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Three friends planned a theater outing to see Mr. Bluebeard for Wednesday afternoon, the day
before New Year's eve celebrations. From
affluent families and members of Chicago society, they had
numerous party invitations to choose from, with
servants to ready their garments or drive the
carriage from their large homes on Calumet Avenue to
the Iroquois. Though separated briefly during
the frantic rush to escape from the fire at the
Iroquois Theater, like most audience members seated on the first
floor of the auditorium, all three survived without injury, the only
consequence being the loss of their coats.
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Bessie
For twenty-year-old Bessie A. Knight (1883–1961), a sophomore at Smith College in
Massachusetts, Christmas break was coming to an end, and she'd soon be boarding a train to return to
school, leaving behind her family's eight-bedroom home on Calumet St. in Chicago.
The family:
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Mother Adele Brown Knight (1856–1912), descendent of American Revolution veteran Lemuel Hawley.
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Father Clarence A. Knight (1853–1911), a prosperous attorney.
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Younger brother, James H. Knight (1886–).
Eight years after the Iroquois fire, Bessie and Martha Aldrich
became sisters-in-law when Bessie married Martha's
brother, Louis Sherman Aldrich. Three months later,
she lost her father, and her mother passed before
the birth of Louis and Bessie's child, named
Clarence, after her father.
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Martha
After her holiday visit, in Chicago twenty-three-year-old
Martha Aldrich (1880–1955) would also head back east to Buffalo,
New York, where she lived with her father, J. Frank
Aldrich, an executive at the City National Bank and
a former Illinois congressman, her young stepmother,
Mariska (a soprano that in another seven years would
debut at the Metropolitan Opera), an infant
half-sister and three servants. The Aldrich family
had lived in Chicago for many years before the move
to Buffalo and maintained close ties to the city.
Martha's choice of a
husband wasn't as fortuitous as Bessie's and
Susan's. Willard Miller abandoned her for a waitress
amidst a scandal involving missing funds and
multiple weddings. Martha and their son Billy lived
with her father for many years, eventually moving to
California.
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Susan
Twenty-two-year-old Susan D.
Hoyne (1881–1972), nicknamed Susie, was the daughter
of Chicago attorney Thomas Hoyne (1843–1941) and
Jeanie Maclay Hoyne (1850–1921). The family lived in
a four-story greystone on Calumet, six blocks from
Bessie Knight. Five of the Hoyne children lived at
home in 1903. Susan attended college for two years
and, at age thirty-five in 1916, married Frederick
Ingraham. The pair settled in Cleveland, Ohio. They
did not have children. He died in 1961, and Susan
followed a decade later.
While Susie and her friends were escaping out the front
door, at the back of the theater was a horror show
with a slight connection to her family.
Painters that had been working in the Booth Hall
lecture hall at Northwestern's 3rd-floor law
school were trying desperately to save people
trapped in the Iroquois balconies, shoving ladders
and planks across Couch Place alley. Susie's
grandfather had donated the money on which
Northwestern's law school was founded, and her
father was an alumnus. Her father was a one-time
mayor of Chicago, and her brother, Maclay Hoyne
(1872–1939), became a prominent prosecutor in
Chicago. As states attorney in 1918, Maclay
appointed
Nellie Carlin to the position of assistant
states attorney, the first female in Illinois
history to fill that position. In 1904 Nellie represented the wrongful death claims of twenty
Iroquois Theater victims.
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