CHICAGO'S BAD OLD DAYS--THE NOTORIOUS FIRST WARD BALL

It's Mardi Gras time and many long for the bad old days when Chicago, the City of Broad Shoulders showed the world how to party. The party to end all parties was Chicago's First Ward Ball which was held every year from 1896 to 1908. This annual revelry was the brainchild of Chicago's infamous First Ward aldermen, Bathhouse John Coughlin and Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna. (In those days, each ward had 2 aldermen.) They were known as the "Lords of the Levee". Their claim to fame was that they controlled the rackets and vice in their downtown Chicago district--the numerous brothels, gambling houses, and who knows what.

Bathhouse John was a beefy, boisterous braggart who wore garish clothes and wrote bad poetry. A good hearted man, he was the caricature of an old style politician. He acquired his nickname as a young man who worked in a bathhouse as a "rubber" (he gave massages). Hinky Dink was the quiet political organizer. He owned a tavern on Clark Street called the Workingmen's Exchange which was the informal headquarters of the Democratic Party in the First Ward. He got his moniker from Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill because of his small stature.

On Election Day, Kenna's party workers (who all had City jobs)rounded up the many lowlifes in the Ward and shepherded them to the polls and gave them marked ballots to drop in the box and bring back unmarked ballots in return for a dollar or so or a free lunch. The unmarked ballots were then marked again and brought to a different polling place.

The colorful duo's best known activity was their annual fundraiser, the First Ward Ball, which was held at the Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue. It was the great equalizer in which underworld characters like pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, pickpockets, assorted thrill seekers and even Republicans mingled with politicians and police officials for a decadent night of revelry and depravity. Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink paid for the event by selling overpriced tickets to the tavern owners and racketeers in their ward. Of course, a business declining to purchase tickets could expect an army of city inspectors to drop in looking for Code violations or worse. Each individual pimp, prostitute, pickpocket and thief was required to buy at least one ticket, but the tavern and brothel owners had to spring for blocks of tickets.

On a December night, 20,000 drunken revelers crowded into the Coliseum, spilling out into the street to greet their two patrons who arrived by carriage. Bathhouse John, dressed in a lavender tie and red sash, led the parade into the building, followed by a procession of Levee prostitutes. Authors Wendt and Kogan elaborated on it, "On they came, madams, strumpets, airily clad jockeys, harlequins, Diana's, page boys, female impersonators, tramps, panhandlers, card sharps, mountebanks...." I'm not even sure what some of those are! Men dressed as women, women dressed as men! Don't even ask about the dogs and horses. Remember, this was 1908, not today.

According to the Chicago Tribune, describing the 1908 event, "During the evening, revelers slopped up 10,000 quarts of champagne and 30,000 quarts of beer. Riotous drunks stripped off the costumes of unattended young women. A madam named French Annie stabbed her boyfriend with a hat pin.... Kenna proudly proclaimed, 'Chicago ain't no sissy town.'"

The Everleigh Sisters, Minna and Ada (no relation to the Everly Brothers) were there, seated in their private box with their girls. They owned the lavish Everleigh Club, the "classiest" and most famous of the brothels, catering to the politicians and movers and shakers. When they were closed down by the Mayor in 1911, they tried to Take a Message to Mary, but instead they sang Bye Bye Love .

The law enforcement community was present at the festivities with a full contingent of 100 policemen. The less than zealous cops managed to make 8 arrests and obtain one conviction. The unfortunate Bernard Dooley was convicted and fined for crashing the party without paying! Don't let it happen again, Pal!

After the outrageous 1908 affair, the reformers came out in full force and put pressure on Mayor Fred Busse to end it. He refused to issue a liquor license for the 1909 Ball and had the police on hand to make sure that none was served. With no booze, the 1909 First Ward Ball, if you could call it that, attracted only 3000 people who fell asleep from boredom.

Despite the corruption and depravity of Bathhouse and Hinky Dink, no criminal charges were ever brought against either of them. Coughlin was once accused by a major newspaper of corruption and he demanded a retraction, not because he was accused of graft, but because the paper falsely claimed that he was born in Waukegan, Illinois. (See KENSUSKINREPORT, Dec. 25, 2007). Hinky Dink stepped down as alderman in 1923 when the number of aldermen was reduced, but he remained the Democratic Ward Committeeman until his death in 1946 at age 89. Bathhouse remained alderman until his death in 1938.

Thus, the year 1908 is fondly remembered in Chicago as the last hurrah for the First Ward Ball. As for the 1907 and 1908 Cubs' World Series Champions, their baseball fortunes looked bright for the three-peat in 1909 and the future.

KENNETH SUSKIN

THE STRANGE STORY OF EDWARD J. O'HARE, THE CAPONE MOB AND THE NAMING OF O'HARE AIRPORT

Despite the "shocking" news about corruption in Illinois government, it's not a new phenomenon here. Since most of the Illinois governors in the past 40 years have served at least some Federal time, it's rumored that a chair at the Metropolitan Correction Center will be reserved and dedicated for future governors. It's not known whether that chair will be wired for electricity, but we can leave that for the voters.

In the early evening of November 8, 1939, a colorful character from Chicago's South Side, the Capone mob lawyer Edward J. "Easy Eddie" O'Hare Sr. was gunned down in his Lincoln coupe in traffic on Ogden Avenue. That was hardly an unique event in Chicago which has had over 1000 gangland killings since the 1920's. In this case, however, his son, Edward J. "Butch" O'Hare Jr., a young Navy pilot, got an opportunity 2 years later in World War II to redeem the family name, and in the process place it on what was to become the World's Busiest Airport.

The senior O'Hare was born in St. Louis in 1893 to first generation Irish parents. He passed the Missouri bar exam in 1923 and joined a St. Louis law firm representing inventor Owen P. Smith who had patented a mechanical rabbit used in dog racing. O'Hare helped patent and market the device and placed it in dog tracks in the 3 states where they operated--Florida, Massachusetts and Illinois. Smith died in 1927, and O'Hare. representing Smith's widow, was able to obtain the rights to the rabbit for himself.

Most dog tracks were owned by gangsters, and the Hawthorne Kennel Club (dog track) in Cicero, Illinois, was no excaption. It was owned by the infamous Al Capone. In Illinois, although dog racing was illegal, Capone continued to operate the track while O'Hare was able to drag out the matter in court for several years. O'Hare also helped the Capone mob acquire control of dog tracks in Boston, Tampa and Miami. The attraction for a mobster was that dog races, which weren't regulated at the time, were fairly easy to fix--feed all the dogs before the race except the one you're betting on. The well fed dogs obviously don't run very fast after a rabbit.

When the authorities finally closed the Cicero, IL. dog track, Capone and O'Hare converted it to a horse track which they named Sportsmen's Park, with O'Hare as president. It happened to be next door to another race track, Hawthorne Race Course, which had operated for many years. Hey, if one race track is good for the town, two should be twice as good!

Easy Eddie, the lawyer, solved many legal problems for the Capone mob in the areas of murder, prostitution and gambling, as well as setting up real estate, stock transactions and money laundering. He befriended judges such as Chicago Rackets Court Judge Eugene J. Holland who, in a 15 month period, dismissed gambling charges against more than 12,000 defendants, while finding only 28 guilty. "I'm shocked, shocked that there's gambling going on!"

In his personal life, O'Hare was intensely loyal to his children, sending them to the best schools and doting on them as a good father should. He taught his son Butch how to target shoot, a skill which he honed at military school. O'Hare was fascinated with flying and often took commercial flights, where, unlike today, he found chances for young Butch to briefly take the controls of the planes. He had many connections, even hitching a ride with Charles Lindbergh on his mail plane out of St. Louis. Upon graduation from high school, Butch expressed a desire to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Certainly O'Hare Sr. had the funds to send Butch to any school he wanted, but for the young man to attend the Naval Academy, he must be appointed by a Congressman.

While O'Hare had several Congressmen who were prepared to appoint Butch, the Feds were at that time becoming intensely interested in the workings of the Capone gang. O'Hare knew the inner workings of the gang, and if he chose to cooperate with the government, was uniquely able to decipher Capone's secret codes that could obtain for the prosecutors a conviction for tax evasion. The accounts of what happened then are in dispute.

One story is that O'Hare's friend, St. Louis newspaper reporter John Rogers, also a friend of I.R.S. Investigator Frank J. Wilson, brokered a deal whereby if O'Hare would cooperate with the Feds, his son Butch would be admitted to the Naval Academy. The other story is that O'Hare simply got an agreement from the government that his involvment with Capone would not be used against Butch's appointment. In any event, O'Hare decided that family was more important, and he talked to the Feds. Just before the start of the 1933 Capone trial, O'Hare learned and advised the prosecutors that Capone had fixed the jury that was to hear the case before Judge James Wilkerson. Forewarned, Judge Wilkerson switched juries with another judge. As a result of O'Hare's information and assistance, Capone was convicted and sentenced to 11 years at Alcatraz.

Capone had contacted syphilis and his mental health deteriorated while in prison. Because of his health, Capone was due to be released from prison in 1939. O'Hare Sr. was killed a week before Capone's release. The murder, like most gangland murders, was never solved.

Two years later, when the U.S. entered World War II, Lt. Butch O'Hare was sent to the Pacific to fly his single engine Grumman F4F fighter plane. In early 1942, O'Hare, flying from the aircraft carrier Lexington with one other plane on his wing, encountered a squadron of 9 Japanese twin-engine bombers heading toward the Anerican carrier. The other plane, O'Hare's wingman found his machine guns jammed, leaving only O'Hare between the enemy and the Lexington. His mission was to hold off the enemy, and hold the line he did--singlehandedly.

Butch O'Hare grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was not a man to back down from adversity. He flew directly at the heavily armed enemy bombers and shot down 5 of the 9 (and damaged a sixth) with close range machine gun fire while avoiding enemy anti-aircraft fire. Three other enemy planes were destroyed when reinforcements from the Lexington were able to take off and come to O'Hare's assistance. The aerial dogfight was witnessed by Lexington crew members. O'Hare became the Navy's first "ace" of World War II and was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions. He was also promoted two grades to Lieutenant Commander.

He continued to fly and encounter enemy aircraft, particularly at night, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for his exploits. His luck ran out and he was shot down on November 16, 1943 while on night patrol near Tarawa and lost at sea. A Navy investigation determined it wasn't "friendly fire" as originally thought, but rather a "lucky" hit by a Japanese gunner. Butch O'Hare was 29 years old and left behind a wife and infant daughter.

President Roosevelt described O'Hare's bravery in combat as "one of the most daring, if not the most daring single action in the history of combat aviation." Those words were engraved on a plaque which stands today at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

The airport in 1949 was a tiny regional airport called Orchard Depot (ORD), formerly used as a military airfield. After a suggestion by Col Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune the airport changed its name to honor Butch O'Hare. It subsequently embarked on an ambitious expansion which eventually made it the World's Busiest Airport for many years (an honor now held by Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport). It is also one of the most confusing airports, and because of Chicago's bad weather, a leader in frequent flight delays and cancellations. Because of limits on flights imposed by the federal government to reduce flight delays, O'Hare Airport relinquished its title as World's Busiest. But the airport designation "ORD" remains as a vestige of the long history of the airport.

This major airport is a fitting memorial to Navy aviator Butch O'Hare, a truly American hero who became who he was through a strange sequence of events unique to Chicago.

KENNETH SUSKIN

CHARLES YERKES--FATHER OF CHICAGO'S LOOP, LEAVING THE CHILD SUPPORT TO ILLINOIS TAXPAYERS

Chicago's famed Loop was created by the lovable scoundrel, Charles Tyson Yerkes, who was described by historians as a robber baron. That was one of the nicer things said about him. But like most movers and shakers, he gets mixed reviews.

Born into an old Philadelphia Quaker family in 1837, Yerkes is believed to have practiced non-violence. His forte, instead, was white collar crime. Yerkes started out using his bank president father's connections, but soon established a strong reputation of his own in local financial and social circles. He opened a brokerage firm at age 22 and joined the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Within a few years, he specialized in selling municipal, state and government bonds. He invested money for a major client, the City of Philadelphia, but got carried away with unauthorized speculation which collapsed when the Chicago Fire of 1871 sparked a financial panic. When he couldn't cover the losses, Yerkes was arrested and sentenced to 33 months in the pen, the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary which was known and feared for its system of solitary confinement.  Remember, prisons didn't have cable TV, golf and air conditioning in those days, and prisoners didn't sue for better food.

The clever Yerkes, attempting to forestall his prison sentence, attempted to blackmail two influential politicians, but the scheme didn't work. However, President U.S. Grant, no choirboy himself, feared that Yerkes' disclosures might hurt the party's chances in the next election, and agreed to pardon him if he would deny those accusations. Yerkes did so and was released after 7 months in jail.

He then returned to banking and rebuilt his fortune over the next few years. In 1880 he took a trip to Chicago where he became interested in the Northwest Land Company, headquartered in Fargo, (North) Dakota. He moved on to Fargo where he posed as a colonel and was able to obtain a quickie divorce from his wife of 22 years so that he could marry his 24 year old girl friend. After doing so, he relocated to Chicago where he planned to open a bank. To build up his bankroll, he assembled syndicates of investors for highly leveraged, high risk ventures which by and large collapsed with adverse results for the investors though not generally for Yerkes.

Eventually, he became attracted to the lure of street railways as profit making ventures. People didn't have cars in those days, and most traveled by public transportation or on foot. His first acquisition was the North Chicago City Reilway Company in 1886. With two business partners, he concocted a scheme to buy a bare majority of the stock for $1.503 million; then form a holding company called the North Chicago Street Railway Company which issued $1.5 million in bonds to pay for the stock purchase and then lease all the property of the former to the holding company for 999 years. Without going into too much detail, the net effect was to acquire a street railway producing $250,000 per year in dividends without investing any money. He found a formula that worked so well that he would repeat it the following year on Chicago's West Side. Because the businesses were highly leveraged, they were unprofitable from an accounting standpoint, although they gave Yerkes a fine living.

Before too long, he came to own more than half the private elevated railway companies in Chicago as well as most of the streetcar system. He built a downtown terminal connecting the elevated lines, which circle the main business district, Chicago's Loop. Through his direction and perhaps self serving vision, he modernized and expanded Chicago's transportation systems and helped make Chicago the world class city that it is today.

To many, the problem was in the details. To keep the competition at bay, Yerkes routinely bribed aldermen to obtain franchises from the City Council. If that didn't work, he hired working girls to seduce and then blackmail the lawmakers. As a last resort, he would buy out his competitors and either dismantle them or integrate them into his syndicate. Yerkes' companies were a maze of frontmen which included business associates, his wife and even his clerical staff so that his name didn't appear on anything--nothing could be attributed to him. But everyone knew who was really in charge, and Yerkes made many powerful enemies in the City Council, especially Mayor Carter Harrison Jr. who, in published articles, essentially called him a crook.

According to his biographer, John Franch, Yerkes didn't invent corruption in Chicago. He merely perfected it, "bringing order to what had been a chaotic system of bribery....After Yerkes' emergence on the scene, corruption in Chicago moved to another level."

Ultimately, in 1899, when his political capital ran out and the City Council defeated the renewal of his franchise, he sold out and moved to New York. Ironically, the swing votes to defeat Yerkes' interests were cast by that unholy aldermanic duo--the notorious Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna. (See kensuskinreport,Dec. 25, 2007)

Unlike some of the so-called Robber Barons of the era like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, who tried to justify their sometimes ruthless actions, Yerkes freely admitted his dishonesty and admitted that self-satisfaction was his primary aim in life. He lived a lavish life style, building a fabulous mansion on New York's Fifth Avenue, complete with a marble staircase, a conservatory with live birds and decorated with fine art by old master painters like the three R's, Rembrandt, Rubens and Raphael. He then built a comparable mansion nearby on Park Avenue for his mistress, the much younger but sophisticated Emilie Grigsby, the daughter of a Kentucky slaveholding father and a Cincinnati brothel-running mother.

Everybody wants to be liked, and to bolster his image and leave a favorable legacy, Yerkes allowed himself to be talked into building the world's largest telescope. In 1892, the 24 year old astronomer George Ellery Hale accepted a professorship at the new University of Chicago with the condition that it build a new observatory costing at least $250,000. Hale and U of C President William Rainey Harper visited Yerkes at his office on Clark Street and cleverly appealed to his considerable ego to obtain his financial support for the project. Since Yerkes wanted the biggest and best of everything, this was right up his alley. While Yerkes had no objection to financing a telescope, he didn't realize he was bankrolling the entire observatory and had some second thoughts. However, Hale leaked the story to the press about Yerkes great generosity, which made it very difficult to back out. The project was dedicated in 1897 with Yerkes delivering the widely acclaimed address presenting the observatory to the University of Chicago.

His other claim to fame was as the inspiration for Theodore Dreiser's novels, The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic (the Cowperwood trilogy) which were based on the life of Charles Yerkes.

Yerkes died in New York in 1905 at age 68, leaving a $4 million estate. The will left $100,000 to the observatory provided that it be officially designated the Yerkes Observatory. It still stands proudly today in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Geneva. Its 40 inch telescope is today dwarfed by modern telescopes around the world and in space, but it still serves a purpose in research and training for the University. And, of course, Yerkes' other legacy, Chicago's Loop has expanded far beyond the boundaries of the elevated lines which gave the Loop its name.

Postscript: The successor to Yerkes' empire eventually consolidated all the elevated railway and other transportation companies to create the system which later became the Chicago Transit Authority (the CTA). His name was Samuel Insull, another colorful character who will probably be the subject of a later article.

KENNETH SUSKIN
1/30/08