Some of the most famous residents of the western suburbs are here to stay. Many of them captained industry, from salt to steel. One had a major city named for him. Another notable was a horse. All have found their final resting places in the area.
Elbert H. Gary made front-page news in Chicago when he died in 1927. A former Wheaton mayor and DuPage County judge, Gary was asked by financier J.P. Morgan to establish U.S. Steel Co. by consolidating the major steel companies of the time.
“He was so fair and upstanding that they asked him to become president of the company,” said Betty Jeppsen, historian of the Gary Memorial United Methodist Church in Wheaton. The company town that sprang up around the Indiana steel mill was named for him.
Upon his death, one front page headline blared “Gary’s Wealth is Guessed at Near $45,000,000.” Not bad for a farm boy, the son of early DuPage County settlers.
His advice, according to one obituary, was: “Hard work, the Golden Rule, thrift, careful investments.”
Fellow industry leaders eulogized him, as did then-President Calvin Coolidge, who said in a letter to Gary’s wife that Gary “proved that success is attained in largest measure through adherence to the highest standards of American business.”
He didn’t win praise from every corner, however. Although Gary promoted some labor reforms, he refused to shorten the 12-hour workday. He opposed collective bargaining. During a 1919 steel strike, U.S. troops occupied the city of Gary until the unrest ended three months later on Jan. 7, 1920, with management declaring victory. Three years later, under public pressure, he agreed to the eight-hour day.
He died of heart disease two months short of 81 and was buried in the family mausoleum in Wheaton Cemetery in Wheaton.
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Another steel man, John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates, also made millions — from oil and barbed wire. A native of Turner’s Junction, now known as West Chicago, he struck oil on his Texas land and started Texas Oil Co., later called Texaco.
He died in 1911 and was buried in New York, but his $38 million fortune found its way in 1918 to his two closest living relatives, brother-in-law Edward Baker, then 40, and niece Dellora Angell, then 15, both of St. Charles.
The Gates fortune bedecked St. Charles. Six years after receiving her inheritance, Angell married her childhood sweetheart, Lester Norris, a St. Charles cartoonist. They built the Norris Cultural Arts Center, St. Charles High School and other buildings, including Delnor Hospital and Delnor Medical Park. A Red Cross volunteer, Dellora Norris worked as a nurse’s aide at Delnor.
She also originated victory gardens as a means to support the country in advance of World War II. The idea took root. Soon Dellora chaired the Victory Garden Program nationally.
The reclusive Norrises shunned publicity, but it found them anyway.
Dellora died in 1979 at age 77. Her husband died two years later. They are buried along with Baker, who died in 1959 at age 90, in Union Cemetery in St. Charles.
Baker was dubbed “Colonel” by a Kentucky governor because he was such a noted horseman. One of his trotters, the silver-gray Greyhound, in 1938 broke the record for fastest mile, a record that stood 31 years.
Greyhound, who would come from behind to win nearly every race, broke 17 world records in all. Horse lovers still come to visit Greyhound’s monument at Red Gate Farm in St. Charles, said Jeanne Schultz, curator of the St. Charles Heritage Center.
Greyhound died in 1965. He lived to the ripe old age of 33, in part because of the care given to him, according to a local news report. He lived in a large paneled stall amid his many trophies. Greyhound outlived Baker.
The horse’s marker, which stands amid graves of fellow Baker trotters and dogs at Red Gate Farm, reads: “World’s Fastest Trotter.”
Another monument at the farm, erected by Baker for all of his horses, says: “This monument is dedicated in affection and pride to him who needs none — the horse. May neither rain nor wind nor flight of time erase the glory of his memory — Col. Edward J. Baker.”
Besides racing, Baker, who remained in St. Charles his entire life, helped his hometown with funds for roads, bridges and buildings. He also spent $600,000 to build the Baker Hotel in 1928, helping St. Charles to become a prime spot for a weekend getaway, especially after the Norrises built the neighboring Arcada Theatre. The hotel was known for its Rainbow Room, a massive glass-floored ballroom with multicolored lights that flashed underneath. Top-notch entertainers played there.
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Another colonel buried locally is Robert Rutherford McCormick. Known as “The Colonel” for the rank he attained in World War I, McCormick was laid to rest in his military uniform at Cantigny, his Wheaton farm, now open to the public.
The grandson of Tribune Editor Joseph Medill, McCormick started his career at 23 in politics as a Chicago alderman, later becoming Sanitary District Board president.
McCormick ruled the Chicago Tribune Co. from 1911, becoming its editor in 1914, until his death in 1955. He used the paper and radio station WGN as bullhorns for his political opinions. He vehemently disagreed with the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, a former classmate of his at Groton Prep School in Concord, N.H.
McCormick had hired Carey Orr, a political cartoonist who, like McCormick, crusaded for America and its flag. The U.S. government and the Freedom Foundation gave Orr an award for his cartoons. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for the sarcastically titled “The Kindly Tiger” that depicted then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as “Krushy’s Kat,” licking its chops at the prospect of establishing puppet governments in newly free African countries.
Like McCormick, he aimed his pen at former Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson, FDR and the New Deal.
A former semi-pro baseball player, Orr saved up to attend the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He spent half a century as a cartoonist, all but four of those years at the Tribune. Famous people lampooned by Orr kept his cartoons. According to his obituary, “Queen Elizabeth has two Orr originals, in which her romance with Prince Philip and her coronation were depicted. Former President Truman often was the target of Orr’s pen, and several original cartoons are in the Truman library in Independence, Mo.”
He died in 1967 at age 77 and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Geneva.
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Political cartoonist Vaughn “Shoes” Shoemaker worked for a competing paper, the Chicago Daily News, and later Chicago’s American and its successor, Chicago Today. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for “The Road Back,” an Armistice Day drawing of a confused soldier leaving World War I only to enter World War II. He garnered a second Pulitzer in 1947 for “Still Racing His Shadow,” about a worker labeled “New Wage Demands” fleeing from his shadow labeled “Cost of Living.”
Shoemaker also rose to fame by creating the John Q. Public character. One obituary said Shoemaker “satirized every public figure for a generation.”
Shoemaker drew his first cartoon for a newspaper at 21 and retired at 70. He died in 1991 at 89 and was buried at Elm Lawn Cemetery in Elmhurst.
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Also buried at Elm Lawn is Percy Julian, an African-American scientist who achieved greatness in the development of synthetic drugs. He has been compared with George Washington Carver, who discovered more than 100 uses for the peanut.
From the soybean, Julian produced a firefighting foam used aboard Navy ships during World War II; a chemical to coat paper; and a filter to mass produce synthetic sex hormones, a first step toward developing birth control pills. But perhaps his greatest use of the soybean was to produce synthetic cortisone, used to relieve arthritis pain.
Julian also mass-produced physotigmine, used to treat glaucoma.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People bestowed its Spingarn Medal upon him in 1947, 14 years after George Washington Carver had received one.
Julian died in 1975. A Tribune editorial eulogized: “Dr. Percy Julian’s death from cancer at the age of 76 ends one of the most brilliant and useful careers of a resident of metropolitan Chicago.”
The son of a slave, Julian found he could go only so far in the American collegiate system, even though he graduated at the top of his class at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1931 after American universities refused to admit him into their doctorate programs. He established the Julian Research Institute in Franklin Park and won international recognition for his discoveries.
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The Mortons, known for their salt company, are buried in a private cemetery in the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the outdoor museum Joy Morton established for the study of woody plants.
Joy Morton began working with the Chicago salt firm E.L. Wheeler & Co. in 1879. Six years later, he owned it. He served as president until 1933, when he became chairman of the board. He died the following year on May 9. His son Sterling, serving as company vice president at the time, followed in his father’s footsteps to the chairman’s role. Sterling, a philanthropist and an art collector, donated a wing to the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Organ music was Ken Griffin’s art. He made 22 records, selling nearly 15 million of them before he died of a heart attack in hometown Chicago on March 11, 1956. He was 46. Perhaps his biggest claim to fame was penning the music for the hit song “You Can’t Be True, Dear.”
Known for a tuneful, unadorned style of ballads and waltzes later popular at skating rinks, Griffin traveled the East and Midwest hauling his organ, which he had taught himself to play. He began his career playing for silent movies out West in the 1920s. He became hot in the ’40s and ’50s, with one of his featured stops the Old Heidelberg Restaurant in the Loop. He is buried in Lincoln Cemetery in Aurora.
