Cubs Player Shot by Showgirl; Unrequited Love?
Letter Solves the Shooting of Bill Jurges: Chicago Daily Tribune, July 7, 1932
I begin a series of posts following events occurring in 1932. The events are taken from my book:
Chapter 1 Newspaper Days
(Thursday, July 7, 1932)
Retterer, R.C.. 1932 Chicago: Bombs, Beer Wars and Cubs Baseball (p. 1). Kindle Edition.
“Aufstehn Schlafmütze,” his mother said in German. “Let’s go, sleeping head.”
“It’s sleepyhead, Mama, and you know I will be on time. I always am. I am a punctual German, as you always remind me, yes?” Otto Pohl said.“Sleeping head, sleepyhead, what difference it making? English so crazy,” Gwen Pohl said. “And better to not say you German. Not so good right now.”
Otto rose predawn every day to work his paper route, delivering the Chicago Daily Tribune, World’s Greatest Newspaper, as was printed modestly on the paper’s masthead. His mother has made him a sandwich as usual.
Otto stuck his sandwich into a paper sack and hurried out the door, bidding farewell to his mother in German. It was still pitch black. He could see by the light overhead that the padlock on the basement door of the three-flat was already open….As he entered, he saw that Anton Putz, the building superintendent, was doing summer maintenance on the coal furnace.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Putz,” Otto said.
Otto was uncomfortable around adults. Anton in particular made him uneasy. He was tall, lean and fit and was what Otto thought of as foreign-looking. He retained a slight accent—Polish, Otto believed, but he was afraid to ask Anton about anything, much less his personal details….
“Good morning, Otto. You know you should speak English. German not getting you nowhere, the places you should want to go, anyway.”
Otto has thoroughly assimilated into his new culture, so much so that he has succumbed to temptation. He has become a die-hard Cubs fan. Anton has retained his old world habits. He is a Fußball fan, still widely played and watched in Chicago among immigrants. He goads Otto about his infatuation with the boring sport of baseball.
“Well, Otto, what happened to your Cubs? Dropped to third place I hear. How they lose two to Pittsburgh?”
“The Pirates are good, but the Cubs’ll be back. Gonna be the Cubs and Yankees in the World Series. You watch.”
Inwardly, Otto was not at all confident that his beloved team would recover. “Anyway, the Phils come in tomorrow. That will be the start of something big—a long winning streak.”
Otto was drawing from a story in the previous day’s Chicago Daily Tribune that featured the headline:
Whippings Make Mean Old Bears Out Of Our Cubs
Phils Look Like So Much Raw Meat To Them“I must check for gas fumes in the building,” Anton said. “Something’s making you light-headed. I’ve told you before. Baseball is a boring game, a waste of time. You should be playing and watching Fußball, or soccer as you call it. You have to be fit to play the game. That fatso, Babe Ruth, would die of a heart attack in the first five minutes of play.”
Otto grabbed his Schwinn Motorbike, put his sandwich in his shoulder bag and said Auf Wiedersehen to Herr Putz, already forgetting Putz’s admonition to avoid speaking German.
“Be careful,” Anton shouted after him, “there are still a lot of drunk Democrats out on the streets.”
Anton was referring to the fact that the Democrat Party Convention had just ended at the Chicago Stadium. There were still convention-goers in town looking to have a good time.
Despite Prohibition, there was plenty of drink available. Ironically, many of the most enthusiastic drinkers and convention party-goers were Members of Congress who had voted to deny the evils of drink to their constituents, those little people that they claimed they were always looking out for.
Chapter 2 Crime of Passion
Otto’s family residence is a three bedroom second floor apartment in a three flat walkup on the southwest corner of Grace Street and Kenmore Avenue.
Exit the building’s main entrance that faced Grace St., turn right, then an immediate right again onto Kenmore, and in a long city block, you would run into the left-field wall at Wrigley Field. Location, location, location.
Otto continued east on Grace, past Kenmore, then turned right (south) onto Sheffield Ave. Sheffield runs past the right field wall of Wrigley Field.
When within the aura of Cubs’ Park, Otto always experienced a feeling that he was expected to feel when his parents dragged him to services at the German Lutheran Church on Sundays but did not.
As he passed the ballpark, he imagined hearing the roar of the crowd and the voice of Cubs’ announcer Pat Flanagan calling a Kiki Cuyler home run that this expansive ball yard simply could not contain. The badly bruised ball landed across Sheffield Avenue and would have been out of any park in this great country, including Yellowstone.
Otto rode his bike about two miles south to his newspaper delvery area which was near Lincoln Park on Chicago’s Near Northside. Lincoln Park is the home of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Founded in 1868, it is one of the oldest zoos in the country. In the 1950s, the zoo became nationally known for its zoo keeper, Marlin Perkins, who hosted a television show from the zoo, titled Zoo Parade.
At the corner of Orchard and Webster there was a modern, Frank Lloyd Wright designed two-flat where Otto’s bundle of Chicago Tribunes was dropped underneath the portico above the stoop….
His habit was to glance at the headline on the front page of the Trib, officially the Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 Cents Daily; Pay No More; 10 Cents Sunday. The Tribune always ran a banner headline on page one. Another staple was an editorial cartoon in the center of the first page, above the fold.
The world was obsessed with the attempt of American aviators, Bennett Griffin and Jimmy Mattern, to circumnavigate the globe in record time, bettering the mark held by Wiley Post and Harold Gatty. Otto thought the headline was misleading. To him, it implied that the flyers were missing, as in could not be found, when they were merely running behind schedule. The story and headline smacked of sensationalism. Otto felt mature and worldly in recalling the word and concept that had been discussed in an English class. It was something for a principled reporter to avoid.
Otto was about to turn to the sports section when a story in mid-front-page, just below the fold caught his eye:
Letter Solves the Shooting of Bill Jurges
What letter? What shooting? Billy Jurges, the Cubs’ star shortstop, was one of Otto’s heroes. Was he dead or alive? How could the Cubs possibly come back now to win the pennant? In this era of high crime rates, the papers were full of stories of murder, robbery, kidnappings and suicides. People, including Otto, had almost grown accustomed to the stories of carnage. But this one really hit home. Otto read on.
“Violet Valley, (I changed the name from Violet Valli to Violet Valley, RCR) the cabaret girl who shot Shortstop Bill Jurges of the Cubs yesterday, told all in a note written just before the shooting. This became known last night.”
The story went on to say that the police had earlier theorized that Jurges was accidentally shot when he tried to prevent Valley from committing suicide. According to the note, however, “she planned to kill herself and Jurges because their beautiful love affair had been broken up.”
WARNEKE WINS 11TH GAME: CUBS 6, PHILLIES 1
Otto turned to the sports pages. He was pleased at the headline indicating that star rookie pitcher, Lon Warneke, had defeated the Phils for his eleventh win. He was disappointed, however, that there were not more details on the Jurges shooting. The only mention of Jurges in the sports section was in a caption of a photo of Stan Hack who had been “Shot” Back Into Lineup because of Jurges’s near death experience.
Otto turned to the back page of the Trib that always featured a full page of photographs of important news events. There were three photos related to the Jurges shooting, two of them of the shooter.
The caption indicated that Jurges was shot in his room at the Carlos Hotel, 3834 N. Sheffield Ave. Several Cubs, besides Jurges, including Kiki Cuyler, lived at the Carlos during the season. Otto and friends occasionally hung out there in hopes of glimpsing a player and scoring an autograph. Player sightings were rare. Autographs rarer still. I’ve got to get over there, Otto thought.