and tried to hurl herself down the elevator shaft.
By that time Tim had been summoned to the county morgue, where Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, the Cook County coroner, was convening an inquest to determine how the fire had started and how the eleven men had died. Bundesen had a long history with Ed Kelly, having worked for the sanitary district during the Whoopee Era; according to journalist Elmer Lynn Williams, he had proved himself “one of the pliable tools of the machine.”26 Kelly, still holding firm in his capacity as chief sanitary engineer, served as technical advisor to the inquest.
Called to testify, Tim Ryan wept as he recalled the first crews of firefighters going after his trapped workmen: “I saw men going down into that reeking tunnel without gas masks — without masks. I never saw such courage displayed in my life.”27 Neither he nor his construction superintendent could state with certainty what caused the fire, and the news accounts of a workman igniting a pile of sawdust never were introduced.
When the inquest reconvened a week later in a courtroom at City Hall, the panel ruled that all eleven men had died of smoke inhalation but declared the cause of the fire unknown. “Unofficially,” reported the Chicago American, “the jury members expressed the view that no human agency was at fault in the fire and tragedy that followed; that all precautionary measures were maintained by the contractors to safeguard life.”28 The city was indemnified against liability for the workmen’s deaths; the Ryan Company would pay any settlements to the families through its compensation insurance. A pall hung over the firm, exacerbated by the Kelly corruption charges still crawling through the court system.
IN THE QUIET SECLUSION OF HANOVER, Bob must have been even more determined not to join the Ryan Company. His grades had improved substantially; he was earning mostly B’s now and the occasional A in English or comparative literature. He had reclaimed his record as an intercollegiate boxing champion and — encouraged by his coach, Eddie Shevlin — even entertained thoughts of becoming a professional fighter. But his father talked him out of it: most boxers, he pointed out to Bob, were washed up at thirty. Bob was tired of athletics anyway. Having defended the heavyweight title in his sophomore and junior years, he retired from the ring to devote himself to his degree in dramatic literature.*
His best friends were still his books. The 1920s had brought a great revival of interest in Herman Melville, and Bob was floored by Moby-Dick. Something in Ahab’s lonely obsession spoke to him; his daughter, Lisa, would remember him ritually reading the book every year.29 He adored Joyce, especially Ulysses, but his tastes also ran to more popular fare; at Dartmouth he sold a professor and several of his classmates on Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 narrative poem The Set-Up, about a black boxer who runs afoul of gangsters.30
As an admired upperclassman, Bob drove around campus in a Buick roadster, took up smoking a pipe, and made bathtub gin. Prohibition had been in effect since 1919, and overturning it had become a touchstone for Democrats. In a nod to his father’s electoral ambitions, he ran for class marshal on the slogan “Rum, Rebellion, and Ryan.” His flyers declared him in favor of “free beer, free love, and free wheeling.” But that summer would bring him closer to genuine lawlessness than he could stomach. “I answered an ad,” he later recalled. “An oil man wanted a chauffeur. He took one look at me and said I was it. I ferried him around for two weeks before I discovered he was a bootlegger and that he was taking me along as a bodyguard.”31 Bob soon quit the job.
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, Ryan became an intercollegiate boxing champ and ran for class marshal on the slogan “Rum, Rebellion, and Ryan.” Robert Ryan Family
Without the athletics, his academic performance improved; he made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior and senior years, wrote an essay on Shakespeare that was anthologized in a collection of undergraduate writing, and won a hundred-dollar prize for his experimental one-act play The Visitor, whose title character was the grim reaper and whose one and only performance took place in the college’s Robinson Hall. Now twenty-two, Bob had hung onto his blissful ignorance for as long as possible, but he began to understand that he would be graduating into harder times than any he had ever known. The Ryans’ life of luxury had evaporated as the country spiraled into depression. Tim wanted Bob to come home and help with the business, but Bob resisted. He would do anything but seal himself up inside an office.
After graduating in June 1932, Bob took what little money he had and moved to Greenwich Village with two fraternity brothers, intending to find a job as a newspaper reporter and work on his playwriting. A third of the country was out of work, and along the streets of New York people queued at breadlines and soup kitchens. Bob couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do with his life; he only knew he couldn’t go into business. He fought a professional bout under an assumed name to raise some cash, but otherwise the boxing went nowhere. A girlfriend got him gigs modeling for true-confession magazines and department store ads — he later claimed to be the first man in America to model French jockey shorts — but his pals gave him so much grief over this that he quit. For a while he worked as a sandhog, pushing rock barges through tunnels under the Hudson River.
In this economic climate the pampered young man oscillated between realism and sheer fantasy. Some pals from Psi Upsilon persuaded him to come in with them on a gold mine in Libby, Montana, and Bob moved out West to prospect with a friend. The living was rough; they had to break ice on a stream for bathing water. After four months they had managed to extract about eight dollars’ worth of gold. When Bob heard about a cowpuncher job in Missoula paying that much every week, he gave up on the mine, and eventually he returned to New York City, wearing a long beard and hitting up his classmates for money to get back on his feet.
Magazine profiles would offer differing accounts of how Bob managed to wind up a sailor aboard The City of New York, a diesel freighter making runs to South Africa, in 1933. According to one, he was strolling along the Brooklyn waterfront one day, visiting a friend, and when he saw the ship loading on the wharf, he impulsively asked for a job.32 According to another, he “accepted drinks one night from a jovial tramp steamer captain” and “woke next morning bound for Lourenzo Marques, Portuguese East Africa.”33 In any event, Bob shipped out as an engine room wiper, cleaning up oil that leaked from the cylinders and various pumps, oiling the pumps, and fetching coffee. Owned by the private Farrell Lines, The City of New York headed down the East Coast to New Orleans and then across the Atlantic, carrying manufactured goods. It probably docked in Cape Town, East London, and Durban, and it returned to New York two or three months later with shipments of raw asbestos or chrome.34
Bob might have been surrendering to his love of Melville and Eugene O’Neill, who had written of the seafaring life in Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape. He spent more than two years at sea, collecting stories of hardship and adventure. The equatorial heat was unbearable; once he had to intervene when a delirious female passenger tried to push her baby through a porthole. Another time, after the ship’s store of food spoiled, he subsisted for days on lime juice.
Whenever Bob heard from his parents, the news was grim. In December 1934 his Uncle Tom died, leaving the presidency of the Ryan Company to Tim. Soon after that both Joe Ryan and John Ryan died. The pressure of the construction industry was crushing them out like the cigarettes Bob now smoked daily. In January 1936, not long after returning home from a run, he received a phone call from his mother: his father had been hit by a car, and Bob was to return to Chicago at once to look after him and help out with a subway tunnel project. Bob made an inglorious return to Chicago as a common sandhog, pushing rock barges beneath the streets of the city by day and struggling to understand the business by night.
Tim’s accident had exacerbated a heart condition, and on April 27, 1936, he died of a coronary occlusion at Passavant
