Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told
"Flower in the River" podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland Disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well, and we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery.Â
The Unsinkable Katherine MacIntyre: An Eastland Story
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A young woman who could swim “a little.” A daring rescue. A remarkable life. And one missing letter that Katherine MacIntyre herself tried to set straight.
On July 24, 1915, when the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River, Katherine grabbed her mother and six-year-old brother and kept them afloat until help arrived. Four days later, she was back at Western Electric, helping correct lists of victims and survivors, assisting devastated families, and contributing her own money to the Mayor’s Fund for Eastland Sufferers.
But Katherine’s story was only beginning.
Her...
Blowtorches, Beer & Forgotten Headlines: Eastland Confidential
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Content note: This episode includes discussion of alcoholism, mental health difficulties, psychiatric hospitalization, and family bereavement.
In September 1933, Chicago was celebrating its Century of Progress World's Fair. The country was also moving toward the repeal of Prohibition, bringing an end to a controversial chapter in American history. The city was looking toward the future, but at the Congress Hotel, another gathering was looking back. The 34th Annual Convention of the International Acetylene Association honored three men for something extraordinary they had done eighteen years earlier.
Their names...
The Daughters of La Grange: An Eastland Family History
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One saved obituary turned into a full investigation and it changed how I think about the Eastland disaster. I’m taking you to LaGrange, Illinois, where a 1929 newspaper notice for Helen Siep Hengels includes the line that stops you cold: her daughter Barbara drowned when the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River. That single record doesn’t just document a death, it opens a door into a whole web of family, faith, work, and the long tail of grief.
From there, I zoom out to the local history that makes this story...
Ludington's Eastland Connection: A Sailor, an Engineer, and a Professor
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What connects a Great Lakes sailor, a ship's engineer, and a mathematics professor to the 1915 Eastland disaster? The answer begins in Ludington, Michigan, with a remarkable letter to the editor published 82 years after the tragedy.
In July 1997, retired sailor and maritime historian Raymond Short wrote to the Ludington Daily News, naming several people whose lives intersected with the Eastland disaster. That letter opened the door to stories rarely told in modern accounts of the tragedy.
Meet Jewell Schubert, whose parents survived the capsizing while her mother was seven months...
A Flower for the Little Feller: Anastasia's Goodbye
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In the days after the Eastland disaster, a little girl in Waukegan read about a boy she had never met—and could not stop thinking about him.
Her name was Anastasia Holmes. The boy was Willie Novotny, the “little feller” whose story appeared in the newspaper after his death. Anastasia was so deeply affected by what she read that she could not sleep. Finally, her mother agreed to take her by train from Waukegan to Chicago so Anastasia could attend Willie’s funeral and place a flower on his coffin.
It is...
Saloons, Scandals, and Survival: The Biehl Family and the Eastland
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This week, we’re heading back to Waukegan, Illinois, where the newspapers once again lead us into a much bigger Eastland story than expected.
At the center is Frederick Biehl, a 26-year-old former Waukegan resident who died in the disaster. But as I began reconstructing his family, the story quickly expanded into a complicated network of relatives, survivors, conflicting newspaper accounts, and identities that needed a closer look.
And then there is Frederick’s mother, Annie Biehl.
Years before the Eastland disaster, Annie operated a saloon on Sout...
Waukegan’s Happiest Man, a Telegram & Family Ties Across Time
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What happens when the newspaper survives, but the stories inside it need reassembling? Stay with me on this one.Â
Amid the Eastland disaster coverage, a Waukegan newspaper suddenly drops one survivor tale and shifts focus to a different story. Over a century later, that fractured page becomes a clue. By following the newspaper trail and family relationships, we can separate the stories and piece together what the surviving evidence reveals.
One story is about Frank Kubik of Waukegan, IL. After the Eastland capsized, he searched the newspapers a...
Extra! Extra! The Eastland Stories Marooned in 1915
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This week, I explored the July 26, 1915 edition of the Waukegan Daily Sun, a newspaper packed with Eastland stories that have sat there for more than a century. As is often the case, the people in those articles are mostly absent from today’s Eastland history accounts. Then, one story turned into a newspaper version of Where’s Waldo? (Where’s Wally?), its trail veering off into the lives of a completely different family.
Next, we slip behind the curtain of a 1915 newsroom. Reporters dash to the Chicago River, jotting frantic notes, search...
Dorothy Missed the Boat. Fred Broke a Window: Eastland Survival Stories
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Being a few minutes late can change an entire life.
Yet being thoroughly documented doesn’t guarantee anyone will keep researching.
This week, we follow two strikingly different threads from the 1915 Eastland disaster and examine how unevenly this history has been documented.
First, let’s talk about Dorothy Berman.
In July 1985, seventy years after the disaster, Dorothy went back to the Chicago River and shared her story with several newspapers. At the time of the disaster, she was a 20-year-old file clerk at W...
Martin saved lives. Edward shattered doors. Opal stepped in.
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In this week’s episode:Â
A Chicago police officer leaps into action, rescuing lives amid the chaos of the Eastland disaster.Two undertakers clash in a dramatic battle for possession of a corpse.Amid the turmoil, a determined woman sets her sights on earning an undertaker’s license.First, meet Martin Benson, a Chicago police officer whose 1936 Chicago Tribune obituary called him an Eastland hero and credited him with saving several lives on July 24, 1915. His role is documented. His biography is findable. Yet Martin’s name and biography are missing f...
Rinse, Lather, Repeat the Evidence: When Lists Overtake the History
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When someone survives the 1915 Eastland disaster, gives a firsthand newspaper account just days later, and, years later, both she and her story disappear from later retellings, a big disconnect emerges. And the disconnect may be because the research didn't go deep enough before the broader Eastland story was repackaged and repeated.
In this episode, I go back to the July 28, 1915 Hudson Observer and use newspaper accounts published at the time to show what happens when documented evidence collides with later lists.
First, I return to Martha Willig’s re...
An Eastland Story Comes Full Circle: Martha Willig’s Eastland Survival
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Picture it. A survivor, Martha Willig, wrote down what happened on the Eastland the very next day. Then, on July 28, 1915, her gripping account ran on the front page of a New Jersey newspaper. Yet her name, the names of her fellow survivors, and their story are missing from modern versions of Eastland Disaster history — despite that article and later corroboration from descendants of the family.
That contradiction is where this story starts, and it's why I'm bringing Martha Willig and Otto Larsen back to the center of it. She's in many re...
A Pitiable Sight: A Postmaster Remembers the Eastland
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What happens when a dramatic story is repeated often enough that people stop asking where it came from?
We begin with the curious case of Arthur Loeb, the self-proclaimed "King of the Bell Divers," who spent years promoting himself as an Eastland disaster hero (not true) and claiming honors that he never received.Â
His story illustrates what can happen when assertions are repeated without documentation and gradually take on the appearance of fact. When preserving a familiar narrative becomes more important than continuing the research, s...
Eastland “Hero,” Vaudeville Star, Octopus Wrangler: Meet Arthur Loeb
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A diamond-studded Carnegie medal. Dozens of dramatic rescues. A “king of the bell divers” who always seems to be first on the scene. Arthur Loeb’s Eastland Disaster legend is the kind of story that spreads fast online because it’s vivid, emotional, and easy to retell, but when we ask the most basic question, “Where’s the evidence?”, the ground shifts.
We slow down and do the work that Eastland Disaster historiography too often skips: reasonably exhaustive research. We walk through what’s actually in the newspaper record, including Loeb’s earlier arrests...
“You’ll Spoil the Boat”: Elmer Nelson, the Torch, and the Evidence
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What does a bad grade on a high-school term paper have to do with the 1915 Eastland disaster? This week is part history, part confession, and part detective story — and it starts with some genuinely good news.
There is a new Eastland documentary — The Eastland Tragedy: July 24, 1915, from Chicago's WTTW/PBS! I braced for the usual retellings and instead found something that felt like a world premiere. It features the story about one of the divers, Iver Johnson, as told by his grandson. Link below.
Then, a conf...
Mr. Eastland and the Night at the Museum
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This week, I remember Dave Nelson, who passed away on July 10, 2026, just before the 111th anniversary of the Eastland disaster.Â
And yet his name rarely surfaces in the retellings his own work made possible.
Dave was the grandson of Elmer Nelson (born Knute David Hjalmar Nilsson in Kalmar, Sweden), an ironworker who helped cut through the Eastland's hull to free trapped passengers in 1915 and was awarded a Silver Star by the Cook County Coroner for his valor.
Watching The Poseidon Adventure brought his grandfather to mind and s...
Ink Against Indifference: The Eastland Cartoonists
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A capsized ship at a Chicago dock should not have happened. Except, it did.
Today, we go looking for the people who translated that shock into a demand for justice while the city was still counting its dead: the editorial cartoonists. Their names rarely appear in modern accounts of the Eastland disaster, but in 1915 their drawings exposed hypocrisy, challenged officials, and said what polite prose often would not.
We also return to the story of Willie Novotny, the child known for days only as “No. 396,” and why his identification prom...
Dwight Boyer: The Man Who Spoke for “the Little Feller”
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As we get closer to the 111th anniversary of the Eastland Disaster (July 24, 1915) in the Chicago River, we learn what careful writers actually put on the page--and what modern revisions often leave out.
We look at why poets and journalists who wrote about the Eastland disaster, such as Edith Wyatt, Agnes Lee, Olive Carruthers, Carl Sandberg, and others, are mostly missing from today’s accounts. We also focus on one key figure: Great Lakes reporter and maritime historian Dwight Boyer. In his chapter “Who Speaks for the Little Feller?” from True Tales...
Olive Carruthers: Chain-Smoking, Gravel-Voiced Chronicler of the Eastland
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Sometimes, a single newspaper article can pull lives back from the shadows. Today, I want to share the story behind one of my most treasured discoveries: writer and journalist Olive Carruthers. Her 1952 Evanston Review piece, “How Evanstonians Assisted in the Eastland Disaster,” brings the 1915 Eastland tragedy in Chicago into sharp, unforgettable focus. Long after the Eastland rolled into the Chicago River during the Western Electric picnic, Olive sought out Evanston residents, collected their memories, and wove them into a gripping narrative that saves names other histories have let slip away.Â
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 We step in...
Rand McNally to the Chicago River: Agnes Lee's Eastland Story
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The Eastland disaster didn't vanish into the Chicago River — it scattered into poems, magazines, archives, and family research, waiting for someone to go looking.
In this episode, I push back on the idea that “history forgot” the Eastland disaster. History didn't forget. The records are there in abundance. What’s missing is the willingness to look past the easy summary and find them.
We return to Agnes Lee, a major voice in Chicago's literary scene, with a newly uncovered Eastland poem and a deep dive into her life and work. Th...
A Hell of a Job: Carl Sandburg's Eastland
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As the 111th anniversary of the Eastland disaster approaches, the podcast turns toward the writers, poets, artists, and witnesses who captured the tragedy in their own words. Their voices, once alive with urgency, have too often been pushed aside as the Eastland’s story has been retold, revised, and diluted over the years.
This episode focuses on Carl Sandburg: poet, journalist, musician, biographer of Lincoln, chronicler of working people, and one of the fiercest literary voices to respond to the Eastland disaster.
Sandburg responded to the tragedy with both pr...
The Clue in the Old Almanac: Solving an Eastland Mystery
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This week, we return to Edith Franklin Wyatt’s July 26, 1915 article, Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow: Community Hushed by Death. Wyatt interviewed families and clergy whose lives had been touched by the Eastland Disaster, yet many of those individuals—and Wyatt herself—have been largely forgotten in 21st-century versions of the story.
This time, we meet the only Lutheran pastor Wyatt interviewed. She identified him as “the German Lutheran pastor Dr. Miles.” Sounds straightforward enough, right? Not exactly. Tracking down “Dr. Miles” and his church turned into a historical scavenger hunt that was far m...
The Scars That Wouldn't Heal: Two Priests, Two Parishes
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One forgotten newspaper article can change how a major tragedy is remembered. I’m picking up the trail from Edith Franklin Wyatt’s July 1915 reporting to recover the accounts of two priests she interviewed after the Eastland disaster. We continue to speculate why so many parish names and their losses vanish from the “standard” retellings of Chicago’s 1915 catastrophe.
First, I introduce Father Albert J. Dedera and Mary, Queen of Heaven Church in Cicero, Illinois. This church was touched by the Eastland disaster but largely absent from modern Eastland history platforms. I also share...
A City of Sorrow, a Voice of Fire — Edith Franklin Wyatt & the Eastland
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A disaster can strike twice—first when it happens, and again in how it is remembered. Today, we bring back another “lost” voice of the Eastland Disaster history that has been silent for too long.Â
Chicago writer and social critic Edith Franklin Wyatt visited Hawthorne soon after the Eastland capsized. She wrote about what she saw in the homes of families still waiting for answers.
In Wyatt’s “Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow,” she shares the details that make history feel real: closed shops, sleepless nights, photos clutched in trembling han...
SPECIAL DELIVERY - A Messenger Boy’s Path to the Eastland
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This week, we’re continuing the biography of Eastland disaster survivor, Charles Borovansky. He has a lot more to say!
When I wrapped up my research on Charles for a previous episode, I felt that his story wasn’t finished. Tracking him backward through Chicago’s industrial labyrinth led to records hiding in plain sight. Long before the Eastland ever listed in the river, Charles’s life was a guided tour of American industrial ambition. We follow him from his Bohemian immigrant roots to his early days as a bicycle...
One Survivor. Two Surnames. A 1940 Eastland Time Capsule
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One surname search can reshape the entire landscape of history, and this week, it did just that. While tracing the path of Eastland disaster survivor Charles Borvansky (sometimes spelled Borovansky), I uncovered a 1940 Cicero Life newspaper article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1915 tragedy. This is the sort of local reporting that rarely finds its way into the most retold versions, yet it brims with vivid, unforgettable details that bring the past startlingly close.
I dove into the article’s retelling of how a joyful Western Electric Hawthorne Plant outing became a...
The "Elephant," the Eastland, and the Catholic Columbian Discovery
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Just one missing name can change how people understand the Eastland disaster—a reminder that the story’s true impact lies in the details we can recover and connect. And we’ll get to that…
After two descendants reached out to me searching for relatives lost in the 1915 Chicago River tragedy, I saw an opportunity to highlight a core problem: when people search for an Eastland person and find only a name on a list, the significance and humanity of the loss are diminished twice—first by the disaster and again by incompl...
Louella Parsons: Ink, Influence, and the Eastland
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Celebrity culture was born not in Hollywood, but in the inky columns of newspapers, each inch building a new kind of fame. Society pages gave way to syndicated gossip that could rewrite a person’s fate before noon. I trace the rise of gossip columnists as they transformed into entertainment kingmakers, focusing on the trailblazer who set the standard: Louella Parsons. At her height, her name was as powerful as a studio head’s, and her blessing could make or break a career.
We journey with Parsons from small-town Illinois to the...
Beyond the Capsizing: Following Four Eastland Survivors
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The Eastland disaster struck Chicago in 1915, but the real tragedy unfolded in silence as the stories of its people faded, uncited and forgotten. I am gathering the scattered threads from 1935 newspaper interviews and tracing the digital footprints of four survivors. While today’s online summaries barely scratch the surface, a wealth of details lies hidden: firsthand quotes, obituaries, work records, and the subtle hints that let genealogy work its quiet magic, transforming names into living stories.
We begin with Rose Smoller, whose journey after the Eastland emerges in decades of dedication at...
Eight Eastland Survivors—On the Record, Off the Radar
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A faded, barely readable newspaper scan kept the Eastland Disaster survivor stories tucked away for decades, hiding them in plain sight. When a clearer copy finally surfaced, it was like prying open a sealed time capsule. We dive into two interviews from 1935, marking twenty years since the SS Eastland tragedy in Chicago. What leaps from the page is vivid and unfiltered: a heated argument at the gangplank, the sharpest screams, the moment the deck lurches, and the heart-stopping decisions that separate survival from loss.
We immerse ourselves in the voices of...
The Ship That Rolled, the Stories That Didn't: More Voices from the Eastland
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We explore three gripping firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses to the Eastland disaster, shared with the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald on July 26, 1915 — just two days after the tragedy. These accounts appeared once in print and then vanished from public memory for over a century.
One witness represented an early film company, another worked for a garment company, and the third was employed by a lumber, sash, and door dealer. Three people from very different worlds who happened to be in Chicago on that fateful morning.
Their words paint scenes of frantic rescue, pa...
The Return of the Omitted: History Strikes Back!
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History sometimes fades not from lack of evidence, but because the path connecting the pieces is broken. The Eastland disaster records are overflowing with accessible online material, yet large parts of this story have drifted out of modern retellings. I’ll share a research discovery that changed my entire plan for this week.
I’ll take you inside the system I improvised to untangle the patterns that kept repeating before my eyes. Together, we’ll confront the problem of “thin” profiles that reduce real lives to mere names, and the Franken-article phenomenon...
Still Black and Blue: Eastland Survivors Speak - A Lost Magazine Recovered
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A single local magazine from over 100 years ago contains details of the Eastland disaster you can’t unhear—and yet, it is rarely referenced. The July 30, 1915 issue of Forest Leaves (Forest Park, Illinois) is a treasure trove. It includes firsthand accounts from those who boarded the SS Eastland expecting a Western Electric picnic and instead found themselves trapped by a sudden roll, crushed by crowds, with broken railings and impossible rescue choices at the portholes. It left at least one woman black and blue all over.Â
From these pages, we beg...
The Teen Deckhand and the Pastor: Two Restored Eastland Accounts
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Uneven historiography (the history of history) rarely announces itself. It arrives as a confident paragraph with no citation, a quote stripped of its author, or a tidy summary that cannot be traced to the original record. What looks like settled history is often the residue of choices: what to compress, what to omit, whose account gets carried forward, and whose gets left behind. The record itself is not the issue. The problem is the hand that shapes it — the shortcut taken, the attribution dropped, the community written out in the name of a co...
Bolts & Bylines: Frankenstein’s Ghost in the Eastland Story
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A missing citation can erase a life twice: once from the pages of history, and again from the digital world. Â
Highlights:Â
RootsTech 2026 recap: Actor and keynote presenter, Marlee Matlin, urged us to honor every life, ensure every story is searchable, and let every family tree reflect humanity’s full spectrum. Her words are simple, but their weight is profound.
These words linger, much like the sting of a lost argument, especially when your daily work unfolds in the shadow of Chicago’s 1915 Eastland disast...
Rescuers in the Shadows: A Milestone, a Mystery Photo, and the Brothers Petroskey
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This week, we pull back the curtain on the Eastland disaster’s historiography and bring two overlooked rescuers to the forefront: Great Lakes captains Walter and Emil Petroskey. The Petroskey brothers manned a lifeboat and saved lives when the steamer rolled in the Chicago River in 1915. Along the way, we share how a podcast milestone—7,500 downloads—became fuel to double down on careful genealogy, source citations, and the investigative steps that turn rumor into record.
We walk through real research problems and the tools that solve them. A listener’s request led us t...
A Beautiful Magazine and a Missing Hero - Selective History at Work
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A glossy company history can sparkle—and still leave a hole big enough to hide a tragedy. We open a 1981 Western Electric centennial magazine that celebrates a century of innovation yet steps neatly over 1915, the year the Eastland capsized by the Clark Street Bridge and more than 800 lives were lost, many from Western Electric's Hawthorne Works. That missing year isn’t just an editorial quirk; it’s a powerful example of narrative control, memory politics, and how brands shape the stories we inherit.
From there, we shift to a name that deserv...
From the Iroquois to the Eastland: One Firefighter, Two Catastrophes
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A single obituary opened a door to two of Chicago’s most haunting tragedies: the Iroquois Theatre Fire (1903) and the Eastland Disaster (1915). We trace the life of Charles C. Morgan, a Chicago Fire Department truckman who assisted with both tragedies. Along the way, we connect the Iroquois Theater fire and the Eastland disaster, explore what firefighters faced on the line, and surface the reforms that reshaped public safety — outward-opening doors, marked exits, stronger fire curtains, and real drills. These were hard-won lessons paid for in lives, and Morgan was there for both reckonings.
Checklist History vs. a Life Remembered
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Our story opens with a puzzle: an independent researcher uncovers a sparse, single-source biography of an Eastland hero that reads more like a checklist than a life. They reach out to me and pose a challenge, “Surely, there is more to this person. Can you uncover it?”
Challenge accepted. Soon, I found Bernard Napolski, our hero who saved more than 40 lives during the Eastland Disaster. A 1916 announcement of his engagement in a Chicago Polish-language newspaper offered many threads I used to weave a richer portrait of his life.
A Mourning Veil and a Missing Address — After the Eastland
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In this episode, I bring to a close my journey through Edna, His Wife by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Margaret Ayer Barnes, a novel that paints a hauntingly intimate portrait of a family navigating life in the shadow of the 1915 Eastland Disaster.
This final section steps past the catastrophe itself and into the tangled aftermath: the paperwork of loss, the quiet unraveling of marriages, and the daily rituals of mourning that linger long after the headlines fade.
Through Edna’s sorrow, Barnes reveals how loss reshapes who we are, tran...
