Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 2
When Uncle Charles was given two tickets for the annual Western Electric Company picnic, I was excited days before the event. I was eight years old, but the picnic festivities themselves at Michigan City, Indiana, meant little to me. The supreme thrill came from the anticipation of embarking on a steamer at Chicago for the trip across Lake Michigan to the picnic site.
My earliest childhood was spent north of Chicago at my grandmother’s in Evanston, just fifty feet from the edge of the lake. There I passed many hours sitting on the shore watching the lake ships through a pair of ancient opera glasses, identifying freighters, tugs, barges, tankers. Twice a day 1 ran out to the end of the breakwater to see the old whaleback Christopher Columbus pass on her way to and from Milwaukee.
To me the lake was a living, fascinating creature of sometimes terrifying moods. A mile north was the Grosse Pointe lighthouse and foghorn. On stormy nights, when the wind whistled and the foghorn mournfully sounded, my grandmother s house was pervaded by an eerie sense of the peril of the deep.
But the lake was to provide no storm-tossed high adventure for me. It prepared an experience far more fearsome.
No thought of tragedy could have crossed the minds of the seven thousand who had passage booked for Saturday, July 24, 1915, on chartered lake steamers from the Chicago River piers to the Western Electric picnic. And that Friday night I was too excited to sleep. Would we be out of sight of land? I wondered. Would I be permitted to see the engines and the steering mechanism? Would I be lucky enough to sail on the Eastland, or would it be one of the “lesser” boats? I knew all about the Eastland . She had a reputation of being the fastest boat on the lakes, with a speed of twenty-three miles an hour. She was 265 feet long, 38 feet wide, and weighed 1,961 tons. Newspaper ads heralded her as: “the Twin-screw steel ship, Eastland , Largest, Finest, and Fastest Excursion Steamship.…” The ads neglected to mention that the Eastland had a history of being an unstable ship.
A thin mist drifted off the lake as Uncle Charles and I left for Chicago that Saturday morning about six thirty. When the elevated train crossed the Chicago River into the Loop, I glimpsed the picnic steamers loading a block away, and urged Uncle Charles to get off at the next station and walk the few blocks to the Eastland ’s dock. But my uncle had no taste for walking anywhere but on a golf course, and we stayed on the el until it went around the Loop and came back closer to the pier. This delay most likely saved our lives.