I’ve lived in Chicago since the fall of 1980, but I never noticed that the street side of the Tribune Tower is embedded with stones from famous buildings around the world until recently. The trigger for me was correspondence from Sigrid Schultz detailing her successes and failures in acquiring, authenticating, and shipping stones to the Tribune’s Chicago office from a variety of locations, including Wartburg Castle, where Luther lived in hiding for a time.

The project was a brainstorm of the paper’s owner, Colonel Robert McCormick—one of many that he would inflict on his foreign correspondents over the years.

Among other things, McCormick was a history bugg* and collector of historical memorabilia on a grand scale. He acquired what would be the first pieces of the Tribune Tower collection on a brief stint as a war correspondent in 1914. While touring the trenches in France, he pocketed stones from the medieval cathedral of Ypres, which had been damaged by German shelling, and a historic building in Arras.

When McCormick began constructing his Tower in 1923, he decided to expand his collection of historical rocks and incorporate them into the structure of the building. He sent a memo to his foreign correspondents instructing them to acquire “stones about six inches square from such buildings as the Law Courts of Dublin, the Parthenon at Athens, St. Sophia Cathedral, or any other famous cathedral or palace or ruin—perhaps a piece of one of the pyramids” and send them to Chicago.

Not surprisingly, local authorities were not always happy to supply the Colonel with a piece of their historical landmarks. Nonetheless, Tribuners successfully collected 136 stones from sites near and far. After the Colonel’s death in 1955, his successors decided to continue the tradition, adding a moon rock in 1971 and a piece of the Berlin wall in 1990.

*A typo that I accept whenever I commit it. I honestly think it makes as much sense as history buff. If the Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed, the use of buff to describe a fan of any sort is an extension of a person who was fascinated by fires and firemen. They were called “buffs” in the early twentieth century because of the buff-colored uniforms then worn by volunteer firemen in New York. Who knew?

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For those of you who might be interested, I will be talking about Sigrid Schultz on the History Happy Hour podcast on Sunday, August 18 at 3pm central time.  You can watch it in real time here:  https://www.facebook.com/events/1514126705853093 or here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ1eErYSE6E.  It will also be available for streaming later.