Introduction: Twenty-One Tales of Old Chicago -- The Brothers Booth -- The Family O'Leary and the Rest of the Story -- Four Butchers Trying to Go to Heaven -- Elisha Gray and the Invention of the Telephone -- Crime and Punishment and the First Policewoman -- Where Time Began -- The Scarlet Letter Verdict -- The Lakefront Forever Open, Clear, and Free -- The Haunting of the Schuttler House -- Stars and Bars and the Symbol of a City -- America's First Automobile Race -- The Rouse Simmons and Chicago's First Christmas Tree -- Wrigley Field before the Cubs -- The Last Supper . . . Almost -- The Leaning Tower Why? -- A World's Fair of Railroading -- The Windy City Songbird -- How Richard J. Daley Saved the St. Patrick's Day Parade -- He Ran for His Life -- All In a Hard Day's Night -- Humanity in the Heartland

"This entertaining collection of twenty-one stories of people and places in Chicago, from roughly the time of the Civil War to the1960s, is a potpourri of personalities, human foibles, heartbreak, and triumph."--