( Read a 1902 description of telephone operator in operation.)

Burning up the lines. Going viral in 1903.

At the 1947 Iroquois fire memorial gathering a year before his death, assistant telegraph operator at the fire alarm office in city hall, Joseph B. Casagrande (1868–1948),^▼3 recalled the night of the Iroquois Theater fire forty-four years earlier. After hours of fruitless searching in hospitals and morgues, some people came to city hall in desperate hope they'd find some new bit of information about their missing family members. Casagrande, who'd been thirty-five at the time, described the wood rail surrounding his office as like a "wailing wall " of sobbing men, white-faced and shaking with grief and fear.

The office was busy too receiving telegrams begging for information about the Iroquois Theater fire. Readers of special editions and west coast newspapers soon began peppering Chicago relatives and officials for information about their relatives that might have been at the Iroquois. An Indianapolis newspaper about six hours south of Chicago later reported that the disaster produced one hundred additional telegrams in its city the night of the fire and two hundred the following day. Major dailies in over thirty western states gave feature coverage the same day as the fire, including the Reno Gazette-Journal, Butte Daily Post in Montana, Desert Evening News in Salt Lake City, Morning Astorian in Oregon, Oakland Tribune in California, Evening Statesman in Walla Walla, WA, Ogen Standard in Utah and Lewiston Evening Teller in Idaho.

Pedestrian network

The fire took place too late in the day to make the major afternoon and evening newspapers in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune got its issue out at midnight but for eight hours, Chicagoans relied on one another for information. Because it was bitterly cold, and the sun went down before all the bodies were removed from the theater, folks were not chatting over the backyard fence, on their porch stoops, or in the park as they might have in warmer weather. The spread of the Iroquois fire news began as people traveled home for the day on streetcars and in train stations, at pubs, and while shopping, possibly for provisions for New Year's celebrations the following night.

Ring up Ida

Once at home, as later newspaper stories revealed, the primary conduit was the telephone, and it can be credited alongside newspapers with a majority of Iroquois victims being identified by the following day, no small feat.

There were roughly 1.8 million residents in Chicago in 1903, and 26,000 of their homes were equipped with telephones. Another 8,000 were installed in commercial applications. Many telephone calls on December 30, 1903, were made by people trying to verify that their loved ones were safe at home and, if not, whether they'd gone to the theater that afternoon and, if so, had they gone to the Iroquois? Could they be at a friend's house? On a train on their way home? Did the friend's home have a telephone? Countless numbers of frantic calls went to police and fire stations. Volume forced many incoming calls to go unanswered. When phone calls failed to provide answers, family and friends traveled to the Loop and lined up outside morgues, hospitals, police stations, and newspaper offices, along the way finding payphones to call back home in hopes that their loved ones had miraculously returned from the theater.

Networking in 1903 meant that if Harriet's sister Edna had mentioned that her daughter, Marian, was going to see Mr. Bluebeard sometime over the holidays, upon learning of the fire, Harriet called Edna to make sure Marian was safe. If Edna didn't answer, Harriet then called their other sisters living in Chicago, all three of them, and they, in turn, called others. Then Harriet called her friend from church who liked to go to the theater. A nightly TV news broadcast could not have been more efficient.

In 1910, a fire at the Stockyards in Chicago that killed twenty-five men, including popular fire chief James Horan, generated so many calls from worried relatives and friends that operators were instructed to provide callers with basic information about the disaster.

Communication juggling

Chicago telegraph and telephone operators worked diligently late into the night, dealing with the unprecedented volume of communications. Under ordinary circumstances, telephone systems then strove for operators to respond to each caller within three to five seconds. Response time was probably erratic that night, however, with many operators surely reluctant to interrupt a tearful parent to go on to another caller.

One such operator was May C. Blair (1863–1948), (see below) the only person on duty at the year-old exchange in rural Chicago Lawn / Marquette Park that night. It was a small community on Chicago's southwest side with fewer than five thousand residents, one of whom, Elva Fowler, would later be confirmed as an Iroquois fatality. Elva lived at 3450 W. 63rd, a few blocks from the exchange manned by May Blair.

Telephone operator May Blair at the ready

Forty-year-old May had gone to work for the Chicago Lawn telephone exchange in 1902 when she left her job as a bakery clerk. By 1920 she would be one of 16,000 Chicago Telephone employees, but in 1902 May wore all the hats at her exchange. She was the manager, accounts receivable clerk, accounts payable clerk, bookkeeper, sales representative, and the sole "Hello girl." An outgoing woman and well known in the community, May was the perfect person to handle calls about the Iroquois Theater fire.

May and her parents had been among the first residents of Chicago Lawn (CL), settling there in 1888, soon after they moved to Chicago from their Milks Grove farm in central Illinois. She was on hand as the first and only operator when the exchange was connected, broadcasting the town's band to subscribers. (Haven't yet found details about that broadcast but based on a photo at the CL historical society suspect it was a group of about a dozen community men with brass instruments and a drum.) Chicago Lawn was May's hometown, where she'd been voted "most popular" in the late 1880s. They were her neighbors, and it was her exchange. On December 30, 1903, she "stepped up" as they say, and for the rest of her life, vividly recalled her experience that night. A reference in a 1947 newspaper story about an upgrade to the telephone exchange referenced an interview with May about the night of the Iroquois Theater fire. It stated that she'd worked until daylight finding information for callers, evidencing that May did more than just connect lines that night. She relied upon her knowledge of community residents and used the exchange to learn who had attended the Iroquois and who had not, who had returned home, and who had not.^▼2

Chicago Lawn was tiny then, with around 4,000 residents (see more about the community at bottom right). To expand the customer base from its original 19 customers, May could offer a month's free service to induce new residential customers to subscribe at $1.50 per month for unlimited service. ($43 in 2019 money.) Calls into Chicago cost an extra dime.

The telephone exchange in Chicago Lawn was housed in a five-room bungalow at 3539 W. 63rd (razed around 1926), a few blocks from where May lived with her parents, Canadian immigrants Robert and Catherine Preston Blair. The family had immigrated to the U.S. from Ontario around 1865 when May was a toddler. In 1903 Robert worked as an "express man" at Bergman Express & Storage, and the family-owned their home at 3641 W. 63rd in Chicago Lawn. Some sources report that May lived at the exchange, even that the switchboard was installed in her home, but I'm not sure that was the case. She did live there, eventually, but probably not until after her mother's death in 1909. Prior to that, city directories cited May's address as that of her parents, at 3641 W. 63rd.

A newspaper story at the end of May's life included the reference to the telephone exchange having been her residence, and I suspect the later newspaper reporter incorrectly assumed that meant from it's founding in 1902.

See a picture of May and her parents on page 23 of Kathleen Headley's book, Legendary Locals of Chicago Lawn and West Lawn.

See another photo on page 21 in another of Headley's books, Chicago Lawn Marquette Manor, that offers a picture of May and her roommates, the Delfeld family. (If these links are no longer active, the books can be purchased on Ebay and Amazon.)

While living at the bungalow exchange in 1910, May had nine housemates, including six in the Delfeld family and three in the Carpenter family. Ten people in a five-room house. By 1930 she moved one street over to live with her sister's family, but the exchange may have remained at 3539 W. 63rd until 1948 when Illinois Bell upgraded service to 8,000 homes in west Chicago Lawn and relocated the exchange to a newly built commercial structure at 6249 Kilbourn.

May Blair's salary is not known, but according to a 1902 government report about the telephone industry, it may have been around $300 annually. Women made up over half the nation's telephone operators -- explaining why a union of telephone operators was formed in Chicago in March 1904.

One government report carried interesting remarks about female telephone operators representing a high caliber of worker.

Enlarge

Chicago's telephone growth

Telephones first made their appearance in Chicago in 1878, and by 1903 there were 34,000 within the city and 100,000 in the Chicago area, including payphones (see Telephone Rage sidebar at right).^▼4 "More than any other city in the world," Chicago boasted, with a backlog of 3,000 unfilled orders remaining in early 1903 despite 1,668 phones having been installed in November. Statewide, Illinois residents had made just over a half-million telephone calls in 1902.

So keen was the demand for telephone service that apartment rental advertisements in newspapers often cited telephone service alongside other features, such as location and furnishings — though that oftentimes meant a shared telephone, not one for each apartment, and in many instances, the shared phone required a nickel to place a call ($1.66 in 2022 dollars.)

The Chicago Public library offers an interesting timeline of telephone history in Chicago on page one and page two.

Discrepancies and addendum

I found no indication that May was related to Iroquois Theater fire survivor Clyde Blair.

1. Two of the few Midwestern newspapers to cover the story the evening of the fire were the Belvidere Daily Republican in Belvidere, IL (about seventy miles northwest of Chicago) and Princeton Daily Clarion in Princeton, Indiana, near the Indiana-Kentucky state line. Belvidere was unable to squeeze the story onto the front page but delayed going to press so as to get it in on page four, mentioning that many Belvidere residents had planned to attend the performance. One of those, Dr. Robert W. McInnes, was interviewed after the fire. The Clarion gave the story front-page coverage but included an inaccurate report that comedian Eddie Foy's children were among the fatalities.

2 In later years, May would be remembered as a friend to Chicago Lawn teenagers, helping schedule meet-ups when parental opposition to non-essential telephone use was an obstacle. This nugget comes from Chicago Lawn historical society archives via history author Kathleen Headley. As an officer in the society for several years, May's recollections had a better than average chance of being recorded.

3 Joseph was married to Lenora Forney Casagrande (1868–1946) and was the father of three: Louis, John, and Sabina. Joseph retired in 1932, at which time he was chief operator at the Englewood fire alarm bureau. He was on duty during some of Chicago's most noteworthy historical events, including the Haymarket bombing in 1886 and fire in the cold storage building at the 1893 Worlds Fair Columbian Exposition, at which seventeen firemen died.

4. Chicago Telephone's service then extended to a radius of 50 miles around Chicago with exchanges and 86 toll stations outside that radius, including 2,800 farmhouses. In addition to phones in private homes were private exchanges for stores and industries such as railroads and banks.

irqcommunications

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