William's family had moved to Buenos Ayres, Argentina, in 1892 when his father — William McLaughlin (1849–1921), married to Mary Rebecca Long McLaughlin (1852–1925) — began a thirty-year career as pastor of a Methodist Episcopal church there. Nine years later, at age 16, William Jr. was sent to Delaware, Ohio, to study at Wesleyan University.

In his sophomore year, McLaughlin spent the 1903 Christmas holiday in Chicago visiting his aunt and uncle, Dr. Frank W. and Georgeanna Long Gunsaulus. Georgeana Gunsaulus was sister to William's mother, Mary. William's cousin Martha Gunsaulus's wedding to Henry Hamilton Schueler was to be part of the holiday festivities, and William was to be an usher. The wedding was to be held at the Gunsaulus home at 2618 Prairie Avenue on either December 31, 1903, or January 2, 1904 (conflicting reports about the date). Some newspapers reported that the wedding was canceled, others that guests were wired not to attend, and a small ceremony of immediate family members was held.

Another Gunsaulus was at the Iroquois

According to a report from a Mrs. Charlotte Powers Ullman, Frank and Georgeanna's youngest daughter was also in the auditorium at the Iroquois.  In a letter to her sister in London postmarked January 20, 1904, Charlotte wrote:

"That poor nephew of Mrs. Gunsaulus! He was horribly burned. He was the son of a Methodist minister and been in a theater only once before in his life as his father was very much opposed to such amusements. As he was walking by he thought he would go in to see where his uncle Frank was preaching for the first time next Sunday. Added to the poor boy's physical anguish was mental suffering, and although Dr. Gunsaulus said all he could to relieve his mind it was in vain.
"Dr. Gunsaulus' youngest daughter was in the theater seated near the front with her escort. When the crowd began to go by them he held her, and would not let her move until the greater number had passed them. Then putting her before him, and grasping her under the arms like a vice, not allowing her to look back lest she should become panic stricken, for the curtain was burning behind them, he succeeded in getting her out." †

Helen was the youngest Gunsaulus daughter and would have been seventeen years old in 1903.  My efforts to verify her presence at the Iroquois Theater failed.  Her three older sisters were Martha, due to marry the day after the fire, Mary, and Beatrice.   The Ullman and Gunsaulus families traveled in the same circles but I found no evidence of direct association.  The portion of Charlotte's letter related to William McLaughlin entering the theater and his deathbed anxiety does not expand upon the widely published newspaper story, but the part about a Gunsaulus daughter escaping from the Iroquois was not published and may have come from Charlotte's son Henry Ullmann.  Only a few years older than Helen and her sisters, Henry had joined the search party for the Long girls so was perhaps privy to stories that escaped newspaper notice.

Frank Gunsaulus' prominent role in the Armor Institute made the Gunsaulus part of Chicago society, with newspapers eager to report on their travels, parties, recitals, weddings, and engagements. Assuming Charlotte's account is accurate, news of a Gunsaulus escaping from the Iroquois, in conjunction with the story of nephew McLaughlin's heroics, would have seriously hiked interest in an already hot story.  The omission cannot have been accidental.  Newspapers either repressed the story of Helen Gunsaulus' escape or the family concealed it from the press.  The question is why. Perhaps Helen's escort was another Methodist family member in town for her sister's wedding who did not want to incur condemnation for being in a theater.

William was taken to the Presbyterian Hospital where he died the evening after the fire.  Reportedly, someone offered to remove his Delta Tau Delta fraternity pin for safekeeping, but he said it was not necessary. Period reports varied as to his exact words about the pin.

William had one sister, Mary Keen McLaughlin, who married Henry R. Storer. William was buried in the Gunsaulus family plot in Forest Home Cemetery near Chicago.‡

In the years after the fire

Martha and Henry married and had five children.

Helen Cowen Gunsulus (1886–1954) became a noteworthy scholar, author and curator, specializing in Japanese costumes and artwork as found in her father's collection of Japanese prints and swords. She did not marry but had a long term relationship with another curator, Helen Mackenzie.

Story of how William McLaughlin came to be in the theater is improbable In the published account, William was passing by the Iroquois when the fire started, a happenstance pedestrian who paused to inspect the architecture of a building where his uncle was to preach the following Sunday. Upon learning there was a fire inside he sprang into action, entered the theater and made it to the third-floor fire escape to help women and children escape by crossing Couch Place on planks. For that to have happened, William would have had to enter the theater through locked doors at the front entrance, climb multiple flights of stairs, and cross the third-floor gallery to the fire exit — in the process pushing through over a thousand terrified people frantically trying to move in the opposite direction. He would have had to climb over an eight-foot block of entangled bodies of dying victims on the landing, break through an interior blocked door, push through a thick throng of people at a gallery doorway, then through the mass of three hundred people in the gallery. In smoke-filled darkness, in a building with complex stairways and hallways, with which he had no familiarity. Most telling, I think, is that even had he been able to conquer all those obstacles, why would someone bent on saving lives pass by and climb over hundreds of trapped and dying people to get to a different group of trapped and dying people?  It is far more likely that William was in the balcony when the fire started.  He might even have been the escort who got Helen Gunsaulus (left) out of the theater but I think not.  That would have required his then making it back into the theater and up to the third floor fire escape, a near impossibility. Today Methodist colleges offer degrees in performance arts, but in 1903, Methodist churches were outspoken in their condemnation of the theater, even passing an "amusement ban" to clarify and assert their position. That theater attendance was taboo for William, son of a Methodist minister, is somewhat corroborated by Charlotte Ullmann's letter (left).  I suspect that if editors of the city's major dailies were presented with a small fib by a highly regarded minister of who sought only to spare William's parents the burden of shame on top of grief at the loss of their son, the editors would would have played along. That said, there is little doubt that William McLaughlin did in fact perform heroically on the fire escape to help people climb onto the plank.  His actions were observed and reported by one of the contractors on the other end of the plank: Charles Henry Cubbon.  Charles would later send William's parents an engraved two-foot section of the plank as a tribute to their son's bravery.  After helping others to cross the plank, William was one of around fifty people who crossed the plank himself, and one of about thirty of those who did not survive.  He was not the only one who helped with the plank.  Four women also stabilized the plank, of which three survived and one did not.

Discrepancies and addendum

** Interestingly, decades earlier, William's uncle, Dr. Frank Gunsaulus, had publicly defended the theater. Gunsaulus was the first president of the Armour Institute, today's Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), as well as a prominent Congregational minister, author, Chautauqua lecturer, philanthropist, and educator. The pastor's open-mindedness regarding theaters persisted in 1903: two days before the fire he announced that his Central Church services, for two years held in the Studebaker Theater, would be conducted at the Iroquois Theater beginning the following Sunday, January 3, 1904.

† Contact me if you would like jpg images of Charlotte Ullman's letter.

‡ The Indianapolis Journal newspaper once again reported utterly false information.  It asserted that McLaughlin's body had been shipped to Indianapolis and would be buried there in the Crown Hill Cemetery.  William was buried in Chicago in the Gunsaulus family plot.

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