Chapter Four
Now that Flora and Elias were the parents of four boys ranging in age from a new-born to a 13-year-old, Elias needed stable work. In addition to continuing to create and sell furniture to area showrooms, Elias recognised that he had a budding talent in carpentry. Noting the success of selling his first two spec houses on Tripp, Elias decided to continue his new trade. Over the next few years he would build additional houses in the area, including two one-and-a-half storied frame cottages located at 1676 and 1678 North Costello Avenue, respectively.
Even though he was certainly busy with work, 1249 Tripp Avenue was a hub of activity as well. Young Walter was a well-behaved baby, and healthy too; he didn’t experience any of the same lactose intolerance that his older brother Roy had as an infant. Walter quickly became the pride of the family, doted on by his mother and brothers. Roy especially took a fancy to his younger brother: he was often seen pushing Walter up and down Tripp Avenue in a stroller. Not only did he shower his brother with affection, but he also occasionally purchased toys and small gifts for him with his own money.
When his older brothers went off to school at nearby Nixon Elementary School, located a few blocks away, Walter spent time with Flora and visited his father’s building sites. However, a few days after his second birthday on 9 December 1903, Flora gave birth to her fifth and final child. A daughter had finally become part of the family: Ruth Flora Disney.
As Walter and Ruth grew, they became playmates while their older brothers were at school. While he loved his children, Elias became more of an authority figure for them.
His increasing piety and devotion at St. Paul’s Congregational caused him to exert an increasingly moral strictness over his family. Perhaps in response to the vices and behaviours of his extended family in Canada and Kansas in his youth, Elias became wary of the temptations that an increasingly ethnically- and economically-diverse Chicago offered. He resisted all vices, never indulging in alcohol or a smoke. He had grown up with an understanding of the importance of hard work and honesty, and wanted to impart those qualities to his children.
This sternness often took the form of retribution for his sons if they crossed the line. Even as a toddler, Walter was strong-willed. After committing a wrong, he would often run from his father, wise enough to ensure that a piece of furniture, like a chair in the dining room, was always between him and his father. When Elias attempted to reason with the boy, Walter would argue back, leading to a clashing of wills. Unfortunately for the exasperated father, these instances often ended up becoming a sort of game of keep-away, where it became difficult for Elias to reach his son to punish him. These situations often ended in Flora coming to the rescue by scooping up her child and teasing her husband to get him out of his frustrated mood.
Elias didn’t miss any opportunity to mete out discipline to his other sons, however. After committing disobedient acts, or not exemplifying honesty and a good character, Elias would send the offender up to his bedroom. Roy, in particular, remembered a time that he stood beside the window of his room which looked into the backyard, watching as Elias cut a switch off the apple tree in the yard’s back corner, before bringing the small branch upstairs to punish his son with a light, yet painful, beating of the backside. In another instance, during one evening around the dinner table, it came to light that Raymond had stolen transfers from a tram conductor on his way to school. Transfers allowed someone who had paid to ride on a public conveyance to get off and board another one to continue their route without having to pay another fare. As a result of his lack of practising good, honest character, Raymond was immediately sent up to his bedroom to await Elias’s punishment.
Elias’s method of discipline was not unheard of at the time. In fact, many fathers and authority figures believed the maxim, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. Elias simply believed that levying punishment was a way to improve the moral character of his sons, something done out of love in the moment. As a contractor in the construction and carpentry business, there were no lack of examples to show what vice and the immoral city could do to a person.
While Chicago was certainly a hub of capitalist greatness, as exemplified by the scores of new innovations being implemented, including elevators, the skyscraper, electric lights, and horseless trams, many of these new technologies served as a draw for immigrants and American migrants alike. This was greater magnified by the important presence of the railroad in the lakeside city: as of 1892, one-twenty-fifth of all railroad mileage in the world terminated in Chicago. Serving as both a method of import and export from the city, the railroads spurred the growth of a number of important industries, including meatpacking and steel and iron manufacturing. The factories needed labourers who would be paid low wages; these jobs were often reserved for unskilled and immigrant workers, all of whom descended on Chicago.
The city quickly became a cultural melting pot: Germans, Swedes, Italians, Polish, Irish, and Eastern Europeans all found work and new life in America’s second largest city. While many of these new arrivals stayed in the centre near their place of work, some were able to afford to move out to the suburbs, settling in neighbourhoods like Humboldt Park and Hermosa. The teeming masses arriving in Chicago caused the city to grow exponentially in the years the Disneys lived there. Shortly after Flora and Elias arrived from Florida, Chicago had approximately one million citizens. Ten years later, when Walter was born, the population had almost doubled. Chicago quickly became overcrowded, leading to problems like pollution, homelessness, and illness. Corrupt politicians preyed on the ignorance of immigrants’ understanding of the American political system, buying votes with promises for housing and jobs. Enterprising entrepreneurs took advantage of the larger population to cater to the needs and desires of the stressed-out immigrants by opening saloons, gambling houses, and brothels, while police officers accepted bribes to look the other way.
The prevalence of saloons and brothels began to creep into middle-class society. Temperance organisations, which aimed at limiting the consumption of alcohol, began to spring up throughout America, including large cities like Chicago. Any kind of liquor, they argued, led to ‘moral oblivion’, and had adverse effects on the family. When a husband imbibed alcohol, he was using money that could have been spent on his family. Drinking alcohol also served as a gateway to other activities and behaviours. A popular political cartoon from earlier in the century entitled A Drunkard’s Progress argued that simply having a friendly drink with an associate could lead one towards violence, crime, social ostracisation and, ultimately, death by suicide. While this was obviously a biased and hyperbolic image meant to show the evils of vice and the potential effects it could have on the American family, the prevalence of alcohol did lead to a growth in other activities deemed questionable and immoral to ‘respectable’ Chicago society. Organised crime skyrocketed. Graft and political manipulation became prevalent. Brothels emerged in the Levee, Chicago’s red-light district, which catered for all levels of Chicago society. Many attributed the lack of morals that seemed to have taken over downtown to the large influx of immigrants to the region.
Unfortunately, Elias began to consider that even his humble neighbourhood in Hermosa wasn’t safe from the corruption and vice in the downtown district a little less than 10 miles away. Immigrant families had begun to move into houses on Tripp Avenue: many good Irish, Swedes and Poles lived on their street. They were well-behaved now, but God forbid they attracted other immigrants who were immoral or corrupted by the city’s temptations.
As more people began to move to Hermosa, things became rougher and more ‘dangerous’. Elias despaired when saloons began to open on street corners near the Disney home. Kids and teenagers began to run around the neighbourhood unattended. The worried father reached out to the local police, but while they promised they would clean up the area, nothing seemed to happen. Privately, he complained to Flora that the police were corrupt and probably accepting bribes to look the other way when mischief occurred.
This trend was not just confined to Hermosa, however. Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century was notorious for its prominent crimes and vices, which were often attributed to the abundant immigrant population, as well as severe overcrowding. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe made the journey from New York to Chicago, looking for work in the nation’s largest industrial metropolis. Chicago at the turn of the century boasted scores of industrial and manufacturing jobs, including those in steel, meatpacking, railroad, and printing. The youth of Chicago were difficult to rein in to the city’s public schools: those who weren’t working in factories or selling newspapers on street corners often received what was known as a ‘street education’ in petty crime by spending time with other youths or unemployed adults. Reformer Jane Addams recognised that many of the problems caused by the immigrant population were attributed to their inability to assimilate into American culture; in an effort to help these ‘poor huddled masses,’ she established Hull House, a settlement house that provided services including Americanisation classes and job training for new immigrants living in inner-city Chicago. Addams’ efforts didn’t change the nativist attitudes that many Americans felt, especially those living in the vicinity of the immigrants. Stereotypes, discrimination, and racism continued, as well as scapegoating for the city’s problems, drawing further the line between native-born Americans and the European immigrants.
The last straw for Elias Disney in Chicago began in mid-1903. On the evening of 4 July, four young men, between the ages of 18 and 21, entered the building of the Clybourn Junction station for the Chicago and Northwestern Railway and demanded money. One of the employees of the station, L.W. Lathrop, was shot in the ensuing scuffle, but the young men escaped with $70. Around a week later, the same young men entered a saloon. When the proprietor and a patron named Otto Bauder were ordered to put their hands up, Bauder fled. One of the youths shot him and he succumbed to his injury. This time, the gang escaped with $50. Two more saloons were robbed by the young men over the course of the following week.
A few weeks later, on 30 August, the young men entered a street railway car barn at the intersection of Sixty-Fifth and State streets, disguising themselves by wearing underwear on their heads. Recognising that some of the street railway employees were totalling up the day’s fares, one of the bandits shot through the window while another took a sledgehammer and rammed down the door. One of the bullets hit Frank Stewart while his two co-workers, William Edmund and Henry Biehl, were also hit by stray bullets and were severely injured. A fourth employee, James Johnson, had been asleep in an adjoining room and rushed to the murder scene, when he too was struck down. One of the murderers swept up the pile of cash from the table at which Stewart, Edmund, and Biehl had been counting it, and fled with over $2,500.
While the Chicago Police had simply chalked the saloon robberies up to petty thieves, they were made painfully aware of what they were up against with the car barn robbery and murders. Herman Schuettler, the captain of Chicago’s Sheffield Avenue police station, began investigating the crimes, and learned from an informant where he might find the car barn bandits.
Schuettler dispatched two of his detectives, John Quinn and William Blaul, to Greenberg’s Saloon, located at the corner of Robey and Addison Streets in northwest Chicago, to capture one of the thugs in the gang. Upon entering the saloon, the detectives found a sole figure sitting at the bar with his back to them. He looked into the mirror across from him and saw the two detectives creeping up on him. Quickly turning around, he pulled a revolver out of his pocket and shot at the detectives, killing Quinn. When the young man tried shooting at the other detective, his revolver failed; Blaul tackled the youth and held him to the floor until backup arrived and then brought him down to the police station.
The young man was Gustave Marx, one of the four who had been responsible for the string of saloon robberies in July and the car barn robbery and murders at the end of August. He quickly confessed to his crimes, naming his co-conspirators as Peter Neidermeier, Harvey Van Dine, and Emil Roeski.
The other three criminals soon found out about their friend’s arrest and went on the run towards Indiana, attempting to escape from Chicago before they could be tracked down by the police. They found refuge in a dugout south of the city, hiding until they ran out of supplies in late November, when they sneaked out to a local grocer. A schoolteacher, Henry Reichers, noticed the boys when Neidermeier pulled a thick roll of dollar bills out of his pocket to pay for their food. On closer inspection, he recognised the three young men by their descriptions in the newspaper and alerted the authorities, who quickly dispatched eight detectives to the location that Reichers identified. However, when the detectives arrived, Neidermeier, Van Dine, and Roeski had already left. Luckily, fresh snow had fallen and they were able to follow the trio’s tracks to another shelter nearby. The detectives surrounded the building and called for the youths to come out, but rather than obey, the young gangsters began to fire their weapons at the detectives outside, killing one and injuring another.
In the ensuing chaos, the three young men were able to escape. However, Van Dine had been shot through the cheek, while Roeski was shot in the hip. A disagreement broke out over where they should flee to; Roeski left Neidermeier and Van Dine behind and continued to stumble 8 miles to nearby Aetna, where he could catch a train on the Wabash line out of Illinois. Van Dine and Neidermeier made their way to a nearby train that was sitting at a station, and climbed into the locomotive, ordering the engineer and brakeman to uncouple the engine from the rest of the cars. The brakeman mistakenly thought that Neidermeier was drunk and grabbed his wrist to push the revolver away; he was immediately shot dead. This convinced the engineer, who started the engine flying down the tracks away from the pursuing police. However, one of the detectives had phoned ahead to the railway authorities, and the train was routed to a side track. The criminals ordered the engineer to reverse the engine until it was back on the main line, at which point they jumped off the train and began running through a cornfield to escape.
As the police arrived at the stopped locomotive, a nearby group of farmers on a rabbit hunt heard the commotion and joined in the chase. Finding themselves at a dead end upon reaching a frozen marsh, Neidermeier and Van Dine piled up dead cornstalks to hide behind. This barricade was no match for the farmers, who fired into the cornstalks with their shotguns; small rounds of buckshot hit the two young men, who looked at each other and stepped out from behind the stalks with their hands raised.
“Don’t shoot,” Harvey Van Dine called out. “We surrender.” The farmers kept their guns trained on the murderous youths until the police arrived, led by railway secret service officer Captain William Briggs, who made the arrest.
“We surrendered because you are not the police and because we want to see our mothers again,” Neidermeier commented to the farmers as he and his partner were led away into the waiting police van.
A few minutes before the capture of Van Dine and Neidermeier and a mile away, the police arrived at the Aetna train station. They had received a tip that ‘a breathless man in his shirt sleeves and covered with blood’ had run into a house and asked for a coat. When he was refused, he found the train station nearby. Cleaning himself up in the washroom, the odd-acting young man lay down on a bench in the station’s waiting room and fell asleep. When the police arrived at the train station, they found Emil Roeski, sound asleep, exhausted from his escape and from the loss of blood from his hip wound.
Over the next few months, trials would occur for all four boys, who quickly became known as ‘The Car Barn Bandits’ by the media. Peter Neidermeier, Harvey Van Dine, Gustav Marx, and Emil Roeski were all found guilty of multiple counts of murder, including that of two police officers, and sentenced to death by hanging on 22 April 1904. However, Roeski’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment at Joliet State Prison when it was determined that it couldn’t be proven he had fired the shot that killed Otto Bauder in the first robbery on 4 July. A failed breakout attempt occurred in late November 1904 when Roeski’s brother, Herman, tried passing tools through the bars to Emil. However, the attempt was discovered and Herman Roeski joined his brother as a convict.
The story of the young gangsters was prevalent in the news throughout 1903 and 1904, as well as filling the thoughts and discussions of Chicago citizens. A number of copycat gangs began to spring up, consisting of young men who perpetrated their own robberies and murders. This trend continued to increase throughout the early 1900s as the economy of Chicago took a slight downturn, leading to an increase in crime. Unfortunately for Elias, this also meant that the housing market dried up, once again putting him out of work.
Elias Disney was especially fearful of the increase in the boy gangs and their crimes. Many of the robberies and murders carried out at the saloons by Neidermeier and company occurred less than 3 miles from the Disney home on Tripp Avenue. In fact, some members of the gang, including Emil Roeski, attended St. Paul’s Congregational, the church at which Elias and Flora served as deacon and treasurer. Because the boys were the same age as Herbert and Raymond, Elias often saw his sons spending time around the accused murderers and worried for his boys’ morality.
In February 1906, Sophia Van Dine, mother of the late boy criminal, wrote a series of articles for The Chicago Tribune explaining why so many Chicago youths had joined gangs and turned to a life of vice, theft and murder. Mrs Van Dine had devoted her life to helping troubled boys after the death of her son at the hands of the law, hoping to save them from a similar fate. She explained that it was ‘the responsibility on the part of normal minded men and women’ to save the delinquents, whom she labelled ‘feeble-minded’ and developmentally ‘dwarfed’. She further explained that due to these boys’ inability to discern what was morally acceptable behaviour, many of them had been corrupted by their own fathers, who were either absent or also prone to vice and violence, and lived a life of alcoholism or abused their wives and children. A solution, she offered, was isolation, separating these young men from the rest of society thus preventing them from a life of crime, as well as making it impossible for them to procreate and create ‘perhaps a greater degree the faults of the parents’.
What was most troubling to Elias, however, was the argument that Mrs Van Dine made in an article published on the morning of 6 February. The feeble-mindedness of young men, she explained, prevented them from recognising the criminal faults of those around them. Chicago’s youth spent time together on street corners, in abandoned buildings and homes, in saloons and pool halls. What began as vice and inappropriate language, eventually turned into petty theft before blossoming into holdups, armed violence, and ultimately murder. The prevalence of this crime in the area surrounding the Disney home on Tripp Avenue was a concern to the Disney patriarch: his two oldest sons, Herbert and Raymond, aged 18 and 16 respectively at the time of Mrs Van Dine’s article, were the same age as the Car Barn Bandits when they began their rampage of crime, and had, on occasion, spent time with the boys through their association with the family’s church.
Fearful that his sons could potentially turn down a similar path due to the influence of other young men in the neighbourhood, Elias decided that the temptations of city life were too much for his family. He determined to find a more rural place where his children would learn what it meant to live a life of honest, hard work and diligence. While the years following the change from Big City Chicago to Main Street, USA would be major for the Disney children, Walt would fondly remember them as some of the best years of his young life.