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Historical Heritage

The siren of an ambulance wails as it transports an accident victim to Loyola University Medical Center from a crash on the nearby Eisenhower Expressway. Overhead, the Loyola Lifestar approaches its helipad, bringing another critical patient to the coronary care unit.

These life-or-death races have become common since Foster G. McGaw Hospital opened its doors in 1969 and since Lifestar's first day of service in 1988.

Few of those who have passed through the portals of the Medical Center, however, know that the two methods of transport,motor vehicle and aircraft, are uniquely tied to the land on which the Medical Center now stands.

The new sport of auto racing first came to Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, 1895, on a makeshift racecourse within the city. Ten cars competed, and the winner's speed averaged less than 10 miles per hour.

Such death-defying speed fueled Chicagoans' desire for a permanent racing facility. By 1914, the Speedway Park Association had been formed for the purpose of creating an automobile speedway and encouraging growth in the automotive industry. Construction began a year later on vacant land in Maywood, Ill., between Roosevelt Road, Cermak Avenue, First Avenue, and Ninth Avenue. Included in this plot was the present site of the Medical Center.

On June 26, 1915, 150,000 people (by some accounts) converged on Speedway Park for the first automobile race at the new facility. It boasted a four-story grandstand and a two-mile oval track made of heavy planks, making it possible for cars to travel nearly 15 miles per hour faster than they could at the brick-paved Indianapolis Speedway.

Chicago's mayor, "Big Bill" Thompson, officially opened the track by riding around it in a touring car and waving to the crowd. Then 21 cars began the inaugural 500-mile race. After five hours, seven minutes, and 26 seconds, a French Peugeot driven by Dorio Resta crossed the finish line to set a new world's record, having averaged nearly 98 miles per hour.

Among the competing drivers during Speedway's three-year existence were two men whose names remain familiar today on roads and expressways across the nation: Oldsmobile's Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet. Neither became a first-place winner at Speedway, but both had a lasting impact on the automobile industry.

Failure of the raceway may have been due, at least in part, to World War I. Rubber for tires and gas for civilian use were in short supply, making it difficult for city-dwelling spectators to travel to far-away Maywood. The nation also had more serious matters than auto racing to deal with, such as the return and care of wounded soldiers from Europe.

A committee from the U.S. Army surgeon general's office was sent to Chicago to find a possible site for hospitalization of returning veterans. The group recommended two: the Field Museum area and Speedway Park.

The final decision was made in favor of the Speedway location, and construction began in 1918. The main infirmary building was 2,040 feet long, 50 feet wide, and four stories high. Half of it was used as an 864-bed hospital, and the other half as quarters for hospital personnel.

The first patients were admitted to the hospital on Aug. 8, 1921 - the same day that Congress created the Veterans Bureau to take charge of all such hospitals. On Oct. 21, a presidential order changed the name of the hospital from the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital Number 76 to the Edward Hines Jr. Memorial Hospital, in honor of Evanston millionaire Edward Hines Sr.'s son, a U.S. Army first lieutenant who died in 1918. The Hines family generously had donated a substantial sum to the construction of the facility.

Years later, 61.7 acres of the original Hines Hospital property was transferred to Loyola ownership for the construction of a Medical Center. The Stritch School of Medicine opened in Maywood on New Year's Day, 1968. Foster G. McGaw Hospital opened in May 1969, and by fall the School of Dentistry was ready to receive its students at the new location.

The portion of land on which Loyola built its Medical Center also has ties to a man best known for the aviation history he made, and who contributed to medical history as well.

In 1919, a company called Society Brand Clothes bought land on the east side of First Avenue in what now is Miller Meadow. A metal hanger was constructed, and two planes were purchased to deliver the company's clothes to towns outside the Chicago area. Each plane, painted with a checkerboard design, carried large signs advertising Society Brand Clothes. Since these were the only planes using the field, it was called Checkerboard Flying Field.

Also in 1919, the U.S. Post Office Department extended its air mail service from Cleveland to Chicago. In the beginning, the mail planes used a portion of Grant Park as a landing field. However, winds from Lake Michigan made landing precarious, so a new location had to be found. Maywood's Checkerboard Field was chosen.

In 1923, a new field was built on the west side of First Avenue, south of Roosevelt Road. The new Checkerboard Air Mail Field received Chicago's air mail from Cleveland and Omaha, and Maywood was the main repair and overhaul center for the entire air mail service, which continued to expand to other cities.

Over 65 years ago, at 5:50 a.m. on April 15, a young man nicknamed "Slim," the chief pilot for Robertson Aircraft Corp.'s Chicago-to-St. Louis airmail route took off from Maywood on the service's inaugural flight to St. Louis. As Charles A. "Slim" Lindbergh later wrote in Apples of Knowledge, "It took me two and three quarters hours to reach St. Louis, including stops at Peoria and Springfield, Ill. Hurtling through the air at 90 miles an hour behind my mail sacks, I thought of the two-mile-an-hour oxcart travel of my father's boyhood."

Lindbergh's Chicago-to-St. Louis trips sometimes were plagued by bad weather or aircraft failure. Already a two-time member of the "Caterpillar Club," a group of pilots who had the distinct honor of owing their lives to parachutes, he insisted that each pilot on his air mail route be equipped with a parachute in case of emergency. Five months after his inaugural flight, Lindbergh became a three-time member of the Caterpillars.

He described his September 1926 flight from St. Louis that didn't quite make it to Maywood in his book, "We": "The fog extended from the ground up to about 600 feet...at no time, however, was I able to locate the exact position of the field, although I understand that the searchlights were directed upward and two barrels of gasoline burned in an endeavor to attract my attention."

When his fuel ran out, about 30 miles from Checkerboard Field, Lindbergh was forced to parachute from his plane. However, he had neglected to cut the switches to the plane's engine. With less weight, the small amount of fuel left in the line drained to the carburetor, and the plane continued to fly.

"The plane was making a left spiral of about a mile diameter, and passed approximately 300 yards away from my 'chute, leaving me on the outside of the circle. I was undecided as to whether the plane or I was descending the more rapidly and glided my 'chute away from the spiral path of the ship as rapidly as I could. The ship passed completely out of sight, but reappeared in a few seconds, its rate of descent being about the same as that of the parachute. I counted the five spirals, each one a little further away than the last, before reaching the top of the fog bank."

After a fourth parachute jump over rural Illinois in November, Lindbergh wrote, "It was just about at this time, or shortly after, that I began to think about a New York-Paris flight."

On May 20, 1927, 13 months after his first air mail flight to St. Louis, Lindbergh in his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, took off from a New York airfield on the flight to Paris that would make "The Lone Eagle" part of aviation and world history.

In The Spirit of St. Louis, his book about his lonely 3,622-mile journey and the events that led up to it, Lindbergh frequently mentioned his air mail experiences between St. Louis and Chicago. He also described the thoughts he had on that historic journey, a number of them connected to Maywood and his air mail flights.

The runway that Lindbergh used on his first flight from Maywood to St. Louis ended near the present location of the Loyola Lifestar helipad and the new emergency medical building. But more than air-related locations link the famous aviator to the work being done today at Loyola.

In 1930, Lindbergh's sister-in-law developed a heart condition that eventually would lead to her death, and he was determined to learn why no one could repair hearts with surgery. On finding that there was no way to keep organs alive outside the body in order to do this, he worked with Nobel Laureate and surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel on a solution to that problem, Lindbergh invented a glass perfusion pump that would make future operations possible. He also found a method for washing blood corpuscles and invented a way to rapidly separate plasma from whole blood by using a centrifuge.

Science carried the first news of Lindbergh's perfusion pump in June 1935. In September, the Journal of Experimental Science carried his highly technical description of the pump. Lindbergh's results were validated as a major breakthrough. In 1938, he and Carrel collaborated on The Culture of Organs, a book summarizing their work on perfusion of organs outside the body. Lindbergh then became involved with the challenge of trying to develop a type of mechanical kidney to remove toxic wastes from organs sustained in his perfusion pump.

Nearly 50 years later, in 1984, the first heart transplant at Loyola University Medical Center was performed: the patient left the hospital a month later. In addition to transplants of hearts, kidneys, lungs and other organs, some 1,500 people a year may undergo some form of open-heart surgery. The same type of surgery that Lindbergh unsuccessfully sought to save his sister-in-law's life has been done routinely at Foster G. McGaw Hospital since it opened in 1969.

Today such surgery is possible because of technological advances that began with Lindbergh's pump, created by a young man who dreamed of flying with eagles - and dared to do it.