T. C. Corbett

Former pilot, newspaperman, and summer resort owner Thomas Cyril "Cy" Corbett (1895-1976) grew up in Chicago’s south side neighborhood of Woodlawn. His Irish-Catholic family consisted of a younger sister and brother, his widowed mother and aunt. A serious student from a young age, he attended St. Ignatius high school and Loyola University.

At the outbreak of World War I, Cy left school to enlist in the Army Air Corps. Training was exciting, exhilarating, and dangerous: he experienced sixteen forced landings and one serious crash, which likely contributed to a painful abdominal ailment that affected him for the rest of his life.

In 1921 he joined the Chicago Tribune as a copywriter in their business department, and was instrumental in creating advertisements promoting the opening of the Tribune Tower in 1925. He continued at the Tribune with various writing and editing assignments until 1944, when he retired to Michigan and built a small summer resort where he lived until his death at age eighty.

Throughout his life he kept journals which provided him an avenue to record observations about the people he knew, and acted as a therapy to cope with bouts of depression, which he dubbed “The Irish Melancholy.”

Though he never published a book while alive, family members were prompted to compile his personal papers and journals into an autobiographical series dubbed the Cy Corbett Chronicles.

When he was in his fifties, Cy was asked why he was so diligent in keeping his journals. His reply, which he repeated often: "A man should not be inarticulate just because he is dead."