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PODCAST

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

"Flower in the River" podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland Disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family"s history. We"ll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well, and we"ll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery.

history spirituality

All Episodes

33:13

The River Remained in Her Bones: A Recovered Eastland...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/12/11

Send us a text The River Remained in Her Bones: A Recovered Eastland Story A single line in a 1922 obituary can change the shape of history. We follow that thread to Chrissie McNeal Lauritzen, who survived the SS Eastland capsizing by clinging to the overturned hull, “was never well since,” and died seven years later from complications tied directly to that morning on the Chicago River. This isn’t just a moving story; it’s documented evidence that challenges the fixed perception of the ...

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31:58

A Hero at the Porthole: The Rabe Family’s Story

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/12/04

Send us a text A forgotten headline. A crowded dock. A father who turns back to a capsized ship and pulls a family friend through a porthole. In this episode, we follow the Rabe family—Fred, Delia, Grace, and Kenneth—from a terrifying morning on the Chicago River into the decades that followed, when work, service, and community stitched their lives into something livable again. We open the archive, and listen as Grace and Kenneth share their memories of that day, 84 years later. Grace b...

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33:44

Fissures in the Archive: Behind the Curtain of the...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/11/27

Send us a text Some histories don’t fracture because records vanished; they fracture because we stopped asking questions. In this episode, we look at the Eastland Disaster through a different lens — not just what happened in 1915, but how its story has been curated, simplified, and sometimes commercialized, and how we can repair and restore it with evidence. I share what two years of deep research (and new academic work) revealed: there’s no agreed standard for who qualifies as an Eastland vi...

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28:03

Capsized. Kicked. Survived.

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/11/20

Send us a text A photographer’s byline led me straight into another long-overlooked Eastland story — the 1965 Chicago Tribune interview with survivor Anna Meinert, one of the many accounts from this event that were well documented but seldom researched and carried forward. Anna’s memories bring the morning of July 24, 1915 into sharp, human focus. Fifty years later she could still see it all: water seeping from portholes, the sudden lurch, the scrap of canvas above a window, a stranger’s boot...

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44:37

The Rosetta Stone of the Eastland Disaster

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/11/13

Send us a text Tracing the Eastland story back to the people who first preserved it online. This week, I’m pulling back the curtain on how, in the late 1990s, the Eastland Disaster story was rediscovered, shaped, reshaped, and carried onto the early Internet (courtesy of the Eastland Memorial Society). But when that original website vanished, some of its content — including family-written stories and volunteer research — resurfaced in later retellings without the names of the people who first...

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38:58

She Stayed on the Line: From the Eastland Disaster to...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/11/06

Send us a text Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines. We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confus...

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34:32

The Afterlife of a Story

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/10/30

Send us a text What happens when the storyteller is gone—but the story keeps rewriting itself? A single family biography can carry the weight of a neighborhood’s memory. We open the archives on a 20-year-old Western Electric employee who boarded the Eastland with her fiancé in 1915—and trace how her story, first written by a family member, nearly disappeared under paraphrase and missing attribution. What begins as a personal account of loss becomes a blueprint for preserving authorship, prove...

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42:08

From Sea to City: A Mariner’s Journey into Chicago’s...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/10/23

Send us a text A city comes alive when you can stand on a corner and glimpse yesterday behind today’s skyline. That’s the spark behind my conversation with Ryan Wilson, a designer and mariner who turned countless hours in archives into the Chicago History Map—a large-format, interactive portal where high-resolution photos meet precise locations and time fades just enough for details to surface. We talk about the winding path that led from Admiralty charts on private yachts to digitized stree...

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34:36

The Eastland Survivors and the Case of the Missing...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/10/16

Send us a text Memory can vanish quietly—sometimes with a server shutdown. This week, we open the door to the Eastland disaster’s online past: from an early researcher’s dial-up “postcard pages” to an early Eastland website’s now-defunct archive. We trace how those pioneering digital efforts shaped what many of us think we know today. Along the way, we revisit transportation historian George Hilton’s foundational work—his flexible approach to casualty counts and the permissions that seeded th...

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29:57

Excursion to Death — The Witness Who Finally Spoke

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/10/09

Send us a text A tug’s line goes taut, a mandolin stops mid-note, and a sleek steamer rolls onto its side in six minutes. That’s the scene an eight-year-old John Griggs never forgot—and the memory he later captured in a gripping article, “Excursion to Death,” lost for decades and now brought back to light. We trace the morning’s small warnings at the dock, the sudden tilt that turned joy into panic, and the eerie contrast of the Eastland disaster unfolding within sight of Chicago’s bridges an...

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39:13

Visiting Every Grave - George Hilton’s Eastland Legacy

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/10/02

Send us a text A century after his birth, George W. Hilton is still guiding our footsteps. This episode honors the transportation historian whose book Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic became the cornerstone of Eastland disaster research. After discovering my own family connection to the Eastland Disaster, Hilton’s work became my north star. What begins with grief — and a surprise manuscript from a relative — unfolds into a story about how scholarship, storytelling, and stubborn love for truth ...

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34:08

Buried by Omission: The Eastland Victim Who Disappeared

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/09/25

Send us a text This week we take a deeper dive into the Claims and Libels files (In the Matter of the Petition of St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company, Owner of the Steamer Eastland, For Limitation of Liability) preserved in the National Archives Catalog. The research revealed a startling omission — a victim missing from the original compilation of Eastland victims and from most later derivative lists (with one exception!) By cross-checking court filings, obituaries, and family connections, I...

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39:14

True Tales from the Eastland: Admiral Rickover...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/09/18

Send us a text Admiral Hyman Rickover—father of the nuclear navy and one of the most influential military figures of the 20th century—had a connection to the 1915 Eastland disaster that’s been virtually forgotten. As a 15-year-old Western Union messenger in Chicago, young Rickover delivered telegrams to grieving families throughout the night following the tragedy. What haunted him most? The undertakers who swarmed the scene, exploiting grief-stricken families for profit. “Where money is invol...

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36:43

Shoeless in Chicago: A Rusyn Teen Hero of the Eastland

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/09/11

Send us a text At just 17 years old, Peter Hardy stood on a Chicago bridge in 1915, watching the Eastland fill with happy Western Electric employees on their way to a summer picnic. Moments later, the ship rolled onto its side, plunging more than 800 people to their deaths. Peter didn’t run. This Rusyn immigrant teenager dove straight into the polluted Chicago River and began hauling people out — families clinging together, strangers fighting for breath. He saved at least ten lives that morni...

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40:08

Erased by a Typo — Meet the Man Who Saved Lives and...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/09/04

Send us a text In this episode, I return to Dwight Boyer’s "True Tales of the Great Lakes" and discuss two forgotten heroes of the 1915 Eastland disaster—one remembered correctly, the other erased for more than a century by a newspaper typo that turned my fact-check into a full-blown genealogical detective story. The Mystery Begins While researching Boyer's account of the disaster, I encountered two names that appeared nowhere else in most modern Eastland documentation: N.W. LeVally, an...

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25:50

Honeymoon Interrupted: The Groom Says "I Do" to Disaster

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/08/28

Send us a text Hidden stories have a way of finding the light. In this fascinating deep dive, we uncover two previously unknown documents that reshape our understanding of the 1915 Eastland disaster that claimed over 800 lives in the Chicago River. The first discovery reveals how the tragedy transformed American journalism. Through a December 1915 Associated Press Service Bulletin, we glimpse the behind-the-scenes response of the nation's leading news agency and hear the voices of newspaper ...

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27:48

The Sleepyhead Who Dodged Death - Another Untold...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/08/21

Send us a text Three young engineers fresh out of Cornell University were running late to the Western Electric company picnic on July 24, 1915. One had overslept, making the trio miss their train and arrive at the Chicago River docks just as their coworkers were boarding the SS Eastland. Redirected to a secondary boat due to overcrowding, they stood on a bridge and watched in horror as the Eastland slowly tilted, then capsized in the shallow water, trapping hundreds inside. Their tardiness ha...

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32:33

Lost in Translation: How a Name Hid a Hero

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/08/14

Send us a text One shout could have saved lives. On the morning of the Eastland Disaster, a lone street peddler saw the danger before anyone else. His warning was met with laughter and scorn, and while his experience was recounted in the papers, it was under the wrong name. In this episode, we return to Dwight Boyer’s True Tales of the Great Lakes and follow one story back in time—stepping onto Chicago’s Clark Street Bridge on July 24, 1915, and tracing the trail from century-old newspapers—...

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45:25

Who Speaks for Dwight Boyer? The Storyteller Who...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/08/07

Send us a text In this week’s episode, I continue reading from "Who Speaks for the Little Feller?"—Dwight Boyer’s unforgettable chapter in "True Tales of the Great Lakes" (1971), one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of the Eastland disaster. A meticulous maritime journalist, Boyer combined accuracy with deep empathy, giving voice to the people whose lives were forever altered that day. This isn’t just history—it’s storytelling with heart. Names, quotes, context—it’s all there. Deca...

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46:26

Dwight Boyer: Forgotten Chronicler of the Eastland...

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told ·

2025/07/31

Send us a text What We’re Covering: Maritime journalist Dwight Boyer (1912–1977) published a detailed Eastland Disaster account in 1971—more than two decades before most major works on the subjectHis chapter in True Tales of the Great Lakes draws from courtroom records, witness interviews, and primary source materialAlthough George Hilton cited Boyer in Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, Boyer's work has otherwise been mostly overlooked or uncredited Highlights from Dwight Boyer's Career: ...

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145 results

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