City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago Read Online Free PDF Page B

jury lost their tempers. “Produce the evidence,” one juror shouted, “and don’t waste so much time!”
    Amid this upset, John C. Lowery, an assistant to State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, threatened to clear the inquest room unless everyone settled down. 9
    Order was restored after a few minutes, but Mayer wasn’t finished. “Wacker isn’t dead yet—he will get well,” the attorney asserted. “We will have him testify to the coroner and then Lipsner will learn that Wacker calls him a liar and a crazy man!”
    He turned to Major C. H. Maranville, another expert witness. “He [Lipsner] said Wacker reached up to put out the flames of his chute with his hands. Major Maranville, is that possible?”
    The Major shook his head. “No, it is not. The man hangs 40 feet below the supporting surface [of the parachute].”
    Thus caught in an obvious absurdity, Lipsner stood up and refused to answer any more questions. He pointed out that he was not testifying as an expert witness—that he was merely reporting what Wacker had told him. He also said that he resented the Goodyear attorneys’ attacks on him. Coroner Hoffman, pounding his desk for order, agreed to excuse Lipsner for the time being, but asked that he remain available for the rest of the hearing. 10
    With the inquest room still buzzing from this dispute, AssistantState’s Attorney James O’Brien demanded that Jack Boettner be questioned next. The pilot, dressed in a light-colored suit and carefully knotted tie (while most present were in their shirtsleeves), exuded an air of unruffled coolness as he came before the juries. Answering questions in a steady, dignified voice, he testified that he had been an aviator since February 1917, and that he had never experienced a mishap of any kind before this. Proceeding systematically, he related precisely how the airship had been assembled, and described each of the three trips made that day. “We had no trouble during our flights on Monday,” he said. “Everything went smoothly. The ship did not roll much on the first two trips, but it was very sensitive to control.” When asked if the flights were experimental, he insisted that only the first one was, and that this initial trip had taken place entirely along the unpopulated shoreline of the lake. “After that flight,” he said, “I believed the ship perfectly safe.… I know that the engines were working perfectly and that there were no sparks or flames thrown from them.”
    “When did you discover the dirigible was in trouble?” he was asked.
    “About three minutes to five,” he said. He described feeling a jerk on one of the suspension cables holding the gondola. That’s when he looked around and saw a flame on the back of the balloon near the equator line. “I knew we didn’t have a chance,” he said calmly. “I said, ‘Everybody jump; that’s our only chance.’ They went over and the gondola dove down.” He insisted again that he was the last person to leave the ship, and that he remembered seeing Wacker four hundred feet below before he himself finally jumped.
    When asked to explain Lipsner’s contradictory testimony, Boettner said that he didn’t believe Wacker had really made the statements attributed to him. 11
    As if to confuse the coroner’s juries even more, the remainder of the session was devoted to an examination of several eyewitnesseswho seemed to agree on very little. Major Maranville, who claimed to have watched the entire flight from Grant Park, asserted that the fire had started “on the right side [of the balloon] near the rear fins.” But the next witness—Irwin A. Phillips—insisted that the fire had started near the front, just above the blimp’s nose. Several other witnesses corroborated Phillips’s account. Just about the only thing everyone agreed on was that the flame was yellow and not blue, indicating that it was the bag that was burning and not the hydrogen gas inside. Even so, by the end of the day’s