The Lives of Robert Ryan Page 3
None of the Ryan brothers was ever implicated, but the scandal soiled the reputations of everyone doing business with the district. Kelly escaped conviction only when the judge in the case, who was pals with a local Democratic boss, quashed the indictments and Northrup, forced to reassemble his case before the statute of limitations ran out, dropped the chief engineer as a defendant. Years of hardball Chicago politics had turned Tim Ryan into a cynic when it came to graft; informed once that a gubernatorial candidate had been accused of embezzling fifty thousand dollars, he remarked, “Any man who could only steal fifty thousand dollars in that job isn’t smart enough to be governor.”22
EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER THE CRASH, in April 1931, Tim suffered another devastating blow. One of his sewer projects for the city, southwest of the Loop in the Pilsen neighborhood, was engulfed in a horrific fire that burned for nearly twenty-four hours and claimed at least a dozen lives. Bob would come to view the disaster as a key factor in his father’s death.
The Ryan Company had contracted to build the Twenty-Second Street section of a huge, $2.1 million concrete intercepting sewer that would travel southwest to the sanitary drainage and ship canal. During construction each block-long section of the ovoid, seventeen-foot tunnel was sealed off to maintain air pressure and prevent collapse; the only exit was a short, perpendicular work tunnel that led to an elevator shaft. The cause of the fire was never officially determined, but according to several newspaper reports — including one that cited Tim Ryan as its source — a cement worker had dropped a candle (used to detect air leaks) into a pile of sawdust. Timber and sawdust were major components in tunnel construction: wooden forms used to mold the concrete were braced against the earthen walls and anchored in place with sawdust packs. The fire began to spread underneath the concrete, pumping black smoke into the tunnel.
At street level a foreman noticed a ribbon of smoke drifting up from the elevator shaft and, fearing an electrical fire, sent three electricians down to check the wiring; they found nothing wrong. Tim learned of the fire around 6 PM, and the first workmen to flee the tunnel reported a smell of burning insulation, which led him and his crew to believe the cause was indeed electrical. Morris Cahill, the construction superintendent, warned them that if the fire reached the east end of the tunnel and destroyed the hoses maintaining the air pressure belowground, the entire tunnel section would collapse.
According to the Daily News, loyal employees begged Ryan to let them extinguish the fire: “We’ll be okay, boss. Let us go, please. It’ll mean your contract if we don’t.”23 Without waiting for Ryan’s permission, an assistant foreman led a party of men down into the tunnel; Cahill made three trips down but each time was overcome by smoke. With no word from the men below, Ryan summoned the fire department around 7 PM.
“My men are in there!” Tim exclaimed as the first engine company arrived on the scene. “What are we going to do?”24 Confusion over the fire’s cause and ignorance of its severity may have been as deadly as the blaze itself: the first two rescue parties descended into the tunnel without the benefit of gas masks. The operation went on for hours, slowed by the thick smoke and the difficulty of getting at the burning material. When the fire broke out, panicked workmen had retreated into the metal chambers at either end of the tunnel section, which were sealed by an air lock and offered fresh air pumped in from street level thirty-five feet above. As the fire raged out of control, it pushed firefighters back into the chambers as well, and the trapped men waited through the night, praying and trying to lie still.
By midnight the construction site looked like the scene of a mining disaster. A light wagon trained its searchlight on the mouth of the elevator shaft, and thousands of spectators, some of them distraught family members of Ryan employees, were being held back by a police cordon. Hospital squads had arrived on the scene and set up shop in a neighboring lumberyard. More than two dozen firefighters had already been taken to Saint Anthony Hospital, and the fire department had by now dispatched a full quarter of its forces to the site.
Firefighters attacked the superstructure over the elevator shaft and eventually managed to tear the roof off in an effort to provide more ventilation. Mining equipment arrived, and mine workers from around the city converged on the site to volunteer their services. After the utility companies shut off the electricity and the Twenty-Second Street gas main (located a perilous ten feet from the tunnel), crews of men with picks, shovels, and pneumatic drills started three new ventilation holes in the concrete — one above each air chamber and another at the center of the tunnel.
No plan was too far-fetched: a professional diver who lived on the North Side was recruited to venture into the tunnel in his wet suit, but after only a few minutes he signaled for help and was brought back up — the rubber was melting. A description in the Chicago Evening Post sounds like a scene from Dante: “Terrific heat developed in the cramped quarters underground. Blazing timbers fell.… Water, poured above the tunnel in a vain effort to cool it and dissipate some of the fumes, eddied, four feet deep in spots, and made it impossible to see even inches ahead in the thick white mist.”25 Sometime during the night, the air supply inside the east air chamber failed, and the laborers and firefighters trapped inside decided to make a break for it, but most them died of smoke inhalation before they could reach the elevator shaft.
Outside, the rescue effort was beginning to reach across state lines. Henry Sonnenschein, secretary to Mayor Anton Cermak, brought word from his boss, who was vacationing in Miami Beach, that the city would spare no ex pense in addressing the crisis, which threatened to become a citywide calamity if the fire breached the east and west walls of the tunnel into the remainder of the sewer line. By 3 AM a rescue squad from the federal mining bureau had roared out of Vincennes, Indiana, for Chicago, escorted by state police. A squad from the state mining bureau in Springfield boarded a special train with right-of-way cleared to the site of the disaster. But the critical arrival, just after dawn on Tuesday, was an experimental smoke-ejector truck designed by an inventor in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A modified fire truck, the smoke ejector was essentially a gigantic vacuum cleaner on wheels, and its long, flexible fourteen-inch tubes were extended down the mine shaft to suck the smoke out of the tunnel.
The crowd roared later that morning when sixteen men trapped in the metal chamber and already given up for dead began emerging from the elevator shaft. Early that afternoon rescuers recovered the last dead man from the tunnel: Captain James O’Neill, one of the first firefighters on the scene, who had been trapped in the east chamber and was trampled near the air lock by the stampeding workmen as they tried to escape. The final death toll was four firemen and seven laborers, plus a policeman who had been run over by an ambulance. Nearly fifty other people had been injured, some seriously. Later that afternoon, the young widow of Edward Pratt, a firefighter whose body had been recovered overnight, broke past the police cordon and tried to hurl herself down the elevator shaft.
By that time Tim had been summoned to the county morgue, where Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, the Cook County coroner, was convening an inquest to determine how the fire had started and how the eleven men had died. Bundesen had a long history with Ed Kelly, having worked for the sanitary district during the Whoopee Era; according to journalist Elmer Lynn Williams, he had proved himself “one of the pliable tools of the machine.”26 Kelly, still holding firm in his capacity as chief sanitary engineer, served as technical advisor to the inquest.
Called to testify, Tim Ryan wept as he recalled the first crews of firefighters going after his trapped workmen: “I saw men going down into that reeking tunnel without gas masks — without masks. I never saw such courage displayed in my life.”27 Neither he nor his construction superintendent could state with certainty what caused the fire, and the news accounts of a workman igniting a pile of sawdust never were introduced.
When the inquest reconvened a week later in a courtroom at City Hall, the panel ruled that all eleven men had died of smoke inhalation
but declared the cause of the fire unknown. “Unofficially,” reported the Chicago American, “the jury members expressed the view that no human agency was at fault in the fire and tragedy that followed; that all precautionary measures were maintained by the contractors to safeguard life.”28 The city was indemnified against liability for the workmen’s deaths; the Ryan Company would pay any settlements to the families through its compensation insurance. A pall hung over the firm, exacerbated by the Kelly corruption charges still crawling through the court system.
IN THE QUIET SECLUSION OF HANOVER, Bob must have been even more determined not to join the Ryan Company. His grades had improved substantially; he was earning mostly B’s now and the occasional A in English or comparative literature. He had reclaimed his record as an intercollegiate boxing champion and — encouraged by his coach, Eddie Shevlin — even entertained thoughts of becoming a professional fighter. But his father talked him out of it: most boxers, he pointed out to Bob, were washed up at thirty. Bob was tired of athletics anyway. Having defended the heavyweight title in his sophomore and junior years, he retired from the ring to devote himself to his degree in dramatic literature.*
His best friends were still his books. The 1920s had brought a great revival of interest in Herman Melville, and Bob was floored by Moby-Dick. Something in Ahab’s lonely obsession spoke to him; his daughter, Lisa, would remember him ritually reading the book every year.29 He adored Joyce, especially Ulysses, but his tastes also ran to more popular fare; at Dartmouth he sold a professor and several of his classmates on Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 narrative poem The Set-Up, about a black boxer who runs afoul of gangsters.30
As an admired upperclassman, Bob drove around campus in a Buick roadster, took up smoking a pipe, and made bathtub gin. Prohibition had been in effect since 1919, and overturning it had become a touchstone for Democrats. In a nod to his father’s electoral ambitions, he ran for class marshal on the slogan “Rum, Rebellion, and Ryan.” His flyers declared him in favor of “free beer, free love, and free wheeling.” But that summer would bring him closer to genuine lawlessness than he could stomach. “I answered an ad,” he later recalled. “An oil man wanted a chauffeur. He took one look at me and said I was it. I ferried him around for two weeks before I discovered he was a bootlegger and that he was taking me along as a bodyguard.”31 Bob soon quit the job.
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, Ryan became an intercollegiate boxing champ and ran for class marshal on the slogan “Rum, Rebellion, and Ryan.” Robert Ryan Family
Without the athletics, his academic performance improved; he made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior and senior years, wrote an essay on Shakespeare that was anthologized in a collection of undergraduate writing, and won a hundred-dollar prize for his experimental one-act play The Visitor, whose title character was the grim reaper and whose one and only performance took place in the college’s Robinson Hall. Now twenty-two, Bob had hung onto his blissful ignorance for as long as possible, but he began to understand that he would be graduating into harder times than any he had ever known. The Ryans’ life of luxury had evaporated as the country spiraled into depression. Tim wanted Bob to come home and help with the business, but Bob resisted. He would do anything but seal himself up inside an office.
After graduating in June 1932, Bob took what little money he had and moved to Greenwich Village with two fraternity brothers, intending to find a job as a newspaper reporter and work on his playwriting. A third of the country was out of work, and along the streets of New York people queued at breadlines and soup kitchens. Bob couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do with his life; he only knew he couldn’t go into business. He fought a professional bout under an assumed name to raise some cash, but otherwise the boxing went nowhere. A girlfriend got him gigs modeling for true-confession magazines and department store ads — he later claimed to be the first man in America to model French jockey shorts — but his pals gave him so much grief over this that he quit. For a while he worked as a sandhog, pushing rock barges through tunnels under the Hudson River.
In this economic climate the pampered young man oscillated between realism and sheer fantasy. Some pals from Psi Upsilon persuaded him to come in with them on a gold mine in Libby, Montana, and Bob moved out West to prospect with a friend. The living was rough; they had to break ice on a stream for bathing water. After four months they had managed to extract about eight dollars’ worth of gold. When Bob heard about a cowpuncher job in Missoula paying that much every week, he gave up on the mine, and eventually he returned to New York City, wearing a long beard and hitting up his classmates for money to get back on his feet.
Magazine profiles would offer differing accounts of how Bob managed to wind up a sailor aboard The City of New York, a diesel freighter making runs to South Africa, in 1933. According to one, he was strolling along the Brooklyn waterfront one day, visiting a friend, and when he saw the ship loading on the wharf, he impulsively asked for a job.32 According to another, he “accepted drinks one night from a jovial tramp steamer captain” and “woke next morning bound for Lourenzo Marques, Portuguese East Africa.”33 In any event, Bob shipped out as an engine room wiper, cleaning up oil that leaked from the cylinders and various pumps, oiling the pumps, and fetching coffee. Owned by the private Farrell Lines, The City of New York headed down the East Coast to New Orleans and then across the Atlantic, carrying manufactured goods. It probably docked in Cape Town, East London, and Durban, and it returned to New York two or three months later with shipments of raw asbestos or chrome.34
Bob might have been surrendering to his love of Melville and Eugene O’Neill, who had written of the seafaring life in Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape. He spent more than two years at sea, collecting stories of hardship and adventure. The equatorial heat was unbearable; once he had to intervene when a delirious female passenger tried to push her baby through a porthole. Another time, after the ship’s store of food spoiled, he subsisted for days on lime juice.
Whenever Bob heard from his parents, the news was grim. In December 1934 his Uncle Tom died, leaving the presidency of the Ryan Company to Tim. Soon after that both Joe Ryan and John Ryan died. The pressure of the construction industry was crushing them out like the cigarettes Bob now smoked daily. In January 1936, not long after returning home from a run, he received a phone call from his mother: his father had been hit by a car, and Bob was to return to Chicago at once to look after him and help out with a subway tunnel project. Bob made an inglorious return to Chicago as a common sandhog, pushing rock barges beneath the streets of the city by day and struggling to understand the business by night.
Tim’s accident had exacerbated a heart condition, and on April 27, 1936, he died of a coronary occlusion at Passavant Memorial Hospital. He was sixty. Writing to his children, Bob would quickly recount the stock market crash and the tunnel disaster, adding, “I am sure that both of these events caused my father’s early death.”35 Tim was laid to rest in Calvary Cemetery in the north suburb of Evanston, beside his little son Jack.
Bob knew he had to look after his mother and made a game effort to help his uncle Larry, now president of the Ryan Company and the last surviving brother at the firm. But he wanted out of the tunnels: one time, as he was breaking up rocks with a sledgehammer, he turned over a rock to find an abandoned dynamite charge. Another time he worked forty-eight hours straight when a power plant failure imperiled the air pressure in a tunnel. Eventually, he quit the company, drifting from one job to the next. One oft-repeated story had him working as a collector for a loan shark on the blighted West Side and, moved by the poverty he saw, coming back to return one family’s money. He was working as a gang boss on a WPA road paving crew for thirty dollars a week when his uncle Larry Ryan died in December 1937, only fifty-five years old. The Ryan Company would endure into the 1940s, but there was nothing left of the brothers now except their name.
Frustrated with her son’s career drift, Mabel finally called on Tim’s old friend Ed Kelly, who had not on
ly survived the sanitary district scandal but ascended through a city council vote to become mayor of Chicago. After Anton Cermak was fatally wounded during an assassination attempt on President-elect Roosevelt in February 1933, Kelly had been pushed through the council by his old friend Patrick Nash, the Twenty-Eighth Ward alderman, and they controlled a formidable vote-getting operation that gave them enormous power over the city. Bob would remember Big Ed Kelly as an avatar of ward politics and no dreamer. One night in 1928, when Bob was home from college, he had been sitting in his parents’ living room when Kelly came calling for Tim, having just met Al Smith, the progressive New York governor and Democratic nominee for president. “He’s talking about things like welfare and human rights and all that shit,” Kelly complained.36
As mayor, Kelly had relaxed enforcement of gambling laws; according to the Chicago Crime Commission, the administration pocketed $20 million from organized crime one year to ignore illegal operations. At the same time Kelly had forged an alliance with Roosevelt and brought much-needed New Deal funding to the city. He went out on a limb politically with his vocal advocacy of open housing and school integration. To some extent this was pure politics: his success at drawing blacks away from the Republican Party contributed to his success at the polls. But Kelly acted too, appointing blacks to more influential posts, working to integrate the police department, and, at one point, shutting down a local screening of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. “The time is not far away,” he told one audience, “when we shall forget the color of a man’s skin and see him only in the light of intelligence in his mind and soul.”37