City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (19 page)

At one point in his interrogation, Fitzgerald made an offhand comment about perhaps finding Janet’s body in the lake, and so the marshy waters off Chicago Avenue were dragged. Police cut away the reeds growing along the shoreline—still undeveloped in 1919—and searched the entire area. But nothing was found, and no trace of Janet was discovered either in the duplex apartment building or at the Virginia Hotel. By evening, police were running out of obvious places to look for the girl. Though theories about Janet’s disappearance abounded, the evidence for any of them was scant. And so the search went on.
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*   *   *

The blimp inquest was also generating its share of unprovable theories. While awaiting the expected late-afternoon arrival of Goodyear officials from Akron, Coroner Hoffman called a number of expert witnesses on Wednesday, including Colonel Joseph C. Morrow, who had been a passenger on the
Wingfoot
’s second flight on Monday.
Though not an aviation specialist, Morrow had served in the army’s air service during the war, and he had given the blimp a quick inspection before the flight. “At that time everything was in good condition,” he testified.

“Was there any motor trouble while you were in the air?” Coroner Hoffman inquired.

“No, sir.”

“Did you notice any leakage in the gasoline pipes?”

“No, sir.”

When asked whether he considered the
Wingfoot
’s flight “experimental,” Morrow was emphatic: “No, it was not. The motor was not of a new type, though it is true that the government had loaned it to Goodyear to be tested in flight.”

Colonel Morrow went on to express total confidence in pilot Boettner’s competence. “The pilot was experienced,” he asserted. “I have never observed him making any mistakes in flying a ship.”

At the conclusion of Morrow’s testimony, Goodyear attorney Berger rose and announced that, in a reversal of his advice of yesterday, Boettner and all other members of the
Wingfoot
crew would cooperate completely with the investigation and answer any questions asked of them. He also added that Goodyear was willing to pay all expenses caused by the crash. “Any families who have suffered because of this accident will only have to present bills to our company to have them paid,” he said. “We are doing this gladly and entirely of our own free will.”
⁷

Other expert witnesses were then called to the stand, but—to the consternation of Coroner Hoffman and the two juries—none seemed able to give a definitive opinion on the cause of the fire. Static electricity, abrasion between the blimp’s interior balloonettes, sparks from the rotary engines, even radio waves from a nearby tower were all proposed by one expert or another. At one point, Coroner Hoffman declared that unless it could be proved that the blimp was improperly
constructed, or that the pilot or mechanics were incompetent, or that flying an untested balloon over a city constituted criminal carelessness, official blame for the deaths might never be established. Without a definitive ruling from the coroner, moreover, State’s Attorney Hoyne would find it problematic to bring a case against anyone. Since no real precedent existed in Illinois law, any prosecution for manslaughter would have to be brought under the Old English common law—“which,” as the
Chicago Daily Journal
observed, “did not contemplate airships falling through the tops of buildings.”
⁸

Sometime late in the afternoon, the officials from Goodyear finally arrived. After conferring briefly with attorney Berger, they echoed his promise of full cooperation and insisted that the company itself was also conducting its own internal investigation. In an official statement, they assured the jury that “every precaution known to the art of air navigation” was taken at all times in the building and operation of the blimp, and that the Goodyear employees involved were “a skilled aeronautical crew.” But since it was too late in the day for any of the new arrivals to testify individually, the inquest was adjourned for the day. Among the topics to be explored when hearings reconvened on Friday morning were uncorroborated rumors in the press that mechanic Harry Wacker, still recovering from his injuries at Presbyterian Hospital, had made several damaging admissions about the blimp’s condition and about pilot Boettner’s behavior during the fatal flight. It was hoped that Wacker would be well enough to testify for himself on Friday.
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While the inquest was still in session, the first of the disaster’s victims was laid to rest. Funeral services for Marea Florence, a stenographer at the bank, were held at 2 p.m. in the little chapel of the Western Undertaking Company on Michigan Avenue. More than two hundred relatives and friends gathered to hear Henry J. Armstrong of the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, read from the Scriptures and eulogize the young woman. “If you ever saw her smile,” Armstrong
said to the assembled mourners, “you would never forget it.” Later, her body was taken to Rosehill Cemetery for burial.

At about the same time, Marcus Callopy, the teller from the bank’s foreign department, succumbed to his injuries at St. Luke’s Hospital. He thus became the disaster’s thirteenth, and final, victim. Of the remaining twenty-seven injured, all were now expected to recover.
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*   *   *

By the end of the day on Wednesday, prospects for a settlement of the transit issue seemed to be stalled. Emerging from their closed-door sessions with the car companies and the public utilities commission in late afternoon, union leaders were pessimistic. Rumors were flying that surface line president Leonard Busby had proposed a compromise contract that would raise salaries to sixty-two cents an hour, with a standard nine-hour day, but the unions claimed to know nothing about it. “That [rumor] is either a dream story or is one of Busby’s tricks to discover what would happen to the proposition if he made it,” union leader W. S. McClenathan told reporters. But he insisted that any such offer “would be turned down cold. It would be a waste of time to take it to the men.” According to McClenathan, the workers were fighting for their very livelihood. “There are certain basic principles that are not open to arbitration and compromise, and the right to live and get a living wage are two things that are not arbitrable.”

Even so, all participants seemed determined to keep talking, and the press was convinced that progress would be forthcoming. “Statements by both sides in each meeting today,” the
Daily News
reported, “made it clear that everyone concerned is trying to avert, if possible, a strike which would paralyze the city’s transportation system.” Union leaders were promising that there would in any case be no strike until the governor’s commission had completed its investigation.
¹¹

The mayor of Chicago, still complaining about being excluded
from the talks, was apparently optimistic enough about the situation to go ahead with some long-standing plans for a summer holiday. Having accepted an invitation to be guest of honor at the annual Frontier Days Roundup in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Big Bill was already packing for the trip, stuffing “a lariat and a pair of chaps in his valise” in preparation for a return to his beloved old stomping grounds out West. And he wouldn’t be traveling alone. At the suggestion of Cheyenne’s roundup committee (who urged the mayor “to bring everybody who voted for [the mayor], if he wished”), Bill was planning to take along the entire Chicago Boosters Club, consisting of more than one hundred of his closest friends and supporters, including Fred Lundin, city comptroller George Harding, and even police chief John Garrity. A special train was due to leave the city shortly before midnight. According to the
Daily Journal
, the train’s baggage car would be “well stocked with ice for lemonades and other soft drinks. What each guest may carry in his grip is a personal matter.”

Of course, some people questioned the prudence of the mayor’s leaving town with the heads of most of the city’s departments. At such a critical time, with bombs going off and strikes threatening everywhere, shouldn’t city hall be fully staffed? Big Bill had decided, therefore, that corporation counsel Samuel Ettelson would be left behind to mind the shop while the boss and his minions were gone. However, given that Ettelson was widely considered to be the creature of utilities baron Samuel Insull—a person deeply interested in the outcome of the ongoing transit negotiations—this precaution was likely to reassure no one. Perhaps as a concession to these fears, Thompson decided at the last moment that Comptroller Harding would remain in town as well.

But the mood was boisterous as the mayor and his entourage boarded the special train at Union Station. Big Bill assured reporters that he would be in close contact with his advisers the whole way,
and that, because of the weekend, they’d be missing only two and a half working days. If all went as scheduled, the mayor and his men would be returning to Chicago early on Monday morning, refreshed and ready to start a new workweek. And after all, how much could possibly go wrong in just four short days?
¹²

A
S IF TO RATIFY
Big Bill’s decision to leave town on nonessential business, the city turned relatively quiet on Thursday. Transit talks remained at a standstill. Traction company owners, union leaders, and the Lowden commission held several meetings throughout the morning, but no one was budging on the question of the eight-hour day, and the unions were refusing even to broach the topic of wage concessions until that issue was settled. The
Wingfoot
inquest, meanwhile, was on hiatus while funerals for seven of the victims were held at various locations across the city.

Shortly before noon at the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, all business came to a halt for five minutes to honor the dead. As the
Tribune
later reported, “Not a typewriter clicked, not a pencil moved, and the telephones went unanswered. The employees rose to their feet and bowed their heads—a silent tribute to their coworkers who were killed.”
¹

A few hours later, officials at Goodyear, rising to the occasion, issued a public apology for the accident and announced the naming of a special three-man committee to arbitrate all claims for compensation from the families of the victims. They requested only that Goodyear and its employees be given a fair hearing. “In justice to our men,” the company said in its statement, “we respectfully ask a suspension of public judgment as to their responsibility until the facts are reliably established.”
²

Legislators were meanwhile acting to ensure that accidents like
the
Wingfoot
crash would not be repeated. In Washington, D.C., Illinois’s own Senator Lawrence Sherman introduced a federal bill designating specific lines of aerial traffic that would steer clear of crowded downtown districts. Closer to home, the Chicago City Council, having passed its emergency resolution on Monday, was now working on legislation to give the symbolic measure a more enforceable form. Even Mayor Thompson, still en route to Cheyenne, made sure to chime in on the topic. Speaking to reporters at a brief stopover in Omaha, the mayor was apparently eager to appear “still on the job.” “I am going to do everything I can to help establish laws for the regulation of airships of every kind when they fly over Chicago,” he told the press corps. “I am opposed to permitting any airship which uses inflammable and explosive gases to pass over a city.”
³

Even the Janet Wilkinson case was stalled for most of the day. Despite being subjected to round-the-clock interrogation—including relentless “man-to-man questioning” by Lieutenant Howe—Thomas Fitzgerald stubbornly maintained his innocence throughout the early-morning hours of Thursday. Toward dawn, Howe brought John Wilkinson, Janet’s father, into the basement interrogation room. When Wilkinson reminded the prisoner of Janet’s claim that he had harassed her last winter, Fitzgerald shook his head vigorously and insisted that the child had been misquoted. Wilkinson, he told Lieutenant Howe, “has it in for me and is telling lies.”

This was too much for the grieving father to stand. “You hound!” he allegedly shouted in his heavy Scottish burr. Without warning, he sprang on Fitzgerald and started strangling him, “driving his fingers tightly into his throat.” Howe and another detective rushed to pull Wilkinson off the much smaller man, who sank to the floor in a swoon.
⁴

Later in the day, other witnesses were brought in for questioning. Edward C. Watson, another roomer in the Fitzgerald boardinghouse, and S. C. Darby, an old family friend who had dropped by the apartment “acting in a peculiar manner,” were both detained and
subjected to a grilling. One issue of concern was the whereabouts of Mrs. Fitzgerald. Her husband claimed he didn’t know how she could be contacted—that she had gone to Michigan at the invitation of some friends who owned a cottage there, but he didn’t know exactly where. Oddly, Edward Watson knew that the cottage was in Bangor. Suspecting a kidnapping conspiracy (as well as an illicit relationship of some kind between Mrs. Fitzgerald and her boarder), Howe had Watson send her a telegram asking her to return to Chicago; Howe himself then spoke to her via long-distance telephone and gave her the details. Insisting that her husband was innocent of any wrongdoing, Mrs. Fitzgerald promised to catch the first train back to Chicago, at which time she would prove to police that her husband had nothing to do with Janet’s disappearance. Howe wasn’t convinced. After the conversation, he had a picture of Janet rushed to police in Bangor in order to initiate a search for the girl there.
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