Showing posts with label Soldier Field. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soldier Field. Show all posts

Friday, August 28, 2020

August 28, 1929 -- Graf Zeppelin Gives Chicago a Show


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August 28, 1929 – Millions of Chicagoans take to the streets as the Graf Zeppelin cruises over the city “to the accompaniment of the most tremendous roar of welcome that ever went up to the skies from this mid-continent metropolis.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 30, 1929]. The great airship is first sighted in the Loop about 5:20 p.m., and it floats over the downtown area for about 18 minutes before it disappears “in the hazy eastern sky within three minutes after leaving the lake shore.”  All of the buildings in the Loop as well as the streets are jammed with spectators, some of whom come from towns and cities a hundred miles away.  Although rain threatens for much of the afternoon, the clouds part as the zeppelin appears, and “As the big ship soared majestically across the loop, circled Tribune Tower, swung south to Soldiers’ Field and then north again to Lincoln Park and away across the lake, the clouds opened and for a brief time the sky cleared.”  As the airship heads east over the lake, the clouds part and, for the first time that day, sunshine peeks through, casting a golden light on the zeppelin as though it “seemed to be disappearing in a halo.”  People begin gathering early in the morning, and they are not disappointed.  As the throng catches its first glimpse of the zeppelin, automobile horns begin to drown out the shouts of the onlookers as the locomotives of the railroads join in the roar with their steam whistles.  Tug boats and larger vessels on the lake and river also sound their horns.  The zeppelin makes a gigantic “figure-eight” over the city, swinging north and circling Tribune Tower before heading south for a pass over Soldier Field where thousands in the arena cheer.  Turning north again it heads over the Loop a second time before cruising along the lakefront to Lincoln Park where it speeds up and heads east over the lake.  During the fly-over drivers simply stop their cars wherever they are, climb on the running boards and hoods, straining for a view and shouting as policemen “threatened and … bullied, but no one paid them the slightest attention, and soon they threw up their hands, shrugged their shoulders and turned their own eyes skyward.”  The Chicago flyover comes toward the end of the Graf Zeppelin’s “round-the-world” flight in August of 1929.  Beginning in Lakehurst, New Jersey the flight was made in five stages:  from Lakehurst to Friedrichshafen between August 7 and August 10; from Friedrichshafen to Tokyo from August 15 to August 19; from Tokyo to Los Angeles between August 23 and August 26; from Los Angeles to Lakehurst from August 27 to August 29; and from Lakehurst back home to Friedrichshafen from September 1 to September 4. 




August 28, 1986 – The Chicago City Council approves a plan to build two 25-story office towers on top of Union Station at Adams and Canal Streets.  Alderman Gerald McLaughlin of the Forty-Fifth Ward, the chairman of the landmarks committee, says that the train station does not hold landmark status and that the developers of the property have promised to retain much of its historical design.  In an editorial, the Chicago Tribune says of the plan, “… we continue to believe that these plans will contribute importantly to the revitalization of the west Loop. New rail facilities, new and renovated shops, restaurants—retail space that the area needs so desperately—and office space will draw people to the building’s dramatic waiting room and create an exciting destination point without destroying either the station’s main waiting room or its walls.” [Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1986] All of the meetings, plans, and protests came to naught, however, and the plan died. About ten years ago the American Medical Association proposed the construction of an 18-story office building and hotel above the station, but that plan fell apart as well.  In the spring of 2017 Riverside Investment and Development was named to head up a three-phase $1 billion (or more) project that is expected to include up to two million square feet of office space, 780 apartments and 350 hotel rooms that will be constructed in three phases, starting sometime in 2018.  Riverside CEO John O’Donnell says of the project, “This is probably one of the best physical locations in the city.  It just needs to be dressed up, and I think it needs to have a number of amenities that don’t exist right now.  We can bring an abundance of those to this location.” [Chicago Tribune, May 25, 2017] The two photos above show the station as it was originally constructed and the Riverside Investment and Development rendering of what it may look like in the future.  


August 28, 2015 – As part of its “Madison and Wabash Bash,” the Rebuilding Exchange auctions pieces of the 119-year-old CTA station that formerly stood at the corner of Madison Street and Wabash Avenue.  The Rebuilding Exchange, a non-profit market for building materials from another era, joins the Illinois Railway Museum and Preservation Chicago to auction off the materials at 1740 West Webster Street.  The station at Madison and Wabash opened in 1896 and was one of the last original station houses in the Loop before it was closed on March 16, 2015 to create room for a new station at Washington and Wabash. The station houses themselves will be held for two years while Preservation Chicago seeks an institution or individual willing to take them in.  The station house as it looked while in operation is shown in the top photo. Below that are the sad remains at the Madison and Wabash Bash.

Chicago Tribune Photo
August 28, 1952 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the U. S. Air Force will press its case for the retention of O’Hare International Airport as a major military tactical and training base.  The military’s decision is based on a two-pronged argument.  First, that an emergency exists with no time for the development of another military air base in the area.  Secondly, that the Air Force has spent $43 million on O’Hare, twice as much as Chicago has. It was the military that first spent $36 million in 1943 to condemn the property and create four runways between 4,850 and 5,400 feet in length to accommodate C-54 transport planes that were being built at the adjacent Douglas Aircraft Company.  In 1947 the city acquired 1,080 acres of the 1,289-acre site from the government although the Air Force maintained “recapture rights.”  A year later the city began the acquisition of another 5,000 acres of land with a ten-year plan that would bring six runways of between 8,000 and 10,000 feet.  Although as of 1952 none of the runways have been started, the first part of the passenger terminal and much of the ramp and loading area are nearing completion.  If the Air Force insists on taking over the field, it will seek Congressional approval to repay the city.  Chicago Mayor Martin Kennelly has stated that the government’s take-over of the field will put the city seven years behind in its airport plans.  The above photo shows the field on September 18, 1949 when it was officially re-named O'Hare Field, a change from Orchard Field, the name by which it had previously been known.


August 28, 1900 – For five hours “in ranks twelve deep, the white-haired veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic passed in their last grand parade . . . Never again can they meet in such numbers.  They are growing gray haired and aged, and gradually death is mustering them out.  But yesterday they marched 23,000 strong through the down-town streets of Chicago . . .”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 29, 1900]  Beginning at 10:00 a.m. the veterans of the Union Army march down Michigan Avenue until 3:45 p.m.  Commanding General of the Army Nelson A. Miles, upon reviewing the ranks, says, “It was a parade which all Europe, with all its armies combined, could not duplicate.  It was a spectacle which perhaps no American shall witness again.”  Although the 23,000 attendees make up only a small portion of the 2,880,000 men who fought, the encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic taxes the city’s resources.  Trains bring 195,000 people to six different railroad stations.  Elevated and surface line trains handle 725,000 passengers on the night of August 28, and 140,000 people arrive in the city on the day before the parade, putting a huge strain on hotels.
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Friday, July 10, 2020

July 10, 1966 -- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Delivers Soldier Field Address

Chicago Tribune Photo
July 10, 1966 – The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. heads up a rally at Soldier Field, beginning a summer-long Chicago campaign against segregation in education, housing and employment.  It was a brutally hot day with the temperature standing at 98 degrees … the city’s beaches were crowded with over 100,000 people.  Before a crowd of 30,000 people, King declares, “This day we must declare our own Emancipation Proclamation.  This day we must commit ourselves to make any sacrifice necessary to change Chicago.  This day we must decide to fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary in order to end slums.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1966].  “We are here,” he continues, “because we’re tired of living in rat-infested slums.  We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for four rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for five rooms … We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.”  Following the Soldier Field rally, King leads a crowd of tens of thousands to the La Salle Street entrance of City Hall where he uses adhesive tape to affix a series of demands, calling for an end to police brutality and discriminatory real-estate practices, increased Black employment and a civilian review board for the police department.  The next day he presents the demands to Mayor Richard J. Daley in person.  As tactful as he has ever been in his political career, Daley observes, “Dr. King is very sincere in what he is trying to do.  Maybe, at times, he doesn’t have all the facts on the local situation.  After all, he is a resident of another city.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 10, 2016).  Operating from an apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in Lawndale, Dr. King directs a campaign that lasts throughout the summer, culminating in an open-housing agreement between Daley and him that was signed on August 28, an agreement that many consider a template for the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

chicagology.com
July 10, 1941 – Members of the German consulate in Chicago leave the city, one day ahead of the U. S. State Department’s deadline.  The chancellor of the consulate, Dr. Wilhelm Freidel, turns over the keys to the consulate offices to the manager of the 333 North Michigan Avenue building, the site of the German consulate for the previous decade.  Office furniture and equipment is placed in storage.  The diplomatic contingent will sail from New York on July 17, bound for Lisbon, Portugal on the S. S. George Washington. From there the individual members of the group will return to their homes in Germany.

July 10, 1929 –The Clark Street bridge is dedicated in a program arranged by the North Clark Street Committee of the North Central Association.  A parade starts on North Avenue and Clark Street with marchers and floats and several members of the Sac and Fox tribes in native dress, an acknowledgement that Clark Street began its life as a trail for Native Americans.  After the ribbon for the new bridge is cut, participating dignitaries adjourn to a luncheon at the Sherman Hotel.
J. Bartholomew Photo
July 10, 1925 – Building Commissioner Frank Doherty gives approval for the proposed 40-story Jewelers’ Building, today’s 35 East Wacker, recommending that Corporation Counsel F. X. Busch issue the necessary building permits as quickly as possible.  There is one major hang-up in getting the construction started – Fire Commissioner Joseph Connery wants a delay in construction until considerable modification is made in a scheme that would see 572 cars parking in the lower levels of the structure.  Connery believes that nothing will eliminate the hazards attendant to a huge parking garage in a skyscraper.  The Corporation Counsel seems ready to take the chance, saying, “Recent surveys indicate that an average of 3,000 automobiles are parked daily in loop streets.  Five or six other such buildings with equal facilities would nearly solve the parking problem and certainly relieve street congestion.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1925]  

July 10, 1893 -- Halfway through the greatest event in the city’s history, tragedy occurs on this day.  A day later the lead in the Chicago Daily Tribune captures the depth of the tragedy as the paper reports, “The World’s Fair received a baptism of fire and blood yesterday afternoon, the Cold-Storage Building proving a funeral pyre for twelve firemen, twenty-four persons receiving serious injuries.”  The cold storage building, the location of the tragedy, was erected by the directors of the Hercules Iron Works and sat on the east side of Stony Island Avenue just south of the Sixty-Fourth Street entrance to the fairgrounds.  The building, designed to resemble a Moorish palace, was five stories high and included a skating rink on the top floor.  There were four towers on each corner with a central tower, encasing the boiler flue, the central tower rising 191 feet above street level.  A promenade encircled the central tower about 70 feet below its inaccessible top.  The flue that ran up this central tower had been a subject of considerable debate since it veered so dangerously away from original specifications and had been subject to minor fires that had flared up in June, causing the cancellation of most of the insurance policies on the building.  At 1:30 p.m. an alarm went out when a small fire was spotted at the top of the flue stack in the tower’s crowning cupola, an area that was supposed to have been made of wrought iron instead of wood and lined with asbestos.  About a dozen firemen climbed to the gallery around the tower, nailing boards to the structure to get closer to the fire.  As they climbed, a puff of white smoke at the roof level of the warehouse preceded flames that cut off the escape of the fourteen firefighters trapped on the narrow ledge surrounding the tower.   As 50,000 fair-goers watched, the trapped men began to jump, one by one, leaping 60 feet onto the burning main roof.  The paper described the horrific scene, “Strong men turned their heads away and women fainted by the score.  The crowd was so dense that escape was impossible.  Down on his knees in the center of the plot surrounding the Pennsylvania railroad exhibit went a well-dressed man, and with hands uplifted he prayed to the Almighty to avert the awful calamity that seemed imminent.  As he prayed tears streamed from his eyes and his words were lost in the sobs and groans of those around him.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1893]  Twelve brave firefighters lost their lives on that July day, along with three civilians.   
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Sunday, December 15, 2019

December 15,1940 -- Chicago Airport Plans Proposed South of Soldier Field


December 15, 1940 – Newly elected Congressman Charles S. Dewey calls upon all Chicagoans to begin backing a plan to place an airport in the heart of the city, a project that would extend from the lake a mile west to the New York Central Railroad tracks and from Sixteenth Street north to the south end of Soldier Field.  Dewey’s plan would raise the airport above the Outer Drive and the Illinois Central tracks just to the west of that roadway.  The congressman lists four distinct advantages of his plan:  (1) the city could recoup the cost of construction through fees charged to the airlines; (2) the project would provide a huge market for unskilled labor; (3) the location of the new airport would be a huge improvement in air service to the city and a boon for all city businesses; and (4) at least a square mile of “blighted area” would be removed from the near south side.  Dewey says, “It is fantastic to put the main airport out at the edge of the city.  The cheapest land, actually, is that in the blighted areas near the center of Chicago.”  Meeting objections that an already noisy city will become even noisier with an airport in its center, Dewey says, “A city is practically built upon noise.  Listen to that street traffic noise 20 floors below my office.  Noise means activity.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 16, 1940]   Dewey served one term as a representative from the Ninth Congressional District of Illinois, was defeated in his bid for re-election in 1945 and went back to the banking business as a vice-president of Chase National Bank. 
theoldmotor.com
December 15, 1936 – The Illinois Commerce Commission orders the Chicago Surface Lines to tear up tracks that cross Lake Shore Drive at Chicago Avenue and which run parallel to the drive between Chicago and Grand Avenues.  The commission gives the transit agency 60 days to implement the order.  This ends a fight that has gone on for a dozen years, ever since the tracks were first laid on park district property in 1921 under a temporary order.  The removal of the tracks will facilitate the movement of traffic along the drive once the bridge across the river is completed sometime during the following year. Otherwise, the tracks would virtually nullify the gains brought on by the bridge that connects the north and south sides of the city. The commission’s decision runs to 23 pages and concludes, “that the Chicago avenue tracks east of Lake Shore drive are unnecessary and that these tracks do not now serve any public convenience or necessity and should be removed.”  The tracks were laid down in May of 1921 to serve a temporary event at Navy Pier, the Pageant of Progress.  Three years later the Lincoln Park Board filed a petition to have the extension removed.  Thus, began a decade-long fight which culminated in October of 1936 after five months of testimony that led to a transcript of 6,000 pages that included 176 technical exhibits.  The above photo looks south on Lake Shore Drive toward Chicago Avenue from Oak Street in the mid-1930's. 


December 15, 1895 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on the progress being made in “transforming the present unsightly vacant space on the Lake-Front into a handsome park.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 14, 1895] At both ends of the proposed new park – at Randolph Street and at Park Row, about where today’s Roosevelt Road runs south of the park – the greatest work has been done.  About 700 feet of a new sea wall that will help to create a new harbor has been run south of Randolph Street.  The Illinois Central Railroad is creating the south end of the sea wall, using two pile-drivers.  On the west side of the tracks, 500 feet of foundation have been laid for a retaining wall with work halted during the winter season.  Railroad spurs have been laid at the south end of the park on which hundreds of loads of dirt have been dumped into the lake to create new land although this section of the new park “presents the appearance of the outskirts of a brick-yard.”  The top photo shows the lake park, today's Grant Park, in 1893 before work started on its improvement.  The 1907 photo below that shows all of the land that has been added to the east of the Illinois Central tracks as the development of the new park continues.
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Wednesday, July 3, 2019

July 3, 1933 -- Jewish Pageant "The Romance of a People" Packs Soldier Field

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July 3, 1933 – All available police reserves are called out as 125,000 members of the city’s Jewish population attend “The Romance of a People,” sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a pageant portraying the history of the Jewish race at Soldier Field.  Five years had been spent in the planning of the spectacle.  Writing for the Chicago Daily Tribune, James O’Donnell Bennett observes, “As I followed bright threads of fortitude, of tenacity, of abiding faith, and of stalwart racial consciousness and racial fidelity from which this fabric of drama was woven, I marveled that any Jew should ever be other than inordinately proud of his ethical and cultural inheritance, so rich and so ancient.  ‘Tis the rest of us who are parvenus by compare.”  At 9:00 p.m. twelve rabbis bear a gigantic scroll that is over twelve feet high to an altar in the center of the floor of the immense stadium. For two hours amplified voices read the story carried in the Torah as the drama unfolds.  At various times there are 750 dancing girls spreading flowers around the altar of the Pentateuch, Roman legionaries and chariots, and 3,500 actors acting out parts of the drama as 2,500 choir members sing, “their voices being led out to the audience by the most nearly perfect system of amplification that has ever been set up on this continent.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 4, 1933].  Most of those attending the pageant had spent the Jewish Day at the grounds of the Century of Progress World’s Fair, and their movement from the grounds to Soldier Field, starting around 7:30 p.m., overwhelmed the 400 policemen originally posted to maintain an orderly flow into the pageant.  Another 400 officers are called in, and 46 ticket windows, each with two cashiers are opened up.  Michigan Avenue is closed between Monroe Street and Twenty-Third Street in order for the crowd to reach elevated and bus lines when the show ends with the prophecies of Isaiah, “’Neither shall they learn war any more’ … as a single voice, high and clear, wafts into the starry sky, ‘How beautiful are thy tabernacles, O Lord!’”  The pageant is repeated on the next evening after the Tribune offers to sponsor the reprise performance so that “rich and poor of all creeds might witness the gigantic spectacle.”


July 3, 1946 –The International Harvester Company opens an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, providing “a complete Midwestern agricultural exhibit with mooing cows, cawing crows, and the latest in farm equipment.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2, 1946] The exhibit includes a modern farm home, “lifelike” barnyard animals and natural sound effects.  Part of the exhibit is a historical timeline of the development of farm machinery since the invention of the reaper by Cyrus McCormick in 1831.  Mr. John L. McCaffrey, the International Harvester president, speaks at the dedication, saying that the model farm will illustrate “the close mechanical tie between urban and rural life.”  Dr. George D. Sotddard, the new president of the University of Illinois, also speaks.  The photo above shows workers readying the exhibit for the public in 1946.


July 3, 1912 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that a new record for inheritance taxes in Illinois has been set with a tax of $329,131 assessed on the estimated $17,000,000 estate of the late R. T. Crane.  Payment of the tax by July 8, 1912 will save the heirs of the estate more than $16,000 because of a five per cent allowance for prompt payment.  The estate of Marshall Field had set the previous record, with a tax on his estate of $125,000.  The Field estate, however, sheltered nearly a half-million dollars in tax liability by insuring that property in the estate did not pass on to heirs at the time of Field’s death.  Richard T. Crane had the singular fortune of being born the nephew of Chicago lumber baron Martin Ryerson.  At the age of 23, the young man moved to Chicago and began a partnership with his brother.  Crane’s timing could not have been better.  He had established himself as an astute businessman in the city for a years before the 1871 fire.  After the fire his mill met the appetite of the city, supplying it with pipe, steam engines and even elevators as architecture moved from four- or five-story buildings to soaring towers.  The company’s manufacture of enameled cast iron bathroom fixtures also synced up nicely with the demand for luxurious indoor sanitary facilities.  In 1910 the Crane company factories in Chicago employed over 5,000 men.  For more information on the Crane company and the son of its founder you can turn to this section of Connecting the Windy City.


July 3, 1976 – The Chicago Tribune reports that artist Marc Chagall has donated a set of windows, entitled “The American Windows,” to the Art Institute of Chicago as a Bicentennial gift.  The windows will measure eight by thirty feet and will be installed in an area overlooking McKinlock Court, a space illuminated by natural light.  Chagall holds the city in warm regard as a result of the experiences he had in 1973 and 1974 in the creation and dedication of his mosaic The Four Seasons, installed on the east side of the plaza of the First National Bank of Chicago, now Exelon Plaza.
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Saturday, November 5, 2016

November 5, 1998 -- State of the Lakefront, 1998



November 5, 1998 – The architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, prints the sixth of a series of articles on plans for Chicago’s lakefront, in which he takes Mayor Richard M. Daley to task for “shying away from the bold moves necessary to get the job done” when it comes to shaping the downtown lakefront.  In the article Kamin looks at three lakefront attractions and assesses the potential and the plans for each of them.  “Navy Pier,” Kamin writes “enables us to sample the carnival midway pleasures of urban life, yet it causes suburban-style pain, particularly through the traffic jams that result from funneling thousands of cars through already-busy Lake Shore Drive and narrow feeder streets.”  Turning south to Soldier Field, Kamin says, “Wouldn’t it be wiser to look at what Soldier Field and its environs could do for the lakefront 365 days a year, not just during the 10 regular season and exhibition games that the Bears play . . . whether the Bears leave or stay, Soldier Field can be transformed from a stadium in a parking lot to a stadium in a park.”  Then, moving to the east, Kamin takes up the issues surrounding Meigs Field.  “Meigs must go,” Kamin writes.  “To stand on this peninsula – to be removed from the clamor of the city and glimpse the stunning views it affords of the skyline and the south shoreline – is to realize that Meigs is an anachronism.”  What Kamin urges is something he calls “a new architecture of both landscape and public policy.”  He recommends appointing a “powerful lakefront commission that would coordinate the efforts of the dizzying array of agencies that control the lakefront, seeing to it that the more than $500 million in projects planned for the next 12 years – roads, buildings, and revetments – turn into an ensemble that is more than the sum of its parts.”
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Tuesday, May 10, 2016

May 10, 1928 -- The Bremen Airmen Land in Chicago


May 10, 1928 – After a delay caused by rain, combined with landing at the wrong airfield, the “Bremen airmen” touch down at Chicago Airport (today’s Midway) and are greeted by 5,000 Chicagoans who have waited for three hours in intermittent drizzle to greet them. Nearly a month earlier the three airmen had taken off in a Junkers W 33 airplane from Baldonnel Aerodrome in Ireland, arriving on Greenly Island, Canada on April 13, thereby becoming the first fliers to make a successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from east to west. The crew is made up of pilot Captain Hermann Köhl, a navigator, Major James Fitzmaurice, an Irishman, and the owner of the aircraft, Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünsfield. They leave for Chicago earlier in the day and stop in Cleveland in the early afternoon. Taking off from there at 1:52 p.m. they fight fog and rain and a 35-mile-per-hour headwind all the way to Chicago. They mistake a Maywood air strip for their destination because the map they are using indicates that it is the only air field in Chicago. Landing there causes further delay. But once they arrive at the Chicago Airport, they receive an exuberant reception, so exuberant, in fact, that the crowd has to be restrained. A procession of 40 cars decorated with flags of the United States, the Irish Free State and the German republic, carry the heroes along Sixty-Third Street to Kedzie with the roads lined with cheering crowds. The celebration moves up Kedzie to Garfield Boulevard and east to Michigan Avenue where the three men are delivered to the Stevens Hotel. “After an hour’s rest,” reports the Chicago Daily Tribune, “the trio emerged to be photographed and interviewed. The booming of flashlights was delayed for a moment while Maj. Fitamaurice, something of a dandy, smoothed back his pompadour with a comb borrowed from one of the camera men.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 11, 1928] The celebration continues into the next day when a two-hour reception is held at Soldier Field (pictured above) and Mayor William Hale Thompson holds a luncheon at South Shore Country Club to honor the city’s guests of honor.

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Tuesday, April 19, 2016

April 19, 1925 -- Paavo Nurmi Wins 3,000 Meter Run


April 19, 1925 --The Flying Finn, Paavo Nurmi, wins the 3,000 meter run at the first annual Loyola Relays at Grant Park stadium, today's Soldier Field. Rain in the morning left the track in poor condition, and the weather was cold and blustery. Still, 5,000 spectators watched as Nurmi covered the distance in 8:49.25, considerably off his world record of 8:32. The sensation from Finland was content to let fellow countryman Willie Ritola lead the pack through the stiff northerly winds until two laps remained. On the last curve he passed Ritola and went on to win by 20 yards. Refusing to pose for pictures, he gathered up his gear and headed into the locker room as the crowd cheered. In difficult conditions he and Ritola were the only two runners to finish the race. The statue of Nurvi, pictured below, stands outside the Helsinki Olympic stadium.
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