Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Sept. 18, according to the Tribune’s archives.
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Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
High temperature: 94 degrees (1955)
Low temperature: 40 degrees (1903)
Precipitation: 2.41 inches (2015)
Snowfall: None
1889: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House, which offered cultural and educational programs and social-reform efforts for the poor at 800 S. Halsted St. in Chicago’s 19th Ward. With the help of private donors, it prospered. By 1907, Hull House — which was named after its original owner Charles Jerald Hull — consisted of 13 buildings covering a city block.
In addition to Hull House, Addams led a highly unpopular international crusade for peace during World War I, spoke against municipal corruption in Chicago and fought for factory inspections, child labor laws and public health services. She also participated in the founding of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
In the 1920s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover characterized Addams as “the most dangerous woman in America,” because of her pacifism and for challenging the status quo. By 1931, Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She died four years later and is buried in her hometown of Cedarville, Illinois. Starr, who had entered a convent in 1930 in failing health, died in 1940.
Hull House remained open until 2012. It now houses the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
1949: A ceremony was held at Chicago Orchard (Douglas) Airport to rename the field in honor of U.S. Navy pilot Edward “Butch” O’Hare, who became a World War II hero when he single-handedly downed a number of Japanese bombers attacking his aircraft carrier. O’Hare was the first naval aviator recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. O’Hare was 29 when he died Nov. 26, 1943, while leading the Navy’s first nighttime fighter attack launched from an aircraft carrier. His plane and his body were never recovered.
O’Hare International Airport: From farm to global terminal
Other than through his father, mob-connected race track owner Edward J., O’Hare had only loose ties to Chicago. That was no deterrent to Tribune Publisher Robert R. McCormick in his campaign to have Chicago’s Orchard Place Airport rechristened to honor Butch O’Hare, and in 1949 Ald. John Hoellen’s proposal passed the City Council, creating O’Hare Field.
The airport’s three-letter International Air Transport Association code (ORD) continues as a vestige of its original name — Orchard Place.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Bernie Sanders, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. protest against ‘Willis wagons’ in schools
1961: A lawsuit filed on behalf of 32 Black children — who attended five overly crowded elementary schools in the city — accused Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis of drawing school districts on racial lines and sought a court order to allow the children to register at desegregated schools outside their present school districts where there were vacancies.
Willis denied the allegations of gerrymandering district boundaries to keep the Chicago school system segregated. Instead, he said the double shift classes — where students attend school in half-day shifts — were the result of an overwhelming increase in enrollment in those areas.
1966: Valerie Jean Percy, 21, was found beaten and stabbed to death in her bed, in her family’s Kenilworth mansion. It was the first homicide in the history of the North Shore suburb. Percy was the daughter of Chicago-area business executive and then-Republican U.S. Senate candidate Charles “Chuck” Percy. She had just graduated from Cornell University and came home to work on her father’s election campaign.
Percy’s death remains one of Illinois’ best known and most mysterious unsolved killings.
1970: “Svengoolie” premiered. The show, originally named “Screaming Yellow Theater,” debuted on WFLD-Ch. 32 and showed, “Ghosts on the Loose.” Viewers were welcomed to the antics by the opening song “Rumble” by Link Wray and the Wraymen, and a load of rubber chickens. The original host was Jerry G. Bishop, who donned green hair and a beard and mustache to portray a coffin-dwelling hippie with a wacky sense of humor named Svengoolie.
1982: The Chicago Tribune printed inside Tribune Tower for the last time. A run of 94,000 copies of the paper’s Midwest Sunday edition was the last produced on the giant, rumbling Goss Mark II presses in the basement of Tribune Tower. Another 1.1 million copies were printed across town in the Freedom Center, the paper’s new $186 million, 940,000-square-foot printing and production plant along the North Branch of the Chicago River.
Print operations were moved in May 2024 to the former Daily Herald facility in Schaumburg. The Freedom Center was demolished starting in August 2024 to make way for the planned $1.7 billion Bally’s Chicago Casino.
Tribune press operators say goodbye to an era as Freedom Center makes its final run
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