Joseph Bernard Beutel

Testified at grand jury in Feb, 1904; testimony not reported.  A native of Missouri, son of Frederick and Mary Murphy Beutel, Joseph married Margaret G. Conley in 1903.  That was also the year he passed the bar exam and on December 30 was working traffic at the corner of Lake and Clark when the Iroquois Theater caught fire.  Three months before the Iroquois fire the Inter Ocean newspaper ran a large story about Joseph.  He had left his parent's Missouri farm to come to Chicago during the 1893 Worlds Fair.  He worked as a clerk while attending night school to learn bookkeeping, then passed the civil service exam to become a police officer, and went on to law school.  He decided his elementary education was lacking so dropped out of law school to return to high school, returning to law school and passing the bar in 1903.  He contemplated eventually leaving the police department and wanted to relocate in the west, when he'd set aside a nest egg.  He wasn't counting then on having ten children, including two sets of twins, the last, Frank and Francis, born five years before his death.  Frank would serve in the army during WWII.  Joseph was promoted to desk sergeant at the Chicago avenue precinct by 1909 and left the Chicago police department between 1917 and 1919, dying of rectal cancer two years later.   He did make it a bit further west before he died, to St. Paul, Minnesota where he worked as a checker in a packing plant.