After Visiting Friends (3 page)

#  #  #

By September 1957, my mother has been working at the
Tribune
for almost five years. She starts when she’s sixteen, still a senior at Gage Park
High School. My mother ends up there because my grandmother sees a help-wanted ad
in the
Tribune
classifieds. Years later, my mother sends the ad to me. My grandmother had kept it
packed away and my mother uncovers it after she moves her into Central Baptist. My
mother scribbles a note:
Mike, A step back in time. Love, Mom

GIRL FOR TRIBUNE

16 TO 19 YEARS OF AGE.

ERRANDS, CLERICAL, IN NEWS DEPT.

DAY SHIFT. 40 HOURS A WEEK.

MUST BE WILLING TO WORK SATURDAYS

AND SUNDAYS. THIS JOB AVAILABLE

AFTER AUGUST 28. ANSWER BY LETTER

ONLY TO TONY STEGER, NEWS DEPT.

4
^TH
FL. TRIBUNE TOWER

435 NORTH MICHIGAN AVE.

When my father arrives from Nebraska, my mother is barely twenty-one years old, a
gal Friday for the paper’s editorial cartoonists. She attends college part-time but
will not graduate. She’s too in love with the newspaper life. Later she will work
on the
Tribune
’s Radio-Television desk, writing up listings for the television guide.

“The
Tribune
was the happiest time of my life,” she tells me.

In a room full of crusty old guys with cigarettes singed to their lips and half-drained
bottles rattling in their desk drawers, she stands out. “She was all our daughters,”
one of them tells me years later. “We adored her.” She blossoms under their attention.
She begins to see there is a world beyond the world she knows. A world of smart, knowing
men. A world at the center of the world. A world that knows what’s happening. A world
where things happen. Like the day Bob Hope drops by. She gets her photo taken with
him. Her parents
can’t believe it. Or the day she goes down to the Radio Grill and buys drinks for
the guys. A slew of screwdrivers in paper cups on a plastic cafeteria tray that she
carries across Michigan Avenue and up the elevator into the City Room. Twenty drinks,
to go. Her idea.

“I thought it’d be funny,” she tells me. “All the guys loved it.” Then she does that
thing she always does—waves her hand and looks away and says, “I don’t know.”

All the while, she’s living with her parents in the West Elsdon neighborhood, by the
runways of Midway Airport, on the city’s Southwest Side. A small, tidy house among
row after row of small, tidy houses built on old prairie, just after World War II
was won and the men came home. Each with a small yard. In theirs, my grandfather plants
a silver maple. Broad-limbed and overarching. Its seeds, come spring, green and conjoined.
Thin wings. As a boy I would gather handfuls of them. Split them from each other.
Cast them to the wind. Watch them helicopter to places beyond my reach.

In the fall of 1957, the man who will become my father walks into the
Tribune
newsroom and starts working with his brother as a copy editor. I have a photo of
the two of them sitting face-to-face at the copy desk, my uncle speaking, and my father,
listening.

My father covers the city. He writes a feature about the construction of Chicago’s
new water-filtration plant. (
WORLD’S BIGGEST WATER FILTRATION PLANT HERE NEARLY A THIRD COMPLETED
); he writes about a man trying to get the Dukes, a West Side gang, off the streets
(
DUKES NO LONGER HAVE THEIR DUKES UP; HERE’S WHY
); he writes a piece about the dead-letter office (
DEAD LETTERS? POST OFFICE SLEUTHS KEEP ’EM ALIVE
); the 4-H Fair (
DOZING ENTRIES BELIE BUSTLE AT 4-H FAIR
); the tale of a man named Otis T. Carr, trying to raise money to build the flying
saucer he wants to fly to the moon (
TRIP TO MOON? OTIS IS READY
); about a reunion of men who’ve been saved by the Pacific Garden Mission (
SKID ROW GRADS HOLD A REUNION—EX-ALCOHOLICS PRAISE GOD AND MISSION
). He cuts these stories from the paper and mails
them home to Nebraska, where his mother pastes them in another scrapbook.

For the next couple of years, he will move from general assignment reporter to copy
editor to assistant picture editor. It’s a lot of movement because the “Old Men,”
as management is known, have marked him as an up-and-comer, and they want him to get
experience.

By 1957, the
Tribune
is the biggest and most powerful of Chicago’s five dailies. As a morning paper, it
competes with the
Sun-Times
. The
Defender
is also a morning paper, but since it is for the city’s black population, the other
dailies don’t pay much attention to it. The two afternoon papers—the
Daily News
and the
Chicago American
(which later changes its name to
Chicago Today
)—are sister publications of the
Sun-Times
and the
Tribune,
respectively. The
Tribune
still labors under the shadow of “the Colonel”—Colonel Robert McCormick, the recently
dead owner. Grandson of the paper’s founder and grandnephew of Cyrus McCormick, the
man who developed the reaper, the Colonel is a rabid Republican and uses the paper
to crusade against the New Deal, back Joe McCarthy, and rant against the Commie threat,
wherever he imagines it to be. He plants an American flag on the banner and dubs the
Tribune
“An American Paper for Americans.” In November 1948, it is the Colonel and his obsessive
Republican wishful thinking, as much as any editor’s ineptitude, that results in the
Tribune
’s most infamous headline:
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
. The Colonel dies in 1955—four days before Richard J. Daley gets elected to the first
of his six terms as mayor—but his presence looms over the paper for years. “That’s
not the way the Colonel would want it” is what men say in the newsroom to keep someone
in check. A paper edited by a dead man.

#

In one of my father’s scrapbooks, there is an 8½-x-11 black and white, shot by one
of the
Tribune
photographers. It’s a crowd scene,
and there, on the edge of the red carpet that unspools up and out of the picture,
is my father—crew-cut, notebook in hand, alone in a cluster of dignitaries crowding
the steps of the Ambassador West hotel. In front of my father stands Prince Philip.
In front of him, his wife, the young queen—Elizabeth. In the photo, all eyes are on
her. She is white-sun-hatted and white-dressed, and about to step from a wide and
deep whitewalled Lincoln convertible. Men, waiting for her to alight, hold ajar her
suicide doors. Her white-gloved hand touches the side of the black car. Mayor Daley
watches her. And he—my young father, off to the side—watches this woman hardly older
than he, really, as she prepares to ascend the steps. It is 1959 and the queen has
come to Chicago to celebrate the completion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, linking
Lake Michigan and the Atlantic Ocean, linking Chicago to the world. From here, finally,
a man can sail unimpeded.

The next day, July 7, my father’s story runs with the subheadlines:

ROSES, QUIPS

BRIGHTEN MEAL

FOR ELIZABETH

————

QUEEN EATS A LITTLE,

LAUGHS A LOT

My father tells Chicago what Elizabeth ate at lunch (lamb and duck, local) and what
Governor Stratton of Illinois gives her as a gift (Carl Sandburg’s six-volume set
of books on Abraham Lincoln).

#

The first Saturday in May 1959. Derby Day. My father and his pal from McCook, Bob
Morris, the same guy who was with him at the
Gazette,
are tossing a Kentucky Derby bash to break in their new apartment. My dad thumbtacks
an invite to the newsroom bulletin board. It’s BYOB.

My mother’s just broken her engagement to a man she had been
dating for a year. She ends it after she realizes he drinks too much. She breaks down
in front of her parents at their kitchen table, telling them between sobs that she
doesn’t love the man. My grandparents stare at her. They do not have the vocabulary
for this. My grandfather says, “You need to talk to the priest.”

As my mother tells me years later—“There I am, twenty-two years old and living at
home, my life falling apart, and what do my parents tell me to do? Go talk to the
priest. I walk over to the rectory of Saint Turibius, ring the doorbell. I hated it.”

Her girlfriends at the paper, looking out for her, tell my mother she should go to
the party.

“You know,” says Diane Lenzi, who works in the
Tribune
’s Morgue, “Hainey looks like a nice one. Why don’t you see if you can get him to
date you?”

When my mother tells me this, I ask, “Did you go to the party alone?”

“Of course not,” she says. “I brought a six-pack.”

#

She borrows my grandfather’s Ford Fairlane. A ’55. Blue and white. It’s the first
car my grandfather has ever owned, as he doesn’t get his license until 1955, when
he’s forty-five.

She has to drive all the way to the North Side, almost to Evanston. She’s never been
this far north. She arrives just after 4 p.m., in time to see the horses go off on
the small black and white.

The man who will become my father is not there. He’s working the late shift and doesn’t
arrive until ten. My father, arriving late. My mother, waiting. From the start, their
pattern.

She’s a girl in a blue skirt and a yellow cashmere cardigan. She knows she’s supposed
to talk to him. But that’s not something she does. Suddenly a friend pulls her over
to Bob Hainey and his group of young newsmen in a corner, all confident.

“Bob,” her friend says, pushing my mother toward the circle. “You know Barbara Hudak.
Radio-TV desk?”

“I do,” he says.

Because he does know her. And she knows him. For months, the old men in the newsroom
have been telling her, “He’s a guy worth knowing.” And they’ve been telling him, “She’s
a girl to get to know.” Now, here they are. They talk. They drink. The circle of friends
expands, contracts, expands, and then, finally, contracts to just them. Two new friends.

She looks at her watch. “I need to go home.”

“Why? We’re having fun. I just got here.”

She tells him that tonight, her father starts work at 3 a.m. He’s an engraver at a
printing plant in town, she says, crafting the metal plates for
Life
magazine.

“If I don’t leave now,” she says, “
Life
doesn’t happen.”

#

He asks her out. Their nights, a rhythm.

My father works 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., drives his ’57 Plymouth to the South Side to pick
her up, then drives to one of his haunts on the North Side. He wears a suit and tie.
Ever since he showed up for his first day of college, he’s made it a priority to dress
well. “I’ll never forget how I felt,” he tells my grandmother years later, “showing
up there in my Nebraska clothes, seeing all those guys with money. I’m in brown and
they’re in blue. I got the picture fast.”

Their first date is at the Bit & Bridle. My father likes it because it once was a
roadhouse. Left over from a time when the area north of the city was stables, pastures,
and nurseries. Inside, pine-paneled walls the color of honey. Paintings of men in
red jackets and black hats, riding horses, tallyhoing over hedges and fields. The
waiter shows them to a tight, round table. A small red candle glows between them.
The man asks what they want to drink. My father says, “Manhattan.”

My mother freezes, doesn’t want to embarrass herself.

“That’s when I looked to the bar and saw a sign,” she tells me later. “It said Champale.
I ordered that. I figured it was classy.”

My mother has instructions from my grandmother: “I don’t want you sitting in the car
and necking. Just come in the house and do it, if you have to do it.”

They stop at the door and he kisses her. The wind blows and rustles the leaves of
the silver maple that shades them from the streetlamp’s glare.

#

A few weeks later, he asks her to be his date to the Page-One Ball—an awards dinner
for Chicago newspapermen. It is June 13—my mother’s birthday. But she doesn’t tell
him.

After the awards, he drives her home. On Ogden Avenue, cop lights in his rearview.
Maybe he’s had too much to drink. Worse, he’s in Cicero, a city unto itself. This
is where Capone ruled. My father pulls to the curb. He hands the cop his license,
a five-dollar bill paper-clipped to it.

“This ain’t gonna do, sir.”

He hands my father his license, the five bucks gone. The cop tells my father to get
in the squad car.

He points to my mother. “You follow.”

The car’s a stick. She barely knows how to drive one. But she follows them to the
station—just in time to see my father taken away to a cell. Another cop drives my
mother home. She doesn’t hear from my father until the next afternoon, after he calls
Uncle Dick to bail him out. Everything gets fixed when Dick shows up and tells the
cops that my father is a reporter, too.

When my father is led out of his cell, the desk sergeant says, “Why didn’t you say
you were one of us? Next time, show us your press pass.”

The cop puts a hand on my uncle’s shoulder. “He’s lucky he has you.”

#

By the late 1950s, four of the five newspapers are clustered in a tight circle around
Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River, in the shadow of the Wrigley Building. Each
newspaper has its preferred bar, each but a few steps out its front door. The
Tribune
men drink at the Boul Mich. Some nights, my father takes my mother there. Sometimes,
my mother meets my father at the Press Club in the Hotel St. Clair, where the reporters
for all the papers hang out. Men in dark suits drinking brown iced drinks. She likes
it because a man plays the piano, and Joe, the bartender, shines attention on her.
“He just thought I was something else,” she tells me. “And he loved Bob, too.” Sometimes
my father takes her to the Tip Top Tap, a cozy bar atop the Allerton Hotel, overlooking
Michigan Avenue. And sometimes they go to Radio Grill on Hubbard Street, where they’re
served by Frank Morgner. As a nine-year-old back in Columbus, Ohio, Morgner was run
over by a horse-drawn cart and lost his right leg. A year or two later, he made friends
with another boy in town—Foy Large, who’d lost his left leg after he was run over
by a train. Eventually, the two boys worked up a tumbling-and-dance act based around
a pair of extra-wide trousers so they could stand together on their good legs. They
played theaters all over the country and made two world tours, including the London
Palladium and the Alhambra in Paris.