City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (18 page)

Earl Davenport’s wife had reacted even more dramatically. Shortly before the accident, the publicity man had apparently telephoned her. She was ill in bed at the time and had asked him not to go up in the blimp, since she’d “had a premonition that something was going to happen.” Earl had promised her that he wouldn’t ride that day. But several hours later, a family friend called the house and spoke to the couple’s daughter-in-law, who was looking after Mrs. Davenport. “Earl was in the ship,” the friend told her.

“But where is he now?”

“Well,” the friend temporized, “he’s not in the hospital.…”

When she heard the news, Mrs. Davenport collapsed and did not regain consciousness until Tuesday morning.
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Survivors with less tragic stories were meanwhile repeating them all over town, regaling friends, relatives, coworkers—and newspaper reporters—with their various close calls. “All I can say is, I thought the end of the world had come,” bank worker Katherine Bruch told rapt neighbors on the porch of her Kenmore Avenue home. “Everything around me seemed [to be] on fire. I was lying on the floor, [and] I thought I might just as well stay there and burn. Then I saw a girl running, and I jumped up and ran, too. I got out, but I have no clear recollection how I did.”

“I was working in the bond department,” Maybelle Morey told a reporter at the Iroquois Hospital, where she was being treated for cuts
and burns. “I was in the front part of the office and I heard something flash. I thought they were taking pictures. Then boom! came the big explosion, and the whole place seemed in flames.… I had to jump out the window. When I came to, they were pouring whiskey down me. I don’t know where they got it, with the town so dry.…”

Even those who were nowhere near the bank that day could not stop talking about the crash. Literally tens of thousands of people had witnessed at least one of the blimp’s three flights that day, and it was only natural that they were eager to share their war stories with all who would listen. Some of their tales, of course, were embroidered or exaggerated for effect. The number of people who claimed that they themselves would have been on the blimp, but for this or that lucky break, would probably have filled a whole fleet of airships.
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Shortly before noon on Tuesday—in room 1123 of the County Building, the other half of the enormous neoclassical pile in the Loop that also housed the city hall—county coroner Peter M. Hoffman convened the official inquest to determine responsibility for the deaths of the victims. Two six-man juries—one consisting of engineering specialists and one of assorted businessmen—had been impaneled the previous evening (“while the airship was still burning,” according to the
Daily Journal
). They would now hear testimony from a wide variety of witnesses and aviation experts. It proved to be a frustrating session. The first two people called—Boettner and Young, now represented by Goodyear attorney Henry A. Berger—refused to testify on advice of counsel and were excused. Several subsequent witnesses gave conflicting testimony about what might have caused the blimp to catch fire on its final flight. After just two and a half hours, Coroner Hoffman decided to adjourn the session and reconvene on Wednesday, when Goodyear representatives, now en route from Akron, could be present.

As he closed, the coroner stood up and said he had an announcement to make. During the inquest session, a note had been passed to
him with news from St. Luke’s Hospital. “You gentlemen now have to view the body of another victim,” he told the jury. “Mr. Norton is dead.”

The toll from the crash had now reached twelve.
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*   *   *

Mayor Thompson, distracted by the transit situation and other city business, seemed to be paying little attention to the tragedy that had struck the Loop the day before. Given Big Bill’s reputation for empathy (not to mention his instinct for the effective sound bite), this was surprising. The
Eastland
disaster—the excursion-boat capsizing that had occurred early in his first term—had seemed to bring out the best in the mayor; the
Wingfoot
disaster, by contrast, seemed not to arouse his sense of public duty, despite the fact that he’d almost been one of its victims. Granted, the death toll in the earlier accident was far greater, and it had occurred during his political honeymoon period, when the local press was more willing to publicize any manifestations of his leadership ability. But if surviving newspaper reports are any indication, the mayor seemed far too consumed by “the traction mess” to show much sympathy for the victims of an aviation tragedy, no matter how spectacular.

Certainly he had an excuse for being preoccupied. The heads of the surface and elevated lines, having rebuffed the mayor’s own arbitration committee, had decided to meet in closed-door sessions with the governor’s commission to discuss fare hikes. City hall was furious. “Mayor’s Forces Resent Lowden’s ‘Interference’ ” ran the headline in the
Daily Journal
. At issue, according to Thompson, was the city’s fundamental right to determine its own fate. He insisted that the transit situation was an affair strictly between the people of Chicago and the owners and employees of the car lines; the State of Illinois had no business being involved. “The Mayor’s position,” the
Daily Journal
maintained, “is that the 1907 ordinances give the city
exclusive control over streetcar fares, and that this control has been assumed illegally by the utilities commission.” Seeing an opportunity for some grandstanding, the mayor and his men attempted to depict the “star-chamber sessions” as a power grab by downstate elements in cahoots with the car companies and other big business interests. “Chairman Dempcy of the utilities board is from East St. Louis,” one of the mayor’s spokesmen announced. “It ought to gall every Chicagoan to think of the Governor sending a man here from such a dinky city to settle a big Chicago question.”
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Especially provoking were rumors that the governor’s commission might choose to raise fares by as much as 60 percent without a public hearing. Thompson (the self-styled “defender of the five-cent fare”) was not about to let that happen. He indicated that he was more than prepared to put up a fight on the issue. And for once he had some newspaper support: “If our state constitution were properly constructed,” the
Herald and Examiner
argued in an editorial, “the people themselves would have a chance to decide whether this city might control its own peculiar affairs or not.… We would have a Chicago utilities body delving into the present mix-up in the open light of day and with authority to deal out justice to employer and employee.”

Thompson, having named just such a Chicago utilities body (in the form of his nine-member mediation committee), only to have it rejected, found himself in complete agreement with this analysis. By evening, he was already threatening to take the governor and his state commission to court.
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*   *   *

With all of the upset in the city that day—the fallout from the
Wingfoot
disaster, the conflict over the transit situation, the ongoing epidemic of strikes and lockouts—it was perhaps not surprising that police at the Chicago Avenue station on the city’s North Side were
somewhat slow to respond to a missing-person report they received in the late afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. John Wilkinson, Scottish immigrants who ran a local grocery store, had come to the station at about 6 p.m., frantic about their six-year-old daughter, Janet. Early that morning, they said, Janet had left the family’s apartment on East Superior Street to accompany two friends to a nearby park on the lakeshore. The three girls had registered their names with a park official and played there for several hours. At noon the park closed for the midday break and they had to leave.

According to one of the friends—a seven-year-old named Marjorie Burke—the three girls had ambled home for lunch through the busy North Side streets. Near the corner of Rush and Superior, they stopped to look at magazine covers in a shop window. But then they had to part ways. The two girls said good-bye to Janet and watched as their friend, dressed in her favorite blue sailor dress, walked down the block toward the Wilkinsons’ apartment. They saw a man with glasses—someone they recognized as a neighbor—beckoning to her on the sidewalk a few steps from her door. Janet stopped and spoke with the man for a moment, but then the girls turned away to head back to their own homes.

A few hours later, Janet’s older sister Berenice returned from an outing and was surprised to find the apartment empty. The lunch she had prepared for Janet a little before noon was still sitting untouched on the table. The girl had apparently never come home, and she had not been seen or heard from since.
¹⁴

T
HE SEARCH BEGAN
in earnest on Wednesday morning. An assortment of neighbors, friends, grocery store customers, and more than fifty volunteer boys and girls joined scores of police in scouring the Gold Coast neighborhood on the city’s North Side, looking for any trace of Janet Wilkinson. Some knew the girl by sight; others relied on the police description: “6 yrs; 3′9″; 42 lbs; blond straight hair; deep blue eyes; wore a dark blue sailor frock and black oxfords; no stockings.” The more optimistic of the volunteers searched for the girl by examining the faces of children on the street, scanning the crowds in parks and playgrounds, and asking questions of nearby merchants and residents. The police, however, were using other methods. They poked sticks into dark, foul-smelling sewers. They turned over fly-specked piles of trash in alleys. They used crowbars to tear up old wooden floors and dug through dusty basement coal bins, looking for—and hoping not to find—the young girl’s body.

By late afternoon, searchers would have a photo on the front page of the
Evening Post
to work from. It depicted a rather homely child with a grave, oddly accusatory expression on her face, her eyes disconcertingly intense. In the photo, Janet’s hands were tightly clasped over a frilly white dress with a wide flaring skirt.
¹

Police had only one real lead in the case, but it was a solid one. The man Marjorie Burke had seen talking to Janet just after the girls had parted on the corner fit the description of Thomas Fitzgerald, who ran
a small boardinghouse with his wife in the other half of their duplex apartment building. Several months earlier, Janet had come home complaining about Fitzgerald, alleging that he had invited her into his apartment and “annoyed her.” The Wilkinsons had confronted the man at the time, but ultimately chose not to prosecute, fearing the ugliness of a public investigation. Now they were convinced that Fitzgerald had something to do with Janet’s disappearance, and the police agreed. At 2 a.m. on Tuesday, they located the man at the Virginia Hotel on Rush Street, where he worked as a night watchman, and brought him into the Chicago Avenue station for questioning.
²

Fitzgerald—a slight, mild-mannered man in his late thirties who wore round gold-rimmed spectacles—denied categorically that he knew anything about the girl’s whereabouts. He admitted that he had stopped her on the street to exchange a few words, but claimed that they had parted again almost immediately, and that he’d then merely continued home to go to sleep, his wife being away in Michigan visiting friends. At six in the evening, he said, he had gotten up as usual and headed to work, where he’d remained until his arrest. He insisted that he had heard nothing about the disappearance of “Dolly”—the neighbors’ pet name for the child—until police asked him about it at 2 a.m.
³

The interrogation went on all night. Under intense pressure from Detective Sergeant Edward Powers and Lieutenant William Howe, Fitzgerald revealed that in 1902 he had served sixty days in the county jail on a charge of larceny. He had been arrested twice more—once in 1905 and again in 1913—on the same charge. More pertinent, however, was the discovery by police that Fitzgerald had been arrested about a year ago on complaints from two neighborhood mothers for his “conspicuous interest” in their young daughters. The case had eventually been dropped for want of prosecution, but it pointed to a pattern of behavior that, in the current circumstances, could only be regarded as ominous.
⁴

When asked about the “bothering” incident with Janet, Fitzgerald claimed it had all been a misunderstanding. “It was around Christmastime she came into my home,” he explained. “She and another girl were coming up the stairs. I had some candy in the house and some funny papers. I invited them in.” He gave the girls some of the candy and let them leaf through the comics. When another resident of the building—a roomer in the Fitzgerald boardinghouse—happened to come in, Fitzgerald asked her what she thought of “my two little girls.” (The roomer, questioned later, claimed to have no recollection of the incident.) According to Fitzgerald, the roomer and the other little girl left after a few minutes, “but Dolly stayed a little longer.” Even so, nothing untoward had happened when they were alone. “She came into the house another time,” he went on, to prove his point. “My wife gave her some bread and jelly. She was a nice little girl. I always liked her.”
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