Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Eastland Chronicles: Katherine MacIntyre's Bravery Didn't Stop with Survival

• Natalie Zett • Season 1 • Episode 38

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🌺 Flower in the River Podcast - Episode 37 Show Notes

Part 1 - A Poignant Journey with Zara Vrabel (Chapter 6, "Sketching an Unlived Life.")

  • Join us as we follow Zara, our main character, on a heartfelt drive to a cemetery. It's not just any trip; Zara is about to "meet" her long-departed Aunt Martha for the very first time.
  • Imagine the conversations they might have! Zara grapples with a whirlwind of emotions – excitement, curiosity, maybe even a bit of apprehension about Martha's dramatic presence in her life after so long.
  • We'll also take a peek into Zara’s past, touching on moments of doubt and heartache that have shaped her. It's a journey of rediscovery, as she seeks to reconnect with the fiery passion and openness of her 20-year-old self.

Part 2 - Katherine MacIntyre : Eastland Disaster Survivor and Rescuer 

  • Our story takes us back to 1889, in Canada, where Katherine MacIntyre’s journey begins. She made her way to Chicago in 1900, carving a path that would lead her to unexpected heroism.
  • Fast forward to 1915, Katherine, a proud graduate of the University of Illinois, finds herself working at Western Electric – and on board the ill-fated Eastland with her family.
  • Picture this: the Eastland capsizes, and there’s Katherine, using her modest swimming skills to keep her mother and little brother afloat. A true unsung hero until help arrives.
  • Just days after the disaster, Katherine's heart of gold shines through as she donates $25 to the Mayor's Relief Fund, a significant sum back then, showing her deep empathy for fellow survivors.
  • Katherine’s life was a tapestry of service and community involvement, from her philanthropic efforts with organizations like the Red Cross to managing the prestigious Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago.
  • Later, she moves to Hammond, Indiana, where her journey of service continues as she manages high school cafeterias and remains actively involved in groups like the League of Women Voters.
  • Katherine passed away in 1967, leaving behind a legacy of service and humility. As a member of a church that honored a WWII doctor and missionary martyr, she showed us the power of looking up to those who dedicate their lives to helping others.

Conclusion - Celebrating Katherine's Legacy

  • In today’s episode, we celebrate Katherine MacIntyre, a woman who faced life’s trials with unwavering calm and grace. Her story, more than half a century after the Eastland disaster, is a powerful reminder of the impact one person can have through a life of service and selflessness.
  • By sharing Katherine’s story, we honor not just her memory, but the spirit of all those who turn adversity into a catalyst for helping others.

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Natalie Zett:

Why Hello, I'm Natalie Zett and welcome to Flower in the River. Flower in the River is a podcast about a book I wrote of the same name, and that book is about the Eastland disaster that took place in 1915 in Chicago and how that long ago tragedy affected my family for generations. I'll talk about writing and family history and what you do when the supernatural comes into your life, when you're innocently doing a family history research project. Come on and let's have some fun with this. Welcome to episode 37 of Flower in the River podcast and, as promised, I'm going to introduce you to another survivor of the Eastland disaster who has a very different story than the one I shared last week. I'd been joking for quite a while that I'd love to be able to interview people who survived and, yeah, even perished on the Eastland, but to do that I would need to conduct a weekly seance and, alas, although many of my relatives did make part of their livings, fortune telling and communicating with the departed and this sort of thing, I didn't get much of that gift. But I'm pretty good at researching obscure documents and even better at picking up on the still small voice that seems to lead me around that capsized hollivorship and pull stories from it. I will have a lot of stories for you each week, at least for a while. That maybe is the next best thing to a seance, right? But I do need to get back into chapter six. And chapter six is sketching an unlived life because it's dovetailing into some of the stories I've been sharing with you. And this is the part of a very long chapter where the main character, zara Robble, is on her way to Bethania Cemetery and she's learning at least to listen to the dead, if not talk to them. And here's the chapter excerpt Saturday, labor Day, weekend, september 5, 1998, 4 am.

Natalie Zett:

Rolling down Highway 61 in Minnesota, Zara was hedged in by the mighty Mississippi River to the left and slab-like rock formations to the right. She reveled in dawn's creamy orange sun, cloudless skies and the empty, curving two-lane highway. She visualized meeting Aunt Martha for the first time, stopped and restarted the scene, changing the dialogue each time. What would she say if she could see and talk with Martha? What could she say? Would she be ecstatic or resent Martha's premature departure and dramatic comeback? The two and a half hours to lacrosse gave time for uncertainty too. How can I be sure of something that can't be? Magda's stories enchanted me when I was a child, but later I replaced enchantment with doubt. Lots of doubt. Appearing sophisticated and erudite was more important. I don't believe in life after death. Not really A dead relative, someone I never met, is communicating with me. This is impossible. The only problem is that it's happening.

Natalie Zett:

Being of her family and her strained, strange relationship with them. She alternated between feeling embarrassed and amused at her long-ago tirades. As a ten-year-old, she named herself the changeling, declaring that she was the master of her fate. Those proclamations were born in the heart of a sensitive child who wondered why certain family members seemed to hate her. While no longer a child, she was still susceptible to rejection.

Natalie Zett:

Zara longed for her 20-year-old self. In the early 70s that girl boarded a bus bound for communal living in an inner-city Detroit alternative religious community oh the 70s. She valued calling over calculating risk. Then she loved that kid. Where'd you go, kid? Are you in there somewhere?

Natalie Zett:

The alternative religious community offered quite a package deal. If you joined, they promised to cure your flaws, give you meaning and discern God's will, since you were incapable of doing that on your own. In addition, the all-male leadership offered many young women members various unconventional therapeutic methods to heal them. What did they need healing from? She never knew. Zara shuddered and cabbished those thoughts before they gained a foothold. Although she never fell for the grift, she helplessly watched other young women starve themselves to please the central leader and the quote-unquote chosen ones would enter into a special relationship with this guy and his minions.

Natalie Zett:

Zara was immune to lecherous and lascivious males, thinking of them as pesky insects needing squashing. But when she wasn't looking, she ran headlong into her true self. Four years there could not inoculate herself against who she was. Then, despite her genuine efforts to resist the flesh, she met a woman, a married woman, and that was a royal bloody mess culminating in a witch hunt. Other community leaders, most of whom were carrying on extramarital heterosexual relationships, threw Zara and this woman into a circle each morning and cast out demons. It was brutal. Zara countered by lambasting the elders, reciting a detailed litany of each one's various transgressions. She'd been tracking their BS in her hidden notebook for a while. After that, the self-anointed ones backed down and offered Zara her heart's desire. For the first time, she witnessed the blatant, unadulterated hypocrisy and sadism of good religious folk. The experience was a death blow to her faith. She walked away and returned to her family in Ohio. The married woman returned to her husband in England, blamed Zara for everything and vanished forever from the stage of Zara's life, leaving her shattered and heartbroken. She was just 22.

Natalie Zett:

Zara seldom let her guard down. Afterward, in her late twenties, she embraced the rebel role. The years of distancing herself formed a chasm between her and the rest of the world. Could she ever trust anyone? Though she did not lack friends, like Ellie, or lovers, something was missing, and now she desperately needed a particular someone in her family. If you could have been there when I was a kid, you could have helped me, she shouted, hoping Martha would awaken from her eternal slumber. Driving around the bend at Lake Pepin, zara noticed a few boats on the water, getting in some early morning sailing and waterskiing, and she suddenly ached for mindless fun. Regardless of the weekend's outcome, zara would end up with a complete story, an exceptional tale of a young woman, a part of her family, a part of her, who lived briefly and then perished violently. End of passage.

Natalie Zett:

Now I want to turn the spotlight on another survivor of the Eastland disaster. But as I've been thinking about that, I really want to steer clear of calling this a long lost story. I've been doing these stories, these character sketches, for quite a while, actually early on in my writing career. That's a lot of what I did, and I have come to the conclusion that these types of stories aren't tucked away in forgotten corners. They're very much present, waiting to be discovered. It's not these people who are lost to time, it's us. We need to find our way back to them. I know that's a lofty goal, but hear me out, you have to go to the right places, which means you have to go to a lot of the wrong places first. But the stories are always there, patiently waiting for someone to come along and bring them back into the light. And I can share that with you based on my own experience.

Natalie Zett:

So much of what is happening now as I get reacquainted, or acquainted for the first time with these people who were involved with the Eastland, so much of this is almost a repeat of what happened the very first time I went to Bethania Cemetery in Justice, illinois, to locate my Aunt Martha and the rest of my family, as I've shared previously, I drove there, I parked right in front of my family's headstones and I didn't see them. Instead, I got out of the car. I wandered around this huge old cemetery for at least 45 minutes, but it felt like an eternity, and because I had driven so far, from Minneapolis, st Paul to Chicago it's about seven hours I was not ready to give up. And when I walked, or was pushed back into the direction of my car, I walked toward it and then just glanced up and then I saw their headstones. I parked right in front of them, but this was the first time I saw them. It was as if they disappeared and reappeared.

Natalie Zett:

Why, I don't know. It's not uncommon to hear about people being unable to see something that's right in front of them, especially when it's tied to strong emotions or significant life events, as was this for me. And I don't know, maybe there was a part of me that wasn't quite ready to see them yet, or maybe the significance of the moment needed a certain mindset to fully register. But I had to work fast, so I got my mind apparently in gear, and maybe it was protecting me, because, I don't know, sometimes it does take time to process the reality of a situation, and when I think about that situation now, it's a poignant reminder that sometimes we see not just with our eyes but with our hearts and we see with our hearts when the time is right. So this was 25 years ago and now I'm more used to being open to this type of thing and also my research skills have grown quite a bit in that lapse of time.

Natalie Zett:

And what has happened since I put out the intention to discover the untold stories of these other Eastland folks? They're popping up all over the place and again I have to work for the information. But it really is almost magical and I think that's what keeps me so intrigued and that's what keeps me going. But it really is not easy. I have to work for it. I have to work for these relationships and sometimes a lot of times I'm finding them in these obscure newspapers that aren't even usually available, on sites such as newspaperscom, where I spend a lot of my time, or newspaper archive, or even in Google Books.

Natalie Zett:

And all of the people that I'm working on now. They're not quote-unquote famous, but they have left trails and sometimes the trails are smudged and obscured, but they're there, ironically, the two people that I have been researching in the last couple of episodes the first one was James Gardner from last week and our upcoming mystery guest, who I'll be presenting here. Both of them have somewhat common last names. Now, I don't mean Smith or Jones, of course that would be really super challenging but I mean fairly common last names, and those types of situations add an extra layer of challenge when you go hunting for their history. You just have to allow for it, and here's what often happens. This has happened so many times, so I do want to mention it. I'll find a person with the same name, exact same name, such as James Gardner, and I'll also find a record for another person who appears to be the James I'm looking for. He's probably around the same age, if not the same age, and born in the same place. He might even be working in the same place, and then I can just rush to assume that it's the same person and I found information about him. But then a little more digging shows that they are two different people with the same names, even though they were living in the same location and often doing the same things. They're not the same person. So this happens a lot, and so I just wanted to make you aware of what the hunt looks like for these folks.

Natalie Zett:

What has happened in my years of doing genealogy is that I try to disprove a hint, if I can. You heard that right. I try to disprove my hypothesis if I can, because back in the early days I used to get so excited and I'd put some information in my family records only to find out I was wrong, and I'm still cleaning up the mess from some of that. So at this point the best way to deal with it is to find something and then try to find corroborating evidence, and that usually serves me well. Without further ado, I want to introduce you to Katherine MacIntyre, eastland Disaster Survivor and Rescuer. Her name is spelled with a K Katherine and MacIntyre, while she was born with the spelling of M-A-C-I-N-T-Y-R-E, although I have seen this in one or two places with M-C-I-N-T-Y-R-E and that can also lead you down the wrong trail. But I've looked for both and the majority of the time her name is spelled with the M-A-C entire.

Natalie Zett:

And to anyone who's been doing genealogy for any amount of time, you know that you have to really get creative when you're looking for someone when it comes to the spellings of their last names, because besides people transcribing things incorrectly, there's also A-I and O-C-R that can also get it wrong, although those two tools are doing fabulous work at this point. But you have to also allow for all kinds of crazy combinations of names and that can often lead to the success you're looking for, and you just kind of learn to do it by watching how other successful people in the field do it. But also you learn your own rhythm and you learn if you're working on your own family branches. You kind of learn how a certain country would deal with spellings and you understand their conventions, and that's a lot of it as well. So it's not impossible, but I don't ever want to say that it's easy. It just takes a mindset and a willingness to keep learning and always, always, learn from the best, learn from people who are doing this really well, because there are so many, and 2023 marks my seven years after returning to genealogy In 2016,. I did that ancestry DNA test and that pushed me back into doing this work, and I have found that, after so many courses and so many exchanges with some of these very well-known genealogists in the field, they are probably the most generous people ever. They are just really cool. So there's a bit of an insight into the under the hood look, or what the journey to discovering someone from the past looks like. So let's get going on. Katherine MacIntyre.

Natalie Zett:

So here is the article about Katherine MacIntyre from the Daily Advocate which was published in Chicago. The date is Thursday, July 29, 1915. And again, the Eastland disaster happened on July 24, 1915. There is a lovely photo of a very young Katherine. It looks like she's dressed in a sailor suit. I'm not sure if that's the case, but the heading is girl swimmer saves family. Heroine is modest over feet. And then the subheading says Katherine MacIntyre, eastland rescuer. Like little spots of sunlight on the walls of a dungeon, little stories of patience and heroism during the dreary wait for death or for life within a sunken ship stand out in bright relief against the dark background of the Eastland horror. One of the bright touches is given by the story of Miss Katherine MacIntyre who, by her presence of mind and slight knowledge of swimming, kept her six-year-old brother and mother afloat within the overturned Eastland until help came.

Natalie Zett:

Miss MacIntyre was at the Western Electric Plant yesterday helping to correct the list of victims and of survivors and with the work of helping families not so fortunate as her own. My story is so little and unimportant, she said, in comparison with what happened I can't see why it's worth telling. We were sitting on the second deck the baby and mother and I. We did not think anything happening. When the boat began to lurch, we thought it was just swaying to and fro as it started out. The first that we knew of the accident, a railing broke away and a woman screamed and we were all in the water. I grabbed my little brother and mother I can swim a little. We kept afloat until some man gave us a life belt and then we waited until someone threw a rope and pulled us all out.

Natalie Zett:

Miss MacIntyre is secretary to the head of the purchasing department of the Western Electric Company, graduate of the University of Illinois and a member of the AOP sorority. Her father, A. M. MacIntyre an Illinois Central Locomotive Engineer, 9439 St Lawrence Avenue, was not so modest in expressing his pride to his daughter's cool exploit. End of article. How's that for a proud dad? This article, the same article about Katherine, was reprinted in several newspapers, including the Chicago Examiner, Rockford Republic, the Daily Advocate, the Huntington Press, the Centralia Evening Sentinel and the Summer Elini or Elinie, I'm not sure. That's. The student newspaper of the University of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana, and the AOP sorority that was mentioned has quite a long history as well. Actually, in some publications it's called a fraternity, even though it was all women. It stands for Alpha Omicron Pi and the tagline is Inspire Ambition. And what they have on their main website is Alpha Omicron Pi was founded on a promise to serve not only one another, but the greater community as well. This commitment reflects a philosophy of friendship, concern and usefulness in the world. You're going to see that Katherine took this to heart.

Natalie Zett:

Katherine was born in 1889, some sources say 1890, in Lawrence Station, Elgin, Ontario, Canada, to Alex MacIntyre and Mary Milligan. Her ancestors immigrated from Scotland. Some of them were among the early immigrants to Nova Scotia in the 1600s. That's a long time ago. So she has deep Canadian lineage. Katherine had a sister who was born in 1890, and then, in 1900, the family immigrated to Chicago, and I'm not sure why. Although her dad seemed to be working as a farmer when they were in Canada, he was working as a carpenter in Chicago. She had a baby brother born in 1909, and Katherine graduated from South High School in Chicago and the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana. I'm not sure what she majored in maybe I'll find that out later. And then she was working at Western Electric in 1915, and, as the article said, by then her dad was working as a locomotive engineer.

Natalie Zett:

So the first thing to note about Katherine is that she's able to keep centered when everything literally is falling apart around her, and the adulation she received did not go to her head. Wait until you hear about the rest of her life. Four days after the Eastland disaster, she's listed in the Chicago Daily Tribune as donating money to the Mayor's Fund to relieve destitution of Eastland survivors. She seemed to partner with a company or two to donate $25. And if you're not impressed, remember this is 1915 and that $25 is around $761 today, according to Dr Google. Then she's back working at Western Electric, it seems like right away. What was she doing? She's helping to correct the list of victims and survivors and, as the article said, she's helped families not as fortunate as hers.

Natalie Zett:

Now she seems to have done a lot of moving around after that, including living in Manhattan briefly, and then she did a lot of back and forth traveling to Hawaii, but Katherine wasn't on a pleasure cruise or getting away from it all. She appeared to be doing surface work, like she was working for the Red Cross. And I'm still researching some of these articles because, honestly, they aren't too clear, so I'll get back to you on that. But by 1940, she was back in Chicago. By then she's 50 years old and she's living at the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago and she was its manager. The Quad Club was established in 1893 and it played, and still apparently plays, an important role in the intellectual fabric and life of the University of Chicago. In its early years it was home to a large number of the faculty and Katherine was busy managing all of that.

Natalie Zett:

But Katherine kept moving and she relocated to Hammond, Indiana, which is about 23 miles from Chicago. She was working at the Hammond High School and ended up being the manager of several high school cafeterias. She was also super active in the community, working with all kinds of civic organizations such as the League of Women, boaters. And, as the Hammond High School yearbook of 1956 said, Katherine was truly a busy woman. At some point she moved from Hammond to Franklin, Indiana, and she was living in a long-term care facility called the Methodist Home. She died on March 23, 1967. And that's still not the end, because her obituary revealed another interesting fact about her she was a member of the Grace Methodist Church, where she was active in the Hawthorne-Darby Guild. Now, at first I thought that this was some kind of organization that had something to do with Western electrics. Hawthorne works in Cicero. But no, Hawthorne Darby was a woman, a physician, who, like Katherine, was born around 1890 and was working as a medical missionary in the Philippines during World War II. There she was captured and was executed by the Japanese.

Natalie Zett:

I was putting together a little video tribute about Katherine and I wrote you can tell a lot about a person by who they look up to and by who they admire. Katherine MacIntyre now rests near her parents in Cedar Park Cemetery in Chicago. I don't know if she ever married. I don't know if she ever had any children of her own. Who knows if she ever talked about the Eastland disaster as the years passed, but just in case she didn't, I'm talking about her and her story now, With deep respect to Katherine and to all those in the USA who are celebrating. Happy Thanksgiving to you. I'll be back next week, take care E-book, paperback and hardcover, because I owe people money and I'm just kidding about that. But 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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