Three Strikes You're Dead

Epilogue

The preceding is a work of fiction, and all of its principal characters, other than those mentioned below, exist solely in the mind of the author. Also, all of the episodes in which these historical figures interact with fictional ones are products of the author’s hyperactive imagination.

Helen Hayes, who completed her storied run (more than 900 performances) as Queen Victoria in “Victoria Regina” in 1939, continued to be a prominent and popular figure on the Broadway and London stage until the early 1970s. She also acted in films, most notably “Anastasia” (1956) and “Airport” (1970). In the latter, she won an Oscar for her performance as an impish stowaway. It was her second Academy Award, the other being for “The Sin of Madelon Claudet” (1931).

Miss Hayes’ daughter, Mary, died of polio in 1949, and her husband, author and playwright Charles MacArthur, died in 1956. The actress, known as the “First Lady of the American Stage,” died in March 1993, at the age of ninety-three.

Al Capone, terminally ill from the effects of syphilis and its later manifestation, paresis, was released from prison in November 1939 and spent most of the rest of his days in seclusion with his family at their home in Florida, where he suffered from both physical and mental deterioration and periods of intense depression. No longer a factor in the world of organized crime, he died in January 1947, eight days after his forty-eighth birthday.

Michael Ahern, who first made his name as a defense attorney in celebrated criminal cases in the 1920s (including the murder of a Chicago policeman), concentrated largely on civil law in the years following the Capone tax trial. Ahern, who also taught law at his alma mater, Chicago’s Loyola University, died in September 1943, at the age of fifty-six.

Dizzy Dean’s baseball career was to all intents finished after the 1938 season, although in some ways that year was his grittiest and gutsiest, given that, despite a burned-out arm, he managed to win seven games while losing only one and posted a superb 1.81 earned-run average. He hung on with the Cubs for three more years, but won only nine games in that span. He did, however, develop a second successful career as a baseball broadcaster on radio and later on television. His fractured syntax and malapropisms (Sample: “slud” for “slid”) endeared him to fans but bedeviled English teachers across the land. He was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1953 and died in 1974, at the age of sixty-three.

Augie Galan batted only twice in the four games of the 1938 World Series because of the injury he sustained late in the season. He played for the Cubs until 1940, when he was sent to the Brooklyn Dodgers, where he enjoyed some of his most productive years. His last season in the major leagues was 1949. He died in December 1993, at the age of eighty-one.

Col. Robert R. McCormick continued to head the Chicago Tribune as its editor and publisher until his death in 1955 at seventy-four. He remained a staunch conservative and Republican throughout his life, vigorously opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Harry Truman and the Fair Deal, and foreign aid to countries including the United Kingdom (he was a fierce Anglophobe) and China.

Robert M. Lee had an all-too-brief career as managing editor of McCormick’s Tribune. Taking the reins of the paper’s news operation on the retirement of the venerable and esteemed Edward Scott Beck in 1937, the flamboyant, imaginative Lee served only two years before dying of a heart attack in January 1939. He was fifty-five.

Edward J. Kelly was victorious in the Chicago mayoral election of 1939, defeating Republican candidate Dwight Green. Kelly went on to serve as mayor until 1947. (Green later was elected, and re-elected, governor of Illinois, serving from 1941 to 1949.)

Richard J. Daley moved from the Illinois State Legislature in Springfield to numerous other governmental posts, including Cook County Deputy Controller, Illinois Revenue Director, and Cook County Clerk before being elected mayor of Chicago in 1955, a post he would hold until his death in 1976 at the age of seventy-four. During his more than two decades as mayor, he exercised firm control over the city and state Democratic organizations. He received national notoriety in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. When police beat youthful demonstrators in the streets, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut ripped what he called these “Gestapo tactics” from the rostrum. Daley, a member of the Illinois delegation, rose on the convention floor and angrily berated Ribicoff before a national television audience.

The late mayor’s son, Richard M. Daley, who had served as Cook County State’s Attorney, was himself elected Chicago mayor in 1989. He was re-elected by comfortable margins in 1991, 1995, 1999, and 2003.