Myron Fox thought he knew his father’s story inside out. He knew, for instance, that Philip Fox had come to America in April 1912, when he was 11, and that he’d sailed from Europe exactly seven days after the sinking of the Titanic.
Myron remembers riding around as a kid in his father’s superintendent’s car at Christmastime, delivering chocolates to switchboard operators and hotel receptionists. He remembers his father’s religious devotion, his participation in political debates at Bughouse Square, and the pride he took in his adopted country. Myron grew up believing that his father’s story had been the story of most of the immigrants of his generation: one of struggle and sacrifice but also of assimilation, steady improvement, and providing a better life for his children.
In 1948, Philip Fox moved his family to an apartment in Hyde Park, where Myron went to high school for two weeks before convincing his father to let him drop out, get a job, and go to night school. Not long after, he met and married Frances Rosenburg, who lived across the alley. In 1950 he joined the air force. He served four years, one of them in Korea, and on October 19, 1954, his 23rd birthday, he was discharged at Chanute air base in Rantoul.
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Yellow was the more established operation, founded in 1915 by car salesman John Hertz (who later started the rental car business) when he realized he could turn unsold used cars into taxicabs. Prior to Hertz, the cab industry consisted mostly of independent owner-operators. Hertz–whose innovations included painting his taxis an eye-catching yellow and introducing a telephone dispatch system–leased the cabs to his drivers and ran a tight ship: Yellow drivers wore a uniform and polished shoes and were required to keep a whisk broom to tidy their cabs. Checker, run by Mike Sokol, was an association of independent drivers formed in 1919 by Oak Parker Frank Dilger. Drivers received insurance and a garage to work out of in exchange for paying an association fee. Hertz claimed that Checker was made up of men who couldn’t get a job at Yellow, and rumor had it that one Checker garage kept a closet full of guns.
Stuben’s run-in at the Hotel Sherman was just one of many clashes that occurred the night of June 8. Earlier that evening, the Chicago Tribune reported, a Yellow driver had been shot in the foot in Logan Square. A Checker driver had been arrested outside the Hotel Sherman for rear-ending a Yellow cab. Another Checker driver told the Chicago American he’d been surrounded by four Yellow cabs at 33rd and Michigan and had been driven into the curb. Still another claimed he’d been attacked by five Yellow cabbies and that the windows of his cab had been smashed.
Twelve years later, Fox, Frances, and his sister Esther were in California visiting another cousin, Sadie, who repeated what Eva had said almost word for word: his father had taken the fall for someone. When they got back to Chicago he asked his nephew Michael Fryer, who was working as a photographer at the Tribune, to search the paper’s archives to see if Philip’s name came up. “He couldn’t find anything,” Fox says. “And knowing my father–he had a short temper, he was a pretty strong guy, short, but he had big arms–I figured maybe somebody wised off or somebody smacked somebody and he went to jail for 30 days for assault and battery.”
