Robert J. Quinn Fire commissioner Robert J. Quinn (1905-1979) commanded the Chicago Fire Department from 1955 to 1978. His last residence in Chicago was at Marina City. During the 1968 riots, Quinn directed fire fighters from a helicopter.

James Brady Former White House press secretary James Brady lived at Marina City most probably in the early 1970s.

Shortly after the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, in which Brady was seriously injured, Chicago Tribune columnist Raymond Coffey recalled a time in July when Brady’s wife, Sara, wanted him to get rid of the Christmas tree.

According to Coffey, Brady picked up the tree, walked to the balcony, and threw it several hundred feet to the street below.

John Palmer Former NBC News correspondent John Palmer lived at Marina City from 1963 to 1969. He moved to Chicago from Atlanta. The original developer of Marina City, Charles Swibel, showed him about five apartments and he chose Unit 4505 in the west tower. He had a view looking west toward Merchandise Mart, where he worked. (NBC Tower was not built until 1989.)

He moved in September 1963 and in November, President Kennedy was assassinated. Palmer says he heard about it while shopping for furniture for his apartment.

Despite the four-block walk to work in freezing winter weather, Palmer says he enjoyed living at Marina City. He had a boat and in the summer, after doing the early evening news, he’d call the marina and they’d have it ready for him.

“My boat, which I owned with two other guys,” says Palmer, “was a 27 foot cabin cruiser named the ’Sea Deuce‘.”

He was the first tenant of #4505. He liked having a balcony, from which he could check the weather.

He remembers when Murray “The Camel” Humphreys, a Chicago crime syndicate figure, died of a heart attack in November 1965 in his 51st floor apartment at Marina City. He had been arrested and released on bond earlier in the day. Palmer recalls that when WMAQ-TV reporter Marjorie “Jorie” Lueloff came to the scene, police mistook her for a grieving girlfriend and let her in.

Jorie Lueloff was the first woman to anchor a daily television newscast in Chicago.

Another time, he was asked by an NBC producer, during the Vietnam War, to help find draft evaders for a documentary. He arranged for a meeting at Marina City of young men of draft age, some of whom were under indictment for draft evasion. The meeting did not go unnoticed by local FBI agents, who even questioned the pizza delivery man. The next day, two agents “in white shirts and hats” visited Palmer at Merchandise Mart.

Palmer, born in 1935, now lives in Washington, D.C., and hosts programs on Retirement Living Television, a television network designed for people age 62 and older.

He worked for NBC for 40 years. Besides Chicago, he worked in Paris and the Middle East. He was a White House correspondent from 1979 to 1982, news anchor for The Today Show from 1982 to 1989, and anchor for NBC News at Sunrise from 1989 to 1990. In 1994, he came back to NBC News and was a Washington correspondent until retiring in 2002.

John Denver Born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., John Denver (1943-1997) and his wife, Annie, lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the 47th floor of the west tower.

In 1967, they took over the lease of Mike Kobluk, an original member of Chad Mitchell Trio.

Kobluk and his wife, Clare, lived in Unit 4707 from 1963 to 1967. In June 1967, Denver and his wife, Annie, took over the Kobluk’s lease.

Kobluk says when they moved in, theirs was the only completed unit on the floor. “Since it was promised by a certain date, the contractors completed my unit first and continued working all around and above us.”

Denver had replaced Chad Mitchell, who left in 1965 to pursue a solo singing career.

The trio chose Chicago because their business manager and booking agency representative were there. They traveled to colleges throughout the country and, says Kobluk, “it made sense to be located in the middle of everything, and close to Chicago’s airports.”

Photograph by Mike Kobluk shows John Denver playing a guitar inside a Marina City apartment in June 1967. Seated on the sofa are, at left, Denver’s wife, Annie, and Bob Hefferan, a guitar accompanist for Chad Mitchell Trio. (Kobluk could not recall the names of the other people in the photo.)

Yvonne Daniels Known as “The First Lady of Chicago Radio,” Yvonne Daniels (1937-1991) was the first female disc jockey at WLS Chicago.

She was the daughter of jazz singer Billy Daniels. She started her radio career in Jacksonville, Illinois. In Chicago, she worked for WYNR, WCFL, and WSDM, before joining WLS in 1973. In the 1980s, she was heard on WVON, WGCI, and WNUA.

She was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.

With her husband, Ben Williams, Daniels lived at Marina City in the 1980s and early 90s until succombing to breast cancer in June 1991. In October of that year, a stretch of Dearborn Street next to Marina City was given the honorary name of Yvonne Daniels Way.

Max Robinson Max Robinson (1939-1988) was the first African-American network news anchor in the U.S. Based in Chicago, he co-anchored World News Tonight from 1978 to 1983. He then worked at local station WMAQ-TV in 1984 and 1985.

Robinson lived at Marina City until shortly before his death of AIDS in 1988. He lived on the 50th floor in an apartment with a view of Wacker Drive and the Chicago River.

In 1990, actor/comedian Aaron Freeman wrote an article for Chicago Magazine (“The Last Days of Max Robinson”), recalling his visit in May 1988 to Robinson’s “tiny” apartment. Wrote Freeman, “The 30-foot trip across the living room to the kitchen exhausted him.”