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The future looked bright

Eleven years into their marriage, by 1898, Gertrude W. Smeal Blackman (1864–1944) and Harry Edward Blackman (1865–1947) probably felt optimistic about the future. Harry had a good job. They had a new home. Their family was nicely balanced, with two daughters and two sons.  Four years earlier they had moved to The Park area in Glenview, Illinois north of Chicago, a forty-acre planned community. They attended Glenview's New Church that had been co-founded by Harry's father, Orlando Blackman).^▼1

In Glenview, the Blackman's lived next door to Gertrude's parents and siblings: James and Adelaide McAdams Smeal, and their grown children, Hugh, William and Florence L. Smeal (1871–1943).

During the next five years, four deaths, including two of their children, shattered the Blackman's happy life.

• When Harry lost his father in 1899, and Gertrude lost hers in 1900, they likely recognized death as a natural part of living. Both men had lived long lives.  Acceptance of their oldest son's death in November of 1902 would have been much more painful: Harold Smeal Blackman (b.1895) was just seven years old.
• The fourth hit, in December of 1903, was bittersweet. Their oldest daughter, Ethel Blackman (b.1890), was a victim in America's worst theater disaster at the Iroquois Theater.  Ten-year-old Gladys (1893–1978) and six-year-old Geoffrey (sometimes spelled Godfrey, Jeffrey, Jeoffery or Geoffrey) Blackman (1897–1965), escaped, along with Gertrude's sister, Florence Smeal (1871–1943).

Florence's nightmare

Florence and the three Blackman children were seated in the second-floor balcony. She got the two youngest to a fire escape and down the stairs to safety in Couch alley, but thirteen-year-old Ethel wasn't with them. Newspapers did not report Florence's initial response. Getting back inside the theater would have been nearly impossible. She would have had to push past hundreds of people fleeing in the opposite direction — while her niece and nephew stood in freezing temperatures watching bodies crash to the ground from fire escapes. Florence and the other two children might have run to the Marshall Field store a few blocks away. Harry Blackman, her brother-in-law and the children's father, was a freight manager there.

Looking for Ethel

Florence took Gladys and Geoffrey home to Gertrude in Glenview.  For the next seven or so hours, the family waited for news.  Florence and Gertrude's brother, William Smeal, joined Harry Blackman to search hospitals and morgues for Ethel's body.

Ethel Found

By midnight morgues were closing their doors for a few hours to update victim lists and organize the bodies.  Harry and William found Ethel's body during the last few hours before the doors closed for the night.

Harry wrapped his daughter in his coat, carried her in a cab to the North-Western depot and on a train to Glenview.  The Marshall Everett disaster book describes Harry taking Ethel home but relied on an inaccurate newspaper story and miss named him as James Blackburn instead of Harry Blackman, and reported that he and Ethel attended the theater together, rather than she with her aunt and siblings.

Bureaucracy & careless reporting

In his hurry to take Ethel home, Harry circumvented the city's regulation for unnatural deaths.^▼2  The official process: 1.) Coroner's office views the body and determines the cause of death, 2.) Family submits burial request, 3.) Coroner's office authorizes burial, 4.) Family takes possession of the body. Two days after the fire, Coroner Traeger swore-in six jurists and to streamline the first step, took them in a pair of horse-drawn patrol wagons to tour morgues and view nearly 600 bodies.

When the Blackmans tried to have Ethel buried, they learned they first needed a permit. Thus it was that on Sunday, January 3, nearly a dozen men boarded a train for Glenview to view the body.

Laid to rest

Ethel joined her brother Harold at the Northfield Oakwood Cemetery, where Gertrude and Harry Blackman would also be buried several decades later.

In the years after the fire

Florence Smeal never married but remained close to her Blackman niece and nephew.

Geoffrey Blackman grew up and served as a Private in World War I.  He became a journalist and married Emily F. Gaertner.  The pair had four daughters and one son who lived to age twelve.

Gladys became a schoolteacher.  She did not marry but traveled to Europe and spent her retirement years in Florida.  Her recollections of her childhood in Glenview, Illinois (below) are charming.^▼3 (Thanks, Glenview Historical society!) She makes no reference to the deaths of her siblings but it is not hard to imagine how tragedy must have impacted the idyllic world she describes.

Two of Harry's nephews, Randolph and Robert, sons of his brother Dr. George Blackman (1875-1918), lived with Harry and Gertrude in the 1920s after the deaths of their parents.

Discrepancies and Addendum

1.  Harry's parents were English immigrants, Orlando Blackman and Susan Cross, whose parents had first settled in Casenovia, New York. Over his thirty-six-year career as a public school teacher, much of it as superintendent of music in Chicago's public schools, Orlando Blackman played an important role in developing a system for music education in Chicago and later in establishing the church in Glenview.
 
2.  Harry Blackman may not have been the only one to do so; newspapers made passing reference to others who found their loved one's body on the sidewalk in front of the theater, or at Thompson's diner adjacent to the theater, and simply took them home, but did not provide details or names. Harry was the only one detailed in the newspaper.
 
3.  Gladys Blackman's recollection:

"I moved to Glenview when I was nine months old in 1894. I was sorry when they changed the name of Telegraph Road to Shermer. I suppose Shermer was a very important man, but there's something interesting about living on Telegraph Road which shows the foundation of the country itself in the very early days. The telegraph, of course, was important before the phones, because you had to go down to the railroad station and telegraph your friends in Chicago; or you went down to the station and telegraphed the doctor when a baby was coming.
"There was one phone in 'the Park' at Mr. Burnham's house [nephew of Chicago's famous architect] and that was as early as the 90′s. We all had phones in 1903. Then, we had kerosene lamps before we had electricity.
We walked to the village on cinder paths along a graveled Glenview Road. The wooden sidewalks were established by 1901 and everybody walked to school. The people who went down to the village to take the train, of course, walked back and forth every day.
"Remember, when you speak of 'the Park' people that these were all city people, thoroughly unused to country living. When you walked down on the cinder path or the board sidewalk, the first house on the north side was the Nelson Nursery boarding house about where St. David's is now. Then, the sidewalk crossed over and went down on the south side of Glenview Road and the first house was Heslington's. There was nothing between Telegraph Road (Shermer) and Heslington's (Elm Street). You walked in all weather. A few people had horses, but not many. The people living in 'the Park' 'had a bus. I remember it met the 6:40 and the 7:15 in the morning for the people who went into town to work. All the men in 'the Park' worked in the city except the people who were engaged in the Nelson Nursery and in those days, the offices of the Nelson Nursery were in Chicago. Then, that same bus met one or two trains in the evening. That's what marked the beginning of the evening.
"That bus was used for outings. We used to go to the lake shore to Wilmette for beach parties and we went to picnic parties at 'Kennicott's Woods' on Milwaukee Avenue and we went over to Ravinia in the early days. Of course, that was the day of sleigh rides. You counted it a poor winter that didn't have at least one sleigh ride. Adults and children rode bicycles. Mr. Junge and my father used high wheels when they lived in Chicago, and Mr. Junge still used his after he moved to Glenview where he used to ride to the Terra Cotta Company at Mayfair. I can remember Dr. King on his bicycle with his medical bag o the handlebars making his trips around the country.
"I can remember well, running out from our house to Telegraph Road to see the first cars go by — they were always red. You rushed out to the road, hurrying to get there in time. Cars didn't go very fast, so if you started as soon as you heard them coming down Telegraph Road, you'd get there in time. Two of the Burnham boys built a car and it was pretty exciting riding in that. My brother had a team of burros and I've driven over to Wilmette in a cart pulled by them. I can remember the sound of the burros' hoofs on the brick pavement in Wilmette.
"All the food was delivered by wagon in those days. A butcher used to come around with his cart and your mother would go out and pick out the meat she wanted and after she bought her meat, the butcher always gave the children a piece of bologna sausage. That reminds me of the striped paper bags that Mr. Rugen always gave everybody when you paid the bill. The children always liked to go down and pay the bill because they'd get a little bag of candy. In the days before deliveries, I remember Roland Rugen in his open chariot. No roman charioteer was ever grander than Roland.
"Rugen and Appleyard's — as it was then—and I remember it was Mr. Appleyard who came around a couple of times a week and took orders. I had a doll whose name was Cherry Blossom Falling From the Tree —Cherry for short—and one time her head was broken and my mother asked Mr. Appleyard if he thought he had any china heads for dolls in the store and would he bring one up. The next time he came, he brought a partitioned box, like an egg box, with dolls heads in it and held it down for me to choose which one I wanted. I remember choosing the black haired doll's head for Cherry. All the dolls I'd ever seen were blondes and it was quite a treat to have a black-haired doll.
"In 1917, Miss Constance Burnham (a classmate and chum of mine from first grade on) and I established Auxiliary 544 of the American Red Cross with a Red Cross workroom in the school rooms here in 'the Park' and many of the ladies in the village came to work with us. The Red Cross wouldn't allow but one auxiliary workroom to a town and our application got in first. I still have the records of how many hours were put in and how much was produced. We folded bandages and my aunt, Miss Florence Smeal, cut all the gauze. Even the children worked and the whole school knitted wash cloths, sox, helmets, scarves and gloves. I still have one of those Red Cross aprons. As the chairman, I had a beautiful floating dark blue chiffon veil with a white band around the hair and a red cross in front. Sometimes the men worked too, in the evening they used to make open pads for the Navy. Mrs. Jimmy Long used to make nite shirts by machine and her boy brought them down on horseback."

Thanks for Glenview historian Gretchen Kieth for calling my attention to some errors in the story.  Always glad to have the help.

Story 1049