Send us a text Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines. We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confus...
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Send us a text Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines. We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confus...
Send us a text Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines. We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confus...
Send us a text What happens when the storyteller is gone—but the story keeps rewriting itself? A single family biography can carry the weight of a neighborhood’s memory. We open the archives on a 20-year-old Western Electric employee who boarded the Eastland with her fiancé in 1915—and trace how her story, first written by a family member, nearly disappeared under paraphrase and missing attribution. What begins as a personal account of loss becomes a blueprint for preserving authorship, prove...
Send us a text A city comes alive when you can stand on a corner and glimpse yesterday behind today’s skyline. That’s the spark behind my conversation with Ryan Wilson, a designer and mariner who turned countless hours in archives into the Chicago History Map—a large-format, interactive portal where high-resolution photos meet precise locations and time fades just enough for details to surface. We talk about the winding path that led from Admiralty charts on private yachts to digitized stree...
Send us a text Memory can vanish quietly—sometimes with a server shutdown. This week, we open the door to the Eastland disaster’s online past: from an early researcher’s dial-up “postcard pages” to an early Eastland website’s now-defunct archive. We trace how those pioneering digital efforts shaped what many of us think we know today. Along the way, we revisit transportation historian George Hilton’s foundational work—his flexible approach to casualty counts and the permissions that seeded th...
Send us a text A tug’s line goes taut, a mandolin stops mid-note, and a sleek steamer rolls onto its side in six minutes. That’s the scene an eight-year-old John Griggs never forgot—and the memory he later captured in a gripping article, “Excursion to Death,” lost for decades and now brought back to light. We trace the morning’s small warnings at the dock, the sudden tilt that turned joy into panic, and the eerie contrast of the Eastland disaster unfolding within sight of Chicago’s bridges an...
Send us a text A century after his birth, George W. Hilton is still guiding our footsteps. This episode honors the transportation historian whose book Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic became the cornerstone of Eastland disaster research. After discovering my own family connection to the Eastland Disaster, Hilton’s work became my north star. What begins with grief — and a surprise manuscript from a relative — unfolds into a story about how scholarship, storytelling, and stubborn love for truth ...
Send us a text This week we take a deeper dive into the Claims and Libels files (In the Matter of the Petition of St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company, Owner of the Steamer Eastland, For Limitation of Liability) preserved in the National Archives Catalog. The research revealed a startling omission — a victim missing from the original compilation of Eastland victims and from most later derivative lists (with one exception!) By cross-checking court filings, obituaries, and family connections, I...
Send us a text Admiral Hyman Rickover—father of the nuclear navy and one of the most influential military figures of the 20th century—had a connection to the 1915 Eastland disaster that’s been virtually forgotten. As a 15-year-old Western Union messenger in Chicago, young Rickover delivered telegrams to grieving families throughout the night following the tragedy. What haunted him most? The undertakers who swarmed the scene, exploiting grief-stricken families for profit. “Where money is invol...
Send us a text At just 17 years old, Peter Hardy stood on a Chicago bridge in 1915, watching the Eastland fill with happy Western Electric employees on their way to a summer picnic. Moments later, the ship rolled onto its side, plunging more than 800 people to their deaths. Peter didn’t run. This Rusyn immigrant teenager dove straight into the polluted Chicago River and began hauling people out — families clinging together, strangers fighting for breath. He saved at least ten lives that morni...
Send us a text In this episode, I return to Dwight Boyer’s "True Tales of the Great Lakes" and discuss two forgotten heroes of the 1915 Eastland disaster—one remembered correctly, the other erased for more than a century by a newspaper typo that turned my fact-check into a full-blown genealogical detective story. The Mystery Begins While researching Boyer's account of the disaster, I encountered two names that appeared nowhere else in most modern Eastland documentation: N.W. LeVally, an...
Send us a text Hidden stories have a way of finding the light. In this fascinating deep dive, we uncover two previously unknown documents that reshape our understanding of the 1915 Eastland disaster that claimed over 800 lives in the Chicago River. The first discovery reveals how the tragedy transformed American journalism. Through a December 1915 Associated Press Service Bulletin, we glimpse the behind-the-scenes response of the nation's leading news agency and hear the voices of newspaper ...
Send us a text Three young engineers fresh out of Cornell University were running late to the Western Electric company picnic on July 24, 1915. One had overslept, making the trio miss their train and arrive at the Chicago River docks just as their coworkers were boarding the SS Eastland. Redirected to a secondary boat due to overcrowding, they stood on a bridge and watched in horror as the Eastland slowly tilted, then capsized in the shallow water, trapping hundreds inside. Their tardiness ha...
Send us a text One shout could have saved lives. On the morning of the Eastland Disaster, a lone street peddler saw the danger before anyone else. His warning was met with laughter and scorn, and while his experience was recounted in the papers, it was under the wrong name. In this episode, we return to Dwight Boyer’s True Tales of the Great Lakes and follow one story back in time—stepping onto Chicago’s Clark Street Bridge on July 24, 1915, and tracing the trail from century-old newspapers—...
Send us a text In this week’s episode, I continue reading from "Who Speaks for the Little Feller?"—Dwight Boyer’s unforgettable chapter in "True Tales of the Great Lakes" (1971), one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of the Eastland disaster. A meticulous maritime journalist, Boyer combined accuracy with deep empathy, giving voice to the people whose lives were forever altered that day. This isn’t just history—it’s storytelling with heart. Names, quotes, context—it’s all there. Deca...
Send us a text What We’re Covering: Maritime journalist Dwight Boyer (1912–1977) published a detailed Eastland Disaster account in 1971—more than two decades before most major works on the subjectHis chapter in True Tales of the Great Lakes draws from courtroom records, witness interviews, and primary source materialAlthough George Hilton cited Boyer in Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, Boyer's work has otherwise been mostly overlooked or uncredited Highlights from Dwight Boyer's Career: ...
Send us a text Released on July 24, 2025 – the 110th anniversary of the Eastland Disaster On this pivotal anniversary, I’m sharing one of the most haunting firsthand accounts ever recorded about July 24, 1915—a story that doesn’t end when the ship rolled, but follows the tragedy all the way to its most chilling conclusion. TRIGGER WARNING: There are graphic descriptions of death in this episode. Jack Woodford was a 20-year-old aspiring writer standing on a Chicago River bridge when he witness...
Send us a text What if being late saved your life? In this episode of Flower in the River, we follow the eerie ripple of that question through time. On the morning of July 24, 1915, Tom Milton and Willard Haynes were in Chicago when the Eastland Disaster unfolded. Milton missed boarding the ship by a single minute. Haynes, a physician, arrived just as chaos overtook the riverfront and assisted at the scene. Their connection to the disaster surfaced in 1954 when both were living in Texas. That...
Send us a text In this episode, we revisit the Bell Telephone News from August 1915 and the stories of extraordinary individuals who responded to the Eastland disaster with courage and quick thinking: Fred J. Lippert - The telephone company engineer who happened to be wearing his bathing suit that morning (planning to swim after work) and dove repeatedly into the Chicago River to rescue victims. But his heroism didn't stop there - his entire life was defined by service and sacrifice.Geo...
Send us a text In this week’s episode of Flower in the River, we unearth a powerful 1952 article written by author Olive Carruthers—an overlooked piece of Eastland Disaster history that should be widely known but has remained hidden for over 70 years. Through Carruthers’ evocative writing, we meet three remarkable figures: Catherine O’Reilly, the telephone operator who took the call about the Eastland disaster—and whose own brother, Patrick, was among the victims.Enoch Moberg, a deep-sea dive...
Send us a text In this episode, I’m circling back to three stories I’ve covered before—but they’re too important to leave behind. First up: Floyd C. Smith, a hardworking Chicago salesman who was near the dock when the Eastland capsized. He assisted and was later recognized by Coroner Peter Hoffman as a citizen hero. I found Floyd through his granddaughter, Ann, who shared his story in The Chicago Genealogist (Vol. 48, No. 3, Spring 2016). Next: Gertrude Berndt, who survived the Eastland—and t...
Send us a text Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines. We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confus...
