Saturday, May 16, 2020

Texas notes: Stolen car



     One of the best things about Caren Jeskey's Saturday reports from Austin, Texas is that I get to discover her along with you. In the third graph of her essay today, I paused and thought, "She has kind of a Chicago female Gautama Siddhartha thing going on." Which few can say.

     He dipped the big fat Philly blunt into the honey, lit it and took a long pull, his glassy sociopathic eyes fixed in my direction. I noticed their corners were turned up a bit in a menacing smile as he took a long pull. He’d brought a woman back with him after going out towards the Howard El for a nickel bag of weed. That’s all we could afford. I asked him why he brought her here, to the studio apartment off of Jonquil Terrace where we were crashing on a mattress in the closet of his 18 year old nephew’s studio apartment. I guess he was my boyfriend, this terrifying creature who was on the run from the law in Madison Wisconsin for a felony assault. The walk-in closet of a college student’s studio was the best housing situation we could line up. In response to my query he said “because she’s pretty. I wanted to look at her.” I was in my late twenties and she was younger than that and indeed very pretty. My blood ran ice cold and I wanted to scream and cry, to run out of there, but I was scared and hooked so I didn’t say a word. He passed her the blunt first, dead cold eyes smiling towards me, as if he was asking me to challenge him. I said nothing. She passed me the blunt and hot honey dripped onto my thigh, burning it and causing a scar. I barely flinched and inhaled the acrid smoke of weed mixed with a thick cigar leaf and held it in for as long as I could before slowly exhaling and finally sitting back. Now it didn’t matter who was there with us as I drifted into oblivion.
     This was just a typical Tuesday for me, and the next day I was back in school at the University of Chicago where I was working on a master’s degree. I’d show up in skin tight jeans I’d gotten at the sneaker store on 53rd Street and platform boots, my hair kinky and as big as Roseanne Roseannadanna’s, fresh out of the braids I’d slept in. I’d clomp around the Mies van der Rohe building where I was studying to be a champion for the disadvantaged, with a philosophy opposite of the great architect Mies who said “I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.” I fancied myself one of the strongest social justice advocates ever to have lived. No wonder I didn’t make a lot of friends that first year in grad school. I didn’t know how to work with others on a common goal — I was too guarded, I had too many secrets.
     Having been born in East Rogers Park where dozens of languages were and still are spoken laid the groundwork for me to realize this world is full of sheltered xenophobes and that I was not one of them. At a young age, through the wise and compassionate guidance of my very liberal folks, I decided that racism and injustice were intolerable. Since childhood I made it my mission to accept everyone, to be inclusive, and to help others fight for their own rights if I could. My folks called me their very own Statue of Liberty and once commented that growing up with me in the house felt like being in the UN with the diversity of friends I brought over.
     The powerful people and institutions in the world always seemed very crooked to me. People did not seem truly good. They were selfish and greedy and left others behind. I’d watch them stepping over homeless people and looking the other way as a person had a psychotic break or delusional episode on the city streets. I’d try to enjoy my privilege but often ended up feeling wrong about the safe and comfortable middle class life I was born into, so I constantly challenged it. I drank and smoked and found other escapes to avoid the deep pain and despair I felt inside. I had no idea that I was going about it all wrong and it took me years of trial and error to learn wiser ways. The answer, for me, to solving injustice or at least chipping away at it is actually living soberly. I do my best to bolster myself by surrounding myself with good people so that I can be a better cog in the wheel. Mentors ask me each night what I packed into the stream of life that day and I like to have something honest and good to share.
     In her song Stolen Car, Beth Orton sings “You said you'd stand for every known abuse that was ever threatened to anyone but you.” It’s easier to help others than reach inside and be honest about your own broken parts, but if we don’t do just that we cannot feel our collective humanity. I’ve heard it said that we learn about ourselves by studying others and I am dedicated to learning about my clients and other people I come across. It’s a means of salvation. If I can know them I am not rejecting this human experience and instead I feel a part of a larger organism. As Carl Jung said “compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.” I’ve only recently come out about my journey into sobriety and chose to do so since I see the value of authenticity. I’ve been taught that we are only as sick as our secrets. Perhaps my story will spark something in others and may even inspire them to get well themselves, or to reach out and help someone else who is suffering.
     As I continue on the path of ever-improving self care — eating healthy foods, resting well, daily meditation, support with my recovery, frequent long walks and bike rides, basking in nature, and finding joy and connection with others — the world keeps looking brighter. I have more energy and clarity to pitch in, in meaningful ways. I feel fortunate that I have this luxury to take care of myself and to reflect.
     I cannot shake the sense that resolving social inequity is partially my responsibility. There is gross injustice in mandating low end workers back to work while the privileged can afford to keep social distance during this pandemic but as we know, without money one does not have power or respect in this world we have created. Behaving this way is not necessary due to a dearth of resources, but has been created by those who hoard and enjoy their success as they step across the backs of others. I feel some solace when I focus on the sheer number of diverse representatives in this country who are now coming into positions of power. People whose ancestors have poured their sweat and tears into the literal fabric of our society might be downtrodden now but with the vast amount of voices ringing together they may finally rise up and be seen, heard and provided reparations. At least that’s the vision I hope to see come true. In 1909 Emma Goldman said “the history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people.” We have always sacrificed the health and well being of our workers and other less privileged members of our society, but now how can we continue to look the other way? We cannot be cruel enough to continue to send them out into this pandemic world, can we? Emma Goldman was planting a seed that we must continue to sow together.


 

Friday, May 15, 2020

Chicago Icon #5: Charles Percy

      Well, this is fortuitous. Monday's icon, Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, led to his secretary and love, Mickey Curtin, on Tuesday, then Wednesday and Thursday's, a two-parter on the man who introduced us, Art Petacque. I was already planning to highlight someone from Art's Pulitzer Prize winning story, Sen. Charles Percy, and so was pleased to see a lively discussion in the comments section on aspects of his life, including the calumny that led to his senate defeat—that he was anti-Semitic, based on a sensible suggestion that Israel would have done well to follow—continuing unabated after 45 years.
     There is one oversight that leapt out when I reread this 2011 obit: I never say what Bell & Howell was: a manufacturer of movie cameras and projectors (today it is ... well, heck, here's the web site. "Innovative Services & Solutions." YOU try to figure it out what that means).

     Charles H. Percy, the wonder boy from Illinois, president of Bell & Howell at 29, a United States senator at 47, and for four years chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, died early Saturday in Washington, D.C.
    He was 91 and had struggled with Alzheimer's disease in recent years.
    Percy won his seat in 1966, less than two months after the brutal murder of his daughter Valerie, a crime that shocked Chicago and the nation. The murderer was never caught, and to this day the case is often the first thing Chicagoans think of when remembering Percy, despite his many accomplishments.
    He might have been president. Upon taking office, the dapper, handsome Percy immediately was pegged as presidential timber, one of the "New Breed'' Republicans, by a GOP eager to move beyond the disastrous Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. He was on the cover of Time magazine, and no less a figure than Dwight D. Eisenhower predicted he would be president.
     But it was perilous to be both an outspoken liberal and a Republican, and Percy's presidential hopes were thwarted by more conservative Republicans such as Richard Nixon.
     Percy also was hobbled, paradoxically, by his honesty, energy and ambition, traits that some viewed as character flaws.
     "He seemed to be a whirlwind of self-promotion, obsessed with public relations,'' George Will wrote in 1974. "He seemed to be a blend of two disagreeable and until then unblendable character traits: cynicism and naivete.''
     Charles Harting Percy was born on Sept. 27, 1919, in Pensacola, Fla. His parents, Edward and Elizabeth Harting Percy, were devout Christian Scientists. The family moved to Chicago in early 1920.
     Percy grew up in Rogers Park and Wilmette. He was, by all accounts, a driven youth. His first job at age 5 was selling magazines, and he did it so well that, at age 7, he got his first public recognition—a year's membership to the YMCA for selling more subscriptions than anybody else.
    His father, a banker, was laid off in the Depression, and the family went on relief. Young Charles sold his mother's homemade sand tart cookies on the street to help out. His Sunday school teacher Joseph H. McNabb, the president of Bell & Howell, encouraged him to enter into a Bell & Howell cooperative training program. In 1936 he did, while studying at the University of Chicago.
     At college, Percy was a Big Man on Campus. He was president of his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, captain of the university's championship water polo team and marshal to university President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the highest honor the school could give.
     He displayed considerable business savvy. He formed a cooperative to save money by pooling fraternity purchases and buying in bulk. By the time he graduated, in 1941, his co-op was grossing $150,000 a year. Hutchins called him "the richest boy who ever worked his way through college."
     After graduation, Percy joined Bell & Howell full time. At 23, he was elected to the board of directors. In February, 1943, he took a leave to join the Navy.
     Percy married Jeanne Dickerson in 1943, and they had a son, Roger, and twin daughters, Valerie and Sharon. His wife died during surgery in 1947. He married Loraine Guyer in 1950. They had a daughter, Gail, and a son, Mark.
     He returned to Bell & Howell after the war to lead industrial relations and foreign manufacturing programs.
     Following the death of McNabb in 1949, Percy was named Bell & Howell president and chief executive officer—at 29, the youngest person to head a major American corporation up to that time. Under his leadership over 14 years, annual sales climbed from $13 million to $160 million.
     He entered politics as a Republican precinct captain in 1946, organizing returning vets in Kenilworth. As he rose in business, he was taken under the wing of Eisenhower.
     "Gen. Eisenhower was the controlling influence that caused me to come into public life," Percy said in an interview for the Eisenhower Library. "He was the only man who could have caused me to seek elective office."
     In 1955, Percy was elected president of the United Republican Fund of Illinois, having raised $4 million for the party in four years.
     In 1956, Eisenhower named him as special ambassador to represent the United States at presidential inaugurations in Peru and Bolivia.
     As a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1964, Percy supported Goldwater. That year, Percy ran for governor against Otto Kerner and was narrowly defeated.
     In 1966, he ran for the Senate against incumbent Paul Douglas.
     On Sept. 18, 1966, his daughter Valerie, 21, was murdered in her bed at the family's 17-room mansion in Kenilworth. The crime was never solved.
     Because of the crime, both candidates declared a halt to campaigning, resuming in mid-October.
     Percy rolled over Douglas, 74, by nearly half a million votes. Some observers felt a certain amount of "sympathy vote" was a factor.
     Nevertheless, "the whiz kid of the 90th Congress" and "the wonder boy from Illinois" quickly made a name for himself, speaking out on a range of issues. Attention immediately centered on him as a presidential hope for the battered Republican Party.
     "Sen. Percy says he isn't running for president, but he's walking awfully fast," began a news story in September, 1967.
     Percy was an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam, which he visited in 1967. During a tour of the Dak Son refugee camp near the Cambodian border, his party came under mortar and rifle attack and had to be rescued by U.S. helicopter gunships.
     "I never got lower to the ground in my life," Percy later said.
     Percy did not abate his criticisms of the war when it ceased being Lyndon Johnson's war and became Richard Nixon's war.
     "Is it worth tearing ourselves apart inside and spending a half billion dollars a week?" he asked in 1969. "I say it's not worth it."
      Nixon disagreed, and he placed his fellow Republican on his infamous Enemies List.
      In 1970, Percy joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired for his last four years in office. The same year, Percy persuaded Nixon to give future Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens a spot on the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit—Percy was known for having an excellent eye for judicial talent.
     In 1972, Percy won re-election by more than a million votes.
     The biggest controversy of his second term came when Percy, the State of Israel Bonds Committee's 1970 Man of the Year, made a visit to the Middle East in 1975 and called on Israel to "take some risks for peace" by negotiating with Yasser Arafat and withdrawing to its 1967 borders. Pro-Israel groups never forgave Percy — though, ironically, his suggestions were embraced in subsequent peace efforts.
     He was elected to a third term in 1978, but in 1984, his image was tarred in a bitter Republican primary, and he was defeated in the fall by Democrat Paul Simon.
     After leaving the Senate, Percy said his proudest accomplishment in office had been pushing for more opportunity for women in the federal government.
     Leaving elective politics, Percy formed a company that worked on behalf of American firms conducting business abroad.
     He remained an active figure on the Washington, D.C., scene, not only as a former senator and a consultant, but as the father-in-law of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the husband of his surviving twin daughter, Sharon.
     After 1995, he began developing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, though he remained an eager participant in his family and civic interests until recent years.
     A section of Georgetown Park along the Potamac River was named in his honor in 2008, and the University of California, Berkeley named a scholarship program for Percy.
     The family will hold a private service.
          
    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2011 

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Chicago Icons #4: Art Petacque, Part Two


    There is the story. Then there is the story behind the story. I felt guilty after Art Petacque's death because I believed I had a hand in getting him fired. Three days after his obituary was published, I ran this column. If later you want to know what he did that so irked me—the story behind the story behind the story—The Reader's Michael Miner lays it out in his column about this column, written in his trademark condescending, tutting style. (Heck, if you want to avoid Miner, and who could blame you, the crux is this: Art dictated a two-line top of a column then flung a heavily-highlighted Tribune story—on pot busts downstate, I believe—at me and said, "Take the rest from that." When I got to 30 lines, the length of a brief column, I said I was done. "No, do 60," he said. "I want it on the front page."

     One of the many advantages of writing obituaries is that it gives you something to do, immediately, when somebody you know dies. Keeps your mind occupied with a diverting task.
     When word of legendary mob reporter Art Petacque's passing reached the Sun-Times newsroom about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, it also meant I had to get busy if I wanted to send him off properly and still make the 6:25 train.
      It wasn't until the next day that what I had written sunk in: he was gone. He wasn't going to call, as he sometimes did, to pass along a tidbit or ask for a phone number or a favor. No more of that dolorous sing-song baritone voice.
     Art was my Dutch uncle. I'm not being proprietary. Maybe he was your Dutch uncle too. He was indiscriminate in his kindness. Thinking now, I realize I'm not even sure what "Dutch uncle" means. To me, a Dutch uncle meant Art Petacque. Somebody old who takes an interest in you, despite your being young, despite your lack of experience or merit.
     Art taught me to smoke cigars. I had started writing his mob column. The choice was easy: either smoke with him or sit there breathing his cigar breath. Art was old school. I never saw him touch a typewriter. I was dispatched to his office to organize his wisdom on paper. Sometimes, to be honest, it was excruciating wisdom. Art . . . could speak . . . more slowly . . . than any . . . man I've . . . ever met. It could be an ordeal to sit there, fingers poised above the keyboard, watching him pat his pockets, hunting for scraps of paper.
     Art was a storyteller. He'd unspool the most intricate tales of gangsters and gunmoles ("She was a HOOR!" he'd say. ". . . who worked . . . at an old joint . . . called . . . the Four Deuces. . . .") I'd listen, wishing I had a tape recorder or wishing I could go. Because the damn thing about a man like Art Petacque, what catches you so short when they go and die on you, is that you never think it'll happen. Why would you?
     You are rich in Art Petacque, sated. There's plenty. He's like Lake Michigan. You may hardly glance at the water, but you know it's there, and if somebody told you the lake had suddenly dried up, you'd rush to the shoreline and gaze horror-stricken and bereft at the muddy void.
     Art forced Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz to come to my house to perform the marriage of my brother, in my living room. It's a story I've told over and over again, sometimes to the same person. My brother was going to get married in the basement of City Hall, and I told him it was a mistake to get married with strangers all around. I had a big place on Logan. He'd get married there.
     "Artie," I said. "I need a judge to marry my brother."
     "I'll get you a judge," he said, taking the stump of a cigar out of his mouth. "I'll get you the most famous judge in Chicago. I'll get you Abraham Lincoln Marovitz." And he did. Art showed up with the judge and a box of fine cigars. Who at your office would do that for you?
     Yet despite my good feeling, my love for Art, there is something more, something I hesitate to say. A puzzle about Art Petacque I've been struggling to get hold of these past few days.
     Art went by a different code. Maybe because he was one of those tough Jews who grew up in the 1930s—his father was a cop. Once, somebody tried to carjack Art. A thug stuck his arm, holding a pistol, into the driver's window. Art grabbed the guy's arm and broke it.
     So perhaps his driven, no-matter-what approach to the news is something I and my namby-pamby college boy pals will never understand. I don't want to judge. Yet how Art went about reporting seemed, at times, like a kind of mania, primal, like a salmon struggling up river to spawn. He, in a way, represented something outmoded and embarrassing about journalism. He was like those prehistoric fish occasionally discovered in the depths of the ocean, armored and beaked. Art would lie and cheat and steal to get a story, and while that might sound romantic and dashing, in the abstract, it could be shocking to be a young reporter and watch him do it, close up.
     The last time I wrote one of his columns was such a time. I sat at the keyboard and gaped with drop-mouthed shock—let's just say that he was generating the content of his column in a manner not taught in journalism school, and leave it at that. When I finished copying what he wanted me to put down, I went into the city room and told the night editor a single, entirely true sentence about Art's column. Then I went to the Goat to get drunk. The whole thing turned into a crisis. I never wrote Art's column again. He retired shortly thereafter.
     I always felt bad and good about this incident. Bad because Art was my Dutch uncle and I betrayed him. And good because I stuck up for an ideal that I thought, then and now, was important. We spoke again, eventually, though never about that last column—I like to think he would have waved the matter away with a chuckle. He was an open, generous man, and now that I am growing older myself, and see the grinning new crop of youngsters arriving daily, it scares me how much less I have to offer them than Art Petacque, flaws and all, had to offer me.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 10, 2001

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Chicago Icon #3: Art Petacque

Art Petacque
     I might never have heard the name "Abraham Lincoln Marovitz," whose life brought us Monday's and Tuesday's icons, were it not for Art Petacque, the unofficial mob reporter at the Sun-Times, back when our staff was deep enough to have such a thing. So it's natural to feature him next, while I'm on taking time off from the paper, doing what I normally do on vacations: working.
   Reading this again after many years, two omissions stand out. First, I can't believe I didn't mention the pride Art took at giving mobsters their colorful nicknames—John "No Nose" DiFronzo lingers in memory, as well he would—and that if you look at one photograph of the crime scene of the 1955 Schuessler-Peterson killings that the Sun-Times splashed across their pages, sickeningly graphic by today's standards, there is a rumpled figure in a raincoat clomping around the naked bodies of the boys: Art Petacque. 

     Art Petacque was a police captain when he needed to be a police captain, and a doctor when he needed to be a doctor. He could be a burglar, too, if necessary, slipping into a basement window to snatch a photo for a story.
     "He was the ultimate go-to guy," said former Sun-Times Editor in Chief Ken Towers. "When you needed the story and needed it fast, Art never let you down. He always came through. He was a classic reporter, of the old school."
     Mr. Petacque, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting at the Chicago Sun-Times, died Wednesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He was 76.
     He was a colorful presence from a vanished age, with wild, unkempt eyebrows and a soggy cigar, drawing scraps of paper and matchbooks out of his pockets, reading notes on the doings of mobsters and madams. A reporter, not a writer, he gathered facts for stories that were written by others.
     "Art Petacque was a classic Chicago character, and that was his charm," said Metro Editor Don Hayner.
     In an era when Chicago had four major newspapers and fierce competition for scoops, Mr. Petacque was relentless. Every colleague had a story of him placing a call and identifying himself as a detective, or the coroner.
     Or the time he called a mob restaurant hangout, told them the police were on the way for a raid, then strolled in the deserted place to swipe a photo he wanted of a gangster hanging behind the bar.
     "He was an aggressive reporter; he screwed me out of a lot of stories," said former colleague Jim Casey. "He had contacts on both sides of the fence, law enforcement and the outfit. That's what some of the talk was."
     Mr. Petacque was born in Chicago. His father was the second Jewish captain the Chicago Police Department ever had. He went to Austin High School and played football, then attended the University of Illinois.
     In 1942, Mr. Petacque became a copy boy at the Chicago Sun, one of the precursors to this newspaper. He got his big break in 1944, covering the mob hit on Ben "Little Zukie" Zuckerman, and organized crime remained his specialty for the rest of his career.
     "He was never threatened by the mob," said his brother, Gerald Petacque. "People respected him."
     Mr. Petacque once brought a wife-killer to justice, tracking down a key witness, then arranged for another killer to give himself up in 1962. He forced a New York firm to back out of a Chicago real estate deal by revealing its mob connections. He covered the Gacy murders, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
     In the Summerdale police scandal, when Mayor Daley and Police Commissioner Timothy J. O'Connor had a private meeting that led to O'Connor's resignation, Mr. Petacque had the dramatic details.
     Unable to get close to John F. Kennedy during a 1960 campaign visit to Chicago, he persuaded the manicurist at the Drake to pepper the candidate with questions while she did his nails.
     Mr. Petacque received the Pulitzer Prize, along with the late Hugh Hough, in 1974 for a series of stories implicating convicted robber Francis L. Hohimer in the 1966 slaying of the teenage daughter of Sen. Charles Percy.
     In the old-style division of duties, Mr. Petacque was the reporter, and Hough was the writer. When news of the Pulitzer hit the Sun-Times newsroom, Hough was out and Mr. Petacque was asked—so the story goes—to express his emotions.
     "I wish Hugh were here to tell you how I feel," he said.
     Mr. Petacque also won a local Emmy for his TV reporting for Channel 7, and numerous other awards. When he retired in 1991, the North Avenue Bridge was renamed in his honor.
     "He had so much to teach today's generation of reporters," Towers said. "About aggressiveness. About persistence, about making his editors look good and his paper look good. . . . He made news interesting, and he made it lively and exuberant. His whole life was news. He was one of a kind. There will never be another Art Petacque—his name will live forever."
     Survivors include his wife, Regina; daughter, Susan Block; son, William, and two grandchildren.
     Services are 10 a.m. Friday at Piser Chapel, 5206 N. Broadway. Burial will follow at Memorial Park Cemetery, Skokie.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 7, 2001

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Chicago Icon #2: Mickey Curtin

     One practical aspect of writing advance obituaries is that you learn so much, knowledge that can be put to good use while the subject is still alive. Because I wrote Jane Byrne's obit, I knew when she would turn 80 (or, rather, when she CLAIMED she would turn 80; later I learned Byrne had subtracted a year from her age) and could celebrate the alleged milestone on its supposed date, a column that led to further honors coming her way while she was still around to enjoy them. 
    Of course, there can be downsides. Having written yesterday's post, a 2001 obituary on Judge Marovitz, years ahead of time, I knew about the 70-year love affair with his secretary, Mickey Curtin. So when she died in 1997, I was ready to tell her story, though it took some quick thinking. 
    The paper had a policy of obituaries being read to the next of kin. So after I wrote Curtin's, about her life and her relationship with the judge, I phoned her brother, the priest, and read it to him. He was not happy. Scrambling, I said, in essence, "You know, the judge is really her next of kin. I should have phoned him." But between the time I hung up, and found Marovitz's number (in the phone book, if I recall) and called him, the brother had already reached him. "I respected her family's wishes for 70 years," Marovitz explained (though I'm not sure why; he had told the story to the Tribune, which printed it three years earlier, though I didn't know it at the time).
     I didn't want to hurt the judge, or the Curtin family, though they seemed wrongly embarrassed by the relationship. But I didn't want to lose the story either.
    "How about this?" I suggested to Marovitz. "I'll run her obituary, but as a column, and won't use any names. That way, nobody who doesn't already know will find out." He agreed. After it ran, Judge Marovitz kept the column below folded in his wallet, and would take it out at parties and show people. A very rare obituary that doesn't include the name of the deceased. I suppose it could be criticized as minimizing a woman's life by viewing it through the lens of her male counterpart. But it didn't seem so in the late 1990s. At least not to me then.
   This originally ran under the headline: "Piety separated them; love kept them together"

     A man and a woman met in Chicago 70 years ago and fell in love.
     I'm not going to tell you their names, much as I'd like to. Because even after the decades, even though the woman died this past Monday and was 93 years old, seeing their names in the paper would upset some of her family members.
     So out of sympathy for them, the grieving family, no names.
     Still, the story should be told. Because a marvel shouldn't be allowed to pass, unheralded. And frankly, the tale doesn't need names. Enough that they were real people. Enough they fell in love. Enough they stayed in love, in a world that at times seems designed to thwart love at every turn.
     Despite opposition, this couple stayed in love for most of the century.
     Think of them as the man and the woman.
     The man was a go-getter, a scrappy former boxer. Some friends watched him get the tar beaten out of him in the ring one night and urged him to become a lawyer, so he did, scrabbling up the ladder.
     This was in the 1920s.
     She was born on the South Side and was 24 years old when he hired her to be his secretary.
     They fell in love.
     But there was a problem. The man is Jewish, a product of the Maxwell Street ghetto. And the woman was Irish Catholic. That was a huge deal then; it can still be a big deal now. It may be why you're reading a story with no names.
     He came to call her his own "Abie's Irish Rose," from the hit play of the 1920s about a Jewish husband and his Irish Catholic wife and the world of grief caused by their families and their hatreds. The play is forgotten now, but it was the most popular piece of theater of the decade, playing thousands of performances over five years.
     It was a fluffy bit of comedic nonsense, and of course ended happily. But in real life, there was to be no happy marriage for this man and this woman. Her family wouldn't dream of it. And his family? He adored his parents—adores his parents still, to this day, in a way that you just don't see much. They were Orthodox Jews, and he could never go and marry a Catholic girl, out of respect for them, even after they were dead.
     So no marriage. But that did not keep them from being happy and forging their own sort of marriage, a marriage of the heart.
     They were a fixture together, working side-by-side during the day, hitting the restaurants and nightclubs at night; it was the era of elegant night spots and swank dance bands, and they took it all in. They had many friends.
     "She was a charming, lovely person and a complete lady," said one of them. "He worshipped that lady, and she obviously was deeply in love with him."
     While half of married people can't seem to find it in their hearts to stay together, these two, unmarried people, did.
     Decades passed. The man went to fight in World War II as a Marine in the Pacific, where he was wounded. The woman raised three children—the children of a sister who died. He rose as a respected member of his profession and she stayed by his side, her entire life, helping him, in the shadows.
     Not subservient, though. She was, after all, Irish, and told him what she thought. He was, after all, a lawyer, and liked to hear himself talk. After a particularly windy speech before a crowded auditorium, she told him that he "missed two chances to shut up." And he was smart enough to love her for that, too, and it became a story he always told to cut himself down to size.
      The decades rolled by. Even though the thought of unmarried people being together lost its ability to shock or even surprise, this man and this woman observed the niceties of a bygone age. At hotels they took separate rooms. Aboard ship, separate cabins. Dignity was maintained.
     "The love of his life," said a relative.
     He lived alone. She lived with another sister. Eventually, his family came to welcome her.
     "She was part of our family, at every one of our celebrations," said the relative. "I don't think it would have been any different if they were married or not. She was part of us. . . . She was just a wonderful person. Quiet, but very warm, sincere, and with a great deal of substance to her. A very caring person."
     When she got old, and got sick, over the last few years, he made sure she was taken care of. He is old now, too, but still vital. He paid for everything. There was no piece of paper. There had been no vows. They weren't, as it turned out, necessary.
      Even toward the end, when she was fading and didn't know who he was when he visited or that someone had been there after he left, he still went to see her, as often as he could.
     The visits always upset him—for days after, he would be subdued and sad. A friend asked him why he continued to go, when it was taking so much out of him and apparently wasn't doing anything for her.
     "I have to," the man said. "I love her."
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 12, 1997

Monday, May 11, 2020

Chicago Icon #1: Abraham Lincoln Marovitz

Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, left, swears in Richard J. Daley
as mayor in 1955. Watching are Adlai Stevenson (center left)
 and former mayor Martin Kennelly.
     I was supposed to go to Taiwan Sunday, visiting volcanoes and indigenous peoples. Obviously that didn't happen. But I took vacation this week anyway—I haven't taken any this year, and we've been encouraged to burn through some now, if we can. 
    I first thought to post a photo and a few words each day. But then my younger son—mirabile dictu—asked me about Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. I thought back to this obit, which hasn't seen the light of day in almost 20 years. He was quite the character—in my Chicago book, he comes to my house to perform the wedding ceremony for my brother. This was the first in-depth obit I worked on, and whetted my appetite for those to come, which I will feature this week. Perhaps the most astounding thing is its length: over 2400 words. A different era.

     Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, a beloved fixture on the Chicago political and social scene from the Roaring '20s to the present day, and a close friend and early supporter of Richard J. Daley's, died of kidney failure Saturday at his North Side home. He was 95.
     "Abe Marovitz is a Chicago icon," U.S. District Chief Judge Marvin E. Aspen said Saturday in a written statement. "The history of 20th century Chicago could not be written without the story of Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, whose lifetime of achievement as a patriot, politician, lawyer, judge and humanitarian spanned the 1900s."
     Judge Marovitz was a savvy, behind-the-scenes power broker in the Democratic Party, who, despite association with many influential and, in some cases, unsavory individuals, enjoyed a long career untouched by scandal.
     He had an inate ability to make friends. Hubert Humphrey was a frequent houseguest, back to the days when he was mayor of Minneapolis. Jimmy Durante and Sophie Tucker were also close to the judge.
     But he is perhaps best known for his friendship with the elder Daley. He was one of the few politicians welcomed into Daley's Bridgeport home, and as a judge he swore Daley into office eight times, six as mayor.
     "Our friendship has withstood the test of time and change," Judge Marovitz said the day he swore in Daley for the last time. "To use an old Irish word, 'shalom.' Good luck and God bless you."
     Daley's sons called Judge Marovitz "Uncle Abe."
     "Abraham Lincoln Marovitz was a fine jurist, a well-known personality and a personal friend," Mayor Daley said in a statement Saturday.
     Judge Marovitz was born Aug. 10, 1905, in Oshkosh, Wis. His mother, Rachel, named him after the 16th president because she was touched by stories of Lincoln she heard at a settlement house lecture in New York City. But the tale that Judge Marovitz loved to tell is that his mother heard that Lincoln was shot in the temple, and so she thought he was Jewish.
     His father, Joseph, moved the family to the teeming Jewish ghetto around Maxwell Street on the West Side when Judge Marovitz was 5.
     Judge Marovitz adored his parents in a way that did not fade with time. He not only displayed their oil portraits prominently in his office for his entire life, but wore cuff links featuring their photos. He praised them constantly.
     "My mother and father came to this country from Lithuania, met, married and raised five children," he told a group of immigrants he was swearing in as citizens. "My father, a tailor, never learned to write English, but he was the most honest man I ever met in my life. My mother, who did not learn to read or write English till she was 70 and who ran a candy store, was the kindest."
     To help the struggling family of seven (he had two brothers and two sisters), Judge Marovitz went to work at an early age: selling newspapers, delivering telegrams and carrying groceries.
     He attended Jefferson Elementary and Medill High School, and became active in Boys Brotherhood Republic, a youth government. A speech he gave to the group impressed Levy Mayer, a senior partner in the law firm Mayer, Meyer, Austrian & Platt—now Mayer, Brown & Platt. Levy Mayer gave the young man his card and told him to look him up if he ever needed a job.
     He did, some time later, only to find that Mayer had died; nevertheless, he persuaded partner Alfred S. Austrian to hire him to work in the law library.
     Slightly built—he was affectionately known as "Little Abe" by friends—Judge Marovitz was athletic as a young man, fighting as a featherweight boxer at Kid Howard's gym on South Clark Street.
     He and a friend worked up a sparring act to perform at club dinners and parties. At one such gathering, instead of drawing his friend, the future judge drew a real opponent, an Italian steelworker.
     Two lawyers from the firm witnessed the pummeling he received at the hands of the steelworker, and reported it to Austrian, who encouraged Judge Marovitz to go to law school instead of making a living in the ring.
     So well-regarded was Judge Marovitz at the firm that Austrian lent him the $60-a-semester tuition to attend Chicago-Kent College of Law. He was 16 years old, and attended law school without having spent a day in college.
     He graduated in 1925 at age 19, but had to wait nearly two years until he took his bar exam, because Illinois law forbade anyone under 21 from becoming a lawyer.
     Again benefitting from the intervention of his mentors, he became an assistant state's attorney for Cook County—at 22, the youngest person to hold that position.
     Judge Marovitz worked there five years, until 1932, when a new state's attorney took office and fired him. But not before he met a young Dick Daley, then a City Council clerk.
     He then teamed up with his brothers Sydney and Harold in private practice, representing labor leaders and a rogues' gallery of some of the most notorious gangsters of the day.
     His clients included Gus Winkler, believed to be a machine gunner in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, North Side boss Ted Newberry, syndicate gunman Murray Humphreys and confidence man Willie Bioff.
     His association with gangland figures—which was to continue throughout his life—led to the inevitable rumor that he was somehow under mob influence, a charge belied by his spotless judicial record.
     "I've never taken a dime in my life," he once said. "I've never done a dishonest thing in my life. People call me up for a favor, and they can get it because that's the way I operate. But nobody can ever say I've ever done anything underhanded."
     He did learn to be less chummy with his criminal clients after an FBI agent read to him a transcript of a phone tap, in which the young attorney greeted Winkler with a breezy, "Well, what bank did you hold up today?"
     He was also close to the famed West Side boss Jacob Arvey, who helped Judge Marovitz get elected to the Illinois Senate in 1938—he was the first Jew to serve in that body. Judge Marovitz, remembering the prejudice he suffered in his youth, helped introduce the first Fair Employment Act, barring discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sex.
     In Springfield, he strengthened his friendship with fellow senator Daley. The two—part of the Democratic minority—took long walks together, avoiding the high life of corrupt Springfield politics.
     Judge Marovitz left the Senate in 1943 to join the Marines, as a private, predicting in his farewell speech to the Senate that Daley would be elected mayor after the war.
     Though color-blind and 38 years old, he pulled some strings to be sent overseas, and saw combat, taking part in the invasion of the Philippines.
     He was wounded but refused the Purple Heart. "I got a scratch, and some guys were without limbs," he said later.
     After the war, Judge Marovitz was involved in nudging Adlai Stevenson—who had used his influence to get Judge Marovitz into combat—toward his eventual role as a two-time presidential candidate, introducing him to Arvey when the three were in New York for the 1947 World Series.
     Judge Marovitz remained in the Senate until 1950, when he was named a judge in the Cook County Superior Court; he was sworn in by his old friend, Dick Daley, then the new county clerk. He served there until 1963, with a hiatus in 1958-59, when he served as chief justice of the Cook County Criminal Court.
     In 1963, President John F. Kennedy named him to the federal bench, as a judge in the Northern Illinois District, perhaps the last federal judge to serve without an undergraduate college degree.
     Judge Marovitz was involved in many noteworthy federal cases in Chicago—presiding over trials of Jeff Fort, head of the P. Blackstone Nation, later the El Rukn gang.
     The corruption trial of Ald. Paul T. Wigoda (49th), held in his courtroom in 1974, was a typical example of both Judge Marovitz's fidelity to friendship and his ability not to let it interfere with his judicial judgment.
     When Wigoda appeared before Judge Marovitz to plead innocent to charges of extorting $50,000, Judge Marovitz startled onlookers by reminiscing about a time during World War II when he was a Marine Corps sergeant in the Philippines and Wigoda was a Navy medical corpsman.
     "I got some shrapnel in my arm, and you removed it," Judge Marovitz told the courtroom. "It was painful for me that day, but I must confess that this is far more painful."
     The Chicago Council of Lawyers asked Judge Marovitz to bow out because of his history with Wigoda, but he refused, remaining in the trial and sentencing Wigoda to a year in prison after a jury found him guilty.
     Even the elder Daley was not immune when the law was at issue. When his administration in 1972 balked at notifying city employees of the Shakman Act, outlawing patronage abuses, Judge Marovitz angrily threatened to jail Daley and other top Democratic officials unless they complied.
     "Tell your client, unless they want to take a vacation in the County Jail, they better comply with this order," he told city lawyers. He later recused himself from the case.
     While he never married, he had a close relationship for nearly 70 years with Mickey Curtin, his former secretary. She died in 1997.
     Judge Marovitz was a fixture at concerts, benefit dinners and theatrical openings. Legendary feather dancer Sally Rand was his date at the opening of the Palmer House's Empire Room in 1933.
     He had friends among Hollywood entertainers. He was particularly close to comedian Joe E. Lewis. Lewis stayed at Judge Marovitz's home whenever he was in Chicago.
     Judge Marovitz was friends with the unknown as well. He could hardly walk through the lobby of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse or the Standard Club without pausing to shake hands, squeeze forearms, hug and kiss his many acquaintances. He had an affection for homilies, and friends became vastly familiar with his favorites.
     "He was one of those people who, if you walk down the street, you probably couldn't get very far because he knew everyone on the block," said Frank Mayer, a longtime partner at Mayer, Brown & Platt, whose grandfather was the lawyer impressed by the teenage Marovitz. In recent years Judge Marovitz, a senior judge, stopped hearing cases, but would preside over marriages and the swearing-in of immigrants, a duty he relished. Judge Marovitz claimed to have sworn in more new Americans than any other jurist.
     Judge Marovitz was honored when Plymouth Court from Jackson to Van Buren was renamed Abraham Lincoln Marovitz Court. There is also a forest with 200,000 trees in Israel that bears his name.
     Those seeking favors, or advice, or just to talk, would journey to Judge Marovitz's office in the Federal Building, where they found a veritable museum of Lincoln memorabilia, with dozens of images of the judge's namesake, from original autographed letters and bronze busts to needlepoint portraits and children's drawings.
     Walls of an inner office were jammed with autographed photos of presidents, prime ministers and popes, not to mention senators, poets and singers—the famous and powerful of the last half-century.
     Survivors include one niece, Adrienne Garman; four nephews, Sanford, James, William and Robert Marovitz, and several grand-nephews and nieces.
     The funeral and burial will be private. The federal courts will host a memorial at 2 p.m. April 3 at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
     The family is asking memorials to be made to the McDermott Foundation and the two congregations where Judge Marovitz was an active member, Congregation Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel and Chicago Loop Synagogue.
     In August 1994, he was asked to say a few words eulogizing Cecil Partee—words that apply just as easily to himself.
     "Even long life ends too soon—but a good name lives forever," he said. "The hurt is awful, but never to have known him would be a greater loss."
      Contributing: Adrienne Drell, Kate N. Grossman

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 18, 2001,

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Bad cats

Casper, in a characteristic setting.
     No, I do not like cats.
     There, I said it.
     In my defense, cats do not like me. Though that is nothing special; cats don't seem to like anybody, as far as I can tell. Oh, some people think their cats like them. But they're wrong.
     So, yes, I do not like them in return. Never have.
     Which is odd for a man who has been living with cats continually for more than 30 years.
     My wife, however, loves cats. And I love her—happy Mother's Day, honey! Hence the cats.
      First Anna and Vronsky, the two cats my wife-to-be adopted at the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society—or as we called it, "The Cruelty Society."
      We had them for nearly 20 years. Proof that this is not a stressful environment for the cats, my attitudes notwithstanding. It isn't as if they can read my mind. Okay, they probably can, but they don't care. Not caring is a basic feline trait. While me, I have to care. And feed and pay for all their special scientific urinary tract kibble and little boutique baglets of treats and occasional cat toys and frequent visits to the vet.
      For which they are grateful not at all.
      I even make a stab at delivering an occasional stroke or pat or whatever you're supposed to do with cats. I try to say something encouraging. "Hello there, Mr. ... ah .... cat." A cheery thought. Anna could chase a string—the elastic gold cord from a Marshall Field's gift box. I remember pulling the cord back, firing it across the room, and allowing Anna to dutifully retrieve it. So there I was, playing with the cat. What else do they—or you—want?
     Anna and Vronsky gave way to Natasha and Gizmo, our current cats. Both quite old now themselves. The cat population leapt by 50 percent at the end of March with the addition of Casper, seen in a characteristic moment above. Our younger son's kitten, purchased, I believe, because ... well, I have no idea. To spite us.
     At least Gizmo and Natasha are old. They spend 23 and a half hours a day on our bed. Which I suppose makes it their bed. They do let us slip into the spaces where they're not, which is kind of them. Casper is constantly bolting around the house, racing across the floor, up the walls. There'll be a crash—such as a potted plant sprayed across the oriental rug. If I tried that, the pot would bounce. But shattering a sturdy raku pot is easy for a cat.
     "Get the vacuum!" my wife cried to the younger boy—it is his cat, after all. And to his credit he slipped over to help, mostly through observation.
     "And a burlap sack! And a weight!" I added, though nobody picked up on it.
Natasha, wishing the man taking the photo would die on the spot.
     Not only must I live with cats, whom I do not like, and who do not like me. But then I must be teased for that perfectly natural and defendable inclination.
    "Dad doesn't like the cats!" one son will say, smirking, with the next thought, "Damn him all to hell" not spoken aloud.
   "Dad doesn't like the cats," the second boy will say, picking up the refrain, shaking his head, in mock or, heck, probably real disgust.
     "I like the cats..." I lie, wanly.
     Or try to, anyway. It is not always easy. Okay, it's never easy. Trying to like them only sets the stage for even greater dislike. When my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, usually on a stand in the dining room, for ease in consultation during Scrabble, Bananagrams, and other word games, was carelessly left open on the dining room table by my older son, and Natasha perched possessively upon it, staring at me intently, almost daring me to do something about it, which I was too smart to do. I neither reprimanded my son, nor shooed the cat off its pages—a mistake, as subsequent events would demonstrate. She looked handsome there, scholarly, in a hateful kind of way, and I took a photograph, just to show that I can get into the spirit of the thing. Cats! God's creatures and man's friend.
     Shortly after this picture was taken, the cat threw up—by accident, one assumes, though I wouldn't put anything past them—directly onto the dictionary. My wife tried to clean it best she could but ... well, lets say the episode will be plain to anybody consulting Volume II of the Shorter Oxford. I don't see why, when I say, "I do not like cats" that should reflect poorly upon myself. The general reaction should be, "Why you poor man! Those awful cats must have done terrible things for a kind soul such as yourself to dislike them." But nobody says that. I am alone in my own house, outnumbered, six to one.
    "The dog too!" my family pointed out, in unison.
    Right. Make that seven to one.