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Tom and Maggie Winder lost
two of their five children at the Iroquois Theater:
seventeen-year-old
Paul W. Winder (b. 1886), a student at R. T. Crane
High School and thirteen-year-old Barry
Winder (b. 1891).
The Winder family lived at 201 S. Harvey
in Oak Park, Illinois. The boys
had three siblings, including an older
sister, a younger brother and a
three-year-old sister.
Two years after the Iroquois fire, Tom and Maggie had another child, a daughter.
Thomas identified the bodies of
his sons and had them buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park.
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The Winder children had interesting parents
Margaret "Maggie"
Walsh Winder (1862-1946) emigrated from
England as a young child with her parents. Thomas
"Tom" Woods Winder (1862-1933) was born in Ohio and
Maggie's family lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They married in 1884 and
spent their honeymoon bicycling around California.
To win a $2,500 prize from the Buffalo Express
newspaper (or $1,000 from the Eclipse Wheels bicycle
company; reports varied), Tom spent 274 consecutive
days in 1895 bicycling around the perimeter of the
United States on a twenty-two-inch Eclipse bicycle. He then
spent 1896 on a lecture tour about his bicycling
adventures.
A writer at heart, as a
young man Tom tried his hand at newspaper ownership,
purchasing the Warsaw Wasp newspaper in 1884.
He stopped publishing a year later when the lease on his
office ran out. By 1903 he turned to the production end of the
publishing
and worked as a printer for newspapers in Chicago,
in later life becoming head of the composing room
for a Methodist book publisher.
In 1924 Tom and Maggie returned to California for a
visit to celebrate their fortieth wedding
anniversary.
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