Terror at the Fair

Author’s Notes

The preceding is a work of fiction and all of its principal characters, other than those listed below, are my own creations. Also, all of the instances in which historical characters interact with fictional ones are strictly products of my imagination.

Walter Elias (“Walt”) Disney is one of the giants of U.S. cinematic history. His company’s 1930s and 1940s productions, among them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, set the gold standard for film animation, and through Disney cartoon shorts and comic books, the irascible Donald Duck and the amiable Mickey Mouse became indisputable American cultural icons.

In addition to films, the Disney machine expanded into television, first with a highly rated weekly show and then with the purchase of the ABC television network. Today, the Walt Disney Company is the largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world, with annual revenue in the billions of dollars. The company’s theme parks, beginning with the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in 1955, are also in Florida, France, Japan, and China.

Walt Disney attended the Chicago Railroad Fair with Ward Kimball in 1948, although I used literary license and moved the visit to 1949, the fair’s second season. In his 2006 book, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, Neal Gabler wrote that Disney’s visit to the Railroad Fair helped inspire him to create Disneyland.

Disney, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer in December 1966, a week after his sixty-fifth birthday.

Ward Kimball, who attended the Chicago Railroad Fair with Walt Disney, is widely recognized as one of the legendary figures in film animation. An Academy Award winner, the man whom Disney termed a “genius” created several of the animated characters in Disney films, among them Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, Lucifer the Cat in Cinderella, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice in Wonderland. Kimball, who worked for the Disney Studios from 1934 until the ’70s, died in 2002 at the age of eighty-eight.

John C. Prendergast began his forty-three-year career with the Chicago Police Department in the first decade of the twentieth century. He served as police commissioner from 1945 until his retirement in 1950. He died in 1958 at the age of seventy-four.

J. Loy (Pat) Maloney started his Chicago Tribune career in 1917. Over the years he rose steadily through the ranks at the paper and became its managing editor in 1939 on the death of Bob Lee. He directed the Tribune’s news coverage throughout World War II and into the Post-War era, retiring in 1950 for health-related reasons. He died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five.

Harold (Hal) Murray was a longtime newsman with the Tribune, joining the paper in 1934 after working at the City News Bureau of Chicago. For the Trib, his reporting beats included City Hall and the Criminal Courts. He then became an editor, and served as day city editor until his retirement in 1971. He died in 1995 at the age of eighty-eight.

Martin H. Kennelly was mayor of Chicago for two terms, from 1947 to 1955. He came into office as a “reformer” following the corrupt regime of his predecessor, Edward J. Kelly. Kennelly proved too independent to suit the Democratic bosses, however, and he got defeated in a primary by the candidate favored by the party machine—Richard J. Daley. That marked the beginning of a Daley dynasty that has continued in the form of Richard M. Daley, who, like his father, has served more than twenty years in the position. The younger Daley leaves office in 2011.

The Whiting, Indiana, Refinery Fire. Serious students of Chicago history will note that as with Walt Disney’s visit to the Railroad Fair, I moved this occurrence to 1949 from its actual date. The multi-million-dollar fire and subsequent explosions took place in August of 1955 and laid waste to much of the 1,600-acre Standard Oil of Indiana refinery just south and east of Chicago along the shores of Lake Michigan. Fortunately, the inferno caused little loss of life, although hundreds suffered injuries and more than 1,000 Whiting residents got temporarily evacuated from their homes, many of which were destroyed or damaged.

I took descriptions of the event from newspaper reports, including the terrifying naphtha explosion and ensuing fireball that rocketed into the sky, as well as the auto that landed upside down on the ruins of a garage.

Train Mishaps. Three of the train wrecks referred to were historical: the 1918 Hegenbeck-Wallace Circus train disaster near Hammond, Indiana; the 1921 collision between two passenger trains in Porter, Indiana; and the 1946 tragedy in Naperville, Illinois, in which one Burlington Route passenger train rear-ended another. There was heavy loss of life in all three. The fourth mishap mentioned, in which three boys got killed by a freight train, was purely fictional.

The Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948 and 1949, celebrating the centennial of railroading in the Windy City, was sponsored by thirty-eight railroads and the Pullman Company and occupied fifty acres of land along Lake Michigan south of downtown Chicago. It became the last such exposition of its scope, and marked the final time such a vast array of vintage operating railroad equipment got brought together in a single place. Its organizers and the railroads in general considered the fair to be a success. According to the Chicago Tribune, “The Railroad Fair has been successful far beyond the expectations of the men who started it.” According to reports, in its two seasons, the fair drew more than 5.5 million visitors.