City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (2 page)

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 six-year-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.
¹

*   *   *

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.

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 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.
²

*   *   *

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 passenger-carrying 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.”

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.
³

*   *   *

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.

“Have you got a cameraman 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 that 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 Grant 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.
⁴

*   *   *

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 Joseph 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.

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.
⁵

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 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.
⁶

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.