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In this week’s episode: 

  • A Chicago police officer leaps into action, rescuing lives amid the chaos of the Eastland disaster.
  • Two undertakers clash in a dramatic battle for possession of a corpse.
  • Amid the turmoil, a determined woman sets her sights on earning an undertaker’s license.

First, meet Martin Benson, a  Chicago police officer whose 1936 Chicago Tribune obituary called him an Eastland hero and credited him with saving several lives on July 24, 1915. His role is documented. His biography is findable. Yet  Martin’s name and biography are missing from modern revisions of the Eastland Disaster history.

Next is Edward Shute.

Edward is mentioned on a list or two, but there’s no biography.  The newspapers, however, had considerably more to say. A lot more.

Shute, a Chicago undertaker, was remembered for handling funerals after major disasters like the Eastland. Yet, as I traced his story through old headlines, his life unraveled into a series of wild and unexpected turns. Here are just a few.

He once fought with a rival undertaker over a body, and the dispute ended up in court.

Then there was the Passavant Hospital incident. Edward, his brother, and friends of the deceased forced open a locked morgue door after hospital officials refused to release a body to him. The door broke, Edward took the body, and when the police arrived, they chose not to get involved.

Edward’s name kept surfacing in the news, tangled in stories of police chases, roaring cars, a rifle, and even a motor ambulance.

Then there is Opal Pulver Shute, Edward’s second wife. In 1912, more than 200 people took the Illinois State Board exam, but Opal was reportedly the only woman there. She passed, joined the family's undertaking business, and sometimes seemed to be the face of it.

Eastland history in the last few years often repeats the same missteps: countless lives fade from the narrative, while others are whittled down to nothing more than a name on a list. 

Deeper research seldom produces a tidy biography. Quite the opposite. It gives us the memorable, complicated, sometimes downright unruly lives that make history worth knowing in the first place.

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