Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Rekindling Roots: Cousin Connection | Survivor Saga Rediscovered | Gripping Eastland Documentary

• Natalie Zett • Season 1 • Episode 37

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Welcome back episode 36 of the Flower in the River podcast where I share stories and reflections around gratitude, family connections, and finding meaning in timeless tragedies.

Highlights

  • The importance of expressing gratitude, all year long. I share an example of feeling grateful after a meaningful conversation with a cousin.
  • Imagining an alternative reality where my Aunt Martha had survived the Eastland disaster. How different my family's story and intergenerational trauma may have been. The paradox of grief and gifts that come from tragedy.
  • The common regret that many of us have - wishing we had listened more closely to the stories of older relatives when they were alive. But there are ways to still "hear" them by being open to synchronicity.
  • I discuss finding and sharing the story of James Lawrence Gardner, a Galena, IL native and Eastland survivor. His incredible first-hand account published in a local paper in 1915. How finding voices like his helps build a broader picture of the disaster and its aftermath.
  • I share about an extraordinary newer documentary on the Eastland disaster released last year, titled "The Full Story of the Eastland Disaster (1915)" by filmmaker Tom Lynskey and HFX Studios.
  • Preview of next week's episode, where I'll share the story of another Eastland survivor, a Canadian immigrant woman named Katherine.

LINKS

Eastland Chronicles 

Eastland Documentary by Tom Lynsky and HFX Studios

Music by Nono (Artlist)

  • Beatrice
  • Interlude
  • The 5th Season
Natalie Zett:

Hey, this is Natalie and hope you're doing well. Welcome to episode 36 of Flower in the River podcast.

Natalie Zett:

And in the United States it is the week before Thanksgiving and there's so much to be grateful for and in the midst of a world that sometimes seems like it's just tipping on its axis, I think it's really important to just stop and re-center and for me, one of the ways I re-center is to, number one, think about what I'm grateful for, who I'm grateful for, and, in the case of a person, I can level up that gratitude expression by telling them what I'm grateful for. I say this a lot, I know and I will keep saying it, because I think it's critical and so few of us think to express our gratitude to people, and I don't mean the perfunctory thank yous that we can see that actually are filled in for us in terms of our emails or on social media and those aren't capturing what's in our hearts. So I'm talking about stopping taking time to think why do I like this or why do I appreciate this or that, and then sharing where you can with people who have done that for you. And there's nothing more fun than getting a sincere note of gratitude from a stranger, so as well as somebody you know, but it's really kind of fun to hear from somebody who was touched by something you did and it's like wow and it encourages you to keep on being better and it also encourages you, as the person expressing that gratitude, to continue to function in that mindset of being grateful, because gratitude does recenter us and reminds us of what it means to be human. So just last night I had a grateful moment. I had a connection and I'm not going to share her name only because I did not ask permission, but I had a connection with a very special cousin and she's special to me for a lot of reasons. She's a really cool person and I just love her intellectual curiosity, her empathy and her insights into things, and I sometimes evaluate an interaction by how I feel after the interaction is over, and I felt really good after spending time with her on Zoom yesterday. She's also related to me via the Pfeiffer side.

Natalie Zett:

That, of course, is the family I've portrayed in Flower in the River. Our grandmother was the sister of my Aunt Martha and my grandmother, so it was fascinating to talk with her for so many reasons, but the most interesting thing was to hear about how her branch of the family experienced the downstream effects of this tragedy that happened to all of us, and we talked about the paradox of these gifts that come our way as well as the incredible challenges that come our way via this intergenerational trauma. That's the best way I can describe what happened to us. It was interesting, too, to get feedback from someone who read the book but also who's related to the family that I portrayed. And I've always said this is just my portrayal and I always invite people to collaborate, to give their two cents, and also that's a way for me to invite them in to tell their own perspective, their own story as well, because everybody's story is different. You might be from the same places, the same family. But your experience of the places and of the family can be very different and by sharing your experience it creates more of a well-rounded narrative, which is why I've been going into the stories of all these other people who were associated somehow with the Eastland disaster. Either they were rescuers, victims well, that would be their families talking about them, observers, etc. So from the historical records that I'm finding and I'm finding a lot of these in very obscure publications everyone who was there has a very different account of how they experienced the disaster and that would depend on so many variables their age, their profession, were they trapped, were they rescued? Did they jump off the ship? That would all depend on all of these variables and you might come up with a very different story. It doesn't mean that one story is, quote-unquote, wrong and somebody else's story is right. It just means different people, different positions in the story. They would experience everything quite differently, quite from their point of view, as we all do.

Natalie Zett:

I have an emotional connection to this story. Obviously it's my family, but I don't own the Eastland story. I don't own the Eastland disaster. No one owns the story. No one owns any of that, it's just given to us. We're stewards of the story at best. Then when we're gone, someone else will pick it up and they'll do something different with it. So while we're here, we're caretakers, we're curators, we're gardeners whatever you want to call us but we don't own it. In terms of my family story, of course, I'm protective of it only because it was given to me to take care of. But I also knew a lot of those people who A were either alive during that time, although they were pretty young, or who heard the first-hand accounts from those who did hear. So it's an intimate journey and it's also into the inner workings of the family and how the Eastland disaster affected my family.

Natalie Zett:

And I want to bring this up because the other thing that happened when I was talking to my cousin last night, as we were in the midst of conversation and in a sense getting to know each other all over again, she started to share a very common thing that many of us share who get into family history. She shared one of her regrets, and that regret is that she wished she would have listened to people closer when they were alive and when she was younger, and that is so common. We all of us myself, I certainly feel that, or a lot of times, we just didn't know the questions to ask. And again, a lot of times the people with whom we were talking, they didn't necessarily want to talk about those experiences. The people who were older at that point, those who may have survived the Eastland disaster or experienced it for the most part they would have been the ages of our grandparents and those folks came from a very different generation.

Natalie Zett:

If you were born in the late 1800s, early 1900s, your values were very different than the people who are walking the earth right now. And I've often thought what would these people think of social media and all of this? Talking about personal stuff? I can tell you these were not people who generally wanted attention drawn to themselves, right? So they probably wouldn't know what to make of all this stuff on social media and they would probably shake their heads and wonder what the heck happened to our world. Only because I heard a lot of that when I was a kid too, my grandfather, who lived with us for most of my childhood and teen years. He would say things like this world is going to hell. My grandfather was born in 1890 and again he immigrated when he was 19. So his view of the world was very, very different than the one that we had, and he just would a lot of times shake his head only because he did not know how to relate, and we, as children, certainly did not know how to relate to the world that he came from, because he seldom spoke of it. But back to this lament that I think all of us from time to time have expressed, and that would be. I wish I would have listened to the older folks when they were alive.

Natalie Zett:

For most people, if they're being honest, they have that same regret, because by the time we all get old enough and mature enough, well, I should say this for those who do become wise, they can reflect and they can pull out of themselves, and because of the ability number one to reflect, but also a lifetime of experience does give a person more empathy and more awareness, I think. So these regrets do come up from time to time, and actually they're good regrets. I don't think that those are bad things, but when you say that you can't talk to them any longer because they're not here, hmm, that's not necessarily so. You just have to learn to communicate in a different way and, as I've said from the beginning, the dead talk back. You just have to know where to go to hear them.

Natalie Zett:

As I was thinking about the topic of regrets this last week, and with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, I thought of an alternative ending to my family's story. What would have happened had my Aunt Martha survived the Eastland? Oh, I can envision it. She would have lived to old age and my grandmother, her sister, who gave her the tickets, wouldn't have been guilt-stricken. She too would have lived to old age. My mother would have had a mom and a dad to raise her, and our lives would have been very, very different.

Natalie Zett:

So, as I was thinking about this hypothetical situation, what would it have been like had Aunt Martha survived the Eastland? I was picturing Thanksgiving dinner when we were children. Of course this didn't happen, but let's just say Aunt Martha's alive and we would know that Aunt Martha and Grandma, and probably Grandpa, would be coming over for Thanksgiving and we kids would have said, oh God, aunt Martha's going to come and talk about that ship again, as kids often do. Because that's certainly what we did when we were kids, because we got tired of hearing the same stories over and over and over again, and we got tired of hearing about the old country and now I am so grateful for those very stories I was once tired of. But again, had Aunt Martha survived, it would have taken us until we were older to understand the ramifications of that event.

Natalie Zett:

But being related to someone who survived such a tumultuous, tragic event, as opposed to our reality of being related to somebody who died, that sets a whole different tone for a family, and I speculate I could never prove that well for myself, my cousin and probably even others that we don't know. Their lives were affected by this disaster because all of us inherited it and I didn't know it for most of my life, but it certainly seemed to be affecting my family's life, whether I knew about it or not, and I think about that quite a bit. However, in the midst of all of this, in the midst of our not knowing stories or not bothering to have listened when we were kids or not knowing how to listen when we were kids, there is a silver lining and I want to talk about that, and that silver lining has to do with learning to listen to the departed in an entirely different way, and a lot of how that comes about is through the power of synchronicity, which I talk a lot about because it really is a big theme in this entire story and indeed throughout my whole life. And my cousin and I were talking about the power of synchronicities last evening as well, and I was stepping back and realizing that there was the first wave of synchronicities that I was just bombarded with. When I first began this journey over 25 years ago of trying to find out about what happened with this family, and as I was putting together the book, a lot of those types of synchronicities, over-the-top synchronicities, supernatural events, whatever you want to call them, these kind of things were really prominent when I was first putting together this what became this book and doing research on this family. It was just overwhelming and I wondered if it would ever come to an end. And it seemed to come to an end and for that I was both relieved and I kind of missed those things. But I figured for me, I figured they were done, they serve their purpose, it was over.

Natalie Zett:

But what's happened is, as I've opened my mind and my spirit to world-building, to my intent of wanting to create Chicago of 1915, post-eastland era as much as possible. Now, once again, the synchronicities are alive and well and smacking me around, sending me in directions and sending me to people that I need to meet. And all of these people so far have been dead for a long time, but their voices remain and I will explain how I've been able to get in contact with them and share their stories with you throughout probably several episodes of this podcast, because it is so interesting and we'll dance back and forth into my own personal family stories and the book stories. But seeing a bigger world and a wider picture, I think is also very useful. But there's also another paradox that I want to describe that has happened with me. Even though I've been very open, wanting synchronicities, wanting to find people, wanting to find information about the Eastland, especially early on when I knew next to nothing, it doesn't mean that I get access to that information right away.

Natalie Zett:

What I'm talking about is one of the very first dramatic things that happened to me when I drove down for the first time from Minneapolis, st Paul to Chicago to the cemetery where my great-aunt Martha and my great-grandparents are buried. I went to this huge cemetery Labor Day weekend, never been there before and had no idea where my people were. The place is huge and I parked my car right in the front of a bunch of other headstones. I didn't see anything. And then I went walking for 45 minutes or so. I asked somebody for help. He didn't know. And I thought, oh God, what a fool. And I was crying because I was so tired and I just felt ridiculous. And when I went back to my car or kind of was pushed in the direction of going back to my car, I looked and I had parked right in front of the headstones.

Natalie Zett:

How I missed it, I don't know why I missed it, I don't know. It's not that I wasn't looking for it, I was, but maybe I was looking too hard at that point, I don't know. I bring this up because something happened again this week and it was something in one respect that was right in front of my vision, right in front of my view, but somehow I missed it, and that is a relatively new documentary. Let me tell you about that. Although this is an audio show, I will certainly provide a link to probably what is one of the most extraordinary documentaries I have seen about the Eastland disaster of 1915. And it came out last November, so it's only been out a year. But how I missed it I don't know. But I contacted the filmmaker this week to express gratitude and he's okay with me sharing the link and sharing a few stills on my webpage. You can take a look at that, but by all means go to the link.

Natalie Zett:

His name is Tom Linsky and he has not just a film about the Eastland, he has films about all kinds of maritime history and he, like me, like so many of us, loves history. But he possesses what very few of us have the ability to tell a story for sure. But he also has a command of very sophisticated special effects. I'm not going to describe it, you have to see it to believe it. He actually has recreated a part of that world that I so have wanted to inhabit, and I thought it was just phenomenal what he did in his film about the Eastland. Again, I will share the documentary link with you, and his studio is called HF, like Frank X Studios, and I'm not an expert on the Eastland ship itself, believe it or not. I mean, I know a lot about it, but that's not my focus. My focus is my family, the stories of my family. However, he has made this story so accessible and I thought if I'm ever doing an Eastland 101, his film would be the required viewing for that, because it is so well done, and his film is called the Full Story of the Eastland Disaster 1915. His YouTube channel is called Part-Time Explorer, so spend some time there, you will not be disappointed.

Natalie Zett:

Now, though, I want to get back into the book. What is happening is, as I'm doing my research on the other people, other communities that were affected by the Eastland Disaster, I'm meeting people virtually, and where I am finding a lot of these stories. A lot of them either have never been told or, if they have been told, their stories are scattered all over the place. There's not one place for them. I mean, there were 844 people who were killed, but there were also even countless more survivors and witnesses and rescuers. Probably the majority of them. If they did talk about it, they didn't talk about it publicly, and the way things are shaking out in terms of my own developing this podcast is that I do want to continue building this world of post-Eastland 1915 in Chicago, and I don't only want to tell the stories of the people that I'm finding in these obscure places, but I also want to give them a virtual home on my website so people can come and find these stories, and I'm in the midst of redoing a part of my website to make a home for them. But my intent is to make a home for as many of these people as possible and I will continue to tell their stories via the podcast. But I also make a lot of short videos that I post on YouTube. Nothing fancy, nothing as elaborate and gorgeous as what Tom Linsky did with the Eastland Disaster documentary, but there are ways to tell stories, and sometimes videos, more appealing to people than just reading a book, outhearing a straight narrative. So that's what I'm doing as well. But as many people who need a home, I will try to accommodate them virtually and I want them to be there for you to talk to as well.

Natalie Zett:

I want to launch into a story that I found a couple of weeks ago in one of the smaller newspapers from 1915. It was out of Galena, illinois, and that's actually quite a distance from Chicago I think about 168 miles. But the person who was working for Western Electric in Chicago this is where they came from and I'll tell you his story. This individual's name is James Lawrence Gardner, and he was living in Chicago at the time, obviously, and the job he listed on his draft registration card in 1917 was supervisor and I can't read the initials after that but it looks like VS. But his employer was the Western Electric Company, hawthorne Station, chicago, and he survived the Eastland. He was on board and he jumped off.

Natalie Zett:

I'm going to share James's story in his words and I made a family tree for James, as I do with these folks that I discover. But I could find very little about James after other than his draft registration card in the 1900 census, for example. He was living in Galena. He was 10 years old, living with his widowed dad. There were no other siblings listed and his dad was working as a carpenter and the dad was originally from Pennsylvania.

Natalie Zett:

And the challenge with more common names such as Gardner, is that initially it can be difficult to locate them. But I will locate more information about him eventually if it's out there. But it's not an easy pass through when you do it the first few times. But I'm sharing with you what I've already found and that letter to the editor is gold and I haven't given up. I will continue to search James Gardner and see what else pops up, but I'm guessing that, based on what the family looked like in 1900, there may not be very many relatives around who descend from that line, unless James had children, and those children had children and they're still around somehow. That's the only way there might be some other evidence of that family in the future.

Natalie Zett:

So this week I will let James share his own story, because he is a fantastic storyteller, and next week I have another story of another survivor that has also not been widely shared At least it hasn't been shared in any of the places where I could find her and once again, thanks to these more obscure papers, I was able to dig up actually a lot of information about this person post-Eastland. And as I was doing this research and as I was talking to my cousin last evening, I thought what happened to these people in terms of their life choices, in terms of how they experienced the world after they survived the Eastland disaster, or after they witnessed the Eastland disaster, what happened to them? Not everyone responds in the same way and I want to leave room for all sorts of responses to this and also, too, in providing their stories. It creates quite a spectrum of colors that flesh out life during and after this event. But survivors guilt. That might be a not correct way to describe this, but it is a thing and it's complex as to how people deal with this and integrate it after they've survived something like this. And when you stop and think well, this doesn't apply to me, this Eastland disaster thing, I don't have anybody in it. Well, somewhere along the line in your family or in your own history, you probably have had something like this. So again, if nothing else you can learn from these stories, you can hear these stories and if, down the road, something does occur in your life or in the life of somebody close to you, you can remember these stories and think, okay, that's what this person did or that's how they expressed what they had gone through.

Natalie Zett:

So now I will read James' letter to the editor, and I'm reading it as he wrote it. There's a small intro from the paper that published it, but other than that, these are James' words. So there are some grammatical things and some choices of words that they used back in 1915 that sound strange to our ears, but that's how they spoke and that's what's also so interesting. So I would like to introduce James Gardner to you. He was 25 years old when the Eastland disaster occurred. His letter was published in the Galena Daily Gazette of Galena, illinois, on the 27th of July 1915. So again, the Eastland disaster happened on July 24th. James pens this letter that's published on the 27th. So fortunately for him and for all of us, he wrote his story down probably right after he got home. Then he sent it off to the paper and the rest is history.

Natalie Zett:

Former Galenian tells of escape from death. James Gardner was among those on board steamer Eastland when disaster occurs, also helped to save the lives of other persons, was on top deck of steamer when he noticed the ship listing badly to one side. James Gardner, formerly Galena, who was now employed at the Western Electric Plant in Chicago, gives the following interesting account of his experiences on the ill-fated steamer Eastland in Chicago River in which so many lives were sacrificed. Chicago, illinois, july 26, 1915. To the Galena Gazette. No doubt you have heard stories in the Gazette of the recent terrible disaster of the steamship Eastland which sunk in the Chicago River Saturday July 24. But I doubt if anyone has given you a story from real experience and as I was a passenger on the boat when it sunk and Galena being my hometown, I feel as though it is my duty to give you an outline of the actual happenings.

Natalie Zett:

The Western Electric Company holds a picnic in Michigan City, indiana, every year, and the employees had been planning on this picnic as one of their greatest accesses, as it was going to be the most beautiful picnic ever held in Michigan City. The parade alone consisted of 3,100 people, all employees of the Western Electric Company. They spent months in the making of floats and different designs for the parade. The people of Michigan City also took a great interest in the picnic by decorating the town in glorious colors. Owing to the large number of people employed by the Western Electric Company, it requires several boats to convey the crowd across the lake. They had the Eastland, the Roosevelt and a few more chartered for this purpose. The Eastland was scheduled to leave at 7.30 am, so, being the first boat to leave, everybody was anxious to get that boat if possible, especially those taking part in the parade. For that reason the boat carried mostly girls, women and children.

Natalie Zett:

I left home about six o'clock so as to get there in plenty of time, but when I got to the car line I had to let three or four cars go by because there were so many people on them that I could not get on. So I went a different way, which took a little longer to get there. I met a friend on the car, but he did not get on because he was to meet someone before he got on the boat, and probably that saved his life. I went directly to the boat and when I first caught sight of it and saw the way it was crowded, something seemed to tell me it was not right. But I paid no attention to it.

Natalie Zett:

The boat consists of five decks, three open and two down in the hull. Well, I got on at the bottom and started for the top deck, but I had quite the time to get through the crowd. Then is when I realized that the boat was overloaded. It was also hard walking because the boat was in a slanting position, but no one else paid any attention to it. So I did the same. I managed to get to the top at last, and then I noticed how bad it was leaning, and I noticed that it kept getting worse all the time. But the thought ran to my mind that a large boat like that could not tip over. But anyway, I decided to get off the top deck and get down inside. But the steps leading to the top deck are very narrow, not room for two people to pass each other.

Natalie Zett:

Just as I was going down, some people started to come up, so I thought I would wait until they got up and then I would go down. But before they got up, the boat started to tip. And when it tipped so much that the people could not stand on the floors, they had to all slide to one side and it made a regular human ballast. By that time the captain came out alongside of me and gave the warning that the boat was going to upset. The whistles all started to blow and the people went insane. All over the boat I have heard many screams, screeches and groans of different kinds, but I never heard anything to compare with that. You could hear the wailing of the women and the girls and the crying of the children, the shouts of the men. It was something awful. They fought and tore each other to pieces Any way to get out.

Natalie Zett:

Well, I climbed over the railing on the top deck. Below me, on the two open decks, people were climbing out over the sides as thick as bees, so I must have walked on people's heads from the top deck to the third deck. When I got to the hull, I let go. The side of the boat was wet and very slippery and I went down so fast that I could not catch my breath. At the waterline there is a piece of wood about the size of a 2x4. It is called a protector. It runs the length of the boat and sticks out two or three inches to keep the side of the boat from getting damaged.

Natalie Zett:

Well, my feet hit this protector and I felt as though my legs had been driven up through my body, which no doubt they would have been had I landed on any solid material. I was thrown forward and my head struck the brick building at the edge of the dock, but I had a hard straw hat on which saved my head from being split open. Another fellow came down just like I did. He had a cap on and his head was split from front to back. It just resembled a cracked watermelon. If I had not hit this protector, I would have been among the missing because had I gone straight into the river, I was going at such a rate of speed that I would have gone to the bottom and stuck in the mud. I saw one fellow dive headfirst from the same place I was and he never came to the top again. I suppose he stuck in the mud.

Natalie Zett:

When I came to myself I started to rescue. I saw all the heads and arms sticking out. The river was just full of them. So I began to save what I could, helped nine women and girls and two men to safety and by that time the police and firemen had arrived and started the rescue work.

Natalie Zett:

The bodies were taken out in all shapes. They were cut and bruised something awful. It certainly is a sad day in Chicago. Everybody seems sad, and especially when I went to work this morning, faces that I used to see every morning were missing. They were drowned. It seemed as if everyone at work was crying, and when I think of those things now, I think of how lucky I was to escape and certainly feel sorry that there were not many more as lucky as I was. So in conclusion, I wish to say that I hope there will be no more such accidents as that and also that this letter will be interesting to those who read it. Yours, respectfully, james L Gardner, 2449 Grenshaw Street, chicago, illinois.

Natalie Zett:

Again, these are James' words and they were published in the 27 July 1915 issue of the Galena Daily Gazette in Galena, illinois, and I'm really grateful it was available and grateful to James for taking the time to write so eloquently and to share it with his world. At that point I'm not sure he's aware that it's gone out this far, but maybe he is. And again, when it comes to your community or your ancestors, please don't underestimate the power of these little papers that might have gotten lost in the shuffle, but for the most part, if they're digitized, they're out there somewhere. So it might take extra effort for you to locate them, as it has for me, but it's well worth the hunt and well worth the find. And if they're available say only on microfilm at a certain library, contact the library. All they can do is say no, but at least they'll know that someone is wanting to have this information. So keep asking questions and keep wanting to access this information, because I am of the belief that this type of information belongs to everyone. Now that I have a place for James Gardner on my website, I will add to his story as I find out more information. And I have to say I'm really happy to be able to share this stage that once only was occupied by my family with other people who are not my blood family, but they are family again because they descend from this tragedy and, as much as possible, I want to welcome them to this stage and fill out this world.

Natalie Zett:

That was Chicago, july 1915. Well, I don't want to comment too much on James' story because he did such a good job himself. When he was talking about waiting for the cars, he wasn't talking about waiting for a lift or an Uber. I know you know this, but I want to say it. What he was talking about most likely was waiting for the street cars or the trolleys. For people who don't know what those are, those are the equivalents Back in the day. They were like our bus service or our commuter train service, and if you research in any history book, especially the history of Chicago, you can find out all sorts of things about street cars and trolleys. They're quite charming and many cities actually still had them in operation until, I think, the middle of the 20th century, so vestiges of them still exist in major cities. They might be paved over, but they were once there, so it's really interesting to consider their history too, in our ancestors' lives.

Natalie Zett:

Next week, I'll have a story of a woman, a Canadian immigrant, who managed to survive the Eastland and her name is Katherine. That's all I'll say about her for now, but she's pretty exciting, so I'll talk to you next week. Hey, that's it for this episode and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. For more information, please go to my website, that's wwwflowerintherivercom. I hope you'll consider buying my book, available now as audiobook, ebook, paperback and hardcover, because I owe people money and I'm just kidding about that. The one thing I'm not kidding about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of the 844 who died on the Eastland. Goodbye for now.

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