Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 23

Of course it was not until years later that I understood the full significance of what I had witnessed in the dreary, catacomb-like underbelly of Stagg Field on that historic December day. By then the war was over and I was happily married, living in a comfortable house in Oak Park with a wonderful woman named Catherine, although that is a story for another time.

The war ended just before the military had a chance to draft Peter, who, after graduation from Lake View High — with honors, I might add — entered the University of Illinois in Champaign, where he now is in graduate school in architecture. All those years of constructing bridges and towers with Erector sets had left their impact on him.

I never got around to calling Irene Bergman as she had suggested. My attentions had become focused solely on Catherine. But I did read a review in the Trib praising her book about the family in Civil War Maryland. The reviewer said “she shows increasing promise as an author of historical novels. It is to be hoped that she will continue to grow in the genre.”

A couple of other loose ends, both of which are worth mentioning:

First, Scott, the brother of Joanie, our City News Bureau reporter in the Headquarters press room, survived the Bataan Death March. He was released from Japanese captivity when General MacArthur’s troops retook the Philippines late in the war. Last I heard, he had married and was raising a family in one of the western suburbs, Maywood I think, a town which had supplied so many of the troops that fought at Bataan.

Second, Alvin MacAfee’s wife, Flora, had an uneventful delivery and gave birth to a healthy girl, Rose Ellen, who I am proud to call my goddaughter. Al, no longer the shy and respectful young journalist of earlier days, is now the Tribune’s City Hall reporter. And in that role, he is something of a bulldog, throwing questions at Mayor Edward J. Kelly that hizzoner would prefer not to answer. I credit this change in Al’s personality to his days in the Headquarters press room, where he was forced to spar with the likes of Dirk O’Farrell and Packy Farmer and the redoubtable Anson Masters.

As for Chester Waggoner, he eventually went to the electric chair, and remained unrepentant to the end. He steadfastly refused a lawyer, insisting that both of the men that he killed had endangered national security and were in effect traitors. “God knows without any doubt that I did the right thing,” he said to the priest who visited him in his cell on the last day of his life. “I look forward to telling him all about it when I see him in heaven.”

Fergus Fahey had his moment of glory in the Waggoner case, getting praise from the Mayor for his “unstinting and tireless dedication to duty in this awful episode.” I’m sure he was happy about the accolades, but he was even happier that those accolades went to him and not to the FBI.

Maybe it was my incessant nagging to Maloney, or perhaps it was that he liked the way I handled myself on what I now refer to as the “Hyde Park Affair,” but I finally got the opportunity to go to Europe as a correspondent. I worked in the Trib’s London bureau during the last year of the war, and covered the election in which Clement Atlee defeated Churchill, which shocked many Americans. I also was at the “Big 3” Potsdam conference of Allies, at which Atlee, Truman, and Stalin discussed the shape postwar Europe would take.

It was an exciting and eventful year. I loved London, and I promised Catherine we would go there together some day on one of those big liners from New York. But I was happy to come home and return to Police Headquarters, where you will still find me bantering with my like numbers on the city’s other newspapers and giving Fergus Fahey packages of cigarettes in return for the superb coffee brewed by the unfailingly cheerful Elsie Dugo.