by Studs Terkel
Genuflection came in the form of a greeting, an awed murmur:
“Hullo, Artie.”
“H’ya, boys. How’s it going?”
“Great, Artie. It’s a sweep.”
“That’s nice.” He looked toward the policeman. “Any trouble?” The officer shook his head. “Uh-uh.” Again. Prince Arthur said, “That’s nice.”
To the five weary old men, he said, “Finish that fifth I brung downstairs?” They all smiled, abashed. Prince Arthur chuckled softly. “You guys better watch it. That’s the third soldier you killed. People might think you’re alcoholics.” He turned toward the earnest, pale young man and smiled. No response. He was Mount Rushmore, that one. The prince slipped a package to one of the old men. “A fresh one. We’re celebratin’. Take it downstairs. And one at a time, huh?”
“Thank you, Artie.”
Prince Arthur Quinn, at length, seated himself on the long table, one well-shod foot touching the floor. Casually, he flipped through the pile of paper ballots. He mumbled, as to himself: “McGrady. McGrady. McGrady. Peace. McGrady. McGrady. Peace. Daley. ’Atta girl Mary. Peace. McGrady—”
“Hey! You’re not supposed to do that!” We all looked up in astonishment. It was the earnest, pale young man. The world stood still. Prince Arthur’s mouth hung open. I remember it even now. A tableau. The young man was pointing a trembling finger at the prince. The pink flesh of Prince Arthur was fast taking on a blushing hue. The others of us watched, transfixed.
After what seemed forever and a day, Prince Arthur murmured, ever so softly, “What’d ya say? Did I hear ya right?”
Young Galahad insisted. “You’re a precinct captain. You have no right to sit on the table and finger ballots that way. That’s only for the judges and clerks.”
Prince Arthur looked toward the policeman, who looked toward Prince Arthur. “Frisk that guy.”
The officer, in a businesslike fashion, went toward the young troublemaker, spun him around, and patted all his pockets, administering a smart slap here and there. “He’s clean, Artie. Nothin’ on him.”
The young man, who obviously didn’t know up from down, was obstinately indignant. “You can’t do that to me!”
Prince Arthur shook his head sadly. His voice was gentle, mournfully so. “Throw ’im out.” Which the officer did.
Prince Arthur Quinn resumed the count of the ballots, which, during this untoward interruption, had never left his hands. The young man was banging at the door. The prince told the policeman, “Ahhh, what the hell. Let ’im back in.” As the young man reentered, Prince Arthur was the hurt parent lecturing the disobedient child. “Will you behave yourself ?” The young man nodded. “Okay. Go downstairs and help yourself to a drink.”
“I don’t drink.” This one was really righteous. The others of us had had a drappie or two of Chapin & Gore. The breath of Laughing Allegra was, by this time, one hundred proof.
“That’s what I figured,” mumbled Prince Arthur, the intimation of a pout on his baby mouth.
The ballots were being leafed through, counted, and tabulated by the three clerks, the two judges, and Prince Arthur Quinn. As the night was drawing to a close and the stack on the table was thinning out, something lovely happened; a moment I shall forever cherish. One of the judges, his glasses perilously slipping toward the end of his nose, appeared bewildered by something he had discovered on one of the ballots.
“Hey, Artie. Look at this one. I never seen this before. What’ll we do with it?”
Prince Arthur held out his hand. The long pink sheet was put in it. He casually ran his finger down the ballot, and suddenly stopped. He looked up, his baby blue eyes wide with wonder. “What the hell! Communist!”
“Yeah, Artie. The guy marked it that way and wrote in ’at name. It’s spoiled, ain’t it?”
Artie was bemused. His usually smooth brow was furrowed. “Communist. Communist.”
“Should I throw it out?”
The prince was lost in a brown study. Slowly, the crow’s-feet disappeared and his face relaxed into its usual baby-fat smoothness. He smiled. It was for all the world. “Ahh, what the hell. Leave it in.”
It was in that beau geste of Prince Arthur Quinn, in that gracious act of noblesse oblige, that I experienced my moment of epiphany. Let totalitarian states defy us; let dictators rave madly; let those who live in thralldom eat their livers. It matters not. We are blessed. How glorious to live in a society of free and fair elections.
The following night, at the headquarters of Mary Daley—in what had once been the meeting hall of a German turnverein—I learned another indelible lesson. We, the hardworking members of Mary Daley’s watch and ward society, were to be paid off. I looked about for Red Kelly. He was, after all, my clout. I had never met the lady. She wouldn’t know me from Terrible Tommy O’Connor. I had five dollars coming. No Red around and about. I saw fat ones and skinny ones, gimps and bruisers. Highpockets and peewees. But where was my leprechaun? I hadn’t seen him since our alley transaction on Election Eve.
Ed McGrady had won the state senatorship quite handily. Charlie Peace was o-u-t. Kaput. FDR’s fireside chat had seen to it that all the Ed McGradys, from sea to shining sea, won quite handily. Mary Daley had not drawn enough votes to alter the result. In our precinct, though, she drew three times as many votes as the Communist. He pulled one. Nonetheless, Ed McGrady and the boys were grateful to Mary for the goodness of her heart.
At the headquarters—with the banner, slightly tattered but flying proud, “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—Mary Daley spoke eloquently. “I personally wanna thank each and every one of you for the wonderful job ya did. We made a great showin’, no matter what anybody tells ya. What counts is we got our feet wet and Charlie Peace was left high and dry. We won a moral victory. ’At’s as good as a real one. All right, everybody, get in line and Angie will pay you off. An’ don’t forget the refreshments in the back room.”
Angie, Mary Daley’s campaign manager, had one arm. It was bruited about that he was a minor member of the Boys’ Club and that, at one time or another, he had offended a major member. The gimp seated beside me, licking an Eskimo Pie, burbled conspiratorially, “Know how Angie lost da arm? He had fat eyes for Louise Rolfe.” Louise Rolfe! The blond alibi of Machine Gun Jack McGurn. Madonn’! His ice cream dribbled onto my mackinaw. “Lookit ’im. He coulda been in da movies.” Come to think of it, Angie did look a little like Valentino. Except for that missing arm. The gimp leaned closer. I backed away, into the shoulder of Zybysco. Or at least a guy that size. He occupied two folding chairs. “I had a chance to be in the movies, know dat? Wit’ Lon Chaney.” I was wiping melted chocolate off my pants. “Yeah, they chopped his arm off just like that. He’ll know better next time, eh?” I recognized the biblical injunction, if only in paraphrase: If thine arm offend me . . .
I saw a thick wad of bills rolled up in Angie’s one fist. The manner in which he peeled each off to pay the faithful was wondrous to behold. Though I was near the end of the line, I saw fives, tens, and even twenties handed out. At last, it was my turn. Mary Daley was checking off, Angie at her side.
“Who’d ya work with, kid?”
“Red Kelly.”
Her smile vanished. Angie’s one fist closed tight on the green. He roared. “Red Kelly!” Where is that miserable son of a bitch?! Where is he?”
I was stunned. “I don’t know.”
“Ya don’t know?”
“No.” I was terrified. I stared at Angie’s no-arm. Would this be my fate? He may have been a minor member of the club, but I hadn’t even been that. And if I offend him . . .
“The kid don’t know.” Mary smiled at me, beatifically. “Give’im the fin.”
Angie handed me the bill. I skipped the refreshments as I slunk out into the Clark Street night.
Only later was I to discover that Red Kelly had worked for all three candidates. He had even recruited the earnest, pale young man who had so absurdly challenged Prince Arthur Quinn.
Thus, it was a second lesson I had learned that first Tuesday in November, forty years ago. Election Day 1934. Cover all your bets. You may never win, but you’ll never lose. Oh, rare Red Kelly!
YA GOTTA FIGHT CITY HALL, 1973
Most of these pieces are reflections of neighborhood people—thoughts about themselves, the city—and their dreams. Our town is more celebrated for its heels than its heroes and heroines. Our heroes and heroines are unsung. They are rarely quoted. They don’t make the financial page. They don’t hold press conferences. They don’t work for city hall (and it certainly doesn’t work for them). In the words of Nelson Algren, they live behind the billboards. But they are the heart—a bruised one, more often than not—of the city.
I can think of nobody better to start things off than Florence Scala. About ten years ago she began to speak out. She and her neighbors were trying to save the place where they lived—Harrison-Halsted. It was the most polyglot of all Chicago neighborhoods. There was life; there was color; there was passion. Now there is a fortress, popularly known as the Circle Campus. There are expressways. There are complexes. There is a lot of cement. There is a lot of money. But there are hardly any people. The fight was lost. But out of it came Florence Scala. And her vision.
There was evoked during this conversation a bittersweet memory of a last walk we took down Halsted Street: Florence, my young son, and I. It was 1962. But now it is 1973, and Florence Scala is speaking:
“YOU REMEMBER THE PASTRY SHOP in Greektown? Mrs. Poulos? The delicious sweets she gave us while we sat there. It was her last week. Mr. Drossos joined us. He was the principal of the Socrates School. I don’t know what happened to Mrs. Poulos. Do you know what happened to Mr. Drossos?”
About a year or so later, I had paid him a visit, somewhere on the Far West Side. He was much more than a year older. He was lost without his old friends. He spoke of the diaspora. They were all bulldozed out and went their separate ways. Gone was the Academy. He called it that: where the old Greek intellectuals of the neighborhood sat in cafes, discussing politics, art, and life. All gone. “Nostos” was the word he used for the feeling that caught at his heart. It derived from “nostalgia” (he pronounced it the Greek way): “When you feel a pain because you cannot return. In Greek, anything that is nice, sweet good taste, we call “nostimo.” It partakes of the feeling of nostos.” Yes, dear friend, Florence, I thought as her gentle voice overwhelmed me: Mr. Drossos died. Old age, someone said. I know better.
“The bulldozers were there. They were tearing down the houses. Remember Dolly Belmont at the cigar store? How furious she was! Where’s Mayor Daley gonna put us, in Grant Park? And Victor Cambio of Conte di Savoia, that wonderful grocery that had foods from everywhere. The fragrance . . . Tearing down the buildings of Hull-House. There was a Japanese elm in the courtyard that came up to Miss Binford’s window.”
Jessie Binford had been Jane Addams’s colleague and lived at Hull-House for fifty years. Until the very day the wrecking ball blasted away her room. She returned to Marshalltown, Iowa, to die. She was ninety but she did not die of old age. She and Florence, those last days, became close and dear to each other. Said Florence, “There are the little blessings that came out of the struggle.”
“It used to blossom in the springtime. They were destroying that tree, the wrecking crew. She asked the man whether it could be saved. No, he had a job to do and was doing it. I screamed and cried out. The old janitor, Joe, was standing there and crying to himself. Those trees were beautiful trees that had shaded the courtyard and sheltered the birds. All night the sparrows used to roost in those trees. It was something to hear, the singing of those sparrows. All that was soft and beautiful was destroyed.
“The main building of Hull-House was retained. It is so changed it looks like a Howard Johnson restaurant. I pass that building every night. The children and the students have no idea what Hull-House really looked like. Or what it was.
“There’s a college campus on the site now. I call my neighborhood the Circle Campus parking lot. That’s all we are for the campus and the medical center. Our streets are choked with cars. Perhaps the college performs a needed function. Yet there is nothing quite beautiful about the thing. It’s walled off from the community. Jane Addams was against walls that separate people. She believed in a neighborhood with all kinds of people. She wondered if it couldn’t be extended to the world. Either Jane Addams brought something to Chicago or she didn’t.
“The cool cats, the tough boys, saw to it that urban renewal was working for them a hell of a lot better than it was working for us. It was a boon to the big realty boys. Their stooges did research studies over and over again for every crappy little project. They always came up with something; somehow we always lost out. One of these city planners became chairman of the Hull-House board. Almost overnight a decision was made to locate the Circle Campus there. It was the end of innocence for people in the community who thought they belonged to the city and its public servants were theirs.
“This is what the crosstown expressway battle is all about today. It would cut across twenty-two and a half miles of the city from north to south. Right now, only those living in that corridor are fighting that battle. The rest of us are on the sidelines. We’ve been conditioned to think of it as their problem, not ours. But we’ll all be affected. The frustrations of all of us are in this struggle.
“They’ve raised important questions, the people of CAP [Citizens Action Program]. The phenomenal cost. The permanent tax losses to the city. The environmental factors, involving health and safety. Where will the people who live there move? It could be another diaspora, similar to the one that occurred out my way ten years ago. A respected urbanologist, Pierre de Vise, dismisses the opposition to the expressway as strictly emotional. That’s arrogant. The people who live there want to be there because their roots are there. It’s more than strictly emotional. If we lose our roots, what good is a city? Are we to be nomads forever?
“De Vise raises the point that blacks, who are stuck in the ghetto, must get to their jobs out in the suburbs, where so many industries have moved. He suggests car pools. That’s the sort of emergency measure we used during World War II to save on gas. Are we to live forever with emergency measures? He did a good job in pointing out how segregated our city is. Wouldn’t he do better fighting to desegregate the city for minority housing and in the suburbs?
“All the citizens of Chicago, not just the politicians or the highway lobby or urbanologists, should make a decision on such projects. There should be public hearings in each ward about a comprehensive plan. Haven’t we had enough of piecemeal measures?
“The State Street Council and their associates are worried about downtown. They should be. At night, you can shoot a cannon and nobody will hear. There may be young black people seeing black exploitation films, but that’s about it. When I was young, that’s where everybody came to have a good time—downtown.
“The big money has drawn up a fantastically expensive and incredibly stupid plan for the central area. It’s jazzy. But they show no interest in what’s happening north of the river or west or on the South Side. The Loop cannot live without the rest of the city. Planning must be for the city as a whole, not something piecemeal.
“They envision the Loop as a garden shopping center, with two levels for pedestrians: a street and an overhead walkway. Oh, boy, can I talk about that! At the Circle Campus are walkways the students hardly use. They’re not protected from the wind and the rain and Chicago’s elements. I know. I’ve walked across them. The students use the ground level only, because it’s protected by the buildings.
“The central area plan throws a few crumbs to the middle-income and working classes. They see the railroad yards south of Harrison for middle-income housing. Superblocks. Superbuildings. They will be nothing more than a jazzier kind of Robert Taylor Homes.”
It sounds Orwellian. Like a fortress. Surrounded by what?
“Surrounded by us, the people on the
outside. The lake on one side, the Loop, and then us. The plan has nothing for the people who are worried, the people who are hating, the people who are sick—all of us on the other side of the tracks.”
Years ago, the people who lived “on the other side of the tracks” were “the undeserving poor who are always with us.” Today it is the blue collar in the frame bungalow, the black project, the Latin in his barrio, the southern white in U ptown, and, lo! the woebegone Indian nearby. As well as the beleaguered middle middle class, who don’t quite understand who thus beleaguers them.
IF YOU WERE GOD
A STREETWORKER BROUGHT ME TO a conflict going on near a public housing project about to be wrecked. A swimming pool is what the shouting was all about.
There were Puerto Ricans, African American kids of eleven or twelve, Irish, Italian, and an Asian kid or two. The stereotypes and insults were in abundance.
“What would God do in a case like this? What does he look like?” The Puerto Rican kid takes over. “If I were Italian, I’d say God is Italian, because he looks like him. If I were black, I’d say God is black. I’m Puerto Rican, I’d say God is Puerto Rican. Don’t you see? You always want somebody great to feel like you, look like you—so you could feel great.”
“If you were God, how would you handle this situation?”
“Are you crazy? I wouldn’t want the job of God. Never. He can’t do a thing about it. Give that job of God to somebody else, not me.”
Part Two
NIGHTHAWKS, 1971
The reason Hopper’s Nighthawks always astonished me when I visited the Art Institute is that there was an all-night diner down below the Wells Grand Hotel and I recognized those people. The man sitting there eating by himself could be having his big meal of the day, “graveyard stew”—it is toast dunked in hot milk. He could be Sprague, from the Wells Grand, whose teeth were knocked out by the vigilantes during the 1918 general strike in Seattle.
