Chapter IV: My First Big “scoop”

The escape of McGarrigle from the Chicago jail gave me an opportunity to score my first conspicuous news scoop. It won me a lot of glory among the craft and what was more gratifying, boosted my salary so substantially that I landed among the highest salaried men on the staff, promoting me almost in a twinkling from a “cub” to a “star.”

McGarrigle had been chief of police while Carter Harrison was Mayor and with a change of administration that turned him out of office, he was appointed warden of the big county hospital. There was no more popular man in political life. Handsome, courteous, and genial, he had a host of friends. The gang that put him in his new job had an ulterior motive, for they made him collector of boodle for the most corrupt political ring that ever infested the western metropolis. The ring was made up of those in control of the Board of County Commissioners. The graft was enormous. Contracts were awarded without regard to lowest bidders and the merchants who furnished supplies to all of the county institutions were compelled to pay a big percentage of the amount of their bills to the boodle gang. The county was plundered right and left, the merchants getting even for what they had to give up, by false invoices, short weights, and outrageous overcharges. McGarrigle did the collecting and the ringsters divided the spoils.

The county was on the verge of bankruptcy when the newspapers turned the searchlight of publicity on the rascals and forced an investigation by the grand jury. Eight or nine county commissioners were hustled off to jail. Some got away and fled to foreign countries. McGarrigle was indicted with the others and was the first to go to bat. He was promptly convicted and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in Joliet penitentiary. An appeal was taken in his case and the courts having refused to accept bail he was kept in jail until the Supreme Court could review the evidence.

One Sunday morning Chicago was startled by the news that he had escaped. Unlike most jail breakers, he didn’t saw his way through steel bars to freedom nor overpower and disarm his guards. McGarrigle had brains and he used them to open prison doors. It was the most unique getaway I ever heard of.

Canute R. Matson was sheriff. He was a ponderous Scandanavian, big of heart but with sluggish wits. It chanced that he and McGarrigle were members of the same benevolent order. When McGarrigle found this out he gave the high sign and the grip and the big sheriff fell into a trap. One Saturday, when McGarrigle had been in jail for several months he coaxed the sheriff to take him home for a visit with his family, at the same time getting a hot bath and change of clothing. Not suspecting a trick, the sheriff came to the jail that night and conveyed his prisoner to the northern limits of the city in a closed carriage. Arriving at McGarrigle’s home without incident, the prisoner’s attractive wife brought refreshments and entertained the sheriff while her husband retired to the bathroom with a suit of fresh underwear. There was a sound of water running into the tub and then all was still.

The clock on the mantel ticked industriously and Mrs. McGarrigle was as vivacious and entertaining as an anxious woman who is playing a game could be. The sheriff grew uneasy. He went to the bathroom door and knocked. There was no response. He tried the door and found it securely fastened. Mrs. McGarrigle began to laugh. Then she dropped to her knees and prayed that her husband might not get caught. The sheriff went out of the house with a rush and around to the rear. The bathroom window was open and he peeped in. The tub was filled with water, there was a change of underwear on a stool, but it was like a cage from which the bird has flown.

There were exciting times in Chicago the remainder of that night. The sheriff notified the police and routed all of his deputies from their beds to search for the fugitive. The only trace they found was the track of the carriage wheels and the prints of horses’ hoofs at the rear of the house, where some trusted friend had waited for the boodler to crawl through the bathroom window. Sheriff Matson became the laughingstock of the town. It proved his political ruin.

I was in Captain Dunham’s tugboat office the following day and overheard Superintendent Sinclair tell of the mysterious movement during the night of a schooner from her mooring at Rush Street bridge. The schooner had taken on a cargo of grain during the week and had been towed down the river late Saturday afternoon, bound for a Canadian port on Lake Ontario. It was the schooner _Blake_. Instead of proceeding to Lake Michigan to begin her long voyage, as a well-behaved vessel should, she had been made fast to the dock at Rush Street, unmindful of the fine weather and fair wind. She lay there throughout the afternoon and evening. About midnight the bridgetender saw a carriage roll down to the dock. The horses were jaded as if from a hard run. A tall man got out of the carriage, shook hands with one who remained inside, and hurriedly boarded the _Blake_. Immediately afterward the captain came ashore, walked to a nearby saloon and excitedly telephoned for a tug to tow him out to the lake.

“That’s how McGarrigle got away,” I whispered to Captain Dunham and I pledged him not to mention it until I could complete an investigation and write a story for next day’s _Tribune_.

On consulting Lloyd’s vessel register I found that the _Blake_ was owned by Fred St. John, a wealthy shipowner of St. Catherine’s, Canada. I knew that a Doctor St. John was a prominent member of the medical staff at the hospital where McGarrigle had been warden, and I recalled seeing him leave the jail a few days before when I was there interviewing one of the imprisoned boodlers. It didn’t take long to ascertain that the Doctor was a Canadian, that he came from the town where the owner of the schooner lived and that the owner and he were brothers. My story was now fairly complete, except for an interview with Doctor St. John, whom I was unable to locate, although another reporter camped on his doorstep almost the entire night.

It was an interesting story that appeared in the _Tribune_ the following morning. No other newspaper had it. The _Tribune_ hadn’t been on the streets long before a squad of sheriff’s men were hurrying by train to the Straits of Mackinaw, three hundred miles away, through which the _Blake_ must pass after sailing the length of Lake Michigan. The officers were expected to intercept the schooner in the narrow waters of the straits and capture the fugitive. They had orders to take him dead or alive. They might have been successful if they hadn’t run afoul of Captain Johnny Freer and fallen victims to an insidious drink called “cherry bunce.”

I figured that I could take a night train, follow the sheriff’s men to the straits, get there ahead of the schooner and be in time to report the capture of the fleeing boodler, but it so happened that the _Blake_ had fair winds from the hour she sailed from Chicago and she almost broke the record for a fast voyage through Lake Michigan.

On the train that took me to Mackinaw was Melville E. Stone, now general manager of the _Associated Press_. He was then one of the owners of the Chicago _Daily News_ and a live wire when it came to gathering news. Accompanied by the city editor of his paper, he was heading for the straits to report personally the arrest of McGarrigle. I recall how nervous I got when the sleeping car porter confided to me that Mr. Stone had sent a telegram, ordering that the fastest tug available be waiting for him. How could I expect to compete with such extravagant enterprise, when I had come away with not much more than railroad fare? I had overheard the city editor scolding one of the reporters only a week before for charging too many carfares and telephone calls. What would he say to one who chartered a tugboat? I believed that he would expect his reporter to swim. When we got to Mackinaw early the next morning, a powerful tugboat was awaiting the enterprising proprietor of the _Daily News_. I hoped he would invite me to accompany him, but I watched him steam out from the wharf and there was a wicked grin on his face as he left me disconsolately wondering what I could do to keep from being beaten.

“Are you after McGarrigle?” said a voice at my elbow. “If you be you won’t get him here, for the schooner he is on slipped through the straits at sundown last evening and is well on her way down Lake Huron.”

“How is it the Chicago officers didn’t capture him? Didn’t they get here in time?”

“They got here all right and they hired a tug and cruised about all afternoon until they sighted a vessel, almost becalmed, heading into the straits from Lake Michigan.” My good natured informant continued, “They thought she might be the one McGarrigle is on, so they hailed her and went alongside. It was Captain Johnny Freer’s schooner, also bound down the lakes from Chicago. They told him of McGarrigle’s escape and Freer replied that he left a day ahead of the _Blake_ and there was no good of the officers looking further before morning. He asked them aboard and led them down to his cabin and opened some bottles of cherry bunce. While they were getting soused Freer chanced to go on deck and he spied the _Blake_ heading in with a fine slant of wind. She had every stitch of canvas set and the fresh westerly wind was driving her along with the speed of a yacht. It happens that Freer thinks a lot of McGarrigle, because of what he did for his wife when she was sick in the hospital and he made up his mind that the officers shouldn’t take him if he could prevent them. And they didn’t. Returning to the cabin, Freer opened more of his cherry bunce and they drank until they were ‘oreied.’ They had to be helped aboard their tug and they have been sleeping ever since. Everybody around here is laughing about it.”

I asked if there could be any mistake about the schooner having been the _Blake_.

“Not a chance. I have reported to the underwriters every vessel that has sailed through the straits for the last twenty years. Besides, I distinctly made out her name on the stern with my glasses. I rowed out and chinned with Johnny Freer before he got under way and he told me how he fooled the officers and got them stewed.”

“What is cherry bunce?”

“Canadian brandy, in which wild cherries have soaked for years. It’s a favorite tipple with Canuck sailing men, and powerful stuff.”

The old vessel reporter told me that the only chance I had of overtaking McGarrigle before he landed in Canada was to go to Port Huron by rail and board the _Blake_ while she was being towed through the St. Clair River to Lake Erie. I hurried to the railroad station and found my train had already pulled out. I ran after it faster than I ever ran in my life, grabbed the handrail of the rear car and was almost drawn under the wheels. Trainmen dragged me to the platform and cursed me in their excitement for taking such chances.

As I sank into a seat, gasping for breath and trembling from exertion, I began to speculate on the wisdom of what I was doing. If the garrulous vessel reporter had misinformed me about McGarrigle having safely run the gauntlet I would be ruined, for Stone and his city editor would have the story of his capture and no amount of explanation would ever satisfy my editor that I wasn’t a fool. I’d probably get fired by telegraph and when I returned to Chicago the boys at the press club would tab me a boob. No other paper would give me a job, for I hadn’t yet emerged from the adolescent stage of reporting. These and kindred thoughts chased tormentingly through my agitated brain all that day on the long ride to Port Huron. I began to liken myself to the gambler who risks his all on the turn of a card or the cast of a die.

It was night when I arrived at Port Huron without a dollar. All the money I had when I left Chicago had gone for railroad fare. I had gone without meals all day and was without the price of a cab to take me to a hotel. I walked from the depot and got even by engaging the best room in the house.

After supper I telegraphed a story of the cherry bunce episode to the _Tribune_, adding a personal note to the editor that I expected to head off McGarrigle and send a complete story of his adventures the following day. In an hour a reply came from the editor. It read:

“Stone wires the _Daily News_ that McGarrigle hasn’t passed through the straits and is not expected until to-night. You are on the wrong track and we are beaten. Come home.”

Somehow I felt confident that no matter what Mr. Stone had reported to his paper, the fugitive had escaped from the sheriff’s men and would be within sight of Port Huron in a few hours. Ignoring Mr. Patterson’s curt order to return, I went down to the docks and negotiated with Jimmy Linn for one of his fastest tugboats. We struck a bargain and then I asked for a loan. There was no money in the tugowner’s safe that night, but he proved a friend in need by driving me to the home of a banker and persuading that amiable gentleman to open his vault. With a fat roll of bills in my pocket I felt myself ready for any emergency.

I might not have indulged in such extravagant expenditure as chartering a tugboat if Editor Stone had not taught me a lesson in newspaper enterprise. While he was a newspaper owner and I but a cub reporter, I had staked my all on landing that story and I argued that a big bill for expenses couldn’t make matters any worse for me if I were beaten.

All that night I sat up in Jimmy Linn’s office, waiting for the break of day, as nervous and apprehensive as the wretch who is expecting a summons to the execution chamber. With the first streak of light in the sky I was aboard the waiting tug and we steamed out into Lake Huron. An hour later we sighted a tow of three big grain vessels, trailing astern of a tugboat, headed for the entrance to St. Clair River. My captain made out the middle one to be the _Blake_.

We ranged alongside and hailed the man at the wheel, but he made no response. Something entirely unexpected happened just then. We saw two sailors run forward along the deck of the last schooner of the tow and cast off the hawser that stretched from her bows to the stern of the _Blake_, and when her headway was checked we saw the crew lower a boat. A tall man, muffled in a long coat and carrying a valise, came from the cabin, swung over the side and dropped into the dinghy. Two sailors began pulling for the Canadian shore, the captain of the drifting schooner urging them on, dancing and yelling like a rum-crazed Comanche.

“That’s Johnny Freer,” exclaimed my captain, as he headed his tug into the wake of the dinghy.

That venturesome little vesselman had played another trick. I afterward learned that when he got rid of the tipsy officers in the straits he headed his boat down Lake Huron and overhauled the one McGarrigle was on, becalmed off Point Au Sable; transferred the fugitive to his own snug cabin, figuring that the sheriff’s men might proceed by rail to Port Huron in time to head off McGarrigle before he could reach Canadian soil. The tug put me ashore on the Canadian side soon after McGarrigle got there in the dinghy, and when he found there were no officers with me he accompanied me to a hotel, where he gave me the details of a story that caused a big sensation when it appeared exclusively in the _Tribune_ the following morning. As the last line of it went over the wires this message came back to me, signed by the managing editor:

“Congratulations and my personal thanks for your brilliant story. You have covered yourself with glory. It is the biggest scoop in years. All of us in the office are more than delighted with your splendid achievement. You shall be handsomely rewarded.”

I couldn’t help laughing when I read it. Tired as I was, I still had some sense of humor.

Mr. Patterson kept me in Canada until the Courts decided that McGarrigle could not be extradited. I left him at the home of Dr. St. John’s brother, where a lot of nervous politicians from Chicago visited him, eager to aid in keeping him out of the clutches of the law. They had to save their own slimy hides. When I got back to Chicago the managing editor summoned me to his office, raised my salary and told me to take a vacation of two weeks, with a generous money allowance. As he handed me a money order on the office cashier, Mr. Patterson magnanimously said: “I want to thank you for disobeying my orders.”

“Would you mind telling me what you would have done if, after I disobeyed your orders, Stone had got McGarrigle in the straits?” I responded.

It wasn’t nice of me, but I could afford to be chesty. A laugh was his only reply.

The city editor told me how excited they all were when my story came over the wires and how Mr. Patterson put uniformed watchmen in the pressroom and about the building to prevent rival newspapers from getting a copy of the _Tribune_ in time to steal the scoop. No other paper had so much as a smell.

Late in the day Mr. Stone, still guarding the straits with the sheriff’s men, telegraphed to his paper that McGarrigle was expected any minute and gave instructions to hold a working force in the office to handle a big story he expected to send after the last regular edition. The only one in his office that dared tell him of the _Tribune’s_ scoop was Victor Lawson, his partner, who wired him to “come home and buy wine.”

A year later I traveled five thousand miles to get another interview with McGarrigle; out to the Pacific coast by rail, thence by steamship to Victoria, another across to Vancouver, then another long journey by rail through great masses of snow and ice over the lofty Cascade Mountains to Banff Hot Springs, where the fugitive had sought safety from being kidnapped across the border. I spent a week with him and the story I wrote softened the heart of Judge Grinnell, who permitted McGarrigle to return and escape imprisonment by paying a heavy fine.

On that trip I ran across another of the boodle gang in hiding. He was Commissioner Johnny Hannigan. I saw him hide his face when I entered a hotel in Vancouver. He was reading a newspaper and recognized me the instant I did him, jerking a newspaper up as if to conceal himself from notice. I walked over to where he was sitting and snatched the newspaper from his hands. He almost hugged me with the delight of seeing a familiar face, even if it might mean his betrayal. He had been pretty much over the world since he ran away from Chicago to avoid arrest at the time of the boodle exposure. I never saw a man more homesick. Judge Grinnell also permitted him to return on the same basis as McGarrigle.

Lake navigation gave me another important news beat soon after that chase to Canada at the time McGarrigle played his trick on the fat-witted sheriff. This time it was an exclusive story from the lips of the only survivor of the passenger steamer _Vernon_, which foundered in the middle of Lake Michigan early one winter. She went down in a furious snowstorm, drowning passengers and crew, only one poor Swede seaman escaping to tell how and when and where it happened. I had witnessed the launching of the _Vernon_ the previous spring and had written an article for the _Tribune_ that pointed out her faulty model and construction. She was built for speed and with apparent disregard for safety, as sharp and slender as a yacht, with cabins perched so high that she was an easy prey to wind and wave. She reminded one of a wedge as she slid from the ways into the waters of the lake, flags flying proudly, bands playing and men and women feasting and drinking champagne to celebrate the christening. Captain Dunham, owner of many lake vessels and an expert on marine architecture, stood by my side. I asked what he thought of her.

“She’ll drown everyone aboard of her some day” was his sententious reply. I feared it might be prophetic.

Booth, who supplied almost the entire West with oysters and fish in those days, had built the steamer to make fast trips with passengers and fish from the northern end of Lake Michigan to Chicago. He lavished money on her construction and furnishings and was so proud of her that he named the boat after his only son.

As lake navigation was drawing to a close in the beginning of winter, a terrific storm swept Lake Michigan and raged with unabated fury for days and nights. When it subsided some fishermen discovered a gilded board on which the name _Vernon_ was carved. It was the first intimation of disaster. The owner refused to believe his boat was lost, insisting that she probably had found shelter from the storm among the numerous islands at the foot of the lake. The bit of drift the fishermen had brought in didn’t shake his confidence.

One afternoon, when all Chicago was excited over the missing steamer, Charlie Elphicke, a prominent vessel owner, summoned me to his office in the Board of Trade, where he showed me a telegram from one of his captains, reporting that he had picked up a raft from the _Vernon_, with a live sailor and a dead one frozen to it. They were aboard of his vessel, which had just arrived at Green Bay, in northern Wisconsin, to take on a cargo of lumber. Elphicke gave me a letter to his captain at Green Bay and promised not to mention the telegram until I could get there.

I was in Green Bay at daybreak the following morning and found a man to row me out to the Elphicke schooner. The captain showed me the frozen corpse beneath a tarpaulin, related the story of the rescue and then brought from his cabin the most forlorn human wretch I ever beheld. His name was Axel Stone. He was in such a pitiable plight that I quickly offered to take him to Chicago and provide medical treatment in a hospital. The captain agreed to this arrangement and helped me get him to the railroad station. His limbs were so swollen he couldn’t walk or even stand, for he had been frozen to the raft on which he escaped, without food or sleep, for nearly a week. Others had been on the raft with him but one by one they perished and were swept into the lake, all save Axel Stone and the dead man, both frozen so securely the greedy waves couldn’t pry them loose.

While we were at the station waiting for a train, an officious little chap, accompanied by two policemen, demanded custody of the survivor. He was the coroner and declared that he would not permit Axel to leave until after the inquest. I pointed out the physical condition of the sailor and warned the coroner that delay in getting him to a hospital might mean his death, but the perky little official had high ideals of his duty and was obdurate. I finally persuaded him to summon a jury and hold the inquest on the spot.

When the jury was assembled, fearful that we would miss the train and fearing more that Axel would be compelled to tell his story for local newspaper men to telegraph to Chicago ahead of our coming, I addressed the jury as eloquently as I could, describing the physical suffering of the unfortunate sailor and denouncing the coroner for “his heartless cruelty in imperiling a life for a useless display of authority.” The jury applauded my speech and the foreman announced that they would go on with the inquest without the witness. They even escorted us to the train.

It was an all-day ride to Chicago, so I put the sailor to bed in the drawing-room of the parlor car and when he was as comfortable as he could be made, he gave me a thrilling narrative of the last trip of the steamer _Vernon_. It caused a big sensation when it appeared in the _Tribune_. The sailor got well in the hospital I took him to and earned the five hundred dollars that carried him home to Sweden by exhibiting himself in a dime museum.