Touch and Go (5 page)

Still others, for whom history has stood still since the Democratic convention of 1968, murmur: Mayor Daley. (As Chicago's most perceptive chronicler, Mike Royko, pointed out, the name has become the eponym for “city chieftain”; thus, it is often one word, “mare-daley.”) The tone, in distant quarters as well as here, is usually one of awe; you may interpret it any way you please. “Who's the mare-daley of your town?”

Carl Sandburg, the white-haired old Swede with the wild cowlick, drawled out that brag in 1914. Today, he is regarded in more soft-spoken quarters as an old gaffer, out of fashion, more attuned to the street corner than the class in American studies. Unfortunately, there is some truth to the charge that his dug-out-of-the-mud city, sprung-out-of-the-fire-of-1871 Chicago, is no longer what it was when the Swede sang that song. It is no longer the slaughterhouse of the hang-from-the-hoof hogs. The stockyards have gone to feedlots in, say, Clovis, New Mexico, or Greeley, Colorado, or Lo-gansport, Indiana. It is no longer the railroad center, when there were at least seven awesome depots where a thousand passenger trains refueled themselves each day; and it is no longer, since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the stacker of wheat.

During all these birth years of the twenty-first century, the unique landmarks of American cities have been replaced by Golden Arches, Red Lobsters, Pizza Huts, and Marriotts, so you can no longer tell one neon wilderness from another. As your plane lands, you no longer see old landmarks, old signatures. You have no idea where you may be. A few years ago, while I was on a wearisome book tour, I mumbled to the switchboard operator at the motel, “Please wake me at six a.m. I must be in Cleveland by noon.” Came the response: “Sir, you are in Cleveland.” That Chicago, too, has so been affected is of small matter. It has been and always will be, in the memory of the nine-year-old boy arriving here, the archetypal American city.

One year after Warren G. Harding's anointment, almost to the day, the boy stepped off the coach at the La Salle Street depot. He had come from east of the Hudson and had been warned by the kids on the Bronx block to watch out for Indians. The Blackhawks. The boy felt not unlike Ruggles, the British butler, on his way to Red Gap. Envisioning painted faces and feathered war bonnets.

In Kiev, in 1963, I ran into kids who on hearing me say “Chicago” burst into laughter. They waved imaginary hockey sticks and howled out “Blackhawks!”

AUGUST 1921. The boy had sat up all night, but had never been more awake and exhilarated. At Buffalo, the vendors had passed through the aisles. A cheese sandwich and a half-pint carton of milk was all he had had during the twenty-hour ride. But on this morning of the great awakening, he wasn't hungry.

His older brother was there at the station. Grinning, gently jabbing at his shoulder. He twisted the boy's cap around. “Hey, Nick Altrock,” the brother said. He knew the boy knew that this baseball clown with the turned-around cap had once been a great pitcher for the White Sox. The boy's head as well as his cap was awhirl.

There was expensive-looking luggage carried off the Pullmans. Those were the cars up front, a distant planet away from the day coaches. There were cool Palm Beach–suited men and even cooler, lightly clad women stepping down from these cars. Black men in red caps—all called George—were wheeling luggage carts toward the terminal. My God, all those bags for just two people. “Twentieth Century Limited,” the brother whispered. “Even got a barbershop on that baby.”

There were straw suitcases and bulky bundles borne elsewhere. There were all those other travelers, some lost, others excitable in heavy, unseasonable clothing. Their talk was broken English or a strange language or an American accent foreign to the boy. Where were the Indians?

This was Chicago, indubitably the center of the nation's railways, as the Swede from Galesburg had so often sung out. Chicago to Los Angeles. Chicago to Anywhere. All roads led to and from Chicago. No wonder the boy was bewitched.

Chicago has always been and still is the City of Hands. Horny, calloused hands. Yet, here they came: the French voyageurs; the Anglo traders; the German burghers, many of whom were the children of those dreamers who dared dream of better worlds. So it was
that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra came into being; one of the world's most highly regarded. It was originally Teutonic in its repertoire; now it is universal.

They came, too, from Eastern Europe as hands. The Polish population of Chicago is second only to that of Warsaw. They came from the Mediterranean and from below the Rio Grande; and there was always the inner migration from Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. The African American journalist grandson of slaves spoke with a touch of nostalgia, memories of his hometown, Paris. That is, Paris, Tennessee. “Out in the fields, we'd hear the whistle of the Illinois Central engineer. OOOweee! There goes the IC to—Chica-a-ago!” It was even referred to in the gospel song “City Called Heaven.”

The city called heaven, where there were good jobs in the mills and you did not have to get off the sidewalk when a white passed by. Jimmy Rushing sang the upbeat blues, “Goin' to Chicago, Baby, Sorry I Can't Take You.”

It wasn't quite heaven. In 1919, an African American boy swam into a zone considered white and was stoned into the waves, setting off the riots of 1919.

Here I came in 1921, the nine-year-old, who for the next fifteen years lived and clerked at the rooming house, run by my mother, and the Wells-Grand Hotel. (My ailing father ran it for its first several years, and then my mother, a much tougher customer, took over.)

To me, it was simply referred to as the Grand, the Chicago prototype of the posh pre-Hitler Berlin Hotel. It was here I encountered our aristocrats as guests: the boomer firemen, who blazed our railroad engines; the seafarers who sailed the Great Lakes; the self-educated craftsmen, known as the Wobblies but whose proper name was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Here in our lobby, they went head-to-head with their
bêtes noires
, the anti-union stalwarts, who tabbed “IWW” as the acronym for “I Won't Work.”

Oh, those were wild, splendiferous debates, outdoing in decibel power the Lincoln-Douglas bouts. These were the Hands of Chicago
making themselves heard loud and clear. It was the truly Grand Hotel, and I felt like the concierge of the Ritz of Paris.

There were labor battles, historic ones, where the fight for the eight-hour day had begun. It brought forth the song: “Eight hours we'd have for working, eight hours we'd have for play, eight hours for sleeping, in free Amerikay.” It was in Chicago that the Haymarket Affair took place and four men were hanged in a farcical trial that earned our city the world's opprobrium. Yet it is to our city's honor that our governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving defendants in one of the most eloquent documents ever issued on behalf of justice.

The simple truth is that our God, Chicago's God, is Janus, the two-faced one. One is that of Warner Brothers films with Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson as our sociopathic icons. The other is that of Jane Addams, who introduced the idea of the Chicago Woman and world citizen.

It was Chicago that brought forth Louis Sullivan, whom Frank Lloyd Wright referred to as “Lieber Meister.” Sullivan envisioned the skyscraper. It was here that he wanted to touch the heavens. Nor was it any accident that young Sullivan corresponded with the elderly Walt Whitman, because they both dreamed of democratic vistas, where Chicago was the City of Man rather than the City of Things. Though Sullivan died broke and neglected, it is his memory that glows as he is recalled by those who followed Wright.

What the nine-year-old boy felt about Chicago in 1921 is a bit more mellow and seared. He is aware of its carbuncles and warts, a place far from heaven, but it is his town, the only one he calls home.

Nelson Algren, Chicago's bard, said it best: “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

T
he Gilded Age was coming to an end as a new century was beginning. The robber barons had a lush life, mostly at the expense of immigrant women slaving away at the textile mills and their men at the railroad yards.

The Republican, Warren Gamaliel Harding, had become president and promised an era of “back to normalcy.”

The changes had taken place: the Jazz Age, the Stutz Bearcat, the pocket flask, the bobbed hair.

 

 

WE HAD FIFTY ROOMS, corner of Ashland and Flournoy, on Chicago's Near West Side. The area was primarily Italian, though there were several rooming houses around and about. Single-room occupancies were what they really were, though there were a couple of “suites” where hotplates and light housekeeping was in certain circumstances allowed.

Cook County Hospital, the biggest medical institution in the world, was only two years old and a few blocks away. Many of the dormitories had not yet been built. There was, you may imagine, a mingling of student nurses and interns in our establishment, and something considerably more than mingling on occasion. Laborers and semi-skilled workers, working for the city, were, by and large, our patrons.

One of them, an Italian railroad worker, brought in his maiden aunt Josefina, who had been raised in a Calabrian village and never had left it until this moment. She was a stranger in a strange land. He had paid her way to America and paid her rent at the rooming house. He made it clear to my mother, hoping she'd consent, that Josefina would need special attention. My mother was sympathetic enough to allow her light-housekeeping privileges. In fact, she helped her guest in shopping. And when there were occasional complaints about the exotic aroma of Italian food, Annie shushed them immediately. Annie treated her as a soft person in a hard world. This was the paradox that was my mother.

Annie was sympathetic to women who were in trouble. She was a crazy kind of feminist, a red-stocking feminist. This young hooker lived at the rooming house, though she didn't bring people up to her room. This little guy Froggy was the pimp who kept her, paid for her room. One day screaming is heard. Froggy is beating the hell out of her, smacking her around. Mother comes in and starts swinging at him. Bam, bam, bam. Not little scratches; tight little fists, bone-hard. He didn't know what the hell to do. “You touch her again, I'll kill you.” Poor Froggy ended up all bloody, and that was the last we saw of him.

Among the other guests were single women doing secretarial work. One such was Helena Turner, the “protégé” of a successful florist, Jimmy Bonavaglia, who paid her weekly rent. At one time, he was delinquent for several weeks. My mother approached him and asked for the money. He was about Annie's height, and raised himself to his full five-feet-one. He said, “Do you know who you're talking to?”

“No, who am I talking to?”

“Jimmy Bonavaglia.”

“Do you know who you're talking to?

“Who am I talking to?”

“You're talking to Annie Terkel.” She collected.

There's a poignant postscript to the story of Helena Turner. She
was obviously a lonesome dove. My brother Ben was then about eighteen and something of a precocious Don Giovanni. He had worked as a shipping clerk at a mail-order house nearby, as well as beginning a career as a shoe dog, a salesman. His big night was Friday, when he attended Paddy Harmon's Dreamland Ballroom. It's where young women who did the anonymous work of offices in tall buildings went—secretaries, operators, and file clerks. And sometimes, if my brother was fortunate, a nurse. Nurses were considered a cut above the others.

(I frequently followed Ben to the Dreamland Ballroom. I was caught by this music that so excited me—jazz. The patrons, lowly though their status in life may have been, were solely white. The musicians were all black. How could I forget Lottie Hightower and her High Steppers, and, on occasion, Charlie Cook? There was, of course, a quid pro quo to this privilege. As soon as I sensed a score on my brother's part, I'd rush back to the rooming house, make certain our mother was asleep, enter a vacant room, and prepare the bed with fresh linens. Oh God, when I think what I might have become. With these natural instincts of mine, I might have been a favored advisor to presidents, or a corporate executive knowing the thoughts and longings of the CEO. Think of it: suggest firing several thousand of the lowlies, pick up a million-dollar bonus, and make the front page of the business section of our favorite newspaper.)

Helena Turner never went to such ballrooms. I've a hunch she'd have delighted to dance with Ben; but Jimmy Bonavaglia kept a sharp eye on Helena as well as on his stockpile of gladioli. What I do know as a certainty: Ben visited Helena in her room more than now and then. Some years later, just before we sold the rooming house, Ben picked up the newspaper. He was casually having a look-see at the sports page when a notice in the obituaries caught his attention. His mumbling suddenly stopped; his easy-come, easy-go manner vanished as his face assumed a bloodless pallor. He showed me the obit notice: Helena Turner had committed suicide. “Do you remember who she was?”