Chapter Five: Gus Is Elected Chief Justice

Chapter Five of “Gus and Julia Bowe, Remembered”

As told by William J. Bowe, drawn from his January 29, 2021 interview with his cousin Tony Bowe.

Table of Contents

Mayor Richard J. Daley Slates Gus for Chief Justice

Columnist Mike Royko Finds Chicago Duller after Gus’s Death

Gus Chairs Landmarks Commission as Garrick Theater is Razed

Putting a Stop to Budget Finagling or a Hand in the Cookie Jar

Judge Bowe Goes Missing

Summary

This chapter covers Gus’s election as Chief Justice of the Municipal Court of Chicago in the wake of the Bail Bond Scandal, Mayor Daley’s mix-up over the Bowe family’s ethnic background, Gus’s later chairmanship of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks during the fight to save the Garrick Theater, and his sudden death on February 6, 1966, followed by his wake and funeral.

The Narrative

Mayor Richard J. Daley Slates Gus for Chief Justice

The Municipal Court of Chicago, before it was reorganized into a countywide system in the early 1960s, had gone through a terrible scandal in the late 1950s. In the Bail Bond Scandal, judges took bribes in return for signing blank pads of bail bond forms, which crooked lawyers could then fill in for their criminal clients. In effect, it was a get-out-of-jail-free card. The public outcry was substantial. Mayor Daley had traditionally slated that judicial seat for someone from the Polish community, and the sitting Chief Justice, Raymond Drymalski, had to take the fall. Daley needed someone new, and Gus fit. He was a lifelong prominent Democrat, well known, plain-spoken, and a lawyer of integrity whom other lawyers had already elected president of the Chicago Bar Association. There was no taint from Daley’s political machine to weigh him down. Gus Bowe was a logical, low-risk choice for a mayor under real pressure to clean up the courts.

Gus told me a funny story about going to see Daley after he’d been slated on the Democratic ticket. He said he wanted to thank Daley, since being slated in that era was tantamount to being elected. Gus said Daley asked him, “Tell me, Gus, what part of Germany are your folks from?” Gus told him, “Germany? I’m as Irish as you are.” According to Gus, Daley started laughing and said, “Well, Gus, shut up about it. The last thing I need right now is another Irish Catholic on the ticket.” Daley’s mistake was an understandable one; plenty of pious German families named their sons after St. Augustine, and Daley had simply gotten Augustine Bowe’s ethnic background wrong while building his always ethnically balanced ticket.

Columnist Mike Royko Finds Chicago Duller after Gus’s Death

Gus had a way of getting himself into the papers, and not always favorably. After he died, the columnist Mike Royko wrote a piece celebrating exactly that quality in Gus, his lack of a political filter. Years later, after Royko himself had died, his widow, Judy Arndt Royko, who later became my first wife, going through his papers, came across the column and remembered Gus and Julia. She was kind enough to send it to me and it’s up on my wbowe.com website now.

Gus Chairs Landmarks Commission as Garrick Theater is Razed

Mayor Daley had a serious political problem with the historic preservation movement during Gus’s years first as Chief Justice and later as Presiding Judge of the Municipal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court. The Garrick Theater, across from what’s now the Daley Center, a Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan landmark, was scheduled for demolition, and preservationists wanted it saved. To keep himself out of the fight, Daley appointed Gus chairman of the newly created Commission on Chicago Landmarks, and tasked it with finding a way to save it. The problem, at the time, was that the tools to actually save a structure like the Garrick didn’t yet exist. No laws or other financing options were yet available. As a result, both the Garrick and Louis Sullivan’s great Chicago Stock Exchange Building were ultimately lost, though some of the Garrick’s sculptural facade later found a home on the front of Second City’s theater on Wells Street. Gus managed to save an interior decorative plaster motif Sullivan had designed for the Garrick. I got it from Julia after Gus’s death and later donated it to the Newberry Library, its present home.

Putting a Stop to Budget Finagling or a Hand in the Cookie Jar

Chicago’s courts have occasionally seen corruption over the decades, and Gus wasn’t blind to it. He once told me about a court official whose funds outside auditors had flagged as having been moved around inappropriately. While not necessarily criminal, it was apparently not according to Hoyle. When I asked him what he did, he said he simply went down to the man’s office, sat down with him, and said, “Put the money back.” And that was that. Gus knew perfectly well that Chicago politics offered plenty of people a very remunerative side business that needed to be dealt with promptly whenever it surfaced.

Judge Bowe Goes Missing

Gus died on February 6, 1966. He’d gone out that evening as he usually did for his nightly walk, had a heart attack, and collapsed in a snowbank near 1420 Lake Shore Drive, a few blocks north of his home. He never carried a wallet on those walks, so there was no way to identify the body at first. For a time, he was an unidentified corpse in the morgue, while the family scrambled to find out where he’d gone. The story made the front page of the Chicago Tribune: “Judge Bowe Dies at 73.” He had, in fact, two conditions that were closing in on him: a heart aneurysm that the medicine of the day, even the pioneering work being done by Dr. Michael DeBakey in Texas, wasn’t yet refined enough to treat safely. He also had lung cancer, likely tied to a lifetime of smoking, as with my own father. He hadn’t started treatment for either, as far as I know, but that didn’t stop him from taking his usual evening walk. He was prepared, in that sense, for whatever was coming.

There was a wake at the Carroll funeral home, in the old Ransom Cable House, a beautiful building now serving as the Driehaus financial headquarters. Mayor Daley came to the wake and was gracious with Julia, as he had been with my own family a few weeks earlier at my father’s wake. Daley had written Gus a kind letter of condolence after my father died. When Daley came to my father’s wake, he was really paying his respects out of his regard for Gus. Daley attended wakes like that constantly. It was part of the ceremonial glue that held his political organization together. The common phrase at those Irish wakes, whoever’s it was, was always the same: “I’m sorry for your troubles.” A funeral Mass followed at Holy Name Cathedral, and Gus was buried afterward at Calvary Cemetery.