National Gary Day

In 1906 the United States Steel Corporation laid out a town at the southern end of Lake Michigan, east of Chicago. It named the place for Elbert H. Gary, its chief organizer.

Making room for it meant rearranging the landscape. Large areas were drained, the sand dunes removed and a meandering river rerouted. The town was incorporated that year, and the city followed in 1909.

The place was so new that its newness became a plot device. In Meredith Willson's 1957 musical The Music Man, Marian the Librarian catches out the travelling salesman Harold Hill because he claims a music degree from the Gary Conservatory, Class of 1905, when the city did not yet exist.

Not much, at first. The count stayed in the low hundreds through 1927. Then it turned.

In 1928 it rose by almost 75 percent on the year before. In 1929, the year Cooper became a major star in his first sound picture, it more than doubled.

After that it ran for decades, then slid back down the list. The day attached to the name is younger and thinner, and nothing in the record says who began it. What can be dated is the observance in the wild: on 19 November 2023 a Chicago television newsroom asked viewers whether they knew that November 20 was National Gary Day, then spent it on a man who works behind the scenes on Good Day Chicago.