Finally The Paperback Release of Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago is a historical look at Chicago during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The story of Chicago fighting the hold that organized crime had on the city to be able to put on The 1933 World's Fair.

William Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World's Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed The Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as prohibition was repealed. The story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the World's Fair with her own rags to riches story and brought sex into the open. The story of Rufus and Charles Dawes who gave the fair a theme and then found financing in the worst economic times the country had ever experienced. The story of the most corrupt mayor of Chicago, William Thompson, who owed his election to Al Capone; and the mayor who followed him, Anton Cermak, who was murdered months before the fair opened by an assassin many said was hired by Al Capone.

But most of all it’s the story about a city fighting for survival in the darkest of times; and a shining light of hope called A Century of Progress.

Paperback Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Capone Stories ---Al Capones Girlfriend

I have given over fifty speeches and done just as many book signing on Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair. At the speeches and signings people bring memorabilia from the fair and their stories of Al Capone. Here are a few....

He had on a brimmed cap and walked up my book table. Yeah, I knew Capone. I was in the Barnes and Noble doing a book signing. I looked at the man. Really? Oh yeah. My mom was his girlfriend. She was a number. Real good looking see.  Anyway she and Capone got into a fight. She was real good looking and so they get in this fight and Capone gets mad and I'm only ten years old but these two goons come to the apartment and take me down to a a speakeasy on Maxwell Street.

So Im pretty scared cause these guys have guns. So they take me into this speakeasy and its real dark and I cant see nothin. My mom had told me she and Al were in a fight. I think he hit her or something. So these guys sit me down at a table and this big fat Italian guy comes in and sits down in front of me. He starts hitting me all over the place, slapping me around. I don't know who the guy is but he starts asking me whats wrong with  my mother. Like I said she was a real number.

So after a while he stops hitting me and the goons take me back to my apartment. The man looked at me and smiled. And that was Al Capone? Yeah. That was Capone. Yeah. He and my mom got back together for a while but then they broke up. The man paused and shrugged. But she was his girlfriend. My mom...she was Al Capones girlfriend.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

How Al Capone Became Scarface

Young Al Capone got a job in a bar along the Jersey boardwalk. A woman and a man came in and sat down at a table. Capone gave them their drinks and went back to the bar. The woman was a real Italian beauty. Al couldn't keep his eyes off her. He went back to get their glasses and that was when he said it. I tell you honey, you got a really nice ass. The man who turned out to be the woman brother jumped up with a knife and started slashing at Capone.

Once twice the knife slashed Capones cheek. Blood flowed down his neck. Capone went crazy and the man barely made it out of the bar. Capone was stitched up but the scars remained. At first they were deep red and angry. Capone was very touchy about the scars. He never wanted to be photographed on that side. He didn't let anyone call him Scarface. Many times he would powder the scars over so they wouldn't be as prominent.

The man turned out to work for a local mobster. Capone was told he could not retaliate. As Capone rose up the man came to work for him and Al harbored no ill will. He had popped off and the woman's brother did what any brother would do. Scarface would not be so benevolent to other men who crossed him.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

The Secret Six Who Got Rid of Capone

You think it was Kevin Costner who got rid of Capone if you saw The Untouchables. Elliott Ness was a treasury agent enforcing prohibition but he did not get rid of Al Capone. It took six Chicago Millionaires dubbed the Secret Six to put Al behind bars. They did it with money and bought a secret police force and formed the first witness protection program. And they were secret. Capone could never figure out the men though he had some ideas. Chicago was having a Worlds Fair in 1933 and something had to be done or no one would show up.

The Secret Six set up their own speakeasy to get information. They had their own gangsters who infiltrated Capones inner circle. They had their own enforcers who got information out of mobsters. And they had thousands to spread around, buy people off, and hire private detectives and investigators. Elliott Ness was running around at this time also but he was basically busting up stills, speakeasies and wiretapping phones. But to get the goods on Capone the Secret Six went after his business and began attacking Capone where it hurt and that was in the manufacturing of beer and whiskey.

They approached it like a business and studied Capones operation and began to wonder how he got his money. This would lead to the conviction on tax evasion that eventually would put Al Capone away. The Secret Six would never reveal their identities but even Capone recognized who put him away. "It was the Secret Six that put me away. They couldn't be bought."

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Selling Books at Printers Row Chicago

You get there early and no one is in your tent yet. You unload your books williamhazelgrove.com and position them on the table along with your bookmarks, water, pad, money for change. Other people arrive. The temperature will soon be in the nineties and your tent is in the middle of Dearborn Street. This is one of the few times you are shoulder to shoulder with other authors selling books. This is good and bad. You are all after the same customers and it is a bit of  an open market with everyone pitching. Nine O'clock rolls around and the first people pass by.

Your books are hardcovers but this doesn't matter. People will pay 30.00 for a book they want. The  man across the street is selling everything for three bucks. You begin to sweat and now you are pushing up against the other authors because suddenly the tent is full. It is already hot, heat rash hot, and the water is not enough. The heat is an enemy that zaps your energy and you need every bit of it to pitch your book over and over and over.  This will go on for two days.

You would like to think you are beyond Printers Row. That your books should magically sell themselves and there are a lot of self published authors there. Your books are more expensive with a big publisher who will not discount. But this is the Midwest Mecca for books and it is long hot and grueling and you fall into bed exhausted and dehydrated at the end of the day. Your books sell out twice and at the end you take home a lot less books than you came with.

You wake on Monday wondering where the weekend went and then you remember, Printers Row. You will be there again next year with another book.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

The WGN Rick Kogan Show On a Snowy Night in Chicago

It takes forever to get there but you make it and you are hungry. You duck into Billy Goats and stare at the old journalists on the walls while you eat your two cheeseburgers chips no fries. There is John Belushi on the wall. Hes gone too. But you are there to go on at ten with one of the few real  journalists still left. Rick Kogans show is unique. He reads the books and wants to talk about them. As you emerge from the underground on the slushy sidewalks of Michigan Avenue you can feel Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren maybe Al Capone. They are all there on this cold wintry night.

But you are there to do the show and so you wait across the street  in a Starbucks and kill time. The Tribune Tower is massive and you can see the WGN studio through the window. You used to live not far from the studio in a high rise but that was a long time ago before kids and the suburbs. But the books always pull you back into the city You know you will be up back here one day with all those dead Chicago authors.

So you walk up and down Michigan Avenue and the snow is coming down harder. Not many people out now. It is Sunday night after all. A ten o'clock slot of live radio for thirty minutes is coveted. Especially with a man who can talk books. You finish a cigarette and look at the clock. Its cold. It's time to go into that Chicago night again and fill the air waves. Last of the Mohicans.

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

About Last Night

You know that old movie set in the mid eighties with Demi Moore and Rob Lowe based on Mamets play Sexual Perversity in Chicago that catalogued that amazing time after college in Chicago when all you had to do was go to work party and find the love of your life. Well I watched it again and like all movies from that era I was amazed at the great times it brought back. My wife and I both lived in Chicago during those years and were actually coming out of a bar across form Mothers on Rush Street when they filmed the New Years Even scene complete with  movie snow.

And a girl I went to high school with appeared in one of the final scenes as her only moment of contextual fame...so close to Rob and Demi and Jim Belushi she could touch them but then she fell into obscurity as did the movie after years passed. But there are movies that bring back a moment in time with the crystal clarity of a clock striking the hour and About Last Night does this very well. Yes it is a brat pack eighties movie but Mamets script anchors the movie and it has moments where it takes flight.

And if you were in Chicago during the eighties. And if you had just graduated from college. And if you lived in old brownstones and went to the bars on Rush Street and if you stayed out all night and walked in the surf of Lake Michigan as dawn broke then you watch this movie as if someone had filmed your life and you end up with a hell of a nostalgia hangover when it ends.

And you wonder for the millionth time...where did all that go? Demi dumped by Ashton. Rob busted for peeping. Still...there was a moment. Ah well...Boats against the current....



www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

A Night at Wrigley

You get there and of course you need a hotdog and a beer. The best stand has the grilled onions and there is a line but you wait. The Budweiser is cold and tastes like ballpark beer...slightly metallic. A bag of peanuts and now you are on your way. The Cubs have not been doing so well so your thirteen dollar tickets are no longer relevant. There are many places to sit and no need to go into the nosebleed sections. So you plop down along the third base line and watch the Cubs warm up.

The rain has blown off and the sky has cleared and it is blue toward the lake. The honor guard is lining up for the National Anthem and the players have their hats off as some guy belts out the Star Spangled Banner. And he really lets it all fly on the final verse and everyone goes nuts and then you sit down and someone shouts: Play BALL. So you finish your hotdog and drink your beer and start cracking peanuts as the Cubs look like they might actually beat the Brewers.

There are some Brewers fans around you who are mostly quiet in the sea of Cub jerseys. And you pick out the lifers the ones who live in the city around the stadium. And the guys who sell the hotdogs and beers and are probably pushing sixty. Everyone in the park is an amazing testament to the national pastime to the old ladies in their Cub hats and the solitary fan scoring quietly by himself to the young girls in the tight Cub tank tops.

And the rain comes and they stop the game and you watch them roll out the tarp. An amazing orchestrated ballet really. And you sit there with everyone for an hour and watch the rain and lightning but you don't care. You are sitting in the middle of the greatest city in the world in one of the last great old ball parks. And the rain does stop and the players hit the field. Seventh Inning stretch comes and you sing with  thousands of other people Take Me Out to The Ball Park.

And then it is over and you are on the train headed back out. The Cub Fans are rowdy and then asleep and everyone is winding down. The rain has come back as you leave the train and walk toward your car. And you think, sometimes...life does deliver.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Last Train out of Chicago

Sir. I need help. We are stranded and we need to catch the next train out. I cant help you I'm sorry. Said while rushing up to catch the midnight train out of Chicago. Wisps of snow fall down on a breathing freight parked by the platform. Chicago glows in the cold darkness, a glittering city of Oz. Hey man. Hey  man. Those people ask you for money. Yeah. The black man with the wool hat appeared out of nowhere. Nowhere.

They do that shit every night man. I'm straight up. Man I need help I say so. Just got out of the pen man. Eight years and now I'm on the street. You a player. I can tell. They are just pulling the same old con. The couple come out onto the platform. Fighting. The woman with bruises rushes past. We have to get on this train. Yeah man. They do this shit every night...but hey man you help me out you know with a few bucks. I already have my hand on four dollars.

Yeah I was going to give it to them but now not so fast. A con. Sure. The homeless con in Chicago and I'm stranded. You really think they are lying? Man. Course they are. I'm for real. I see the train coming from Chicago. The last train out. Cmom man just give me a couple bucks. I hand the money over and he starts walking. I got your back man. You ever by the library we play chess.

The train rushes in and the couple jumps on. The man goes into the bathroom. The conductor faces the woman and then pulls the stop cord. Come on...get your boyfriend out of the bathroom. I watch him escort them off the train back into the night.  The sleeping suburban people don't stir.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Driving Through the Blizzard of 2011

The blizzard in Chicago assures you that you will be going nowhere. But you push it anyway and end up being the last man out of the coffee house that every sensible person left hours ago. Didn't you hear? Sixteen inches! Worst storm in history! Yeah Yeah Yeah. Let me finish this scene and I'll be along. But you do notice you can't see out the windows anymore and even the toothless guy in the zip up suit guys at Jiffy Lube wear looks concerned. She's going to be a doozie he says nodding. You wonder where he has to go because you can't stay in Starbucks forever. Mr. Starbucks the revolutionary studying theology goes out the door and comes back in giving up on the smoke. It's getting bad he declares to the toothless guy in the zoot suit and the writer in the scarf balancing the laptop. Morons I'm sure.

So head it home. The SUV can handle this. But where are all the cars and why are the only cars out off the road? Why is the guy in the middle of the road with his flashers on the hill? Could it be he cant get up the hill occurs to you as you rumble past. But now things are getting bad. You just cant see. The world has turned white like one of those car washes that freaks you out with blankets of suds and the claustrophobia grabs you by the throat making you consider driving through the car wash door to get the hell out of there. But there is no door to drive through because you cant tell up from down or right from left. You instantly win the Sarah Palin award for pushing everything once again to the limit. DUMMMMMMMMB

But like a pilot flying through clouds you guess where the road should be. You have driven it a million times and there are dim lights pulsing through the white haze that must be a car in front of you so you key on that. Keep the nose on the dim lights. You are now a sailor aiming for a lighthouse in the far distance. The light pulses and moves away and you push down on the accelerator. Lose that light and you really are doomed. So you inch along passing more cars off the road with misty figures standing by the side. You cant stop. If you stop the guy behind you who is also blind will ram right into you. Oh and by the way, you didn't fill up and your CHECK GAUGE light has just come on.

Now you are risking your life for coffee in Starbucks and reading an extra article in the New York Times. Run out of gas on this desolate road and you are just done. Oh and the cellphone needs charging too. Perfect. The complete moron. You really should call up to Alaska and ask if they need a campaign manager because you have out Palined the Palinator. Now that the road has vanished and the wheel is vibrating in your hand because there is just as much as snow on the road as off the road you consider your fate. Snowbank death. Turned over vehicle death. Frozen death. The wheels do not like the snow pushing back and of course you have no idea where you are and the gas gauge is screaming you are on fumes. You simply don't have any landmarks anymore and so you don't know how far you have to go.

You pick up the cellphone blinking BATTERY LOW. You dial the wife. Might as well do a Scott and Amundsen thing with a final I love you. They will bring that up at your funeral. If only he left the Starbucks earlier. Every one will shake their head: moron. You press send and the phone shuts down. No final epistle: I believe I could have made it if I put another mile behind me. So you are alone in your folly. Moron Moron Moron. The blinding howling wind taunts you in your capsule. You give in to the inevitable sputtering engine that is making strange noises. Then...like Shackleton's sighting of the whaling station after being lost for two years...the light appears.

That is the light on the corner of the road to your neighborhood. LAND HO! You knew you could do it! You turn in and glide down toward your home, cheating death, cheating the great blizzard of 2011. Sarah Palin will have to find another man. You pull into your garage and wait until the door is safely down and you sit contemplating the cosmos and your small place in it. Moron you mutter.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off soon

When Your Team Loses

I don't know why but I am moving a little slower for a Monday. Maybe it is the winter that starts to really drag in January with the long slog to spring like some grey ghost that envelops the land with snow and bitter soul deadening cold. Or maybe it is the normal questioning that goes on during the dark months where you count your age and your situation and like a poker player with only so many chips left you wonder why you have squandered so many wagers on losing propositions. Or maybe it is because your team just got bounced out of the Super Bowl by a bunch of cheese heads. Nah, that couldn't be it.

But you never know. Sports are a strange thing.  We forget ourselves for a while and wrap our destiny with the team or the individual. Life is a bet and we bet on the underdog, the come from behind team that will let us know maybe there is a chance. Maybe we just don't like to lose in anything and if you revel in the victories there is no shaking the defeats. And I am not even a sports person, but I went down the road and screamed and yelled for the Bears to stomp the Packers into the turf at Soldier Field with everyone else. They didn't. They got stomped instead.

And still intellectually your day goes on. I''m not getting a million dollars to play football. The day dawns with it's expectations and thudding reality whether the Bears win or lose. But there is something there. A win gives you just a little zazz because you feel that all things are possible. A mediocre life suddenly becomes entwined with something bigger than ourselves. Humans are better in groups and we give off a buzz that is felt by all. Walk into any stadium and you pick up on that energy like a drug. But of course the flip side is once that battery drains it takes the juice from everyone.

So here we sit. Monday. Grey winter in Chicago. All those nagging questions. What am I doing with my life? Why don't I do something else? How did I live all those years? What's it all about anyway? Why didn't Cutler stay in the game? Why did I buy this house? Why couldn't Erlacher keep running and not get tripped up by the quarterback on his interception? I Is there really a God?

Why couldn't the Bears beat the Packers?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

Three in the Grave-The Right To Bear Arms

The Second Amendment. The right to bear arms. Ok. I get it. The British, roving bears, dinner, your neighbor who lost his mind from the mind numbing isolation of seventeenth century America. The Indians. Cant' forget them. Anybody who even thinks of coming on our farm, our land, in our door. DO NOT TREAD ON ME OR I WILL BLOW YOU AWAY. Ain't no sheriff. Ain't no police. Just us in this vast Louisiana Purchase and I think I will go further west to where the Pacific rims the shore and you better believe I need guns and lots of them. The Spanish. Texans. Mexicans. You name it they were there and nobody was very friendly. Then a funny thing happened, in the year of our Lord 1900, they declared the frontier closed.

We had just about exterminated the Indians. Shot most of the bears. Banished the Mexicans, the British, the Spaniards. We gave Texas to the Texacans. Now there are cops. Sheriffs. GMEN. Towns and roads and rules and regulations and highways and planes and trucks and automobiles. Not only is the frontier closed but it is jammed with people now. Three hundred and fifty million by the last count. America has filled up.

Year of our Lord 2009. We consistently mow each other down. We do it with assault weapons, handguns, machine guns, pistols, Winchesters, glocks, AK47s and an occasional grenade launcher. I've shot just about every weapon under the son. Magnums really kick but you can't hit anything. The Colt 45 is a really cool pistol but again it is very hard to hit the target. The Winchester, very cool rifle. Accurate and short and very Wild West. AK47 is amazing the way it can puncture a 55 gallon drum. Shotguns are a blast to knock the limbs of trees off. Thirty eights and twenty twos. So to all of you NRA devotees I am not someone who doesn't know his way around guns. I go shooting with retired Chicago cops in the Boundary Waters and these guys are not just playing around. I use guns that have three in the grave, four in the grave, five in the grave. For all you Rambo wantabes that is real people gunned down by cops in Chicago. They killed lots of bad guys with these weapons. And they always say with some reverence, "be careful, I got three in the grave with that one"

But here's the thing. They need their guns. Again, I get it. They are cops. But as far as I know after that, we are out of enemies--except for each other. The Founding Fathers passed the second amendment because WE NEEDED IT. We did not want the British to come back and try and colonize us again. And it worked! But here's the deal, those days are OVER. Oh I need my gun to protect me against the government. Please. Your gun will do nothing if it comes to that. They will simply zap you with a drone in your fortified suburban home. You will never know what vaporized you as you sit clutching your assault weapon.

The fact is it's over. We live in the twenty first century and the only thing the second amendment is doing is allowing every psycho and his mother to mow down the last guy who cut him off in the parking lot. Or the guys who have watched way too much American television and figure it is better to go out in a hail of bodies then the ignominious death of obscurity. That's it. Hey, to you ranchers out in the hinterlands, I understand. But that is what...one percent of the population. It is no longer about gun control, it is about doing what is good for the majority. You really don't want your neighbor who's not a cop, saying, " hey Bill, be careful with that one, I got three in the grave."

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

A Raisin in the Sun

President Obama does not like the White House. It is easy to see that. He takes every opportunity to book out of there...to Chicago, Denver, Washington. He just doesn't like it. He and Michelle hit a school and hang with the kids, saying they had to get out of the White House. They were doing what parents do, going to school functions, taking a breather from life. I mean, really, can you blame him? He's from Hyde Park, which for those of you who don't know is hip, interracial, collars the city, South side, close to the Lake, intellectual, has the University of Chicago, bohemian and well, cool. He went from Greenwich to to the suburbs in one quick jump and he just didn't go to the suburbs, he went to the stuffiest, whitest suburb in the land--The White House. We won't even touch the name but it ain't exactly inviting. So he does what everyone who has ever had to move for kids or a job does, he busts out for the city at every opportunity to get out of weird land. And not only did he move to a white bread suburb he is now stuck in the equivalent of a Home Owners meeting everyday. Homeowner meetings are uptight and usually have covenants so anal you have to get your Christmas lights approved. Home Owner meetings only attract people with nothing to do, people who want to get into other peoples business, people who want to tell other people how to live. So here he is, this dude who likes to play basketball, hang with the fellas, eat at his favorite hip spots, go to his favorite place to get his haircut and now he's stuck up on the North Shore with the Guess Whose Coming to Dinner crowd. Even Sidney Poitier would have a hard time with this crowd. So you cant' blame him for firing up Air Force One and pointing it toward Chicago every chance he gets. In Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, an African American family moves from the South Side of Chicago to the white suburbs. The movie ends with the family packing up their apartment and leaving. The assumption is that they fit in and had a better life. I wonder what the sequel would be to that movie... possibly that same family moving back, shaking their heads, "nope, ain't gonna live with all them uptight white people." Too bad President Obama doesn't have that option.

http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

Waiting in the Green Room at WGN Chicago

You have glimmers of something passing. Sometimes you just know that what you are seeing might not be around too long. Maybe it was the space reserved for the microphone from the Scopes monkey trial. Maybe it was the foundation of the Chicago Tribune building inscribed on Lower Michigan with Culled in 1920. The slight wisp of snow in the cold darkness as a guard buzzes you into the WGN studio in the bowels of the old Tribune building and you follow a man up to the green room, passing the cases where old microphones reside and black and white pictures of celebrities long passed. Then you sit down and wait and there is no one there in the green room, just you and rows and rows of pictures of people who look curiously human. The celebrity quality is gone and they are just men and women with gray hair, getting old. A thirty minute radio interview on WGN in Chicago is something you want to hang on too. The man doing the interview is the son of a legendary newspaper man from the Chicago Sun Times. You can hear the footfalls and you shake hands and he tells you to relax and do whatever the *&%$ you want. All Chicago old school. Then you are on in front of the WGN microphone telling your story for thirty minutes. You try and imagine people all over Chicago waking up and hearing your voice, but your mind doesn't work that way. All you think is that it is just the two of you talking and it doesn't go near long enough. There are a million things you want to say, but you just can't get it all in and then you are walking back through the silent building and down through the guard room and suddenly outside in the cold. It's barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Chicago is empty and just waking up. You drive through the streets, knowing you have used up one of the moments of your life that will never come back. You hit the city limits, then slip into the past.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January