A look at WTTW’s new season of ‘Chicago Stories’

Here comes a new season of WTTW-Ch. 11’s generally worthwhile and understandably popular “Chicago Stories.” As usual, it is eight hour-long programs packed with such familiar people and places as Hugh Hefner, Al Capone and Riverview. Many of the subjects — the Black Sox Scandal included — have been told and retold enough times to have become part of most Chicagoans’ DNA. That forces the documentary makers to exercise their skills and judgments, which most of them have done, I’m happy to see and say.

So let’s begin, with that pair of wealthy thrill-seeking lunatics named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in “Deadly Alliance,” airing at 8 p.m. Sept. 20. This is a solid retelling, using vintage photos and some modest dramatic recreations to great effect. It was May 21,1924, when those two wealthy University of Chicago students lured 14-year-old Bobby Franks into a car. They savagely beat him to death and dumped his body near Wolf Lake in Indiana. Thanks to the work of a couple of sharp-eyed newspaper reporters, the young men eventually confessed to the murder and were brought to trial for what would become, perhaps until O.J. came calling, the “Crime of the Century.”

Depending on your views on capital punishment, the hero or villain of this tale will be famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, who was paid a handsome fee to keep the convicted killers alive. You will learn how he did it, in part by spending 22 hours spread over two days making his closing argument. (If the program compels you to read that summation, good. It’s brilliant, humane and moving.)

Chicago Tribune historical photo

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Richard Loeb, 18, left, and Nathan Leopold Jr., 19, right, look at each other after they gave separate confessions to the killing of Robert “Bobby” Franks on May 21, 1924, in Chicago. The confessions were finally given on May 31, 1924, after Leopold’s glasses were found next to Franks’ body at 121st Street and the Pennsylvania railroad tracks. Leopold and Leob had said they were out in the remote area to bird watch.

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Director/writer Tania Lindsay has a creative touch, and adds a short but interesting look at Loeb’s later years. And from the large pool of talking heads that are a presence in most documentaries, she has chosen wisely, especially by interviewing Nina Barrett, the author of 2018’s graphically stunning and detailed book “The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes.”

Fittingly, coming as it does at the end of an embarrassing White Sox season, we have at 8 p.m. Sept. 27, a story even more shameful.

“The Black Sox Scandal” tells of the eight White Sox players and the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. In short, eight members of the Sox were accused of throwing the series in exchange for money from a group of gamblers. The players’ names were Arnold “Chick” Gandil, George “Buck” Weaver, Oscar “Happy” Felsch, Charles “Swede” Risberg, Fred McMullin, Eddie Cicotte, Claude “Lefty” Williams and, most famously, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.

A Chicago grand jury indicted the players in late September 1920 and, though all were acquitted in a public trial on Aug. 2, 1921, baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis the next day permanently banned all eight for life from professional baseball.

This was what many consider the biggest scandal in the history of sports and has been the subject of many books, the best of which is Eliot Asinof’s 1963 “Eight Men Out,” which gave birth to the fine 1988 film of the same name.

The episode strains to make a case that this somehow led to Pete Rose’s gambling troubles decades later and to the even more recent steroid epidemic, but it makes terrific use of author Richard Lindberg and Northwestern University professor/writer Bill Savage. It also winds up giving us a kinder view of the team’s then-owner Charles Comiskey, normally seen as a skinflint.

Chicago Tribune historical photo

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A scene in the courtroom during the Black Sox trial in 1921. Eight Chicago White Sox players were on trial for allegedly fixing the 1919 World Series.

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Nothing like the Bobs or Tunnel of Love to spark some pleasant memories and that is what you’ll get at 8 p.m. on Oct. 4 in “Amusement Parks.”

Naturally, the main focus of this hour is Riverview, that massive North Side extravaganza that began with a small carousel and some donkey rides and would expand to hundreds of rides (and such weird “diversions” as a freak house and a nasty thing known as the “African Dip.”)

But we also learn how Chicago was once home to more amusement parks than any city in the country, how variations of a local Kiddieland spread across the area and the country, visit Funtown on the South Side and eventually watch this amusement paradise come to an end with the advent (invasion?) of such giant parks.

Cultural historian Tim Samuelson is his delightfully smart self in giving all manner of context and anecdote. You’ll hear me specifically yammering about Riverview’s thrills. And you’ll revisit Santa’s Village and learn how it died but was brought back to life. Producer/writer Rachel Pikelny, far too young to have tasted the pleasures of the bygone amusement parks, is sensitive to the parks’ abilities to allow people to, as Riverview’s slogan had it, “laugh your troubles away.”

The accompanying website for this program offers more Riverview, more about the 1893 World’s Fair’s Midway Plaisance, and offers viewers a place to share their own Chicago amusement park memories, which I have no doubt you will.

Chicago Tribune historical photo

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Members of the Young Lords with their fists in the air on Nov. 2, 1969.

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On Oct. 11 we have “The Young Lords of Lincoln Park,” the least well known of the stories in the series. It is revelatory, telling of the Young Lords, a group of young Puerto Ricans formed from the large influx of people from that island to Chicago in the years following World War II. Always at odds with the political power structure and the avarice of real estate developers, the Young Lords would transform in the 1960s from social club to street gang to a community activist organization.

Led by the charismatic José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, the group fought various injustices, eventually bonding with like-minded and ill-fated Fred Hampton and his Black Panthers to form what would be known as the Rainbow Coalition, and help elect Harold Washington as mayor. Lots of interviews offer emotional and first-hand history, photos and film clips capture the impact and tensions of the times.

The following episodes of the series are “The Making of Playboy” (Oct. 18) focused on Hugh Hefner; “When the West Side Burned” (Oct. 25) about the fires and looting and shooting that came in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; “Al Capone’s Bloody Business” (Nov. 1), giving more airtime to our city’s now almost cartoonish gangster; and finally “House Music: A Cultural Revolution” (Nov. 8), which should for most viewers be very informative.

A look at WTTW’s new season of ‘Chicago Stories’

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