Demand-side Sheepdog

Hello and welcome back to Foolkiller Friday!

Last week, I took you through the Foolkiller’s presence—or lack thereof—during its Midwestern tour with the C.W. Parker carnival company. In that, I said that it was likely the Foolkiller hadn’t made it more than a month or so with Parker’s Greatest Show, and in point of fact that the evidence was not especially solid that it toured with Parker after their opening show in Leavenworth at all.

There was, I said, a lot of articles saying the Foolkiller would be appearing at a place, and a marked dearth of reporting saying “I went to the carnival in Oelwein, and I saw the submarine.” This is true for its return to Chicago, as well. On June 26th and June 27th, advertisements appeared promising that “The Big Submarine ‘Fool Killer’” would be appearing at Riverview on the 30th:

Starting on the 28th, the Foolkiller was dropped from those advertisements, and by June 29th the opening had been pushed by one day to July 1st. At no point after Riverview’s opening is the submarine ever mentioned, and towards the end of July it was being offered for sale:

I mentioned last week that this ad doesn’t mention anything about its time with C.W. Parker’s shows; it also doesn’t mention anything about its time at Riverview, just the original State Street exhibition. So today’s question will point towards the north star of: “was it at Riverview?” with a side of: “Is that something it’s even possible to say one way or the other?”

It sounds like this could be rather frustrating, right? So I think now is a good time to pacify the disquiet with some of what we can say, and go through the start of the Foolkiller’s journey, when it was on South State Street.

(All entries in this series as of October 27th, 2023):

• Introduction
• “The Recovery” (geolocating the location of the 1915 salvage)
• “The Find; or, The Theory of the Case” (fixing the date and circumstances of the salvage)
• “What If It Was Round?” (a history of the cylindrical lifeboat phenomenon)
• “Everything You Wanted to Know About the International Automatic Lifeboat (But Were Afraid to Ask)” (…)
• “The Man from the East” (covering Harry Fisher and his lifeboat)
• “The Summer of 1907” (fixing the dates of photographs of the lifeboat)
• “Step Right Up” (tracking the relationship between “the Foolkiller” and C.W. Parker’s carnival)
• “The Prestige” (this one!)
• “Postcard Mania” (trying to find out when the last bridge photo was taken)
• “Blow Yourself Up” (all about William “Frenchy” Deneau)
• “Conclusion [citation needed]” (reviewing open questions)
• “The Experiment” (lessons from a model I built of the lifeboat)
• “Back from the Dead” (David B. Marks, and an update on the salvage)

This is also a good time to tell you that if you thought last week’s piece was a bit heavy on the inferences and a bit light on things we definitely know, this week’s will be much more bold in my willingness to extrapolate. But in exchange, I promise to at least make the journey seem suitably bizarre, and contribute some brand-new photographic evidence to the Foolkiller canon. Deal?

Alright, then, let’s get started.

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So! One of the most interesting elements of the Foolkiller has always been the lovingly illustrated full-page Chicago Tribune ad where it’s mentioned, which I’ll reproduce here:

This is an important document for a few reasons. The first is that, before the Power Boat News article was uncovered, it gave the clearest picture of what the Foolkiller looked like (or was supposed to have looked like). In a post-IAL world, it also raises new questions about what kind of shape the boat was in when it was recovered.

For example: the turret at the front, which is visible in one picture of the salvage, is missing in the others and must have been destroyed in the first attempt at raising it. Said turret is shown in this drawing as having two windows on each side, which isn’t accurate; it’s not really clear whether it was reconstructed for the exhibition or not. Similarly, the stern of the boat was badly damaged at the time of—or by—the salvage, and is conspicuously absent from the drawing.

Another reason it’s important is because it’s one of the only places where the Foolkiller’s whereabouts are known, and the context in which it was presented is known—what an attempt to directly compel you to see it looks like. We know that it was exhibited on State Street because of other, similar contemporary ads, and the July classified ad that mentions it having been on display for a concrete span of time.

The more exaggerated claims from the spring are missing here—nothing about it causing the Eastland disaster, or about a mysterious eastern man. It’s not, for that matter, identified here as the first submarine, merely an old one. But the core of the narrative—about it having killed its inventor, being an antique submarine instead of a 7-year-old derelict lifeboat, etc.—are present.

Finally, it’s important because it has, to many, always presented a bizarre contrast. Here’s this interesting historical artifact (so we are told), and it’s being shown at an arcade—or at least, in association with Skee-Ball? Why? What made Deneau choose that venue as opposed to something closer to the water, or maybe the barge it was being cleaned on? Was this a particularly plum location? Did he think there was going to be a lot of foot traffic?

We’ll get back to that one. But first, I’d like to note something I’ve never seen mentioned.

All those questions make sense if it’s Deneau’s boat, and the ad doesn’t say that. He’s at 208 South State Street delivering lectures and answering questions. He’s never described as the Foolkiller’s owner, only its discoverer (and “Hero of the Eastland,” natch). He’s not even the only lecturer—a “Professor Herbert” is also giving talks. In a later advert, Deneau is listed as being in charge of the show, but the Foolkiller’s exhibitor is not Frenchy, it’s “the Skee-Ball Company of Illinois.”

So what was that, anyway? Information about the Skee-Ball Company of Illinois is a little difficult to come by. They were incorporated on July 3rd, 1915, and dissolved in 1921. Unlike many of the companies we’ve covered on Foolkiller Friday, though, they do seem to have actually existed and traded in, well, Skee-Ball arcades. At the time, the Skee-Ball company licensed other companies as distributors within a region, who had singular authority over that region but could not otherwise sell the machines.

In April, 1916 it was reported that the Skee-Ball Company of Illinois had “39 alleys in use, and had orders in for 150 new alleys” as of November 1st, 1915. They existed sufficiently to have produced arcade tokens:

Put a pin in this for a moment, because now we’re going to close a circle. The classified ad for the Foolkiller lists the seller’s contact information as “508 Rector Building.” That would be the Samuel L. Winternitz company, an auction house that is, indeed, still in business today. At the time, they occupied at least the 506–508 suites at the Rector Building, because that’s the address that shows up in other auctions. For example, machine tools for making cars:

Or paintings:

Or, hey, carnival equipment:

Why, in 1917, you could head on down to Suite 506 in the Rector Building to find yourself some Skee-Ball Machines:

Because, to say what you’ve doubtless already guessed, 506 Rector Building was both the home of the Samuel L. Winternitz auctioneering company and the Skee-Ball Company of Illinois—it’s also the address given in their tax filings to the state. I will say that I have not been able to turn up the incorporation documents of the company, and I cannot prove that Samuel L. Winternitz was the owner of the Skee-Ball Company.

However, I do know that he wound up owning companies whose listed officers were not Samuel L. himself. In 1916, for example, he’s listed as the defendant in a suit being brought against “Samuel L. Winternitz, trading as the Waterdrome Company” where, in point of fact, the court is siding for the plaintiffs in an argument that appears to hinge on Waterdrome not being incorporated and, perhaps (?), Winternitz disclaiming responsibility as a result:

National Printing & Engraving Company (a corporation), Winterburn Print Branch, Defendant in Error, v. Samuel L. Winternitz, trading as The Waterdrome Company, Plaintiff in error.

Gen. No. 22,156 (Not to be reported in full.)

Error to the Municipal Court of Chicago; the Hon. JOHN R. CAVERLY, Judge, presiding. Heard In the Branch Appellate Court at the March term, 1916. Affrmed. Opinion filed June 27, 1917.

Statement of the Case.

Action by the National Printing & Engraving Company (a corporation), Winterburn Print Branch, plaintiff, against Samuel L. Winternitz, trading as The Waterdrome Company, defendant, for the purchase price of goods. To reverse a judgment for plaintiff for $217.40, defendant prosecutes this writ of error.

WILLIAM FRIEDMAN, for plaintiff in error.

P.F. MURRAY, for defendant in error.

MR. PRESIDING JUSTICE GOODWIN delivered the opinion of the court.

Abstract of the Decision

1. CORPORATIONS, § 516*—when evidence shows business not incorporated. In an action to recover the purchase price of goods, evidence held to show that defendant was owner of the business by which the goods were purchased, that he was doing business under such name and that the business was not incorporated.
2. MUNICIPAL COURT OF CHICAGO, § 30*—when granting of leave to amend statement of claim is not ground for reversal. The fact that though leave was given to amend the statement of claim in a case of the fourth class in the Municipal Court of Chicago, which named several defendants who were not served with process, no amendment was actually made, is not ground for reversal.
3. APPEAL AND ERROR, § 471*—when objection to statement elicited on cross-examination may not be raised. One who elicits a statement from a witness on cross-examination and does not object thereto cannot raise the objection on appeal.

(But I have no idea—some lawyer please help?)

What was the Waterdrome Company, you ask? This might be a little bit of a mystery. It was (theoretically) incorporated on August 7th, 1915. What we can say with some degree of certainty about the Waterdrome Company is: when it was founded, the lawsuit, its dissolution in 1921 as reported in the National Corporate Reporter—and that’s it.

…Oh, right. Also, Riverview Park’s 1915 spectacle was a water carnival called Waterdrome.

Prior to that, Riverview had operated the Creation Building, home of big productions like “The War of the Worlds” and “The Sinking of the Titanic.” For 1915, they replaced those with “Waterdrome,” a spectacle with hundreds of dancers managed by James Hutton and designed by Frederick Robinson, the lead engineer.

They seem to have run into trouble, though. Robinson Exhibitions went bankrupt in May of 1915, with liabilities of $127,15.67 against assets of $95,000. Those assets were sold at auction, naturally. I suppose I don’t have to tell you who the auctioneer was—but it bears noting here that a February, 1915 issue of Billboard says that “Little Solly Winternitz of the War of the Worlds wants to be a manager”—that would be his eldest son Solomon, who was born in 1895 and took over the company when Winternitz died. So they were involved in Riverview affairs before that.

A useful summary of this is to be found in an August 24th, 1916 paper, which tells us, uh…

Tell you what, I’ll spare you trying to read blackletter type.

Twisted Story

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Howard Hews seeks to make Samuel L. Winternitz settle accounts.

And to force him to make an exact settlement with him in court and to pay him the sums still to be seen, Howard Hews is now suing the auctioneer Samuel L. Winternitz. He was one of the auctioneers of the Robinson Exhibition Co, which presented the panorama "The Sinking of the Titanic" in Riverview Park, and in a short time made a net profit of 60,000.

In view of this success, Hews was persuaded to buy shares in the corporation, the latter in the later ventures "War of the Worlds,” ”Waterdrome,” etc., and saw itself compelled to stop making payments when the proceeds at the San Diego show fell well short of expectations.

To cover the thousands of expenses, Hews had hastily advanced funds, issued notes, etc. Some of these financial transactions were of such a dreadful nature that he does not know exactly how much Winternitz still owes him, but in his opinion it must be several thousand dollars.

The Riverview Park administration is in no way involved in these endeavors.

So, to make this timeline explicit: in 1915, Riverview commissioned Waterdrome as a major attraction in the Creation building. However, for whatever reason, the subcontracting company, Robinson exhibitions, ran out of money and the show either failed or came close to failing while it was on tour—a tour in which the younger Winternitz was an active participant. In May, the company folded, with Sol’s father Samuel picking up the pieces.

This process was completed by that summer, at which point Samuel L. Winternitz definitely owned the Waterdrome assets, definitely created the Waterdrome Company to manage them, and almost certainly created the Skee-Ball Company of Illinois—an “almost certainty” I’m going to stop hedging here because I don’t think there’s any meaningful doubt. Both of these were operating in concert with Riverview Park.

But apparently there was trouble in paradise for Samuel Winternitz, because 1916 saw Waterdrome Company in serious trouble—owing thousands of dollars to Riverview, and (at least) hundreds of dollars to (at least) one other contractor. And then, in January, 1916, he happened upon—and began showing—a submarine. In July, he was trying to sell it. In September, he tried again:

This is the last contemporaneous mention of the Foolkiller. There are scattered mentions after that—one as late as 1918—but they’re clearly reprints of earlier pieces with the serial numbers filed off. I don’t know if anyone ever bought it or, if so, what they did with it. In subsequent years, actual submarine shows would appear at Riverview, and there’s no mention of the Foolkiller in their reviews.

Winternitz didn’t live to see it, either way. He died on February 23rd, 1917. Announcing his passing, the Chicago Tribune called the “King of the Auctioneers […] an intimate friend of nearly every judge in the federal courts of Chicago, and widely known throughout the United States.” Then-judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, three years before finding fame as the first commissioner of baseball, made a special trip to be at his friend’s side on his deathbed.

Samuel Winternitz was, by all accounts, a master salesman. Note how, between the July and September classified ads, the Foolkiller goes from attracting “an average of 1,000 PEOPLE A DAY” to attracting 3,000—a “wonderful money-maker” that is being sold very reasonably “on account of other business.” He knew how to sell everything from jewelry collections to machine parts.

He was, in short, the kind of person to have known how to spin a yarn about ancient submarines that would get people lining up to hand over their dimes. Frenchy Deneau was a bit of a fabulist, and definitely willing to tell tales, but his are always devoid of romance—pure, blustery self-promotion. He was the Hero of the Eastland. He had invented a revolutionary new life-jacket that he demonstrated by putting on and firing a shotgun (?). He had a plan to get rich off salvaging war wrecks.

He also had no money; in December, 1916 he had pawned his diving suit and was being sued for alimony. I’m not sure if it was the first time this happened, but it definitely wasn’t the last. His name is attached to the Foolkiller because he was the mouthpiece for it, but it began and ended its historical record on the property of Samuel L. Winternitz, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I see four possibilities. The first is that Deneau was involved in finding the sunken International Automatic Lifeboat, more or less on his own, and that Winternitz—recognizing an opportunity—bought it off him and hired Deneau to run the exhibition. It’s possible that Deneau was in hot water for some of the events of the Eastland trial and was persona non grata as a legitimate salvager for a while—in any case he doesn’t seem to have been involved with it after its initial showing, and maybe not even through all of that.

The second possibility is that Deneau may not have been directly involved in finding it, and that when Great Lakes Dredge and Dock found it in October, 1915 they recognized it might be valuable enough to recover and sell. That wasn’t, however, something they intended to do on their own, so they engaged the Samuel L. Winternitz Company. As he’d done with Waterdrome, Winternitz figured it would be a good entertainment investment; when he asked for a conspirator to lend things an air of verisimilitude Frenchy was the obvious candidate.

The third possibility is somewhere between the first two: Winternitz needed material to prop up his show and to bring in much-needed revenue to his troubled Riverview experiments. Casting around, one of his many well-placed friends mentioned: “hey, what about that piece of junk they found in the river the other day?” and Winternitz agreed to buy it and pay for its salvage.

In all of these, note that I believe Winternitz to be the primary storyteller. I think he’s responsible for the “submarine” aspect, and the timeline of its disappearance, and maybe the man and the dog. I think in his role as a showman well-acquainted with the spectacle industry, he would’ve been ideally positioned to have heard about a daredevil like Peter Nissen and thence the name “foolkiller.”

The existence of a coherent, consistent, completely fabricated narrative from day one to me implies that this narrative itself existed before the Foolkiller was “found” in November. This tracks with my belief that it couldn’t have escaped notice in the October dredging, which is when it was actually discovered. I am speculating, mind you, but I think Winternitz is a much more logical storyteller for this than Deneau.

Last week I mentioned a fourth, spicy possibility about how the Foolkiller wound up in the Chicago River to begin with, and to keep things simple I’ll make that the fourth possibility here, too. And that’s that Winternitz was always the owner of the Foolkiller, and the one who sunk it to begin with. His company disposed of countless bankruptcies, after all. What if he acquired the International Automatic Lifeboat at some point—either from Brown or from one of Brown’s creditors—gave up on selling it, and disposed of it as cheaply as he could?

Probably, in that case, he did not sink it with the intent of making it a carnival attraction. But I can easily see a conversation playing out that goes like:

“Hey, Sam. Remember you dumped a bunch of garbage off Wells Street? Anyway, pretty sure we found some of it. Some rube asked about the ‘sub’ and it rung a bell.”
“Oh. Yeah, that piece of junk. Whatever, I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“Yeah, I know. But F.E. Monville, federal inspector of rivers and harbors, is really gonna ride us if he finds out we left it there.”
(wheels starting to turn) “…A sub, you say?”

Here the story is, paradoxically, both clearest and most muddled. I don’t have evidence for Winternitz as the originator of the Foolkiller story, only my hope that you agree with me that a slick-talking auctioneer makes more sense than the salvage diver whose next big story would be trying to convince the Chicago Tribune he was too talented as “the human submersible” to be drafted as a mere doughboy.

But it is at its clearest, because Winternitz’s involvement puts the Foolkiller at an identifiable place. 208 South State Street was a property with 60 feet of frontage, at that point sandwiched between the Century Building and the Consumers Building. Both of those are still there—for now. They’ve been abandoned and decaying for years, since the government bought them to prevent someone (?) from blowing up the nearby courthouse (???).

Back then, though, they were new, exciting, and beautiful. There are a few photos from the 1910s—I’ll cover them later, probably, because that aspect is interesting in and of itself. One in particular stands out, though. In the October 20th, 1920 issue of The American Architect, the Century Building’s designers (Holabird and Roche) submitted a photograph of their building that also shows the rest of the block.

It’s undated, but we can guess that it’s from 1916 because 208 South State is shown, and it says “SKEE-BALL” right in block letters on the entrance. Below the sign that covers the rest of the building… the one that says, in big, familiar letters: “Fool Killer.”

Are you excited? Because I was floored when I found this—found that, through some strange serendipity, Holabird and Roche had photographed that block at the exact time signage for the exhibition was still up. This is, so far, the first and only photographic evidence we have of the Foolkiller, qua Foolkiller, existing in the real world. However, as you may have noticed, it’s a little difficult to make out. I mean, it probably says “SKEE BALL.” It’s hard to read anything else.

Anyway, so I tracked down a copy of the magazine.

Some things stand out to me. The first is that it’s using a similar—but not actually identical!—typeface to the ad that ran in the Chicago Tribune. The second is that it is explicitly described as “the first submarine ever built,” which is a tagline not from the full-page ad. The third is that I’m not sure what’s going on with the white square in the middle. I don’t think it’s a drawing of the submarine?

(The fourth is that we now know this was a skee-ball arcade, not just property that the Skee-Ball Company of Illinois happened to own. Also that their description of it was that it was the “20th Century Bowling Game.” Skee-Ball was truly the Dippin’ Dots of midway entertainment)

Given that there are not a thousand people lining up outside, I suspect this photo was taken after the Foolkiller had already moved—maybe the billboard was in the process of being removed or painted over? Unfortunately most of the text is not legible, and I believe it’s as clear as we’re going to get with a magazine scan. Holabird and Roche reprinted this photo in a book of theirs—I can’t tell if it’s higher-quality or not, but either way it gives me hope that the original might still be around.

This, alas, is as tangible as the Foolkiller currently becomes. To the extent that we can definitely say anything, we can say that it was definitely shown at 208 South State Street, in what was definitely a skee-ball arcade owned by famed auctioneer Samuel Winternitz. It probably went on tour with Parker’s Greatest Shows, but if so, it was for—at most—barely a month.

Or, maybe, it never left. Maybe Parker thought about buying it—enough to print up promotional material and talking points about the first submarine and its attendant skeletons—but got cold feet. I don’t think that’s true, because Parker invested so much time in seeding stories in the Leavenworth Post. I think it was in Kansas. Did it come back to Riverview? If so, why wasn’t it advertised after June 27th?

I’d love to answer at least one question like that for certain, after all this time. Here we run headlong into how scanty the evidence is. I’ve gone through a lot of old trade publications, and old books, and old newspapers. And the big problem is that everyone who might be expected to be an authority at this stage—Winternitz, Parker, and Deneau—are also demonstrable liars and inherently untrustworthy.

Deneau is untrustworthy because he was a trickster archetype given human form, constantly getting into trouble, constantly inventing reasons it wasn’t his fault, and constantly looking for the next thing to burnish his image. He’s worth a post of his own. He’ll get it.

Winternitz and C.W. Parker are untrustworthy because they were carnival barkers, selling the promise of an interesting story. They were magicians—as Michael Caine’s character puts it in The Prestige, taking the ordinary and making it do something extraordinary. They turned an abandoned lifeboat into the FIRST SUBMARINE EVER BUILT, and they turned some bones in a pile of mud into a poignant tableau of man and man’s best friend, undone before their time by circumstance.

In reexamining how much we can rely on them, I may have made the Foolkiller metaphorically disappear, but I am not a magician. I am an amateur historian, and while I’ve done a lot of speculating in this series (this week in particular) I’ve stuck to what evidence we have, even if it’s in the service of revealing just how little that is. So: frustrating or not, out of the half of 1916 when it might have been shown, the only place I can say for sure the Foolkiller was is 208 South State Street, in the care of Winternitz and Deneau.

…Is what I’d hate to have to tell y’all.

But the truth is that I’m certain the Foolkiller was never at Riverview, because I know why it was briefly advertised and then omitted, because—thanks to a early fall retrospective of the 1916 season from a park employee—I know exactly what happened. Which is that they did try to exhibit it (in the Waterdrome building, no less).

And then they dropped it through the goddamned floor:

But don’t worry! This show will go on, so stick around for the next Foolkiller Friday, where we’ll either talk about Frenchy’s shotgun show or about Postcard Mania, depending on how esoteric I’m feeling :P See ya then!