A narrow escape

Bob and Lily were seated on the second floor, in the dress circle, in the middle of the fourth row from the back.  As the fire and heat bore down on them, Bob lifted Lily over the seats and to the east wall of the auditorium where they were able to pass through Door #33, clamber over bodies and jump down to a landing.  There Lily was pushed up against a marble pillar as the crowd surged past, struggling to reach lobby exits. Her spectacles were broken and fell to the floor.  "Bob was between me and the crowd and by bracing himself partly protected me, and swung and pushed me to the lower side of the pillar, where progress was someone easier," Lillian reported in a later interview.*

Bob and Lily's bios

Lily and Rob were the adult daughter and stepson of widow Elizabeth Ann "Eliza" Merriman Beach Howell (1837-1906). The deaths of two husbands left Elizabeth had twice widowed. She first married Lillian's birth father, Francis E. Beach (1844-1871), operator of a billiard parlor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1874 Lily married Robert's birth father, Josiah Howell (1831-1894). He had been widowed by the death of Robert's birth mother, Elizabeth Clark Howell (?-1871), leaving him with a two-year-old and a six-year-old. Josiah Howell met Elizabeth Clark while participating in the 1853 Australian gold rush, marrying her in Victoria in 1865. Robert and his sister — Annie Howell Curtis (1865-1941) — and two other siblings no longer surviving by 1880 — were born in Ballarat Victoria Australia, before the family emigrated to America and New York. Sometime after Elizabeth Clark Howell's death in 1871, Josiah Howell met Eliza Merriman Beach in Connecticut. The pair merged their three offspring into a family of five and in 1878 relocated to Dixon, Illinois, where Josiah opened a hardware store.  Lillian was thirteen then and Robert nine.

Lillian grew up to become the wife of Edward C. Benjamin, a piano teacher and realtor in Dixon whose father, Horace Benjamin, was an early settler in the region. Lillian and Edward lived in Freeport in 1902 but by 1903 were in Dixon.  Lillian's mother, Eliza Merriman, was related to another of Dixon's founding families, the Judds.

Robert Howell was a man of varied interests.  As a high school senior in 1892, he'd been president of his senior class (of nine students) and a member of the Young Republican Club.  He followed his father's footsteps into the retail hardware business, but after his father's death in 1894 seemed unable to find an occupation he could stick to. (See right for more discussion of his jobs.)  Six months before the Iroquois Theater fire, after a failed effort to sell furnaces, he sold some of his Peoria street property in Dixon. He raised a stake with which to prospect copper in Lewiston, Idaho.

It was a venture made to order for Robert.  The copper company name - Eurika, matched that of the historic 1850s Eurika rebellion by gold miners in his birth city, Ballarat, Victoria.   It might be that Bob worked as hard at playing as at working.  The Dixon newspaper captured moments of his hobbies over the years, including billiards, horse racing, duck hunting, intramural baseball and boating.

In the years after the fire

Bob

I did not find evidence that Bob Howell married, but he led an interesting life.  Immediately after the fire, he tried managing a Dixon office for a large national stock brokerage, Floyd, Crawford & Co.  A month later the brokerage's license was suspended by the Little Board, the Consolidated Stock Exchange.  It had been gutted in a utility shorting scheme by the infamous Alfred R. Goslin.

Retail hardware was the only occupational theme for Bob, and then only in his early years.  A few years after the fire, he opened a hardware store on First Street and Peoria in Dixon.  He later worked in Chicago at the Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett hardware store, and in 1912 for Hinde Hardware in Riverside, California (founded by Illinois native, Henry H. Hinde).  He also tried to lease his boat for scenic cruises on Rock River, worked for Illinois Northern Utility, and as a substitute mailman in Dixon.  He wintered in Riverside, California in 1942. During the last two to three years of his life, suffered health problems that resulted in foot amputation and left him confined in a nursing home in Dixon.  At his death his He left his property on First street to the Dixon Library.† 

Lily

Her Iroquois experience did not frighten Lily away from theaters.  At the end of her life, she owned shares in a Dixon, Illinois theater.  Lily's husband, Benjamin, died in 1913, so she spent the last thirty-seven years of her life alone.  Far from a solitary existence, she was active on the hospital board, traveled to spend time with friends and relatives, entertained, and seemingly sent off a notice of her every move to the Dixon Telegraph newspaper.  Dixon remained her primary home for the rest of her life, most of those years spent at 304 Peoria St.

Discrepancies and addendum

*  Newspapers sometimes reported Robert Howell's nickname as Bob, other times as Rob.

† There may have been a falling out between Bob and Lily later in life.  He did not include her in his will, and in the numerous newspaper references about each of their lives, after about 1920, none mentioned Lily and Bob participating in joint activities.

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