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businessmen, dubbed The Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as prohibition was repealed.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

Sally Rand Rode Naked into The Worlds Fair of 1933 and Became a Star

Sally Rand looked like something from the heavens on her white horse, her bare skin painted white. Holding onto a bridle, she sat bareback atop the skittish horse and glided across Lake Michigan toward the back of the fairgrounds. The lake whooshed softly against the gurgling motor as the pumping horse blood warmed her thighs. The fair’s colored lights jumped in the cool, rushing water. Sally was pimply with goosebumps, even though it was late May.

The low-riding wooden Chris-Craft could barely contain the horse, and as water slapped up, she leaned close to his ear. “It’s fine . . . it’s fine, baby. We are almost there.” She pulled the white velvet cape around her and felt the wind pass over her loins and breasts. Except for the ankle bracelet, her blond wig, some makeup, and the cape that barely covered her breasts, Sally Rand, a.k.a. Harriet Helen Beck from Missouri, was naked from her painted toes to her dimpled smile. Who would turn away this gliding nymph approaching the opening of the 1933 World’s Fair?

The boat bumped the dock, and the horse stepped down from the low bow as if he had done so all his life. Sally Rand clamped his sides with her legs and dug her heels in. The horse jumped to life as her blond hair flew back. They raced down the deserted streets heading for the grand opening, where people gathered around the stage. A Century of Progress, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, was about to open during the worst year of the Great Depression, with a gangster-ridden city at its back. It was a perfect setup for a naked woman on a charging white steed.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

How was Capone Really Brought Down?

It wasn't Elliott Ness. When I am signing books of Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair I ask this simple question of people. Who brought Capone down? Elliott Ness and the Untouchables is the fast answer. Most people have either seen the movie or even the old television show or heard it through the lore of Capone that makes people profess being related to the big man, having seen the gangster, having been past his home, his grave, worked on his car, his stills, gone to his home in Wisconsin, eaten in his restaurant hideout along the Fox River. But the truth of what really happened to Capone has not seen the light of day.

Elliott Ness in 1957 was a drunk who met a Sports writer Oscar Fraley. Fraley like a lot of writers myself included was on the lookout for a new story. So he asked Ness if he had any good stories from the Prohibition years about Al Capone. Ness produced a dogeared manuscript of about twenty pages and gave it to Fraley. It wasn't much and Oscar went to work by the time he was done the tale of the Untouchables was complete. Then Ness died and Fraley published his books and sold about a million copies. Then he sold it to television and Robert Stack was set for life and then it was sold to the movies and Kevin Kostner became famous.

But the real story is much more fascinating. Six Chicago millionaires banded together to get rid of Al Capone. They had a Worlds Fair coming and it was going to be a disaster unless they got rid of the gang violence plaguing the city. They hired their own investigators and their own police force. They began a witness protection program, set up a speakeasy, and sent their own gangsters into Capones organization. Then they started to study his operation and began to attack his profitability. In the end they famously got him on tax evasion.

So that is the real story. Fraleys story was good but the real story of the Secret Six is even better.


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All Those Capone Stories

When you write a book on Capone then you hear lots of stories. What happens is you are at a signing or giving a speech and someone comes up to you. They lower their voice and get close and then say, you know I'm related to Al Capone. This is usually through some distant relation that married someone who was married to someone who was the great aunt of Capone. Then come the truly weird stories. One involved a welder.

The women who told me this story said her father had been kidnapped by Al Capone. Men had driven up and pulled out some guns and put her father in a car. They blindfolded him and drove him to an undisclosed location. When they took the blindfold off he was facing Al Capone. I need someone to fix my stills Capone told him. The welder did the job for Capone but the men in the car came back and he was kidnapped again. After the second time he moved his family far away. He just feared for his life the woman told me.

The other stories involve other gangsters who worked with Capone or houses he owned or his vacation home in Wisconsin. Some people ask me if i have been to his grave and many tell stories about how as kids they had a chance sighting of the gangster. They described his heavy black Cadillac passing by the way someone might speak of a rock star. And then there are the stories of places he ate, bars he frequented, people he murdered. The way the book is selling convinces me more than ever that Al Capone is the ultimate superstar that time cannot dim. He has been dead for seventy years. Rock stars should have such longevity.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

How the Thompson and Valentines Day made Chicago get rid of Capone

It was Valentines Day in 1929 that sealed Capones fate. The German Shepherd tied to a bumper was the only witness and he wasn't talking. The smell of gunpowder still lingered in the air when the cops arrived. The Thompson Machine gun fired .45 ACP cartridges and fired them one after another. General Thompson wanted a gun to kill the Germans in World War I and so he invented The Annihilator. That's what he called it but everyone else called it The Thompson. Soldiers called it a trench sweeper. 

Whatever the name the angry gun fired one bullet after another from the gas of the last one. The war ended and the annihilator was very rarely used and it was expensive for civilians at 400 per gun. The British thought it was too loud. But a new group of men really liked it. The cost wasn't a factor and it fit nicely in a violin case. Just like a man going to a recital of death. So the Thompson did its dirty work in that garage on Clark Street on St Valentines Day and killed off seven of Bugs Moran's men. 

The brick wall behind the men would be sold to a restaurant in Indiana so people could sit and stare at the chipped brick. The Annihilator fired like a garden hose and that's how the two men dressed as cops fired it. One low and one high so they could be sure each man was shot at least a dozen times. And that is what made Chicago realize Capone was out of hand and had to go. The Annihilators rendezvous with Americas holiday of love. 

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

The Woman Who Charged in Naked to the 1933 Worlds Fair

Sally Rand looked like something from the heavens on her white horse, her bare skin painted white. Holding onto a bridle, she sat bareback atop the skittish horse and glided across Lake Michigan toward the back of the fairgrounds. The lake whooshed softly against the gurgling motor as the pumping horse blood warmed her thighs. The fair’s colored lights jumped in the cool, rushing water. Sally was pimply with goosebumps, even though it was late May.

The low-riding wooden Chris-Craft could barely contain the horse, and as water slapped up, she leaned close to his ear. “It’s fine . . . it’s fine, baby. We are almost there.” She pulled the white velvet cape around her and felt the wind pass over her loins and breasts. Except for the ankle bracelet, her blond wig, some makeup, and the cape that barely covered her breasts, Sally Rand, a.k.a. Harriet Helen Beck from Missouri, was naked from her painted toes to her dimpled smile. Who would turn away this gliding nymph approaching the opening of the 1933 World’s Fair?

The boat bumped the dock, and the horse stepped down from the low bow as if he had done so all his life. Sally Rand clamped his sides with her legs and dug her heels in. The horse jumped to life as her blond hair flew back. They raced down the deserted streets heading for the grand opening, where people gathered around the stage. A Century of Progress, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, was about to open during the worst year of the Great Depression, with a gangster-ridden city at its back. It was a perfect setup for a naked woman on a charging white steed.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Chicago's Forgotten Fair of 1933...Hold the popcorn

Microwave popcorn. That is among the many things the 1933 Worlds Fair in Chicago brought to the populace 33 years after the turn of the century. That and a star in the flag of Chicago. There are four stars in the flag, one for Ft Dearborn, one for the fair of 1893, one for for the fair of 33 and one for the incorporation of Chicago into a city. But because the fair was held during the Great Depression it is overshadowed by HH Holmes and the Devil in the White City fair.

You could make a long distance call at the fair. Call anywhere in the United States. You could see yourself on a crude television. You could watch popcorn appear out of the air from microwaves. You could watch peas get canned and get a souvenir can yourself. All you had to do was press a button. Or you could watch your next car get built. Chrysler had a whole assembly line at the fair and cars rolled off the assembly line every hour. You could watch a woman in grease paint hide her body behind two huge ostrich feathers .

And if this wasn't enough you could ride on the Skyride 625 feet up across the lake to Northerly Island. You could watch the Zephyr the first diesel electric train set a new speed record from Chicago to Denver. And you could do all this for a nickel unless they threw the gates open on "kid days" which they did frequently because a lot of people didn't have a nickel. And you could go to the fair secure int he knowledge Al Capone had just  gone to prison and there was less chance you would get shot by some Thompson machine gun toting gangster.

You could even watch an unknown singer named Judy Garland.  She would bump into a man at the Biograph and get his autograph right before he was gunned down by the police. John Dillinger would not make the 33 fair.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

The Problem with Print on Demand for Authors

Publishers love print on demand. They can hedge their bets now. Sure we will buy your book does not have the same import any more as the print runs really don't exist. So lets talk about this. Traditional publishing goes this way:  Good advance. Good print run. Books in the stores. That is traditional publishing. But technology morphed and suddenly a publisher no longer had to make a stand on a book. Doing a print run requires the publisher to say I think I will sell x amount of books and it lets the author know that books will be there for the stores, events, signings, whatever the author does he can rest assured the book will be behind him.

Now lets talk POD. Small advance. The publisher will print maybe a hundred books. Maybe 50. The technology is such that if there is a demand then a book will be printed. But there is a lag. So the author notices there are no books in the stores. Then you notice that the publisher is showing no books in stock. Now you have another event and the printer cannot get the books to the press because there are lots of presses using this technology and they have books in cue. So the author shows up a at his signing with no books.

The author does not do well with POD technology. The publisher cannot react to a surge because the printer has other jobs ahead. Worse there will be no surge because books are not out in the marketplace pinging around. Now you are over nighting books talking to harassed book sellers and publishers. It becomes publishing lite. The assumption the book will be there is gone. Books create energy. But if the books is not there then there is a vacuum. So the question is where do authors sell their books?

The truth is for the author the traditional is still better. It is the publishers job to produce the book and the authors job to sell the book. Both must do their jobs for a book to be profitable.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

What Happens When Your First Print Run Sells Out

You pop your cork on the champagne and raise your glass and then you freak. As an author you always want your books to sell. Then when it happens you go to the dark side of freaking out because people are running out of books. Recently my book Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair A Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair sold out the first print run. In publishing publishers try and guess at demand and it is hard to do. You can print too many or not enough.  Authors usually fret about books not selling and so you go from that to there is not enough books.

Print on demand technology has largely solved the problem of warehousing books but you still have to take a stand and print enough for the warehouses. The economics of publishing are such that anyone can publish a book. But to get books into the system you still need to have supply. Supply and demand is king and if there is no supply then you have a problem.

Many will say well that is a good problem to have. It is but you want the storm to continue and for that you need books and you want them as soon as possible. Books are due from the printer tomorrow. 

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair Still in stock

Was Devil in the White City A Novel?

Not technically. But it was told in a novelistic style. This would be narrative nonfiction which uses the technique of a novelist to tell a historical story. HH Holmes would have been less terrifying if he was not described the way a novelist would describe a character. We were privy to his thoughts and his horrible deeds as if we were there. History could not do this only a novel could pull this off. Historians give us exactly what happened and that is pretty much it. They interpret the historical data but we do not know what characters feel, see, sense. This is the purview of fiction.

So what is the difference? Scenes. Novelists build scenes and so do writers of narrative nonfiction. I had a Masters in History yet I wrote ten novels before switching to nonfiction. Granted some of my novels could have been considered historical fiction but they were fiction. When I switched I ended up using the same techniques as writing a novel. When I wrote Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson I imagined what Edith felt like running the White House when her husband became ill. I wanted the reader to feel the pressure she was feeling.

Same with Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt  I wanted the reader to be in the Badlands with Teddy. And finally in my latest book, Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair I wanted people to smell the popcorn and know how Sally Rand felt when she galloped into the opening ceremonies. In this way, we get the best of both worlds and the story is more real for the reader. Verisimilitude means what is most true. That is what we are all after.

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

Sally Rand was the #1 Money Maker at the Worlds Fair

She did it all with her clothes off. She came from a small town in the Ozarks. Her real name was Harriet Beck. She wanted to be a dancer and follow the sun to Hollywood. She ran away when she was twelve and of course she ran to the circus. Her parents brought her back but she ran away again. She learned the trapeze and found she was very athletic. She was barely five feet tall and compact. This time she made it the coast and began to get big parts. Cecil B. Demills noticed her and asked Harriet her name. He frowned and looked around and saw an Atlas. Your name is Sally Rand he pronounced.

Sally Rand did well in the silent movies. She was a WAMPAS Baby Star which was basically a whos who of up and coming actresses. Everything was going fine until sound came along. Her screen test was a disaster. Sally Rand had a bad lisp that ended her Hollywood aspirations. Demills showed her the door and she ended up taking a bus to Chicago to look for work. She found it at the Paramount when she showed up with two giant Ostrich feathers and took off her clothes. Her dance was a hit and in three years the Worlds Fair was going to open.

Sally Rand crashed the opening ceremonies on the back of a white horse. She was naked of course and the people thought she was part of the fair. She was hired and quickly her fan dance became the number one draw. The fair had to hire extra accountants to take in all the money. Her fame lasted but the money did not. She had to go on the road and never got off. Sally Rand died penniless and obscure, only to live on in Youtube videos and rare 1933 Worlds Fair viewers.  Her dressing room was bought by a millionaire on the North Shore. Irony upon irony.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

The Devil in the White City and the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933

The two fairs were forty years apart. The fair made famous by Eric Larson's book Devil in the White City was to show that Chicago had arrived and was a world city like Paris or New York. Daniel Burnham and his architects had this in mind when they designed the neo classical buildings of the White City. It was a celebration of culture in a city that was the slaughter house for the world. The Ferris Wheel made its debut along with Cracker Jacks and the first Hootchie Koo dance. People came away from the fair amazed that such a world existed in the rough and tumble coal burning city that at times smelled so bad people would not go out doors.

The 1933 fair was entirely different. Officially it was to celebrate the incorporation of Chicago but that didn't seem enough so it was changed to A Century of Progress. Technology and industrial might became the themes in a fair held in the worst year of the Great Depression. The fair quickly became a quest against the naysayers who pointed out that Chicago was broke and nobody would come during a Depression where a third of the banks had failed and a quarter of the work force was unemployed. The fair would be built on gold notes and corporate funds. No public funds would be used.

The Ferris Wheel became the Sky Ride, a cable car that went over the lake to Northerly Island 625 feet up. For people who had never been in a plane this was amazing. Television and long distance phone calls made their debut. An unknown young girl named Judy Garland sang and another unknown named Sally Rand danced behind two ostrich feathers. It was not white but multi colored earning it the name The Rainbow City.  It was the first disposal fair and was torn down a year and a half later.

People could watch peas get canned and cars get built. There was no Dr. Holmes but there was Al Capone. How Chicago got rid of Al Capone is a whole another story. President Roosevelt asked that the fair stay open an extra year. It was the only bright spot in a very dark world.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Great Booklist Review of Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Reviews
Booklist Reviews 2017 September #1
In the years leading up to 1933, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two rich Chicago kids, murdered another boy for fun; the U.S. was mired in the Great Depression; Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped and murdered; Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany; and Al Capone, who had used Prohibition as a way to expand his criminal empire, was the de facto mayor of Chicago, even though he was, technically, a prison inmate.

 Amid all this turmoil, the Chicago political powers that be thought it would be a great idea to throw a World’s Fair. But how do you fund a $20 million extravaganza when the city is broke? How do you keep the gangsters from running rampant? The fair’s planner promised the people of the city that gangsters “will be gone” by the time of the fair, but how could he possibly follow through? 

Enter the Secret Six, a group of businessmen who joined forces for a most dangerous mission: to eradicate organized crime in Chicago by the time the fair opened. This is a thrilling and frequently surprising story about larger-than-life people and their larger-than-life ambitions. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.

The Sad End of Sally Rand

She came to fame during the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933 after she rode a white horse naked into the opening ceremonies when she could find no other way to be part of the fair. The horse reared at the moment the photographers snapped her picture and people thought she was part of the fair. From that moment on she was. Sallly Rand took her two ostrich feathers and became the number one draw of the Chicago Worlds Fair. They had to hire extra accountants to keep track of all the money. Her name became associated with The Century of Progress forever.

But then the fair ended and Sally Rand enjoyed a brief stint in Hollywood before returning to the circuit and there she stayed doing her feather dance coast to coast.  Many husbands and many divorces and lawsuits later found her at seventy still performing her feather dance. If you watch the movie The Right Stuff then you will remember at the end the woman on the stage dancing behind the feathers and that is Sally Rand. It was her last bit of fame before obscurity swallowed her up forever. She would die broke and alone and forgotten.

But Sally Rand does live on...on Youtube. You can watch her 1933 Worlds Fair dance that tantalized thousands during the worst years of the Great Depression. When you talk to people who went to the fair they always bring up Sally Rand. As one man told me. I went and saw Sally Rand, but I was just a kid and never told my mother. She would have wore me out with a switch. And there is a Sally Rand viewer. I have never seen one but I am told this souvenir exists where you can watch the feather dance over and over.

The cost of this bit of history...priceless.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Echoes of World War II

Those Goddamn Japs. I have heard that before from the Greatest Generation. You cant blame them. They fought the Japanese for four years after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941. The Japanese embodied everything that Americans hated for those war years. They attacked us and assumed we would cower and that they could consolidate their gains in the Pacific before we could fight back. A few of our carriers were not at Pearl and that happened to save us for that scenario. But what still echoes today is that Americans hated the Japanese yes because they attacked us, but there was a racial component.

Imperialist Dogs. That leaked out of Kims mouth recently. Close your eyes and listen to the the hyperinflammatory rhetoric and the racial component of the Korean Crisis  hits you between the eyes. The Americans are the aggressors and the Koreans are the pure people who have been wronged. North Koreans believe they are the purest race and that Kim is divinely chosen. In World War II we had the Emperor who was divinely chosen. The problem was that the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man woman and child for the Emperor. It took two atomic bombs to get him to tell his people it was over and even then the military wanted to fight on.

The North Koreans view us the same way we view them. Different. Odd. Dangerous. This was World War II thinking that allowed us to drop those two bombs. This is the racial component. Somehow the Japanese were not human. They had done inhuman things and so that allowed us to not treat them that as humans. We are drifting quickly to this same thinking. Hopefully, people will not be saying sixty years on...those Goddamn North Koreans.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Judy Garlands Strange Encounter with John Dillinger During the 1933 Worlds Fair

It was hot. Judy was with her mother and sisters. They had no money and were singing at the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933. This is six years before The Wizard of Oz would bring her fame. Judy decides to duck out and catch a movie at the Biograph. It is air conditioned and she stays for five shows and finally leaves when Manhattan Melodrama ends a final time with Clark Gable getting the electric chair. She walks into the lobby and then out to the sidewalk and sees a man she recognizes.

Garland thinks he is a movie star because she recognizes his face from the papers. This is Chicago after all and famous people are out and about. Judy asks him for his autograph and he obliges, giving her a grin. Then the man goes into the theater leaving the young singer staring at his signature. John Dillinger. The famous bank robber was going in to catch a movie and probably get away from the heat as well. Judy cant believe it and goes back to the fairgrounds to tell her mother.

Three hours later John Dillinger is confronted by the police and shot dead in the alley outside the
Biograph. He is thirty one. Judy sings that night at the Worlds Fair but she is not famous yet. Thirty years later she will tell her story of running into Public Enemy #1 on a hot Chicago night when she took a break from the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933.

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

WGN Leaving the Tribune Tower

WGN is leaving the Tribune tower. No more going there on Sunday nights to do a live broadcast on a fifty thousand watt station that beams halfway across the country. You can only imagine the farmer out in Iowa picking up the voice of some writer being interviewed about his latest book. I remember once being on vacation in Minnesota and picking up WGN in the middle of the night. I was the distraught teen on vacation and it was like there was a bit of home sweeping across the cold dark skies of Northern America. And it will still be there but it wont be coming from the Tribune building anymore.

High up on seventh floor you can look out over the city before your interview. You cool your heels in the green room. How many people walked the halls? Sinatra, Newman, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe? You didn't come to Chicago and not do an interview on WGN. This would be before television when radio was King and the top of the mountain was the top of the building that also boasted one of the countries largest circulation newspapers. But that will be no more.

I was able to wait in august lobby of the Tribune building four times. It was always a Sunday night and no one was around. I would get a burger sometimes at Billy Goats  on lower Wacker and then head up to the seventh floor and wait in the green room and then into the studio. Rick Kogans show covers books and my last four have landed me across from him with the big WGN microphone in front of me. Always a great interview with a man who actually reads the books.

And then it is over and you drive home. You always wonder if you will do it again. Not anymore. At least in the Tribune building. That era is over.


Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair