The Pineapple Primary, FLW Studio Tour, the Uptown and some Good Reads

It's Friday and for me, it is the beginning of my "work week." I work part time Friday through Monday. While the rest of you are visiting the Chicago History Museum, reading all the recently released books on Chicago history or taking a walking tour of Chicago's historical sites, (Isn't that how everyone spends their weekends?) I'm slaving away at a job I detest, so far removed from what I wish to be doing that I might as well be on another planet. But, whilst I labor, here are some choice Chicago history blog-bits for you to chew on...


The rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air/ Gave proof through the night that Chicago's still there. --Chicago newsman, during the 1928 Republican primary


"The Pineapple Primary" is the subject of one of Zachary Whitten's new projects. The Pineapple Primary is the name given to the Chicago Republican Mayoral Primary of 1928, one of the bloodiest elections in American history. (Is this appropriate timing, or what!?)Whitten's blog, Brain Release Valve, first came to my attention with his post, "The words, they ain’t comin’ tonight." According to some earlier posts, Whitten became interested in the topic while doing a "I'm bored; let's see what turns up in Wikipedia" search. Ya, been there. Scroll down his Categories list for all the posts on the primary. I want to see what he does with his research.

Hat tip to PrairieMod (quickly becoming one of my favorite websites) for their post, "FLW's Home & Studio Film and Interactive Tour on DVD."

Visit ShopWright.org, part of the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, for more information.


Some good news about the poor Uptown Theater, one of Balaban & Katz's great movie palaces. (The theater was designed by the architectural firm of Cornelius and George Rapp.) The theater, recently purchased by Jam Productions, has seen better days, but next week marks the 83rd Birthday Party for the Uptown. There's a good piece on the theater - "The Gray Old Lady is Waiting" - at Uptown Chicago History.


Lake Claremont Press, the little Chicago publishing house that could, released For Members Only: A History and Guide to Chicago's Oldest Private Clubs by Lisa Holten this summer. I can't really make a comment since I haven't read the book, but it looks damn interesting. Check out the book on the LCP website. They have an upcoming book that really interests me, I might add. It is called Oldest Chicago and written by David Witter. It is scheduled for publication in October, but as of now there isn't even a cover shot I can show you. I'll let you know about both books.

Finally...because my back hurts...
A great ad from the October 24, 1880 Chicago Daily Tribune.

Click for a larger image.

Reciprocity: When You're Good to Mama...

One of the great rewards of blogging is the opportunity to meet writers around the world and read their work. While our specific topics may differ, we share a passion for our subjects and hold a strong desire to share it with others.

While I was on my summer break, Elizabeth at Scandalous Women , one of my top favorite blogs, honored CH with an "Excellent Blog Award" meme. I was quite surprised and flattered to be included by such a gifted writer. Thank you so much! But, now it is my turn to select ten blogs which I deem excellent and pay it forward. Not an easy task, but here are my selections:

The Pen and the Spindle
A Historian’s Craft
Chicago Argus
Footnote Maven
The Vapor Trail
History and Education: Past and Present
Book Calendar
Old is the New New
Digitized Book of the Week From the Library of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Hippie Couture


I was also honored lately by writer/researcher extraordinaire Lidian at The Virtual Dime Museum with BFF award. Lidian's site is filled with solid research, writing and retro pop culture. The community building award she has bestowed upon me has a few rules:

1. You must pass it on to 5 (and only 5) other bloggers.

2. Four of them must follow your blog.

3. One must be new to your blog and from another part of the world.

4. Link back to the blogger who gave you the award.

This one is a bit harder to do, but here we go:

History’s Mysteries
The Pen and the Spindle
Edwardian Promenade
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub
Early Modern Notes

A word on my choices: Some of the blogs on the above lists have been long-time supporters of "Chicago History." The support and encouragement of "Scandalous Women," "The Virtual Dime Museum," "The Pen and the Spindle and History" and "History and Education: Past and Present" is greatly appreciated, and I thank them all. Others on the list don't have a clue I exist and may not care. No matter and, despite the title of this post, reciprocity is not required.

As a final note, check out "What Makes for a Good Blog?" by Merlin Mann on his blog, 43 Folders. It has given me much to think about. (Hat tip to Sharon at Early Modern Notes)

(For all of you who are aware of where the title of this post came from, here's a great little video. It's a little different than what you might be expecting...)

Murder at Taliesan PostScript; FLW on Stage and in Song

I've been a bit surprised at the number of people who have contacted me, or to whom I've mentioned the Taliesan murders, who have been unfamiliar with the event. Perhaps I shouldn't be. William R. Drennan notes in Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesan Murders that

"...the murders have received surprisingly short shrift from Wright's vast number of chronicler...One of Wright's chief biographers dismisses the murders in a single paragraph. In the wake of those seven savage deaths and the destruction of Taliesan, another source notes merely that 'This incident marked a rupture in Wright's career.'"

From the little Internet research I've done, Drennan's statement regarding the event's dismissal seems to be true. I've found very little.

There is, however, one somewhat unusual but interesting acknowledgement of the tragedy: Shining Brow: The Opera about Frank Lloyd Wright.

Shining Brow ("Taliesan" means "shining brow" in Welsh) premiered in 1993 at the Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin. The music was written by Daren Hagen with words by Paul Muldoon. In 1997 the Chicago Opera Theater presented the production in Chicago.


Grief-stricken townspeople mourn as Wright (Robert Orth) places wildflowers on Mamah's grave. (Photo Credit: Chicago Opera Theater production; Shining Brow website)

The opera dramatizes Frank Lloyd Wright's life from 1903 to 1914, beginning with Wright visiting his fallen mentor, Louis Sullivan, in The CliffDwellers Club and ending with Taliesan in ruins and Wright in despair but vowing to rebuild. A more complete description of the opera's plot is provided by Daren Hagen on the opera's website. Unfortunately, there is no recording of the opera yet available. Let's hope a Chicago company will revive the production sometime soon.

I ran across two other artistic tributes to Wright that you might find interesting.


The first is "Franks Home," a play written by Richard Nelson and directed by Robert Falls at its world premier performance at Chicago's Goodman Theater in 2006. The story is set in 1923, just after Wright had completed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Peter Weller starred as Frank Lloyd Wright and photos from the production are available on the Goodman Theater website. The New York Times review was not particularly glowing.

A far more favorable response has been given to the melancholy Paul Simon song, "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright," sung by Simon and Art Garfunkel on the 1970 Bridge Over Troubled Water album:

Architects may come and
Architects may go and
Never change your point of view
When I run dry
I stop a while and think of you

There is some discussion as to whether the song is actually a tribute to Wright, but I prefer to take it at face value. You judge:





Photo Credits: "Frank's Home" photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lost But No Longer Forgotten: The Chicagoan

Yes, I admit it. I had never heard of The Chicagoan until I stumbled on the University of Chicago Press's announcement of the November, 2008 release of Neil Harris' book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. It seems I'm not alone. Harris himself only discovered the magazine a few years ago while browsing in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago and he is the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History and Art History Emeritus at the University. What he found were "a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name the Chicagoan. Pulling one down and leafing through its pages, Harris was startled to find it brimming with striking covers, fanciful art, witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles. He quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory."

The Chicagoan hit the newsstands only sixteen months after The New Yorker made its debut in 1925. Alas, it didn't survive. But, now comes Harris' book; 400 pages of delicious deco (or, probably "nouvoue") as only Chicago can do it. Check out the sample pages (prepare to begin drooling) tantalizingly provided by the UofC Press. It is gorgeous! Please tell me a series of posters of Chicagoan covers will be available soon! If they aren't, someone is asleep in the marketing department.

UPDATE: I can assure you that the University of Chicago Press is NOT asleep. (I really didn't think they were.) That's the good news. The bad news is, however, that their agreement with Quigley Publications (the original publisher of “The Chicagoan”) prevents them from issuing posters. Now I'm depressed. But, we do have the book to look forward to!

The Library of Louis H. Sullivan

"A man's library is a sort of harem."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924)

[Sullivan] read a great deal. The books in his library reveal some rather esoteric interests. There were several books on Japan and Japanese art, and he possessed a small but choice collection of Oriental rugs, Chinese and Japanese vases, bronzes, and jade carvings. He had about a dozen books on gems and precious stones, from the designs of which it has been suggested that he derived motives for his ornament, although this is not true. Gray's Botany influenced his ornament more than any other single source. He had a dog-eared copy, showing extensive use in studying the morphology of plants and their curious and marvellous differentiations within species. He referred the book to students frequently. His sketch-book was full of drawings from this source: complex organic developments from single germinal ideas. There were a few books on the history of music, others on musical analysis, harmony, etc., and fourteen volumes of oratorios. Several books on psychology and psychic phenomena reveal a profound interest in this field. There were in addition well-worn copies of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, especially suggestive to the student of his writings.

The lack of commissions reduced him to desperate straits by 1909. It was at that time that he had to give up the office in the Auditorium Tower and to auction off his library and many of his household effects.

(From: Louis Sullivan Prophet of Modern Architecture by Hugh Morrison (1935)

From the Chicago Daily Tribune, November 27, 1909:



I found this incredibly sad...

Books by Louis Sullivan on Internet Archive:
The Autobiography of an Idea
Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings

A set of links to information on Louis Sullivan has been added in the left column.

Gangs, Capone, Murder, OH MY!

The Digitized Book of the Week from the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is Chicago Gang Wars in Pictures: X Marks the Spot (c1930])(Internet Archive location here.)Those rough and tumble gangland scamps are not really my cup of gin, but I did glance through the book and, for those interested in the period, it will, no doubt, be fascinating. Cautionary note, though. This is one graphic book that does not hold back on photos of recently deceased gentlemen of questionable reputation.

That being said, this is the perfect lead in to an extensive website (understatement) dedicated to Al Capone.

The site is My Al Capone Museum. It is the online Capone collection of Canadian Mario Gomes a self-professed Capone-aholic.

Want to see a brick from the wall of the garage where the St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place? He's got it. Curious about Capone's telephone or bathroom tile? Look no further. Where was Capone buried and then reburied? He's got it all. Gomes has been working on his hobby/collection/passion/obsession for many years. The man even has a Capone tattoo! Capone may not be of primary interest, but I totally respect Gomes work. Check it out.

One last thing. While I am not so interested in the Capone era, I am interested in Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John, the notorious First Ward Aldermen. You have to see Bryan Lloyd's two detailed maps of the Levee District.

Note:

There are actually two versions of the site: The original site can be found here. The new and improved (so the collector claims) is located here. You judge.

New Book on Leopold and Loeb Released

The nice people at HarperCollins Publishing recently sent me a review copy of For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago. The complicated, brutal and senseless murder of young Bobby Franks by two privileged students shocked Chicago and the nation in 1924. Anyone familiar with Chicago history is aware of the incident, but author Simon Baatz is such a skilled wordsmith that the reader seems to be hearing the story for the first time. While I have only begun reading the hefty 560 page tome, I can tell you this - it's a page-turner. My review will be coming soon, but you can preview the book for yourself on the helpful HarperCollins "Browse Inside For the Thrill of It" page.

For more on Leopold and Loeb, scroll down the links in the left column and see my May 21, 2008 post, "Boys Gone Wild: Leopold and Loeb."

The Faces of 1892 Chicago

In placing this collection of Character Studies before the public I hope that it will meet with the recognition and hearty appreciation of such as have daily and yearly noted these types in the crowded streets of our American cities.

To collect these studies in such shape and execution as to make the volume a desirable acquisition to every lover of art, it was not sufficient merely to take the kodak and start out to get a snapshot at a desired subject, but I was compelled for weeks and months to haunt the crowded thoroughfares, the fashionable avenues and the dingy alleys for such characters as seemed to suit my purpose; and when I had found them, persuasion, appeals to their vanity and very frequently pecuniary considerations had to be resorted to in order to induce them to visit a studio in the garb and equipments of their daily vocation.

The majority of my characters lacking the educational qualifications necessary to grasp my ideas, I had many failures, caused by their unnatural, awkward and stubborn behavior in front of the camera, before I had sufficient material to issue this collection.

I do not wish to speak about the many ludicrous and unpleasant experiences my self-imposed task has brought upon me; suffice it to say that after enduring frequent insults, escaping a fight with a courageous dude, being taken for a medical student in search of subjects for the dissecting-room, and barely avoiding arrest through a misunderstanding by a female Italian type, I am happy to present the ' 'STREET TYPES OF AMERICAN CITIES' ' to the favorable notice of the public, who I am sure will find the same pleasure in looking them over as I had — despite the many drawbacks — in finding them, for it is an eternal truth:.


"In arte voluptas."

SIGMUND KRAUSZ

The above quote is the introduction to the 1896 edition of Street Types of Great American Cities By Sigmund Krausz, originally published in 1892 as Street Types in Chicago. Krausz was a documentary photographer who was well-known for his photos and essays on his world travels and automobiles. (See WorldCat for a list of his books.) It is, however, his posed "character studies" of early Chicagoans that I find most interesting. Let's take a look at a few samples...


"The Street Sweeper" (Note the bottle of liquor)


"Out for a Stroll"


"One of the Finest" (This is turn-of-the-century Chicago. Is he kidding?!)

The above photo samples are from the American Experience, Chicago City of the Century website page titled, Faces in the Crowd. They selected 20 pictures and provide a little background information, but there are more pictures to explore on the Google Book Search page linked above. Here are a few more:


"Scissors"


"Matchbooks! Flypaper!"

and, finally, this last little "character study" which begs the question: Which came first? The stereotype or the photo?


I haven't been able to find out much about Sigmund Krausz. According to the Illinois Historical Art Project page he was born on May 14, 1857 in Tolna, Hungary and is thought to have died sometime after 1927. I also discovered he was a member of the Chicago Coin Club (he was a charter member in 1919). It is obvious his pictures reinforced ethnic stereotypes and, at least from our 21st century perspective, made the ethnic Chicago poor a cliche. But, as in immigrant himself, why? Was Krausz simply recording what he saw on the streets - staged studio images though they were - or was there another purpose?

Whatever the purpose, these photos are an amazing look into the eyes of Chicago long ago.

Recommended reading:
I encourage you to explore the University of Illinois at Chicago website, In the Vicinity of the Maxwell Street Market: Chicago 1890-1930. Of particular note is the essay titled, "Victorian Stereotypes of Italian Street People" which mentions Krausz and his photographs.

In December, 2001, Chicago Magazine writer David Zivan wrote an article titled, "Street Life, 1892" but I have been unable to find the piece online. If anyone has a copy, please let me know. My guess it has more information on Krausz.

The 3Cities Project: Chicago Essays
Instantiating Urban Space: Forms of Representation and the Redefining of Chicago
at the Fin-de-Siecle and the Opening of the Millennium

Sigmund Krausz photo credit: DN-0005292, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.

Murder at Taliesin

On August 15, 1914 Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two young children, Martha aged 9 and John aged 11, and four workmen were brutally murdered at Taliesin, the Wisconsin home that Frank Lloyd Wright had built for himself and Mamah. Julian Carlton, a 30-year old servant from Barbados, locked all the exits, set fire to the home, and then waited, ax in hand, for the terrified people to try to escape. Two others were able to escape alive, but wounded, to run for help. Wright was in Chicago at the time working on the construction of the Midway Gardens.

Mamah was quite an accomplished woman. She had earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Michigan, spoke six languages and was an advocate of women's rights. In 1903, her then husband, Edwin Cheney, a successful electrical engineer, commissioned Wright to build them a house in Oak Park. Mamah and Frank were instantly attracted to one another and their resulting affair was the scandal of the age. Mamah and Edwin eventually divorced in 1911.

Recommended sites:

Taliesin
THE MASTER BUILDERS By KEN BURNS (VANITY FAIR - NOVEMBER 1998)
Mystery of the murders at Taliesin
Taliesin (Wikipedia)

Chicago History Family Mysteries: The Barretts

Not long ago, I received an email from a Florida reader, John Barrett, hoping to unravel some family mysteries. One concerns his mother’s career as a jazz singer and includes a murder at a Chicago jazz club. The other mystery centers around a drawing by a famous Chicagoan found among his adoptive father’s things and is more than a century old. Since I know that there are many Chicago-area genealogists out there, one of you may be able to shed some light on these two dim corners of the Barrett family history. I’ll let John tell you the story himself…

My mother, Barbara Cotter, or "Bobbi," and I often sat around the kitchen table late at night after everyone else had retired, just talking. She would tell me stories of her life, but many other stories came to light in the lengthy letter she left at her death.

Mystery #1

Mother often told me of an incident to which she had more than just an attenuated connection. It was, from a public point of view, a small matter -- as run-of-the-mine unsolved Chicago gangland killings go. Thanks to the deathbed letter, I now know that it occurred some time in the late 1940's. My best guess, as I piece together a time line from the letter, is that it happened between 1947 and 1949.

I was by the time the episode begins about two or three years old. By that time, my mother had ended her war time marriage with Walt Delong and was just finishing her undergraduate work at the State University of Iowa, as it was known in those days. She was singing weekends with a territorial band -- the Larry Barrett Orchestra (headed by the man whom I would later know as my father) – and working weekdays at a low paying job with a local ad agency known as Economy Advertising.

I’ll let her letter tell the story:


I finally quit at Economy with an idea of “seeking my fortune” in Chicago. I needed someone to take care of you while I tried to make it in the big city. Meanwhile, you began calling Barrett “Daddy Larry” – he was around us a whole lot – gave you your first tricycle on your 2nd birthday. He was not particularly in favor of my going but I felt I had to do something. We had made one recording at Woodburn’s – “Lover Man”– with the big band. It was an impressive record.

I left for Chicago with my record of "Lover Man." I didn’t have much money so I couldn’t stay there very long, I knew.

After two weeks of hitting agencies, getting nibbles but no bites, I was out of money. I still had a return ticket to Iowa City so decided I had better go back. I had all my luggage – and record – and was in a taxi on the way to the train station. The taxi driver had the Dave Garroway show on the radio. I suddenly got an idea – told the driver to take me to the radio station instead. I got there just as Garroway was going off the air. You know the story, I think. He played my record, picked up the phone and called Taye Voye, then working at the Hollywood Club on Randall St. And I had a job. I was to rehearse with the group while they completed a booking at that club and I was to open with them at the Argyle Show Lounge, which I did.

On opening night, Barrett came – as did Dave Garroway & Dick Hines (Downbeat Magazine). I was on the way! Then Taye Voye offered me a contract. Barrett said it was a lousy contract. I got my first paycheck – $ 35!! I couldn’t survive on that.

Meanwhile, because I was broke I had to borrow from the guys in the group. I was supposed to earn $100 a week, but the club owner deducted a lot of items – such as dry cleaning I never had done etc. – it was a kick-back proposition I never really understood and still don’t, but I, at least, understood there was something very “fishy” about it. The manager of the club was Rudy Davis – a few months later he was shot and killed in his own club. Barrett read about it in a newspaper back in Iowa City.

Anyhow, after that first pay-check & a 3-way conversation with Rudy Davis & Taye Voye, I discussed it with Barrett. In those days I had great respect for Barrett. I thought he was (& he was) one of the greatest musicians going. Added into this great confusion – Taye Voye begging me to stay, Dave Garroway promising me fame & fortune, & Barrett insisting the set-up was crooked (as it was) – was my great longing for you. I missed you so much I would cry every night before I went to sleep. When I added up everything, all the weight was on the side of leaving and going back to Iowa City to sing with Barrett’s band. So I turned in my notice and Barrett and I took the “Rocket” (Rock Island Line) back to I.C. It was on the train that he proposed to me.

There is more to the story. As I have said, my mother’s deathbed letter is more than 75 pages. But this is the gist of the first Chicago historical mysteries I hope to unravel. What I am hoping to do is find anyone alive who recognizes those names – Taye Voye, Rudy Davis, and, of course, Dave Garroway – and who might recall the incidents she describes. At a minimum, I’m hoping to pin down the dates and determine if there is more to the story my mother may not have known.

Mystery #2

Although, as it turns out, my father was not my biological father – and in any event he and my mother divorced when I was in my early teens – Lawrence Eugene Barrett remains for me a towering influence who had an enormous effect on who I am and how I think. Walt Delong was my biological father, but to my dying day Larry Barrett will be my “dad.” He died of a heart attack exacerbated by alcoholism just a year after cancer claimed my mother.

Dad was born in Fremont, Nebraska, where his own father had begun a career in the dairy business, more or less as a milkman, or so the family stories claimed. My dad’s father, who was born in 1892, also was named Lawrence. But his middle name was “Horatio.” That could be important to this last of the Chicago mysteries I am trying to unravel.

As a child, my dad moved to Rockford with his parents when Lawrence Horatio Barrett was promoted into management of the National Dairy Co. The family moved, again, to Chicago when “Grandpa Barrett,” as he was known to me, became president of the Sealtest Ice Cream Co., which then occupied the Hydrox Building in Chicago.

The family had roots in Galena stretching back to before the Civil War. If you wander down the main street of Galena today, you’ll see two buildings with brass historical markers bearing family names. There is the Barrett Store, once a dry goods establishment where, so family legend has it, a great-great-uncle of my grandfather (or some such relation) employed U.S. Grant as a clerk while he trained local volunteers before joining in the Civil War. Just a few doors away is the Coatsworth Building, now a modern rebuild on the site of the original Coatsworth Building. The original was a rambling, multi-storied structure that burned in a spectacular fire some time in the late 1950's. I know the approximate date because an AP dispatch reprinted in Illinois newspapers in 1968 describes it this way: "The Coatsworth building, largest of the six buildings and the original homes of the J.R. Grant leather store, owned by President Grant's father and run for a time by Grant, has been vacant for over 11 years."

Coatsworth was the maiden name of my Grandmother, Lucille Barrett. Her father, Joseph H. Coatsworth, was a jeweler and a bank trustee for a Galena bank. The bank’s name is still engraved above street level in the building that is now the Log Cabin Steakhouse. After every family funeral I attended in Galena, the ever-diminishing number of our family would gather there for a memorial dinner. For the black humor of it, we usually reserved the room that once upon a time was the money vault.


Enough with the genealogy. Here’s the mystery. There has been in my family for at least four generations a small graphite drawing signed and dated in pencil by Eugene Field and dedicated, "Affectionately yours, Dear Barrett." The date, though badly faded, still clearly reads “March 24,1893.”

Eugene Field was a popular Chicago newspaperman, amateur artist, and poet in the latter third of the 19th century. He is best known today as the author of the children’s poems “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and “The Duel” between “the gingham dog and the calico cat.” I vividly remember that my grandfather had this drawing framed and on the wall of his den in the years after he retired, along with all the other furniture, photographs, and accessories from his Sealtest office. It seems reasonable to speculate that the drawing probably was on the wall of his office before that. It passed to me when my father died.

The family story which I recall being told is that Field was friends with a stage actor named Barrett who was prominent – or at least active – in the Chicago area in the latter third of the 19th century. This Barrett, too, was a great or great-great uncle or something like that. I do not remember ever being told anything more specific than that. For a very brief time, I assumed that the drawing by Eugene Field depicted the Barrett to whom it was “affectionately” given. The maddening thing is that Field doesn’t mention the first name of the Barrett to whom he dedicated the drawing.

There was in the last half of the 19th century a very famous Shakespearean actor by the name of Lawrence Barrett. He was a close friend and professional collaborator of Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth, along with most of the other great stage actors and actresses of his time. Moreover, I have discovered from recent biographies that Field and the actor Barrett became good friends after they were introduced to each other by William Dean Howells. But the actor Barrett, as it turns out, was born “Lawrence Brannigan.” The history books tells us, too, that he was by no means confined to the Chicago area. Finally, this famous actor died March 20, 1891-- two years almost to the day before the date of the drawing (March 21, 1893).

I have recently had the leading living biographer of Eugene Field, Prof. Lewis O. Saum, more or less verify that the drawing is a self-portrait of Field, not of any Barrett, done in Field’s hand. Because Eugene Field was so prolific (he tossed off hundreds of sketches for friends and strangers, so I was once told) in itself I doubt the drawing has any particular value. But if it can be done, I would like to verify just who the specific "Barrett" recipient could have been. Prof. Soam, who is now retired, also cautioned me that Field was “a great kidder.” He would play jokes on all sorts of people. It’s a stretch, I suppose, but that leads me to wonder if it’s possible the drawing was a joke Field played on my grandfather, who in 1883 would have been about one year old. Among other roles, the great actor Lawrence Barrett apparently was known for his stage portrayal of Horatio in the great Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet. If so, is it reasonable to wonder whether the jokester Eugene Field made the drawing expressly for my grandfather when he learned that the one year child’s middle name also was Horatio? I tend to doubt it.

Consistent with family legend, there must have been another actor Barrett who was prominent in the Chicago area. Just who it may have been, what connection he had to Field, and why Field would have given him his own self-portrait remain mysteries.

One last mystery: As I have said, my father's given names were "Lawrence Horatio." My dad’s given names were "Lawrence Eugene." To my shame, I never thought to ask either dad or Grandpa Barrett if their first and middle names were in any way connected with Eugene Field or the Shakespearean actor known for his role as Horatio.

So, what do you think? John is looking for information on the jazz club murder and the possible identity of the Barrett named on the Field drawing. As you probably might guess, he is writing a family memoir and would like to fill in the gaps of the family history. If you have any thoughts, you can contact John at jcbarrett44@yahoo.com.

Anyone else have a Chicago history family story they would like to tell?

Photo Credits: J.C. Barrett