Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia, Volume 1, Number 2
Figure 5. A color postcard, published by Gerson Brothers of Chicago, showing the Mary M. and her running mate in Frank Martinek's lakefront excursion fleet, the motor launch Illinois 200851, at the Lincoln Park landing, sometime before 1913. The Illinois, like the Mary M., was also built at Manitowoc by Henry Burger. During the winter of 1912-1913, Martinek added a second deck to the Illinois.
The Chicago lakefront excursion trade flourished from about 1905 until after the Century of Progress Exposition of the early 1930s. During that time, a number of names became associated with the vessels’ ownership and operation: The Barry, Young, Rinke, Kegel, and Hintze families were the most prominent, with the Hintzes, operating the Anna C. Wilson 210216 and Skater 116330, staying in the business the latest, until the late 1930s. The Martineks were among the first and most prominent to operate a fleet of boats to Lincoln Park. According to my research, Captain Frank Martinek and his wife, Mary, owned no fewer than five vessels engaged on the Lincoln Park route between 1904 and 1922, four of which had been built for the Martineks by the renowned Henry Burger of Manitowoc. These boats included the Illinois 200851 (built in 1904), Mary M. 206255 (our focus here, built in 1909), White Flyer 211273 (built in 1912), America 213020 (built in 1915), and Favorite (subject of our next section and acquired by Martinek in 1920 from Captain J. E. Murphy). Internal combustion engines propelled all of Martinek’s boats, with the Mary M., America, and Favorite probably powered by early Kahlenberg engines, according to conversations I had with some lakefront old-timers some years ago, while the White Flyer definitely did have a Kahlenberg power plant according to a photograph of her in the collection of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum.
The Mary M., apparently Frank Martinek’s second boat, received her first enrollment at Chicago on 5 May 1909, just in time to enter the season’s Lincoln Park excursion trade with her older sister, Illinois. In profile, the Mary M. originally resembled the Illinois although almost twenty feet longer, with one deck, a pilothouse and small cabin, all covered by an awning that extended the length of the vessel. During the winter of 1910-1911, Martinek added a second open deck to the Mary M., bringing her pilothouse up to the new higher deck and necessitating a distinctive tall, thin funnel. This rebuilding did not alter her original registered tonnages of 44 gross tons, 34 net tons, and hull dimensions of 66 feet length, 18 feet breadth, and seven feet depth, but increased her passenger capacity considerably.
Figure 6. A rare snapshot of the Mary M. in the Chicago River, presumably, although not necessarily, before the opening of Municipal Pier in 1916. Before, and to a limited extent after, the opening of the pier excursion boats would embark passengers for Lincoln and Jackson Parks from riverside landings as seen in the background. It is easy to visualize from this photograph the vessel's original configuration as single-deck excursion boat. William Lafferty Collection.
The Mary M. continued as a mainstay of the Lincoln Park run for the next eight seasons, ferrying passengers between Lincoln Park and landings adjacent to the major street bridges across the main branch of the Chicago River and, after 1916, Municipal Pier. Her career would meet a swift and ludicrous end, though, as she left Municipal Pier at 10:30 PM on 28 July 1918. Newspaper sources say sixty-four passengers boarded the boat that evening; the final document of the Mary M., surrendered to the Chicago Customs House, stated 146 persons were aboard. Whatever the actual total, the vessel left the north side of the pier into a slight summer night’s haze on calm waters. Her master, a well-known Chicago lakefront man, Alex West, left the pilothouse after the Mary M. had left the dockside to assist in taking tickets from passengers, and put the helm in charge of, as a witness later described him, a "youth." The vessel’s course would have taken it between the four-hundred foot opening in the newly-constructed northerly breakwater, built to protect Municipal Pier’s north side, from where the Mary M. would have made the quick two mile-long trip to Lincoln Park, a route she had probably traversed uneventfully almost a thousand times a season over the past ten years. This trip would be different. Within minutes of leaving Municipal Pier, panicked passengers on the vessel’s bow began shouting toward the pilothouse that the Mary M. was headed directly for the breakwall (figure 7). Captain West immediately yelled from the main deck for the helmsman to put the boat hard to port. As the pilot obeyed, the passengers, mostly women and children, scurried to the boat’s port side, away from the breakwall, just as the Mary M. hit it a glancing blow and ended fetched up parallel against the it. All the passengers aboard but five scrambled over the side of the heeling vessel to the breakwall; those five, all men, jumped into the lake and were quickly rescued. The Mary M.’s running mate, the America, and the gas launch Columbia, whose crews had witnessed the mishap, quickly reached the scene, and ferried the shaken folk back to Municipal Pier. In the meantime, the Mary M. heeled over against the breakwall, her bottom apparently torn open by the riprap at the breakwall’s base.
Newspaper accounts the next day, in typical Chicago journalistic style, gave a sensationalist bent to what was actually a mundane and silly accident. The superintendent of Municipal Pier claimed that liquor was being sold freely on the pier excursion boats (this, of course, a year before the invocation of the Volstead Act), and despite his protestations to the authorities, nothing had been done to stem this activity, although how this may have contributed to the odd calamity of the Mary M. was never explained. Passengers aboard the boat claimed that after West had left the pilothouse, the "youth" at the wheel had let two young women enter the pilothouse with him, perhaps providing a more reasonable explanation of how such an incredibly bad job of piloting could have ensued just minutes after leaving the dock. The Chicago Tribune singled out apparent incompetence on the part of the entire crew when it stated
No attempt was made by the crew of five men to man the Mary M.’s lifeboats, distribute life preservers, or otherwise aid the passengers, according to statements made. The crew in fact was not in evidence and there was no indication it had ever been schooled in ship drills for an emergency, it was said.
I have not pursued anymore concerning the loss of the Mary M. beyond these newspaper accounts, and a silly loss it was. Years ago, during my research on the Favorite, in correspondence with a longtime denizen of Chicago’s yacht clubs I was told that Martinek salvaged the Mary M.’s engine, and the hull, its bottom ripped open and beyond repair, was towed out beyond the breakwall and sunk in deep water. I would witness the same end to Chicago’s very last old-time excursion boat, the Lincoln 213307, when in 1978, after she sank at her berth just south of Navy Pier, her venerable Sterling marine engine was plucked from her insides and her hull, suspended from the bottom by several large, inflated rubber balls, was towed beyond the Chicago harbor light and sunk.
Figure 7. A fine Kaufman & Fabry aerial view of Municipal Pier in 1923. The broken white line indicates the fateful route of the Mary M., the "X' indicating the point where she struck the breakwater, failing to make the gap on her short voyage to Lincoln Park, in the extreme upper right hand corner of this photograph. Two excursion boats can be seen on the pier's south side, while apparently two Goodrich Transportation Company boats occupy berths closer to the mainland. Reproduced from John W. Larson, Those Army Engineers: A History of the Chicago District, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1979).
Continue for the story of the Favorite
©1999, William Lafferty
