111 degrees in the shade

   

     To be honest, when I stepped out of the air conditioning of Sky Harbor International Airpot in Phoenix Wednesday morning, I expected to be hit with a red hot hammer. After all, this is the city being crushed by the full brunt of global warming, 31 consecutive days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That has to be brutal.
     Yes, it was only 103 at the time, about 11 a.m. I'd experienced hotter, and perhaps that was affecting my expectations, memories of that 105 degree day in 1995. Back then, I'd walked a block to the dry cleaners in East Lake View and immediately home to lie down, wrung out, spent.
     Six hours earlier, it had been 58 degrees when I'd walked the dog in the early morning cool of Center Ave. I'd considered wearing a jacket, but figured, "Enjoy it while you can."

     Stepping through the automatic airport doors, I even formed phrase, in my mind, just to be ready, "Jesus fucking Christ!" Or some such thing. It was on the tip of my tongue.
     Only the 103 degree heat was ... bearable. Not a shock at all. Dry heat, as they say and ... could it be? ... slightly balsam-scented. Phoenix smells like a hotel sauna.
     As the temperature rose, I went about my business. Delivering my younger son's cat (I can almost hear readers who learned their parenting skills watching "The Great Santini" lunging for their keyboards to lecture me about how I am a ruinously indulgent parent. Spare me; based on how my boys turned out, you don't have a leg to stand on. Off the charts).
     We swung by Phoenix's main drag, such as it is, and the Sandra Day O'Connor United States Courthouse. Phoenix is depopulated at 12 noon. Hardly anyone on the street. At Home Depot, where I went to buy the lad the cordless electric drill that every householder should own (note to Great Santini set: shhhhhhh) groups of Hispanic men waited under trees. Day laborers, waiting for work. I bet the heat they feel is much different than the heat I shrugged off, dashing in and out of air conditioned cars and buildings. So let's stipulate that. I can only report what I experience; I'm not the all-seeing-eye.
     Phoenix reminds me of Los Angeles, not an actual city at all, in the Chicago, cohesive-place-with-a-downtown-and-neighborhoods, sense, but more of a random agglomeration of disparate locations united in a municipal totality. Streets of tiny ramshackle houses gave way instantly to the ballpark for the Diamondbacks. ("How do they play baseball in this?" I asked my son, and he pointed out that the field is covered and air conditioned, which seems wrong). The stadium yielded to a stretch of office buildings, then back to cement plants and flooring outlets, welding supply companies and yards of lawn statuary.
     I tried noting the colors of the buildings, but here words failed me — maybe it's the heat. There was red brown and copper brown and rose brown, khaki and beige and khaki beige, a spectral wheel of brown: dun brown and tan brown and brown brown, with the occasional bright yellow and faded red for variety's sake, with lots of old mustard and yesterday's oatmeal.  Blame the sun — I saw more cars whose paint jobs had been seared off in two days in Phoenix than seen in two years in Chicago.

      There are many junior and community colleges and trade schools. As we drove Interstate 17, heading to dinner, I began to notice all the billboards were for personal injury attorneys, but left off one salient detail — the lawyers' names. Instead they read "Husband & Wife Lawyer Team" and "Accidentjustice.com" and nicknames like "Sweet James" and "Rafi."

     My guess is their targets have limited English skills. Digging around, I found the Arizona Republic dedicated an episode of its Valley 101 podcast on this very subject. Like most podcasts, it's an incredibly slow-moving 22 minutes of time-filling and tap-dancing — including an eye-crossing number blast probing whether Arizona has more lawyer billboards than other states, beginning with the protracted story of how, in 1977, lawyers advertising became legal in Arizona. 

     The key question — why so many personal injury lawyer billboards compared to billboards for supermarkets and accountants and every other form of human endeavor? — wasn't raised, never mind answered.

     Though one lawyer interviewed on the Arizona Republic did say, "If you have any soul at all, you have to kinda hate lawyer advertising."

    Yes, but why? That was asked.

   "Why does it feel like we're surrounded by them?" host Kaila White wonders, calling Mark Breyer, who with his wife Alexis constitute, "The Husband and Wife Law Team." 

    "The reason is ... " Mark Breyer begins, promisingly, then says, in essence, they're trying to reach people. Stop the presses!

     "If anyone can be your client, then casting a wide net kinda makes sense," host White reveals.

      The obvious answer of why we notice them — because they're numerous and crude, with their stupid nicknames and sledgehammer get-cash-now tone — is finally hinted at, toward the very end of the podcast, after 22 minutes of life I'm never getting back.
     After lunch, it reached 111 degrees, and I retired to a chaise by the pool. It was warm, but not unbearable so. My biggest trouble was my eyes — running and smarting. Did I say it's a dry heat? It is. A very, very dry heat. 
      The biggest way the brutal Phoenix heat manifested itself was when I went to relocate from the lounge chair to the pool. I went to step onto the concrete and drew my bare foot back. Too hot to walk upon. I put on my flip-flops, and walked over to the stairs. The metal handrail was too hot to touch. I slipped off one sandal, then the other, and stepped into the water.  

     We ate well , and since readers do both live in  and occasionally visit Phoenix, I probably should go into detail. Lunch the first day was at the Welcome Diner at 10th and Pierce, where I had the "Carol" sandwich — smoked pork shoulder, Carolina BBQ sauce and tangy coleslaw on a fresh baked biscuit, with homemade lemonade and a slice of their hibiscus cherry piece 

     Dinner was a place my kid discovered because it's in a strip mall by the Goodwill, the lyrically named "Soup & Sausage." I tried kvass for the first time — think a rye bread soda, not sweet, almost like an NA beer, but dark. And a platter of pierogi — chicken, onion, and two sour cherry — a pair of well-crafted sausage, and a mound of sauerkraut.

      Dinner in Phoenix Thursday night was at Taco Boy's — as much as I sometimes lament a missing possessive, the presence here made me itch to ask the oldest person behind the counter if he were the Taco Boy, and to congratulate him on his grammar. But the place was hopping, and I thought better than to bother anybody. The food hot of the grill and fantastic — the first taco I've ever gotten that was too hot to pick up when I unwrapped it.

     Speaking of hot. We were there about 7 p.m., and people were sitting outside, enjoying dinner on the patio. It was 106 degrees. But a dry heat. You get used to it.

Measuring a ruler

    

    Believe it or not, as much stuff as I write here, every ... goddamn ... day, not everything I write gets posted. Like this, a follow-up on last week's column on the Field Museum's show, "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery," that kept getting bumped by more pressing topics. Honestly, as the days piled on, given the third-rail aspect of the topic, I considered just adding it to the list of emergency, Fire Axe Behind the Glass columns to run should I get hit by a bus. Which is kinda what happened, given, that I find myself in Phoenix, where it hit 111 degrees Wednesday and is supposed to do the same today. But it's a dry heat ... More on that tomorrow, I imagine.

     The word "oriental" was retired from polite society a number of years ago because it smacked of the Western eagerness to view unfamiliar Eastern cultures as exotic. Egyptian hieroglyphics conveying tax rolls and recipes for beer were mistaken for incantations and other mystic hooha.  Asian women were fetishized into geishas and courtesans, part of the general practice of presenting classes of Others, not as complicated, multi-dimensional human beings such as ourselves, but flat cut-outs, redolent of incense, eroticism and intrigue.

     Finally scholarship rid itself of that attitude. 

    I thought.

     Though that Ripley's Believe It or Not view of the world came to mind while reading the comments after my Friday column on the "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery" exhibit at the Field Museum. I had spoken the silent part, wondering where the whitebread American death rituals were. The Field, with  charming and unexpected candor, said, in essence, two things: 1) "This is the stuff we collected" and 2) The white social baggage is in the heads of the visitors.

       Of course. Anthropology is generally the study of tribes in the Brazilian rainforest and nomads in the Punjab. While there is a fine tradition of Western academics turning that microscope upon ourselves, whether examining the social structure of city blocks or suburban cheerleading squads, that seems more the recent exception than the longtime rule. Why study ourselves? We know ourselves. We're familiar. We're normal, and the standard by which others are judged. Exploring ourselves would be like measuring a ruler.

     While I admired the pith of the reader who observed, "We don’t usually see horses or squirrels in the zoo, either," I disagreed with the thinking behind the remark. First, it's simply wrong. The Lincoln Park Zoo has a Farm-in-the-Zoo, with cows and goats and, yes, horses, or ponies anyway. A zebra might be more exotic, to us, than a horse, but it would be hard to argue that it's somehow a more intrinsically interesting animal.
     But it's also an antique way of thinking. The flip side of viewing the world as exotic is viewing ourselves as ordinary, the scenery and curtains that are to be ignored while taking in the rich pageant of life is celebrated. It is an equally defective way of thinking. I have no sympathy for the strident self-victimization of the anti-woke segment of this country, and that is not why I pointed out the lapse. What I was trying to say is, that when the world is being gathered and presented, supposedly in its totality, such as at the Field death show, I would like to be considered part of it. The multitudinous sins of my race — some of them perpetrated against my religion — do not exile their descendent from the realm of the living. Not yet anyway.

     Yes, the pendulum swings, and given the centuries of unashamed bigotry, it's a fine thing to see it going the other way. To a point. My central complaint about the "Death" show is that nobody considered the bulk of visitors might appreciate learning about a few of their own culture's many odd rituals and beliefs. It seems a failure to lay out Chinese hell but ignore Dante's hell.

     I hope this isn't all about ego, the boost of being showcased. I suppose there has to be some of that. But there are interesting aspects the Field left on the table. If we wanted to show the way Western society tries to thwart death, to negate it, those Victorian death photos, such as above, would be an apt vehicle, unfamiliar to most visitors. Or below, the circa World War I New York Police Department glass plate photographs Luc Sante unearthed and gathered in his chilling 1992 book, "Evidence." You can't say they aren't interesting. There's a danger when certain realms stop being considered worthy of contemplation. The NYPD tossed thousands of these glass plates into New York harbor — Sante, now Lucy Sante, was lucky to find a few boxes overlooked under a stairwell. When we don't consider the full range of history to be significant, losses are certain to follow.

from Luc Sante's "Evidence"

Straight from the Blagojevich playbook

     

Samuel Johnson

Like the mayor, I sometimes cite quotations.
     For instance, a reader will occasionally write in, just baffled by one of my columns. What do I mean by “religion should be voluntary”? That’s craaaaa-zeeee. Maybe I could explain it to him, take his hand and walk him through it?
     In such cases, I try to hurry silently on, but sometimes pause to share my favorite quote from the great dictionary writer and wit, Samuel Johnson: “Sir, I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”
     I can’t tell if that does anything for the reader; but it makes me feel better. And, more to the point, it is relevant, a way of saying, “The column is clear enough, bub. Figure it out. Or don’t.”
     That cannot be said for Brandon Johnson’s reply when asked Monday about his firing of Chicago’s diligent health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, without the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting, or even of telling her himself on the phone. An underling did the deed, late Friday. A question was posed: What about that, Mr. Mayor?
     “You can’t always go by the things that you hear. Right? ‘Real eyes realize real lies,’” Johnson replied, quoting Tupac Shakur.
     So a follow-up question: What the heck does that mean? What are you saying? That the question is premised on a lie? Then Awardy still has her job? Was she not fired? Did the mayor indeed give her the sort of respectful termination that might, oh, I don’t know, encourage another highly skilled health professional to agree to replace her? Someone the city will desperately need as COVID rates rise and God-knows what new nightmare Hot Zone plague is at this very moment dripping out of a bat’s backside somewhere, heading to a rendezvous at O’Hare International Airport and then every block of the city of Chicago?

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1998: 1890s newspaperman slashing prose stings today

Brann

     Baylor University is in the news, applying for — and receiving — a religious exemption to the Department of Education ban on sexual harassment, so that any young LGBTQ person who has the misfortune to find themselves on campus can feel the full lash of Southern Baptist hospitality. 

    This of course brought to mind my hero, William Cowper Brann. I plan to channel him in the newspaper, eventually. Until then, here's a column about him, published 25 years ago.

     He wielded a pen like a razor, and gleefully slashed at his many, many enemies, one of whom stepped out of a dusty street in Waco, Texas, and shot him in the back, "where the suspenders crossed," 100 years ago this past Wednesday.
     His name was William Cowper Brann. He is utterly forgotten today — his name appeared just once in this newspaper, 41 years ago — so I thought I would take advantage of the anniversary to introduce you to this son of Illinois, whose acidic personality got him tossed out of newspaper jobs from Matteson southward until he ended up in Waco, where he ran his paper, the Iconoclast, for three years before he was murdered.
    In that short span of time, the Iconoclast went from a tiny local monthly (he ran off 50 copies of the first edition, sold those, then rushed the money back to the printer to pay for more issues) to a famed journal of international reputation with 100,000 subscribers, a testament to the eternal public hunger for a mean guy with high standards who doesn't pull his punches.
     In the first issue, February, 1895, he went after a hugely popular columnist, T. DeWitt Talmadge, who had called Brann "the Apostle of the Devil" (a nickname that even Brann devotees came to use). Brann dismissed him as a "wide-lipped blatherskite" and "a religious faker."
     "The Iconoclast will pay any man $10 who will demonstrate that T. DeWitt Talmadge ever originated an idea, good, bad or indifferent," Brann wrote. "He is simply a monstrous bag of fetid wind."
     That was mild for Brann; he suggested another group of opponents "should have been hanged with their own umbilicular cords at birth."
     Brann unspooled James Whitcomb Riley's nauseating verse ("So I stand in the dawn of her beautiful eyes.") until he couldn't take it anymore.
     "Ah, God! A little ice water and a fan, please," Brann wrote, conjuring up the image of the Hoosier poet swooning from his own muse. "He revives, he totters to his feet, he smites his breast, he gropes hither and yon in his delirious ecstasy. . . . Perhaps he can persuade his star-eyed charmer to wear green goggles or only squint at him through a piece of smoked glass."
     Is it fair that Riley's name endures, sort of, and Brann's is forgotten?
     On the celebrity wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough, Brann noted that "the fiance of Miss Vanderbilt is descended . . . through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty." And the bride? "A long, gaunt, skinny young female whose face would frighten any animal but a pauper duke out for the dough."
     One can only pine for what he would have done with the current Windsors.
     The man certainly had his faults — particularly a jarring, bottomless racism (though reading his views on the subject is a sobering reminder of what racism is, now that the term is tossed about as lightly as a beach ball in summer).
     Brann's subjects have a way of reverberating a century later. The "Slick Willie" in the White House now is only an encore of "Slippery Bill" McKinley, whose rise Brann mourned as if it were the coming of doom.
     "In 30 years we have passed, by regular gradation, from the wisdom of Lincoln to the stupidity of (President) Cleveland, and it may be the will of God that we should drain the cup of humiliation to the very dregs . . . (and elect) a political nonentity astride a vacuum."
     Brann battled the rabid anti-Catholicism that was so popular in the 1890s, primarily by attacking Baylor University, the preeminent local Baptist establishment. After a Brazilian Catholic girl, brought to Baylor to be trained as a Baptist missionary, instead got pregnant, Brann used the incident to heap an endless river of abuse on the school. A high point was his starting a fund drive to raise a marble monument on campus to the infant, who had died.
"It seems to me that the great Baptist seminary has been strangely derelict in its duty — has failed to properly advertise itself as a place where souls are made as well as saved," he wrote. "Baylor is far too modest. It received an ignorant little Catholic as raw material, and sent forth two Baptists as the finished products."
     The college, needless to say, writhed under Brann's lash. A mob of Baylor students kidnapped Brann at gunpoint, beat him, and might have lynched him had professors not interceded.
     On April 1, 1898, the father of one Baylor girl stepped out of the twilight and shot Brann in the back. Never one to treat a foe lightly, Brann whirled around and emptied his gun into his attacker. Both men died, Brann lingering until the early morning of April 2 — a day he was to begin a speaking tour that would have led him northward, perhaps as far as Chicago.
     I think he'd be pleased by the idea that, a century after his cowardly murder, his words are finally echoing here:
     "People frequently say to me, 'Brann, your attacks are too harsh. You should use more persuasion and less pizen.' Perhaps so; but I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter. . . . Never attempt to move an ox-team with moral suasion, or to drown the cohorts of the devil in the milk of human kindness. It won't work."
      —originally published in the Sun-Times, April 5, 1998

Hydrant repair crews face water, pressure

     The fire hydrant on the northwest corner of Damen and Fulton is “jumpy.” Meaning, in Department of Water Management parlance, that water can be heard vibrating within the cylinder, a tip-off that the neoprene seal inside has decayed and is leaking.
     A leaking fire hydrant wastes water, and in winter will freeze, rendering it useless — common enough that on really cold days the Chicago Fire Department routinely sends four engines to a really big fire, setting up north, south, east and west of the scene to make sure they tap enough working hydrants.
     The public is generally unaware of the water department’s important role in firefighting — any fire 2-11 or above requires a hydrant truck be dispatched. Their steamers can thaw a hydrant in 10 minutes, and sometimes a main must be shut down so the CFD can remove their hoses, though that can cause another complication — the main must be turned back on. When the old McCormick Place burned down in January 1967, blame fell to the surrounding hydrants, most of which didn’t work. Not due to being frozen, as first believed, but because one valve that was supposed to be open was closed.
     So a jumpy hydrant can’t be ignored — it can be the difference between life and death. A week ago Friday, one of the water department’s four hydrant repair trucks was dispatched to fix the hydrant at Fulton and Damen.
     Not an easy task.
     It would be a lot easier if they shut off the main — but that would also cut water for blocks around, including the Chicago Teachers’ Union headquarters across the street and an array of nearby hip brewpubs. For hours. Work would have to be done at night, which means overtime for a crew of four.
     To yank out the seal of a fire hydrant while still under pressure and replace it with a new one requires a large, complicated tool the water department calls a “gun” — a 10 foot tall assemblage of pipe, part tent pole, part giant socket wrench, that easily weighs 200 pounds. It seals off the hydrant so it can be opened while under pressure. Only one company in the world makes them to fit Chicago’s unique style of hydrant, and occasionally a pickup truck arrives to collect a broken gun and take it back to Texas for repairs. Water workers call the process, with an occasional blush, “jerking.”
     Dangerous work for them — and passersby
     The device takes about an hour to set up by the truck crew — Kevin Franklin, Robert Laws, Dorian Minor and supervisor Charlie Brown, who between them they have well over a century on the job. Three wear bright orange rain pants — hydrants are 2 feet from the curb, and — talk about pressure — vehicles rushing past pose a constant peril to the workers. Pedestrians blithely blundering by put themselves in danger.
     “We have to worry about their safety and ours,” Laws said.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2006: George Dunne — Scandals couldn't dent charm of board president

George Dunne, foreground and Mayor Richard J. Daley, at 1968 Democratic National Convention.

     "Very nice," reader Dave Bahnsen commented on my 2010 obituary of Dan Rostenkowski. "Now do George Dunne." 

     Welllll...on the one hand, I'm not a lounge singer or a short-order cook. I don't do requests. However, this is Sunday, and while I have indeed written something new, it can wait. I'll need something Tuesday as well (Monday is my fire hydrant magnus opus).

     "Okay," I replied.

     As it happens, I did write the obit for the longtime Cook County Board president. If I had to grade this one, I'd give it a B minus. That "epic" in the beginning of the fourth graph is unfortunate. Its averageness is probably why I didn't post the piece before. I left out some key points — I must have been hurried. I buried the sex scandal that ended his career, and left out the frat brother admiration some of his fellow hacks said in public without shame. The obit also doesn't mention that Dunne personally banned abortions at Cook County Hospital in 1980, even though — as he later admitted — he lacked the authority to do so. Which didn't stop him from sometimes approving the procedure, on an ad hoc basis, when he felt the situation demanded it. "Sometimes he said yes, and sometimes he said no," a source told the Sun-Times in 1992. I'm not sure why I overlooked it — I hope because, in the rush to get the obit written, I just didn't know. It's an important historical fact to bear in mind, a reminder that while when the decision whether or not to have an abortion is denied the woman most affected, a decision is still being made, by an unseen man.

     George W. Dunne, for years among the most powerful cogs in the once-mighty Chicago Democratic Machine who worked his way up from playlot supervisor to Cook County Board president and heir-apparent to Richard J. Daley, died Sunday afternoon.
     Mr. Dunne died at his farm in Hebron, near the Wisconsin border, according to his wife of 16 years, Claudia Dunne. He was 93 and had been suffering heart trouble, she said.
     "I said, 'Just let go. I'll be fine,' " his wife said. "And he did."
     During his epic career, Dunne was Chicago Park District assistant general superintendent, Democratic Central Committee chairman, and longtime committeeman of the 42nd Ward — serving in many capacities simultaneously.
     In his nearly 22 years as board president, Dunne supervised $1 billion in construction of county buildings and was embroiled in a variety of controversies over Cook County Hospital and the County Jail.
     Through it all, he was a smooth politician and a charming man. Scandals that would have shattered the careers of lesser politicians simply rolled off Dunne, at least until toward the end of his long reign.
     "George Dunne was a friend and a respected, charismatic leader who spent a lifetime in public service," Mayor Daley said Monday. "Our heartfelt prayers and condolences go out to his family."
     Park District playlot manager
     George William Dunne was born Feb. 20, 1913, in the Near North Side's 42nd Ward, one of eight children of John and Ellen Dunne. His father, sexton of Holy Name Cathedral for 33 years, died when George was 12.
     He graduated from De La Salle Institute and attended Northwestern University for a year but dropped out. He caught the eye of the Democratic Party organization and snared a job as manager of a Park District playlot.
     During World War II, he served in Europe and in the Pacific from November 1942 to April 1946. He was recalled to active duty for the Korean War and served from April 1951 to September 1952.
     Back home, state Sen. William "Botchy'' Connors, the 42nd Ward Democratic committeeman, tapped him to fill a vacancy in the Legislature in 1955.
    After eight years in the Legislature, Mr. Dunne became Democratic floor leader. Then Mayor Richard J. Daley tapped him for the County Board, where he quickly rose to lead the powerful Finance Committee.
     When Connors died in 1961, the ward committeemanship passed to Mr. Dunne, along with the lucrative ward insurance business. Mr. Dunne's Near North Insurance Agency, formed in 1962, later collapsed in a scandal while under the control of Dunne's partner, Michael Segal, who was convicted in 2004 of looting $30 million from the firm.
     When the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority — whose chairman was appointed by Daley — wanted to insure the new McCormick Place in 1968, it did not take bids but handed the contract directly to Mr. Dunne, who pocketed between $15,000 and $20,000 in annual commissions from that one policy alone.
     Like any good ward committeeman, Mr. Dunne held court, granting favors to his constituents, finding jobs and clouting. But those jobs and favors came with a price tag: Not only ringing doorbells and hustling votes on Election Day, but raising money. Mr. Dunne was proud of the patronage system.
     "I've been in government for a long time, and I can't see any concrete evidence of the merit system resulting in more efficient government,'' he said after being elected president of the Cook County Board in January 1969.
The logical Daley heir?
     Mr. Dunne was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention. There, he was seen on television next to Richard J. Daley while the mayor jeered Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut for decrying violence in the streets of Chicago.
     For more than 21 years, Mr. Dunne controlled Cook County, the second-most-populous county in the nation with 54 agencies and departments and a budget of more than $150 million.
     Mr. Dunne established himself as a cost-cutter. But despite his loyalty to the mighty Democratic Machine, outside forces began to crack it. In 1972, the Shakman decree ended the practice of coercing government workers to make contributions and do political work.
     Toward the end of Daley's life, it was assumed that Mr. Dunne was "the logical Daley heir.'' Mr. Dunne was at the height of his power, a large, handsome man who had a face that had "aged gracefully and a head of gray hair cut so well and so often that one suspected it actually never grew at all,'' as he was described by one historian.
     But the mid-1970s were also a difficult time for Mr. Dunne. In fall of 1971, Mr. Dunne was in hot water when a Daily News story said government officials had bought racetrack stock on the basis of information and sold it at enormous profit. The venture was the same deal that sent former Gov. Otto Kerner to prison. But Mr. Dunne was spared because he had no public duties connected to the racing industry.
     In 1972, the Better Government Association accused Mr. Dunne of holding stock in two banks receiving interest-free county money, and that the banks had given Mr. Dunne huge loans. Mr. Dunne sold his stock and resigned his directorship at one of the banks.
     The next year, Mr. Dunne was accused of making lucrative investments in luxury high-rises built by a Chicago contractor who received millions in county contracts. He did not deny the charges.
'Very smart in every way'
     After Daley died in December 1976, Mr. Dunne seized the chair of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. His first act was to unceremoniously dump Jane Byrne as co-chair and disband the Democratic Women's Group.
     "Dunne obviously cared little for women politicians,'' Byrne said in her memoirs.
     On Monday, Byrne remembered Dunne as "very smart in every way."
     Mr. Dunne threw himself and the then-faltering Machine behind the luckless Mayor Michael Bilandic. But Byrne upset Bilandic in the 1979 primary, and in March 1982, Mayor Byrne ousted Mr. Dunne as chairman of the Democratic Central Committee.
     With his future in a Byrne administration bleak, Mr. Dunne threw his support to Harold Washington. He was one of the few Machine pols to do so, and battled old-timers' horror at the prospect of a black mayor.
     "The party had better get used to the idea . . . and get behind Washington's candidacy,'' Mr. Dunne told party regulars. He also played a decisive role in the Council's election of Eugene Sawyer as mayor after Washington's death.
     The wheels finally began to come off Mr. Dunne's career in 1988, when WMAQ-Channel 5 reported on two female Cook County Forest Preserve female employees who said they were forced to have sex with Mr. Dunne to get hired and gain promotions. Encounters with the women, described as lesbians, happened at Dunne's farm in Hebron.
     Mr. Dunne, whose first wife, Agnes, had died in 1980, was 75 at the time. He admitted having sex with the women and acknowledged "extremely poor judgment.''
     He did not run for a sixth term as board president in 1990.
     Mr. Dunne did continue as committeeman of the 42nd Ward until 2003, when he stepped down at 90 after holding the post for 42 years.
     "His personality was always marked by charm and good manners. The good deeds he performed for so many are the best commentary on his long and worthy life," said Ald. Ed Burke (14th).
     Besides his wife, survivors include two daughters, Mary Louise Morrisseau and Eileen Dunne Zell, a son, Murphy Dunne; five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
     Visitation will be 6 p.m. Wednesday at Holy Name Cathedral. A prayer service led by Cardinal Francis George will follow at 7:30 p.m. On Thursday morning, a funeral mass will be said at Holy Name.

                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 2006

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