Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The "I Don't Know" Man: From Eastland Disaster to Salvage Czar

• Natalie Zett • Season 3 • Episode 107

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The untold stories of Chicago's deadliest disaster continue to emerge from dusty archives and forgotten legal documents. In episode 107, "The 'I Don't Know' Man: From Eastland Disaster to Salvage Czar," we dive deeper into the coroner's inquest that followed the 1915 Eastland tragedy, focusing on the testimony of Daniel W. Gee—a Western Electric employee who helped organize the ill-fated company picnic but whose story has been largely overlooked by historians.

Daniel's testimony reveals the confusion surrounding ticket sales and passenger counts that fateful day. His hesitant responses—filled with "I don't know" and deflections of responsibility—stand in sharp contrast to the confident accounts of certain survivors. Yet beyond this seemingly evasive testimony lies a remarkable life story: this same man later became a key figure in America's WWII salvage efforts, coordinating critical material reclamation across 19 Midwestern states.

Why are so many Eastland stories missing from our collective memory? From legal proceedings that stretched into the 1930s to Treasury Department documents suggesting the vessel was dangerously overloaded, the historical record remains frustratingly incomplete. Still, this drives my ongoing mission to uncover these forgotten voices.

The most gratifying moments come when family members reach out after hearing their relative's story told, often for the first time. These connections remind us that history isn't just about events—it's about people whose lives deserve remembrance and recognition. Join me as we piece together the fragmented history of the Eastland disaster, one overlooked story at a time.

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Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett and welcome to Flower in the River. This 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. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 107 of Flower in the River podcast. So what I'm going to do is continue discussing what we began discussing last week, and that would be the coroner's inquest, and the coroner would be Peter Hoffman. And we reviewed the testimony of Richard J Moore RJ Moore last week, and we're going to talk about the next witness for a completely different take on what happened the day of the Eastland disaster. What I have learned in the last couple of weeks or so is that there were a number of legal proceedings. They began with the coroner's inquest, but there was also grand jury investigations, hearings by the US Steamboat Inspection Service, a string of civil lawsuits and, finally, a series of legal appeals that stretched into the 1930s. And you know what? There may even be more legal proceedings documents, and since they're all over the place on the internet, I don't know if I've been able to capture all of them and, who knows, many of them may not have even been digitized, and I assumed that this type of thing the legal proceedings would all be in one location on various websites that devote space to the Eastland disaster. And they're not in a single location. And that's what I'm trying to do gather everything, put it in one place and make them available, and I also upload everything that I find that's a public domain document to the Internet Archive so it can be located there as well as my website. I want to make sure that all of this information is available for you if you want to look at it. But I'm also aware there are future historians and genealogists and whoever who will be interested in this, and it's really frustrating when you don't know where to look or how to look. So I'm trying to make it easier for people as well, because it's part of the legacy we leave as genealogists and as history enthusiasts.

Natalie Zett:

So here's the weird thing At the time, in 1915, the press extensively reported on the legal proceedings that took place after the Eastland disaster. Now, a lot of front page items that I have been able to find and I'll put those in my graphic and add them to my website. But along with all of that coverage, after the Eastland, those legal proceedings generated extensive legal documentation. I mean extensive. It's not exactly a light read, I'll give you that, but very little of that information has been studied, analyzed and shared in recent years, despite much of it being readily accessible online. Why is this the case? I don't know. But I do know that we can make that right and that's what we're doing.

Natalie Zett:

But this pattern that I have found points again to a much larger story that's been left mostly untold, which is an ongoing theme with the Eastland disaster. And here's the weird twist, and I didn't see that until I was putting this episode together the very thing that spurred me on to uncover the missing stories, the missing lives of those who were affected by the Eastland disaster, wasn't a newspaper article. I rely heavily on newspaper articles, as you know, but the thing that started this adventure, this journey, was a legal document. Now I've worked I've done a lot of work throughout my career with legal documents and I don't find them things I run to to read because they're kind of off-putting. The language is not plain language, it's very difficult to read and for someone like myself who has a bit of dyslexia, it's like whoa. This is challenging. But the legal document that I found turned out to be a key, a wonderful key that unlocked the door to all of the lives of so many people who either weren't mentioned or whose stories weren't told.

Natalie Zett:

In regard to the Eastland disaster and this document, I've talked about it before and I'll keep talking about it because it's such a strange thing that happened. It was a 1934 federal appeals case involving William and Herman Ristow, the Ristow brothers involving William and Herman Ristow, the Ristow brothers. And the reason that this stopped me in my tracks when I initially found it is that I'd seen DNA matches on Ancestrycom with Ristow as the surname, and it does turn out that these guys seem to be distantly related. I'm still trying to find the most recent common ancestor. That's just me being a little bit obsessive about this, so I can't say for sure. They're my cousins, but they seem to be, and if that is the case and if I can prove that conclusively, that's yet another familial connection to the Eastland disaster, which may explain why I get rather concerned about the history of this thing and while I feel obligated to take care of it the best I can and again, I found it by chance in October 2023, and I reported on it in early November 2023.

Natalie Zett:

Get this, as it turned out, this wasn't just some buried footnote. It was clearly written, it was a lot of information and when I went hunting for it elsewhere, it hadn't even been discussed. It was buried there on Google Books. And what's even more disturbing to me is that at that time, even the biographies of the Risto brothers were practically non-existent. Yes, I saw their names, but that was it, and that's not the case now, because I featured them not just once, but several times, because they do keep coming back in my other stories. There's some crossover. Ironically, this 1934 document was actually the beginning of this journey that I've been on to uncover the lost people of the Eastland.

Natalie Zett:

So when I found that the Bristow brothers were missing, I thought who else isn't in the records? Who needs a story told? Quite a few, if you've been listening for the past couple of years, quite a few and who qualifies as a person whose story needs to be told? Anybody whose story hasn't been told and who was connected to the Eastland. They might be journalists, they might be surviving family members, for sure they are victims of this thing, including my great aunt. She's listed, but her story hasn't been told except by me, which is sobering, and I realized that that was a pattern throughout this thing that many of the people are listed but their stories have never and will never be told, unless, of course, someone takes this project on and decides to tell their stories and decides to stop waiting for somebody else to do it. So here we are, and the most gratifying thing is when I hear from a family member. It doesn't happen often, but when I do, it's heartfelt and people really do appreciate the effort that I've made to tell their loved one's story, because a lot of times or they don't have a lot of detail about that either. So it is my honor and privilege to do this for people. I think of the people associated with the Eastland as extended family In many ways. Quite a few of them are. So it is my privilege and I really love doing this. My frustration comes from the fact that this should have been cared for a long time ago, but it wasn't the fact that this should have been cared for a long time ago, but it wasn't. That is the reality, but I'm happy to assist where I can.

Natalie Zett:

Let's jump back to last week, to the coroner's inquest of 1915, coroner Pete Hoffman. This is an incredible primary source for what happened after the Eastland. So last week I shared the story and I have the full transcript and, honestly, the information that's in there is jaw dropping. You've got to wade through a lot of things like contracts and other things that were going on in that inquest because it is a legal document and somebody was there recording exactly what happened. But within those recordings are stories and you get a sense of what was going on there. So the coroner's document actually is ground zero for post-Eastland disaster research and this transcript is a goldmine. It includes testimonies from key witnesses, ship personnel and others directly involved in the Eastland disaster.

Natalie Zett:

And yet so many of these people too have been overlooked, barely mentioned in the literature, missing entirely sometimes from the digital spaces where you'd think this history would be curated. And when I started reading through the names, I immediately wanted to know more about these people. Who were they? What did their lives look like before, during and after the Eastland disaster? You'd think detailed biographies would be easy to find after all this time, but, as you probably guessed, they're not. Yes, authors like George Hilton quoted from the inquest so clearly. This document wasn't missing, but back in the 1990s, when he was doing this work, it might have been available, but it wasn't accessible. So many of these people who are at the heart of this testimony have remained in the shadows.

Natalie Zett:

So I want to talk about one of the men. Actually, he's the second witness who was called by Coroner Pete Hoffman. His name is Daniel W. That's his middle initial, g Orgy. I'm not sure how he pronounced his name. So we are going to return briefly to the coroner's inquest document and before we get into the inquest document, I want to read the names and roles of the people who will be mentioned. We have McLaugh Hoyne, who was the state's attorney. Aj Sabbath, representing the Bohemian American Societies of Chicago. We have Michael S Sullivan, state's attorney. We have Walter Greenbaum. His occupation was the manager of the Indiana Transportation Company. And, last but not least, we have Coroner Peter Hoffman. And, unlike the testimony of RJ Moore that I shared with you last week, this one's a little more convoluted. What I've done is truncated, what I'm going to share with you, but the entire document is available.

Natalie Zett:

So let's talk about Daniel. His testimony is intriguing, but what really caught my attention was this. But what really caught my attention was this when I tried to find out more about him, thinking because he gave this big testimony, because he's all over the newspapers at that point in 1915, I'd find something about him. I only found a footnote about him in one of the Eastland books and on the digital spaces. Well, here's what I found. His name is there, what I found. His name is there, but his involvement with the Eastland disaster is categorized as unsubstantiated. Daniel is very much substantiated. Not only did he testify at the coroner's inquest, he also made the front pages of several newspapers who were covering the coroner's inquest. Daniel Gee was a Western Electric employee and he played a key role in organizing the company picnic that day. I'm not going to read all of his testimony because we don't have that kind of time. This could go on for days, really. I'm going to read an excerpt At this point.

Natalie Zett:

Coroner Pete Hoffman calls Daniel G to the witness stand and he's asking him about the arrangements for the picnic, since Daniel was part of the employee group that did the planning. Here we go. This is Coroner Hoffman. Did you or your committee have anything to do with the loading of the boats. Daniel says nothing whatever. Hoffman, you simply turned in the people in what you thought, somewhere near it for the purpose to see that they got the proper boat that right. Yes, sir, did you discuss anything about the safety of the boats with them? Yes sir, how many times and with whom we discussed the proposition of having the government inspectors down there to be sure they take a tally of everybody going on in our boats so we wouldn't have them overloaded? Mr Greenbaum advised me that he had made arrangements to that effect.

Natalie Zett:

Coroner Hoffman, did he say to you at any time the number of passengers that the Eastland might carry that morning? No, sir, he just gave me the capacity of each boat. Do you know whether they checked the children, counted them with the adults under five? Between five and ten? I do not know.

Natalie Zett:

Mr Sullivan is also going to step in and aska question here. He asks is there any way by which your company can aid the coroner in determining the number of children under five years of age that were on the boat? Well, if they knew who were on the boat, we might make a canvas and find out if they had any babies with them and on that basis we might check what percentage of the ticket buyers worked for your company. Beg pardon About what percentage of the ticket buyers worked for your company. Beg pardon About what percentage of the ticket buyers of the 7,100 people were employees of your company. We did not sell any tickets outside of the plant. They were sold by employees. Some employees would buy probably two or three or four. We did not sell any outside of the plant. Tell us how you managed to sell all your tickets in your plant.

Natalie Zett:

We had a ticket committee representatives in each department and they were given a number of tickets they thought they could sell. They in turn sold the tickets and reported back to the ticket committee and the ticket committee reported the receipts and reported back to the ticket committee and the ticket committee reported the receipts. In other words, when I received the tickets from the Indiana Transportation Company, I turned those over to the picnic committee and charged them with so much for them to account for. Was it understood by the employees that children under five need not pay fare? Yes, sir, thoroughly understood. Yes, sir, was it understood before that children between five and twelve could go for half fare? Children between the ages of five and twelve, that they could go for 35 cents instead of 50 cents, while we had to pay the full fare, the full value, that is on the basis of the full fare tickets. Well, didn't the purser on the boat? If anyone presented a full fare ticket, they would admit two children between the ages of five and 12? Yes, that was the understanding. That was the understanding. Yes, sir, understanding, that was the understanding. Yes, sir.

Natalie Zett:

The deputy now asks what proportions of the people on the boat at the time it tipped over were employees of the Western Electric Company? I don't know. You say there were no tickets sold outside of the various departments of your company, not outside of the plant. No, sir, all tickets were sold in it. Then, was it understood that the steamer Eastland was reserved exclusively for the employees of the Western Electric Company? I don't know. I don't know that the Indiana Transportation Company was handling that. Do you know whether any of your employees that you would sell two or three tickets to, sold those tickets to people on the outside? I don't know. That was unbeknownst to you. I don't know to you. I don't know.

Natalie Zett:

Mr Hoyne steps in to ask a question. They could have done that? Could they not? I think they could, I don't know. Was it permitted? We didn't have any restrictions on that. They had the right to sell them to outsiders if they wanted to. Yes, sir, I suppose.

Natalie Zett:

So as far as the company was concerned, yes, in your understanding, the agreement with Mr Greenbaum, were the ticket holders only to be received on the boat? I don't get that question. Mr Sullivan asked the question. Your people who bought tickets from you or from your company, either your employees or their friends. They were the only ones to be received on the boat. They were to honor all tickets. Do you know how many of the passengers went before the? Have you any idea how many passengers were received onto the boat who didn't have your class of tickets? I don't know who bought a regular ticket. I don't know, you don't know. No, sir, mr Hoyne asked the question. For instance, mr Morin testified here that he was on this boat and he bought a ticket on the dock and never had went to the plant. That is only one man. He don't know how many there were. I don't know how many. Mr Hoyne says you don't. I don't know how many. Mr Hoyne says you don't. I don't know how many. I understood from you you have stated that, in answer to Mr Sullivan's question, that the fact that you sold tickets for 6,900 adults and 200 children's tickets that wouldn't determine the number of children on the boat because you say they honored a single adult ticket. Would that be accepted for two children, didn't you? There are two children could go on one adult ticket, so that the sale of 200 tickets wouldn't necessarily show how many children were on the boat? No, no, the coroner steps in. I desire to say to the state's attorney that, as to the ages of the children that were children and those that were adults, because we don't know who they were At this point, aj Sabbath, who's representing the Bohemian American Societies of Chicago, steps in to ask a question.

Natalie Zett:

The gentleman may be able to inform us of the different names of the people to whom they turned the tickets over to. He has a list of the tickets and maybe also the names of those that were selling the tickets to the plant and then, in turn, it has been divided perhaps among 100 or 200 employees that they may know to whom they sold the tickets and in that way you may be able to ascertain the names of the people who purchased the tickets and whether they all bought at the boat or not. The End Coroner asks Can you answer that question? We have a ticket committee and Mr Harmon, chairman of the ticket committee, and he, in a day or so, can give you the names. He can give you the names of all the ticket sellers and the ticket sellers will have the names of the people they sold to, probably some of them and probably some of them won't.

Natalie Zett:

Although this goes on for quite a while, I'm going to stop reading the testimony now. And we do know, in fact, that the tickets were sold outside of the plant, but that's another story and that was reported in the day book and by various witnesses, such as RJ Moore, whose testimony I read last week, and people who were family members of survivors. So Daniel's testimony does go on for quite a while and, unlike RJ Moore's, which was more confident and direct as a survivor witness, daniel's account, as you may be able to hear, is all over the place. He waffled, he hedged and he often seemed unsure of himself. His responses frequently included phrases like I don't know, I don't remember, I can't recall when asked about key details such as boat capacities, timing of events and specifics of conversations. But that does not make it unimportant. In fact it's a very important part of the coroner's inquest. Remember, daniel was not on the Eastland. He did witness what happened, though In an earlier part of the coroner's inquest he repeatedly emphasized that loading and safety inspections were the responsibility of the Indiana Transportation Company. Inspections were the responsibility of the Indiana Transportation Company and he would say things like we had nothing to do with the ordering of the boat out of the dock, nothing whatsoever. When questioned about his committee's involvement in loading the boats, the plot thickens right. What stands out is his rather selective memory, and while Daniel claimed not to recall many specifics I'm not sure about the committee part, but definitely tickets were sold outside the plant because my aunt who was aboard the Eastland was not a Western Electric employee.

Natalie Zett:

But before we are too hard on Daniel, there could be a lot of reasons why his testimony seemed shaky. Put yourself in his position. Let's just say you're one of those go-getter types of people and the other employees in your group or in your organization put you in charge of stuff. They figure Daniel can take care of that. So Daniel feels he's in charge of this thing. But Daniel's probably feeling responsible too. And if you saw what Daniel saw, I bet that you too would be traumatized from witnessing the capsizing. You would feel rattled. And again, they were called to this witness stand right after this thing happened. He had no time to, in a sense, emotionally recover. Daniel could have been feeling a lot of things. He could have been afraid as an organizer, maybe he felt survivor's guilt. The bottom line is we have his words, but his words cannot allow us to open his psyche and look within and understand his motivations, and we never will know what happened there with Daniel.

Natalie Zett:

But the bigger question is with this testimony. Yes, it waffles, whatever, but it's an important part of the Eastland disaster history. Why is someone like Daniel so hard to find in the historical record? Well, there's no reason for it. His testimony is right there in the coroner's inquest and I do hope that down the road there's some deep analysis of what happened here. Mine is simply an overview, but I'm going to do a deeper dive into Daniel and into what happened here to see if we can get some more information about that. I want to give you a sense of Daniel's life before, during and after the Eastland disaster.

Natalie Zett:

Let me share with you what I was able to find out about Daniel WG or Gee. He was born in 1876 in Somerville, massachusetts, to Daniel G Sr and Nancy Holland, who had immigrated from Lancashire, england, in 1865. At that point the family lived in Massachusetts and they later moved to New York City. By the census of 1880, daniel Sr was working in a factory. By the 1900 census, daniel Sr was still working in a factory in New York and it said that he was working as a dyer. So that gave us more information. He was dyeing clothes or cloth or something like that.

Natalie Zett:

And Daniel Jr, that's our Daniel. He was 23, and he was working as an office clerk. Now let's go to the 1910 census. By then Daniel Jr was married to Laura Laura died, by the way, in 1951, and they had a five-year-old son, wesley, and they were living in Chicago. Daniel was working for Western Electric as a clerk. Now we know what happened during the Eastland disaster. But fast forward. During World War II Daniel served as a regional director of the Federal Reclamation Service. According to Daniel's 1957 obituary in the Chicago Daily Sun-Times, he had also been chief of the Reclaimed Material Division of Western Electric Company and he had lived in the Austin neighborhood in Illinois for 42 years prior to moving to Villa Park in 1941.

Natalie Zett:

In the November 1942 issue of the Illinois State Journal and Register we learn a little bit more about Daniel's wartime work. The United States had just entered World War II. Just a few months earlier, after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Our entire nation was rattled and mobilizing for the war effort, with every aspect of American industry pivoting to now support military production. Military production Factories across the country were racing to produce tanks, planes, ships and weapons in unprecedented quantities. The massive production effort created an urgent demand for raw materials, so resources like steel, copper and aluminum and rubber were in critically short supply. The government formed the War Production Board, wpb, to coordinate this nationwide industrial effort, and one of their key strategies was an ambitious salvage program. So I hope you understand what was going on here.

Natalie Zett:

And Daniel, whose role in the Eastland disaster has largely been forgotten, went on to have a long career in salvage and reclamation work, and that 1942 newspaper article reveals Daniel was no small player in this effort. He served as a special technical advisor for the War Production Board's Industrial Salvage Division, covering 19 Midwestern states. That's an enormous territory and he was essentially the salvage czar of the American heartland. How's that for a title? I don't know if that's a thing, but I just made that up, made that up. Let me stop to say that Daniel's later career success doesn't erase what happened, the evasiveness that he displayed during the inquest. But his story is important precisely because it shows how complex real people are, how complex all of us are. As time goes by, hopefully we learn from our mistakes, we learn, we learn to self-reflect.

Natalie Zett:

And the same person that Daniel was in 1915 gave way to make a major contribution to assist the war effort for the United States of America. For this context, his work was absolutely vital. The United States couldn't build bombers, battleships and tanks without copper, aluminum, steel and rubber, and a significant portion of these materials came from recycling industrial waste and these types of programs that Daniel helped coordinate. They were happening all across the country and this was part of a massive coordinated effort where both civilians and companies were called to contribute everything from scrap metal to bacon grease for the war effort. Yep. So his obituary noted too that he died in an Arlington Heights rest home and was survived by his son, wesley Kay, a brother and a sister. He was buried at Acacia Park Cemetery in Illinois.

Natalie Zett:

Before we conclude, I want to share the contents well, not the entire thing of a document that I located on the National Archives at Chicago. It was from the Treasury Department and the date is January 28, 1916, and it is the number of passengers carried on the Eastland during various times. They start off with 1915, and then they go back to 1914. Not sure why they organized it that way, but let's start with 1915. On June 12th 1915, the number of people carried were 154, and they were at the Rush Street Bridge on July 23, 1915, and that would be 1,123. Then we jump up to 2,500 or more at the Clark Street Bridge on July 24, 1915, and we know what happened. So at that point 2,500 was the largest number of people that the Eastland ever carried. Let's go back to 1914. On July 30th 1914, at the Rush Street Bridge, the number of passengers carried was 174. The highest number carried in 1914, according to this document, is 1,489. So that is quite a leap. So already it says hints strongly at the possibility that, besides everything else that was wrong with the Eastland, it was overloaded. And I cannot read the signature of the person who signed. This was the deputy collector of customs, but they said on January 31st 1916,. I hereby certify that this is a correct list of the number of passengers carried out of Chicago on the steamer Eastland between June 20th and September 7th 1914, inclusive, according to the records of this office compiled from the reports made by the US Navigation and US Customs inspectors who counted the passengers at the gangway as they went aboard this vessel. Again cannot read the signature, but this is signed by the Deputy Collector of Customs.

Natalie Zett:

I just thought that was very interesting. Why I like to explore the lives of those who were part of the Eastland disaster story. Isn't it interesting to see what happened? If you just read the story about his responses during the coroner's inquest, daniel wasn't that impressive, but he went on and he became a different person. We'll never know him entirely because he's long gone. That said, I'll end right here and I'll be back next week with some different stories for you. Have a great week. I'm thinking of you all, care for you deeply and please care for each other. Okay, hey, that's it for this episode and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes, and for more information, please go to my website, that's wwwflowerintherivercom. I hope you'll consider buying my book, available as audiobook, ebook, paperback and hardcover, because I still owe people money and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of 1915. Goodbye for now.

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