Vern Whaley

Vern Whaley was born in 1908 in Valley Junction, Iowa, USA. He died on May 28, 2000 in Skokie, Illinois, USA. Vern Whaley was a picture editor for the old Chicago American for more than two decades and a sportswriter who covered boxing for the Chicago Evening Post in the late 1920s. The son of a Rock Island railroad engineer, Whaley was born in Valley Junction, Iowa. He went on to become a Chicago journalist and, according to good friend and fellow journalist John O'Brien, "a virtual walking historian." "He was always full of stories," said O'Brien, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who got to know Whaley when they were members of the Chicago Press Veterans' Association. "He was legendary. When other journalists or people would come to Chicago looking for stories about Al Capone or Chicago, Vern Whaley would always be there to oblige them." For example, there was the time when Capone, an avid sports fan, spotted Whaley at a sports writers' luncheon inside the Metropole Hotel and handed him a 50-cent Cuban cigar, a very expensive smoke at the time. Whaley was hooked, until age 80, when he decided to stop smoking them "cold turkey," O'Brien said. "But after that day, he never smoked anything less than a Cuban cigar," O'Brien said. "And his home, it was like a museum. It was a reflection of his time and era, of the Great Depression, of the Prohibition Era. He was particularly proud of a slot machine. It was seized by police in some vice raid ... way back when." Whaley started his career as a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register from 1924 to 1928. It was an experience that helped land him a job as an editor and sportswriter at the Chicago Evening Post, where he worked from 1928 to 1930 covering prominent boxing matches and writing a popular column called "Knockout Drops." He was a sportswriter at a time when reporters and writers occasionally socialized with the people they covered. And so it came to be that boxer Jack Dempsey helped finance Whaley's wedding in 1929 after Whaley lost $500 in savings, according to his son Dr. John V. Whaley. "That was the story that he would tell anybody who would listen," said Dr. Whaley. "My poor mother had to listen to that for 66 years of marriage. In fact, the only way she could get out of it was by preceding him in death four years ago." Most of Whaley's career was spent at the Chicago American, a daily newspaper in Chicago, where he was a picture editor for 21 years. One day, in the late 1950s, Whaley decided to place several potted plants inside several potholes along a stretch of city street. The headline the next day read: "Mayor Daley's New Plan for Beautifying Chicago's Streets." Hours after the newspaper hit the stand, Mayor Daley's street crews were filling the holes. Whaley was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in May 1998. In 1992, he was named Chicago Press Veteran of the Year by the Press Veterans' Association of Chicago. In his later years, some of Whaley's thoughts and feelings on what it was like to be a reporter during the Depression were tape recorded. They are now part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica audio-visual library. He has also appeared in several documentaries in Europe and the United States about Chicago's Roaring '20s.