Mother’s Day was rapidly approaching in early May 1937 when Col. Nelson Morris convinced his friend Burtis Dolan to fly with him across the Atlantic Ocean instead of embarking on his planned steamship journey home.
That way Dolan would be able to surprise his family by being home for the holiday — the ocean route would take several days longer than the two-day zeppelin trip. Morris, a wealthy executive and scion of Armour and Co. meat packers in Chicago, would pay for airship tickets if Dolan covered the bar tab.
It was a deal.
A few days later, the friends were standing together in the passenger cabin of the Hindenburg airship as it prepared to land May 6, 1937, at Lakehurst, New Jersey. They were moments away from what Herbert Morrison, a reporter for Chicago radio station WLS, called “one of the worst catastrophes of the world” in what would become one of the most famous radio news broadcasts in history.
Morris, who owned a large home next to Ravisloe Country Club in Homewood, survived.
Two other Chicago area resident Hindenburg passengers — Clifford Osbun, a farm equipment sales manager from Park Ridge, and River Forest resident Herbert O’Laughlin, president of Consumers Coal and Coke Co. of Elgin, also survived the fiery wreck.
Dolan, who grew up near DePaul University in Chicago and was Morris’ friend and former secretary, was among the 36 people who died in the crash. Two dogs also perished.
The crash of the airship and its history are detailed in the book “Zeppelin Hindenburg: An Illustrated History of LZ-129” by Dan Grossman, Cheryl Ganz and Patrick Russell, which was published in 2017 and updated in 2019 though is now out of print.
Russell, a former Chicagoan who now lives in La Porte, Indiana, also compiled the stories of the 97 passengers and crew aboard the airship on its famous final voyage on his blog Faces of the Hindenburg.
It’s the result of a project he started in 2009 or so, after reading fictionalized accounts of the disaster that created imagined personas for some of the lesser known travelers on the zeppelin’s final journey.
“There were these people who nobody knew about. A lot were just names on passenger or crew lists,” he said. “They turned one guy into a Gestapo agent. I thought it was a shame. These were people who died in the crash and nobody knows anything about them, so I dove in and found out what I could confirm about these folks so they aren’t just fading into history as a name on the list.”
In the process, he became friends with fellow airship enthusiast Dennis Kromm, of Aurora, whose extensive research on Hindenburg casualty Bertis Dolan in the 1980s included interviews with Dolan’s offspring and recorded the heartwrenching Mother’s Day connection that led to his death. Dolan’s presence on the zeppelin had been kept a secret from his wife and mother to preserve the surprise.
There are plenty of sad stories associated with the horrific fiery crash. But there are amazing tales of survival as well.
“This thing took half a minute from when it was just floating there and then becoming wreckage on the ground,” Russell said. “In the time it takes me to have a good yawn and stretch, it was done. All these people had just a few seconds to figure out what to do, and so many of them managed to get out. Some got out without a scratch, which is weirder.”
While Dolan’s family in Chicago wouldn’t find out about their loss until later, Osbun’s wife and daughters in Park Ridge heard mixed initial reports, some indicating that he was among the missing or dead. Hours later, they received a telegram from the injured sales manager that “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” according to Russell’s research. It might have been the second time they got that news, as Osbun had survived a seaplane crash near Puerto Rico a year earlier.
O’Laughlin, whose family founded Oak Park National Bank, largely escaped injury when he jumped from a window just before the airship crashed into the ground. He ran to a hangar and got in line to use the phone to send word home that he had survived. He stuck around to give interviews to WLS’s Morrison and later to the Tribune, and he made it home to River Forest in time for Mother’s Day.
Morris, the grandson of Chicago meatpacking giants on both sides of his family — Swift & Co. and Morris & Co., which merged with Armour & Co. — was vacationing in France with his wife, the French actress Blanche Bilbao, and was making a quick jaunt back to Chicago for meatpacking business when he boarded the Hindenburg. He intended to return to his wife in France when the airship was scheduled to return to Europe May 14. That trip, of course, didn’t happen.
After recuperating from burns to his hands and face suffered in the crash, Morris went back to meet his wife in France, and eventually made their way in July back to Homewood, traversing the Atlantic this time by steamer.
Nelson and Blanche Morris had long been known for supporting Homewood causes. A Dec. 26, 1933, item in the Chicago Heights Star detailed his years-long custom of presenting “a fine, dressed turkey” each December to “the entire county police force at the Homewood station as well as members of the Homewood and Flossmoor force.”
A World War I veteran, Col. Nelson Morris was a founding member of the American Legion of Homewood, the Wally Burns Memorial VFW Post in Homewood and the Homewood Izaak Walton League, according to information provided by the Homewood Historical Society.
Joan Brazzale, a historical society member who grew up next door to the Morris mansion on Perth Avenue in Homewood after moving there in 1954, related a story from her older brother, Harold, who remembered Morris as “a very generous man.”
“While walking down the street, Harold found a golf ball, and Nelson Morris gave him $1 for it. That was big money for a golf ball then, especially to a 5-year-old, and my brother remembers it to this day.”
That generosity extended beyond Nelson Morris’s lifetime. After he died in 1955, Blanche Morris donated the Homewood home and property to the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. It soon became home to 18 Dominican nuns who would teach at Marian Catholic High School in Chicago Heights, which opened in 1958. Once the nuns moved to their own convent, Viatorian priests, some who also taught at Marian, moved in and lived there until Blanche died in 1983, according to materials from the historical society.
While the Morrises were known for lavish garden parties, the priests preferred life more low-key, and converted the home’s former wet bar into an altar and prayer station, which still exists in the home. The altar, which current owner Sally Pellati said came from the former St. John Catholic Church in Homewood, remains in place, though it has been repurposed once again into a wet bar.
Sally and her husband, Giorgio Pellati, have lived in the Morris mansion since 2000. Built amid the Great Depression in the Spanish Mission style, the house mirrors the similarly designed clubhouse at Ravisloe Country Club as well as the Homewood train station.
Sally Pellati said she saw a 1979 story in the Homewood-Flossmoor Star newspaper about the mansion and clipped it because she liked the house so much.
“It fascinated me for years,” she said.
When it came on the market 14 years later, they bought it and that clipping is now framed on a “history wall” in a room devoted to the home’s famous past.
“People would show up and give me things,” Sally Pellati said. “A gentleman who lived in the south suburbs came up, and his grandparents had been caretakers that worked for Blanche and her husband. Now I’ve got a picture of them in there. I’ve got a picture that was left in the house of Blanche and her husband. Then somebody else came and gave me a photo of Blanche from France.”
Also hanging on the history wall is a plaque from Saint Xavier University announcing a residence hall at the school in Chicago. Built in 2003, Morris Hall was named for Blanche Morris after the final $1.5 million of a legacy trust fund she’d established went toward its construction. At the time, it was the largest cash donation from a private donor in the university’s history. The Pelattis attended the dedication of the building.
While memories of the Morrises live on at their Homewood mansion and the Saint Xavier University dormitory, it is Col. Morris’s association with the Hindenburg that remains etched strongest in history.
Russell, one of the authors of the Hindenburg history, said it wasn’t just the disaster that made it stand out. There’s a longstanding “cultural attachment” to the zeppelins themselves.
“There never was anything like them,” he said. “Never before and never again were you able to see something two or three city blocks long flying over your head.
“It persists in the collective consciousness, and it seems to grab a hold of a few people every generation. How did anyone get away with flying people on a hydrogen airship? That these things even existed was remarkable.”
Landmarks is a column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
