Mass grave marks victims of 1995 heat wave
Dozens were buried at Homewood cemetery; 25 years later, witnesses ‘still think about it’
Twenty-five years ago, people all over the world helped mourn as unclaimed victims of a deadly heat wave were laid to rest in a Homewood cemetery.
People who witnessed the burial of 68 bodies in a mass grave Aug. 25, 1995, at Homewood Memorial Gardens said they will never forget the unbearable sadness of that day.
Some see parallels between the heat wave that claimed more than 700 lives in Chicago that summer and the current COVID-19 pandemic that so far has killed more than 175,000 Americans and nearly 800,000 people worldwide.
A quarter century ago, no one claimed the bodies of 41 people who died due to the excessive heat. They were buried in a paupers’ grave along with 27 other indigent souls who passed away from other causes.
“I knew the Cook County medical examiner did burials there every month,” said Elaine Egdorf, a founder of the Homewood Historical Society.
Egdorf said she was familiar with the cemetery back then. The graveyard was near her home and more than 20 members of her family were buried there. She had escorted groups on tours through the cemetery to highlight local history.
She knew the late Rev. Joseph
Ledwell, pastor of First Presbyterian
Church of Homewood, who had presided over the county’s services since 1980.
“On that morning, I had heard on the radio they would be doing a mass burial,” Egdorf recalled. “I had my granddaughter, Megan, with me. She was about 6. I went there so the pastor wouldn’t be alone.”
Egdorf hadn’t anticipated that several local and national media outlets would cover the event.
“There were all these TV trucks there,” she said. “I was caught unprepared.”
Tall oak trees cast shade over the granite headstones and other monuments that mark graves in the cemetery at 600 Ridge Road, east of Halsted Street, near the Thornton Quarry. The graveyard had long served as Cook County’s potter’s field, a place where poor and forgotten people were buried.
Typically, there might be a dozen or more buried at a time. Never more than 30. Nothing
close to 68 at once, not until that summer.
Most of Chicago’s deaths fromthe heat occurred in mid-July. The temperature reached 106 degrees on July 13, according toNational Weather Service records. The heat and unusually high humidity— dew pointswere around 80 degrees— created a peak heat index of 125 degrees.
The medical examiner’s officewas overwhelmed with bodies. Refrigerated truckswere brought in to handle the overflowof corpses. Many who died were elderly and lived alone. Some had no air conditioning or didn’t want to open windows or leave their homes due to fear of crime.
“Iwas on the team of reporters that covered heatwave victims,” Melita Garza said. “I had talked with families and contributed to those stories that we did back then.”
Garza is an associate professor of journalism at Texas ChristianUniversity in FortWorth. In 1995, she covered the burial inHomewood for the Chicago Tribune. She worked for the newspaper for 15 years, she said, beginning in 1989. “I had knocked on doors, gone into homes, talked with relatives and got a real feel for the people who had died,” Garza said.
Therewere no family members to interview at theHomewood burial. The cemeterywas still and silent, she said. The only soundwas the hissing of cicadas, she said.
“I remember the starkness of the atmosphere, the bare pine coffins lined up right next to each other,” Garza said.
Egdorf alsowas moved by the sight of 68 plain boxes made ofwood, each containing the remains of someone with no friends or family to mourn them.
“It tookmy breath away,” Egdorf said. “Chills ran upmy spine, as hot as itwas. It reminded me of newsreels that showed mass graves during the war. They had dug this huge trench.”
The trenchwas 160 feet long, according to news reports.
Egdorf said reporters from network news outlets interviewed her. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and others covered the burial with reporters and photographers.
“Later, my son in Portland, Oregon, said he saw me on the news out there,” Egdorf said. “It was on the news in Europe, the Far East, all around theworld.”
Therewas something profoundly sad about the moment, that such a large number of people could have died alone, all at once. It seemed to shock the human conscience. The burial may have felt like a real-life version of the sad loneliness fictionalized in The Beatles song, “Eleanor Rigby.”
Eleanor Rigby died in the church
Andwas buried along with her name; Nobody came; FatherMcKenzie, wiping the dirt fromhis hands
As he walks from the grave;
No onewas saved
In her report for the Tribune, Garzawrote about a young man who wasworking at the cemetery that summer. Josh Beals, then 16, of Chicago Heights, was heading into his senior year at Bloom High School.
Bealswas overcome with emotion as he stacked coffins in the grave and wiped tears from his face, she wrote.
“Iwas really taken with the young man I had interviewed for the story, whowas doing all the heavy lifting and how overcome hewas by this,” Garza said. “He’d been working there and had seen coffins before but never this many.”
Beals nowis a police officer in Littleton, Colorado.
“Itwas a summer job,” Beals said. “Iwas supposed to be cutting grass and trimming hedges. It turned into something else.”
The cemetery’s contract with the Cook County medical examiner’s office meant itwas all hands on deck, all the time that summer, Beals recalled.
“I had friends who wereworking atMcDonald’s,” he said. “Itwas very humbling, eye-opening. I grew up quick. I still think about it. I can picture that day, the faces of people, the smells.”
Beals, Garza and Egdorf remember howLudwell, the Presbyterian minister, recited the 23rd Psalm.
“Therewere a lot of Jane Does and John Does that day,” Beals said. “He tried to give them a little bit of dignity.”
The deadly heatwave that summer transformed theway Chicago responded to emergencies. People collectively felt a need to showthat society cared about its most vulnerable members due to the loss of human life. Theywere poor and elderly, mostly minorities.
“They seemed to be people thatwewere almost comfortable ignoring, or forgetting about, or passing by,” Garza said.
Garzawas struck by the irony of a swarm of media covering the burials of people whowere overlooked while theywere alive.
“In death, people who weren’t getting much attention at the end of their liveswere suddenly getting attention from the nation’s most important media outlets,” she said.
The heatwave 25 years ago that killed 700 Cook County residents touched theworld and changed howa major city responded to emergencies. One wonders howsocieties will demand changes in response to a pandemic that already has claimed nearly 800,000 lives worldwide.
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown. tslowik@tribpub.com