Terror at the Fair

Chapter Forty-Eight

Not surprisingly, the last few weeks of the Chicago Railroad Fair were more than a little anticlimactic for me. Oh, I still cranked out stories all right, some of them actually suggested by the new young P.R. man and the enthusiastic Charlene Miller, both of whom had stepped up and filled at least some of the public relations void left by Fred Metzger and Rob Taylor.

A few examples: an interview with a grizzled seventy-nine-year-old gold miner, who had panned for the stuff during the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon in 1897 and spun his yarns, some of them possibly true, at the “Gold Gulch” frontier town; a talk with a mid-season newcomer to the outdoor ice show, a thirteen-year-old skating sensation from suburban Glen Ellyn, who outperformed many of her older and more seasoned colleagues; and a profile of Janie Brady Jones, the octogenarian widow of locomotive engineer Casey Jones, who visited the fair almost a half century after her legendary husband’s death in a storied rail collision on the Illinois Central down in Mississippi.

I looked forward to the closing of the fair in early October for a pair of reasons. First, of course, the assignment I got maneuvered into was ending; second, and far more important, being a date I had down in Missouri shortly after the fair’s end.

“Glorious” best described a sunny October Saturday in the well-heeled St. Louis suburb of Clayton. In the back yard of a handsome Georgian-style house, a white canopy crowned by brightly colored streamers stood out against the backdrop of a rolling green lawn.

The blue-robed minister stepped forward and opened his book to begin the litany of the marriage ceremony for Amanda Gail Rogers and Peter Reed Malek. As we all stood on the grass under the canopy for the short service, I glanced at Catherine to my right and saw a bit of moisture in her eyes, then looked to my left at Norma and noticed the same. My former and present wives, united in their emotions.

I danced with four women on that fine afternoon: Catherine, Norma, Amanda, and Amanda’s mother—more dancing than I had done in one day in probably twenty years. Amazingly, not a single toe got stepped on, which probably was more a tribute to the ladies’ dancing prowess than to mine.

After a honeymoon in San Francisco, the newlyweds would begin their lives together in a spacious four-room apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood, not far from Wrigley Field, and they would commute on the Howard Elevated Line to their downtown jobs: Amanda’s in the Nineteenth-Century European Art Department at the Art Institute and Peter’s at the renowned architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.