Shadow of the Bomb

Epilogue

The preceding is a work of fiction, and all of its principal characters, institutions, and events, except those listed below, exist solely in the mind of the author. Also, any episodes in which historical figures interact with fictional ones are strictly products of the author’s imagination.

The 1942 Chicago Bears became only the second team in National Football League history to go through the regular season undefeated (the first being the 1934 Bears). The 1942 Bears, like their ’34 counterparts, lost the championship game, falling to the Washington Redskins 14-6. The Bears exacted revenge the next season, however, defeating the Redskins 41–21 in the 1943 title game.

The Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston’s Bay Village district in November 1942 claimed more than 490 lives, making it the deadliest blaze in U.S. history. The disaster led to a greater emphasis on fire prevention in nightclubs and other public places. Emergency lighting, exit signs, and occupancy capacity signs were widely mandated. Today a hotel occupies the site where the nightclub stood.

Enrico Fermi was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1938 in physics for his work on nuclear processes. He moved to the United States in ’38 and was a professor of physics at Columbia University from 1939 to 1942, when he relocated to Chicago and oversaw the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the Stagg Field grandstands on Dec. 2, 1942. He subsequently played an important part in the development of the atomic bomb. He became an American citizen in 1944. In 1946, he was appointed a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, a position he held until his death in 1954 at the age of 53.

Robert Maynard Hutchins was named president of the University of Chicago in 1929 at the age of 30. He served in that position until 1945, revamping the school’s approach to academics by putting a greater stress on a liberal education rather than specialization. He also advocated the measurement of achievement through comprehensive examinations rather than by classroom time. He decried nonacademic pursuits, including big-time football, which was abandoned by the school in 1939. He served as the university’s chancellor from 1945 to 1951, when he became an associate director of the Ford Foundation. He later headed the Fund for the Republic and founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions to study and discuss a wide range of issues. He died in 1977 at the age of 78.

J. Loy (Pat) Maloney started his Chicago Tribune career in 1917 but soon after enlisted in World War I, where he was an aviator serving with Eddie Rickenbacker. After the war, he worked in a succession of reporting and editing positions at the Tribune until he became managing editor in 1939 on the death of Bob Lee. He directed the paper’s news coverage throughout World War II and into the postwar era, retiring in 1950 for health-related reasons. He died in 1976 at the age of 85.

The Powhatan, where Steve Malek twice visited the beguiling Irene Bergman, is a modernist apartment tower on Chicago’s South Side lakeshore near the University of Chicago campus. Designed by Robert De Golyer, completed in 1929, and designated a Chicago landmark in 1993, the 22-story structure is classic example of what since the 1960s has been termed “Art Deco.” Even today, the Native American-themed design has the power to entrance visitors: The building’s splendid lobbies, elevators, mosaics and other ornamentation make it one of Chicago’s most interesting architectural icons.

Eddie Rickenbacker made news in both World Wars. He was a flying ace in the first war, shooting down twenty-six German planes in a two-month period. Although he initially opposed American entry into World War II, once the U.S. was in the war he volunteered his services and became a civilian advisor, reporting to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. In that role, he visited military bases all over the world. He was on one such mission in 1942 when his plane, a B17 bomber, went down in the Pacific off New Guinea. He and six others survived at sea on life rafts for twenty-four days before their rescue. After the war, he returned to Eastern Airlines, which he had operated in the 1930s. Under his leadership, it became a major carrier in the 1950s and ’60s. He was chief executive of the airline until 1959 and chairman until 1963. He died in July 1973 at the age of 82.

Stagg Field, the longtime home of the University of Chicago football team, until the school dropped the sport in 1939, was the site of the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear chain reaction. Discerning readers will note that in this story, the author altered the time of the Dec. 2 chain reaction from afternoon, when it occurred, to evening. His defense: “It seemed like it should have happened after dark.” The old Gothic-style stadium was razed to make way for the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, which opened in 1970. The site of the chain reaction is marked by a Henry Miller sculpture, “Nuclear Energy,” as well as with plaques commemorating the 1942 scientific breakthrough. A newer and far more modest Stagg Field, northwest of the old stadium’s site, has tennis courts and a football field. Decades after dropping out of the Big Ten, the University revived football, although on a far more modest level. The University’s NCAA Division III football team now plays such schools as Elmhurst College, Carnegie Mellon University, and Eureka College.

Amos Alonzo Stagg, for whom both Stagg Fields were named, coached the University of Chicago Maroon football teams for forty-one years, from 1892 to 1933, and five times had undefeated teams. Forced by the school to retire at age 70, Stagg then coached at College of the Pacific from 1933 to 1946. From 1947 to 1952, he assisted his son, Amos Alonzo Stagg Jr., as football coach at Susquehanna University. He died in 1965 at age 102.

Leo Szilard, a physicist and molecular biologist who worked with Enrico Fermi on the 1942 nuclear chain reaction, was born in Hungary and worked in Germany until 1933, when he fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution. He did research in nuclear physics at Oxford University before moving to the U.S. in 1938. He joined the University of Chicago’s “Met Lab” project in 1942. He later became opposed to the development of both the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, and founded the Council for Abolishing War. In the 1950s, he was a professor of biophysics at the University of Chicago. He died at 66 in 1964.

Mark Waldron was a longtime desk sergeant at Chicago’s Hyde Park police station, which no longer exists. The author, as a City News Bureau reporter at the Hyde Park station in 1959, knew Waldron. Using literary license, he placed the sergeant behind the front counter at Hyde Park several years earlier than actually was the case. Waldron, who never once fired his sidearm in thirty-five years on the force, was injured in 1965 while breaking up a fight between a group of young men. He retired soon after, but not because of his injuries. He learned that one of the youths, who he had almost fired at, was only 17. “If I have to kill a 17-year-old, you can have this job,” he told his son. Waldron died at 91 in 2000.