Tag: Chicago

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Murder City

By way of MK, an absorbing site from Northwestern University, Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930. It’s a database of 11,400 killings in the city during the six decades between the eve of the Chicago Fire and the beginning of the Great Depression. The information comes from a handwritten Chicago Police Department index. It’s a pretty staggering collection, and one that tends to at least soften the notion that we live in remarkably violent, crime-ridden times. I went into the site and looked up cases that took place on Racine Avenue, a major thoroughfare a block west of the street where my mom grew up. Some highlights:

June 17, 1920

Ryan, Paddy “THE BEAR” – Age 37 – Fatally shot in Racine Ave., 100 feet north of 14th St. by some unknown man who escaped. Motive jealousy. [The suspect’s identity was unknown but his motive was? Chicago Tribune stories from the time say this was a hit undertaken because Ryan, gang chief and ward heeler, was not “splitting square” the proceeds of a recent liquor heist. Suspects named in “Front Page” fashion included a diminutive pickpocket identified only as “The Rat” and Ryan lieutenant “Nuts” Nolan. The stories suggest that police detectives stood by and watched the Ryan shooting because he might have sung about cops on the take.]



June 4, 1923

Santorsala, Rose, alias “Blackhand Rose” – Age 37 – Shot to death in her home, 416 N. Racine Ave., by some unknown person or persons who escaped. [Love the handle “Blackhand Rose.” Wonder what her game was.]



July 23, 1925

Long, Arthur – Age 42 – Fatally assaulted with an iron bar (neck broken) at 5:45 A.M., at 7930 So. Racine Ave., the Cascade Laundry Co., where he was employed by four safe blowers who also bound and gagged two other employes, blew the safe and escaped. 10 Dist. Charles Pfarmenschmidt and Joseph Bushell are wanted. [This is four blocks from my grandparents’ home; they were married in 1925, I think, but I’m not sure they had moved in there yet.]

March 22, 1929

Kaplan, Howard – Age 19 – Accidentally shot to death at 11:30 PM, 3/22/29, at 3047 Racine Ave., during an initiation of members into the “Royal Order of Skulls” by Louis Dolinsky. On 3/23/29 Dolinsky, who was not booked, was exonerated by the Coroner.

March 21, 1930

Danaher, Dennis – Age 55 – Found shot to death at 10:45 AM, 3/21/30, in the bedroom of his home, 4th fl., 326 So. Racine Ave., the place in disorder. Deceased collected on his wife’s insurance policy a few weeks ago and it is believed his unknown assailant’s purpose was robbery. 26 Dist. The doors were locked but the bedroom window was wide open.

May 31, 1930

Chick, Rose – Age 29- Shot to death at 9:30 AM, 5/31/30, in a room at the Bel Ray Hotel, 3150 N. Racine Ave., by her husband, Noah S. Chick, from whom she had become estranged. They had registered at the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. John Swanson and met in an attempt to effect a reconciliation. Chick also attempted suicide but did not succeed.

August 5, 1930

Jelinek, Agnes – Age 6; Emil – Age 3 – Murdered in the kitchen of their home, 1848 So. Racine Ave., by their temporarily demented father, Frank Jelinek, who worried recently over financial losses. He cut the children’s throats, fractured his wife’s skull with a hammer, and then committed suicide by slashing his own throat. [Temporarily demented? I looked this case up in the Chicago Tribune’s archives. The paper gave this page one treatment, complete with a picture of one of the two child victims. Two of the killer’s older sons by a previous marriage survived because they were away at work. They discovered the bodies when they came home. According to the Trib: “The two brothers said their father had been acting queerly for several months and recently purchased some rope with the avowed intention of hanging his entire family. At that time, the brothers said, their mother sought to have her husband placed in an asylum, but was restrained by relatives.” The dad was said to have been frantic over losses in his candy and cigar store, situated at the front of the death house.]

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Saturday Night’s Alright for Dribbling

Why Do You Call It MAY-Hee-Koh? Lydell points out a query posed to the Chicago Tribune’s lingo expert:

Q. Why do Americans pronounce Chicago with a “sh” sound at the beginning (as in “she”), instead of a “ch” (as in “chick”)? You might have noticed that Spanish speakers, even bilingual speakers (such as myself) make a very clear distinction between the CH sound and the SH sound. My lips refuse to conform to anything but a “Chick-ah-go” pronunciation.

— Stephanie Pringhipakis Guijarro, Chicago



To his possible credit, the Tribune guy ignores the multicultural preciousness behind the question and answers it seriously. I would have been tempted to respond. “Dear Stephanie: Where the heck did those people down in México come up with that voiceless velar fricative pronunciation for the X: MAY-hee-koh? What’s with that strange-o accent and wild vowels? You may have noticed Americans (such as myself) say “MeKSiko.” My Midwestern lips (actually, the back of my tongue and my soft palate) absolutely refuse to pronounce X as anything but the most excellent consonant cluster “ks” (except in all the many exceptional cases, such as the “gz” in “exit”). P.S. What’s a ‘Pringhipakis’?”



Doubts Answered: By way of Steve Downey, fellow cyclist and connoisseur of notable sports names, we encounter Lucious Pusey, a linebacker with Eastern Illinois University. Maybe I should say former linebacker, because Pusey reportedly changed his name and the EIU roster now shows him as Lucious Seymour. Mr. Seymour-Pusey’s name has been the subject of frequent blog-based chortling; I join in the chorus only for the most noble of reasons: because I told someone this story and they dared to doubt me.

Blogger Embed: There’s lots of talk about bloggers being the future of journalism, but it’s rare at this point to find bloggers trying to tackle real reporting. An exception: Bill Roggio, a blogger who has embedded with U.S. military units in the past and has just gone back to Iraq to do it again. He’s unattached to any news organization, and his trip is funded by readers. I kicked in 25 bucks despite the fact I’m not in love with his hawkish take on the war. But I think it’s worth supporting anyone willing to put themselves on the line to report independently (or as independently as possible in a situation where staying alive means staying with the troops).

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And Now, the Weather

November 29, wee hours, Chicago and Oakland. It’s colder here. By 17 degrees. But talk to me again in a couple days. (Oregon location added for family and scholarly interest.)

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Today’s Top Question: Why Are the Chicago Bears Called ‘The Monsters of the Midway’?

BearsTwo questions, actually: What’s the origin of the Chicago Bears’ nickname, “The Monsters of the Midway,” and how did it come to be applied to the Bears?

Part One is easy. When Kate asked me a couple weeks ago, I knew it had something to do with the Midway Plaisance on Chicago’s South Side, but was fuzzy on why that might apply to the Bears, who played in Wrigley Field (on the North Side) through 1970. That Midway began as a park, was the center for carnival-type attractions during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and ran adjacent to the University of Chicago. And in fact, the original Monsters of the Midway were the U. of C.’s football teams under coach Amos Alonzo Stagg.

But the university, once a gridiron powerhouse, gave up football in 1939. That coincided with a golden age of Bears football. Under team founder and head coach George Halas, they appeared in four straight NFL championship games between 1940 and ’43, winning three of them. One of the victories, the 73-0 destruction of the Washington Redskins in 1940, remains one of the best-known games in league history. After the U. of C. abolished football to better focus on the serious business of education and splitting the atom, the Bears became known as the Monsters of the Midway (and began using the stylized letter “C” that the university had adopted as its helmet emblem).

OK so far. But all the accounts I’ve come across fail to explain just how the Bears began using what had been a college nickname. Invariably, references say the Bears “acquired” the name or that it “was applied” to them. A scholarly study of the University of Chicago football, “Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago,” says the Bears “appropriated” the name.

Something’s left out here. Either George Halas or someone else with the team came up with the idea to grab the University of Chicago nickname (which was long out of date, by the way; my dad likes to recall how in the late ’30s, some locals wanted to set up a contest between the Maroons and Austin High School, a juggernaut on the city’s West Side), or — my theory — it caught on after some sportswriter or headline writer began using it.

More research to come on this pressing question.

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One More Cemetery Visit

Back in Berkeley now — since late, late Monday night; remind me to bore you with the tale of United Airline’s feat of taking half an hour to move a planeload of bags 100 yards — but I undertook another family cemetery excursion in Chicago before returning west. And another cross-city bike ride, too.

I decided to go out to Mount Olive Cemetery, where my dad’s parents and other relatives are buried. I’ve only been there once: for my grandmother’s funeral, thirty-one years ago this month. Otilia Sieversen Brekke was buried next to my dad’s dad, who died twenty-two years to the day before I was born. I’d never seen his grave before: Sjur Brekke. 1876-1932. He was a Lutheran minister and member of the Hauge Synod, a branch that rebelled against the state-established Lutheran church in the early 19th century (bits of the history here and here). He died when Dad was just 10, of Parkinson’s Disease, long before there was an effective way to treat it.

I rode from Dad’s place, roughly Touhy and Western (7200 North, 2400 West) to the cemetery, near Narragansett and Addison (3600 North, 6600 West). I did an online map of the route I took, but the rough path was: Pratt west to Kedzie; Kedzie south to Irving Park; Irving west to Pulaski; Pulaski south to Addison, and Addison to Narragansett; on the return: Narragansett north to Nagle; continuing north on Nagle to Gunnison; west on Gunnison to Austin; Austin north (with the help of a pedestrian overpass across the Kennedy Expressway) to Bryn Mawr; Bryn Mawr east to Elston; Elston north to Central; Central north to Devon; then winding through side streets east and south back to Bryn Mawr (there’s a river and expressways and forest preserves in the way of a direct route); Bryn Mawr east to California, and California north to my starting point.

Aside from that numbing recitation of street names only a Chicagoan could cotton to, I have to observe that while I had to ride on busy streets with plenty of traffic, the local drivers behaved pretty generously to the freak on a bicycle they encountered. I’m sure riding day in and day out you get to see the same hostile attitude on occasion that’s a daily reality riding in California, but on my two long city rides, I had just one car honk at me, heard no one curse me for being on the road, and saw no raised digits.

When I got to the cemetery, I rode in the gate believing I’d be able to hunt down Sjur and Otilia’s headstone from my thirty-one-year-old memory. I rode in a couple hundred yards and when I came to a turn realized how much I’d overestimated my power of recall. Before I turned back to the cemetery office, I saw a sign listing prohibited cemetery activities. Bicycling was one. I rode back to the gate, went into the office, and asked the manager for help finding the Brekke site, mentioning that I hadn’t been to the cemetery since 1975. He complied with no hint of enthusiasm or engagement, but didn’t say anything about not cycling in the graveyard. He gave me a very general outline map of the grounds and marked the rough location of the grave in Section G, Lot 482. The guidance was good enough, though: I found the spot after looking for no more than 10 minutes. Different from how I remembered it.

When we were down at Holy Sepulchre on Sunday to see my mom’s family burial places, Dad commented on how much more activity there was there than at Mount Olive. Tuesday afternoon, I saw just one car in the cemetery. The place has a bit of an about-to-be-overgrown feel to it. The ground seems unlevel. Stones are leaning and atilt, and rows don’t seem to line up. The grass is a little long. It’s not a bad feeling, in itself; the trees out there are beautiful. It’s just that the families that buried parents, spouses, siblings, and children here have gone somewhere else — California, for instance. They don’t come back often or at all, and nobody’s minding Uncle Ole’s little patch up there on the Northwest Side too closely anymore.

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A friend of mine recently called cemeteries a waste of valuable property, and I know what he was saying. It’s a lavish use of land. Out of necessity, mostly, other cultures seem to remember the dead a bit more economically; in Japan or China or India, where land is food, it would be reckless to give so much to those who no longer need it. The thought came to me while I was out amidst the Brekkes and Reques and Sieversens (all my dad’s folks) that cemeteries are memory; that’s what gives them value, that’s what makes them poignant and absorbing even when you know nothing about the people you encounter there. Our national fascination with genealogy aside, though, memory — the kind that tries to weigh the past, personal and collective, not to romanticize it but to provide context and maybe a lesson or two for the present and future — doesn’t look like a hot commodity. People without that sense of memory, of the value of memory, of the importance of connecting today with what’s gone before and what’s to come — for them, cemeteries might really be a waste.

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Chicago Connectivity Notes

Sporadic posting, email reading, and Web off-goofing in Chicago. Not because America’s Greatest City lacks for newfangled electronic contrivances, including those of the Internet variety. But because connectivity is not readily available during my laptop-toting visits here (which probably turns out to be a good thing, since that makes me actually talk to people and go out and see things, like Millennium Park and that North Side Starbuck’s that the Wobblies are trying to organize. So: Not a complaint; I’m just saying.

(One thing I notice, though: My family is used to seeing me turn on my computer and just getting on whatever household Wi-Fi network happens to be in range. A couple years ago, I could do that just about anywhere because most of the people who had set up wireless seemed to have skipped the part of the Wi-Fi router manual that told them how to restrict access to their networks. Now, most of the wireless nets I see require a password to get on; that shuts out the likes of me, those neither inclined to try to crack someone’s security nor proficient at the tricks or tools you might need to do that. So either people are learning or the manuals are shorter and easier to read.)

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Flying Home

Heading back, watching the night unfold, watching the towns approach, slide past, right-angle layouts, the bright stitching of main streets against invisible landscape.

I can guess the names of the bigger towns: Rockford. DeKalb. Galesburg. Iowa City. Cedar Rapids. All maybes. Nothing big enough to suggest Des Moines or Omaha. Then the smaller towns. Some I’ve passed through, others are just names I’ve picked up along the way. Dyersville. Grinnell. Ottumwa. Story City. Stanhope. Storm Lake. Then across the invisible Missouri: Grand Island. McCook. Hastings. Ogallala.

But most without any names that I know, though I’d love to learn them. All down there somewhere in that thinning web of settlements as we move west, each town throwing its main-drag strands of light into the dark. Island universes in uncounted numbers.

[Translation: United Flight 385, Chicago to Oakland. Took off 8:45 p.m. CDT, landed 10:45 p.m. PDT.]

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A Day in Greater Chicagoland

Towpath
On the Illinois and Michigan Canal towpath.

We drove from Dad’s place on the far North Side out toward Joliet, southwest of the city, to find the spot where the Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers come together to form the Illinois.

The first 99 percent of the route is straightforward: If you like, you can drive to within a few miles of the spot on Interstate highways. But we got off the expressway and took side roads to follow the dual channels of the Des Plaines and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The side roads weren’t pastoral lanes; we drove past tank farms and refineries and generating plants, one after another. Eventually we turned away from the Des Plaines and drove west and south through brand new subdivisions — some half built, some just surveyors’ markers outlining streets and lots for homes that will go up next year. One was a neighborhood with a long curving boulevard of fresh asphalt and a giant new playground and not a single home even under construction yet. We eventually passed through a place called Minooka, which must have been a quiet little crossroads once. We crossed a highway at a strip mall called Mallard Point and drove south about a mile to a T intersection where we met my brother John, his wife, Dawn, and their two kids (Sean and Leah) who had driven over to meet us from my brother Chris’s place in Tinley Park.

After wandering around on a couple of country roads, we finally figured out that the road to the confluence depicted on one of our maps was actually the towpath to the old Illinois and Michigan Canal — the link that in the mid-19th century connected Chicago and Lake Michigan and all points east to the Mississippi River and beyond that the great western interior of the United States. We hiked down the path for maybe three quarters of a mile, to where the conjoined rivers go through a lock and dam. A little short of the confluence, but close enough for today. Everyone was still smiling on our way back to the cars.

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Disappointed Office-Seeker, redux

HarrisonAs I mentioned in today’s post on the James A. Garfield assassination, the stock phrase used to describe his killer is “disappointed office-seeker.” Google turns up a bit that comedian Robert Klein once did based on that cliche. But Garfield wasn’t the only elected official of his era done in by someone who expected an appointment that didn’t come through.

Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison was shot to death in October 1893, the day before the scheduled closing of the World’s Columbian Exposition in the city. The killer was an apparently mentally ill man named Prendergast who believed he merited an appointment to a senior city position for services rendered to Harrison. He didn’t get the job he fancied, general counsel for the city, so he went to Harrison’s home with a gun.

Harrison was a five-term mayor (though terms were just two years in his day). His death prompted an orgy of mourning. By one account, the day of his funeral, more than half a million people lined the route to the cemetery. Later, his son, Carter Harrison II, also won five mayoral elections (so the Richards Daley were not the first to pull off that feat).

The other day, when Dad and I went down to Randolph and Desplaines streets to take a look at the new Haymarket statue, he mentioned he thought the original Haymarket sculpture, which depicts a cop trying to calm the waters of unrest, might be over in a park a few blocks to the west. We drove by, and found Union Park. On one edge is Spaulding Elementary School, where my mom’s mom, Anne O’Malley Hogan, taught back in the 1920s. We could see driving by that there was a statue in the park, but it was obscured by trees and I couldn’t see whether it was the Haymarket cop.

Dad went back down there today and called from the statue to report his findings. It’s a statue of Carter Harrison, who it turns out lived nearby when he was assassinated. (And, to connect back to Haymarket, was on the scene of the bombing before the blast took place. The Chicago Historical Society has a great writeup of the event, and Harrison’s part in it, here.)

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More on Uncle Bill

The death notice we sent to the Tribune:

Hogan, Bill

The Rev. Bill Hogan, a former Roman Catholic priest in the Chicago archdiocese, died Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2003, in Chicago. Throughout his life, Bill was guided by a fierce sense of justice and bore witness to his faith by living Christ’s injunction in Matthew 25 to comfort and lift up all his brothers and sisters. Bill was born in Chicago on Jan. 9, 1927, the son of Edward D. and Anne O’Malley Hogan. He attended St. Kilian’s School before following his vocation at Quigley Preparatory and St. Mary of the Lake seminaries.

He was ordained in 1952 and assigned to Holy Angels parish on Oakwood Boulevard. He subsequently served at St. Martin de Porres, St. George on the Ryan, and Our Lady of Lourdes, all in the city. But Bill’s work as an agent of Christ stretched far beyond the congregations he served. He carried his faith into the major social and political struggles of our time: the movements to establish civil rights and economic justice for all, to stop the Vietnam War, and to end the evil of nuclear arms. This part of Bill’s ministry took him from Chicago’s South Side to Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, to Washington and far beyond; it also put him into conflict with both civil and religious authorities; he was arrested many times during protests and suspended by the Chicago archdiocese.

Eventually reinstated, he decided to continue his work outside the church, and married. He taught briefly in Chicago high schools before finding his next professional calling, working in Cook County’s adult probation department. He was enthusiastic, stimulating, challenging, brilliant, and steadfast in all his roles in life: priest, husband, stepfather, brother, uncle, friend, colleague, adviser, ally, parishioner and choir member (at St. Bride’s in his adopted South Shore neighborhood). Most of all, his life reflected a deep and abiding optimism.

Bill is survived by his wife, Jackie Bartholomay, and stepson Jeff and stepdaughter Katie Bartholomay; by his brother-in-law, Steve Brekke; by his cousin, Jack Fitzgerald; by niece Ann Brekke and nephews Chris, John and Dan Brekke; and by great-nephews and -nieces in Chicago, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Berkeley, Calif. Bill was the last surviving of six siblings: brothers Dick, Tom, and Ed, all ordained Roman Catholic priests, and John; and one sister, Mary Alice Hogan Brekke. Visitation will be held from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at St. Bride’s Church, 7811 S. Coles Ave., Chicago (773 731-8822), with a prayer and memorial service from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. A funeral mass will be said at St. Bride’s at 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 10. Bill gave to many, and it would be fitting for his friends to make donations in his memory to causes of their choice.

Remember Bill: “Keep your eyes on the prize.”