Eastland (16 page)

Sleep had been impossible last night, so at dawn I gave up
trying and got dressed. Today would be the first day with the
hundreds of new hires. Twenty-eight of those hirelings would
be coilers who needed training and guidance from me. The
past three weeks since the
Eastland
overturned had seemed
unnatural, each day feeling more peculiar than the last. There’d
been no rhythm to my life. I’d stumbled along doing the best
I could. But now it was back to a regular schedule, a normal
workday, a full staff.

Without Mae.
I put on my new green mid-calf skirt and the white cotton
blouse with the lace cuffs. Mama had kept her promise. She’d
made me a whole new, professional wardrobe. I pinned my
watch over my heart and my employee badge to my collar and
then tiptoed into the kitchen.
I took two baguettes from the wooden bread box, grabbed my
lunch basket, and crept quietly into the parlor. My hand went
automatically for my umbrella. I hesitated. The sun had risen.
The sky looked clear. Rain would be a thing of the past, like my
old life. It was time for something fresh. I left the umbrella in its
wicker stand and headed outside.
Dolly O’Brien sat on the stoop.
“You’re up early.” I checked the time. “It’s barely six-thirty.”
“Couldn’t sleep. I see you had the same problem.” She stood
and stretched. “I’m too excited about all the new people. All the
new men. But you don’t have to worry about that, Miss I-HaveTwo-Suitors-and-You-Have-None. So tell me all about your
weekend dates.”
We started walking. “Well, on Saturday night I had dinner
at the Palmer House with Karel. On Sunday, Lars took me rowboating in Garfield Park.”
“You’re my idol. Who would have thought that mousy little
Delia Pageau had it in her to tame two men?”
“Certainly not me.” I kicked at a stick on the sidewalk. It
landed with a splash on the soggy grass. “Not ’til circumstances
forced my hand.”
“But you did it. Doesn’t matter how it came to be.” Dolly
elbowed me. “Now stop feeling sorry for yourself and enjoy the
game. Play the field for as long as you can. A girl’s got to have
some fun before she settles down to dishes and diapers.”
Work. Work. L-i-v-e! My head reeled with the exciting possibilities. And then, before I could stop myself, I kissed Dolly
right on her freckled cheek.
She touched her face. “What was that for?”
“For listening.”
“That’s what friends do.”
In less than a month, my world had capsized, flipped sideways, all topsy-turvy. But somehow, through all the chaos and
grief, something unexpected had emerged. This wasn’t me and
Mae. That friendship could never be repeated. No, this was
unpredictable, incorrigible, and fun.
Dolly O’Brien fit with my new life.
We paused at the corner. With traffic so light at this hour,
we only had to wait for a produce truck that had onions
spilling out the open back door and the milkman’s wagon.
As the familiar wagon passed, we both stepped off the curb.
The horse took that moment to lift its tail and drop a load of
manure at our feet. We screamed and scrambled back onto
the curb.
“Damn beast!” Dolly waved a fist at the milkman. He tipped
his white-brimmed cap at her and chuckled as he drove on.
“Can’t wait for the day when horses are outlawed. Only motorcars should be allowed on public streets.” She grumbled all the
way across the muddy road.
I opened my basket, pulled out the two baguettes, and
handed one to Dolly. “Tell me about your weekend.” I took a
crunchy bite of bread.
“Not much to tell.” Dolly snapped her loaf in half and plucked
out the soft middle. “I took Grandmum to the store. Caught up
on my sleep.”
“Tell you what. Why don’t you and I go downtown after work
next Saturday? See a vaudeville show at the McVicker’s?”
“That’d be swell! And then maybe some supper at Berghoff’s?”
“Sure. Why not? I love their corned beef. It’ll be two girls out
on the town.”
“Yeah! Who needs men?”
We looked at each other and burst out laughing as we crossed
busy Cicero Avenue.
“Looks like everybody’s eager to get to work early today.” Dolly
pointed a half loaf toward the parking lot forming in the outer yard.
A swarm of people scrambled off the Twenty-Second Street trolley.
Another flock hastened up the street behind and around us.
“They’re probably more anxious than excited. I know I am.”
“Ah, quit worrying. You and Mr. Hofstedder did a grand job
getting things ready for today. You’ll be wonderful with all those
new coilers.”
We followed the fast-moving stream through the north gate.
“Don’t see any Johnny Volos in this new bunch.” Dolly sighed.
“Maybe not, but we do have his mother.”
“Thanks to you. Don’t know that I would have been as generous with a woman who ripped my dress.”
“You would have been even more charitable. You’d probably
have offered her your own job.”
We finished the last of our baguettes and marched into my
building. I stopped to check my watch. It was two minutes past
seven.
“Do we have time for a cup of coffee?” Dolly asked. “To wash
down our breakfast?”
“Yes, but I’d better not. I should probably stick around the
time clock. There’s bound to be problems.”
“See you at lunch?”
“You bet!”
“Later, alligator.” She waggled her fingers over her shoulder
and headed to her switchboard.
I raced up to the third floor. Just as I’d suspected, a long line
had formed at the time clock.
Normally, new workers would have been given a tour and
then instructed on the use of the time clock. But today was not
normal. Never in the history of Western Electric had so many
new people started at the same time. No contingency plan had
been made for an event as catastrophic as the
Eastland
. Today,
we were all new hires learning how to cope in a truly unique
situation.
I stood beside the clock helping out until the starting whistle
sounded. I directed the last of the women to their new departments, scooped up my basket, and headed to coiling. At the
doorway of department 2322, I paused to peer inside.
Dozens of new faces had joined the eleven women I’d seen
on that first day back. Every seat on every bench was now filled.
I hurried down the hall to department 2327.
The door swung out to greet me. “Miss Pageau!” exclaimed
Mr. Hofstedder. “We’ve been waiting for you. Please, come in.”
I took a deep breath and scuffled through the doorway. A
roomful of eager faces stared at me.
“You remember all these ladies,” said the chief. “And of
course, they remember you. In fact, they’ve been telling me quite
a lot about you.”
“They have?”
Mr. Hofstedder scurried toward the front of the room and
rolled out a chair from behind a polished oak desk.
“Have a seat, Miss Pageau. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“You want me to sit at your new desk?”
“No.” He grinned at me.
What was going on? I glanced around the room.
Maria Tomaso smiled at me as she rubbed her rotund belly.
Mrs. Volo grinned, waving quite enthusiastically. I scanned
every face and every single woman was smiling.
“Come, Miss Pageau. I want my new assistant chief to sit at
her own desk.”
The room erupted in applause. I stared at Mr. Hofstedder.
“But … But … There are no female assistants in the company.”
“There’s one now.” He rolled the chair closer to me.
My heart thundered as I slipped behind my brand new desk.
“Now, as your first duty as my assistant, I want you to go over
the Employee Handbook with our new staff. They all have their
copies. Yours is in the top drawer.”
I opened my desk drawer and found my handbook. And on
top of it, my new badge. Bigger than my present one and blue
instead of white. But there was something else in the drawer.
I pulled it out.
Tears flooded my eyes.
I looked at Mr. Hofstedder. He nodded, pulled out his handkerchief to wipe away his own tears, and walked to the back of
the room.
I ran my fingers over Mae’s badge. I inhaled and then tucked
my treasure back into my drawer for safe-keeping. I rolled back
my chair and stood, removing my old badge and pinning on my
new one.
“All right, ladies, open your handbooks. Let’s begin.”

Researching
Eastland
has been a long, intensely emotional
journey for me. What began as the seed of an idea ten years
ago blossomed into a passion for the real-life story of the SS
Eastland
, the 844 victims, and the hundreds of survivors and
rescue workers. I’ve tried to keep the details of the capsizing as
authentic as possible, but all conversations with the customs
agents, the crew, and the captain are imagined, as is the
character Lars Nielsen, First Assistant Engineer.

However, one truth remains. On the morning of Saturday,
July 24, 1915, a series of events occurred in catastrophic succession, resulting in the greatest loss-of-life disaster in the history
of Chicago.

For the most part, the victims were working class, Catholic,
and of European descent. St. Mary’s of Czestochowa Catholic
Church, where twenty-nine caskets were eulogized at a single
Mass, is still, at the time of this writing, an active parish in
Cicero, Illinois. The small, brick church/school of 1915 has
since been restored and now serves as the center for religious
education classes. Bishop Peter Paul Rhode and Father Aloysius
Raczynski were the real-life priests involved in the funeral Mass.
The expansive Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero was
demolished in the mid-1980s and replaced by the Hawthorne
Works Shopping Center. As of 2014, only the iconic water tower
remains, standing as a long-forgotten sentry at the southeast
corner of the plaza.

Western Electric lost nearly five hundred employees on the
Eastland
that day. The women’s departments were hardest hit,
with the real-life department 2327 experiencing the most losses.
As a tribute to those women, I used some of their actual first
names in the story. Maria Tomaso, workbench four, is a fictitious character, but Eleanore, Rose, Helena, Frances, Louise,
Jennie, Anna, Lillian, Elizabeth, Barbara, Julia, and Fannie all
lived and died on July 24, 1915.

Midway Gardens, where Dee and Lars have their first date,
really existed. Built in 1914 by the renowned American architect
Frank Lloyd Wright, the gardens succumbed to financial burdens and the pressures of Prohibition and were demolished in
1929. World-famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova did indeed
host a benefit for the victims’ families at Midway Gardens. She
can be seen online performing “The Dying Swan.”

The plot of the novel developed as a direct result of my newspaper research. Though I had a main character and a premise,
I didn’t know how the story would unfold until I studied the
microfiche newspapers of July to August 1915. On the morning
of the picnic, the headlines were about the First World War in
Europe. With so many immigrant readers anxious for news of
their homelands, the papers were keen to cover wartime stories,
including the recent sinking of the
Lusitania
by German U-boat
torpedoes.

But following the capsizing on the Chicago River, the
Saturday evening editions related nothing but sensationalized
headlines of the
Eastland
. For ten days straight, the disaster
dominated the front pages, not only in Chicago, but across the
nation. From the horror of the makeshift morgue at the Second
Regiment Armory (now Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios) to
Black Wednesday’s funerals and the chaos at the gates of
Western Electric, the news was heartbreaking and alarming.

Then, on the morning of Monday, August 2, the
Eastland
was banished to the back pages, and the war in Europe once
again dominated the headlines. The victims and their families
were old news as life returned to “normal” in Cicero and around
the country. The
Eastland
faded from our collective consciousness to become a mere footnote in our history books.

I was aided in my research on Western Electric by Dennis
Schlagheck, Cathy Lantz, Jennifer Butler, and John Gieger,
the dedicated library staff of the Hawthorne Works Museum at
Morton College in Cicero, Illinois. Alberta Adamson, President
and CEO of the Center for History in Wheaton, Illinois, shared
her museum’s amazing collection of
Eastland
memorabilia with
me, including a recorded interview with one of the last remaining survivors. Funeral Director, Nathan Tamayo, provided
valuable details on the burial process. My SCBWI writing group
in Schaumburg, Illinois, and my Script Sisters, Marianne Lurie
and Lyda Williamson, offered insightful critiques of these chapters. Linda Colaprete and Amber Cheatham suffered through
my entire first draft. Tiffany McPherson endured every single
revision of the novel and survived.

Thomas Reid, tattoo artist extraordinaire,
www.StayDownTattoos.com, created the detailed map of
Cicero and the gorgeous rendering of the SS
Eastland
found
in the opening pages. Freelance editor, Bethany Kaczmarek,
www.alittleredinc.com, approved the final touches
with an incredible eye for detail. D. Robert Pease,
www.walkingstickbooks.com, designed the dramatic cover.

For more information on the doomed steamer, I recommend Jay Bonansinga’s powerful nonfiction book,
The
Sinking of the Eastland, America’s Forgotten Tragedy
(Citadel Press, 2004). Photos of the disaster can be found in
Ted Wachholz’s stunning book,
The Eastland Disaster,
from
the
Images of America
series (Arcadia Publishing, 2005) or
visit his website at the
Eastland
Disaster Historical Society.
However, the definitive nonfiction book on the subject
is:
Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic
by George W. Hilton
(Stanford University Press, 1995).

As for the history of the
Eastland
after the capsizing, the
steamer was righted three weeks later and then put up for
auction. The hulk was purchased by the Illinois Naval Reserve,
renamed the
Wilmette,
and used as a training vessel at the Great
Lakes Naval Base. The
Wilmette
remained in duty through
WWII. She was finally scrapped into oblivion in 1947.

My own personal interest in this tragedy began in childhood
with a story my dad told me about his mother. It seems that
Grandma Manseau had a ticket to the Fifth Annual Western
Electric Employee Picnic. On the night before the big event,
Great-Grandma Savageau had a premonition of danger and
begged my grandmother not to go on the outing. In
Eastland
,
teenager Dee Pageau ignores her mother’s warnings and runs
off to the picnic. But in real life, Grandma Manseau was an
adult at the time of the disaster and heeded her mother’s pleas.
My grandmother remained safely at home that day, and for
that fateful decision, I am eternally grateful. If not for GreatGrandma Savageau’s premonition, I might not be here to tell
this tale.

There is a permanent memorial to the
Eastland
near the
site of the disaster along the Chicago River between the Clark
and LaSalle Street bridges. An urban legend persists that the
spot is haunted. I’ve visited the riverwalk memorial several
times, and each time, I’ve heard screams rising from the water.
My husband, who accompanied me on each visit, never heard
a sound. I don’t have an explanation for my unnerving experience. Was it simply fatigue from too many hours at my laptop
poring over particulars of the disaster or some strange psychic
phenomenon? I’ll leave the final determination to the reader.