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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Highlights:
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...
From Page to Stage: A Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author, an Actor, and the Eastland Disaster
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A single newspaper review from 1938 turned this story on its head.
Digging through Chronicling America, I stumbled upon a mention of Cornelia Otis Skinner's one-woman show—a performance inspired by Margaret Ayer Barnes's novel Edna, His Wife—and it included a "sensational scene" set on the Eastland. That brief reference shatters the myth that Chicago's 1915 disaster simply faded from memory. It never vanished. It lingered in novels, on stage, in film, and in poems.
I retrace that rediscovery, then plunge into vivid passages from Barnes's novel: morning chatter, a ringing phone...
“Catastrophe on the Chicago River” - the Cermak Connection
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In this episode, I finish reading “Catastrophe on the Chicago River,” a Czech-language article by Josef Mach Sr. from 1916. The piece delivers a searing, firsthand account of the Eastland Disaster’s impact on Chicago’s Czech community: families shattered by the loss of multiple members, a grieving husband driven to despair after losing his wife, and three hundred funerals unfolding in just three days.
But then, an unexpected detail rises to the surface.
Near the end of the article, a name appears: Anton J. Cermak. Chief Ba...
Catastrophe on the Chicago River — Part 2: The Archive Finds Keep Coming
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We journey deeper into "Catastrophe on the Chicago River," a century-old chronicle of the Eastland Disaster as seen through the eyes of Chicago's Czech community. Josef Mach Sr. crafts a living, breathing account of the capsized excursion ship, trading headlines and statistics for the intimate details of lives upended. This narrative names names, lists addresses and funeral halls, and traces the ache that rippled through the close-knit Czech neighborhoods of Chicago.
As we move through the recovered text, you’ll hear eyewitness detail:
When Research Starts Talking Back
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When Research Starts Talking Back
What happens when your research doesn’t just sit there quietly… but starts nudging you, whispering, insisting you dig deeper?
In this episode, I try something a little different. After sharing my 2025 retrospective, The Search Goes On — Coincidence. Clarity. Resolve., I handed that episode to Google’s NotebookLM—an AI tool many genealogists are exploring—and let it analyze the work.
The result? Two AI research companions, Eva and Max (NotebookLM’s AI hosts), listen to my last episode and talk back—anal...
The Search Goes On — Coincidence. Clarity. Resolve.
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A single number can shape how we remember—until new evidence asks us to look again. This episode takes you inside another year of research on the people of the Eastland disaster, where a repeated death toll gives way to an evolving, documented estimate. I share how two overlooked victims surfaced through archival work, and why adding their names is crucial for families, historians, and anyone who believes facts should lead the story—not follow it.
This journey isn't just archival; it's personal and communal. I discuss the engine of citizen gene...
Pages, Faces, and Names Restored - A Czech Eastland Breakthrough
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In this episode, we return to Chicago's Czech community and uncover something extraordinary: an original 1916 Czech-language publication that didn't just tell the story of the Eastland disaster—it preserved more than 100 photographs of Czech women, men and children who lost their lives during the Eastland Disaster.
Many of these photos haven't been seen since the article was published in 1916. You'll hear how finding this rare primary source adds depth, texture, and nuance to our understanding of the tragedy.
🌊 What's inside
Meet Josef Mach, the...One Family, Two Losses, and a Voice That Went On
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A century-old trade journal shouldn’t be the most gripping thing you’ll hear about this week, but here we are: a 1915 issue of The American Lumberman unlocks the intertwined stories of Chicago’s Czech community in the aftermath of the Eastland disaster. We trace a death notice—Julia Kolar—through a maze of addresses, parish ties, and workplace notes. We then follow the thread to meet another victim, Anna Molitor Kolar, and a survivor, Ellla Kolar, whose voice would carry from Chicago to Milan.
We walk through the exact research steps that...
The River Remained in Her Bones: A Recovered Eastland Story
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The River Remained in Her Bones: A Recovered Eastland Story
A single line in a 1922 obituary can change the shape of history. We follow that thread to Chrissie McNeal Lauritzen, who survived the SS Eastland capsizing by clinging to the overturned hull, “was never well since,” and died seven years later from complications tied directly to that morning on the Chicago River. This isn’t just a moving story; it’s documented evidence that challenges the fixed perception of the Eastland death toll and reveals how disasters reverberate through families...
A Hero at the Porthole: The Rabe Family’s Story
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A forgotten headline. A crowded dock. A father who turns back to a capsized ship and pulls a family friend through a porthole. In this episode, we follow the Rabe family—Fred, Delia, Grace, and Kenneth—from a terrifying morning on the Chicago River into the decades that followed, when work, service, and community stitched their lives into something livable again. We open the archive, and listen as Grace and Kenneth share their memories of that day, 84 years later.
Grace becomes a skilled comptometer operator at Western Electric, part of a large...
Fissures in the Archive: Behind the Curtain of the Eastland Disaster
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Some histories don’t fracture because records vanished; they fracture because we stopped asking questions. In this episode, we look at the Eastland Disaster through a different lens — not just what happened in 1915, but how its story has been curated, simplified, and sometimes commercialized, and how we can repair and restore it with evidence.
I share what two years of deep research (and new academic work) revealed: there’s no agreed standard for who qualifies as an Eastland victim, and no peer-reviewed, source-cited list — even though a mid-1990s tally has often be...
Capsized. Kicked. Survived.
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A photographer’s byline led me straight into another long-overlooked Eastland story — the 1965 Chicago Tribune interview with survivor Anna Meinert, one of the many accounts from this event that were well documented but seldom researched and carried forward.
Anna’s memories bring the morning of July 24, 1915 into sharp, human focus.
Fifty years later she could still see it all: water seeping from portholes, the sudden lurch, the scrap of canvas above a window, a stranger’s boot kicking her away, and the two other strangers whose hands pulled h...
