The secret could finally be told.
Homewood-based historian Elaine Egdorf had been sworn to silence by our mutual friend, Mary Compton, who died Christmas Eve after a yearslong battle with ovarian cancer.
After seeing the obituary, “My first thought was, God bless you, Mary. Now I can tell,” Egdorf said.
Mary had been freelancing as a writer and photographer for the Daily Southtown and other outlets even as she dealt with her devastating disease and the side effects of chemotherapy. I first met her when I was hired at Star Newspapers in the late 1990s, where she already had been a longtime staff photographer.
We were there in 2001 when The Star marked 100 years since its founding in Chicago Heights. A few years later the papers marked a century since the founding of the first of the many papers that came together to eventually become the Daily Southtown, including the Englewood Economist and the Daily Calumet.
At the time, the Star and Southtown maintained separate newsrooms on the first floor of the same building, a former Gately’s Peoples Store at 159th Street and Harlem Avenue in Tinley Park. I was gone by the time the papers merged in 2007 to become the SouthtownStar, having left to take care of my young son and pursue a living in freelance writing.
So I missed the bulk of the downsizing, the dark days when wave after wave of my former colleagues were unceremoniously shown the door as the company dealt poorly with the electronic challenges of the 21st century.
Eventually, the former Peoples Store office with its sometimes-functioning escalators became too large for the remnants of what were once two bustling newsrooms. Company officials decided to sell the building to Menard’s, and less than a decade after celebrating centennials, the remaining Southtown workers had to figure out what to do with a vast accumulation of archival material.
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A smaller Southtown office down Harlem Avenue wouldn’t be able to hold the decades worth of printed newspapers and photographs generated by generations of journalists. Things were moving quickly. Dumpsters were deposited at the building’s back door loading dock.
That’s where Mary’s secret comes in. She was visiting with Egdorf and “was concerned that the photographs were going to be thrown away the next day,” said Egdorf, president of the South Suburban Heritage Association.
“Mary told me who to call, gave me the number and told me who to ask for and what to ask for,” she said. “I did what she suggested and asked if we could have some of the photos. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
She received permission to retrieve photo prints and newspapers from a storage room where they’d been accumulating for years. She also got on the phone with friends from other historical groups to come help. They would have one day to rescue what they could. The rest would be dumped.
“I called these people and said we meet tomorrow morning. Bring boxes,” Egdorf said.
A group of about 10 or 12 people, all representing south suburban historical groups, showed up at the rear loading dock the next morning, and “we just started going through the drawers,” she said.
There was a caveat, though.
“Mary told me I should never dare tell anyone what she told me to do,” Egdorf said. “I don’t know the reason. We didn’t talk about that. But she said you can’t ever tell how you found out. So I never told anybody. She made me promise to never tell, and I was OK with that, so nobody ever knew how I found out about it.”
After the crew of historians had collected all they could handle — “we probably could have used more boxes,” Egdorf said — they brought everything to the Thornton Historical Society’s headquarters, an old church that has a large room in the back once used for Sunday school classes.
“We lined up six tables and started placing all the brown envelopes alphabetically, starting with Alsip and going around that way,” she said. “Some of what we collected could have been for any of us. We worked there most of the summer.”
Eventually, the SouthtownStar photographs and news clippings were distributed to historical groups across the south suburbs and beyond. Egdorf sent some to the Chicago History Museum, and many of the train photos went to the Lockport-based Blackhawk Railway Historical Society.
“I’m not sure what people did with some of these, but the historical societies took them back to their museums and archives,” Egdorf said.
Brad Bettenhausen of the Tinley Park Historical Society, was among those who met Egdorf at the Peoples Store loading dock that early summer morning.
“We had a limited window to retrieve items from the newspaper archive and I pretty much dropped whatever I was doing to go over to see what we could retrieve related to Tinley Park and the vicinity,” he said.
“The newspaper photos and clippings are valuable items to help document local history. I regret that we did not have enough time, and still lament the materials we had to leave behind.”
I reached out to a few former co-workers from those days, all who remember a lot of confusion surrounding the Southtown’s move, first to a smaller office in Tinley Park and then shortly after that to the Chicago Sun-Times office downtown. One colleague said the moving window was tight — they had about 10 days to get everything out. A photographer said he remembered being told to throw away his negatives because they wouldn’t be able to find anyone that would take them.
When the Sun-Times sold its suburban newspapers, including the Daily Southtown, to Tribune Publishing a few years later, I remember another colleague describing his day starting in the old Sun-Times building, loading a box with items from his desk and carrying it down the street to the Tribune Tower.
While the remaining suburban staff made that trip safely, no electronic archive of photographs from the Southtown and other suburban newspapers ever arrived. Tribune Publishing now technically owns the photos, I was told, but we don’t actually have them.
We had lots of great photographers on staff who captured some amazing images of life in the Southland. The collection likely included plenty of routine pictures, too — grip-and-grin shots of officials shaking hands and other standards of 20th century community coverage.
“While a lot of what we got wasn’t earth shattering, it still helps to tell a story of our life and times,” Bettenhausen said. “I am glad that we were able to save them from a landfill.”
Mary Compton cemented her lasting legacy through her acts of kindness, her compassion for everyone she met and her talent for showcasing the good in people. She didn’t need anyone to know that she was responsible for saving perhaps the only remaining copies of a century’s worth of images and stories.
But I’m glad Mary’s secret is finally out. She deserves this enduring photo credit.
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].
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