|
There were three men named as hero in separate nearly identical stories
about a coal chute escape with performers. ▼1
Only one of the three testified about his coal chute escape and it was
not James Gallagher who is featured in the clipping above.
The day after the Iroquois Theater fire, morning editions of several
major daily east coast newspapers gave large amounts of high-visibility
space to the disaster, sometimes on multiple pages, sometimes devoting a
majority of the front page.
In Chicago there had not yet been time to sort out fact from rumor
and speculation but the demand for news stories about the disaster
motivated these distant newspapers to dramatize and publish whatever
unverified information their stringers heard in random interviews at the scene.
To fill the allotted space they also patched in stories
found on the AP wire and ran them verbatim, such as these paragraphs about James
Gallagher that appeared in dozens of newspapers.
Where the Gallagher story did not appear was in Chicago newspapers,
leastwise not in the Inter Ocean or Chicago Tribune. There is
reason to believe, however, that a James Gallagher was at the Iroquois
Theater. The Chicago Live Stock World newspaper reported that an
unconscious man by that name was carried from the Iroquois, and lists of
injured survivors in some newspapers outside Chicago included a James Gallagher.
So Gallagher
may have been an Iroquois survivor but I don't know if he was in the audience
or on the stage, as a performer or
a stage worker. The 1900 U.S. Census reported nearly two dozen men in Chicago
named James Gallagher or Gallager. None were involved with the stage.
The 1910 Census reported a similar number, again without a theater man
in the mix. I looked for an actor or vocalist named Gallagher outside Chicago
from 1895 to 1975 but found none mentioned in conjunction with Mr. Bluebeard
or Klaw & Erlanger. In 1914 there was a vaudeville performance duo named
James Gallagher and Joe Anthony but I found no indication that it was the same James
Gallagher that had been at the Iroquois Theater. Could use some crowd sourcing here.
|
