Three Stories from the Morgue
Fascinating finds from The Inside Edge files: Chuck Hughes' on-field NFL death; my aunt & co-workers `foil gunmen' only to have their home addresses listed; assassination attempt of Prez-elect FDR
As a young newspaper reporter in the early 1990s, my first desk in the newsroom of The Courier News in Elgin, Illinois was located right next to the “morgue.”
That’s where our newspaper’s stories had been filed for decades, clipped from each day’s edition and stored in countless manila envelopes and assorted folders. In this pre-electronic storage era, this served as a background resource for current stories under development.
Unlike actual morgues, many of those old stories didn’t die forever—they’d come back to life. My colleagues and I would root through those file cabinets in search of prior drafts of these various slivers of history.
One of the most crucial tricks we developed was guessing what word or phrase had been assigned as the category for any given story. That way, we could actually locate it among the thousands of other yellowing—or already yellowed—clips that had accumulated for decades.
As you might imagine, it was a hit-or-miss process.
By contrast, these days when I want to unearth a story going back to the 1700s, all I have to do is visit Newspapers.com, tap out a few words, insert a date range and perhaps include a city or state if I want to drill down further.
These rabbit holes have resulted in dozens of fascinating finds that I have clipped and stashed in my own electronic morgue. I share three today, along with brief observations.
October 25, 1971
Chicago Tribune
On the second day of 2023, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after making a tackle during a Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
He went into cardiac arrest and nearly died, prompting references in stories to Chuck Hughes’ fatal heart attack during a game between his Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears. To this day, it’s the only on-field death in a National Football League game.
Fifty-two years ago, unlike the cancellation of the Bills vs. Bengals game (which was still in the first quarter), the Lions/Bears game was about one minute from concluding and play continued to the end.
Both stories below go to some length to make clear that the Bears players were unaware of Hughes’ death until after they returned to Chicago that evening.
January 29, 1946
Boston Globe
About a year ago, I typed in my late aunt Anna’s maiden name and learned of this dramatic moment in her life, when she was 21: three gunmen tried to rob the office where she worked.
Not only did the newspaper get a photo of six of her co-workers, but the Globe performed that era’s apparently standard journalistic practice of listing the streets they resided on, and in some cases, their home addresses!1
I rarely employ exclamation points in my writing, but I’ve got to add a few more here. …!!!! What?
Scan to the end of the story and you’ll see that information on the residential whereabouts of these young ladies followed the words “…office workers intimidated by the gunmen were…” (So those robbers—who got away, mind you—could later track each of them down again, only this time at their homes?)
February 16, 1933
Miami Daily News
This past weekend, I decided to check out the initial coverage of the assassination attempt on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life in Miami while he was President-elect. A few weeks before he began what would become the longest Presidential tenure in U.S. history, FDR narrowly averted death at the hands of Giuseppe Zangara.
For over three weeks, the paper chronicled the medical ups, downs and eventual death of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who had just shaken hands with Roosevelt. The paper also tracked the lightning-fast disposition of Zangara’s criminal proceedings. He was executed in the electric chair on March 20th, only 32 days after the incident and two weeks after Cermak’s death.2
By that point, FDR was two weeks into what would become a 12-year stretch as President. In an era where newspapers ruled the media roost, the Miami Daily News’ coverage made for one remarkable rabbit hole. A few samples from that span:
The address for Anna, referred to as Ann DeLoskey, is where I lived the first five years of my life: 18 Pritchard Avenue in Somerville, Mass., just outside Boston.
One particularly questionable piece of writing describes Zangara as a “diminutive, swarthy hater of the present-day social order.”
Interesting that these LADIES are repeatedly referred to as "girls" throughout the article. Another sign of disrespect...beyond outing their residences!
I had tried (without success) to find that old story on Chuck Hughes. Thank you for the post!