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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—first to the real name, and then to his origins in Sicily and finally to the heart of Little Sicily (Chicago), along with the life he built before and after that pivotal morning.

This is the story of how a simple error—repeated for more than a century instead of being researched—can bury a legacy… and how setting it right can bring a hero back into the light.

Resources Referenced

• Boyer, Dwight. True Tales of the Great Lakes. Chapter 2, “Who Speaks for the Little Feller?”
• Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1915.
• Daily Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), July 26, 1915.
• Lombardo, Calogero. “A Brief History of Chicago’s Little Sicily Neighborhood and the Saint Philip Benizi Parish.” 2013.
• Additional Music: Multiple tracks sourced from Pixabay. Licensed for free use under the Pixabay Content License.

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• The opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opus
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