Working

by Studs Terkel

  I was hopin’ Leonard would be a doctor. When he entered the seminary, I thought: Gee, what caused him to go in there? When he was an Andy Frain usher he was assigned to Holy Name and he got acquainted with a lot of priests there. A lot of the ushers were at the seminary. They probably influenced him. He’s happy, so I’m happy for him. At first I wasn’t sure he was gonna stay, ’cause he loved life too much. He loved everything, people and animals. (Muses) Maybe that’s why he became a priest . . . (Trails off.)

  In the past, it was strictly parish. They come out once a year to bless the house and shake the hand. But now, with the younger set, things have changed. All the priests are goin’ without their collars and doin’ a lot of things that the old-time priest would never think of doin’. I don’t think they were allowed to.

  Henrietta Dubi reflects: “I’ll never forget those women, my neighbors, they were sittin’ out on the porch and they couldn’t understand why I’m grievin’ that Leonard went into the seminary. They said, ‘Oh, it’s such an honor.’ I said, ‘Yes, but it’s gonna be a hard life.’ No freedom, no privileges. We could only see him once a month. I figured he was in prison. One day I said to him, ‘Leonard, are you happy?’ He said, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am. Please don’t ask again. I chose this life and this is the life I’m going to lead.’ When he was havin’ his senior prom, I should have known then. Everything he was buying was black. It never dawned on me. The first time I seen Skid Row in my life was when my son took me down there. He said, ‘I want to save people like this.’ In a kidding way I said, ‘These people are beyond saving.’ He said, ‘As long as there’s breath in ‘em, they can be saved.’ I was sad and depressed when he first went in. I couldn’t understand why. Now I’m very proud of him. I wish there were more like him to speak out, but some are afraid. We pray for him all the time.”

  Sometimes I worry about him. He takes on the real big shots. He might buck the wrong person. They’ve been shooting Presidents and senators. He could be shot at too—if he says the wrong thing or gets the wrong man angry. When you’re foolin’ around with a politician, why you got troubles. But he’s for the people, he wants ’em to have a square deal. And I’m glad. If the people don’t like what he’s sayin’, why that’s too bad.

  You know the big joke? When Len was an Andy Frain usher, he used to seat Mayor Daley in his box at Comiskey Park. Ten years later he’s fightin’ him on the Crosstown Expressway business and the county assessor’s office. (Laughs.) When we first started visiting Leonard at the seminary we weren’t even allowed to bring him a newspaper. He wasn’t allowed to have a radio. It was so strict at that time. What amazes me now, I turn on the TV and I see him arguin’ with the mayor, (Laughs.) Or the county assessor and them politicians. It’s so different, it’s fantastic.

  When he started on this pollution against the steel mills, I told Leonard everybody knows the steel mill is polluting. How can you make steel without polluting? I’m not gonna bite the hand that feeds me. They been doing it for a hundred years. It could be cut down a great deal, I suppose, if they wanted—which they are trying to do. They’re putting in a lot of new buildings. I don’t know what they are, but they claim it’s for ecology. Who knows?

  This pollution business. He helped them people on the West Side where he lived. When we used to go to visit him it seemed you are going into a valley. It seemed you hit a fog bank. We learned later it was smog from the Edison plants. And he cleared it up. So we’re for him one hundred percent. But this fightin’ with the mayor and the aldermen, that scares me. (Laughs.)

  Mrs. Dubi interjects: “When I see him on television, I run. There might be a nut in the audience who’ll shoot.”

  She’s scared. We’re real proud of him. All my friends cut clippings out of the newspaper and bring ‘em to me and they’ll say, “Hey, I heard Leonard on the radio on my way to work.” They’ll tell me they’re all for him. My sister was tellin’ us the other day that her doctor was speakin’ of a young priest who was doin’ so much for the people in the neighborhood. She said, “That’s my nephew.” He said, “Gee, he’s wonderful.”

  You know what I told him to start on next? He’s fightin’ for lower taxes, which is all right. And better livin’ conditions, which is all right. And this road that he’s against, it’s all right. Like he said, they’re gonna demolish a lotta homes, a lotta people are gonna be put out. So the next thing I want him to do is lower this age of retirement, social security to about sixty, so I can get out of the mill sooner. If they lowered the age to about sixty, maybe they’d get a year or two benefit out of the pension before they die.

  Hard workin’ never killed a man, they say. I say workin’ in the steel mill is not like workin’ in an air-conditioned office, where politicians and bankers sit on their fannies. Where you have to eat all that dust and smoke, you can’t work hard and live a long life. You shouldn’t be made to work till sixty-two or sixty-five to reap any benefit. We’re paying social security, and most of us will never realize a penny from it. That’s why they should give it to him at a younger age to let him enjoy a few years of the life he ruined workin’ in the factory. I told him. “Leonard, you get to work on that next.” (Laughs.)

  Yeah, we’re proud of Len. At least he’s doin’ somethin’. What have I done in my forty years of work? I led a useless life. Here I am almost sixty years old and I don’t have anything to show for it. At least he’s doing something for his people. I worked all my life and helped no one. What I’m happy about is that them two boys took my advice and stayed out of the steel mill. (Laughs.) We’re a couple of dummies. We worked all our lives and we have nothing.

  MRS. DUBI: You know what we have? We got two million dollars in our children. Even in this angered world, both these kids turned out good, right? So we’re still winners. (To him) Even though we don’t have the cash, Father, we don’t have nothin’ to retire with we still got two million dollars.

  You gotta show it to me.

  MRS. DUBI: You see him on TV, don’t you?

  No thanks to me. I had nothin’ to do with makin’ him what he is. I told you I am nothing. After forty years of workin’ at the steel mill, I am just a number. I think I’ve been a pretty good worker. That job was just right for me. I had a minimum amount of education and a job using a micrometer and just a steel tape and your eyes—that’s a job that was just made for me. But they don’t appreciate it. They don’t care. Bob worked in the mill a few months during a school vacation. He said, “I don’t know how you done it all these years. I could never do it.” I said, “I been tellin’ you all your life never get into that mill.” (Laughs.)

  FATHER LEONARD DUBI

  He is associate pastor of St. Daniel the Prophet. He has just turned thirty. “This is a big year for the parish. It’s twenty-five years old. Tonight I have a meeting with the book ad committee. I have a person coming in for counselling this evening. My day will end around ten-thirty. It’s a fourteen-hour day, sometimes longer. I wear two hats. I’m a full-time priest and I’m cochairman of a community organization, CAP.”92

  “My day begins about six ’ in the morning. We have three masses: six forty-five, seven-thirty and eight. I rotate with my boss, the pastor, Father Brennan, and Father Tanzi. We come back to the rectory. We put on a cup of coffee, we’ll sit around, read the papers, chat. The kids start arriving for school. The doorbell will ring several times before that. A little kid wants to ask a question or see one of the priests to bless religious articles.

  “The phone starts ringing and rings all day. Simple requests. Somebody’s in the hospital: ‘We’d appreciate your going to see him.’ Kids call up for premarriage instructions. There are calls about funeral arrangements—mass, burial, wakes. The morning is spent answering the mail and checking with the CAP office. I try to do some reading in the afternoon or run out to the hospital for a visitation or I’m called to a meeting. After school I’ll meet with the altar boys to plan for the masses, for special liturgies, for the annual
picnic. I don’t know where the time goes. The weekends are the busiest time for a priest—weddings, confession schedules, mass schedules. Sunday’s a great time to meet our people.”

  I never thought I’d be a priest. I didn’t even know what a seminary was until I was seventeen. I started working for Andy Frain as I entered my senior year in high school. Frain hired a lot of seminarians. In the process of knowing these fellows, I started going back to church. One of my friends kept nagging at me: “Why don’t you consider being a priest?”

  My mother went to work when I was about four years old just to be able to make the weekly and monthly bills. My father completely discouraged me from ever thinking of a life as a steelworker. Where others would admire their fathers for their work in the mills, my father challenged me to lift my horizons beyond that.

  The steel mill’s been a hard thing for my father. He’s always suffered from back trouble. There were times when just the burden of walking and bending over those steel ingots just knocked his back out and he’d be in pain for days and weeks at a time. He felt life was like that because people like him went to work too early, had no education. They didn’t really discuss, they didn’t read. When they’d get off work it was a release to go to the tavern and have a couple of drinks. He didn’t want that for his children. He agonized. He was so unhappy with himself. Sometimes it caused serious strains in the house. I think he has tremendous ability. But because he was caught up in the system so young, the system that kept him so humiliated, he was just frustrated in his life. He didn’t want it to happen to his sons.

  I know my father had much more potential, but he was locked into a system day after day, and he didn’t want me to get locked in. He encouraged me to go college—“to make something of yourself” were the words he used. My mother was lobbying very strongly that I go into the medical field.

  When I entered the seminary, I can remember my mother would cry and cry and cry. My father was so frustrated, he thought I was going to be a priest to save his soul, that I did it to make up for all his sins, that I was doing penance for him. I said, “Hell no, Dad, I’m going because I’m choosing to go, not because of your life. I want to do it.” Even today if I decided I could not be happy and personally fulfilled, I’d step out as a priest. The work of a priest is to bring life to people. If I don’t have that life inside me, I can’t give that life away.

  My parents were raised in Catholic families, but they were not that deeply religious. They were married in court and did not have it validated by the Roman Church until I entered the seminary. My father was turned off by what he considered the religious hypocrisy of many of the Catholics he was raised with. My mother grew up in a Polish home, and many people of ethnic backgrounds looked upon the clergy as people who were just interested in money.

  The priest would come on Easter to bless the baskets and pick up a five-dollar bill. My grandmother—she didn’t have much money—used to embarrass me every time I’d go over as a priest. She would hand me money. That would hurt me. I’d say, “I don’t want it.” She was a poor old lady. That’s part of her tradition. When the priest comes you give him money. I started going over there less and less . . .

  When I got out to St. Daniel’s three years ago, I had an agenda for myself. I was trained in a very liberal seminary. I saw social action issues—war and peace and poverty. I spent my deacon years—before I was or-darned—at Catholic Charities. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. I was a fisherman pulling people out of troubled waters. Trying to bring them back to life with artificial respiration and Band-Aids. Then I’d put them back on the other side of the river into the same society that pushed them in. I knew I’d have to do more than just be a social worker and patch up people.

  When I got there I decided I would listen rather than just act. I kept hearing people talk about their problems and it blew my mind. I had stereotyped white middle America. I came from a steelworker’s family. We lived in a cold water flat until I was fourteen. We had plenty of problems. But I hadn’t been listening to these people. I put them all in the same bag: they were all prejudiced, they all hated black people, they were all for the war in Vietnam, they could hardly care less about poor people. As I listened, I saw they were as powerless as anybody.

  We had a congregation of about twenty-four hundred families, two thousand attend regularly. We get about four thousand people at St. Daniel’s every single weekend. It’s a working-class, a lower-middle-class community. Most of the people are laborers. We have a high proportion of city workers, people who have migrated to the outer edge because of changing racial patterns. We’re in the Twenty-third Ward. About twenty-four hundred policemen and their families live here. We have very few professional people.

  The one high school here, John F. Kennedy, was built for fourteen hundred. Now thirty-six hundred kids go to this school. It’s integrated because there’s a public housing project nearby. Two white kids or two black kids can jostle and if they have a fight, it’s just a fight. If a black kid and a white kid happen to jostle in the hall and a fight breaks out, it’s a racial incident.

  It’s just one example of poor city planning of a community where taxes have doubled over the past ten years. People who were paying $350 are now paying $700. They’re just about wild about that. They feel they’re not getting the services they’re paying for. They have been neglected by the city.

  They couldn’t do anything about their kid’s poor education, the pollution caused by Commonwealth Edison and the Sanitary treatment plant that poured nine and a half tons of greasy aerosols on them every day. They couldn’t do anything about the Crosstown Expressway when it was announced from on high. They wrote letters, they called the alderman, but nothing happened year after year. I was listening.

  In January 1970 I got a call from a young Jesuit seminarian. He was working with a new organization known as CAP. I had lunch with him, and the next day I was off and running. It was like a roller coaster ride. It took off like wildfire. At St. Daniel’s the women especially got active. I’m an advocate of the Women’s Lib movement. I try to have as many women as possible participate in the church services. Many of the extraordinary ministers at St. Daniel’s are women. The women understand exactly the need for power. They became committed organizers for CAP.

  There’s a great difference between textbook civics and the actual civics of the streets. When people, fifty or a hundred, go to see the alderman or the mayor, they can’t believe what they hear. They’re resented by the men they put in power. For the first time in their lives they learn that politics is power. People with the big money—the big institutions, corporations—have worked out deals in back rooms with politicians. They’re not going to break these deals until they’re forced to by the people.

  We had five hundred down at Mayor’s Daley’s office during our battle with Commonwealth Edison. They were peaceful. Some of them for the first time in their lives had ever been to city hall. They were just digging it. They’re really looking around and enjoying it. Out come two aldermen, Tom Keane and Paul Wigoda93 and they yell at the people, “You should be home with your kids. Why do you have your kids down here?” Who are you, sir?” said one lady. She couldn’t believe an alderman would talk to her that way. The next thing, she’s being shoved by a policeman. A middle-class woman who loves the system, who’s a friend of the police because they’re for law and order. All of a sudden she’s pushed. She came up to me with tears in her eyes: ”I didn’t do anything. I would have moved if he’d asked me, but he just shoved me. I could understand what those kids went through in Lincoln Park in 1968.“ She hated these kids before.

  Funny thing, a lot of the police are for CAP. Some of them are from our community. Their wives have actually participated. The people who delight me are the policemen and their wives. We have many of them involved. They can’t take out-front roles, but they’re silent supporters. They know the system needs an overhaul, that change must come.

  Ours is a wh
ite community, except for the housing project. A strict racial balance was kept in the area adjacent to the project, fifty percent white, fifty percent black. During the civil rights decade, black organizations pressured for the removal of the quota system. Consequently, white people moved out and black people came in. Homes were built in this area, where you put five hundred dollars down and the rest of your life to pay. The community there is now ninety percent black. Youth gangs keep the black people of this area in fear.

  This affects my parish nearby. “Where are we gonna go? We don’t want to live in a black neighborhood.” The blacks say, “We don’t want to live in a white neighborhood.” Both want to live where they can have good schools, good services, good transportation, and feel safe. I blame the CHA,94 which couldn’t care less about these blacks and whites.

  Yet in the process of organizing we have seen black people and white people share the same problems. The small home owners. The community has been built up around Midway Airport. When the airlines, in their overscheduling, clogged up O’Hare, Mayor Daley wanted a lot of them transferred to Midway, with their 747 jets. That’s why we’re fighting the Crosstown Expressway. It would gut the city and demolish many of the homes. Black and white together have united to stop the Expressway.95

  Another fight. The Sanitary District had been processing waste into sludge, dehydrating the sludge, and the gases had been polluting the community. We had attended Sanitary District meeting after meeting, with one hundred, two hundred, three hundred people. It kept escalating. Finally all the trustees but two came to the rally in the school basement at St. Daniel’s. The room holds eight hundred. Over fifteen hundred were there. They were standing in the aisles, on the window sills, up on the doorway, out in the parking lot. We had testimony from the people who were being terribly affected by this pollution.