Welcome.

The Incident in Mattoon has been a fascination of mine for quite a few years. I first came across the story when my wife was teaching at Nazareth College. I would come to pick her up, and usually wait in her office. One of the books that was in her office was an abnormal psychology anthology containing Donald Johnson's "The Phantom Anesthetist of Mattoon."

I was immediately intrigued and saw, as a former journalism major, the excesses of the rough-and-tumble Chicago-style journalism that was captured in the Hecht & MacArthur classic, "The Front Page."

This story screamed out to be told. The war-weary home front, the terror of a gas attack on U.S. soil, the bustling town that was a rail crossroads with the Big Four and the Illinois Central lines carrying up to 100 trains a day through Mattoon (between heavy freight and troop trains), it has all the elements of classic film noir, which actually, was just starting to make its presence known in Hollywood, with Fritz Lang's "Ministry of Fear" and Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity."

I began searching for as much information as I could find. I looked up old magazines and periodicals in the stacks of the Rundell Library, and through inter-library loans, was able to view microfilmed copies of The Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Daily News, and the Chicago Herald-American, the local Hearst organ. (Yes, this was pre-internet, and libraries would mail rolls of microfilm from location to another, for free -- just because I asked!)

I'll be posting a lot of what I found, as well as some of my ideas, as I have struggled for years to fashion the story into a narrative. And well, those are later posts.