Religion: Holy Comforter

Among Chicago’s barflies of two generations ago, Newsman Eugene Field was about as well known as a bottleman and writer of scatological ballads (such as The French Crisis) as he was as a children’s poet. Poet Field was nobody to conduct a Sunday school class, and would have been the first to admit it. But last week, at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, school children gathered about the tomb of Eugene Field on the day before the 44th anniversary of his death. A Boy Scout and a Girl Scout laid wreaths on the tomb. Read and sung were Wynken, Blynken and Nod, Little Boy Blue, The Drum.

In 1926, what the Church of the Holy Comforter needed, its rector quite frankly decided, was a good, popular tomb. Five years before, the Episcopal diocese of Chicago had been about to abandon the Church of the Holy Comforter (29 members and communicants) when young, handsome, go-getting Rev. Leland Hobart Danforth asked for a chance at the parish. Just out of seminary, he took over at $35 per month, increased the congregation to 500. On a visit to Washington’s National Cathedral, he saw what a drawing card the tomb of Woodrow Wilson was. Father (because high church) Danforth resolved to obtain some popular Chicago dust—that of Eugene Field, buried in Graceland Cemetery.

Father Danforth went to Eugene Field’s octogenarian widow, who repeatedly turned him down. Finally Father Danforth learned that there had been much jealousy between the families of Eugene Field and his brother Roswell, a lesser writer. By suggesting that he might move Roswell field’s body to his church, Rector Danforth so moved Widow Field that at last she consented to the transfer. Poet Field’s remains were placed in a handsome granite tomb in the Holy Comforter garden. Father Danforth acquired some Fieldiana, including the poet’s wedding ring, put up two tablets to Field in the cloister, had the Widow Field buried near her husband in 1937.

If jovial, bridge-playing Rector Danforth’s church is not yet what he wants it to be, “known all over the world,” it is nevertheless of wide repute, not only for its Field relics but for its well-landscaped garden, which the rector tends himself, its 700 historical-religious mementos, its Holy Comforter Memorial Singing Tower, equipped with mechanical chimes and vibraharp. Its visitors number 20,000 a year.