Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Oct. 9, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
High temperature: 86 degrees (2010)
Low temperature: 30 degrees (2000)
Precipitation: 2.27 inches (1954)
Snowfall: Trace (1925)
Chicago Tribune Archives
Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T.McCutcheon’s response to the White Sox defeating the Cubs in Game 6 of the 1906 World Series, published on Oct. 15, 1906. (Chicago Tribune)
1906: The all-Chicago World Series, pitting the Chicago Cubs (“Spuds”) against the Chicago White Sox (“Hitless Wonders”), began with a 2-1 Sox win at West Side Grounds (also known as West Side Park; formerly at Congress Parkway and Loomis, Harrison and Throop streets). It would be the last Series meeting between teams from the same city until the Yankees and Giants, then both playing in the Polo Grounds in New York, met in 1921 for the first of three consecutive Fall Classics.
As Tribune reporter Don Pierson noted in 1996: “Because pro football, basketball and hockey weren’t invented yet, the 1906 baseball season had little competition for sporting excitement in a town still rebuilding from the 1871 fire. World wars hadn’t even been invented, so a World Series was indeed a happening.”
The Cubs went into the Series as 3-1 favorites. Tribune baseball writer Hugh S. Fullerton, though, disagreed, and picked the Sox. His editor thought Fullerton’s pick was so ridiculous he refused to print the article until after the World Series — when the Sox claimed the pennant 4 games to 2.
“The Cubs were so upset, they won the next two World Series, Tribune reporter Bob Verdi wrote in 1996.
“After half a century of waiting Cincinnati baseball fans came into their own yesterday when their Reds cinched the world’s championship in the eighth game of the world’s greatest world’s series,” Tribune reporter I.E. Sanborn wrote in the Oct. 10, 1919, paper. “And it was significant that they burned up the White Sox by a score of 10 to 5 on the anniversary of the day Mrs. O’Leary’s cow burned up nine-tenths of Chicago forty-eight years ago.” (Chicago Tribune)
1919: The White Sox lost the best-of-nine World Series (Major League Baseball decided to expand from the best-of-seven format due to post-World War I demand) to the Cincinnati Reds.
Eight White Sox players had been charged with throwing the World Series. Despite earning the nickname the “Black Sox,” the men were acquitted by a jury that deliberated just 2 hours and 47 minutes.
A day after their acquittal, however, baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis ruled that the players allegedly involved — Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Oscar Emil “Happy” Felsch, Chick Gandil, Frederick William McMullin, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver and Lefty Williams — were banned for life from organized baseball.
The Eugene Field Memorial (nicknamed Dream Lady) northeast of the Helen Brach Primate House at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago on July 12, 2012. (Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune)
1922: A memorial to children’s poet Eugene Field was dedicated at Lincoln Park Zoo. The monument, featuring a “dream lady” sprinkling flowers over two sleeping children, was revealed by two of Field’s grandchildren 27 years after his death. Field wrote “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “The Sugar Plum Tree,” both of which are carved into the granite monument. The memorial was later moved to the northeast corner of the Helen V. Branch Primate House.
President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama with his medal and diploma at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at City Hall in Oslo on Dec. 10, 2009. (John McConnico/AP)
2009: President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
It happened just 11 months after he celebrated his election as president in Grant Park and nine months after his inauguration. Obama was the fourth U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the third to do so while in office (the other two were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson).
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Nobel Prize winners with Chicago connections
The bestowal of one of the world’s top accolades on Obama, who had yet to score a major foreign policy success, was greeted with gasps from the audience at the announcement ceremony in Oslo, Reuters reported.
Obama, as if accepting the unusual circumstance of the award, accepted it “as a call to action” rather than a reward for accomplishments.
Archbishop Blase Cupich greets visitors after Mass on Oct. 9, 2016, at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. Cupich was elevated to the rank of cardinal by Pope Francis. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)
2016: Pope Francis named Blase Cupich a Cardinal. Cupich was elevated the following month, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
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