Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on July 19, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Front Page Flashback: July 20, 2017
2017: DNA supplied by a brother and sister helped confirm that James “Jimmy” Byron Haakenson was Victim 24, whose remains were found buried with many of the other victims in the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy’s Chicago-area house. A 16-year-old Haakenson had set out on an adventure more than 40 years ago, traveling to Chicago from his Minnesota home.
Haakenson’s mother had come to Chicago in 1979, after Gacy’s arrest. Her attempt to find out if her son was among Gacy’s victims failed because she did not have his dental records — then the main method of identifying remains.
One additional victim — Francis Wayne Alexander — was identified in 2021. Just five of Gacy’s 33 victims remain unknown.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 101 degrees (1930)
- Low temperature: 50 degrees (1873)
- Precipitation: 1.96 inches (1963)
- Snowfall: None
1949: President Harry Truman spoke at the Shriners convention, of which he was a member. It was one of the first televised events at the stadium.
“The formation of foreign policy on the part of the democratic nations may be a slow and painful process, but the results endure,” Truman told the crowd. “It is only in the totalitarian states, where all decisions are made by a few men at the top, that foreign policies can be reversed or radically altered in secrecy, or changed abruptly without warning.”
“The huge bowl of Soldiers’ field looked like a flower garden yesterday — blazing with the blue, red, gold, green, and white uniforms of the members of the Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, in Chicago to celebrate the diamond jubilee of their fraternity,” the Tribune reported.
1989: A Chicago-bound DC-10 made an emergency landing at the Sioux City, Iowa, airport, after failure of the plane’s hydraulic control system. One hundred passengers and a United Airlines flight attendant died after “the plane slammed down on the runway, flipped over, lost its wings and burst into a huge fireball, spewing wreckage and bodies into an adjacent cornfield,” the Tribune reported. “Miraculously, more than 170 passengers, some of them children, and the three-man cockpit crew survived.”
2019: Music festival Mamby on the Beach was canceled due to the arrival of a pair of federally endangered piping plover shorebirds on Montrose Beach. Nicknamed Monty and Rose, the pair continued to migrate to the area and hatch chicks for three consecutive summers. Their descendants carry on the tradition.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: How piping plovers have captured our hearts through the years
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