Dear Stu,
I am exhausted this week from work and dealing with a sinus infection that won’t seem to go away. Tired as I am, when I go to bed I can’t seem to really wind down and stop thinking. You’d think the meds I’m taking would help put me to sleep more, but instead my eyes are just heavy, but I’m still awake. I don’t know if this is a “big life question” but, you got any tips to help me out? When my kid is like this I can usually just get away with telling him a short story or something (he’ll even go to sleep to a scary one which may just speaks to my lack of creativity).
- Alan G.
Dear Alan,
Get yourself a glass of warm milk and I’ll spin you a yarn. Submitted for the approval of the Dear Stu Society, I call this story… THE MURDEROUS MYSTERY OF JOLIET
In late 1920s Joliet there stood a majestic hotel called the Riverclear Inn. The place has long since been razed, but in its prime it was the go-to spot for all the local elite. We’re talking big-time bootleggers like Wild Otis Sullivan and Timmy Haggerty. We’re talking big-time singers like Misty Brown and Carol de Brees. If you weren’t in your finest wears at Bridge and Broadway streets Friday night, you weren’t nobody.
One cool night in October, 1928, bootleggers Wild Otis and his partner Desmond (Des) Hart set themselves up with a whisky bottle and two glasses on the 5th floor viewing deck of the Riverclear Inn. The deck was a marvelous place to be at night. There was a little three piece band playing the standards in the far east corner, a full bar with the good stuff in a locked cupboard beneath the counter, and the warmth of a fireplace for those who didn’t venture too far out to the deck’s edge. All this and the loveliest view over the Des Plaines river you could ask for, with the hotel’s bright lights reflecting back its splendor.
Otis and Des sat on the Riverclear deck, clear out of earshot of the night’s action to have a private conversation about “the family business” as they liked to call it. The men weren’t blood related, but both had deep roots in County Mayo back in the old country.
After about five minutes of serious talk, Otis and Heart were seen by witnesses to be laughing so vigourously that Desmond Hart nearly fell out of his chair. No one could hear enough to determine what was so funny. Suddenly, the laughing stopped. Both men sat upright, silent. The hardened gangsters looked scared stiff, as though someone had walked in behind them and held a gun to their necks. The question of what was so funny hardly mattered any more. That bit of information went with God that night, along with Wild Otis Sullivan, Desmond Hart, and 15 passengers on the dining boat, Meridian, that gently floated past the hotel at the time of the explosion.
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The explosion.
The Meridian was a night club on water. It ran at a snail’s pace up and down the Des Plaines river every night and delighted local onlookers who could only dream of affording a ticket to a night of dinner and dance. From a distance the boat emerged like a new star in darkness, the brightest white lights the young invention of electricity had ever powered. Not far behind the lights was the soulful sound of damn good jazz. Minutes away it started like a melodic little fly in your ear.
Maybe this was the sound Otis and Des heard that knocked the life off their faces even before the boat rounded the corner and exploded that night. In the wake of the incident, all anyone with a newspaper and a good pair of glasses could know was that the men were right to be scared. Because that boat should not have been there. They watched the Meridian sink a year ago, the night they rigged it up to explode on the orders of Irish Mob boss Dean O’Banion.
How does a ship that blew up a year ago come back to life and blow up again? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the right question is: how can the perpetrators of such horrible violence return to the scene and laugh—yet it is the ghost of their victims that terrifies so many?
No one else was hurt that night of the explosion by the Riverclear. Only Otis and Des met their end as they sat toward the edge of the hotel’s viewing deck, on a night that otherwise was so full of vibrance and life.
Two days later the city of Joliet experienced another shock. Another cool October night. A speakeasy on Ottawa Street. Three members of John Torrio’s south side Chicago outfit keeled over at their tables as they drank and told stories of their most recent “work.” An investigation found that the men had been poisoned, and the only viable suspect was a waiter no one on staff knew, or had seen since. After the police interviewed the speak’s previous owner, the server was identified as Hans Klub, a German immigrant and fledgling restauranteur who disappeared and was presumed murdered for refusing the mob’s protection (and the sizeable cut that came with it).
Night after night went down like this: gangsters all over the city being killed in the worst possible ways. Explosions, poisonings, sprays of tommy gun bullets, drownings. For a time the unpredictable horrors put the whole town on edge. But then the honest folk of Joliet—far and away the majority of the city—realized that in all of these deadly nights, not a single innocent was hurt. They came to believe that victims of gangsters had returned as ghosts to exact their vengeance; that time of year was just the right kind of cold and dark to do it.
The killing stopped on October 30th of that year, 1928. Anyone with a stake in the death of the gangsters who oppressed and threatened the lives of the good people of Joliet was confused. Even the most devoutly religious were disappointed, then angry. The vengeance had come to feel like an entitlement. The fates owed Joliet, big time.
No one was truly able to explain the stretch of killings that October that began on the deck of the Riverclear with Wild Otis and Desmond Hart. But all these years later a great many of the locals hold up Father Angus Tierney, parochial vicar of St. Patrick’s on Broadway as having the most poignant, if enigmatic, explanation of all. A transcript of his homily on All Souls Day can be found in the diocesan archives; these words in particular are held close to those most effected by the mysterious and violent events of October 1928:
“For the Irish among us, the festival of Samhain was significant to our pagan ancestors. It was a cold time. A time of death for the crop that nourished the people, and supported the livelihood of those who planted and harvested. Attached to these natural phenomena, our ancestors intuited the thinning of the veil between this life and the next. By October 31, the souls of the dead were free to wander amongst us, in our time and place.
Are we to believe that the events of this month were carried out by the vengeful dead? Let us entertain the thought. If these spirits are meant to have returned from purgatory, what right have they to punish sinners? Surely, the man in purgatory is far too occupied with the work of purifying his own immortal soul to be concerned with the affairs of another. If the spirits are meant to have come from heaven, how could they not know and follow perfectly the dictates of Holy Scripture? “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God” (Romans 12:19).
Has all this, then, been the wrath of God? Surely not. Our Catechism of Christian Doctrine (#3, Lesson 14) reminds us that Christ himself has foretold the final judgement in the Gospel of Matthew, speaking of his return in glory with all his angels (Matthew 16:27). What glory is there in re-living the horrible explosion of the Meridian, taking two more lives in the process? They were not innocent lives, no. But I submit that no life truly is, save our Lord and his Blessed Mother.
Fellow Christians of Joliet, I believe my ancestors were right about the veil between this world and the next. But what has come through the veil this October has nothing to do with God. It has everything to do with the deceiver, the evil one—Satan himself.
To God alone belongs vengeance, but we humans are instruments of his peace, not his destruction. There is so much destruction in these many deaths that one could easily miss the most insidious. This month has swayed so many of us to believe and behave as the evil men who have died. We have been guilty of presumption, not of God’s forgiveness, but of his blessing in carrying out these horrid acts. We saw men die and we rejoiced. We rejoiced rather than look into our own hearts for those parts of ourselves that need His mercy.
Whatever you believe about these horrible events and the mystery surrounding them, let us now put down our rejoicing and do what we have been commanded to do on this day of All Souls.
Let us pray for the dead.”
Hey Alan, I hope you’re asleep by now. I had to stop myself from writing a full homily there, hopefully the first mention of a catechism helped you drift. Praying the same for you, Dear Stu readers one and all.
- Stu
P.S. Audio voiceover should be posted and sent to the podcast by end of day 10/16.
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