City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (3 page)

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?
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*   *   *

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 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.
⁸

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 feedlots 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 world unto itself, bringing together the artifacts and energies of a vast multitude.
⁹

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.
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*   *   *

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 twelfth-floor 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 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 win 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.”
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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 Exchange 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.
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*   *   *

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.
¹³

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.