On December 30 in 1903, nearly six hundred people died when a stage fire spread to the auditorium of a new Chicago theater, the Iroquois on Randolph Street. Among the eleven hundred survivors was a mother and daughter from Carroll, Iowa, a community of around three thousand people. They were thirty-eight-year-old Mary "Mollie" MacClean Hungerford (1865–1954) and her fourteen-year-old daughter Josephine, visiting in Chicago for the holidays. As a pianist, Mollie may have been drawn to Klaw and Erlanger's extravagant Mr. Bluebeard. They'd purchased the elaborate sets and costumes from Drury Lane Theater in London. After five months in New York, the musical variety act, loosely drawn on the Bluebeard folktale from 15th century France, was on the road, appearing in K & E theaters in the midwest. It featured hundreds of performers, aerial dancers and comedians, with a twenty-six-piece orchestra. Mary was a pianist back in Carroll; Chicago's theaters and mega productions may have been a special treat.^▼1

From their seats at the back of the first floor they climbed over the backs of seats to maneuver past jams of other audience members, escaping without incident along with ninety-nine percent of first floor occupants. JB Hungerford was one of the few journalists who defended the audience for not having remained in their seats awaiting their death. Around the country other newspaper editors engaged in serious blame-the-victim stories, eagerly emphasizing attention-getting headlines about panic.  JB was not among them.  I suspect JB read Chicago newspapers and listened to his wife and daughter, and recognized that the the Iroquois owners' attempt to blame the catastrophic loss on undue panic was nonsense.

Ink in the veins

Molly and John Boyd Hungerford (1854–1946), known as "JB," had married in 1887. They had much in common. Both had been born in Pennsylvania and moved to Iowa in early childhood. Both had family members in the newspaper industry and John probably met Molly through association with her brother Paul Maclean, his partner in the Carroll Herald, from whom he later purchased full ownership. Mollie and Paul were the children of Matthew Maclean (1830–1915), one-time owner of the Atlantic Telegraph and Pittsburg Gazette/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In 1903 the Hungerford's had two children, Josephine and John, and owned a small home on Main Street in Carroll. In addition to his newspaper work John served as the Carroll postmaster.  When writing his father's obituary in 1946 John junior would describe JB as a man of strong opinions, unselfish and community-focused, who treated his staff as family.

In the years after the fire

Son John Hungerford (1897–1975)
In 1927 J.B. and his son John co-owned a California newspaper Upland News and sold it a year later, then started a paper in North Hollywood. In 1932, Hungerford launched the Reseda News, which he published until 1948 when he sold it, retaining Hungerford Press in Reseda until his stroke in 1975. Along the way he wrote three books about narrow gauge model railroads.

Josephine Hungerford (1889–1983)
While in college Josephine worked summers for her father on the Herald. She graduated from Iowa Agriculture College in Ames, Iowa (that became Iowa State University) where she met and in 1913 married John Simpson Dodds (1885–1950), a civil engineer. They settled in Ames, Iowa where they raised four children. John became an engineering professor at ISU — where in 1940 Josephine was a fifty-year-old graduate student and their son Parry Dodds (1917–2014) a twenty-three-year-old research student. (He went on to successful careers in the Navy, accounting, and teaching, his last position as a professor at the School of Business at California State University in Fresno.) Josephine and John's first born, Robert Dodds (1914–1976), followed his father's steps into engineering, and later his mother's and grandfather's into journalism, becoming a senior editor of Engineering News-Record. One of their daughters, Mary Sophia Dodds (1925–2020), followed he family tradition of graduating from ISU and making a career of journalism in Yakima, Washington. Josephine's oldest daughter, Katherine Dodds (1919–1993) married Robert Avery Fletcher (both ISU grads) and they had just one child, a daughter named after Josephine.
Josephine's granddaughter, Josephine Fletcher (1947–1964), died of complications from acute myeloid leukemia in 1964 at age eighteen. Today the survival rate for AML is sixty-six percent but in the mid 1960s it was only sixteen percent. I couldn't find a picture of Joseph the Iroquois Theater survivor so am using a picture of her granddaughter to suggest what Josephine Hungerford might have looked like when she escaped from the Iroquois Theater in 1903.

Discrepancies and addendum

1.  It was not reported who Mollie and Josephine spent time with in Chicago. In early August Mollie had spent a day in the city with Miss Annie Belle Moore, described as an old school friend. I found an Annie Moore in Chicago in 1900, born in Iowa, two years younger than Mollie, but couldn't find a second connection to Mollie.

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