Fiery 1943 Oswego train wreck produced a young heroine

What does it take to make a hero? What, in fact, does that word really mean?

We tend to throw “hero” around a lot these days. Sports stars in each generation, from Babe Ruth to Walter Payton to Michael Jordan are described as heroes. Men and women who served in Afghanistan and Iraq were described as heroes. The hostages held in Iran back in the ’80s were called heroes.

But sports heroism consists mostly of being born with physical gifts and then using them to earn lots of money performing in front of sports fans. Not much actual heroism there. The men and women serving in the military were doing their jobs—tough jobs—and doing them very well. Those who left family and friends (including female soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who left spouses and children including newborn babies, and their homes) certainly verged on heroism if they didn’t exactly achieve it. The diplomats imprisoned by the Iranians 40+ years ago weren’t precisely heroes, although they acted, for the most part, heroically.

Local heroes are hard to come by, too. Perhaps that’s because we live in such a mundane community that there is little need for heroism here in northern Illinois. But we’ve had a few. Oswego native Slade Cutter was a bonafide World War II hero. Teenager Robinson B. Murphy was a legitimate hero, earning the Medal of Honor during the Civil War. And teacher Anna Brown achieved hero status in 1877 by saving one of her students from being run over by a train at the expense of losing part of a foot, crippling her for the rest of her life.

Several years ago, while going through some newspaper clippings donated to the Little White School Museum in Oswego, I came across another real life local hero. Just a year older than young Robinson B. Murphy, she nonetheless selflessly endangered her own life to save others.

Helen Gilmour was just 16 years old on that Tuesday afternoon in April 1943 when she stood waiting for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad’s gas-electric motor car—locals all called it the Dinky—to pull into the Oswego depot down at Jackson and South Adams streets.

The country was in the midst of World War II. Gilmour, a student at Oswego High School, was waiting at the Oswego depot to take the Dinky to Aurora to help her parents, Mr. and Mrs. James Gilmour of Wheatland Township, celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

But although it had been scheduled to arrive at 4:05 p.m., the car was running an hour and a half late due to engine trouble at Streator.

Following the end of regular interurban trolley service in the late 1920s, the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad began using the Dinky, which looked like a large trolley car, to provide daily passenger service from Streator to Aurora. The 58-mile Fox River Branch Line linked Streator with Aurora via Ottawa, Millington, Yorkville, Oswego, and Montgomery. The service was convenient and economical, offering residents of all those communities the public transportation option to commute to Aurora or Ottawa for jobs, school, and recreation in an era when two-car families were rare.

Plan of the CB&Q Railroad’s gas-electric passenger cars that ran on the Fox River Branch line through Oswego from the 1920s through 1952.

The Dinky, formally identified as Car 9850, was built in 1928 and was powered by a 275-horsepower gasoline engine that turned an electric generator that, in turn, powered the electric motors that turned the wheels.

The blocky car—no streamlined beauty—was painted a bright orange red, was nearly 78 feet long, and was divided into an engine and control compartment, a Railway Post Office compartment, a baggage compartment, and a passenger compartment seating 32 people.

One of the CB&Q’s gas-electric cars at the Aurora Depot on South Broadway in 1942. (Photo by H.W. Barber)

On that relatively warm April afternoon, the Dinky finally arrived in Oswego about 5:30 p.m. and the waiting passengers, including Helen Gilmour and one of her OHS schoolmates, 17 year-old Harold Alderman, hurried aboard. Motorman F.E. Bishop of Galesburg gunned the noisy engine and the car accelerated, heading north up the grade towards Montgomery. As the car clattered across the Waubonsie Creek trestle near downtown Oswego, mail clerk Paul Chrysler of Elmhurst and Chicago Assistant Chief Clerk John G. Gall of the U.S. Railway Mail Service sorted mail and baggage man Chalmers O. Kerchner of Streator prepared for the short run to Aurora. Conductor P.H. Follard kept track of the occupants of the passenger compartment in the car’s rear.

The Dinky sounded the distinctive “Blat!” of its horn at the North Street, North Adams, and Second Street crossings as it clattered up the gentle grade and across the Route 25 viaduct, laboring to reach 20 mph.

A steam shovel works in the gravel mine between Oswego and Yorkville in 1913 in this photograph from the Stephens-Adamson Manufacturing Company’s May 1913 “The Labor-Saver” newsletter. The mining operation used a variety of Stephens-Adamson equipment manufactured at the company’s Aurora plant.

Meanwhile, a CB&Q steam engine and caboose, with engineer Leo Kasid at the throttle, had started from Montgomery south on that same Fox River line to pick up a string of loaded hopper cars at the gravel pits south of Oswego. Fireman R.L. Parker stoked the engine’s boiler with coal as brakemen G.P. Schwartz and E.L. Shields and conductor D.R. Clark settled in the caboose for the short ride down the line to the gravel pit siding. Crossing the Fox River where Boulder Hill would one day be developed, the short train picked up speed as it steamed down the slight grade and around the gentle curve leading to Oswego.

It all seemed routine, but, as the Interstate Commerce Commission report on the accident noted about that stretch of track: “…the view of an engine approaching from the opposite direction is restricted to a distance of 753 feet, because of the cut and the track curvature.”

In addition, Kasid had not read the stack of dispatches he’d picked up on the way south, instead reading them as the train steamed down the grades. Possibly distracted by reading the dispatches, Kasid, who assumed the Dinky had passed that stretch of tracks an hour and a half earlier, didn’t see the Dinky coming towards him around the blind curve.

A Beacon-News photographer captured this image as rescuers removed the charred bodies of the motorman and the Railway Post Office workers from the wreck of the Dinky.

As a result, just after 5:30 p.m., roughly in back of today’s Oswegoland Civic Center, the steam engine crashed full speed into the Dinky, smashing five feet into the lighter weight car, pushing it 93 feet back down the track before the engine could be stopped.

Minnesota Falk, who lived about 300 yards from the crash site, told a reporter she heard the smash-up in her house and given the on-going war, feared the worst: “I heard the crash and thought it was the Nazis bombing the tracks,” she said.

A wider view of the wreck from a photograph in the collections of the Little White School Museum, Oswego, shows that a crowd of local residents gathered to see the wreck.

Dinky motorman Bishop along with baggage man Kerchner and the two post office employees, all riding in the front of the car, were killed almost instantly.

In addition, the Dinky’s fuel tank ruptured and then the fumes exploded, spraying 160 gallons of burning gasoline in all directions, engulfing the front half of the car in flames. Burning gasoline flowed downhill back towards the passenger compartment from the shattered fuel tank, setting everything in its path ablaze.

As the dazed passengers sat in danger of being incinerated, young Helen Gilmour, despite the ankle sprain she sustained in the collision, jumped up and began shepherding the traumatized survivors out of the blazing car.

“I just remembered what I had learned in first aid,” she later told a local newspaper. “We were taught not to get excited, so I didn’t; but it was pretty bad. The injured were lying all over the field. It looked just like a battlefield.”

Her schoolmate, Harold Alderman, critically injured, was rushed to St. Charles Hospital in Aurora, where he later died. A number of other passengers were also seriously injured, including the entire crew of the steam train.

The subsequent Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) investigation found the freight train, because the Dinky was running more than an hour late, was supposed to have waited at Montgomery until the Dinky passed. But faults in the communication system resulted in the failure to inform the locomotive’s crew of the on-coming passenger car. In fact, the steam engine crew, busy reading their stack of orders, never even saw the Dinky before the collision. Why the Dinky’s engineer both failed to see the approaching train and apply his brakes was never adequately explained.

The Dinky leaves the Oswego depot, heading southbound to Yorkville in this 1942 snapshot taken by the Cutter family, now in the collections of Oswego’s Little White School Museum.

In its accident report, the ICC strongly recommended that all gasoline electric passenger cars be transitioned to diesel engines, which use less explosive fuel. Further, since the surviving train crew said they’d never have proceeded had block signals been installed and working on the Fox River Branch line, the report recommended the railroad install the signals along the entire Aurora to Streator line.

Helen Gilmour went on to graduate from Oswego High in 1945. The community mourned young Alderman’s death. And while much of the mail Chrysler and Gall were sorting at their time of their death was incinerated, some of the letters were saved, arriving at their destinations charred and streaked with soot, causing not a little consternation among local military personnel serving overseas.

The demolished Dinky was replaced, despite the ICC’s warning, by another gas-electric car that provided service until the CB&Q discontinued it, with the last scheduled passenger car on the Aurora to Streator branch finishing its run on Feb. 2, 1952.

That marked not only the end of the Dinky, but also the end of the passenger train era on the Fox River Branch Line that had begun in 1870. It was also the final reminder of the deadly, fiery crash late on that April afternoon in 1943.

Advertisement

The world–and Kendall County–changed 80 years ago today with the attack on Pearl Harbor

Eighty years ago today the world changed when the Japanese bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor to begin the 20th Century’s second world war. A few days later, Germany followed Japan’s lead and declared war on the U.S. as well.

From our vantage point eight decades later, we clearly see that both Japan and Germany made extremely foolish decisions. While Japan had a very respectable navy to begin the war, their industrial base was small compared to the U.S. and the natural resources necessary to conduct modern warfare—coal, oil, and iron—were severely lacking compared to the seemingly unlimited supplies the U.S. had.

Likewise, Germany’s Adolph Hitler seriously erred in bringing the U.S., with its huge population and almost unimaginable industrial base, into the war he’d started in Europe. Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, could scarcely believe his luck when he heard about Hitler’s declaration.

Historians like to play the what-if game as much as anyone else. And they also like to look at events—particularly wars—to determine what the major turning points were. Many historians believe the thing that lost Japan and Germany the war was declaring it in the first place. The same can be said about our Civil War. The South, in its zeal to expand slavery into the western states, attacked the north, which had several times its population and industrial base, assuring its eventual defeat.

At Oswego’s Little White School Museum, the story of the community’s history is divided by three major inflection points: Settlement in the 1830s, the Civil War, and World War II. Why World War II? Because it marked the end of the Great Depression locally and nationally thanks to the greatest government funding program in the nation’s history and because of the generous way the government treated most of the millions who served after the war.

In early December 1941 the Oswego High School Band was practicing for their upcoming Christmas concert. After war was declared on Dec. 7, many of the boys in this photograph–and some of the girls–ended up serving in the military. (Little White School Museum collection)

Our county’s late 20th Century population boom has its roots in the G.I. Bill housing and education programs that, at least for White veterans, supplied low-cost single-family homes and college educations. It was something that created considerable wealth for those families lucky enough to have been eligible to participate—and not just for the generation that fought the war. That postwar economic base the World War II generation created continues to generate wealth here to this day. Kendall County’s population grew faster than any other county in Illinois between 2010 and 2010 because of what happened thanks to those government programs of the 1950s and 1960s.

To commemorate this year’s 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack and its immediate impact on our county, I wrote a column that appeared in last week’s Oswego Ledger. Generally, I don’t post blog entries and columns on the same topic at the same time, but this seems worth making a special case. Back all those years ago, the county’s residents were just clawing their way out of the Depression and they really weren’t paying much attention to what was happening thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Life at home, at school, at people’s workplaces and on area farms was going on as the community looked back at the end of the harvest and towards the coming Christmas and New Years holiday season.

So when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place, residents here were caught more or less off-guard. It seems to have taken a week or two for them to process the idea that the nation had again been drawn into a conflict with a foreign nation a couple short decades after what many had hoped would be “The War to End all Wars” ended in 1918.

With that introduction, here’s my take on the effect the start of World War II had on our little corner of northern Illinois, published in the Ledger last Thursday, Dec. 2:

******************************************************

Eighty years ago next Tuesday, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii without warning, destroying the fleet’s battleship squadrons. Fortunately, they missed the fleet’s aircraft carriers, and even more critically to the war effort, the huge tank farms with the fleet’s fuel oil supplies.

That Dec. 7, 1941 surprise attack, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt angrily described as “a day which will live infamy,” galvanized the nation into an almost unbelievable level of cooperation that created the “Arsenal of Democracy” that eventually led to crushing the Axis powers of Japan, Germany, and Italy.

The attack literally stunned the nation. Here in Kendall County, immediate reaction was shock, with not a little confusion.

Tensions with Japan over their conduct in China and elsewhere in the East had been growing for years, tensions that were getting through, even to such a safe and protected place like pre-World War II Kendall County.

The Oswego High School District had just completed the purchase of this house at Washington and Monroe streets in late November 1941 to house the school’s home economics classes. (Little White School Museum collection)

In general, life as usual was going on in November 1941. In Oswego, the high school’s home economics classes had moved into and off-campus house on Washington at Monroe Street. The house was built by Luella Hettrich in 1907 after she moved the house originally on the lot around the corner to Monroe Street. Mr. and Mrs. Ed Weidert moved into the moved house in the late 1930s. Shortly before the home ec students moved in, the Weiderts welcomed home a new son, Gerald, born Oct. 26.

But those looming problems half a word away were beginning to cloud the horizon. The Nov. 12 Kendall County Record noted that “Gov. Dwight H. Green expressed faith in Illinois farmers to meet the call for increased food production and pledged the support of the State Department of Agriculture to the nation’s ‘food for defense’ program in a statement issued through the Illinois USDA Defense board.”

In general, though, life was moving on. The corn harvest was on-going, with farmers planning to work right through Thanksgiving Day, weather permitting. At the county’s country and town schools, teachers—overwhelmingly young women—headed home to share the holiday with family. On Nov. 13, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Condon welcomed a new son. And on Nov. 19, the Record announced “Richard Young, a senior at Oswego Community high school, has been elected by the student body to represent them as ‘Boy Mayor’ in the parade to be held in Aurora Nov. 21.”

But those war clouds continued to gather. On Nov. 26, the Record carried a short note announcing “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Robinson entertained relatives at a Thanksgiving dinner Sunday. Their son, Wylie, in the selective service, will leave Saturday, as will two other Oswego boys, Louie Reid and J. Fred Reeves.”

The next week, Dec. 3, while noting a whooping cough epidemic was getting started in Oswego in those pre-vaccination days, the county, state, and nation were beginning to get serious about registering everyone—even those who’d previously served—with the Selective Service. “Those men in the National Guard or Regular Army on Registration day who didn’t register but who have been discharged since must register immediately,” a note in the Record warned. “If you are within the age limits and haven’t registered because you were in the service, you had better get in touch with Mr. Wells of the Selective Service board at the courthouse in Yorkville and straighten out your status.”

Then on Dec. 7 came that devastating attack on the Pacific Fleet, and the start of a world war, the second worldwide conflict in the first half of the 20th Century.

Kay Ivan Fugate, whose family had deep Oswego roots, was killed Dec. 7, 1941 at Pear Harbor aboard the USS Nevada. (Little White School Museum collection)

Finding the news difficult to believe, the Record’s Oswego correspondent briefly remarked with considerable understatement on Dec. 10: “The world is in a turmoil this Monday morning. This will be a day whose date goes down in history.” A story about a fire in the basement of the Oswego Prairie Church was several times as long.

Down in Yorkville, Record Publisher John Marshall tried to come to grips with what had happened in his usually breezy weekly local gossip column: “Of course the main topic of thought and conversation in Yorkville and elsewhere is the attack of the Japanese upon the United States and its possessions. And here we sit at the Linotype and try to concentrate what we facetiously call our brain on the writing of this here kolyum and at the same time hear the news reports as they come over the radio which is a difficult thing to do. So if the kolyum sounds a wee bit more screwy this week than it usually does, you know that there is some reason for it.”

The area’s Republican Congressman, Noah Mason, a bitter Roosevelt foe, threw his support solidly behind the war effort. “Signing off for Duration,” he wrote in the Record. “America has been attacked. War has come. From now on all Americans must put aside differences of opinion and unite to win the war as quickly as possible. We pray that ‘Peace on earth good will to men’ may soon become the controlling gospel of all nations.”

Elwyn Holdiman, whose family farmed in the Oswego area, was among the Oswego men drafted during World War II. He was killed in action 29 Oct 1944 in the Netherlands. (Little White School Museum collection)

The pages of the Record began recording meetings of local Red Cross chapters who were knitting hats and mittens for soldiers, as well as notes on the young men who were either enlisting or being drafted. Forest Wooley, Bill Leigh, Bob McMicken, Cecil E. Carlson, Logan Harvey, Paul Krug, John Lewis, Elwyn Holdiman, and Charles Sleezer all headed off to serve.

And bringing the Dec. 7 attack home to Kendall County, the Record reported on Jan. 28 that “Mrs. Mary Shoger received a message telling of the death of her grandson, Kay Fugate, 24 years old, who was killed in action at Pearl Harbor He enlisted two years ago in Aurora.”

The conflict beginning Dec. 7 would continue for nearly five years and involve hundreds of local men and women. Some, like Dick Young, the “Boy Mayor,” would fight on bloody Iwo Jima with the U.S. Marines but live to return home. So many, many more like Kay Fugate at Pearl Harbor; Elwyn Holdiman, drafted just weeks after Pearl Harbor and killed in action in Holland in 1944 along with young Oswego men Frank Clauser, Donald Johnson, Stuart Parkhurst, and Paul Zwoyer would never return, but instead make the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.