her to restaurants and theaters, springing for hansom cabs. He wanted her badly, but she took a dim view of his boozing, not to mention his political ambitions. Tim agreed to swear off liquor and politics, and in 1908 they were married, in a ceremony conducted by both a priest and a protestant minister. They moved into the apartment on Kenmore, and Robert Bushnell Ryan arrived late the next year — November 11, 1909.
Robert Bushnell Ryan (circa 1912). “I was a completely nonaggressive youngster,” he later recalled. Robert Ryan Family
Two years later Mabel gave birth to a second child, John Bushnell, and the two boys slept in the same bed. “Very early in my life I remember the lamplighter,” Bob wrote, “a solitary youth who went around lighting the street lamps.”6 He and Jack enjoyed an idyllic life in Uptown, frolicking every summer on Foster Avenue Beach and running up and down the alley behind their house, an avenue for commercial activity. “Almost all heavy hauling was done by horse and wagon,” Bob remembered, and the alley “was full of various dobbins hauling ice, garbage, groceries, etc. In the hot summers the horses wore straw hats. The horses got to know the various stops and often would break in a new driver by showing him where to go.”7
The brothers’ friendship ended in June 1917 when Jack — “a rather solemn, gentle little fellow,” Bob wrote — died of lobar pneumonia, probably brought on by flu. He was not quite six years old. “I remember the terrible day that he died,”* Bob would write, “and the feeling of my mother and father that he might have been saved.”8 Devastated by the boy’s death, Tim and Mabel vacated their little apartment at 4822 Kenmore, blocks from Lake Michigan, and moved slightly northwest to a one-bedroom on Winona Street. “The neighborhood was somewhat less desirable,” Bob wrote. “But nothing mattered. We had to move and we did.”9 His parents, craving a portrait of little Jack, took a photograph they had of their sons on a dock and had Bob airbrushed away.
Now Bob slept alone, in a Murphy bed that folded out from the wall, like the one Charlie Chaplin had wrestled with in his two-reeler One a.m. He went to school alone, having transferred from Goudy Public School, which he remembered as mostly Jewish, to Swift Public School nearer his home. His parents were Victorian people, reserved even with their own child; and as the years passed, Bob learned to keep his own company, reading endlessly and roaming around the new neighborhood.
One unique attraction was the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company on Argyle, founded a decade earlier and now the city’s premiere movie studio. Chaplin had made films for Essanay in 1915, and Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery had gotten their start there; Bob would remember seeing them all on the streets of Uptown. He and his school friends even spent their Saturday afternoons appearing as extras in the two-reel comedies of child star Mary McAllister, each earning the princely sum of $2.50 a day.
He was naturally quiet, even withdrawn, and his parents worried over his introverted nature. Mabel gave him a violin that once had belonged to her brother and every Friday marched Bob to the elevated train and downtown to Kimball Hall for a lesson. His teacher, a Scandinavian player for the Chicago Symphony, couldn’t do anything with him. Tim, knowing full well that a boy carrying a violin down the streets of Chicago would be a magnet for bullies, signed Bob up for boxing lessons at the Illinois Athletic Club, where a coach by the name of Johnny Behr taught him how to fight. Bob loved boxing: he was smart and quick in the ring, and he realized that if you didn’t worry about the punch it didn’t hurt as much. “Athletic prowess did a lot for my ego and my acceptance in school,” he later told an interviewer. “The ability to defend yourself lessens the chance you’ll ever have to use it.”10
Chicago could be an ugly place. Eight months after the Armistice was signed, Bob saw the city erupt again, this time in violence. Temperatures in the nineties had irritated tensions on the Near South Side between blacks confined to the Twenty-Fifth Street Beach and their white neighbors on the Twenty-Ninth Street Beach. On July 27, 1919, a black boy rafting near the shore at Twenty-Ninth Street was killed by a white man hurling rocks, and the incident touched off five days of murderous rioting. “As rumors of atrocities circulated throughout the city, members of both races craved vengeance,” wrote historian William M. Tuttle Jr. “White gunmen in automobiles sped through the black belt shooting indiscriminately as they passed, and black snipers fired back. Roaming mobs shot, beat, and stabbed to death their victims.”11
Thirty-eight people died, and more than five hundred were injured. An official report would blame much of the initial violence on Irish athletic clubs such as Ragen’s Colts and the Hamburg Club, but the rage had spread like an infection, creeping into the West and North Sides. (Just south of Uptown lay one of the North Side’s isolated pockets of blacks.) For a boy not yet ten, the riot must have been a frightening experience. Not only could war go on forever, it could happen right in your own backyard.
THE RYAN FAMILY’S FORTUNES began to turn in 1920 when Tim’s friend Ed Kelly was appointed chief engineer of the Chicago Sanitary District. Son of a policeman, Kelly had started out with the district at age eighteen, and though he had studied engineering at night school, he displayed more talent as a South Side politician, having founded and been elected president of the two-hundred-member Brighton Park Athletic Club. The Irish athletic clubs were mainly social, organizing team sports, but they were also politically oriented, and Kelly soon made a name for himself in the Cook County Democratic Party. By the time he became chief engineer, he had put in more than thirty years with the district. His spotty formal training was much noted in the press (one muckraking journalist accused him of farming out his technical work to consultants). Yet Kelly understood and had mastered the operating principle of Chicago politics: take care of your friends and they’ll take care of you.
Under Kelly, the Ryan Company won lucrative city jobs paving streets and building sewer tunnels. Tim, who supervised sewer construction, worked from 5:30 AM until 8 or 9 PM at night; he and his son barely saw each other except for weekends. With his winning manner and many connections, Tim was critical to the operation, though according to Bob, the man who really ran the company was his Uncle Tom, “a rather cold and shrewd businessman.”12 Flush with the company’s profits, Tim and Mabel decided to move again, this time to a bigger apartment, in the northerly Edgewater neighborhood, that was only a block from the lake. They bought their own automobile and furnished their new home well. During the summers Bob went to Camp Kentuck in Wisconsin, while his parents enjoyed golfing weekends in Crystal Lake, northwest of the city. Mabel might have succeeded in keeping Tim away from drink, but politics was another matter, and Kelly could always rely on T. A. Ryan as a Democratic Party committeeman for the Twenty-Fifth Ward.
Haunted by the memory of little Jack, Tim and Mabel would never have another child, choosing instead to spoil and smother Bob. “You cannot know the difficulties that attend an only child,” he would write years later, in a letter to his own children. “Two big grown-ups are beaming in on him all the time — even when he isn’t there. It is a feeling of being watched that lingers throughout life.”13 He hid in the darkness of the movies, spending countless afternoons at the Riveria Theater on Broadway or the smaller Bryn Mawr near the “L” stop. The charm and dash of Douglas Fairbanks were his greatest tonic, and he never missed a picture: The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood. Bob had seen how motion pictures were made and was fascinated by the results. Yet he could barely conceive of the movies as an occupation; his father and uncles considered the Ryan Company a legacy for their children.
After Bob graduated from Swift in 1923, his father pulled some strings to get him a summer job as a fireman on a freight locomotive, which satisfied the thirteen-year-old boy’s appetite for freedom and Tim’s desire that he learn the value of a dollar. Rumors of petting parties at the local public high school had persuaded Mabel that Bob needed a private education, and that fall his parents enrolled him at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit college prep school for young men that was located near the Loyola University campus to their north. The experience would shape him not only as a person but also as an artist.
Loyola was heavily Irish Catholic,