Murder in Canaryville

by Jeff Coen

  In fact, each side had a particular park that they held as a sort of home base. For the Italians, it was McGuane Park in Bridgeport, near Twenty-Ninth and Halsted. It was their hangout, and it was just a few blocks from the house party drawing kids together that night. For the Irish, it was Boyce Field, less than two miles to the south, in Canaryville. That park was just a couple of blocks from the longtime border between the two neighborhoods, Thirty-Ninth Street, or Pershing Road. It wasn’t even a mile to the southwest of what was then called Comiskey Park, the home of the Chicago White Sox.

  The reasons teens gathered at parties like this one were nothing new. The boys knew girls would be there and vice versa. There was laughter and the occasional sound of an empty beer bottle clattering above the blaring guitar chords of Led Zeppelin. The girls wore tight jeans and feathered their hair like Farrah Fawcett. Many of the boys grew their hair until it touched the oversized collars of the shirts under their leather jackets.

  And it wasn’t for a terribly new reason that tempers eventually would flare either: the wrong boy talking to the wrong girl. On this night it was apparently an Irish teen who spent a minute too long talking to one of the Italian girls, and her boyfriend didn’t care for it. Pushing and shoving ensued inside the house at first, followed by shouting and more shoving in the front yard. Many teens at the party had seen this before and knew how it would go. Chest-puffing and alcohol would lead to punches being thrown and the cops getting called. Many of them decided they’d had enough before that started and began to make their way to their cars.

  They knew the shoving and threats at the party meant they were probably in for a night of street fighting wherever the two groups found each other, and they were up for it. A group of six or seven Irish kids, including the teen who had talked to the girl, piled into one car and headed for Halsted.

  Soon they circled up toward McGuane Park, intending to mess with whatever Italian kids they might find there. It was already 11:30 PM, but they were far from ready to pack it in for the night. When they reached the park, some of their longtime enemies had in fact made it there, and there was more shouting. The Irish kids pulled away.

  They hadn’t gone far before one of them glanced back out the rear window of their car. They were being followed. A larger group of Italian kids had jumped into two or three cars and were coming up fast. Clearly whatever offense had been taken at the party was not going to fade quickly, and they had made it worse by cruising near the park.

  Might as well get it over with was the agreement among the Irish kids, who were more than willing to settle this with their knuckles. A few of the teens were especially skilled fighters and were not scared at the prospect of being outnumbered, which was what this skirmish was going to entail. They stopped their car on Halsted and quickly hopped out into the street.

  The Italian kids did the same, and there were more than a dozen of them. Soon the two groups were punching each other and tearing at jackets. One of the Italians carried a small souvenir GO GO WHITE SOX baseball bat, which was soon knocked from his hands. Cars honked as the oblivious teenagers pounded each other in the street. One Irish youth was confronted by a group of four or five Italians when he was separated from his pack. He ran down a nearby alley and the Italians followed, evening the odds back on Halsted a bit.

  In the chaos, one of the Italian kids was beaten over the head with the small White Sox bat. The groups only scattered and went back to their cars when someone caught sight of the police approaching.

  The Irish kids had cuts and bruises, but they laughed as the Italians scrambled away. Things still weren’t over, however. Someone being cracked over the head with what amounted to a club had only escalated things further, and both sides knew they were going to fight again. The Italians retreated to McGuane Park, while the Irish headed south, back toward Canaryville and Boyce Field.

  On this night—as it was on most when the weather was good—Boyce was the center of the social system for the Irish kids of the neighborhood. The ending of the Throop Street house party and others in the area meant everyone was on their way there. On many nights, the boys might play pickup basketball while the girls watched. Many would sit on their cars with the doors open, listening to music from the stereo. There was certainly beer and couples sneaking off to hidden spots in the park.

  The police would sometimes roll through but typically wouldn’t roust the kids. They might take the beer from the underage teens, though. “Thanks, fellas. Captain’s birthday tonight,” they would laugh, putting a stray six-pack into their squad car.

  The Irish boys from the fight on Halsted arrived to find the typical scene. Lines of cars were parked on the street beside the park, with friends sitting on their hoods and trunks. Some teens could be seen milling on the softball field nearby, drinking and laughing. But there was some tension. Word had spread about the fight and the fact that the Italians had been embarrassed. They had been turned back by the Irish teens despite outnumbering them, and one of their own had been hurt. They would surely be back with more people, maybe even raiding Boyce Field for a larger brawl. Irish kids there began to tell each other to make sure they knew how to get to their softball bats quickly, which many of them kept in their cars for weekend games. Some went ahead and got their bats out and sat them an arm’s reach away.

  There was a thought of taking the fight back to the Italians. Rumors of locations swirled in the park, places where some thought another fight might present itself.

  Bands of friends talked about leaving and looking for the fight. If one broke out, they didn’t want to leave the teens from their neighborhood out there without them. It was clear the Italians would only circle back with a much larger group. Some of the Irish kids got into one of their cars to head them off. But it wasn’t to be. The teen whose car it was did not want to leave the park and go get in a fight, at least not on this night. He knew his car wouldn’t turn over if it was in neutral, so as the friends talked of heading out, he slipped the gearshift down silently. The car didn’t start, so the group decided to stick around.

  For a time, it was quiet. Midnight had passed. Some in the park had started to grow more relaxed, joking around more than keeping watch. Maybe the Italians had thought better of making a trip into enemy territory.

  “Car,” someone said.

  It wasn’t clear who saw it first, but it was starting to attract attention. It was a light green Chevrolet sedan, maybe an Impala, but not one that the Irish kids recognized as belonging to any of them. It rolled slowly east down Root Street on the northern edge of Boyce Field. It moved past some of the parked cars, close enough for some to see into the passenger’s open window. One girl near a parked car instantly recognized the teen sitting there as he went by just feet away; she had known him since grade school. “Hi, Horse,” she said, using his nickname as the car slowly moved by.

  The Chevrolet came to a stop at the corner of Root and Lowe, at the park’s northeast corner, and the teens inside began shouting insults.

  The Irish kids in the park began to shout back, and some of them acted as if they were going to head for the car. Then suddenly, some did. A group of teenagers charged, at least one of them with a bat in hand.

  John Hughes was among them. Hughes heading directly into a confrontation like this was startling even to some of his friends. One saw Hughes bolt in the car’s direction, recognizing his jean jacket and yellow shirt out of the corner of his eye, and was so surprised that he joined Hughes in the rush almost without thinking.

  The group did not have far to sprint. Maybe twenty or thirty feet, and they covered the ground quickly. Hughes was nearly six feet tall and a star cornerback on the football team. His athleticism put him at the front of the group almost instantly.

  The streets were dark, and the car sat directly under a streetlight, the glare obscuring most of the interior of the car in blackness. But those charging could see the teen in the passenger seat. And they could see when he leaned down toward his feet under the da
shboard. And they could see whoever was in the driver’s seat raise an object over the passenger’s back.

  One of the charging boys caught its shape. It was a chrome, long-barreled pistol.

  One of the first teens to get near the car saw it and tried in vain to stop and run back. His feet hit loose asphalt on the street as he reached the Chevy, and they slipped out from under him. He had been running so hard his momentum carried him forward, and his legs slammed into the rear tire of the car as he skidded.

  Hughes had been running almost directly toward the passenger’s window. He may have seen the gun as well. He began to try to turn away to his right at the last instant.

  There was a flash and a shot.

  The bullet flew from the window and into the left side of Hughes’s chest, spinning him. He collapsed where he was struck.

  Screams of panic rang out. Teenagers were suddenly running everywhere, not knowing what had happened.

  The green car accelerated away into the darkness, with Irish kids behind it, yelling. The teen who had slid into the back of the car hurled a bat as the Chevy pulled away, possibly striking it near a taillight.

  John’s friends immediately came to his side, but his blue eyes were already fading. There was blood coming from his mouth. A dark line of it pooled red under his yellow shirt. Someone tucked a jacket under the red hair of his head as a pillow. “Keep him warm!” someone shouted, as kids began removing their jackets and draping them on top of John. A few ran to nearby houses for help, while one darted into the darkness in a direction where he knew there was a firehouse.

  Minutes passed like hours. Where there had been screaming, a stunned silence settled in. “What happened?” teens asked each other. “Who was that?” They looked down at their friend John in disbelief.

  Finally, the police appeared. They began asking questions about who had seen what. The fight earlier in the night was mentioned, and police had a good description of the car. Cops who worked the district were aware of which kids were trouble. They had broken up these fights many times before. Pick up the right kid from the Italian side of Pershing and surely the case would crack right open, some officers immediately thought. In fact, a group of teens from Bridgeport were stopped a short time later in the area of the park in a different car, apparently as they came to check what was going on. Some officers expected this would be a quick solve.

  John Hughes, meanwhile, had been taken to Mercy Hospital at Michigan Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street. But he would not be saved. A Dr. Boyd pronounced him dead at 1:20 AM on May 15, 1976.

  A tall, good-looking football player and member of the student council, Hughes was supposed to be heading into his senior year, expecting to be student body president the next fall. He had college on his mind. He was going places. Many of John’s friends instantly thought of his mother. He was her seventh child, and in some ways the pride of the Hughes family. How could he be the victim of a crime like this?

  2

  THE FRIEND

  Larry Raddatz parked in a small lot in the shadow of a Stevenson Expressway overpass and walked across the street to a Bridgeport staple, Ricobene’s, which has been serving its famous breaded steak sandwiches to the neighborhood since World War II.

  Raddatz had picked the spot, maybe for some comfort as he reached back through the decades to think about a teenage friend he once knew very well.

  He had a somewhat gruff demeanor and a voice with a hint of gravel. He was of Irish and German heritage but, growing up in Canaryville, had leaned toward identification with his Irish roots. And like many men from Irish families, his tough exterior belied a likeable and disarming sensitivity. He looked down at his lunch. He was watching his diet, but every once in a while this was OK.

  “Happy-go-lucky. Johnny was always smiling, always laughing. I met him …” Raddatz reminisced on that day in 2019, before pausing. “I don’t want this to be about me.”

  It was a phrase repeated in Canaryville and Bridgeport by many of those who had agreed to talk about one of the most painful nights of their lives, a night they had carried with them for decades since. Raddatz was definitely one of those. The trauma of what he had seen was barely below the surface, even more than forty years later. Those who had taken his friend, and those in the city who had done nothing about it, “they can burn in hell,” he said, with tears welling in his eyes.

  Raddatz had been friends with a guy named John Russell since childhood, and it was Russell who first started hanging around with Hughes. Another of their group was David Gilmartin, John Hughes’s cousin, furthering the connection.

  Raddatz was two years ahead of Hughes in school. “It was like, So what. He’s big,” Raddatz remembered with a laugh. Hughes was also the same age as Raddatz’s younger sister Kathy. “In the neighborhood you know everybody.”

  Like many kids at that age, Raddatz recalled their time together as doing “a lot of nothing,” which meant hanging out at the park and playing sports. It was a tight group—Raddatz, Russell, Hughes, and Gilmartin. Raddatz remembered times they would all drive to the lakefront together with the windows down, Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” blasting from the stereo.

  Being friends with John was easy. He wasn’t quick to get angry or all about himself. He was funny but not distractingly so. He wasn’t a class clown and didn’t try to pick on kids weaker than him. But he did tend to bring girls around, and he may have shone brightest on the athletic field. He was left-handed and seemed to move fast and with ease while others had to push themselves harder to keep up.

  There was always pickup basketball and football to be played. And on some weekends as they grew older, the group would trek together to parties or to another friend’s family’s place in Michigan for quick warm-weather trips.

  “How do you describe any of your friends? You just like being around them,” Raddatz said. “Johnny attracted people.”

  Not everyone in the friend group even went to the same high school, but it didn’t matter. Raddatz went to Leo, while Hughes went to De La Salle. Nights and weekends and hours spent at Boyce Field made the real social network. The park was a mecca.

  And they had other things in common, like the feud. The Italians and the Irish. Bridgeport and Canaryville. Oil and water. It went back as far as anyone could recall. It was the same with their fathers and in prior generations. Raddatz was among those who didn’t even really know why it had started or kept going. The groups just never got along in a city that tended to divide itself up by ethnicity and faction, block by block.

  Every kid had a story about the other side. Raddatz was a runner, and in college he had a job at Mercy Hospital. He tended to run there and back home to stay in shape. One day as he cruised along a city street, a car full of Italian kids yelled at him, and one leaned out a window and punched him in the back as they passed, he said.

  Fights could start for seemingly no reason. There was a Boys & Girls Club near Thirty-Fifth Street where kids would sometimes congregate, but the Irish kids were careful. “If you had a Canaryville shirt on you’d turn it inside out,” Raddatz said, “if you didn’t want to get jumped by more guys than you had with you.”

  That said, Raddatz never recalled Hughes getting in a fight, partly because he just wasn’t that way and partly because of his size. The friends weren’t really brawlers. Russell was the outgoing class president and Hughes was expected to take over in his senior year.

  At the time, Raddatz was the only one with access to a car. It was his parents’ 1969 Chrysler New Yorker, and the four friends spent a lot of time driving around in it. Often they would stop at each other’s houses, but ultimately they were usually headed to the park. They had girls on their minds and knew girls would be hanging out there with the rest of their friends. They’d flirt and play volleyball. “We used to joke you didn’t miss anything if you went out there, but if you didn’t go out, that’s when everything happened,” Raddatz said.

  Even when Raddatz graduated high school first, he was near
by at Saint Xavier University, so he would hang out with the same friends on weekends and take in a football game. Hughes had been a starter as a junior, and there was talk he could even play in college. Raddatz was still plugged in to the social circle and still found himself out on weekend nights with his usual group of friends at Boyce Field.

  More than forty years later, it was clear how close their friendship had been. The old joking and good-natured rivalry would flash. “John was the best, or one of the best,” Raddatz said, laughing. “Maybe one of the best. If I say he was the best it’ll be fifty fucking guys calling arguing about who was the best. Let’s not say that.”

  As far as the feud, he remembered May 1976 being no different from normal. There was no more fighting than usual. No one had been looking for trouble as the school year wound down. But if it happened, any of their friends would fight their way out of it. No one would back down, even if they were outnumbered. It was better to take a beating than look soft.

  Word had gotten out about the house party in Bridgeport, and kids from both neighborhoods had flocked there. Raddatz and his friends were like moths to the flame, knowing there would be girls and beer and music. But they hadn’t been there long when they could tell it wasn’t going to be a good place to be. There was bad energy, and the two typical groups were at each other fairly quickly.

  There had been other fights at parties where two dozen kids on either side of the feud had wound up rolling around in the street fighting, so the friends left almost as soon as they arrived. They piled back into Raddatz’s car and circled back to home base, the park, where they heard there had been more pushing and shoving at the party after they left.

  They stood around drinking and talking, before other friends arrived and reported there had been a much larger fight after the party. A group of Italian kids had followed some of their pals on Halsted, and a brawl had ensued.