Music: Tsar

The west side of the Loop facing the oily, murky Chicago River is not the most glamorous site in the world for the home of grand opera. Yet, Chicagoans had reason to be proud last week when it was announced that Samuel Insull had acquired a half block amid bleak, uncouth warehouses facing the grimy waters, where he intends to make rise the $7,500,000 monumental abode of the Chicago Civic Opera Company and create a midWest music Mecca. Perhaps Mr. Insull's plan is a lusty answer to the Babylo-American style skyscraper which Otto Hermann Kahn is now erecting for the Metropolitan Opera among the tenements and speakeasies which creep up to 56th and 57th Streets at 8th and 9th Avenues, in Manhattan.

But Chicago opera connoisseurs have more immediate glories at which to point with pride. Fortnight ago (TIME, Nov. 22) the Civic Opera embarked upon a season of splendor—probably its greatest. Marie, Queen of Rumania, came the opening night to see Aïda. If Samuel Insull, sitting beside Her Majesty in the first box, had been a man of many words, he might have told her of the rising fame of Chicago opera, of such artists as Edith Mason, Mary Garden, Rosa Raisa, Cyrena Van Gordon, Charles Marshall, Tito Schipa. It is true that Chicago has no Rosa Ponselle, no Maria Jeritza, no Gigli, no Martinelli, and that it dispensed with the high-priced Amelita Galli-Curci; but often the Chicago operas more than equal the Metropolitan in vitality and freshness. Mr. Insull, being both quiet and reticent, undoubtedly neglected to tell Her Majesty that he is the Tsar of Chicago opera, that he dashes off to Europe in search of these artists, that he recently collected the second five-year guarantee of $500,000 a year from wealthy Chicagoans months before it was due, that he hopes some day to see a self-paying opera in his dream palace on the Chicago River.

A ruddy-faced young Englishman on a tramcar was reading a copy of a U. S. magazine. A smell of perspiration and wet woolens arose from the people around him. They were people like himself, of obscure destiny and unimportant identity, working people, going home to supper. The young man was 20 years old, a clerk by profession, secretary to one Thomas Gibson Bowles, proprietor and editor of Vanity Fair. The article he read told about Thomas Edison.

Sought out by reporters, Samuel Insull will speak of that evening, of the magazine. He adds, in matter-of-fact tone, that it was pure chance that made him answer an advertisement in which one Col. George E. Gourard announced his desire for a secretary. Colonel Gourard represented the Edison interests in London. Samuel Insull was a good secretary. When Mr. Edison needed a secretary, Colonel Gourard recommended him. So began one of the most important combinations in U. S. business.

Samuel Insull came of a poor family. His father ran a temperance hotel near Reading, Eng. Temperance was not popular. Samuel Insull had worked hard all his life, but he had never in his life worked so hard as he now began to work for Thomas Edison. When he landed in Manhattan, he hurried to the home of his new employer. It was five o'clock in the afternoon. "Report for duty after dinner," Mr. .Edison said. Samuel Insull worked until five next morning.