Flashback 2010: Dan Rostenkowski — The ultimate mover & shaker

    Dan Rostenkowski's name was mentioned at a party Thursday night — bidding a belated farewell to my colleague Mark Brown, who officially retired two years ago, but whose fete was nixed by COVID, and so circled back for some well-deserved cake in the newsroom. It was delicious cake.  Mark was one of the Sun-Times reporters who helped put Rostenkowski in prison — for what I considered a "Lone Trombonist Crime" (the marching band on the field makes a hard right turn; one poor schmuck trombonist keeps going straight). That, plus the anniversary of Rosty's death falling Friday, nudged me to realize I've never shared his obituary here. Let's correct that.

 

 Loyola University
Chicago Digital Special Collections,

     Dan Rostenkowski was the most important congressman ever to represent Chicago, "Mr. Chairman" of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, confidant of presidents, pride of the Polish community and bringer of millions upon millions of dollars in federal pork home to Illinois, until it all came crashing down in a scandal over minor expenses — postage stamps and office chairs — that tarnished his legacy and sent him to prison.
     Mr. Rostenkowski died Wednesday at his summer home in Wisconsin, surrounded by family. He was 82.
     He was never an eloquent speaker, but Mr. Rostenkowski's inside knowledge and useful connections — especially with Mayor Richard J. Daley — eased his rise, first in Springfield, then in Washington, where he was friendly with presidents from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton. He and Lyndon Johnson were particularly close.
     Among his most significant accomplishments were the 1986 rewriting of the tax code, the passing of the 1993 deficit-reduction package and the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
     Some said that, had Mr. Rostenkowski's conviction come six months later, Clinton might have succeeded in reforming health care. Instead, Mr. Rostenkowski pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud in 1996 and was sentenced to 17 months at the Oxford Correctional Facility in Wisconsin.
     Mr. Rostenkowski never apologized for the actions — he called them "technical violations" —that sent him to jail, though doing so might have eased his return. The central debate is whether Mr. Rostenkowski was a victim of changing times, an advocate for Illinois who was too focused on the big picture to worry about trivial expense account rules, or whether his life as a consummate political insider — born to an alderman, weaned on the Cook County Democratic Machine, given the inside track, first in Chicago and then in Washington — finally caught up with him, that times had changed, and he, lulled by power, had arrogantly refused to change with them.
     Daniel Rostenkowski was born Jan. 2, 1928, son of Joseph P. Rostenkowski, the 32nd Ward alderman, in the house built by his grandfather, Piotra Rostenkowskiego, born in Poland in 1868, who came to Chicago as a teenager.

     Like his dad, the boy was called "Rusty" — "Rosty" came later — and accompanied his father to Washington in 1941 to witness FDR's third inauguration.
     His surname lopped to "Rosten," he attended St. John's Military Academy in Wisconsin. The young man considered West Point but instead enlisted in the Army, serving in Korea from 1946 to 1948.
     Big and nimble, he went to the University of Kansas on a basketball scholarship, where he lasted a few weeks. He aspired to baseball and got a tryout with the Philadelphia Athletics farm team in Florida until his father pressed him to return to Chicago, where he worked as an investigator with the corporation counsel's office, got his real estate license, did some public relations for the Teamsters. In May 1951, he married LaVerne Pirkins, whom he met on a blind date.
     But in these jobs, Mr. Rostenkowski was just killing time until the right opportunity came along — his father pointed out a vacant Illinois House seat and urged his son to run. In 1952, after restoring the "-kowski" to the end of his name, he won the House seat. In 1954, he moved up to the Illinois Senate.
     Toward the end of the decade, he eyed Congress. Richard J. Daley would have preferred Mr. Rostenkowski to stay close to home. "Daley wanted to keep him around as another Cook County hack," Jim Merriner wrote in his book, Mr. Chairman. But Mr. Rostenkowski convinced the mayor that he needed a young hand to grow in power in Congress, and Mr. Rostenkowski was elected to the U.S. House in 1958.
     He was easily re-elected 17 times over the next 36 years.
     Throughout the 1960s, Mr. Rostenkowski built his power in the House. In 1967, he became chairman of the Democratic caucus.
    Mr. Rostenkowski played a brief role at the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention that was to have implications on the rest of his career. With police and protesters clashing in the streets of Chicago, the convention floor dissolved into chaos. An enraged Lyndon Johnson called the Amphitheater to find out what was going on. Mr. Rostenkowski took the call. LBJ told him to restore order.
     Taking the gavel from House Speaker Carl Albert, Mr. Rostenkowski banged it and called for security to clear the aisles.
     "But for those brief moments at the podium," Merriner wrote, "Rostenkowski may well have become Speaker of the House."

     Instead, Mr. Rostenkowski made an implacable foe of Albert, who felt bullied and spent years trying to thwart his ambitions toward House leadership.
     In the early 1980s, Mr. Rostenkowski had a major role in funding the construction of Chicago's four-building Presidential Towers, a classic political boondoggle that seemed to benefit everybody but the low-income residents it was supposed to house.
     A Sun-Times investigation revealed that Mr. Rostenkowski had provided governmental favors for the complex at a time when his personal finances were being managed by one of the developers.
     But it was an investigation into petty expenses, also led by the Sun-Times, that blew into scandal in the mid-1990s and led to Mr. Rostenkowski's losing his House seat.
     "I was there 36 years," he said in 1996. "They changed the rules 30 times. I can honestly say I was not fully cognizant of the rules and where there were changes. Maybe I was brazen, I ignored it."
     He was accused of chiseling $695,000 from his congressional and campaign funds over two decades. A 17-count indictment included charges of embezzlement, fraud and witness tampering.
     The actual acts that he pleaded guilty to were using government funds to pay for china he gave as gifts to friends and having congressional employees perform personal errands for himself and his family.
     After his indictment, he lost his bid for re-election in 1994.
     Inmate No. 25338-016 spent his nearly 13 months at his prison job, recording the numbers on boiler gauges, and slept on the bottom bunk in a four-man room.
     The last two months of his sentence were served in a Salvation Army halfway house on South Ashland Avenue.
     After his confinement  during which he shed 50 pounds — he formed Danross Associates, a consulting firm, and advised corporate clients, including the hotel workers union. He gave speeches and appeared on TV as a commentator.
     Many supporters saw the conviction as a farce. Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal called it "wrong and vengeful."
     "Dan Rostenkowski unfortunately ended his career with legal problems," Sen. Paul Simon noted in his memoirs, "but his contributions as chairman of Ways and Means helped the nation immensely. He had a quality not in abundance, backbone."
     Mr. Rostenkowski was issued a full pardon by President Clinton in 2000.
     Survivors include his wife, LaVerne, and daughters Dawn, Kristie and Gayle — who all shortened their names to Rosten. One daughter, Stacy Rosten-McDarrah, died of a kidney ailment in 2007.
     Visitation will be from 1 to 9 p.m. Monday at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, 1255 N. Noble. Services will be at the church at 10 a.m. Tuesday. Burial will follow in St. Adalbert Cemetery in Niles.

      —Originally published Aug. 10, 2010

No Casper, no Dante, no Halloween

Ofrendra by Norma Rios Sierra (Field Museum)

     Unlike you, I actually read books of contemporary poetry. Because they float my way and I like the cover. Or, in the case of “Citizen Illegal,” because a college-age neighbor loaned me José Olivarez’s 2018 debut collection. I take the literary recommendations of young people as a compliment, nearly a duty.
     I enjoyed Olivarez’s casual, lowercase tone, his honesty, nodding along as he explains how his therapist, encouraging him to “make friends with your monsters,” doesn’t realize just how relentless those beasts can be.

...i ran & it never stopped
chasing me. each new humiliation
coming to life & following after me.

     I forgave Olivarez the occasional broadside fired in my direction, such as in “Mexican Heaven,” which begins:

there are white people in heaven, too,
they build condos across the street
& ask the Mexicans to speak English.

     Well, yeah, we white folks can be jerks.
     The poem ends:

i’m just kidding.
there are no white people in heaven.

    Of course not. There can’t be, because white people don’t die. At least that’s the impression I took away last week from “Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery” at the Field Museum.
     The grim reaper gives us a tour of the globe. We see a Mexican ofrenda, eight paintings of a decomposing Japanese monk, a Ghanaian coffin decorated as a boat, a Haitian spirit flag, Peruvian mummies.
     I particularly liked the mask of Tai Shan Wang, a denizen of Chinese hell, “Judge of the 7th Court, where liars and gossipers had their tongues removed.”
     “Mmm, nice,” I thought. “We could sure use ...” Better stop there.
     Animals were not overlooked. A deep-sea octopus seems very angry to find himself in a jar of preservative. One display explores grief in the animal world.

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Ohio back in the fight

Berea Triangle, postcard circa 1960.

     There's a line in the Pete Townshend song "White City Fighting" that crosses my mind every time I find myself back in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. Standing in its little downtown triangle featuring one monument to the Bereans who fell in the Civil War and another to the USS Maine, blown up in Havana harbor in 1898, helping spark the Spanish-American War, made of steel recovered from the doomed battleship.
     "I couldn't wait to get out, but I love to go home."
     That's true. To pass the familiar stores — and the increasing mix of unfamiliar ones. To mark the spots where something once stood — here was the Berea movie theater, with its green and yellow marque. Here was Southwest General Hospital, now a nursing home. This was Wallace Lake, now a silted in, half muddy field, half swamp.
     Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell" came out when I was a senior at Berea High School, and as much as I loved the MetroParks, running a few blocks from my house, and the bone deep block by block, almost foot by foot familiarity that comes from growing up in a place, I just knew that my life, whatever it would be, would not unfold here.  Eighteen years and out.

     "And maybe I'm damned if I never get out, and maybe I'm damned if I do..."
     Not that the departure was without melancholy. I remember, the summer before I left for college, standing in the dry cleaner's — there was only one — and rotating the little metal rack with all the yellow tickets and reading the last names, the Campbells, the Cherrys, the Corenos. I knew them all, and I realized, with a certain indelible sadness, that I would never again be in a place where that would be true. 
     I wasn't attuned to Ohio politics beyond what I gleaned from my mother being a member of the League of Women Voters — the name itself vibrating with 19th century idealism. The mayor of Cleveland was the homunculus Dennis Kucinich — he's still on the political scene, a member of the shabby crew of third-rate failures surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His wife Sandi was a teacher at our high school, and he showed up before the performance of "The Wizard of Oz" and I noticed that students, teenagers, were turning away and busying themselves with makeup and such rather than notice him and shake his hand.

     But I thought of Ohio as a fairly down-to-earth place. We made stuff — in US Steel, the Ford Plant and the Chevy Plant, Youngstown and Lordstown. Glidden, General Electric, and Goodyear in Akron. Ohians farmed, and fed the world. So yes, we had Republicans, naturally, but they were of the Robert Taft Jr. variety — our senator. I still have the letter that my class at Fairwood School received from him after we sent letters expressing our concern about pollution "It is admirable that so many young people are concerned about this problem," the grandson of President William Howard Taft wrote.
    That was back long before the the Republican Party had swapped business for fantasy and become a cult, dancing around the golden calf of Donald Trump, buffing his statue with their long hair. Now a Republican star, Ron DeSantis, can declare war on one of Florida's largest employers, Disney, basically over a few press releases, and nobody bats an eye. Crazy is the new normal.
     Now the junior senator from Ohio is the loathsome piece of shit named J.D. Vance, who parlayed "Hillbilly Elegy," his book celebrating Appalachian poverty, into election to the senate. Cosplaying as a regular working person, the hedge fund investor became the first Ohio senator to take office with zero government experience. The graduate of Yale Law School at first saw Donald Trump clearly enough, expressing valid concerns that "he might be America's Hitler." Then he smelled personal advantage, and got in line for the proto-fuehrer's benediction. "The best president in my lifetime," Vance gushed, while Trump ridiculed him. "J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so much,” Trump sneered, before giving it, lowering his ring to waist level for Vance to smooch. And he did. And does.
     It saddened me that my home state could slide into nationalistic fervor. Ohio seemed so grounded in practicality — home to eight presidents, the aforementioned Taft plus William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren G. Harding. Not exactly an honor roll of excellence. But more commanders in chief than any other state, and not a radical among them. Warren G. Harding, long considered a nadir of corruption and cronyism, was Cincinnatus compared to the 45th president. 
     But maybe the days of Ohio as a bastion of stability and decency are not forever lost. Hope flickered anew Tuesday, with Ohio's referendum on whether the citizens could mute their ability to amend the constitution — a Republican ploy to game the system, and prevent voters from controlling their lives, trying to keep Ohio from following other states in enshrining women's reproductive rights constitutionally.  A referendum would move the vote needed to amend the constitution from 50 to 60 percent. Beyond the reach of the current divide.

      About 57 percent of Ohio voters said, "No, we'd like to keep our ability to decide how we live our lives." Some 43 percent voted to have that power taken away (Good thing they have those notional babies they can pretend to be saving, because otherwise, I'd think they're just hot to meddle in the sexual choices of women they've never met).

       My general relief that the totalitarian charge might be turned away was mixed with nostalgic pride. “You can fool all of the people some of the time," begins a popular 19th century saying variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln or P.T Barnum. "You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.”
     Ohioans, having been fooled for a while — they threw their support behind Trump twice — seem to be moving from the second to the third category. Whether they stay there, and whether the rest of the nation follows them, is an open question. But it is good to see Ohio back in the fight, on the side of the good guys once again.

Dictionary time with Brandon and John

 

Noah Webster seems to grasp the concept in his 1828 dictionary.

     Readers regularly fall into a trap I call the “Two Definitions Problem.” They know a word means A, but forget it can also mean B,
     For instance. On Monday, a reader chided me for referring to a choice between something that might cure you or kill you as “a dilemma.” A mistake, he lectured, because “a dilemma is a situation in which both possible outcomes are bad. ... Precise English is essential to the unambiguous writing for which you’re admired.”
     I replied by pointing out that while a dilemma indeed can be a choice between bad alternatives, it can also simply be “a difficult situation or problem.”
     We saw the Two Definitions Problem on public display last week at a Brandon Johnson press conference when a reporter called teens looting a 7-Eleven a “mob action” and the mayor objected.
     “We’re not talking about mob actions,” Johnson said. “To refer to children as, like baby Al Capones, is not appropriate.”
     There was a muffled “whump” as countless palms slapped countless foreheads. Meanwhile chairs innumerable scraped back as their occupants leapt up to cheer. The remark made headlines around the world.
     “Chicago’s woke new mayor Brandon Johnson scolds reporters for using phrase ‘mob action’ to describe rabble of ‘400’ youngsters who trashed 7-Eleven in Windy City” blared Britain’s conservative Daily Mail.

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Mail bag

     A heavier than usual load of reader mail Monday. While prudence dictates that most go unanswered, I responded to more than I probably should. The faux "I'm just discovering the world" tone of the first email moved me to reply. This guy has been sending me right wing fictions for a decade.
    

Dear Mr. Steinberg,

     I always look forward to your column in the Sun-Times, and thoroughly enjoyed the recent offering on the blockbuster film Barbie.
     Yesterday I saw 'The Sound of Freedom' and think it should be on many 10 Best Films of the Year lists. I hadn’t heard much about the film and was taken aback by the content and the message therein.
     I texted a friend about it and he said he wouldn’t see it because of QAnon.
     I can’t say I’ve ever heard of QAnon and googled same. I’m still a bit in the dark about this American political movement and theory, as I am sure others are.
     Please see the film and write an article about your observations as well as those you have on QAnon.

Thank you,

Dick N.
Rogers Park

     My reply:

    I appreciate you reading my column, but that doesn't make me in any way more open to the way QAnon has cynically seized the real problem of child trafficking as a figleaf to cover their shameful and toxic conspiracy peddling and anti-rationality. As for seeing the film, I will instead quote Kierkegaard: "Happy is he who didn't have to go to hell to know what the devil looks like." Since you profess to "still being a bit in the dark" about of QAnon — I don't see how that is possible, it's been around for years — and say you respect my opinion, allow me to fill you in: anyone parroting QAnon is either mentally ill, a chronic liar, irredeemably stupid, or some combination of the three. Thanks for writing.

As the Teletubbies said, "Again! Again!" 

     You are one of my favorite ex-Chicago authors and bloggers. (As I am an ex Chicago resident since 2005.) However you also seem to not have an actual clue as to how life goes on before and after Covid to the great majority of actual Illinois, Cook County, and Aldermanic Ward residents.
     My friends and relatives do suffer from these residencies. Their choice for now.
It might be more elucidating, and interesting if you, yourself spent more time within the City Limits, and then used your fine writing skills to report and reflect back to your readers.
I am a long time fan, (and ex Northbrook resident for one delightful year: 1970) but just wonder why you are no longer in the actual mix, of Chicagoland.
     — Mary C.

I chewed on that a bit, then tried to answer with all the candor I could muster:

Mary:

     Thanks for reading my column, for liking what I do, generally, and for your on-point suggestion and intriguing query.

     I suppose the honest answer to your question of why I don't spend more time in the city is a mix of the isolation and slow decay of age, lingering COVID, both tamping down society and affecting me personally — I was laid up with it most of July — not to forget my characteristic laziness, plus a lack of need. My most popular columns tend to be about some inane social subject — shopping at Aldi's — while columns that involve spending the morning crawling around Lower Wacker Drive with the Night Ministry get a chorus of crickets. I still do them, when I can find something, and try to go to the city whenever possible — I was there last Wednesday, at the Field Museum, then walking up the lakefront to the Gold Coast, then across the River Walk. On Friday, I was on the West Side, standing on the corner of Damen and Fulton, watching a Water Department crew repair a fire hydrant for two hours. I'll attach a photo below. That column will run a week from today.
     Until then, thank you for your patience when my column strays from your vision of what it should be, one that I share with you. That said, while I don't have many rules, as a writer, one I do adhere to is that I should always be who I am. This is who I am right now, for good or ill. Lately I've been quoting to readers dissatisfied with that person a sharp line from Shirley Jackson : "If you don't like my peaches; don't shake my tree."* But in this case, your remarks have such obvious merit, that doesn't quite apply, so I'll just say is that I agree with you, and will strive to do a better job of capturing the Chicago scene.
Best,
Neil Steinberg

There's more, but you get the idea.

* Reader Charles Troy points out that the line predates Jackson, and is found in a 1914 Irving Berlin song, "If You Don't Want My Peaches (You Better Stop Shaking My Tree)."

What I can’t say anymore

     When my official Maria Pappas, Cook County treasurer 2023 wall calendar arrived last December, I immediately put it on prominent display. How could I not? Every month, Pappas models from her wardrobe of flashy fashion. The whole thing harkening back to a bygone era of outsized personalities in public office. She thoughtfully autographed it.
     Of course I thought of writing about this amusing artifact But there’s so much to unpack. It’s not just a calendar; it’s a relationship. Or was, anyway. We haven’t spoken in years.
     I became better acquainted with Pappas 23 years ago, by complete accident after walking over to the 2000 Gay Pride Parade. There she was, in a spangly top, high-stepping down the center of Broadway, twirling a baton.
     The moment’s significance is examined in my memoir, “You Were Never in Chicago:”
     “Pappas represents, to me, a glimpse of the vanished idiosyncratic glory of the city, the colorful past which always seems to be disappearing over the horizon, if not utterly lost already. The carnation-wearers, the bamboo-cane leaners, the nudge-and-winkers, the organ-grinders, the First Ward Ball revelers ...”
     After I wrote as much in the newspaper, she reached out — actually made my wife and me dinner on the roof of John Regas’s mansion on Astor Street. A relationship ensued, and she ended up hiring my brother, who became chief financial officer of her office.
     Therein lies the rub. Am I hopelessly compromised, ballyhooing her calendar because she made me dinner and hired my brother? Or score-settling, because he ended up fleeing her employment for a better gig?

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A book of matches

     A couple weeks ago I rode my bike to the post office and mailed a matchbook to a man I've never met.
     But I'm getting ahead of myself.
     This story should really begin with Bookman's Alley, the marvelous used bookstore that Roger Carlson ran behind the Varsity Theater in Evanston. I started going there as a freshman at Northwestern, and stopped as a man in his 50s when Mr. Carlson finally retired.
     Mr. Carlson was a savvy businessman. His books were not cheap. And while he would sometimes, writing up a receipt, he would give me a 10 percent "Friend of the store" discount, he only gave me one free book in all that time.
     The book was "War! War! War" by "Cincinnatus," an anonymous anti-Semite who printed the book in October, 1940. The book blames Jews for all wars, for the Great Depression, and pretty much anything that ever went wrong anywhere.  It almost defies characterization, but I managed to pluck out a single sentence that can represent the entirety:

     Every unbiased student of history and foreign affairs knows that the new world war is not a war for Democracy, but a war to maintain the British-Jewish Empire, its tremendous wealth, its commercial supremacy and overlordship of the seven seas, and above all for the unconditional return of central Europe to Jewish control, even though it results in the destruction of millions of lives and the hopeless insolvency of all the civilized world.   

     Memory had Mr. Carlson giving it to me because he didn't want to make money from selling it. But that wasn't quite correct, I learned when I pulled the book down, for the first time, and discovered a pair of notes written on the little Bookman's Alley slips of paper he used as receipts. Dated Feb. 19, 2010, the message reads, in his distinctive all-caps handwriting: "30's AND 40's AMERICAN ANTI-SEMITISM; I'D RATHER YOU HAVE IT AS A HISTORY TEXT INSTEAD OF SELLING IT TO SOME A-HOLE WHO BUYS INTO IT. MR. C."
     That is an attitude one can't help but admire, but really there was no occasion to apply it in my own life.
      Until I got an email out of the blue, from a young man named Matthew in Los Angeles:

     I came across an old blog post of yours from 2014 regarding the "Fagots stay out" Barney's Beanery matchbook you have. Or, at least, Im hoping you still have it! I started collecting matchbooks through estate sales here in LA and, as a young gay man who lives right behind Barney's, I've become fascinated by the history of Barney's. Amazingly, very few people my age know this history but I've had a good time learning about it and spreading it to my friends. So, when I came across your blog post, I came to the conclusion I have to find those matches! I've been searching the internet but haven't found anyone else with them and then I realized I should just reach out to you. Do you still have those matches? If so, and if you're willing to sell them, I'd love to buy them from you. At this point it feels like they're an important part of West Hollywood history and I don't want that history to be lost! And, at least in my opinion, there's something fun about the idea of those matches going on a journey with you and now, a few decades later, returning to where it all began. If I'm able to buy them from you, my first stop with them in my pocket will be to Barney's for a beer and then after that I plan on displaying them in my apartment and telling everyone who comes over about them and their history. Let me know!"

      Of course I had the matches. I thought carefully about the situation, remembered "War! War! War!" and realized I would not be selling him my matches. I wrote back:

     Good to hear from you. Yes, I have those matches right here, in a little drawer in my roll top desk. As for selling them, no, I'm not interested in doing that. Their being a relic of baseless hatred, I don't think I should profit from them. But if the matches would mean something to you, then please send me your address, and I'll mail them to you, gratis. I've had them for more than 40 years. I think that's long enough.

  

     Actually, it was that last sentiment that was most important. I'm at an age when I'm surrounded by great masses of detritus, aka, crap. Files and furniture, notes and boxes, mugs, souvenirs, relics. I hate to include books, which are holy, but hundreds of books, most of which I'll never read. After I wrote the above, I went to walk the dog, and can't tell you how good I felt. The mixture of performing a small kindness plus the liberation of divestment was a real boost. Only a little thing, true: an old, used matchbook. But it's a start of the great give-away that will end with me being put, possessionless, into the ground.
     Matthew sent me his address, adding this: 

     "Wow Neil, that means a lot to me. In a way I think you doing that completes something of a moral arc for those matches, they've seen the worst and now the best side of humanity. Thank you." 

     Completing the moral arc — there's a good thought for today. I tucked the matches in an envelope and mailed them the next day. He received them a few days later. A very small thing, a single drop of generosity. But each drop waters the world, and ourselves.