When I was a girl, my father told me stories. There were some stories he made up such as the one about a little snowflake that fell reluctantly to earth and another about an old bridge that had to make way for a new one. And then there were the stories that he didn’t make up. About living in Hannibal, Missouri, next door to the house where Mark Twain had once lived. About his travels along the Mississippi as a young, enterprising man. But there was one story my father really wouldn’t tell. Or he would half tell it and then with a wave of his hand, as if swatting a cobweb from his eyes, and go on to something else.
Yet that was the story that stayed with me. And the one I most wanted to hear. On July 24, 1915 my father was a boy of 13, running an errand for his father. His father had a caps factory near the Loop and my father had a delivery to do. It was barely seven in the morning when he paused on the Clark Street Bridge. He watched the five ships, boarding to take the workers from Western Electric on a picnic. The first ship to board was the Eastland. He saw the fanfare, listened to the music, then stared in horror as the ship was unmoored, slipped on to her side, and sank in 20 feet of water.
The Eastland sank for many reasons. She had always been a somewhat unstable vessel. She was top heavy. Because of the Seaman’s Act, written after the sinking of the Titanic, it became the law that vessels had to carry life-saving equipment for every man, woman and child on board. Earlier that summer an extra fourteen tons of life saving equipment had been loaded on to her top deck And then Captain Pederson ordered the emptying of the ballast tanks so that the passengers could board more quickly.
It was raining and many of the passengers had gone below. When the Eastland rolled on her side, they were trapped in her hull. At first Captain Pederson refused to allow rescuers to burn holes into her hull in order to save people. He was arrested and later prosecuted though eventually cleared of all charges. 844 passengers died that day, most in the hull. More passengers than on the Titanic. Yet few people know about this disaster. In fact the Eastland has been called “the forgotten tragedy.” Why don’t more people know about it? Because the people who drowned were all factory workers, not the well-to-do and famous who went down with the Titanic.
My father, Sol Henry Morris, was born in Chicago in 1902 and he lived until 2005. He lived so long that the computer at Walgreen’s would default when we ordered his heart medication, thinking we were ordering it for a boy of 3, not a man who was almost 103. My father liked to tell me how when he was a boy Chicago was still a prairie and when his young brother, Sidney, was born, he ran across the prairie to tell the neighbors.
He saw the first airplanes fly overhead, the first automobiles drive down Michigan Boulevard, as it was called back then. As he grew older, he played piano and hung out with his cronies in the jazz clubs of Chicago’s South Side. In 1927 he became the youngest member on Chicago’s Board of Trade. A year later the market crashed.
My father married late and he lived a long time. He was a great storyteller and chronicler of his own life and yet he could never share with his children what he saw that day. And yet perhaps in his own way he did share it. He was a man afraid of going to a baseball game or driving in a convertible. A ball could hit you in the head and kill you. You could fly out of the convertible. Danger lurked everywhere. He used to tell me to be careful when I walked through the house with a sharpened pencil because I could fall and stab myself in the eye. I could blind myself from carrying a pencil. Years later when I swam in the ocean, he patrolled the shore, looking for sharks. I’m not sure where all of his fears came from but my brother is sure, and I to some extent agree, that in part they must have come from what my father saw that day.
Over the years the true story of what my father saw and the story that I eventually came to make up and that became the starting point for my novel, The Jazz Palace, became enmeshed in my mind. I spent years at the Chicago Historical Society, looking at archival images, reading first hand accounts. All these years I think that what I was really trying to do was understand who my father was from the tragedy he witnessed. It is of course only in recent time that we have come to understand what post-traumatic stress can do. To soldiers, to survivors of genocide, and to all of us who have suffered a traumatic event in our lives.
Now it is one hundred years after the Eastland went down and at last it seems as if the city of Chicago is going to recognize and remember this tragedy so that it will become less forgotten. But as we do, what I will remember is a boy of thirteen who paused that morning on the Clark Street Bridge, waiting to watch the ships that were about to sail and whose life would never be the same.
