing several warnings, tournament officials declared that if the talking continued Beebe would have to forfeit the match; this, of course, touched off a loud round of arguments and more ejections from the course.

Over the next few years, Florence Beebe’s name occasionally appeared in local area tournaments, but she essentially failed to fulfill the golf potential she had demonstrated while in high school.

Her younger sister, June, first came to the attention of the local media in 1926, when at the age of thirteen she qualified for the second flight in the Cook County tour-

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June Beebe (pictured above in 1929) served as WWGA president in 1961 and 1962. At that time, she and her husband were members at Exmoor Country Club in Highland Park, Illinois.

Virginia Wilson pictured in 1921 at age fifteen, two years before she began to gain national attention. Two decades later, in 1944 and 1945, she held the position of WWGA president.

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nament; at the time, the Tribune noted that she was “just a little taller than your driver.” Three years later, June Beebe convincingly won the Cook County tournament with a 6 and 5 victory. Playing out of the Lincoln Park Golf Club, she impressively defeated Mrs. F. FitzGibbon, the defending champion, and Mrs. Lillian Zech, the Illinois State Parks champion, on her way to the final.

The Tribune reported, “Miss Beebe has the earmarks of a real champion; quiet, cool and calculating.”

In 1930, the WWGA inaugurated the Western Open to go along with its nationally prominent Western championship; the latter was soon renamed the Women’s Western Amateur. The new tournament was open to players from member clubs, nonmember clubs, and— most significantly for the future, although not anticipated initially—professional golfers. The first Women’s Western Open was held in July 1930 at Chicago’s Acacia Country Club, and June Beebe—now playing out of Olympia Fields where she had been awarded a playing membership—advanced to the final round before losing to Mrs. Lee Mida.

Over the next five years, Beebe pieced together a remarkable record in spite of a severe illness in late 1931 and attending DePaul University to study law. In 1931, she finished runner-up in the Chicago District to Jane Weiller of Northmoor Country Club—a player with whom Beebe would have a great rivalry—and rebounded to win the Western Open with a 3 and 2 victory over Mrs. Melvin Jones. During the 1932 season, while recovering from her illness, she managed to nab second place finishes in both the Chicago District and Western Open tournaments.

In 1933, Beebe was at the peak of her game. She swept the championships of the Chicago District, Western Open, and Western Derby, the last a seventy-two-hole medal play tournament conducted from 1929 to 1941 that she won at Sunset Ridge Country Club, shooting a women’s course record of 78 in the final round. After her marriage to Phillip T. Atwood, Beebe closed out her major tournament career by taking second in the 1935 Western Amateur and winning another Chicago District championship, solidifying her place as the most accomplished woman golfer to come from the ranks of Chicago’s public links players.

While golf thrived in the Chicago area’s country clubs and municipal parks, another area of the sport remained virtually invisible. As far as the mainstream media was concerned, golf among the city’s African American population was essentially nonexistent.

African American golfers had always been able to play on the city’s municipal courses, although it had been almost exclusively men who could be found playing golf—primarily at the Jackson and Marquette Park courses. Around 1910, Walter Speedy and several other African American players organized the Pioneer Golf

Club of Chicago with the intention of popularizing the sport among the city’s African American community.

Speedy’s wife, Nettie George Speedy, was a society reporter for the Chicago Defender and said to be the first African American woman golfer in Chicago.

The first reports of African American women golfers appeared in the Defender in 1916, and Speedy regularly promoted golf in her column, billing it as a game for all ages and stressing the health benefits to be realized. Unfortunately, prior to 1920, economic constraints and working conditions made it difficult for many African American women to take up the sport. In this environment, it would be a number of years before players emerged with enough skill to compete in local tournaments.

In this 1931 column, Nettie George Speedy covered the upcoming UGA National championships, highlighting the work of the charming Miss Esther B. Smith, chairwoman of the program committee and an ardent golfer.

The solution came in 1925 with the organization of the United States Colored Golfers Association, later changed to United Golfers Association (UGA). The UGA was a national organization that intended to promote the sport and stage occasional tournaments; its first national championship tournament for men was played in 1926.

By the late 1920s, an increasing number of African American women golfers were beginning to receive attention in African American newspapers in various cities, although most of the coverage treated the women’s game as a primarily social event. Then in 1930, the Pioneer Golf Club sponsored the UGA National, which included a women’s championship for the first time. The winner of the initial Women’s UGA National was Chicagoan Marie Thompson, who easily won the eighteen-hole event over a field of sixteen players at the Casa Loma course in Powers Lake, Wisconsin.

In 1931, the Pioneer Club again sponsored the UGA National championships—this time the tournaments were played at Sunset Hills in Kankakee, south of Chicago.

Thompson successfully defended her title, winning by a mere one shot in the twenty-seven-hole tournament. The following year, she finished second before moving away from Chicago. Local women won the UGA National from 1939 to 1941 as representatives of the Chicago Women’s Golf Club, an African American group organized in 1937 that remains active to this day.

Beginning in the mid-1920s, Chicago produced two more outstanding women players, who fashioned brilliant records and brought back a number of national championships. Virginia Wilson of Onwentsia first gained attention in 1923 at age seventeen with a surprising victory over the defending champion in the first round of the Women’s Western. In 1926, she won the Buffalo Invitational against a tough field and stunned the American golf world at the US National when she eliminated Collett, the defending champion, in the third round and advanced to the semifinals before falling to the eventual champion, Mrs. G. H. Stetson, in

a nineteen-hole struggle. A couple of weeks later, Wilson finished runner-up in the prestigious Berthellyn Cup tournament.

In 1928, her top season, Wilson finished runner-up in the Women’s Western; won the Canadian Women’s National in Montreal; and lost a hard-fought match to Collett in the third round of the US National. The following year, she posted the then-lowest women’s medal score on record, shooting a brilliant 71—one under men’s par—at the Allegheny Country Club Invitational.

After marrying Charles Dennehy of Lake Forest, Wilson restricted her competitive golf for a number of years; although she won five consecutive women’s club championships at Onwentsia from 1927 to 1931—no small achievement. She excelled at polo and tennis and occasionally returned to tournament golf, finishing runner-up in the 1936 Western Open and winning the Chicago District title in 1955.

Without question, one of the all-time greatest players in the history of American women’s golf and the best to come out of Chicago was Virginia Van Wie. The lifestyle of the well-to-do Van Wie family helped Virginia develop

Chicago golfers played a significant role in the sport’s developing popularity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Above: Wilson and Van Wie as pictured in Collett’s Ladies in the Rough.

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her golf game: they belonged to the Beverly Country Club and spent winters at their second home in Florida.

In early 1925, at age fifteen, Van Wie finished runner-up in the Florida South Atlantic tournament, one of the emerging events on the women’s winter tour. Later in the season, now turned sixteen, she posted a major upset at the Western Amateur championship over a tournament favorite; shot women’s course record scores of 77 and 75 at Beverly while capturing the Western Junior title; and won the Western Michigan tournament. These achievements prompted one writer to describe her as “probably America’s most sensational youngster on the golf course.”

In 1926, Van Wie burst upon the national scene and began her long rivalry with all-time great Glenna Collett by winning the Florida East Coast and Florida State championships. In the East Coast tournament, she defeated Collett 1 up in the nineteen-hole championship match; both players shot scores of 78 during the first eighteen holes before a large and boisterous gallery.

Collett later called it “the most spectacular match of my career.” Later that summer, Van Wie won her first of three consecutive Chicago District titles.

Over the next several seasons, Van Wie continued her fierce rivalry with Collett as well as Helen Hicks, a close friend, and Maureen Orcutt, winning a few tournaments each year, including six more titles in Florida, two MidSouth wins, and championships at Buffalo and the Western Derby. In 1928, she won the Mid-South championship at Pinehurst after defeating Collett 1 up in a sensational twenty-two-hole final; and in 1929, she lost to Collett in the final of the North and South tournament before a gallery estimated in excess of four thousand fans. On her way to victory in the 1931 Mid-South, Van Wie shot a dazzling 73 in the first round. Yet she continued to be frustrated in her quest for the US National title: she lost to Collett in the championship matches in 1928 and 1930 and in the semifinals in 1931. Publicity about Van Wie increased after a full-page photograph of her appeared in the April 1930 issue of American Golfer with the caption “Queen of the Winter Season.”

After traveling to England in mid-1932 to play for the successful US Curtis Cup team, Van Wie blazed her way to the thirty-six-hole final at the US National. There she shot a blistering 73 in the morning against Collett

Mrs. Lee Mida (left) and Miss Virginia Van Wie chat on a course in 1926, the year Van Wie burst upon the national scene.

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The Museum’s collection includes a 1930s golf ensemble—a light brown cardigan; brown and yellow pleated wool skirt; and brown felt hat trimmed with grosgrain ribbon—donated by Mrs. Howard Linn. Above: The garment (second from right) on display at the Museum in 1969.

before one of the largest galleries to ever watch a women’s final. She continued the onslaught in the afternoon for a 10 and 8 victory and her first national championship. The New York Times described Van Wie’s play as “the most devastating golf ever witnessed in the women’s national championship.”

After much of her 1933 season was hampered by a fractured rib, Van Wie was back in shape in time to defend her US National title at the Exmoor Country Club in suburban Chicago. She rolled to the finals— having trounced three-time British champion Enid Wilson in the semifinals—where she defeated Hicks by a tally of 4 and 3.

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By 1934, Van Wie was considered the top woman golfer in America. She solidified that reputation by winning her third consecutive US National championship— defeating Collett in the semifinals by a 3 and 2 tally. In the wake of the victory, the Associated Press named her “Outstanding Woman Athlete” of the year. Yet as she sat atop the golf world, Van Wie stunned the sporting community in early 1935 when she announced her retirement from tournament golf. Although only twenty-five, she had been playing seriously for a decade and, similar to Bobby Jones, had tired of the pressures and travel: she longed to play golf for the sheer enjoyment of the game back home in Chicago.

The retirement of Virginia Van Wie brought to a close the peak of women’s golf in Chicago. American women’s golf had also reached its pinnacle prior to the professionalization that developed after World War II. By the mid1930s, the sport featured an impressive number of talented players, a large fan base, and received substantial media attention. Chicago would produce more excellent players in the coming decades, but never again would women’s golf in the city ever approach its glory days.

Raymond Schmidt is the author of four books and many articles on sport history topics.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum collection. 40–1, SDN-068233, logo: i65971; 42, SDN-061606; 43, DN-0056934; 44, top: SDN054326, bottom: SDN-056449; 45, DN-0069602; 46–7, left: SDN-054326, top right: SDN-060838; 48, top: SDN-063622, bottom: SDN-065926; 49, i65881 (detail); 50, left: SDN062966, right: SDN-065563 (detail); 51, SDN-062242; 52, top: SDN-063618 (detail), bottom: SDN-060499 (detail); 53, top: i65979, bottom: i65980; 54, i65975; 55, left: SDN056282 (detail), right: SDN-065560 (detail); 56, SDN068190; 57, top: SDN-065520, bottom: SDN-064801; 58, top: SDN-068329, bottom: SDN-062904 (detail); 59, Chicago Defender, August 15, 1931, page 7, i65943; 60, left: i65976, right: i65978; 61, SDN-066075; 61–2, top: i65880, lower right: i65972.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the evolution and development of public and private golf courses in Chicago, see Tom Govedarica, Chicago Golf: The First 100 Years (Chicago: Eagle Communications, 1991). Excellent material on the pre–World War II years is available in Rhonda Glenn’s The Illustrated History of Women’s Golf (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1991). H. B. Martin includes a very good chapter on the early American women’s game in Fifty Years of American Golf (New York: Argosy-Antiquarian, 1966). Additionally, see the Chicago Tribune’s “Who’s Who in Women’s Golf,” a daily series published from May 12 to June 4, 1932, featuring short biographical articles on the city’s top golfers of the time.

The Women’s Western Golf Association continues to this day, hosting national amateur golf competitions and “encouraging the development of sportsmanship, amateurism, and skill in the game of golf.” Left: A WWGA program from 1952.

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M A K I N G H I S T O RY I

First Families of Philanthropy: Making History Interviews with Renée Crown and Marshall Field V T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

F

ew surnames are better known in Chicago than those of Crown and Field. Their names are attached to structures ranging from the pioneering State Street department store of Marshall Field’s (1892–1907), to the path-breaking Marshall Field Garden Apartments (1929) in the Old Town neighborhood. Similarly, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece S. R. Crown Hall (1956) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Jaume Plensa’s popular Crown Fountain (2004) in Millennium Park epitomize the Crown family’s long association with scores of institutions and architectural landmarks across the region. The two families have even combined their philanthropy with the creation of the Crown Field Administrative and Education Center at the Lincoln Park Zoo in 1979. This rich philanthropic heritage continues today with Marshall Field V and Renée Crown.

Marshall Field V, scion of the founder of Chicago’s best-known department store, was born in 1941 in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Marshall Field IV and Joanne Bass Field. He lived in Lake Forest until his parents divorced when he was seven. Field then spent the remainder of his childhood in New Hampshire, Long Island, and McLean, Virginia, before boarding at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for high school and attending Harvard University as a fine arts major.

Renée Crown grew up in Gloversville, New York, the daughter of Hildegarde and Junius Myer Schine. Her father emigrated from Latvia in 1902 when he was eleven years old. He started out as a candy butcher and a dress salesman.

Eventually, he went into real estate and hotels, where he enjoyed considerable success. With no more than an eighth grade education, “he raised himself with his brother to great heights through energy and ambition and hard work,” recounts his daughter Renée. “He taught himself most things.” Crown attended elementary school in Gloversville and then, like Field, went to boarding school 64 | Chicago History | Fall 2012

Both Renée Crown (left) and Marshall Field V (right) are active participants in Chicago’s numerous cultural and charitable events.

for her secondary education, in her case attending the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut. “I grew up in a very normal childhood with friends and camp and bicycles and roller skates and just a normal upbringing.”

At Harvard, Field admits that he devoted most of his time to the Harvard Lampoon, the college’s satire magazine. He looks back on his undergraduate experience with appropriate humor. “In fact, my dubious claim to fame,” Field admits, “is I was one of the few students ever to go through Harvard who never set foot in Widener Library.”

Field’s experience on the Lampoon later influenced his early career choice as a publisher. “I liked it [the Lampoon] more on the business than the reporting side.” He sarcastically adds, “I’d have a hard time reporting my own name, much less anything else.” Field initially had no intention of coming to Chicago; he wanted to strike out on his own. After a brief tour of duty at Fort Dix in the US Army in 1964, he worked at Random House before moving on to the Herald-Tribune in New York.

Crown elected to attend Syracuse University, primarily because Syracuse had a highly-regarded music program and music had been an important part of Crown’s childhood. “I love music. Our home was filled with music. We all played instruments,” she remembers. “My sister played the harp, my brother the violin, my other brother the piano, and I played the piano.” Often their mother joined in and sang or played the piano.

During her senior year, Renée Schine met Lester Crown in Florida while their parents were vacationing at the Boca Raton Hotel. If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was close to it. “I met him in March, got engaged in October, and got married in December [1950].” Shortly thereafter, the newlyweds moved to Wilmette, where their seven children were born between 1952 and 1963. For the first three decades after their marriage, Renée devoted herself to raising her children. “I was very busy. I would go 100 miles a day in the car and never really go anywhere,” she explains with some incredulity. “I’d go to Hebrew School. I’d go to dentists. I’d go to after-school sports. I’d go to music and piano lessons. There was always an activity. I guess the challenge was trying to get everybody to sit down at the table at the same time.”

Renée Crown lists her proudest achievement as “our seven children and twenty-five grandchildren, plus two.”

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One of Field’s most difficult decisions was the closure of the Chicago Daily News in 1978. He had been its publisher since 1969.

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Years later, Crown’s children returned the favor, and surprised her by naming two neonatal facilities in Chicago after her. The Renée Schine Crown Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Northwestern’s Prentice Women’s Hospital provides the most up-to-date care for premature and critically-ill newborns, and was one of the largest facilities of its kind upon opening in 2007.

Similarly, the Renée Schine Crown Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Rush University Medical Center, scheduled to open in 2013, will be one of the few pediatric hospitals with private patient rooms enabling family members to remain at the bedside of their special-needs infants.

Crown’s children eventually gave her a nickname: GOM. “When they were little, and they’d say, ‘Oh, I forgot something. Never mind. Good old mom [GOM], she’ll take care of it. . . . Good old mom, good old mom, she’ll do it.’”

When grandchildren appeared years later, the moniker became the best way to distinguish her from other grandparents in the extended family. Crown, however, is quick to add that “we did not think G-O-D for Lester was going to work.”

While Crown was raising her seven children, Marshall Field’s career took an unexpected turn in 1965 when his father died suddenly. “He died of a massive heart attack at forty-nine, and it was a surprise to everybody,” he remembers, “and then, I moved out here.” Field was shortly thereafter elected to the Board of Directors of Field Enterprises as part of the succession plan. At the time, Field Enterprises was a leading media corporation and the holding company for the Chicago Daily News (which ceased publication in 1978) and the Chicago Sun-Times, both of which enjoyed a long association with the Field family. The Chicago Sun, for example, was founded by Marshall Field III in 1941 before merging with the Chicago Times in 1948. Two years later, Marshall Field IV was named editor and publisher of the new Sun-Times, a position he held until his death in 1965.

Field had spent little time with his father in the city. “He had a house in Florida, and we’d go to Florida on Easter or Christmas,” Field remembers, “and then we’d come out here for a month, but we were in the country.”

Consequently, Field had only intermittently visited Chicago. “Honestly, when he died, and I came out in ‘65,” Field concedes, “I didn’t know where State Street was.”

But Field proved to be a quick study. He served in a variety of positions— assistant to the general manager of the Newspaper Division, senior vice president of the Newspaper Division, senior vice president of the corporate division of Field Enterprises—before being elected publisher of the Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News in 1969. The Sun-Times was then the fifth largest morning newspaper in the United States and Field became the youngest publisher of any major American newspaper.

Field enjoyed managing Field Enterprises. “I have a management style of trying to hire good people and letting them do their thing, day to day,” he explains. Field was deeply involved in budgetary matters, primarily because the paper was losing close to $5 million annually. Eventually, he balanced the budget, “But it took a ton of work, because it was scratching out little tiny things,” he now admits.

In the early 1980s, Field and his half brother Ted elected to divide Field Enterprises. That event ultimately forced the siblings to sell the Sun-Times to Rupert Murdoch, a choice Field partly regrets in retrospect. “I felt the newspaper was such a big deal for my father and grandfather, that out of respect for their memories, we ought to keep the Sun-Times, just because that was their prime interest, and neither of us really needed the money.”

Renée Crown’s involvement in philanthropy emerged as her children grew older and more independent. She explains that her early involvement in charMaking History | 67

itable institutions evolved out of very specific personal relationships. “I had a friend who had multiple sclerosis,” she remembers. “Because I had seven children, the only thing I could do was write letters at home.” But as the children grew older and became more independent, her commitment grew.

Crown was initially invited to serve on the Chicago board of the Multiple Sclerosis Society, was later elected its chairperson, and eventually served on the national board.

Crown’s philanthropic devotion was quickly noticed, and she began receiving requests to participate in various non-profit and charitable institutions. “I was invited to be on the WTTW board by [Henry W.] “Brick” Meers, an early board member and a wonderful man,” she recounts. Crown believed then and now that public television serves an important need for metropolitan Chicago. “It’s balanced. It’s thoughtful. It’s important. It relates to culture, politics, education, health,” she summarizes. “To me, it’s a very important sounding board for the listeners in Chicago, and I’m very proud of the work they do.”

Crown was primarily interested in participating in organizations which produced an immediate result. For example, her involvement in the Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago was rooted in the distinctive programs they offered.

“We do more than keep kids off the street,” she emphasizes. “We do mentoring. We do job opportunities. We provide all kinds of scholarships for them.” Crown considers the Clubs to be “a daily reward,” an institution which is more than just a long-term investment. “You don’t have to wait to see the rewards; the rewards are there every day.”

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The Renée Schine Crown Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Rush University Medical Center, scheduled to open in 2013, is one of the pediatric hospital units endowed in Crown’s honor by her children.

During the past three decades, Crown has been a leading member of the Women’s Boards of the Field Museum, the University of Chicago, and Lyric Opera. Her love of music motivated her to a term as president in the latter.

“What could be better than having the best opera company in the world?” she asks. “It’s just terrific that we have such great museums in this city.”

After a brief foray into commercial real estate, Field elected to devote himself to philanthropy. Despite his doubts, he now considers the sale of the SunTimes a blessing in disguise. “The decision not to have other companies forced me to move on,” he says. Most importantly, he was forced to think about his next step. “I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do, and I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life concentrating on improving Chicago.” When asked why, he responds: “I didn’t need money. I needed satisfaction. I had a deeply ingrained feeling that Chicago was the Field family city, even though I didn’t come from here. And I wanted to do something to change it for the better.”

Field quickly gravitated to fundraising. He first led a successful campaign on behalf of the Lincoln Park Zoo, where he served as director from 1969 until 1992 and as Life Director thereafter. His success with the Zoo attracted the attention of officials at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he served on the Board of Trustees. At a key moment in that museum’s history, he not only led an $80 million fundraising campaign, but simultaneously served as both chair of the Board of Trustees and the Institute’s chief executive officer from 1987 to 1993. “Because I hadn’t picked to do anything else, I would spend half the day every day in that place,” Field remembers. Even after he relinquished many of his responsibilities, “I kept coming down just out of habit if nothing else because I loved the place.”

Since then, Field has assumed major roles at some of the most significant cultural institutions in Chicago. At various points, he has chaired the Board of Trustees of the Terra Museum of American Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and RushPresbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center. It was not always easy. Field’s election as president and chairman of the board of trustees at the Terra (in 2001) happened in the midst of a controversy. Judith Terra, widow of the museum’s founder Daniel Terra, was attempting to move the collection to Washington, DC, only to be stymied by a lawsuit initiated by the Illinois Attorney General.

The Illinois court ruled that the museum’s collection had to remain in-state for at least fifty years. But that did not end the controversy. “What we inherited was a disastrous situation,” Field explains. “The museum was losing $10 million a year, and spending $5 to 6 million a year reimbursing various lawyers.” Furthermore, the endowment had suffered from some ill-timed investments. “Our $400 million endowment went to $200 million,” remembers Field. “Actually, the market went down, so it was $180 million by that time.” These financial conditions forced Field and his fellow trustees to close the Terra in 2004.

But Field recognized the circumstances and the Terra collection were unique and demanded an innovative solution. “I didn’t want the paintings to disappear, so I started a program to negotiate something with the Art Institute for them to take our paintings.” By some measures, the American collection at the Art Institute of Chicago was ranked approximately fifteenth in the country. Field recognized that if the Terra collection was combined with the Art Institute’s “it would be number three or four in the country, so the rationale said that you’ve got to do this.” In 2005, Field worked out a lending arrangement whereby as many as fifty paintings from the Terra collection are always on display at the Art Institute.

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Crown’s philanthropic interests eventually extended to higher education.

She was one of the founding members of the Women’s Board at Northwestern University in 1978, and later served as president from 1984 to 1986. “They never had a women’s board,” Crown remembers. “So a group of us got together, and we started the women’s board.” The organization was devoted to promoting and sponsoring faculty lectures on leading public issues and controversies. The primary purpose was “to showcase all the wonderful things that Northwestern has to offer,” according to Crown.

Crown also maintained a strong relationship with her alma mater Syracuse University. “I love my university. I felt I had a debt,” she states. “I enjoyed my four years. It was very enriching.” Crown not only served on the university’s Board of Trustees, but made a $2,500,000 contribution to Syracuse University for a student center which was dedicated in honor of her parents in 1985. In the following decades Crown served on the Executive and University Relations Committees of the Board of Trustees and the Board of Visitors of the College of Arts and Sciences, while also playing a significant role in the University’s “Campaign for Syracuse” and “Commitment to Learning” campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. When she retired from the Board of Trustees, the Syracuse college honors program was renamed the Renée Crown University Honors Program in recognition of her exceptional service.

Both Crown and Field have also devoted considerable time and energy to causes beyond Chicago. Field’s interest in wildlife and conservation issues, for example, motivated him to serve as the Chairman of the National Council of World Wildlife Fund, the Board of Visitors of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, and the Board of Directors of the Openlands Project. He has been an active member in the Nature Conservancy and the Atlantic Salmon Federation. Crown, like previous generations of Crowns, has promoted programs for the benefit of Israel and various Jewish institutions, in particular the Weizmann Institutes of Science in Rehovot, Israel. “For forty years,” she adds, “I have had the Jewish United Fund major gifts event here in my home.” And over the years, she has also entertained Israeli leaders such as Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan at fundraising events in her home.

Perhaps the best-known and most recent local example of shared Crown and Field philanthropy is Millennium Park. Field’s fundraising acumen attracted the attention of Millennium Park’s chief fundraiser, John Bryan, at the campaign’s inception. Field still remembers Bryan’s words: “Marshall, you handle the small gifts, I’ll handle the big gifts.” In the next sentence, Bryan explained that “small gifts” were going to be a million dollars. “I almost had a heart attack,” says Field. But Field was not flustered for long. By the time they were finished, Field and Bryan had raised more than $235 million in private donations.

Renée Crown’s family proved to be among the most important of the onehundred-and-sixteen individuals, corporations and foundations that contributed to Millennium Park. The Crown Fountain—two fifty-foot glass block towers situated in a shallow reflecting pool that simultaneously serve as fountains and screens projecting rotating faces of Chicagoans—was designed by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa and paid for with a donation of $10 million from the Crown family. The fountain remains one of the most popular elements of Millennium Park. Historian and activist Timuel Black has described the park and fountain as “the central gathering place for people in this city,” and a unique communal space where “a sense of community among people whose backgrounds—nationally, religiously, racially—may be different.”

Field’s fundraising acumen was central to Millennium Park’s construction from the start.

Together with chief fundraiser John Bryan, he raised more than $235 million in private donations.

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Making History | 71

Field considers Millennium Park his most meaningful accomplishment.

“We had nothing. We had a piece of paper, and we sold a dream,” he now admits. “And we didn’t know if the dream would work.” Field admits the project was risky. “You know, we could have completed the park, and no one would come.” That didn’t happen.

Millennium Park has attracted more than three million tourists annually since opening in 2004, making it one of the three leading tourist attractions in Chicago.

Field and Crown agree that Chicago philanthropy is distinctive. “There’s a history here of the business community getting together,” believes Field. If the city’s political and business establishments agree on something, “. . . off they go and do it.” Crown concurs, adding that many in Chicago’s philanthropic community are both passionate about their causes and “sincerely believe that the money will be well spent.” Besides, she adds, “the worst thing that can happen is somebody says no. They have their priorities and I have mine. All you can do is ask.”

But if you ask her to identify her greatest accomplishment, her answer is predictable: “Our seven children and twenty-five grandchildren, plus two.”

Timothy Gilfoyle is a professor and chair of history at Loyola University Chicago and author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (W. W. Norton, 2006) and City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (W. W. Norton, 1992).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum collection, unless otherwise noted. 64, left: courtesy of Syracuse University (detail), right: courtesy of The Chicago Community Trust, photograph by Cathy Sunu (detail); 65, courtesy of Renée Schine Crown; 66, i65932; 68, courtesy of the Rush University Medical Center; 70–1, Steve Hall/Hedrich Blessing Photographers; 72, photograph

by John Alderson.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Marshall Field V and Renée Crown await their biographers. On the early history of the Crown family, see Harry Mark Petrakis and David B. Weber, Henry Crown: The Life and Times of the Colonel (Henry Crown & Co., 1998). Marshall Field’s department store has attracted a considerable literature. See Leslie Goddard, Remembering Marshall Field’s (Arcadia Publishing, 2011); Gayle Soucek, Marshall Field’s: The Store That Helped Build Chicago (History Press, 2010); Axel Madsen, The Marshall Fields: The Evolution of an American Business Dynasty (Wiley, 2002); Robert W. Twyman, History of Marshall Field & Co. 1852–1906 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954); and Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants: The Story of Marshall Field & Company (Rand, McNally, 1952). On Millennium Park, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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The 2011 Making History Awards. Top row, from left: Alison de Frise, Gary T. Johnson, and Sharon Gist Gilliam. Bottom row, from left: Barbara Bowman, Renée Crown, Bill Kurtis, Donna LaPietra, and David Speer. Not pictured: Marshall Field V.