Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Dec. 14, according to the Tribune’s archives.
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Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 66 degrees (1975)
- Low temperature: Minus 9 degrees (1901)
- Precipitation: 1.43 inches (2011)
- Snowfall: 10 inches (1951)
1908: Revelers slopped up 10,000 quarts of champagne and 30,000 quarts of beer at the Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue during the First Ward Ball. For more than a decade, it had been the city’s most notorious party.
Its hosts were “Bathhouse” John J. Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna. They conceived the First Ward Ball as a way of further stuffing their pockets, already bulging with graft, through imposed ticket and liquor sales. The first ball, held at the 7th Regiment Armory on South Wentworth Avenue in 1896, had attracted a wild mix of society thrill-seekers, police captains, politicians, prostitutes and gamblers.
The First Ward balls continued until reformers succeeded in getting them shut down after the 1911 bash.
1941: The Chicago Bears beat the Chicago Cardinals on Dec. 7, 1941, which gave the Bears a 10-1 record. The Green Bay Packers also had a 10-1 record, which meant the two teams forced a game to decide the Western Division winner.
More than 43,000 fans came to Wrigley Field in 16-degree weather to watch the Bears topple the Packers 33-14.
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A week later, despite temperatures in the high 40s, only 13,341 showed up at Wrigley for an anticlimactic 37-9 Bears win in the title game against the New York Giants.
1959: Pope St. John XXIII appointed Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer as Chicago’s third Cardinal.
1973: Illinois Gov. Dan Walker signed the Illinois Lottery into law, marking the 10th state in the contiguous United States with its own lottery.
1994: The Chicago White Sox traded 1993 American League Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Jack McDowell to the New York Yankees for minor league pitcher Keith Heberling and a player to be named later (Lyle Mouton).
McDowell went through three consecutive bitter arbitration hearings with the Sox after he and the team twice failed to reach an agreement on a long-term contract. After McDowell asked that February for $6.5 million, an arbitrator awarded him the club’s bid of $5.3 million. Angered, McDowell vowed that 1994 would be his last season with the team.
2015: Chicago firefighter Daniel Capuano’s company was dispatched to a fire inside a vacant warehouse in the 9200 block of South Baltimore Avenue, his second fire of the night, according to his father, Michael Capuano. Searching the second floor through thick smoke, Capuano fell down an elevator shaft and died hours later.
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City building department officials said the building’s owner didn’t have proper permits and the removal of the elevator was unauthorized. Capuano’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit days later against the owner of the building. The building was to be demolished in 2016. A stretch of Hamlin Avenue in Chicago was dedicated to Capuano in May 2016.
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