Distinctly Montana Magazine

N O R M A N M A C L E A N S P E C I A L I S S U E 1 7 FROM CHAPTER SIX "PAUL! PAUL!" On the last full day of Paul Maclean's life, Sunday, May 1, 1938, he had about $50 in his wallet, having cashed a two-week paycheck. He took his girlfriend, Lois Nash, twenty-nine, a redheaded Irish nurse, to an afternoon White Sox game at Comiskey Park at Thirty-Fifth and Shields. She later said she and Paul had been dating for two months and were engaged to be married, which came as news to his brother and sister-in-law. The White Sox played the St. Louis Browns, who won by a score of 7 to 5. Paul made a day of it and took Lois for a leisurely dinner at Hyde Park's best restau- rant, Morton's at Fifty-Fifth Street and Lake Park Avenue. After dinner they visited friends, and Paul then delivered Lois back to her place at 5143 Kenwood Avenue. He left about ten fifteen p.m., saying he was headed home. Paul walked south across the midway toward his lodgings at the Weldon Arms Hotel, 6235 Ingleside Avenue, just a couple of blocks from where Norman and Jessie [Maclean's wife] lived, at 6020 Drexel Avenue. But he did not go home. The following events occurred within a few blocks of each other just south of the university, in the Woodlawn neigh- borhood near where Paul lived. Not long after midnight, on Monday, May 2, Sidney Sorenson saw a man behaving strangely across the street from his home in the 6200 block of Eberhart Avenue. The man threw himself to the ground and then arose, pretending to stagger and walked a short distance away to the corner of Sixty-Third Street and Eberhart Avenue. Sorenson said "two colored women and a Negro man" apparently became alarmed and moved off as the man approached. He saw the man, whom he later identified as Paul, at one fifteen a.m.—it's not clear how an identification was made. Another witness, A.D. Adkinson, who lived nearby on East Sixty-Fifth Place, said he saw a young man scuffling with two others at Sixty-Third Street and Drexel Avenue that night. The man, whom Adkinson identified as Paul, walked away from the scuffle and the others drove off in a car. Then shortly before five a.m., Edward Miller was awakened by loud talking in the alley behind his home at 6234 Rhodes Avenue. He got up and looked out into the yard but saw no one and went back to bed. When the noise persisted, he got dressed, went out to investigate, and found a man lying unconscious in the alley. Miller didn't have a phone in his home and had some trouble finding one to call the police. When he did, the address he gave was garbled. It was not until six eighteen a.m. that the Chicago Police received another call of a man down in the alley behind Sixty-Second Street and Eberhart Avenue. They found Paul alive but unconscious where two alleyways join in a T. Police found his wallet nearby, empty, and three $1 bills and a dollar in change in his pockets. Police also found in one of his pockets a match- book for the Vogue liquor House, a bar near where he lived. He was transport- ed to Woodlawn Hospital, where nursing staff at first thought he was passed out drunk. When they turned him over, however, they discovered a deep wound in the back of his head in- dicating that he had been severely beaten or struck with a heavy object. He did in the hospital at one twenty p.m. without regaining concsciousness. Those are the bare facts from police and coroner reports and from the account in the Chicago Tribune, which my father said covered the story accurately and with restraint. The murder was a sensation, though; the alley where Paul was found was near Sixty-Third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, known as "sin corner." It was said that every vice known to man was for sale there, and not every newspaper handled the story with the same care as the Tribune did. The New York Post, for example, report- ed that prostitutes had been active in the vicinity that night, but the police investigation found no link between them and Paul, and such activity in that neighborhood was hardly a rarity. My father speculated that Paul had gone wandering through the neighborhood that night, as he had done as a reporter back in by JOHN NORMAN MACLEAN PHOTOS COURTESY OF JOHN MACLEAN Excerpt from HomeWaters Paul Maclean

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