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Twenty-eight-year-old Norton W. Barker (1875–1954)
of Michigan City, Indiana, was at the Iroquois
Theater Mr. Bluebeard matinee with unknown others.
He escaped from the auditorium with a young girl, an unnamed
stranger, who sat next to him. With two fewer aisles than had
been approved by the building department, one in front of
each box, and the remaining east-west aisles jammed with
people, they were fortunate to have the youth and strength
to follow a somewhat arduous path to safety. They
climbed into the box seating alcove on the north side of
the first floor and from there fled to a fire escape exit
into Couch Place alley.
Norton was married to Marjory Clark Barker, and they
had two toddlers, Wallace and Marjory. Norton worked
for the Haskell & Barker Car Company in Michigan
City, manufacturer of railway cars. Norton's uncle,
the wealthy John H. Barker Jr., was company
president and principal owner.† It employed over
3,000 workers. Michigan City, in 1903 a community of
around 15,000 residents, was a three-hour train ride
southwest of Chicago.
In 1878 when Norton was a three-year-old, his father, Wallace
Barker, had drowned in a boating accident on Lake
Michigan with a group of his fellow Hyde Park Qui
Vive yacht club members. Wallace's hardware company,
W. C. Barker, had failed two years earlier.
Norton grew up in Chicago, where his mother, Jessie
Norton Barker, chose to remain after her husband's
death. He attended Phillips Andover Academy prep
school near Boston. At her passing in 1899, Norton
moved to Michigan City, where he met his wife.
In the years after the fire
Norton and Marjory's marriage ended in divorce, and
in 1925 he remarried to Florence E. Wilbur. By 1918,
age forty, he described himself as retired. For
twenty months 1921–1923, newspapers carried dozens
of stories of his daughter's failed effort to force
Bryn Mawr to reinstate her after expulsion.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* Barker and his girlfriend were not the only ones
to take this arduous path from the theater. One
young man in the twelve-member
Sanborn party occupying
that box seat would later describe a man climbing
into the box, leaving his wife and children in their
seats. The group shamed him into returning to his
family, asserting he had been looking for an exit.
† At his death in 1910, the bulk of John H.
Barker's thirty million dollar estate was left to
his fourteen-year-old daughter, Catherine. Norton Barker
received a "gift" from his uncle's estate (a portion
of ten million dollars), adding to his 1896
inheritance of $50,000 from his grandmother, Cordelia Collamer Barker.
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