Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Send us Fan Mail 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 to...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ro...

Send us Fan Mail 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 a...

Send us Fan Mail 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, m...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Wyat...

Send us Fan Mail 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 in...

Send us Fan Mail 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....

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 heigh...

Send us Fan Mail 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, obitu...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 emp...

Send us Fan Mail 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 untangl...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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....

Send us Fan Mail 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 ling...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 su...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Disa...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ma...

Send us Fan Mail 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 191...

Send us Fan Mail 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 unfoldin...