by Gary Krist
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.13
* * *
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
THE 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.”5
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.6
* * *
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 tes
tified.
“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.9
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.10
* * *
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
AS 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.”