Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

A Pitiable Sight: A Postmaster Remembers the Eastland

• Natalie Zett • Season 5 • Episode 179

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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, sources stop being questioned, old claims stop being tested, and the received narrative begins to substitute for history.

From there, I share a personal experience that reminds us why evidence is critical. A DNA relative in Poland sent records proving that I had a major branch of my family tree wrong. I mean, really wrong! Correcting it meant letting go of a story I had believed for years and rebuilding from original records instead.

Finally, we restore another overlooked voice: Chicago Postmaster Frederick E. Coyne. His memoir places us near the Clark Street Bridge in the immediate aftermath of the Eastland disaster and provides another eyewitness perspective on the rescue effort and its human cost. Although some of the statistics in his recollection are inaccurate, his firsthand observations add an important piece to the historical record and remind us that every contemporary account deserves to be examined alongside the evidence.

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Flower in the River, share it with someone who loves Chicago history or genealogy, and come back next week for another piece of the Eastland story.

Resources:

Coyne, F. E. In Reminiscence: Highlights of Men and Events in the Life of Chicago. Chicago: Privately printed, 1941.

Watch the extended video: Eastland “Hero,” Vaudeville Star, Octopus Wrangler: Meet Arthur Loeb — a companion video with additional documents, newspaper clippings, and visuals that expand on this episode. 

Welcome And Series Purpose

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.

The Arthur Loeb Myth Recap

Natalie Zett

Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 179 of Flower in the River. And I hope you're doing well. I also hope that you had a chance to listen to last week's episode about the incomparable, unbelievable Arthur Loeb, the self-proclaimed King of the Bell Divers, hero of the Eastland disaster, recipient of a Carnegie Hero Commission award. The only problem is that none of that stuff happened. And speaking of last week's episode about Arthur Loeb, each week I make a 90-second video promo for each episode, and that's because of the constraints of many of the online platforms. Actually, I love the challenge of having only 90 seconds to tell a very long story, but one of my followers wrote back and said that they needed more time with each slide. So I created a longer version of that promo video. It's about two and a half minutes, and I posted that to YouTube. I will give you the link to that in the show notes. So if you want to see that and read the newspaper articles, please be my guest and also follow me on YouTube as well. In order to set the stage for this week's podcast, I do want to summarize his interesting career. So Arthur Loeb, a very successful con artist, who began his run-ins with the law at age 18, found his claim to fame with the Eastland disaster. I think he was looking for something to latch on to. And the Eastland disaster gave Arthur Loeb the stage that he had coveted for so many years. He was arrested at the site of the Eastland disaster after allegedly rescuing people. What he was really doing, according to a number of newspaper articles, was picking the pockets of the dead. I cannot imagine number one picking someone's pocket. Number two, I cannot imagine picking the pocket of someone who was deceased. But that's what he was doing, and that tells us a lot about who he is out of the gate. But Arthur Loeb saw an opportunity. Didn't take much time at all for Arthur Loeb to reinvent himself as a hero of the Eastland disaster. To give himself even more credibility and a bit of flash, he said that the Carnegie Hero Commission people awarded him a jewel encrusted heroes medallion for his work during the Eastland disaster. One of the representatives for the Carnegie Hero Commission said in no uncertain terms that Arthur Loeb did not receive any type of award from them. But pesky little things like facts and truth did not stop Arthur Loeb. He just kept going and performing on various vaudeville stages as the hero of the Eastland disaster. He is the only quote unquote hero of the Eastland disaster who took to the stage to present his exploits. But he kept going until the Grim Reaper finally caught up with him in the gift shop of the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Bizarro History And Vanishing Sources

Natalie Zett

The myth of Arthur Loeb embodies what has happened in terms of the Eastland disaster historiography of the 21st century, when a story, a false story, is repeated for so long that evidence can no longer get through the door. And what I've encountered while researching the historiography of the Eastland disaster, or more precisely how the historical narrative of the Eastland disaster was reshaped, it feels more like bizarro world history. If you were a fan of the very old Superman comics, you might remember Bizarro World. It wasn't simply a strange version of Earth. Bizarro society deliberately operated according to the opposite of ordinary logic. The Bizarro Code proclaimed us do opposite of all earthly things. A salesperson could sell bonds guaranteed to lose money. Being called stupid in Bizarro World could be a compliment. The rules weren't merely confused, they were reversed. And Bizarro World often comes to mind when I'm in the midst of doing this research. What I often find when I go to various online platforms as I'm researching the people of the Eastland disaster is this sources disappear. Provenance is missing from photos. Unsubstantiated claims are repeated without documentation. If the source citations, if the footnotes aren't there, that makes it very challenging.

When DNA Proof Upends A Tree

Natalie Zett

I'll tell you about a time when I was confronted by somebody who told me that the results of my long research into one of the lines in my family tree was completely wrong. Way back when I documented a branch of my family tree, my third and fourth great grandparents on my mother's side. I thought I had it right. I had done the research, I added source citations, and followed the steps I was supposed to follow. And some of these people were fascinating. One of them was an opera singer, for goodness sake. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool. Then about three years ago, one of my DNA relatives in Poland was researching my tree and sent me an email with a massive Excel spreadsheet. His message was basically You're wrong. These are not your third great grandparents. Let me show you who they are. And so he did. He was still living in the area where this branch of our ancestors had come from, and he also had access to original church records that he had digitized, records that I had never seen. While it's never fun to hear that you were wrong about something, once I reviewed his documentation, there was no question he was right. My tree was wrong. Correcting the tree was not without pain. First, I had to admit that I had become emotionally attached to these people who were not actually my relatives. Second, I had to remove them very carefully, because family trees are interconnected, and one careless deletion can take legitimate relatives with it. So there was a lot of anxiety that I felt. And then I had to rebuild that entire branch with the people who actually belong there. It was stressful, but it was absolutely worth doing because once I had the correct people, the real history began to reveal itself. For one thing, I started recognizing surnames amongst my various DNA matches that connected directly to this newly connected branch in my tree. I also discovered that members of this branch of my family were among the earliest immigrants to the United States from any branch of my ancestry. They settled in Milwaukee in the middle of the 19th century, somewhere I had never expected to find any family at all. So yeah, I made a mistake with that branch of the family tree, and it was a big mistake, but it was an honest mistake, meaning that I had tried to do the best that I could with the information that I had at that time. Then better evidence came along. I could have ignored the new actual evidence about this branch of my family and kept my beloved opera singer in there, even though we weren't related, but I chose to go with the evidence and with the actual records that were available to me. And because I did that, I found something more valuable than the story I had lost. I found the history that actually belongs to us.

Who Gets Left Out Of Eastland

Natalie Zett

I share this story with you because it's very similar to what I have found in my researching of the people of the Eastland disaster. A lot of people are missing from the narrative. So far I have found nearly 300 people, 295 to be exact. And I've shared these stories with you. These people were part of the Eastland disaster in one way or the other, and that includes three victims who were omitted in the modern day revisions of the Eastland disaster story. The bottom line is pretty simple. The real history is much deeper, richer, and interesting than the fabricated one. You don't want to live in bizarro world history, do you? So let's get to work. Today I'm going to share with you the story from one of those people who was an eyewitness and whose story has been omitted in the twenty first century retellings of the Eastland disaster history. Technically, it's actually the storyteller and his son who were eyewitnesses to the disaster. I

Frederick E. Coyne Enters The Story

Natalie Zett

want to introduce the storyteller to you. His name was Frederick E. Coyne, C-O-Y-N-E. I found Coin's book on Google Books, by the way, and Google Books is a free resource that has so many digitized older documents. In fact, much of the content for this podcast is from Google Books and similar resources such as Hothatrust. There are quite a few free resources and it doesn't cost anything other than the price of an internet connection. Let's get back to Frederick Coyne, who was an author, a storyteller, and so much more. Here's a brief biography. He was born in eighteen sixty and died in nineteen forty eight. Originally from New Jersey, he eventually made his way to Chicago, where he had a long and sometimes controversial and complicated public career. He was a business person, a federal revenue official, Chicago postmaster, and much later in life a chronicler of the Chicago he had come to know. He was also well connected. President William McKinley appointed him U.S. Collector of Internal Revenue for Illinois First District, and Theodore Roosevelt later appointed him Chicago Postmaster. His career had its share of controversies and setbacks as well. He was involved in political disputes, faced scrutiny during his time as postmaster, and at another point operated a bakery that was successful for a long time but eventually failed. Frederick Coyne had lived a lot of life by the time the Eastland disaster had occurred, and that is part of what makes his account very intriguing. A few years before he died, Coyne privately published a memoir that included a section about the Eastland disaster. He had a different kind of proximity to what happened, and this needs to be noted as well. I'm going to share some excerpts from Frederick Coyne's book In Reminiscence Highlights of Men and Events in the Life of Chicago by F. E. Coyne, U.S. Collector of Internal Revenue, 1897 to 1901, Postmaster of Chicago, 1901 to 1905, by appointments of Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Privately printed Chicago 1941.

Coyne’s Chicago And The Eastland Shock

Natalie Zett

My first sight of Chicago was in 1879. I was then returning to my home in East Orange, New Jersey from a trip out west. I had gone there to settle down and to quote unquote grow up with the country, as in those days was quite commonly done in response to the well known and widespread advice of Horace Greeley to the young men of the East. I came to Chicago on the C, B, and Q Railroad, and our train was switched to the old Michigan Central Depot on Lake Street over a trestle that looked like a railroad on stilts. The rails were well out in the water of Lake Michigan, the shore of which was not far from Michigan Avenue. Having read and heard a great deal about Chicago, I stopped over for a few days to get a view of the city that only a few years before had almost been entirely wiped out by fire. The morning after my arrival I started out for a walk and found myself in South Water Street absolutely jammed with wagons and trucks loading up the produce for outlying stores. The commission houses at that time were thickly located on both sides of the street, from La Salle to State Street. I stopped on the Clark Street Bridge and took a look at the river traffic. There I saw a large steamship that would compare favorably with such vessels as I had seen in New York making her way with the assistance of tugboats up the river with a load of grain from Lake Superior. Small towboats, noisy and smoky, were rushing up and down the river, tipping their smokestacks as they passed under the bridges. I saw two schooners loaded with lumber and yards hauled aback and cockbilled as to pass through the traffic. That type of vessel was new to me, and a casual acquaintance told me that these were lumber luggers from northern Michigan. I'm just reading the opening here to set the scene and to let you get a feel for how Chicago appeared to someone who newly arrived and stayed in the late 1800s. This next reading is from Chapter 10. Beginning with the Iroquois Theater Fire, the 20th century started out with a record of disasters with loss of human life that was appalling. Following the theater fire, referred to in a former chapter, came the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906. Then came the sinking of the Titanic, April 25th, 1912, and then the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. And after that, the most terrible of all, the capsizing of the excursion steamship Eastland at the Chicago dock on july twenty fourth, nineteen fifteen. The steamship Eastland had been chartered by a committee of employees of the Western Electric Company at Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, for an excursion to Michigan City on the date above mentioned. There were several other boats at hand to take care of the crowd. There were 7,100 tickets sold, including 250 for children under 12 years of age. It was understood that one adult ticket could be used for two children. Babes in arms were free, and it was therefore a difficult matter to ascertain the exact number of adults, children, and babes that were lost. The total loss was eight hundred and twelve. The Eastland was to leave at seven thirty in the morning to be followed by two other boats that were nearby. The Potoski was to start at eight o'clock and the Racine two hours later. Another ship was at hand if needed. The Eastland was allowed to carry 2,650 passengers and was practically loaded to capacity when, without more than a minute's warning, she tilted over to one side, and three to five minutes later was lying on her side in the bottom of the river, with the steel plates of the hull showing about three feet above water, and more than half her passengers struggling against a two-mile current. At about the time the boat turned over, my son, Mason, was crossing the Clark Street Bridge not more than a few hundred feet from the scene. He could not swim, and was unable to help as others did by plunging into the river to the rescue of those struggling in the water. Many were rescued from the middle deck where they were imprisoned, but able to keep their heads above water, but some in like positions died by suffocation before the firemen could cut through the steel plates on the side of the boat above water with oxacetylene gas torches that arrived shortly after the disaster. Mason called me on the telephone, and I arrived there about twenty minutes after. By the time word had been sent to Joliet to close the dam of the drainage canal, the effect of which in a short time stopped the current, thereby making it much easier to rescue those who were drifting away, clinging to hen coops, egg cases, and other floating articles that had been thrown in by commissioned merchants on South Water Street. It was a pitiful sight to see the processing Procession of stretcher bearers with bodies from the wreckage streaming across the bridge to the basement of Reed Murdoch and Company's large building, which had been converted into a temporary morgue. The Eastland Calamity recalls the tragic fate of the Titanic in 1912 and the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. There were a number of people in Chicago who had relatives in all of those heart-ending disasters, notably the Plamondans, one of the most prominent families in the city. I believe the same family had relatives in the Iroquois theater fire in 1903. In all of these cases, the unexpected happened. The Titanic was planned and constructed by the White Star Company as a ship that would be, quote, absolutely unsinkable, end quote, because of its unusual system of watertight compartments. If she were to be struck in the side and cut part way through the middle, the forward and after compartments would keep her afloat. If, on the other hand, she should run bow on into another ship or an iceberg, smashing the bow to the second compartment, she would still remain afloat until help would reach her. There was one source of danger they did not figure on. All of the time they were approaching the day for launching, a mountain sized iceberg, having broken away from the Arctic regions, was slowly floating on its way towards the point where the Titanic would cross on her first trip, thousands of miles away. I cannot recall the name of the writer who wrote the iceberg story, but acknowledge that the thought did not originate in my mind. The total loss of life in the Titanic amounted to 1,517, including passengers and crew. If the Iroquois theater had been equipped with a steel roller curtain and exit doors opening out instead of in, the number of lives lost would have been small, if any. If the Eastland had been condemned as an excursion boat when overhauled some time before, as she should have been, that terrible accident could not have happened. I'm going to skip to the end of this chapter only because Coyne repeats quite a bit, but here's his final sentence. Does it not seem at times that too little thought is given to the value of human life? End of chapter.

Why Eyewitness Memory Still Matters

Natalie Zett

What makes Frederick Coyne's account valuable is not that he got every detail or statistic exactly right. He didn't. But what matters is that he was there, arriving at the river about twenty minutes after his son telephoned him, and he recorded what he saw, the rescue effort, the bodies being carried across the bridge, and the Reed Murdoch building transformed into a temporary morgue. He also recorded something statistics cannot capture, his own reaction to the catastrophe, calling it a quote unquote pitiful sight, and later asking whether too little thought was given to the value of human life. In Reminiscence by F. E. Coyne, that gives us another eyewitness perspective, and importantly, a different one. Coyne was not writing as a survivor, a rescuer, a Western electric employee, or a newspaper reporter. He was a Chicagoan who came upon the disaster in its immediate aftermath and carried the memory with him for decades. And perhaps most strikingly, this account, this book was not hidden away in some inaccessible archive. In reminiscence has been freely available for years. Yet Coyne's Eastland recollections seem to have remained outside the story most of us have been told. So more than a century after the disaster and more than eighty years after Coyne put his memories into print, we can finally add his voice to the history of the people of the Eastland Disaster. As

Final Thoughts And Where To Follow

Natalie Zett

always, I thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope you take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and stay safe. I'll talk to you next week, and I will have more stories. Goodbye for now. 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 www.flowerinthher.com. 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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Natalie Zett

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