The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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of limitations ran out, dropped the chief engineer as a defendant. Years of hardball Chicago politics had turned Tim Ryan into a cynic when it came to graft; informed once that a gubernatorial candidate had been accused of embezzling fifty thousand dollars, he remarked, “Any man who could only steal fifty thousand dollars in that job isn’t smart enough to be governor.”22
EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER THE CRASH, in April 1931, Tim suffered another devastating blow. One of his sewer projects for the city, southwest of the Loop in the Pilsen neighborhood, was engulfed in a horrific fire that burned for nearly twenty-four hours and claimed at least a dozen lives. Bob would come to view the disaster as a key factor in his father’s death.
The Ryan Company had contracted to build the Twenty-Second Street section of a huge, $2.1 million concrete intercepting sewer that would travel southwest to the sanitary drainage and ship canal. During construction each block-long section of the ovoid, seventeen-foot tunnel was sealed off to maintain air pressure and prevent collapse; the only exit was a short, perpendicular work tunnel that led to an elevator shaft. The cause of the fire was never officially determined, but according to several newspaper reports — including one that cited Tim Ryan as its source — a cement worker had dropped a candle (used to detect air leaks) into a pile of sawdust. Timber and sawdust were major components in tunnel construction: wooden forms used to mold the concrete were braced against the earthen walls and anchored in place with sawdust packs. The fire began to spread underneath the concrete, pumping black smoke into the tunnel.
At street level a foreman noticed a ribbon of smoke drifting up from the elevator shaft and, fearing an electrical fire, sent three electricians down to check the wiring; they found nothing wrong. Tim learned of the fire around 6 PM, and the first workmen to flee the tunnel reported a smell of burning insulation, which led him and his crew to believe the cause was indeed electrical. Morris Cahill, the construction superintendent, warned them that if the fire reached the east end of the tunnel and destroyed the hoses maintaining the air pressure belowground, the entire tunnel section would collapse.
According to the Daily News, loyal employees begged Ryan to let them extinguish the fire: “We’ll be okay, boss. Let us go, please. It’ll mean your contract if we don’t.”23 Without waiting for Ryan’s permission, an assistant foreman led a party of men down into the tunnel; Cahill made three trips down but each time was overcome by smoke. With no word from the men below, Ryan summoned the fire department around 7 PM.
“My men are in there!” Tim exclaimed as the first engine company arrived on the scene. “What are we going to do?”24 Confusion over the fire’s cause and ignorance of its severity may have been as deadly as the blaze itself: the first two rescue parties descended into the tunnel without the benefit of gas masks. The operation went on for hours, slowed by the thick smoke and the difficulty of getting at the burning material. When the fire broke out, panicked workmen had retreated into the metal chambers at either end of the tunnel section, which were sealed by an air lock and offered fresh air pumped in from street level thirty-five feet above. As the fire raged out of control, it pushed firefighters back into the chambers as well, and the trapped men waited through the night, praying and trying to lie still.
By midnight the construction site looked like the scene of a mining disaster. A light wagon trained its searchlight on the mouth of the elevator shaft, and thousands of spectators, some of them distraught family members of Ryan employees, were being held back by a police cordon. Hospital squads had arrived on the scene and set up shop in a neighboring lumberyard. More than two dozen firefighters had already been taken to Saint Anthony Hospital, and the fire department had by now dispatched a full quarter of its forces to the site.
Firefighters attacked the superstructure over the elevator shaft and eventually managed to tear the roof off in an effort to provide more ventilation. Mining equipment arrived, and mine workers from around the city converged on the site to volunteer their services. After the utility companies shut off the electricity and the Twenty-Second Street gas main (located a perilous ten feet from the tunnel), crews of men with picks, shovels, and pneumatic drills started three new ventilation holes in the concrete — one above each air chamber and another at the center of the tunnel.
No plan was too far-fetched: a professional diver who lived on the North Side was recruited to venture into the tunnel in his wet suit, but after only a few minutes he signaled for help and was brought back up — the rubber was melting. A description in the Chicago Evening Post sounds like a scene from Dante: “Terrific heat developed in the cramped quarters underground. Blazing timbers fell.… Water, poured above the tunnel in a vain effort to cool it and dissipate some of the fumes, eddied, four feet deep in spots, and made it impossible to see even inches ahead in the thick white mist.”25 Sometime during the night, the air supply inside the east air chamber failed, and the laborers and firefighters trapped inside decided to make a break for it, but most them died of smoke inhalation before they could reach the elevator shaft.
Outside, the rescue effort was beginning to reach across state lines. Henry Sonnenschein, secretary to Mayor Anton Cermak, brought word from his boss, who was vacationing in Miami Beach, that the city would spare no ex pense in addressing the crisis, which threatened to become a citywide calamity if the fire breached the east and west walls of the tunnel into the remainder of the sewer line. By 3 AM a rescue squad from the federal mining bureau had roared out of Vincennes, Indiana, for Chicago, escorted by state police. A squad from the state mining bureau in Springfield boarded a special train with right-of-way cleared to the site of the disaster. But the critical arrival, just after dawn on Tuesday, was an experimental smoke-ejector truck designed by an inventor in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A modified fire truck, the smoke ejector was essentially a gigantic vacuum cleaner on wheels, and its long, flexible fourteen-inch tubes were extended down the mine shaft to suck the smoke out of the tunnel.
The crowd roared later that morning when sixteen men trapped in the metal chamber and already given up for dead began emerging from the elevator shaft. Early that afternoon rescuers recovered the last dead man from the tunnel: Captain James O’Neill, one of the first firefighters on the scene, who had been trapped in the east chamber and was trampled near the air lock by the stampeding workmen as they tried to escape. The final death toll was four firemen and seven laborers, plus a policeman who had been run over by an ambulance. Nearly fifty other people had been injured, some seriously. Later that afternoon, the young widow of Edward Pratt, a firefighter whose body had been recovered overnight, broke past the police cordon and tried to hurl herself down the elevator shaft.
By that time Tim had been summoned to the county morgue, where Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, the Cook County coroner, was convening an inquest to determine how the fire had started and how the eleven men had died. Bundesen had a long history with Ed Kelly, having worked for the sanitary district during the Whoopee Era; according to journalist Elmer Lynn Williams, he had proved himself “one of the pliable tools of the machine.”26 Kelly, still holding firm in his capacity as chief sanitary engineer, served as technical advisor to the inquest.
Called to testify, Tim Ryan wept as he recalled the first crews of firefighters going after his trapped workmen: “I saw men going down into that reeking tunnel without gas masks — without masks. I never saw such courage displayed in my life.”27 Neither he nor his construction superintendent could state with certainty what caused the fire, and the news accounts of a workman igniting a pile of sawdust never were introduced.
When the inquest reconvened a week later in a courtroom at City Hall, the panel ruled that all eleven men had died of smoke inhalation but declared the cause of the fire unknown. “Unofficially,” reported the Chicago American, “the jury members expressed the view that no human agency was at fault in the fire and tragedy that followed; that all precautionary measures were maintained by the contractors to safeguard life.”28 The city was indemnified against liability for the workmen’s deaths; the Ryan Company would pay any settlements to the families through its compensation insurance. A pall hung over the firm, exacerbated by the Kelly corruption charges still crawling through the court system.
IN THE QUIET SECLUSION OF HANOVER, Bob must have been even more determined not to join the Ryan Company. His grades had improved substantially; he was earning mostly B’s