Terror at the Fair

Chapter Three

I’ve never been all that interested in trains, which is why I didn’t bother going to the Chicago Railroad Fair in its first summer. Now I’ve ridden the rails on occasion over the years: to Springfield some years back, for instance, to have a chat with then-State Representative Richard J. Daley; out to various suburbs in search of stories; and when my son, Peter, was in grade school, we did a one-day round trip to Milwaukee during a phase when he got enamored of the railroads.

When I arrived on the lakefront south of the Loop on a sunny June morning to begin my new assignment, I wasn’t prepared for the setting. Here we had a one-industry exposition masquerading as a world’s fair. Even so, the masquerade seemed pretty convincing, at least on first glance.

For one thing, this fair occupied roughly the same slender coastal stretch of real estate as an honest-to-goodness world’s fair, the Century of Progress, which I had attended fifteen years earlier. My fondest memory of that exposition had to have been meeting and writing a feature about the delightful and coquettish fan dancer, Sally Rand, who had scandalized the more prudish elements of the populace with her so-very-close-to-Lady Godiva-nude-but-not-quite performance. Further, as I got shown around the grounds by Fred Metzger, the public relations flack for the fair, I was struck by other similarities to the ’33-’34 extravaganza.

Where the Century of Progress had faux-European enclaves including the Streets of Paris and the Belgian Village, this fair presented such regional American attractions as a New Orleans French Quarter, a Southwestern Indian Pueblo Village, Florida Tropical Gardens, an honest-to-goodness San Francisco cable car operating over a hilly stretch near the lake, and “Gold Gulch,” a frontier mining town—each one of them hosted by a railroad serving a particular geographic area. Although all the buildings on the grounds were of a temporary nature and would be dismantled in the autumn, they had been designed to look permanent.

“Isn’t this great, Mr. Malek?” the ruddy and well-fed Metzger gushed as he steered me through the fifty-odd acres of the fair, pointing out attractions as workers put final coats of paint on buildings and planted palm trees in the Florida exhibit.

“Take this pueblo, for instance,” he said, mopping his brow and indicating the three-story adobe structure. “When the fair opens, we’ll have one-hundred-fifty gen-yoo-ine Indians right here, all brought in from Arizona and New Mexico by our good ol’ Santa Fe Railway folks. There will be Navahos and Apaches and Hopis and... and a bunch of other tribes, too, I forget their names, doing native dances and ceremonies. We’re talking actual Indians, yes sir, the real thing, red men from the Southwest.

“Just look at the pueblo, Mr. Malek,” Metzger raved on with the sweep of an arm. “Makes you feel we could be on the Navaho reservation right now.”

“Except for this,” I replied, gesturing toward the shimmering blue, ocean-like expanse of Lake Michigan less than a city block away to the east. “You won’t find a body of water near its size anywhere close to New Mexico. By the way, you can drop the ‘mister’ business. I go by ‘Snap.’”

“Oh yeah, somewhere I heard that’s what you’re called. Mind if I ask you why?”

“Nope. It’s because of this,” I told him, pointing at the Panama perched on my head. “I’m rarely without one hat or another.”

“Oh, now I get it,” the PR man said with a giggle. “As in ‘snap-brim,’ right?”

I nodded and our walking tour continued, Metzger directing me to a large open-air amphitheater along the lakeshore with bleachers seating several thousand facing a wide, paved stage with railroad tracks imbedded into it. “You probably saw the fair last year, right, Mr. — er, Snap?”

“Wrong. For one reason or another, I just couldn’t seem to make it.”

“Really? Well, you’re in for a real treat then. A real treat. This is where the ‘Wheels-a-Rolling’ pageant takes place four times every day. It’s a reg’lar history of transportation in the United States, from the days of the French voyageurs exploring in canoes to the very first trains in the early 1800s to the push west across the prairies and mountains to some of the modern steam and diesel locomotives. There’s even some gunfights between the cavalry and train and stagecoach robbers. Exciting stuff. About five hundred rounds are fired every day. Blanks o’course.” Metzger giggled again. The guy started to get on my nerves, but I needed somebody to get me acclimated, and it happened to be him.

“I assume you worked here last summer, too, right?”

His smile disappeared. “No, I didn’t. The public relations at the ’48 fair got handled by Chester Rawlings.”

“Did he retire?”

Metzger shook his head. “No, he had a heart attack, so they say. He was in a State Street subway station and fell onto the tracks in front of a train. An awful thing, I’ll tell you.”

“Oh yeah, I do remember reading about it. Tough way to go, although he may have been dead before he hit the tracks.”

“I sure hope so,” Metzger said. “After that happened, I applied for the position here. I run a little public relations firm in the Loop, just me, one other man, and a girl who answers the phone and such. Plus an intern I’ve got working for me who you will meet in just a few minutes.”

Our tour over, the PR man bestowed upon me a fair press pass in a plastic case, which I clipped to the breast pocket of my suit coat. He then showed me to my work space, a windowless room tucked away in the back of the fair’s administration building near the 23rd Street main entrance. An unplugged electric fan hugged the floor in one corner. I had a hunch I’d be using it a lot before the summer came to an end.

“You’ve got yourself a desk, a typewriter, and a phone here. All any good newsman needs, Snap,” Metzger said, slapping me on the back.

The drab, plywood-walled room had four other desks, also equipped with phones and no-nonsense Underwood upright typewriters. “Your Tribune, bless them, is the only paper with a man assigned full-time to the fair,” Metzger told me, bobbing his head in approval as he spoke. “But our understanding is the other local dailies, and maybe some outlying papers in places like Milwaukee and Aurora and Joliet and Gary will have reporters here from time to time. We hope they will. After all, this is absolutely the closest thing to a world’s fair this country’s had since before the war. And who knows when—and where—we’ll have anything like it again.”

Having completed his pronouncement about the gravity of the exposition, Metzger smiled and beckoned me into his small office, which adjoined the makeshift pressroom.

“I’d like to have you meet my right-hand man, Rob Taylor, who’s a summer intern on summer break from college,” he said heartily, gesturing toward the young man seated at the second, smaller desk in his office. “Rob, say hello to Steve Malek of the Tribune.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Malek,” a boyish-looking young fellow with light blue eyes and a pleasant, guileless face said as he rose to shake my hand with a firm grip.

“Call me Snap, everybody does,” I replied. “Where do you go to school?”

“At the University of Wisconsin,” he said with a grin, brushing a shock of sandy hair back from his forehead.

“Madison, eh? I was there once, years back. Nice campus, and I seem to remember a lake, right?”

“That’s it, a great place, sir—uh, Snap.”

“Rob will be doing some of our press releases, and he may be able to suggest some story ideas to you as well. I’m just so glad to have him here,” Metzger said, gazing at the young man in what I would call a fatherly way.

“You have an interest in trains?” I asked Rob.

“Not... really, but hey, it’s a job, right?” the intern said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. When Metzger frowned in his direction, the lad quickly added, “I’m doing my best to learn all I can while I’m here, though.”

“Well, I look forward to our working together,” I told them both with an upbeat tone belying my feelings about our being on this strip of land far removed from the pulse of the city.

Back in the pressroom, I considered my surroundings. As a work space, this was nothing to turn handsprings over. But to give the fair its due, my old spot at Police Headquarters could hardly be termed a paradise, either: a battered desk in a dismal room too cold in winter and too hot in summer, with Elevated trains thundering past the grimy third-floor windows every few minutes. But at least there, I had some company. Plus, for all the internal grumbling I had done over the years about the irritating and eccentric traits of Anson Masters, Packy Farmer, and Dirk O’Farrell, I already began to miss those guys.

My early days at the fair confirmed my initial reservations about the assignment. This was, plain and simple, a feather-weight feature assignment. My first byline described the full-blown wedding of a young couple from Central Missouri in the “Fiesta” dining car serving as a restaurant in the Rock Island Lines exhibit.

“We first met on one of them milk runs between Saint Loo and Kansas City,” the grinning, freckle-faced groom told me. “When we heard about this fair and this diner, we thought, shucks, let’s us go and get married right on a train, see’n as how that’s where we came to know each other. And sure enough, my folks and her folks all came up here from Jefferson City, along with some cousins and my honey’s ninety-year-old aunt, who’d never in her whole life been out of Missouri, can you believe it?”

I told him that, no, I couldn’t believe it in this day and age, or something similar. A Trib photographer, Phil Muller, took pictures of the wedding party, all of them grinning and squeezed into the narrow confines of the diner, and one of his shots ended up on the photo page of the next day’s edition. As he packed up his gear, Muller raised an eyebrow and lowered his voice in my direction.

“Snap, how in the hell did you pull this one off? What a cushy deal you’ve got here along the lake all day while the rest of us schnooks are at the beck and call of our heartless bosses in Tribune Tower. Just who do you know?”

I answered with a grin and a nod, as if I really were happy to be out here among all the locomotives and Indians and, yes, even palm and orange trees—brought in from Florida and planted by a railroad serving the Sunshine State. Speaking of Indians, my second fair article was an interview, if you can so term it, with an eighty-five-year-old Navaho who, so I was informed, had never before been off the reservation in New Mexico.

When I asked him about his reactions to Chicago and the fair, I quickly learned his English vocabulary essentially consisted of “nice place,” “big town,” and “much water.” Somehow, I ground out a ten-inch piece, mostly concentrating on the Navaho’s colorful garb and headdress and his lined and classic face, which looked like it should have been in profile on the head of a nickel.

“You are doin’ absolutely great out there, Snap. Keep it up,” Hal Murray, the day city editor, told me by phone near the end of my first week at the fair.

“That so?” I replied without enthusiasm.

“Hell, yes. That dining car wedding number of yours has drawn all sorts of reaction. At least four people have called in asking how they can get married in the very same diner. And in tomorrow’s edition, we’re running a letter to the editor from a woman in Elmhurst applauding your piece and complaining that we don’t have more ‘happy stories’ like this one. She writes, quote, ‘Your paper always has too much bad news, not enough good news.’ You, Snap, have now officially become our ‘good news’ reporter,” Murray said with a chuckle. “Keep up the great work. I’m sure the Colonel loves it.”

My response was a single word—one the Tribune refuses to print.