City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America

by Donald L. Miller

“Give me plenty of work, and it is about all the tonic I want,” he would say, but his secret was that he knew how to relax. In his later years he would leave the office at around three or four o’clock and go for a ride along Lake Shore Drive in his custom-built buggy, taking the reins himself and driving his two blooded trotters as fast as they could run. Then, his head cleared of business concerns, he would stop by the Armour Institute, the technical school that was his favorite charity, to see “my boys” and on his way home pay a visit to his grandchildren. He was back at 2115 Prairie Avenue by six and in bed by nine, unfailingly. “I never think of the office until I return to it,” he told Dreiser. “Your sleep is never disturbed?” “Not at all.” “You have your pile… why not retire?” a Chicago journalist once asked him. He couldn’t, he shot back. “I do not love the money; what I do love is the getting of it, the making it.”