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player ready...An election, an execution, empathy and the end of an expedition.
These are some of the events Paul Durica, director of exhibitions for the Chicago History Museum, found in the past month as he nears the end of his daily search of the pages of the baiduhai from 100 years ago. We’re sharing a few of his finds from November 1924 here, but many more can be found on his website, pocketguidetohell.com.
Nov. 4, 1924
Albert Bailey George was elected the city’s first Black judge. The 51-year-old Northwestern University law school graduate and practicing attorney “won a place on the Municipal bench by a vote approximately 65,000 over his nearest Democratic rival,” the Tribune reported.
“I am not exulting over a personal victory,” George said. “I feel that a great trust has been imposed upon me. The colored people of our city not only rejoice in this success but are looking forward to this service as being something that will help straighten out some of our problems.
“I am impressed with the thought that the welfare of our group may be seriously affected either for good or harm by my conduct. I am sensible of the fact that it will be my duty to be a good judge in every sense of the word.”
George failed to win reelection in 1930. According to The Journal of Negro History, George was also secretary of the Chicago Urban League, secretary of the board of trustees of Provident Hospital and served as attorney for The Chicago Defender.
Nov. 8, 1924
Former Chicago Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson sponsored an expedition — aboard his namesake sailboat, which had been constructed at Riverview Park — from the city to the South Seas in search of a tree-climbing fish.
Yet the trip was scrapped just north of New Orleans. Suffering from troubles which the Tribune reported were “chiefly financial,” the vessel was moored in Lake Pontchartrain after its crew abandoned ship. The cook was first to exit after being informed that no pay would be forthcoming — he jumped overboard and swam ashore near Peoria.
Thompson claimed the crew left him due to superstition.
“The chief reason we couldn’t hold the original crew was their refusal to serve on a ship on which the skipper had his wife. That is an old superstition of the sea,” he told the Tribune.
Thompson’s mission was sold to the public as a major contribution to science, but it seems he was just interested in its potential windfall.
“I made a bet of $22,000 that I would bring back pictures of the tree-climbing fish, and I’m going to do it if I have to go in a rowboat and take the films myself,” he said.
Nov. 10, 1924
Three men entered the establishment. One grabbed O’Banion’s hand and held it down. Two drew pistols, shot him to death and were picked up by a getaway car.
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“O’Banion sprawled on the floor beneath the pots of roses, which shook of his body hitting the showcase as it fell,” a Tribune reporter noted. “Out of the front door sped O’Banion’s wagon driver. Some say he started in pursuit of the murderers. Some say he was too scared to stop. But he hadn’t been heard from late last night.”
O’Banion’s slaying sparked a gangland war, and gave him both pop culture and literary fame. The protagonist of the 1931 movie “The Public Enemy,” starring James Cagney, was based on O’Banion. A fictionalized O’Banion similarly appeared in HBO’s series “Boardwalk Empire.”
Shot dead in his flower shop, bootlegger Dean O’Banion got a classic gangland sendoff
Nov. 22, 1924
Leo Koretz promised investors — including members of his own family — high dividends in return for buying stock in his Bayano River Syndicate. The Panamanian land totaled millions of acres that supposedly gushed with oil. But it was all a facade.
“Because fictitious oil can’t be sold, he paid hefty dividends to stockholders by recruiting ever more investors,” Ron Grossman wrote in 2021. “Koretz was robbing Peter to pay Paul — a classic Ponzi scheme.”
Those who were wary of Koretz’s claims traveled to Panama — as did a Tribune reporter — to visit the property they “owned.” The fact-finding group found no evidence of Koretz’s company in court records or along the Bayano River. There were alligators and clouds of mosquitoes, but not a trace of oil or the infrastructure to extract and transport it.
Koretz skipped town in late 1923 and lived under an assumed name in Nova Scotia, Canada, where his extravagant lifestyle took locals by surprise and led to his capture by Chicago detectives.
Once back in Chicago, he pleaded guilty then was sent to prison in Joliet.
In a prison cell in early January 1925, he somehow got his hands on a large box of chocolates, ate every piece, keeled over in a diabetic coma and died. His body was laid to rest at a suburban Chicago cemetery. There were few mourners, a rabbi said a brief prayer, and then he was lowered into a grave, as the Tribune’s Genevieve Forbes Herrick reported:
“And Leo Koretz, the man who loved superlatives, the man who bought things by the dozens, the score, the gross; Leo, the lavish host who had a hospitality complex, is left alone.”
Nov. 27, 1924
Lena “Ma” Greenstein often opened up her lunchroom to the homeless on holidays and provided them with free meals.
In 1924, the Thanksgiving dinner at her Movie Inn, 906 S. Wabash Ave. in the Loop, was called “The Feast of the Outcasts.”
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Those invited, according to a circular, included: “The migratory workers, tramps, hobos and bums, reformed hi-jackers and jack-roilers, unsuccessful rum runners and bootleggers, former Black Harders and white slavers, habitual booze fighters and dopes, unlucky ex-cons and ex-gunmen, the handicapped, the mistreated, the wornouts, disappointed agitators, soap boxers and spittoon philosophers, and all the down and outers whom the government, society and the church have forgotten this day,” the Tribune reported.
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