This week, day after Labor Day , Chicago's public schools were due to open one week ahead of time because the Board of Education, performing a Chicago miracle; discovered in its kitty an extra $900,000 which could pay salaries of its often unpaid teachers for the extra week. Five days before the scheduled opening, Chicago's schools made unexpected news when Board President James B. McCahey announced that they would remain "indefinitely closed" because of a threatened epidemic of infantile paralysis (see p. 35). President McCahey's order brought much pleasure to the city's 619,000 hale pupils. To the Carpenter Elementary School on Chicago's West Side it brought destruction.
Picking up whatever implements they could lay their hands on, a band of marauders broke into the school and proceeded to thwack, whack, hack their way through each & every one of its dozen classrooms. They battered blackboards into slate piles and desks into kindling, doused gobs of ink on walls, disemboweled a piano, scuttled kitchen 'equipment, tore up writing paper, tore down wall clocks, scattered movable and immovable objects on the floor until thousands of dollar? of damage had been done and the building looked like a Hollywood set at the end of an Edward G. Robinson cinema. What typewriters they forgot to destroy they took with them, sold for 50¢ each. Next night they came back. This time they were greeted by a policeman who was surprised to discover that the pillage and wreckage had been done by six barefooted, dirty-faced moppets, twins Chester & Leo Froelich, 9; John Rudecki, 9, and his 8-year-old brother Walter; Walter Miranda and his 6-year-old brother Norbert. John Rudecki, the only one who tried to escape, was extricated with difficulty from between the blades of a ventilating fan. Bundled off to the station house, they were lined up, photographed (see cut), bound over to their parents pending a hearing this week. The raiders explained they did not like their principal.