Bob Zemko gained notoriety as a hometown hero in Chicago in the late 1960s while working as a truck driver for The Chicago Tribune. In two separate incidents in 1969, he used his imposing size and strength to rescue victims of street assaults on Chicago's North Side, first saving a teenage girl from an attacker armed with a butcher knife, and then rescuing a man being beaten by six street thugs. In this last incident, the thugs turned on Zemko and he ended up hospitalized with a broken cheekbone; he had periodic problems with blurred vision for the rest of his life from this incident, and was troubled by the fact that a crowd watched the attack and no one came to his aid. Tragically, in October 1974 he was found hanged in a Chicago jail cell a few hours after being arrested at a record store on a drunk and disorderly charge. The record store was at the same intersection where he had battled the thugs five years earlier.