Second in a series of posts following events occurring in 1932. The events are taken from my book: (Part one)
Chapter 3: Chaos at the Carlos
Sixteen-year-old Otto Pohl finishes delivering his Chicago Tribunes for July 7, 1932. He had read the front page story on the shooting of Bill Jurges, rookie Chicago Cubs shortstop, by a disgruntled showgirl whom Jurges had been seeing. The shooting occured in Jurges’s room at the Carlos Hotel, about two blocks north of Wrigley Field.
Otto decides that he has to check out the crime scene which is only about a block from his apartment.
As soon as he turned north on Sheffield Ave., he could see in the distance the mass of humanity blocking the sidewalk and spilling into the street. Otto expected a crowd, but this was beyond his most extreme expectations. As he got closer, he could see several squad cars parked in front of the Carlos. Newspaper reporters, notebooks open and pencil in hand, were everywhere, as were photographers, all pushing and shoving toward the front entrance like a herd of cattle plodding toward the chutes at the Chicago Stockyards. The main entrance was guarded by police. The coppers allowed residents out, but only hotel guests were allowed in. That fact did not deter the multitudes from furiously attempting to reach the promised land behind the hotel’s revolving door.
Retterer, R.C.. 1932 Chicago: Bombs, Beer Wars and Cubs Baseball (p. 11). Kindle Edition.
Over the years, many Cub players took up summer residence at the Carlos Hotel. It was on Sheffield Avenue, the street that ran past the right field wall of Wrigley Field and was within walking distance of the ballpark. That season Jurges’s teammates, Kiki Cuyler and Marv Gudat, were also staying at the Carlos.
More details of the shooting were emerging. Gudat was in the lobby when he heard three shots fired. Running upstairs to Jurges’s fifth floor room (509), he found Jurges in the hallway bleeding profusely. Jurges later said that he thought he was dying. Gudat thought so, too. Jurges told Gudat to call a doctor.
A doctor was found and at first glance at Jurges, who was holding his side and bleeding badly, the doctor said, “You’ve got it bad.”
Cubs’ team physician, John Davis, also happened to be in the hotel. When he finally got a look at Jurges, he said that he did not think Jurges’s condition was life-threatening. It turned out that one of the three bullets fired glanced off a rib. That saved Jurges’s life because the bullet was headed for vital organs. According to a later story in the Chicago Tribune:
Bill Jurges, Cub shortstop, will be lost to the club for another week at least. At the Illinois Masonic hospital, where Jurges was taken last night, an X-ray revealed that one of the bullets fired by Violet Popovich (Violet Polansky in the book) during an altercation in his room at the Carlos hotel on July 6, still was in his body.
It was removed by Dr. John Davis, club physician, who said Jurges would be unable to return to the lineup at Pittsburgh Friday, as had been expected before the bullet was discovered. Jurges was removed to the home of a friend immediately after leaving the hospital.
Dr. Davis said that apparently three bullets had struck Jurges, one passing through the right hand, another grazing his right side, and a third, the one discovered last night, lodging between the ninth and tenth ribs on the right side.
In the meantime, the police had found the shooter, Violet Popovich, in her room that was in considerable disarray. There was a half-empty bottle of gin on the floor and a suicide note on a desk. Violet had obviously been drinking before she took a revolver out of her desk drawer and went to Room 509.
Popovich had followed the Cubs to New York in June during their eastern road trip. Jurges was from Brooklyn and was harassed by Popovich several times while he was staying at his parents’ house. That was too much for Jurges. He finally did what several teammates had advised him to do. He told Popovich that their relationship was over.
Popovich checked into the Carlos Hotel on her return from New York. After dropping an Independence Day doubleheader to Pittsburgh and falling further behind the Pirates, the Cubs were set to open a series with the Phillies on Tuesday, July 6th. That is the day that Popovich made her move.
Violet Popovich went on to lead quite an interesting life that included dating other ballplayers, Leo Durocher among them. For an interesting account of her life, I recommend the book The Chicago Cub Shot For Love: A Showgirl’s Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series, by Jack Bales.
In brain-storming for the writing of this book, I wanted to model it after Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. In his book, which I highly recommend, Larson employs parallel plots. One is the story of the building of the White City for the Columbian Exposition of 1892-’93 in Chicago, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christoper Columbus’s first voyage to the New World.
The parallel plot follows the megalomaniac, Dr. H.H. Holmes, who became one of the first of what are now called serial killers. The University of Michigan medical school graduate moved to Chicago in 1886 and became a pharmacist. He had already been involved in several criminal activities when he began a murder spree of a number of young women.
The Columbian Exposition attracted many young, naive, small town girls to Chicago to seek one of the many jobs available in connection with the much-publicized spectacle. Holmes took advantage of their naiveté to lure them to what the press came to label Holmes’ Murder Castle, then sexually assault and murder them.
My plan to use the Jurges shooting as my parallel crime plot collapsed when I learned that the crime in a sense never really happened because Jurges refused to press charges. No crime; no plot.
My second choice was to find a crime of espionage. I knew that there had been plots by German Hitler sympathizers in Chicago. Germans were the largest immigrant group in the Second City at the time. Alas, there were such plots, but they occurred later.
Thus, I decided to invent a crime of foreign intrigue. The book, then, is part non-fiction, the account of the Cubs’ 1932 pennant-winning season, and part fiction, the plot involving protagonists Otto Pohl and his girlfriend, Amanda Halverson, as they stumble into a web of intrigue that includes the Chicago Outfit and German and Soviet espionage.