As dyed-in-the-wool members of
the old Valley Gang, the older Touhy boys learned the dark arts of burglary, daylight
holdups and labor extortion, at which they excelled. There is a story that
became underworld legend, how one stormy night in 1909, Patrolman James Touhy
was walking his beat when he confronted his eldest son, Jimmy leaving Paddy the
Bear's saloon with a burglar's bag over his shoulder. The normally
quick-tempered Touhy remained uncharacteristically calm.
"Open the bag," his father said.
When the young man did as he was told, out
rolled burglary tools and a bottle of nitroglycerin- an explosive used on
difficult safes around the turn of the century. The elder Touhy cuffed his son
and then called a paddy wagon to have the boy taken to the station to be
booked.
"You book him,"he told the cop
behind the desk. "It's bad enough to arrest my own son without going to
court to testify against him."
Nothing good came from the Touhy boys. In
1917 Jimmy Touhy was killed in a botched robbery attempt. His brother, Joe
Touhy was killed in a freak shooting ten years later. Brother John tracked down
Joe's killer and murdered him, only to die of consumption in the state prison
several years later. Tommy Touhy, the second eldest and most fearless and
feared of the lot, grew to be a ruthless outlaw who well deserved his nickname
'Terrible Touhy." By 1919, Tommy was one of Chicago's leading hoods.
With poverty and crime on the rise in the
Valley, James Touhy gave up on his elder sons, and, early in the summer of
1908, he moved his daughters, Eleanor and Eileen, and ten-year old son Roger to
the tiny village of Downer's Grove. The village had been created only
seventy-five years earlier, taking its name from a New Englander, Pierce
Downer, who settled on what had been the crossing of two ancient Indian trails.
In Downer's Grove, Roger became a
better-than- average baseball player and an above-average student. In general
it was a pleasant time in his life. "It was a good enough boyhood,"
he remembered. "I played baseball and raised the usual amount of the devil
and got teased because my hair was curley. [sic] If I had anything to gripe
about, I didn't realize it, because the other boys didn't have any more than I
did, generally speaking."
He took up ham operations as a hobby and
built his own set at home and learned the international code. He attended St. Joseph's
Roman Catholic church and school while the parish was still being run out of a
hall over the top of the Des Plains hardware shop.
Since the family was strapped for cash,
Roger worked around the parish as a handyman and assistant to the parish priest
and its first pastor, Father Eneas Goodwin. Roger's duties included serving mass
as an altar boy and accompanying the priest as his driver in a rented horse
buggy on his twice weekly rounds. "At whatever house we stopped there
would be refreshments-apple pies, lemonade, thick sandwiches, salads, pickles,
ice cream. Father waved the food away, but I ate fit to bust a gut....In the
church there was a big oil painting of the Last Supper. Father Goodwin
explained it to me, saying that a man called Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ
for thirty pieces of silver. A thing like that can have a remarkable influence
on a kid. I began thinking of Judas as a stool pigeon, a word I knew as did all
youngsters. While sweeping up the church and dusting the pews I would stop and
look for a long time at the painting. I picked out the face of a man I figured
was Judas, and I would stand there hating him."