by Renée Rosen
Mrs. Angelo appeared in the doorway of the kitchen and made an exaggerated point of looking at her wristwatch. “Don’t you ladies have some work you should be doing? By the way,” she said, grabbing hold of me with her eyes, “congratulations.”
We dispersed and went back to our desks, back to writing about our recipes and celebrity sightings and secretarial tips. Thankfully, I was working on a series of small follow-up articles about the el derailment.
The investigators had determined that the accident was caused by human error. The motorman was reportedly going twenty miles per hour over the regulated speed limit. He was consequently fired and was now facing manslaughter charges. The total number of fatalities had climbed to thirty-four, and the funerals and memorials were held back to back.
The derailment had happened nearly two weeks ago, and since then the city had moved on, but I couldn’t. I was beginning to think I was the wrong person to have covered this story. I couldn’t stop thinking about those thirty-four lives lost and the thirty-four families for whom Christmas would be torture this year. And for every year going forward.
Later that day I visited Harley’s mother. Not to write anything more about her, but just because I couldn’t stay away.
“Look at this,” she said, walking me into his bedroom and pointing to a glass beaker, test tubes and a microscope. “This was his science-fair project for school.” She traced her fingertips over the surface of each item on his dresser. “He’d been working on it for more than a month.” She smiled faintly.
I knew this was the exact type of story Mr. Ellsworth wanted me to get. He would have had a photographer there in an instant, taking pictures of the deceased boy’s room. It would have been a nice piece for me, but I wasn’t going to exploit a mother’s grief. No, unfortunately, there was no shortage of other stories to write about from the derailment.
“He was so close to finishing his science project,” said Mrs. Jackson. “And now it’s just been left undone forever because”—her voice cracked—“I can’t finish it for him. You can’t imagine what that feels like. Having that unfinished edge left hanging in my mind.”
Oh, but I knew exactly how that felt. At the time my brother was killed, he’d been working on a big scoop. I didn’t know all the details, just that there was a racket in Chicago passing off horsemeat as beef. He had been working on it for nearly two months and was close to piecing it all together. He said he’d never eat another hamburger again in this town. And that was true. He didn’t. He was killed, run down before he got to finish his article. No one at the Sun-Times picked up on the story and attempted to complete the investigation, which I always thought was a shame. But for whatever reason they let the whole thing die right along with my brother.
• • •
A few days later, I sat at my desk, finishing up a piece on the best festive holiday centerpieces. Oh, the things you could do with pinecones and cranberries. The city room was caught up in its usual buzzing.
Walter was puffing on his pipe, shouting out of the corner of his mouth at Benny, who was frantically trying to track down some information for his afternoon story about a citywide air-raid test with simulated H-bombs. Immediately following the sirens, every TV and radio station would switch from their regular programming to the CONELRAD system created to broadcast civil-defense information. Meanwhile Randy was humming Winter Wonderland and I was just about to rip my copy from the typewriter when I got a telephone call.
“Jordan? Jordan Walsh?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was expecting a man.”
I rolled my eyes. I’d lost count of all the people who thought Jordan was a man. And they always seemed so disappointed. So much for my mother’s theory. I was used to this reaction, only this time it was coming from another woman. A woman who didn’t want to give me her name.
“So what can I help you with?” I was skimming over my copy, but as soon as she said she was with the Chicago Transit Authority, I gripped the phone tighter. I could hear the trepidation in her voice. “Hello? Hello? Are you still there?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.” Click. She hung up.
I was still staring at the telephone when it rang again.
“It’s me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hang up. Well, maybe I did. I just didn’t realize you were a female reporter,” she said again. “You see, I’ve been following the articles you’ve written about the el derailment and . . .”
I switched the phone to my left ear and covered the right one to block the background noise. “Go on.”
There was a long pause. “Do you think maybe we could talk? Over coffee? I’d rather do this in person.”
We agreed to meet at a Wimpy’s on State Street in the Loop, not far from Wabash and Lake where the accident had occurred. It was cold and snowing that day with the kind of biting wind that got right down inside your bones. The weather didn’t deter the holiday shoppers though. They packed the streets, scurrying in and out of stores, their arms loaded down with packages. The el track had been repaired, but it still gave me an eerie feeling each time I was near the site where so many people had died. I turned up my collar and stuffed my hands inside my pockets, fingering an ever-growing hole in the lining.
It was quiet when I stepped inside Wimpy’s. The lunch crowd was already back at work. Other than a couple of waitresses behind the counter and two ladies surrounded by green Marshall Field’s bags, I didn’t see anyone who could have belonged to the voice on the telephone. I slipped into one of the booths along the side for privacy, ordered a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette to pass the time.
Finally a woman appeared inside the doorway, hovering next to a life-size cutout of Popeye’s friend Wimpy with a caption that read I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. The woman was a bit heavyset and had light brown hair that rested on her cheeks, curving upward like two fishhooks. She looked to be in her mid – to late forties. She clutched her pocketbook with both hands and scanned the room. When we locked eyes I gave a slight nod, and she came over and slid into the booth.
“I’m sorry I’m late. I—I had to make sure no one was following me.” She glanced around the restaurant.
“Who would have been following you?”
“Could have been anyone from work. I just can’t take any chances.” She was nervous, curling and uncurling her paper napkin as she spoke. “I’ll get fired if anyone finds out I’m talking to the press. And I can’t afford to lose my job. My husband passed two years ago and I have three small children to raise.”
I knew she was reluctant to speak to me and somehow I had to put her at ease. She didn’t say another word in the time it took the waitress to pour her coffee and refill my cup.
I reached for another cigarette. “So, you wanted to talk about the derailment?”
The woman looked at me, on the brink of speaking but still hesitating. I thought there was a chance she’d change her mind, get up and leave.
“I won’t quote you,” I said. “I won’t even allude to you. I can keep you out of this—whatever it is. I promise.”
She bit down on her lip and her voice cracked. “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t keep quiet.” She shook her head as the tears ran loose. “All those people who died—I tell you it’s eating me up inside, and I have to come forward and tell someone.” She dabbed her eyes with a napkin and went silent again, as if rethinking her decision to meet with me.
Again I feared she might back out. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s start at the beginning. You work for the Chicago Transit Authority, right?”
She nodded and fiddled with the buckle on her pocketbook. “I’m a secretary to Anthony Briar, the Senior Director of Infrastructure and Maintenance.”
I lit my cigarette, waiting for her to continue.
“Someone needs to look into what happened,” she said eventually. “What really happened.”
“They did an investigation. They said it was
human error.”
“I know for a fact that that’s not true. It wasn’t human error.” The tone of her voice and the look in her eyes set off alarms inside my head.
I exchanged my cigarette for my pen.
“The motorman didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “The train wasn’t going too fast. The problem was in the tracks. I tell you it was an accident waiting to happen, and they knew it, too. Take my word for it—it won’t be the last one, either.” Now that she’d started speaking, she couldn’t stop. It was as if she was purging herself of weeks of guilty silence. The details came gushing out, and I had my notepad out like a bucket to capture it all.
“The CTA has a subcontractor—J.T. Porter and Company. They do the routine inspections and conduct the maintenance on all the tracks. They’ve been doing it for the past ten years—for as long as I’ve been working there. During their last round of inspections, they had some concerns about the condition of the tracks in certain locations. They sent the directors a series of reports, recommending they shut down the track for maintenance. My boss, Mr. Briar, called a special meeting that afternoon, and by the end of business that day, they had fired J.T. Porter. And that was after ten years of service.”
“Did they say why they were firing them?”
“They were afraid they’d lose too much money on rider fares if they shut down the tracks.”
“I see.” My father used to describe that moment for a reporter when they knew they’d landed something big, like a fisherman who’s hooked into a shark. I had that feeling now, so much stronger than I’d ever felt it before. My pulse pumped as fast as my pen would write.
“So they hired another firm,” she said. “Unger Brothers Iron and Rail. They said they were going with them and that they weren’t closing down the tracks. I wondered how they were going to make the necessary repairs without doing that. My husband was an engineer, so I knew how these things worked. Then I happened to get a look at the Unger Brothers’ bid. It was $7,000 more than what the other company charged.”
“So Unger was charging more than J.T. Porter?”
“That’s the thing. It didn’t make any sense—especially since they were worried about losing money. But then I realized that the owner of this new firm, this Lawrence Unger, was my boss’s brother-in-law. I’m not stupid. I knew right then that this company—this Unger Brothers—was going to do a fraction of the work that J.T. Porter did and that Mr. Briar and his brother-in-law were going to pocket the difference.”
While she spoke, I wrote, not wanting to miss a word. In the back of my mind, I could hear Mr. Ellsworth asking for the quotes, the facts, the proof. I had a frightened woman before me who wouldn’t go on the record with her name. I knew I was going to need more than that.
“I couldn’t keep quiet anymore,” she said. “All those innocent people died for no good reason. And now the motorman is being blamed for something he didn’t do. I saw the article in your paper yesterday about charging him with manslaughter and negligence. It’s just not right. Those monsters inside the CTA are going to let an innocent man take the fall for this.” She paused, looking away. “And there’s more.”
More? My pen froze in place. What more could she possibly have?
“I wasn’t even going to say anything about this, but with you being a woman and all . . .” She bit down on her lip again, pinched open her pocketbook and pulled out a trifold of papers. Without a word she passed the documents to me.
I shuffled through the pages and looked up at her, stunned. “How did you get these?”
“They were sent to my boss and all the department heads.”
I was holding a series of memorandums and reports from J.T. Porter and Company dated November 8, 1955. Less than a month before the derailment. It was page upon page of track inspections and maintenance recommendations. Each one was stamped URGENT . . . TRACKS IN NEED OF CRITICAL REPAIR. . . . HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS . . . RECOMMENDATION: CLOSE TRACKS IMMEDIATELY. . . .
Holy crap. I swallowed hard.
“Mr. Briar told me to gather all the memos that had been distributed to the department heads and destroy them.”
“He what?” The hair on the back of my neck stood up for the umpteenth time. “Anthony Briar? The Senior Director of Infrastructure and Maintenance for the Chicago Transit Authority told you to destroy these?”
She nodded. “Only I didn’t. But I didn’t mean to disobey him. I had a dentist appointment after work that day and I was rushing to get out of the office on time. I put the memos in my drawer and figured I’d destroy them the next day, but then there were meetings and well, I—I plain forgot. In fact, I forgot all about them until the derailment. And it’s been eating me up alive inside ever since.”
“Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”
“God, no.” She shook her head. “No. I’ve been too afraid. I’m hoping that enough other people in the office saw that memo that they won’t be able to trace it back to me. Do you think they’ll figure out it was me who told you?”
I didn’t answer her question. I couldn’t say. “All I can tell you is that I think you’re doing the right thing.” I studied her face. The color was gone from her cheeks. “Why didn’t you go to the police with this?”
“I was too afraid. I called you at first because of your articles, but then I lost my nerve. That’s why I hung up. But when I realized you were a woman—I figured I could trust you. That’s why I decided to meet with you. I’m showing you this now because I’m hoping you’ll understand my predicament. Do you understand what I’m up against and why I can’t lose this job?”
“I do. I do understand.”
She looked at the memos in my hand. “You can keep those if you want. I made copies for you. I’m figuring I can trust you not to use my name—you know, on account of you being a woman reporter and all.”
It was the first time that my gender had ever worked to my advantage.
• • •
I raced back to the city room and stood over my typewriter while I knocked out a quick memo and then rushed over to Mr. Ellsworth at the horseshoe.
He read it and puckered his mouth. “Christ, Walsh. Where’d you get this from?” He turned to me, fingers in his beard. “Wait—don’t tell me, you can’t tell me.” He set the memo down on his desk and shook his head. “You’re accusing the directors of the CTA of blatant criminal activity, and without a shred of evidence.”
“Oh, I have evidence, all right.”
“Well, let’s have it.”
I hesitated. My hands were sweating. My heart was pounding.
“Well?” He hiked his eyebrows up on his forehead.
“I have the evidence. Hard evidence. And I have an exclusive. But before I show it to you, I need something in return.”
He chucked his pen onto the desk. “What the—”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t cut me out of this piece like you did with the insurance fraud. You can’t have me doing all the work and then hand over my byline to Walter or Henry or anyone else.”
“You got some nerve, Walsh. You do realize that you’re talking to your managing editor.”
“I do realize that, sir, but with all due respect, I also realize what I’m sitting on and that any managing editor in this city would jump at the chance to run this story.”
“I don’t like your tactics, Walsh, I can tell you that right now. This scoop of yours better be as big as you say it is.”
“So do we have a deal?”
He folded his arms and gave me a look that seemed to be equal parts contempt and surprise. He didn’t think I had this kind of fight in me. I didn’t know I had it, either. The din of the city room seemed muted. It was a showdown between the two of us.
“Okay, Walsh,” he said eventually. “We have a deal.”
I nodded and handed over the memos from J.T. Porter and Company.
Mr. Ellsworth glanced at them and sprang up from his chair. “Hey, Copeland,” he called out, his eyes still on
the memos. “Get over here.”
Mr. Copeland came over and stood next to Mr. Ellsworth, reading over his shoulder before glancing at me, dumbstruck. “Where the hell did you get these?”
“From someone who works for the CTA.”
“Does this someone have a name? A title?”
“They work under one of the executives.” That was all I was willing to say.
“Can you get more information from this guy if we need it?” asked Mr. Copeland.
“That won’t be a problem.” I found it reassuring that they assumed my source was a man. I hoped for the woman’s sake that others would draw the same conclusion.
Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Copeland finished shuffling through the memos. Mr. Ellsworth tossed his pencil onto his desk and rubbed both hands over his face as if he were scrubbing it clean. He turned to Mr. Copeland. “Do we have any art for this?”
“I’ll have Russell pull something from the photo lab.”
Mr. Ellsworth looked at me and said, “Well, what are you waiting for, Walsh? I need your copy on my desk by four o’clock, in time for the page-one meeting.”
The page-one meeting was the meeting where all the editors hashed through the top stories and mapped out the next day’s edition, including what would appear on the front page.
“Did you hear what I just said?” He gave me that impatient look of his.
I was still stunned. “Yes, sir. You got it.”
I hurried back to my desk and spread my notes out, sorting through the napkins and scraps of paper. My hands were shaking as I spun the copy paper into my typewriter and started crafting my lede. I never thought that doing what I always wanted would make me so nervous. But it came with the burden of responsibility to protect my source and to get it right.
