Joseph Norris

Nothing was reported in major newspapers about Joseph D. Norris Jr surviving the Iroquois Theater fire, but LaPorte, Indiana historian, Fern Schultz, cited his name in a 2011 news story. As chief history archivist for the community, Fern has access to stories about the disaster that appeared in local newspapers and have not been scanned for online distribution.

Forty-year-old Joseph D. Norris Jr. (1863-1918) lived in LaPorte County, Indiana in 1903, his hometown since childhood. All that is known about his trip to the Iroquois is that he sat on the ground floor.

He was one of four children born to Joseph D. Norris and Catherine Mills Norris.  Most of his life he described himself as a surveyor. He did work in that capacity in 1907, compiling and publishing an atlas of La Porte County, but the occupation that turns up most often in the scanty amount of information found about him is that he was a steeple jack, doing repair and painting on industrial smokestacks, water tanks, flag poles and steeples.  A steeple jack with a drinking problem.

CHESTERTON LOCALS.

Joseph Norris, a former surveyor of Laporte county, was electrocuted Monday morning in a steel company plant at Gary, where he was employed. He was born in Laporte county and was 60 years old. He had lived in Gary for the past two years. His remains were taken to Laporte for burial. Deceased had relatives in Valparaiso.   Source: The Chesterton Tribune, Chesterton, Porter County, Indiana; October 24, 1918; Volume 35, Number 32, Page 7, Column 3.

Joseph's timeline

1884 worked as a teacher. Played a $5 practical joke on a friend, a joke that looked too much like blackmail. Was sentenced to a year in the Michigan City penitentiary. Granted an appeal, results not reported.
1888 patented a cutter bar for reapers and mowers.
1890 married Margaret Laughlin, a fellow Indiana native. They did not have children.
1900 worked as a milk dealer
1902 living in Michigan City, north of LaPorte
1904 injured while repairing a smokestack at Republic Iron and Steel in East Chicago. Blown into the air, reportedly 100 feet. Injuries described as serious but survived. Maybe fell on his head.  Maybe the estimate of 100 feet was hooey.  Keep reading.
1906 accused of home burglary, stealing $2,000 worth of jewelry in Hammond, Indiana, near Gary. Confessed he'd sold the jewelry to a Chicago saloon keeper for $29. Newspapers reported he was from Liverpool and a sailor. Maybe living in Liverpool, Indiana at the time. Suspect seaman angle was interjected when he talked about using a bosun's chair in his work.
1907 claiming to be 65 years old, appealed to a Chicago police station to give him night's lodging. Also claimed to have climbed the Eiffel tower and worked the world over as a steeple jack after leaving his Iowa home forty-five years earlier, and to have wasted a $100,000 fortune in earnings to alcohol. If police recognized him as the fellow who burgled jewelry a year earlier, it wasn't reported but has to have been Joseph. How may steeple jacks can there have been in Chicago-NW Indiana named Joseph D. Norris?
1916 filed for bankruptcy.
c. 1917 moved to Gary.
1918 while supervising a construction crew at the Aetna Powder Company, a Gary, Indiana munitions and dynamite manufacturer, he leaned against an electric switch or wire (both reported by various newspapers) and was electrocuted.