A month after the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, a newspaper story appeared describing the horrific experience of Mary Lutiger and her mother, Eleanora Lutiger, on December 30, 1903.
As they made their way to a fire escape exit, just stepping out onto the landing, they were hit from behind by a large man wielding a knife. Eleanora was knocked back into the theater, where she died. He left a long cut in Mary's back and continued slashing his way through the crowd. A police officer had watched his brutality and was ready for him when he reached the ground, felling him with a club. When the officer returned to helping people fleeing the theater, the knifer regained consciousness and escaped, his identity unknown.

Sixty-five-year-old Eleanora Oevilie Lutiger (b. 1839)* and at least one of her five adult children, Mary Lutiger, went to the Christmas season matinee at Chicago's newest luxury playhouse, the Iroquois Theater on Randolph street. They were seated in the second-floor balcony. According to a later newspaper report, there may have been other women in the theater party not related to the Lutigers. The night before, a woman in the original group who planned to attend had a premonitory dream about a fire. Some of the women were troubled enough that they decided to stay home. It was not reported how many women were part of the original plan or how many stayed home, only that Eleanora and Mary went on to the theater. This is the fourth report of a premonition of disaster I've come across in researching Iroquois victims.

Eleanora lost her life there that afternoon with nearly six hundred others in the worst theater fire in US history. Her only son, George Lutiger Jr., identified his mother's body. Mary Lutiger was taken to Passavant Hospital. She survived but with such severe burns that new ears had to be fashioned from grafted skin and her teaching career was over.

Born in a village near Zurich, Switzerland, Eleanora had emigrated to the United States in 1868 at age twenty-nine. Within her first two years in America, she found a husband and gave birth to the first of their five children. Her husband, saloon keeper George Lutiger Sr. (1841–1899), had emigrated from Switzerland as well in 1867. He died of liver cancer fourteen years before the Iroquois fire. Eleanora was laid by his side in Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois.

Three of Eleanora's children, Annie, George Jr, and twenty-four-year-old Rose (1878–1940), had married and left home by 1903. Two daughters, both schoolteachers, twenty-eight-year-old Mary (1874–1937) and twenty-three-year-old Eleanora Marie (1879–1961), shared a rented flat with their mother at 756 S. Trumbull Ave. in Chicago, southeast of Garfield Park.

Mary Lutiger taught at the Thomas Chalmers school. After the fire, the Chicago school system voted to award three months paid leave of absence, and soon after she filed suit against the city, the school board listed her as "unassigned." I found no evidence that she returned to teaching.

Three of Eleanora's daughters were school teachers prior to marriage — Mary at Chalmers, Rose at the Hammond school, and Eleanora Marie at an unknown school.

Eleanora's funeral was held the morning of Monday, January 4, 1904, at St. Mary's Church, and the burial was at Waldheim Cemetery.

Eleanora may have had the opportunity to know two of her grandchildren before her death. One was the son of George jr and his wife, Josephine, and the other daughter of Annie and her husband, Joseph Youngs, born January 5, 1892. The Youngs daughter did not survive past 1909, and her date of death is not known. Joseph Youngs was known in the sporting world as Tommy Ryan.† For a time, George Lutiger jr followed in his father's footsteps and co-owned a saloon at 634 W. Vanburen with William Hamilton. He later went into the sanitation business.

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