February 14: Jack Benny, Sunday Nights At Seven

He was an American comedian who began in Vaudeville, then moved to radio, movies, and television, making America laugh throughout the Great Depression, WW II, the Fifties, and the Sixties by making fun of himself.  He portrayed himself as being a cheap, vain, insecure, untalented braggart who would never willingly be more than 39 years of age.

Meyer and Emma Sachs Kubelsky became the proud parents of Benjamin Kubelsky on February

14, 1894, at Mercy Hospital, Chicago, Illinois. Even though they lived in Waukegan where Meyer ran a haberdashery shop, his mother had insisted that the baby be born in Chicago, because – in her view – it was an honor to be born in a big city.  Both parents were immigrants – Meyer from Poland, Sachs from Lithuania, who settled in America to achieve a better economic life.  They would have one other child – Florence – born in 1900.  Little Benjamin Kubelsky would later change his name to Jack Benny – the name that he will be referred to in this article.

Young Benny did not do well in school.  He was often described as a ‘dreamer’, didn’t do his work, and was ultimately expelled from Central High School.   He also studied violin – he was given a half-size violin for his sixth birthday - and loved playing the instrument.  However, he hated to practice, and his mother’s hope of her son becoming a concert violinist were not to be realized.  Later in life the violin would become one of his comedic trademarks.

He did, however, find a use for his music.  By the time he was fourteen he was playing in local dance bands.  By the time he was sixteen he had a job playing in the orchestra pit of Waukegan’s Barrison Theater. 

In 1911 The Marx Brothers would offer the young violin player his first real travel opportunity.  Minnie Palmer was the mother and business manager of that vaudeville group.  She had a sharp sense of show business values, and wanted Benny to join their small orchestra.  She had enjoyed Benny’s violin playing – and offered him a job and would have paid him $15/week, plus transportation, and room and board.  However, his parents declined the offer, as they didn’t really see much opportunity in making a successful career in show business.

However, Benny persevered, convinced that he could make a career out of show business – plus being attracted the adventure of it all.  In 1912 he joined up with a 45-year-old widow, pianist Cora Salisbury, who needed a partner for her act. They formed the vaudeville duo of “Salisbury and Kubelsky: From Grand Opera to Ragtime”.  However, because of possible confusion with another performer, Benjamin Kubelsky created his first name change and became Ben K. Benny. 

Why did his parents let him go with a 45-year old widow and not the Marx Brothers?  Benny wrote:

“It was obvious from the way Cora looked, dressed, and spoke that she was a decent respectable lady.  She promised Mama that she would take care of me, see that I lived in respectable boarding housed, ate kosher meals, and got plenty of sleep.  She promised to guard me from the ‘loose’ actresses who, my parents were convinced, were lounging around in hundreds of theaters, waiting for the chance to seduce their son.  Mrs. Salisbury coaxed Mama around to the idea that a son with such basic integrity couldn’t be corrupted.  Then Mama got to work on Papa and coaxed him into giving his consent to a trial period of three months.”

After Salisbury retired from the act in 1913, Benny teamed up with Lyman Woods – forming the Vaudeville duo, "Bennie and Woods: From Grand Opera to Ragtime."  They had some success over the next four years – even performing in the famous Palace Theater in New York – although they didn’t do as well there as they had hoped.

By 1917 the US had entered World War I – and Benny joined the Navy.  He had quit the act earlier in the year to return to Waukegan to help take care of his ailing mother – who passed away in November of 1917.

While in the Navy he often entertained his fellow sailors with his violin playing – and one evening in 1918 a legend would be born.  His violin performance was booed by the audience – he was playing “The Rosary”, a classical piece, to a rather unappreciative audience. Benny was advised to start talking by future star PatO’Brien, and he although he had never really ‘talked’ on-stage before, Benny ad-libbed his way out of the potentially tense situation, leaving the audience laughing with such jokes as: 

“I’ve heard you sailors complain about the food. (they groaned in agreement)  Well, I want to tell you that the enlisted men get the same food as Captain Moffett gets. (pause) Only his is cooked!”

After this, he began receiving more comedic spots, earning himself a reputation as both a musician… and a comedian. After the Armistice he went back to Vaudeville, and by 1921 had built a show up around his comedic talking, not his classical violin playing.

Soon, however, Benny has to change his name again… to the now famous “Jack Benny”.  There was another performer and violinist named Ben Bernie who felt Ben K. Benny was too close to his and might confuse the audiences.  How did Benny get the name Jack?  That, too, is from his Great Lakes Naval Station days in the Navy.  To the sailors of the era, “Jack” was a generic term like “fella” or “dude”.  Benny was having dinner with Benny Rubin while he was considering a new name.  A couple of former Great Lakes sailors approached and greeted him as “Jack”.  Rubin then suggested that he use “Jack” as his new first name.  He would now bill himself as "Jack Benny:  Aristocrat of Humor".

In 1926 Benny met and gradually wooed Sadie Marks, a distant cousin of the Marx Brothers.  He had met her twice before, but had ignored her.  But something clicked with Benny on the third meeting, and he avidly pursued her, even showing up at the May Company where she worked as a clerk in the hosiery department – buying more stockings than he could ever use.  His persistence paid off.

They would be married in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony at the Clayton Hotel in Waukegan, Illinois on Friday, January 14, 1927.  The original plan had been to marry on Sunday the 16^th, but as Benny wrote:

“We were supposed to get married the next Sunday because there were no Sunday performances, but I was afraid if we waited until Sunday, Sadie might change her mind.  We got married on Friday, January 14, 1927.  We used my mother’s ring because there was no time to buy one.”

In 1934 they would adopt a baby girl – Joan – who would be their only child.

Benny continued to hone his theatrical skills – the pauses, the poses, the timing – and in 1932 decided that he didn’t want to go on the road any more as a part of a theater group.  Instead, he decided to try a new medium: radio.  A friend of his, Ed Sullivan, provided the first opportunity for Benny to test this new medium.  Benny was asked to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in early 1932.  According to Benny’s autobiography concerning this experience:

“My very first radio spiel began: ‘This is Jack Benny talking.  There will be a slight pause while you say, ‘Who cares!’…’.  My five minutes didn’t rise much above that level.”

But someone apparently did care, for on May 2, 1932, Benny played the role of Master of Ceremonies on NBC for the Canada Dry Program.  Later that year the show switched to CBS.  In 1933, Benny was hosting the Chevrolet Program on NBC, and a year later hosted the Jack Benny Program – sponsored by JELL-O.  His innovative commercials for the product would so thrill the company that they guaranteed him his Sunday night at Seven programing slot, which he would have for much of his radio and television career.  Later Benny would gain other sponsors – the longest running was Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Benny’s radio programs were developed around a carefully nurtured character that was actually the opposite of Benny’s true persona:  the character was a miserly, self-centered, bossy tightwad who developed a characteristic and recognizable “Well” when having things not go his way.  His character couldn’t play the violin, and he was eternally 39. 

In reality, his key to success was his self-depreciating humor, and it made his the top radio show of the era.

The shows evolved from general comedy routines and a number of musical tunes to less music and a planned, central skit that would permeate the show time slot.  Benny also attracted – and kept – characters that could be developed over a long period of time:  announcer Don Wilson; tenor DennisDay; the abused but often triumphant servant Rochester; the man of a thousand voices, Mel Blanc; and Benny’s wife who played the role of wisecracking Mary Livingston.  The latter became so identified with her character name that she officially changed her name from Sadie Marks to Mary Livingston.  Band leaders changed – but even they stayed for a number of years.  Phil Harris, Bob Crosby, and Meredith Willson were among the longest staying band leaders, each having a speaking role as well as leading the orchestra.

His radio shows were immensely popular, and the shows continued until 1955, transitioning Benny and his cast into the new media of television.  His popular Jack Benny Program ran from 1950 to 1964.  Benny also had a number of movie roles during the thirties and forties, appearing in 22 motion pictures.

His style, mannerisms, and timing left a legacy that affected the way sitcom actors portrayed their characters through the present time.

Benny passed away due to cancer on December 26, 1974, in Los Angeles, California.  He arranged to have a single red rose delivered to his wife daily until her death nine years later.   Perhaps Benny can be best described through the words of an eulogy given by Bob Hope:

“For a man who was the undisputed master of comedy timing, you would have to say that this was the only time Jack Benny’s timing was all wrong.  He left us too soon.  He only gave us eight years.  God keep him, enjoy him.  We did for eighty years.”

Many of his radio shows and televisions shows are commercially available today, and would provide a great listening and viewing experience for comedy aficionados. 

RESOURCES:

Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story, by Jack Benny and his daughter, Joan.

Find-A-Grave   

Jack Benny Biography,  

Jack Benny Fan Club 

Jewish Virtual Library     

Museum of Broadcast Communications  

Waukegan Historical Society  

Wikipedia  

IMAGES:

Young Jack Benny (1909)    

Jack Benny: Young Actor        

Jack and Mary     

Cast of the Jack Benny Show     

Jack, Mary and Rochester   

Well!  

July 14: Dr. Florence Bascom, Rock Star

The late nineteenth century was an exciting time for women in the United States as they saw their opportunities for professional careers expanding further than they ever had before in this nation. One of those women became among first to earn a PhD in Geology (the second woman to do so); the first woman geologist hired by the U.S. Geological Survey; as well as the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America. However, none of these significant ‘firsts’ in women’s history occurred with out struggle, persistence, and dedication.

Florence Bascom was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts on July 14, 1862. She would be the last of six children. Her parents were John and Emma Curtis Bascom. John Bascom was a professor of oratory and rhetoric at Williams College, and in 1874 he became the president of the University of Wisconsin – a post he held until 1887. He and his wife actively supported the temperance and suffrage movements and he advocated coeducation. A year after he became president of the University of Wisconsin that school opened its doors to women students – a radical and progressive move for the era. Florence’s mother was a suffragist as well as a school teacher. The progressive attitudes of her parents encouraged Bascom to not fear any challenge to attain what she desired.

While not much is known of Bascom’s early education, she did graduate at the age of fifteen from high school in Madison, Wisconsin. Immediately after her high school graduation in 1877 Florence Bascom enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. While admitted to the university, women were limited in what they could do. For instance, they had limited access to the library and the gymnasium. Women were not allowed to be in classrooms that were filled with men. But, she listened, took notes, and read widely – graduating by the time she was twenty with two Bachelor’s degrees in 1882 - and adding a Bachelor of Science degree in 1884. She went on to graduate school, earning her Master’s degree in Geology in 1887.

Bascom applied to John Hopkins University for admission to the Geology Department in September 1890 – and seven months later she was given permission to take graduate classes at John Hopkins University – even though John Hopkins had not officially opened its doors for women to earn a degree. An executive committee voted to allow Bascom to attend classes without being officially enrolled. In 1892 she formally applied to enter the doctoral program, and was be accepted secretly into the program.

While at John Hopkins she had to sit, isolated, behind a screen that blocked her view of the men, the teacher, and the blackboard. Why? The reason was simple in the perspective of the male-dominated school: she was isolated in order not to “disrupt” male students who were not used to seeing a female student, especially in graduate courses. This isolation continued in the field studies – which women were not encouraged to attend, but Bascom did. Since she could not accompany the class, she would travel with her mentor, Professor George Williams, to conduct studies on rock formations and structures in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The end result of her experience was a doctoral dissertation that was classified as ‘brilliant’, and put her in the foremost rank of young, budding geologists. In 1893 Bascom became the first woman to earn a PhD at John Hopkins University.

Bascom’s interest in geology was due to a driving tour she made with her father and a geology professor at Ohio State, Edward Orton. Orton was an early supporter of allowing women to study the science of geology. This early interest led to her studying geology at the University of Wisconsin and making it her career.

From 1893 to 1895 Bascom would work as an instructor at Ohio State University. Then her big break came in 1895 when M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, invited Bascom to establish a Department of Geology for women in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Since geology was not yet considered important enough for its own building, she worked at first in a storage space that was in a building housing the ‘major’ sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics. She spent the next two years gathering the resources she would need to educate a new generation of women in the field of geology – collections of mineral, rock, and fossils. She would achieve full professorship at Bryn Mawr in 1906, where she not only created the undergraduate Geology course, but a national recognized graduate course in geology as well.

A number of students would come under Bascom’s influence during her teaching career, and would later become university instructors, work on state and federal geologic surveys, and serve in the Military Geology Unit in World War II. Bascom was described as rigorous, incisive, and consistent. She was also proud of her students, writing to Professor Herman Fairchild in 1931:

“I have always claimed that there was no merit in being the only one of a kind… I have considerable pride in the fact that some of the best work done in geology today by omen, ranking with that done by men, has been done by my students…. These are all notable young women and will be a credit to the science of geology.”

In 1896 Bascom became the first woman geologist employed by the U.S. Geological Survey. She would combine her teaching position at Bryn Mawr College with field studies on the eastern seaboard for the Geological Survey where her work on mapping crystalline rock formations became the basis of many later studies. In 1906 the first edition of American Men and Women of Science listed her as a four-starred geologist – which placed her among the nation’s hundred leading geologists. Her accomplishments were described in the Geological Society of America's magazine, GSA Today, July 1997 as follows: "Bascom was the first woman hired by the U.S. Geological Survey (1896), the first woman to present a paper before the Geological Society of Washington (1901), the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America (elected in 1924; no other woman was elected until after 1945), and the first woman officer of the GSA (vice president in 1930). She was an associate editor of the American Geologist (1896-1905) and a four-starred geologist in the first edition of American Men and Women of Science (1906), which meant that her colleagues regarded her as among the country's hundred leading geologists. After joining the Bryn Mawr College faculty, Bascom founded the college's geology department. This site became the locus of training for the most accomplished female geologists of the early 20th century."

Bascom retired from her professorship at Bryn Mawer in 1928 but continued working for the U.S. Geological Survey, moving to Washington, D.C. in order to prepare her final series of Survey reports. She would retire from the Geological Survey in 1936 at the age of 74.

Bascom passed away from a cerebral hemorrage in the city of her birth, Williamstown, on June 18, 1945, leaving a remembrance, according to former student Eleanora Bliss Knopf writing in American Mineralogist, "to her colleagues, her students, and her friends the inspiring memory of a scholarly and brilliant mind combined with a forceful and vigorous personality." As Ida Ogilvie, one of Bascom’s students who herself became a geology professor, wrote in 1945 about Bascom:

“Probably no one will ever know all the difficulties that she encountered, but little by little she achieved her purpose of making her department one of the best in the country.”

WEB RESOURCES:

Associated Content
Bookrags
Geological Society of America
Memorial to Florence Bascom
Today in Science
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Dr. Bascom/Mineralogical Society of America
John Bascom, University of Wisconsin
Emma C. Bascom, University of Wisconsin
Younger Florence Bascom/Wikipedia
Bascom Standing with a Compass/GSA
Bascom at the Grand Canyon/GSA
The elder Dr. Bascom
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June 22: John Dillinger, Public Enemy #1

John Dillinger, Johnnie Dillinger
The G-Men will chop you down
Some of the things that you've done done
Have been makin' the government frown.
Your numbers up, the words gone round
You won't be goin back to jail
You'll be a bull's eye for the police
And they'll throw the lead like hail.

This first stanza of a song refers to a man that America loved or hated, viewed as a killer or a Robin Hood, and who even today stirs controversy on whether he really died on that night of July 28, 1935, in a hail of bullets that reportedly struck him down in an alley next to the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Illinois.

John Herbert Dillinger, Jr., was born at 2 P.M. on Monday, June 22, 1903, in a middle-class residential neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the younger of two children – his sister, Mildred, was fourteen years his senior – whose parents were John Wilson Dillinger and Mary Ellen “Mollie” Lancaster.

As a child, Dillinger was beset by a litany of social issues that combined to – in the eyes of some – force him into a life of a rebel and criminal. His father earned his living as a grocer and was inconsistent in his application of discipline. His father went from being harsh, repressive, and physical at times to being generous and permissive at other times. Dillinger’s mother, Mary, died when he was three, and he would show resentment and rebellion when his father remarried seven years later. Basically he was raised by his older teenage sister until his father remarried.

His father would have three more children by his second wife, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Fields.

Dillinger often found himself in trouble as an adolescent. He was a bully in school and had his own group of followers when he was ten years old. Impatient, intelligent with no interest in academics, he finally quit school and went to work in a machine shop in Indianapolis. However, Dillinger – who was very intelligent and a good worker – became bored with his job and often stayed out all night. In a desperate attempt to provide a healthier atmosphere for his children, Dillinger’s father sold his property in Indianapolis and moved to a farm near Mooresville, Indiana. Seventeen-year old Dillinger would commute to work in Indianapolis – and never grew to enjoy farm life.

In 1923 Dillinger got into trouble with the law because of auto theft (he was caught by police officers, but escaped before being booked) and did what many young men in his situation did - enlisted in the Navy. After his basic training was complete, he was assigned to the battleship Utah as a Fireman, Third Class – which meant his spent his work shift shoveling coal in the bowels of the ship – and went AWOL when the ship docked in Boston. He returned a day later, was fined and sentenced to the brig by a court marshal, and four months later deserted.

When he returned to Mooresville he claimed that he had received an honorable discharge because of a heart murmur, then wooed and married sixteen-year-old Beryl Ethel Hovious on April 12, 1924. They ultimately settled in Indianapolis, where Dillinger had worked briefly at a variety of jobs. He joined Ed Singleton in a bid for ‘easy money’ and tried to rob a grocer. They were apprehended and Dillinger was sentenced to prison for up to 30 years. Beryl would divorce Dillinger in 1929 – and a month after the divorce Dillinger requested to be transferred from the Indiana State Reformatory to the Indiana State Prison, where he could associate with a

On May 10, 1933, Dillinger was paroled because his step-mother was dying, only to discover that she had died by the time he got home. Although at first his relations with her had been strained, he had grown to respect and love her. After the various emotional upheavals in his life, with the Great Depression at its depths, with little prospect or inclination for steady employment, he began his rise to infamy.

John Dillinger, Johnnie Dillinger
The finger will be laid on you
And the G-Man watchin' with his gun
Is goin to get you too.
When he stops you Johnnie
He's gonna stop you dead
And head you out for the golden gate
Packin a load of lead.

He started a crime spree of robbing several banks in Ohio that lasted from June 10, 1933 until his arrest Sept. 22, 1933. When the authorities searched Dillinger they found plans for what looked like a prison break. While Dillinger denied any knowledge of it, a number of his Indiana State Prison cellmates broke out of prison, shooting two guards with guns that had been previously smuggled in by Dillinger - and using plans very similiar to those found on Dillinger. On October 12, 1933, they arrived at Lima, Ohio, and broke Dillinger out of the county jail, killing Sheriff Jessie Sarber. Dillinger had his “gang”.

The Dillinger gang travelled through Indiana, robbing several banks and plundering two police arsenals – equipping themselves with rifles, Thompson submachine guns, pistols, bulletproof vests, and ammunition. They also killed several police officers in Indiana and Illinois.

Deciding to let things ‘cool off’, they vacationed in Florida, and then travelled to Tucson Arizona. On January 23, 1934 a fire broke out in the hotel the men were staying in while in Tucson – and the police arrested four of the men, including Dillinger, after firemen recognized them from their photographs.

Dillinger was sent to the ‘escape proof’ county jail at Crown Point, Indiana to await trial for robbery and murder. While there Dillinger was interviewed by several reporters who were impressed with his charisma and sense of humor. They added his escapades by relating the mortgages he destroyed while robbing banks, and even contributions his gang made to the poor. He even had his picture taken with prosecutor Robert Estill – a picture that would ruin Estill’s career.

On March 3, 1934, he tricked his guards with a wooden gun he had whittled and painted black with shoe polish. After forcing his guards to open his cell door, he grabbed two Thompson submachine guns, locked up the guards and several trustees, and left the jail. He stole Sheriff Lillian Holley’s car, and crossed the Indiana-Illinois state line as he headed to Chicago.

The act of transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines brought the precursor of the FBI - the United States Bureau of Investigation - into the case.

Dillinger formed a new gang and began robbing banks again, and hide out in Little Bohemia, Wisconsin. By this time Dillinger is front-page news, and locals in the area report an unusually high number of tourists to the United States Bureau of Investigation. United States Bureau of Investigation agents surround the Little Bohemia Lodge, only to discover that Dillinger and five of his gang members fled out of a back window to freedom.

The heat was on. Dillinger now made Chicago his hideout, and on May 27, 1934, had minor plastic surgery to alter his features. He spent several weeks recovering from the surgery in the home of a local bar owner, Jimmy Probasco.

Dillinger was able to celebrate his 31st birthday by reading U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings’ declaration that Dillinger was Public Enemy #1. Dillinger took his current sweetheart, Polly Hamilton, out to dinner. A few days later the Justice Department offered a $10,000 reward the arrest of Dillinger. A week later, on June 30, 1934, Dillinger showed his lack of concern by robbing a bank in South Bend, Indiana.

Back in Chicago, Dillinger moved into an apartment owned by Anna Sage – an illegal immigrant who owned several brothels, and was Polly Hamilton’s landlady. In order to broker a deal to stay in the country, Sage promises to turn over Dillinger to the federal agents.

On July 22, 1934, Dillinger had dinner at Seminary Restaurant, went to a Cubs game, and then took Sage and Hamilton to a movie at the Biograph Theater – which offered an “air-cooled” environment that was especially appealing on a hot summer day in Chicago.

Sage made a quick phone call to the federal agents, telling them of Dillinger’s movie plans. When Dillinger and the two women left the movie theater at 10:30 PM over twenty federal agents were waiting for them.

O Billy the Kid and the Dalton Boys
And others of their kin
Were bad gun
men outside the law
But they were brave gun men within
Now you know the
old time story
How Billy met his end
It's too late to change you now
So long, old friend.

Dillinger sensed the ambush, turned, and fled into an alley. A hail of bullets followed, four hitting him, and one of these entering Dillinger’s neck and exiting through his right eye, instantly killing him.

Three days later the remains of John Dillinger were laid to rest at the Crown Hill Cemetery, Mason County, Indiana. He had come home.

WEB RESOURCES:

Chicago Tribune
FBI
Find A Grave
Google books: John Dillinger
John Dillinger
John Dillinger Museum
Northwestern
Tru Crime Library
Wikipedia

Library of Congress: John Dillinger (song title)

PHOTO SOURCES:

John Dillinger, FBI
Dillinger and Estill, True TV
Dillinger’s Wooden Gun, Examiner
Arrest Warrant for Dillinger, National Archives
Wanted Poster, National Archives
The Biograph Theater, Chicago Tribune
The Dillinger Grave Site, Find A Grave
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Blog Entry: April 19: Eliot Ness and the Untouchables

Over the years he has become a name recognized by the group of incorruptible Federal agents he managed during a time of intense political corruption – the Untouchables. A book, television series, and – more recently a movie - have all documented the courageous acts of this group of men against one of the most renown of all gangsters during an era of gangsters: Al Capone. Yet, he also was a businessman, and an (unsuccessful) candidate for mayor of a major city.

Eliot Ness was the youngest of five children born to Norwegian immigrants Peter and Emma King Ness. Born on April 19, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois, Ness would attend public school - graduating from Christian Fenger High School. He would show an early dedication to the work ethic – maintaining his grades at school, a paper route, and working at his father’s bakery. He then attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1925 with a degree in business and political science.

After a brief career as an investigator of the Retail Credit Company of Atlanta, Georgia – where he was assigned to work in Chicago conducting background investigations gathering credit information – Ness returned to the University of Chicago, earning a Master’s Degree in criminology.

In 1927 Ness joined the U.S. Treasury Department as a member of the Bureau of Prohibition. The Bureau had been created as an enforcement arm for the 18th Amendment – which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol, and ushered in an era known as Prohibition. Ness was encouraged to enter Federal law enforcement by his brother-in-law, Alexander Jamie – who was a Federal agent himself.

Prohibition encouraged the rise of organizations to illegally produce and sell the illicit alcohol. Because of the profit involved, this became the era of gangsters – who made big money in booze, illegal gambling, and more. At the top of the criminal food chain in Chicago was Al Capone.

Starting in 1929, the Federal government decided to make a concerted effort to bring down Capone – whose tentacles of influence included ‘bought’ politicians, police, and civic leaders. Ness was chosen to head the operations that targeted the illegal breweries and the supply routes of Capone’s business empire. Ness’s goal was to reduced Capone’s ability to pay bribe money to public officials by eliminating his main source of income – bootlegged alcohol.

Chicago’s law-enforcement agencies – city, state, and federal representatives – were rife with corruption, and Ness searched through the records of hundreds of Prohibition agents to create a reliable team of eleven men that could not be bought or bribed – the famous “Untouchables”.

"When they were settled, and while the newsreels were setting up their cameras, I told them of the attempted briberies. I related in detail how an emissary of Capone'shad tried to buy me off for two thousand dollars a week and how Marty and Sam had thrown back their flying bribe. [...] It was a long, wearisome process but well worth the effort. Possibly it wasn't too important for the world to know that we couldn't be bought, but I did want Al Capone and every gangster in the city to realize there were still a few law enforcement agents who couldn't be swerved from their duty." --from The Untouchables by Eliot Ness

Within six months Ness had seized breweries worth over a million dollars, which put a crimp in Capone’s operations. After bribery attempts failed, several assassination attempts were made by the Capone organization against Ness – all of which failed.

While Ness was keeping Capone’s attention focused on the loss of income through raids on the breweries, other Treasury Department agents were focusing on Capone’s tax evasion. In 1931, Capone was charged with 22 counts of income tax evasion and 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. As a result of this, Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison, winding up at Alcatraz.

Soon after the end of Capone came the end of Prohibition. The 1933 passage of the 21st Amendment provided an end of a great social experiment – and a revamping of Ness’s career.

After Prohibition, Ness was reassigned to the “Moonshine Mountains” in Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio. A year later he was transferred to Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1935 – at the age of 32 - was hired by the mayor Cleveland, Harold Burton, as Cleveland’s Safety Director. Ness campaigned to clean out corruption in the police department and to modernize the fire department. He formed a new “Untouchable” unit of six men, who took on gambling, racketeers, and organized crime in Cleveland in an attempt to clean up the city. Two hundred Cleveland officers were forced to resign from the force, and over a dozen police officials went on trial for various criminal acts. His concentration on his work was one of the reasons he was divorced by his first wife, Edna Staley Ness, in 1938. He would marry Evaline Michelow, and illustrator of children’s books, in 1939.

Ness showed his far-reaching vision while in Cleveland. He created the Emergency Patrol, which was a special unit of vehicles manned by police officers with first aid training. He also established a central communications center to take and dispatch all emergency calls. Ness also established a juvenile crime unit, and obtained city funds for gyms, bowling alleys, and playgrounds in areas where gangs were prevalent. He also worked with the Works Program Administration to provide employment for the youths of Cleveland’s inner city. Juvenile crime dropped 80% while Ness was Safety Director in Cleveland.

Ness had a number of accomplishments as the Safety Director of Cleveland, but he had one significant failure that would give his critics ammunition against him. Ness was unsuccessful in solving a series of twelve murders were known as the “Torso Murders”, and occurred between 1935 and 1938. These serial murders, committed by the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” were never solved. This - combined with his extensive ‘social’ drinking and a scandal involved when he drove away after car accident in 1942 - would create the conditions for Ness to leave Cleveland in 1942.

America entered World War II in December 1941. In 1942 Ness left Cleveland and moved to Washington, D.C., again in the employ of the Federal government to control prostitution and the spread of venereal disease at the military bases in the area.

In 1944 he left his job and moved back to Ohio to become the chairman of the Diebold Corporation, a security safe company. A year later he would be divorced by his second wife, Evaline, and in 1946 he married artist Elisabeth Anderson Seaver. It was in this third and final marriage that Ness adopted his only child, Robert.

In 1947 he would campaign unsuccessfully for the position of mayor of Cleveland – losing by what one source called an ‘embarrassingly large margin’. He was also removed as the CEO of Diebold after the election. Ness would become involved with several other businesses, but had difficulty providing for his family – until he met Oscar Fraley, an author who worked with Ness and ultimately published a book chronicling Ness’s Chicago years. The “Untouchables” would be published in 1957, just six months after Ness’s May 16th death from a heart attack.

Ness’s remains were cremated and kept by family members until 1997. Then his ashes – along with those of his last wife and his son - were scattered on the waters of Wade Lake in the Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. A marker was erected to honor the man who revolutionized and revitalized Cleveland’s police force, and had captured America's imagination with his honesty and his war against crime.

WEB RESOURCES:

About Cleveland
Crime Library
FBI Files
FBI Freedom of Information Act Records
Find A Grave
Finding Dulcinea
Google Books: Eliot Ness and the Untouchables
Historical Biographies
Ness Returns to Cleveland
NNDB
Ohio History Central
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Eliot Ness, Wikipedia
Ness as a Child, Cleveland Memory
Cleveland Safety Director, Cleveland Memory
Campaign poster for Mayor of Cleveland, Photo collection (Cleveland years)
Elisabeth and Bobby Ness, Cleveland Memory
Ness’s burial marker, Find-a-Grave
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April 3: David Kenney, "Father of the Vacuum Cleaner Industry"

Note: Great Lives is honored to present our first guest blogger, Mary Robinson Sive, who contributed this life story to the Great Lives blog. Mary is the author of Lost villages: historic driving tours in the Catskills as well as other works.

An almost forgotten New Jersey inventor was a pioneer in the vacuum cleaner industry long before this appliance became a standard piece of equipment in most households. Historical accounts often do not give this self-taught and self-made man credit, some dismissing him as a “New Jersey plumber;” others not mentioning him at all. Yet the patents he received between 1903 and 1913 placed him at the center of the American vacuum cleaner industry in the first two decades of the 20th century. In 1910 the New York Times called him the “father of the vacuum cleaner industry.”

The son of Irish immigrants, Kenney at age 15 was apprenticed to a plumber and soon had his own business with offices in New Jersey and New York City. In the 1890s he received patents for a “Flushometer” (to flush toilets) and other plumbing devices that proved quite profitable. Soon he joined the many other inventors who sought to improve housecleaning by mechanical means. By 1902 he installed a steam engine in Pittsburgh that could suck dust out of all parts of a large building.

(Frick Building 1902 installation)
An English engineer, H. Cecil Booth, coined the term “vacuum cleaner” for his truck-mounted invention. He applied for a US patent during the time that Kenney also had several patent applications pending. Kenney received his most significant patent in 1907 after a six-year wait. The Englishman’s application for a US patent was now moot.

According to a 1906 ad Kenney's firm counted the White House and the New York Times building among its customers for stationary central vacuum systems. Two years later it was chosen to install such a system in New York's Singer Building, at the time the world’s tallest office structure, and later provided such service in the US Treasury building.

In a highly competitive environment Kenney was aggressive in pursuing his business interests. He was successful in several lawsuits alleging patent infringement and eventually gave up manufacturing in favor of licensing other companies.

Portable vacuum cleaners came into their own after James Spangler received a patent in 1909 for one powered by electricity and sold it to William Henry Hoover, a name still recognized. But electric power was far from universally available, and a market existed for hand-operated cleaners. Sears Roebuck began offering three versions of such machines the same year.

Anyone living on a farm or in a small town who hoped to clean floors in a modern manner had to use a vacuum cleaner operated by hand. And that vacuum most likely used the nozzle patented by Kenney.

Most of the manual vacuums that survive are of a plunger type (shown in the middle above) that functioned somewhat like a bicycle pump in reverse, with the operator pushing the handle down a tube, then pulling it back up and depositing dust in a container. Other models required operation by two individuals. Sears offered a money-back guarantee on the three models advertised, but within eight years the manually operated cleaners were gone from the catalog and only electric ones were shown. Perhaps word got around that they weren’t really “labor-saving devices.” Women who grew up in farm homes in the 1920s and 1930s remember seeing manual cleaners, but they don’t actually remember their mothers ever using them much.
Manual vacuum cleaners are described in few books dealing with home life or homemaking during the pre-World War I period. Women’s history institutions have no photographs. More examples are found in small local history collections than in major museums. The Hoover Company’s Historical Center in Canton, OH has a number of these appliances, but the largest number is held by a private collector (vachunter.com)

In 1920 1,024,167 vacuum cleaners were sold for a total of $35 million, most undoubtedly electric. The industry for whose growth he was given so much credit by his contemporaries was well-established. Kenney now turned his inventive skills to yet another field and received his last patent in 1920, this for a heating system designed to improve the distribution of heat from a wood-burning fireplace.

The income from his various patents enabled Kenney to pursue other business interests, including real estate transactions beginning early in his career. During the long wait for the 1907 patent Kenney asked the Sisters of Mercy, an order of Catholic nuns who were his daughter’s teachers, to pray for him. His donations beginning in 1905 and continuing to the end of his life totaled over 70 acres and enabled Mt. St. Mary’s College, founded by the order in 1873, to move to a site near his manufacturing operations. He took an active part in the planning of the buildings for the school, which opened in 1908 with elementary and secondary classes and included seven girls in a college department. The school continues as a girls’ prep school with several hundred students. Kenney’s generosity resulted in his being made a Papal Chamberlain by Pope Pius X in 1906. Other civic activities included service on the board of a hospital and of a reform school.

Booth’s name appears in the British Dictionary of National Biography and in biographical reference works dealing with technology. The vacuum cleaners he invented and manufactured are held in London’s Science Museum. Kenney’s name cannot be found in corresponding American reference books, the Library of Congress’ “American Memory” or its Prints and Photographs Collection, nor in the Smithsonian Institution. While the courts uniformly held his patents applicable to portable household cleaners as well as to central installations, the industry largely shifted away from the systems serving entire buildings that he had pioneered in this country. His vacuum cleaner patents survived David Kenney by a few years. He committed suicide in May 1922. His body was found near Beacon, NY, after he had been missing about ten days. He had been in ill health for some years and had recently lost his wife and a sister. He was long forgotten by the 1980s, when the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame was inaugurated with names like Edison and Einstein.

February 22: Marguerite Clark, Film Fantasy Queen

She had a beautiful, waiflike quality that came across well in the silent films of the early 20th century. She was a contemporary of actors and actresses still recognized today, such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Lillian Gish. Despite the competition, or perhaps because of it, she was voted America’s top female star in 1916, and again in 1920. Her film career would voluntarily end in 1921 when she married a Louisiana plantation owner.

Marguerite Clark was born on an Ohio farm on February 22, 1883, near Avondale in the southwest corner of Ohio. Not much is known about her childhood, early education, or parents, but it is known that she was sent to the Brown County Convent, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Cincinnati, when she was about twelve. Her father died when she was around eleven, leaving the family in financial difficulties. She would eventually be watched over, and later have her career managed, by her older sister, Cora.

She finished school when she was sixteen, already having decided to pursue a career in the theater. The 4’10”, 90 pound actress would quickly show herself to be a talented actress..

Clark could sing, dance, and act at a young age. She would start her stage career as a chorus girl in Baltimore in 1899, and within a year, when she was seventeen, she was discovered by DeWolf Hopper Sr. and taken to New York. Clark made her Broadway debut in The Belle of Bohemia. She would receive positive reviews for her work in Mr. Pickwick in 1903, The Wishing Ring and Baby Mine in 1910, and starred opposite of theater legend John Barrymore in the 1912 production The Affairs of Anatol.

Clark’s popularity led to into a new venue for her talent: she signed a contract in 1914 with the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, with whom she made all of her movies during the next seven years except for the last one – which she made with her own production company. Thirty-one was then, as it is now, relatively late in life to start a film career. However, Clark had a waif-like, little girl quality that made her look much younger than her actual age, and she would specialize in playing young girls and fantasy roles. Her film debut would be in a movie short titled Wildfire, and the reviews would claim that her debut was “the best screen performance to date.”

Edward S. O’Reilly interviewed Clark in 1918 for Photoplay magazine. He stated about her:

“My impression of Miss Clark, formed by viewing her pictures, was that she was a happy hearted little elf smiling her way through the sour old world. She is all of that and something more. She is a serious minded little person intent on doing her work well. Even the directors say that she is less trouble than anyone in the cast, and obeys orders like a little soldier.”

She would work on forty films during her seven-year movie career, starting with Wildfire, and ending with Scrambled Wives in 1921. She was ready to give up the hustle and bustle of movie life, and settle for the quiet and serenity of living in the country in Louisiana. Also, her ambition had been to end her career when she was at the top, which she achieved in 1920 when she was recognized as America’s top female star.

Clark met Harry Palmerson Williams during a War Bond Drive in 1917, and married him in 1918. She would take up residence in his home in Patterson, Louisiana. She divided her time between her Louisiana home and New York – where she made most of her movies. Clark did have a new rule to follow in her movies: her husband forbade her to kiss any of her leading men, a demand that she met willingly.

Harry Williams grew up in Louisiana, owned and managed a lumber yard (one of the largest in the world), plantation, and other interests there, and in the late 1920s entered the budding aviation industry, using his managerial skill and business know-how, combined with skilled aeronautical engineers, to develop a series of racing aircraft. Williams would eventually die in when an airplane he was piloting crashed in 1936.

Clark returned to New York after the death of her husband in 1936 to reunite with her sister Cora – who had been her manager during her stage and film career. She would be the model for the cartoon image of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney’s 1937 masterpiece. Disney had seen Clark in the 1916 silent film version of Snow White and, he later confessed, the film made a lasting impression on him. A brief film clip of that film is here.

She would die in New York on September 25, 1940, after a brief bout with pneumonia. Her ashes are buried with her husband’s in the Williams mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans.

Most of Marguerite Clark’s films have disappeared, yet the legend of the little girl in the fantasy films still continues.

WEB RESOURCES:

All Movie
Find A Grave
Golden Silents
Google books
IMDB
Interviews with Marguerite Clark
Louisiana State Museum
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Frontal view of Marguerite Clark, Louisiana State Archives
1916 Publicity Photo, Wikipedia
1919 Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch publicity photo, New York Public Library

Harry Williams, husband to Marguerite, Louisiana State Archives
Gravesite, FindAGrave photo by Rob Leverett
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August 3: Ernie Pyle, The Consummate War Correspondent

"ALGERIA, JANUARY, 1943: Men who bring our convoys from America, some of whom have just recently arrived, tell me the people at home don't have a correct impression of things over here."

Ernie Pyle looked at his job as a war correspondent during World War II as one in which he told the unflinching truth, not based on political agendas or political correctness, and

As a result, Pyle was one of the most respected journalists of his era, beloved by the men – the common soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines – that he worked with because he wrote their stories, their lives, their truth, and he shared their dangers.

He had that rarity among men – the ability to look at where he was emotionally and professionally, and where he needed to be. He wrote September 11, 1943 in an article titled “Fed Up and Bogged Down”:

“Perhaps you who read this column wonder why I came home just at this special time, when events are boiling over in Italy.

Well, I might as well tell you truthfully. I knew, of course, that the Italian invasion was coming up, but I chose to skip it. I made that decision because I realized, in the middle of Sicily, that I had been too close to the war for too long.

I was fed up, and bogged down. Of course you say other people are too, and they keep going on. But if your job is to write about the war, you’re very apt to begin writing unconscious distortions and unwarranted pessimisms when you get too tired.”

Ernie Pyle – always called Ernest by he parents – was born on August 3, 1900, on a tenant farm near Dana, Indiana. He was the only child of William and Maria Taylor Pyle. A shy youth, he worked his way through school more or less as a loner, sitting alone during recess in elementary school, and seeking the quiet and solitude of long walks in high school and during his college years.

He was not an exceptional student, nor a motivated one. He got by grade-wise, with no real ambitions. He took journalism at Indiana State University not because he had a real, sincere desire to become a journalist, but because it was an easy grade.

Pyle would quit Indiana University the semester prior to graduation in order to accept a job at the LaPorte, Indiana newspaper. He worked there three months, then moved to Washington, D.C. to accept the job of reporter, then managing editor, of the Washington Daily News. He survived, desk-bound, for three years. He married Geraldine Siebolds in 1925, then quit his job in 1926 so he could see America with his new wife and Ford roadster.

After travelling more than 9,000 miles, Pyle went to work at the Evening Herald in New York for a year, and then returned to the Daily News. In 1928 Pyle became the nation’s first aviation columnist at a time when aviation was beginning to boom. It was during his stint as an aviation columnist that Pyle honed his story-telling ability that would provide the format for his columns during World War II.

In 1932 Pyle became the managing editor of the Daily News, but would leave the paper in 1935, hired away by the opportunity to write a national travel column for the Scripps-Howard syndicate. It was the era of the Great Depression in America, and Pyle travelled America to write nationally syndicated columns about the places he visited and the people he met. The column was very popular, and would continue until 1942.

Pyle began to achieve national fame during a trip to war-ravaged London in 1940 – a trip exercising his writing ability and setting the course for the rest of his life. His stories of the bombing of London gave Americans a glimpse of the war that they had not recognized before. Using word pictures, Pyle painted a portrait that struck at the heart of America while reporting on one of the biggest Nazi raids on London of the war:

"It was a night when London was ringed with fire…"

Returning to London as a war correspondent during the summer of 1942, Pyle would start the process that made him man loved by those who came in contact with him. He seldom took notes – with the exception of names and addresses – instead preferring to take the images he saw and the stories that came with those images, store them in his mind, then leave the front lines to write his story. He was treated as an autonomous reporter by his bosses, who allowed him the latitude that he needed to get the story.

Pyle had the gift of using his feelings and emotions to accurately, humanely, and compassionately interpret the scene for the soldiers. He wrote about the common solder, never portraying war as glamorous – but portraying it truthfully, digging beneath the surface of the men he met to find out why they did what they did, and risked what they risked, day-after-day.

And he was able to share those findings with the American public, and the public took pride in the men that he wrote about. Pyle wrote about privates, ambulance drivers, front line infantry, Captains and Generals – but not about the politics of war. He won a Pulitzer Prize with his column on the honor that the men serving under Captain Waskow paid to him when his lifeless body was brought down from a mountain in Italy – a column showing the death that occurred in war, but also the comradeship that often goes beyond the understanding of those who have not experienced it.

Pyle served in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and later Anzio, and in Normandy. He returned back to the United States briefly in late 1944, tired and dispirited. He had written in one column:

“When you get to Anzio you waste no time getting off the boat, for you have been feeling pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. But after a few hours in Anzio you wish you were back on the boat, for you could hardly describe being ashore as any haven of peacefulness.”

He didn’t want to go back to the world of combat, but he felt he had to – to do otherwise would, in his mind, be unpatriotic to the country he loved. After a brief respite he went to the Pacific to write the story of the invasion of Okinawa.

He landed on Okinawa with the Marines and Army units, landing on a portion of the beach where there was practically no Japanese resistance. A few days later he went to a small island near Okinawa called Ie Shima. It had been captured by the Americans, but there were still pockets of resistance on the island.

On April 18, 1945, Pyle was riding in a jeep with the commander of the 77th Infantry Division when the vehicle came under fire by a Japanese machine gun. Everyone hit the dirt by the side of the road, and when Pyle raised his head to check on the others he was hit in the head by a bulled, dying instantly.

He was buried at first on Ie Shima, and then reinterred in 1949 at the Punchbowl Cemetery in Honolulu.

America had lost a unique man. Pyle’s columns, compiled into books such as Here Is Your War and Brave Men, bring the story of the 'Greatest Generation' to those today who know virtually nothing of the men who fought - and died - in World War II - if they will read it. It is my privilege to have early editions of both of these books as a treasured possession.

Click here to read a collection of stories by Ernie Pyle from Indiana University, and click here to view YouTube Tribute to Ernie Pyle.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War
James Tobin, Ernie Pyle: America’s Eyewitness to World War II

WEB RESOURCES:

Article by Pyle in Stars and Stripes
Ernie Pyle
Indiana School of Journalism
Indiana School of Journalism: Biography
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
NBC
New York Times Obituary
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Ernie Pyle, Find A Grave, by T. Houston
Pyle's Corona typewriter

Pyle at Anzio http://journalism.indiana.edu/archive/news/041505pyle/
With Marines on the way to Okinawa
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