Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Captain Santa

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

Herman Scheunemann wasn’t the only captain carrying Christmas trees across Lake Michigan to Chicago at the turn of the last century, but he was the most beloved. Which makes this episode even sadder.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi and welcome to The Short Stuff. I should say Merry Christmas and welcome to The Short Stuff everybody because this episode comes out on December 25th, which as many people know is Christmas Day. That's right and it's a rare Christmas short stuff where we also have to issue a warning for kids listening that the story, while beautiful and lovely, takes a very dark turn as yet another maritime disaster episode. Yeah, I mean, I guess I had second thoughts about this, but reading over it again, I'm like, no, this is a good Christmas story.

Yeah, this was so funny to me. I just have to tell everyone when Josh sent it, I thought he was sending it as a joke of like, hey, here's a Christmas thing. This was so funny to me, I just have to tell everyone, when Josh sent it, I thought he was sending it as a joke of like, hey, here's a Christmas thing, because I had already given him a hard time about all the maritime disaster episodes we do. And here was another one, and you're like, do we do a lot of those?

I was like, are you kidding me? I still couldn't tell. Yeah, no, I forgot about the orang-medan and mystery of the Sarah Joe two for, in like, I think, two weeks in a row or something. Yeah, but hey, this one is about the death of Captain Santa. Yeah, so just ring some jingle bells for this maritime disaster and it'll differentiate it from the others, right?

Yeah, this one has a very cool story around it though, because in Chicago, around the turn of the last century, they did a very cool thing wherein if you needed a Christmas tree you could head down to the Chicago River and you could go aboard a real sailing ship loaded with Christmas lights and Christmas trees like a little temporary Christmas tree lot to pick out your tree. Yeah and if you were down on your luck at the time, and you went to a particular schooner, the Rouse Simmons, you would probably meet the captain. He was nicknamed Captain Santa.

And if he found out that you were down on your luck, he would probably give you one of the Christmas trees free of charge. Pretty great. Yeah. So the reason that this was already a thing, this is the late 19th century, by this time the Germans had been decorating Christmas trees for a very long time, but it wasn't until Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert, who was from Germany, introduced it to England and it spread to America.

So people wanted Christmas trees by this time pretty badly. And it was hard to come by in Chicago, not a lot of forests in Chicago. So sailors who sailed schooners, or captains who sailed schooners, which are large masted ships used for shipping cargo, would sail from Northern Michigan, from Wisconsin, with literal boatloads of Christmas trees and show up at the Clark Street docks in Chicago, string up some lights on their boat and just say, come on aboard and pick out your tree.

That's right. It's pretty wonderful tradition. Captain Santa was born one Hermann Schönehman, obviously German, in somewhere probably around 1865. And he was second in line in the family business. His brother August would also do this along Lake Michigan, sell trees from the schooner. But Captain Santa was not a rich man. He only owned one eighth share of the Ralph Simmons. He was heavily in debt because he owned a saloon that put him about $1,300 in debt, about 42,000 today.

So he wasn't a rich guy, which made the fact that he had some financial hardships even more heartwarming, heartwarming? Heartwarming that this guy would still give away trees if he couldn't afford one. Yeah, so with a failed saloon, he was like, well, I've got to get out there and be captaining the Ralph Simmons as much as possible.

He had a wife named Barbara. He had three daughters, two of whom were twins, which is usually how twins come. And so it's important to say he was not the only ship that would sail to Chicago. In addition to his brother, there were plenty of other captains, but he differentiated himself from his generosity, from his jolliness, and the Chicago papers gave him the nickname Captain Santa.

And so by this time, this last run that he would make, and yes, that is kind of a cryptic way to put it, it was November, mid-November, and this was around the last time of the year where you could cross the Great Lakes. In particular, he was crossing Lake Michigan. So he was making one last run with the Ralph Simmons so loaded with Christmas trees that witnesses later said it looked like a floating forest.

And it turns out Chuck, that this was the last trip that both Captain Schoonemann and the Ralph Simmons would ever make. Are we going to be right back after this? Yeah, I think so. All right. Part two coming up. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed.

I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going to go to bed. Okay, we're back. We're somber. The Christmas joy has now been replaced by yet another maritime

disaster, because after they set sail on November 22, 1912, heavily loaded with 3,000 to 5,000 Christmas trees, a floating forest as you said, things went bad. They knew things could go bad because August, that older brother that we talked about, he actually already had died in a boat, a ship loaded with Christmas trees not too long before, I believe about 14 years earlier, November 1898, devastated the family obviously, but Hermann marched on. The schooner was spotted by a life-saving station at Keewawnee, Wisconsin, had its flag at half mass, which means I need help. Their motorboat was the only vessel that could make it in the storm, but it was on the lake already doing something out of touch. So by the time they got in touch with

the station at Two Rivers and got their motorboat out, it was too late. That boat was gone. Yeah, it was only 20 minutes that had passed, but by the time that motorboat from Two Rivers made it out there, they were like, we couldn't see it. I mean, it was dark. And this was in the afternoon, but it was so dark and the snow was so heavy and the mist was so thick that they were like, it's not there. So they don't know exactly where it went down. They didn't know where it went down for a very long time, about half a century. But the thing is, is despite the fact that it had vanished, no one saw it go down. So like in maritime thinking, it was not necessarily lost.

It could have made it out of sight into a safe harbor and waited that mid-November storm out. And that's what Barbara and her daughters were thinking. They were concerned when the Ralph Simmons did not show up in Chicago as planned, like on its normal schedule. That's the word I'm looking for. It's a Christmas miracle.

I just pulled that word out of thin air. But they also realized, like it's possible they were just sheltering in a harbor for a little while. Let's give it a few days before we're really worried. Yeah, that came over the next weeks and months when Christmas trees started washing up on the Wisconsin shoreline. It turns out that their fears were confirmed. The Ralph Simmons was never seen again.

Up to 23 people perished. It seems like there were some lumberjacks who hitched a ride in addition to the Captain Santa and the crew. And they, you know, people would find things here and there in 1924. This is pretty remarkable. They actually found Captain Santa's wallet wrapped in waterproof oil skin. Yeah, there was no doubting it.

It had his business card. Yeah. It also had, like, clippings of some of the newspaper accounts on him as Captain Santa. It was definitely his wallet. And, I mean, found in a fishing net is not the way you want to find your lost husband's wallet. No. So the Ross Simmons was definitely lost, but Barbara herself carried on this family tradition of delivering Christmas trees

in Chicago for several more years, as a matter of fact, using schooners. Eventually they moved over to trains, which is far more sensible. But the loss of the Rouse Simmons was basically the signal, like, okay, the age of schooners sailing across the Great Lakes using cargo, and in particular, showing up at the Clark Street docks with Christmas trees is probably over.

Yeah, but the cool thing about his family continuing, even when they brought him in by train, they would take them to a docked schooner and sell them from that. And even after that, they sold trees from a lot. So they were just a legit Christmas tree business family by that point. But like you said, that kind of was the beginning

of the end for the whole practice. There are some interesting little sort of ghost stories and rumors, I guess you might call them, that like you can still smell evergreen in that area and that the trees may have, maybe still be in good shape, like preserved at the bottom of Lake Michigan. – Did you see the photo of it? – Yeah.

– That was apparently the real deal, like some of the, they're so well preserved in the silt that some of them still have their needles attached. That's incredible. I don't, I can't get my needles to last through New Year's. Yeah. So a diver in Lake Michigan, I think Lake Michigan is now the fog to clear lake thanks to the zebra, zebra mussel invasion. Yeah.

But at the time in 1971, when it was discovered, a diver felted out by hand and somehow figured out that this was the Rouse Simmons that he had found in 172 feet of water. And then over time, I think in 2006, some underwater archaeologists did the first survey. And there's a picture, I think Atlas Obscura has a really great article on this. And there's an overhead shot of the Rouse Simmons sitting upright on the bottom of Lake Michigan. And you can see some of the Christmas tree timbers still scattered around it. Yeah, amazing. And I believe where the evergreen scent is present is near Barbara's grave site at Acacia

Park Cemetery in Chicago. One thing that struck me is very sad. I mean, obviously the 23 souls aboard, including Captain Santa, is very tragic, but I also feel bad about 5,000 live trees that just went to waste. Yeah, that is very sad. It's a lot of trees.

I hadn't thought about that. Wow, if this wasn't a bomber Christmas episode, it sure is now. It's a but, but it might not be a scary ghost story, but it is a tale of the glory of Christmas as long, long ago, if you ask me. And so to kind of tie the whole thing up in a nice Christmas bow, Captain Santa was so beloved.

The Chicago papers went nuts when the Ralph Simmons was lost. There was a legend, which was apparently true, of a poor little girl who was waiting at the Clark Street docks for Captain Santa himself to get her Christmas tree and was left waiting forever, essentially. But he's still so beloved around this area that every year in early December, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mackinac commemorates the Ralph Simmons journey across Lake Michigan and brings a load of Christmas trees to

Chicago's disadvantaged kids. That's great. Happy ending. It is a happy ending. You nailed it. It's a Christmas ending. Yeah, it has a dark center. It's called a Happy Christmas sandwich. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah. I want to give a big shout out and thanks to Glenn V. Longacre who wrote a great 2006 article in the National Archives' now defunct Prologue magazine in addition to Atlas Obscura too. That's right. And is this coming out, when would this be, like a couple of days before New Year's?

No, this comes out on Christmas. It is Christmas right now, Chuck. Oh, well, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Chuck. Merry Christmas to everybody who's listening and happy holidays. Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.