Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Send us Fan Mail Released on July 24, 2025 – the 110th anniversary of the Eastland Disaster On this pivotal anniversary, I’m sharing one of the most haunting firsthand accounts ever recorded about July 24, 1915—a story that doesn’t end when the ship rolled, but follows the tragedy all the way to its most chilling conclusion. TRIGGER WARNING: There are graphic descriptions of death in this episode....

Send us Fan Mail What if being late saved your life? In this episode of Flower in the River , we follow the eerie ripple of that question through time. On the morning of July 24, 1915, Tom Milton and Willard Haynes were in Chicago when the Eastland Disaster unfolded. Milton missed boarding the ship by a single minute. Haynes, a physician, arrived just as chaos overtook the riverfront and assisted...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we revisit the Bell Telephone News from August 1915 and the stories of  extraordinary individuals who responded to the Eastland disaster with courage and quick thinking: Fred J. Lippert - The telephone company engineer who happened to be wearing his bathing suit that morning (planning to swim after work) and dove repeatedly into the Chicago River to rescue victims...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s episode of Flower in the River , we unearth a powerful 1952 article written by author Olive Carruthers—an overlooked piece of Eastland Disaster history that should be widely known but has remained hidden for over 70 years. Through Carruthers’ evocative writing, we meet three remarkable figures: Catherine O’Reilly , the telephone operator who took the call about the...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I’m circling back to three stories I’ve covered before—but they’re too important to leave behind. First up: Floyd C. Smith , a hardworking Chicago salesman who was near the dock when the Eastland capsized. He assisted and was later recognized by Coroner Peter Hoffman as a citizen hero. I found Floyd through his granddaughter, Ann, who shared his story in The Chica...

Send us Fan Mail In this special retrospective, I’m circling back to some of the most powerful stories I’ve uncovered in my Eastland research—stories that have been entirely absent from the popular historical accounts of the disaster. Meet James Gardner , a survivor who not only escaped the capsized vessel but went on to rescue nine women and two men from the Chicago River. His vivid first-person...

Send us Fan Mail This is a special bonus episode in honor of Father’s Day 2025. On an ordinary evening in 1960s Cleveland, an unexpected knock at the door changed the way I saw my father forever. This short, true story is a tribute to Robert Joseph Zett (aka, Dad), a working-class man who never thought of himself as brave—but showed me what quiet courage really looks like. Video Link: The Night No...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I explore an aspect of the Eastland Disaster that’s rarely  investigated: the insurance industry’s response. It’s not as dry as it sounds! We take a deep look at The Insurance Post, an independent trade journal published out of the Royal Insurance Building in Chicago in 1915. This was likely never meant for public eyes—and it offers a stark, often unsettling glimp...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I share the compelling story of the Wagaman brothers from Pennsylvania, not far from Gettysburg. In 1915, both were aboard the Eastland when it capsized in the Chicago River—one as the ship’s chief cook, the other as a last-minute passenger who couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong that morning. And he was right. What followed was a dramatic survival...

Send us Fan Mail It’s May 31st—an important date if, like me, you have roots in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. On this day in 1889, the South Fork Dam gave way, and a wall of water wiped out most of the city. Over 2,000 lives were lost. It was a manmade disaster—tragic, preventable, and all too familiar. In this episode, I begin with the story of Maggie Irwin, a chambermaid who died in the Johnstown Flo...

Send us Fan Mail The untold stories of the 1915 Eastland disaster continue to surface over a century later through forgotten newspaper accounts and overlooked connections. These rediscovered narratives reveal how this Chicago tragedy touched lives across America in ways rarely documented. FEATURED STORIES H.L. Bening, a West Virginia jeweler who witnessed the disaster while in Chicago on business,...

Send us Fan Mail In today's episode, I take you on a journey through my unexpected DNA discoveries and how they've connected me to both famous and infamous historical figures. This discovery some new (but very old) Hungarian connections inspired me to research Hungarian immigrant victims of the Eastland Disaster, leading to some remarkable stories of transatlantic families. My Family Bac...

Send us Fan Mail A cemetery caretaker's steady act of tending graves becomes a powerful lesson in historical preservation and honoring forgotten lives. I'll share how this unassuming influence shaped my approach to uncovering and preserving stories of the people of the Eastland Disaster. This episode includes: The story of Mr. Schmidt, a German immigrant who tended church graves because,...

Send us Fan Mail 🛳️🎶 “Goodbye, Everybody…” That was the jaunty tune Benton Harbor residents remembered the Eastland playing from its calliope — long before the disaster. 🎙️ In Episode 112 of Flower in the River , we travel to Benton Harbor and St. Joseph , Michigan — twin port cities on Lake Michigan — to uncover their overlooked connection to the Eastland. A year before the tragedy, the ship rac...

Send us Fan Mail Grief knows no borders. When Chicago's SS Eastland capsized in 1915, the tragedy didn't just devastate local families—it sent shockwaves all the way to Denmark, where anxious relatives waited for news that would forever change their lives. This episode unveils the forgotten Danish dimension of the Eastland disaster through contemporary Danish newspaper accounts that capt...

Send us Fan Mail Peter Alter —Chief Historian and Director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History at the Chicago History Museum —joins me for this episode, and what a conversation it turned out to be. We nearly had to cancel. A massive Zoom outage hit just before we were set to record. But like all good historians and podcasters, we adapted. Zoom came back to life minutes before our scheduled...

Send us Fan Mail When history speaks, it rarely does so in just one language. In this episode of Flower in the River , I take you on a journey I never expected—deep into international newspaper archives that covered the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago. What started with the discovery of Polish-language coverage has now expanded to include a stunning find: a Norwegian-Danish newspaper called Skan...

Send us Fan Mail A breakthrough discovery reveals how news of the 1915 Eastland disaster reached across the Atlantic to Poland, unearthing voices unheard for over a century. While exploring the Silesian Digital Library—an extraordinary archive of Polish publications spanning from 1892 to 2011—I discovered several newspapers from Silesia that covered Chicago's tragic shipwreck with remarkable...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail A long-overlooked document adds a vital missing piece to the Eastland Disaster story. For over a century, the full account of what happened when the SS Eastland capsized in downtown Chicago has remained incomplete—not because we didn’t know what happened--but because the stories of so many of the people involved were lost, overlooked, or never told. In this episode, I share how I...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I explore a seldom documented incident involving the Eastland steamship from August 1905—ten years before the infamous Eastland Disaster of 1915. This forgotten event reveals important patterns in the ship's troubled history and adds crucial context to understanding the later tragedy. Episode Highlights: Rosemary Pietrzak's Passing : I begin with a tribu...

Send us Fan Mail Ever wonder what secrets lie buried in forgotten newspapers and dusty archives? For the victims and survivors of Chicago's deadliest disaster, their stories waited patiently for over a century to be rediscovered. Genealogy isn't just about filling in branches on a family tree—it's about stories--connective tissue to the past. During this year's RootsTech confer...

Send us Fan Mail Death came knocking three times—but Bertha Behrend Healy wasn't home. In this episode, I uncover the jaw-dropping story of a woman who narrowly escaped not one, not two, but THREE of America's deadliest disasters: The Johnstown Flood (1889) - A catastrophic dam collapse that killed 2,200+ people while Bertha's family fled to higher ground just in time The Iroquois T...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we explore newly discovered insurance records of Eastland disaster victims through the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (PRCUA). These records provide unprecedented insight into the aftermath of the tragedy and its impact on Chicago's Polish community. Key Discoveries Previously unsearchable records found through FamilySearch.org's experimental Lab...

Send us Fan Mail History isn’t just about what’s remembered—it’s about who makes sure it’s remembered.  In this episode, I take you to Fall Creek, Wisconsin —a small village with a deep familial connection. It’s also where I first saw what real historical preservation looks like. Their approach to honoring the past contrasts what I’ve found in my research on the Eastland Disaster , where some vict...