Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (6 page)

Whenever I was hurting or anxious and felt as if there were nowhere else to turn, Dad was there for me with soothing, sensible advice and a warm, loving, always comforting smile. “It’ll be all right, boy,” he would tell me. “It’ll be better tomorrow.” And it almost always was, but would it now? Would it ever?

I returned to New York and joined my sister to deal with the grim business of funeral arrangements. Mercifully, a family friend agreed to spare me by identifying the body. Many of Dad’s patients and former patients came to his funeral, and more than a few told Joan and me how he had saved their lives and how much they would miss this warm, graceful man. I wished he could have heard their tearful tributes and the difference he had made in their lives.

He didn’t leave a note, but there was no doubt that the financial burdens Dad had hinted at the previous summer were a constant concern. He had taken on the extra work doing testing at the settlement house, but had performed badly and was fired, evidence that this bright, talented man was no longer quite himself. I’ll never know the whole story, but I believe it was this desperation coupled with a sense of failure that drove Dad to hang himself in the sterile little studio apartment in Midtown where he and I had spent so many nights.

Dad left me seventeen thousand dollars, an old Plymouth Fury, and a broken heart. I was angry with myself for missing the clues, and angry with him for not seeking help. A mental health professional, he had saved the lives of others, but was apparently incapable of reaching out to save his own.

For years after his death, the anniversary announced itself to me through bouts of depression and self-doubt. What did it say about my fate that the man I so admired could end up broke and alone, overcome by feelings of failure?

In the sorrowful and confusing aftermath of my dad’s death, however, the strongest sentiment I felt was that my childhood was over.

My father was dead. My mother, distant. I was completely on my own.

T
WO
DAYS
AFTER
I
graduated from college, in
J
une 1976,
I
stood on
M
ichigan
A
venue just north of the
C
hicago
R
iver, waiting anxiously for the massive clock on the
W
rigley
B
uilding to strike nine.
A
cross the street stood the imposing, neo-
G
othic
T
ribune
T
ower, where
I
was about to begin my summer internship.
S
porty in a brand-new suit—one of two
I
had bought to upgrade my threadbare student wardrobe—
I
leaned against a light pole, contemplating the whirlwind three months leading up to that moment.

It was an extraordinary break to win a
Tribune
internship, for which several hundred students from across the country had competed—but it was an absolute miracle that I had graduated in time to take advantage of it.

Years of neglecting my studies finally had caught up with me. The spring my father died, I was forced to take some incompletes so I could return to New York for the funeral and aftermath. And they wouldn’t be the last.

All the writing and reporting I had done had earned me the shot at the
Tribune
, but in order to focus on journalism, I kept deferring classwork. By the time the final quarter rolled around, I had to finish five incompletes, along with four other courses, in order to graduate and get that chance to prove that I belonged in a newsroom.

At the start of my final quarter, the registrar, who, in my memory, was a misanthropic character worthy of Dickens, seemed to take perverse pleasure in telling me that there was no way I could complete the academic gauntlet in time.

“Mr. Axelrod,” he said, “if I were you, I’d plan on summer school.”

“Not a chance,” I replied. “I have an internship waiting for me at the
Chicago
Tribune
, and I am not going to summer school. I’m finishing. Wait and see.”

The next ten weeks were a blur. Little by little, I knocked off the load, but I literally worked around the clock. I remember having to negotiate with one professor who accused me of plagiarizing my final paper.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked, incredulous at the slander. I was bone tired, and final grades were due that day. “I could have plagiarized,” I told him. “A lot of my friends who have taken your course offered me their papers. But I wanted to do my own work.”

Still, he wouldn’t budge. “No one who attended my class regularly could have written this paper,” he said. “It’s way off topic.”

“Well,” I replied slowly, “I confess I may not have been the most
regular
attendee. But this is my work. And, Professor, I have to graduate. I have an internship at the
Chicago
Tribune
this summer. I can’t go to summer school.”

The professor stared hard at me, stroked his chin, and changed the F to a D—the only one I received during my four years at the university. It was just enough for me to get by.

I strode triumphantly into the registrar’s office with my final grade. He looked over my transcript glumly, and then a small, sadistic smile curled up on his face.

“Wait one minute, Mr. Axelrod,” he said, barely able to contain his joy. “It says here you never passed your freshman swimming requirement. If you don’t pass the test by three p.m., you won’t be graduating with your class.”

I looked at the clock. It was almost one.

Now, I have never been a great swimmer, and the quarter when I entered the U of C, when one would customarily have done a stint in the pool, I was given a pass because I was recovering from mononucleosis.

So I sprinted across campus to the gym, found a coach who could administer the test, and explained my dilemma. “And if I start to drown, please let me go,” I told him, without a trace of humor. “I just don’t want to explain to my family and friends that I’m not graduating because I flunked the freshman swimming test.” I stripped down and paddled my way through five laps in positions that were varied enough to qualify as separate “strokes”—at least in the eyes of a sympathetic coach. He called in the news to the registrar, and I staggered off to the main quadrangle of the campus and collapsed in a triumphant heap.

Four days later I was on Michigan Avenue, experiencing that adrenaline rush as I waited for the top of the hour to report to the City Desk for my first day at the
Trib
. I didn’t want to be too early, and appear overeager, but I also didn’t want to be late, and seem indifferent. So at nine sharp, I crossed the street, took an elevator to the fourth floor, and entered a time warp.

The cavernous, two-story
Tribune
newsroom was essentially the same as it had been for generations, a vast sea of desks, phones, and typewriters framed by heavy doors and trim of dark wood. On one wall hung a gigantic reproduction of “Injun Summer,” an anachronistic tribute to autumn, drawn by famed
Tribune
cartoonist John T. McCutcheon in 1907, and then republished by the paper every fall from 1912 onward (until 1992, when political correctness and good taste relegated the once-celebrated but vaguely racist classic to the archives). On other walls, huge clocks marked the time in Chicago and in Washington and other world capitals. Above the newsroom was an observation window, from which visitors could look down on the frenzy. And by nine, the action was stirring, as dayside reporters checked in for their assignments.

I was greeted by Sheila Wolfe, the day city editor and intern coordinator, who had stuck her neck out by hiring me over a flood of impressive applicants from America’s leading journalism schools. In an intern class of nine, I was the lowly claimer among highly trained thoroughbreds. Now, I thought, she looked slightly dyspeptic as she considered her long-shot bet. “You ready?” she asked as she led me over to the City Desk to introduce me around.

The first to extend his hand was Bernie Judge, the young, dark-haired city editor, who would become a great mentor and a lifelong friend. Bernie was a veteran of the City News Bureau, a local wire service with a grand history in Chicago’s front-page lore. In fact, the playwright Charles MacArthur, who coauthored the hit Broadway comedy
The Front Page
, got his start there, as did Royko, Seymour Hersh, and a raft of other celebrated reporters and writers. On Bernie’s wall hung a quote from A. A. Dornfeld, the longtime night city editor of City News, that summed up the wire service’s gestalt: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Translation: get it right!

Sheila turned me over to Don Agrella, the crusty assignment editor. Agrella had spent his entire career working for Chicago newspapers, as had his brothers Chris and Joe. Between them, they had more than a century of experience. I would quickly learn that when Agrella shouted your name—followed by a “hat and coat!”—it meant there was breaking news somewhere in the city, and you had better get a move on it.

In our first encounter, he looked a little bemused. “Nice suit,” he said, with the smile of the veteran gently hazing a rookie. “But it’s going to get a little dirty. There was a tornado in Lemont last night. Lots of damage. I’m sending you out with Jeff Lyon.”

Lyon, a second-generation reporter and one of the paper’s star writers, showed up a few minutes later, appropriately dressed in blue jeans and a Hawaiian print shirt. He was my Sherpa as we tromped through the muddy, littered streets of Lemont, and then visited a local hospital, looking for victims. After a few hours, we called our notes in, and a rewrite man turned those facts into a coherent narrative. Rewrite men, I learned, were the anonymous heroes in journalism’s trenches. By the time we returned, there was a story with Jeff’s and my bylines in the afternoon editions. Damn, I thought. Whole new world.

The next day, Agrella’s hazing continued. That summer, Frank Fitzsimmons, the mobbed-up Teamsters president, had proposed obscenely large pay raises for himself and other top union officials. Agrella had an idea. “Hey, kid,” he said, calling me over to the desk. “Why don’t you go out and find some Teamsters and see how they feel about Fitzsimmons giving himself a raise.”

I had no clue where to start, but also no inclination to ask. Agrella smelled my fear. He directed me to a set of loading docks on the Southwest Side, where he said I would find a bunch of Teamsters packing or unpacking trucks. What he didn’t mention was the obvious: regardless of their feelings, Teamsters were not terribly eager to be quoted speaking disparagingly of the guy at the top. They were angry about the pay raise, but not enough to risk life and limb.

“Are you fucking nuts?” said one driver, pushing me off the running board of his truck, when I asked him for a reaction to the Fitzsimmons raise. “You trying to get me killed?” His was the standard response.

Still, the only thing scarier to me than an angry Teamster was the prospect of returning to Agrella from my first solo assignment without a story. Finally, I found a few guys bitter (or crazy) enough to challenge their corrupt and menacing union boss on the record.

Such were my days that summer, a steady and varied diet of challenges, each meant as a test and almost all of them an education. I loved the paper, and like the eight other aspiring reporters who worked as
Tribune
interns that summer, I desperately wanted to stay. History said the
Trib
would keep only a few of us, and I was bound and determined to be among them.

It was a diverse class, and everyone’s assumption was that the paper’s selections would reflect that diversity. So I found myself competing all summer with a bright, young Jewish guy named Paul Weingarten. We each quietly assumed that, between us, it would be one or the other, but not both. If Paul worked extra hours, I made sure I put in at least as many. Whenever there was a tough or odious assignment, and volunteers were requested, our hands shot up in unison. I read his excellent copy with a mixture of admiration and dread, and pushed myself that much harder. At summer’s end, we were shocked to learn that we had
both
been hired. “I just couldn’t choose between you guys,” Bernie explained.

So began my formative years at the
Tribune
, which at the time still represented what was best about the journalism of that era. Though my colleagues were all different, most shared one quality: an unquenchable thirst for a good yarn. They viewed reporting as a calling. As products of one of America’s most competitive newspaper towns, they lived to get it first and to get it right.

Our editors would be as enthusiastic about a good story as their reporters, often sending congratulatory notes and handing out small bonuses for scoops or simply a well-told story. They also were fearless, or so it seemed to me; always willing—maybe even delighting—in taking the high and mighty down a peg when they deserved it.

There were plenty of role models, but none more so than Bernie, the city editor, whose guidance meant everything to a kid still reeling from the loss of his dad and looking to find his way. When I joined the staff, he sat me down and explained the facts of life to a young man in a hurry.

“I know you love politics; that’s what impressed us,” he said. “And the truth is you probably already know more about the committeemen and aldermen and all that jazz than ninety-nine percent of the people in this newsroom. But there’s a lot more to reporting and a lot more to life. So starting next week, you’re on nights, six p.m. to two a.m.”

Bernie was right. I would have loved simply to step into the political beat, but I was twenty-one years old, and a reporter at one of the biggest papers in the country. Who was I to gripe? And as it turned out, that nightside stint was exactly what he promised: another layer of my education. Murder, mayhem, and disasters, both man-made and the natural variety, became my beat, as that’s pretty much the bread and butter of the late-night shift.

The night city editor was a former Green Beret named Frank Blatchford, who loved nothing more than a grisly crime or gruesome catastrophe because they would put him and his team to the test. The more horrific the disaster, the more blissful Frank would become. Around the
Tribune
, such calamities were known as Blatchford Brighteners. I had my share, each a learning experience about large notions such as evil, heroism, and the perils of life in the big city.

I covered an elevated train that overshot the tracks and fell twenty feet to the downtown street below, scattering bodies in its wreckage. Stunned pedestrians ran from person to person, trying to identify the living to offer help.

A massive fire broke out at a Commonwealth Edison facility, where wreckage pinned a fireman to the upper wall of a huge, burning plant. An elderly police surgeon climbed into a cherry picker, rose seventy feet, and amputated the fireman’s pinned leg, in a vain effort to free him and save his life.

One night, early in my tenure, we heard a crackling bulletin on the newsroom police radio—“shots fired . . . officer down.” It was a drug raid gone wrong. I raced to a South Side police district and waited with other reporters until two detectives dragged a suspect in, bloodied and bruised.

“What happened to him?” I shouted as the trio passed by.

One of the detectives turned around to see who had asked such a naïve question, and shot me a scowl. “He had a fall,” he sneered, as they disappeared into the lockup. An older, streetwise reporter from City News grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me close. “The kind of fall you take when you kill a cop,” she whispered.

 • • • 

During my nearly three years on nights, I learned more about reporting, about Chicago, about people and life, than I ever could have imagined. Bernie’s admonition had been right.

Yet Bernie also honored my long-term interest in politics by assigning me, in election season, to cover candidates—albeit almost always the sure losers. In that spirit, he gave me a reprieve from nights in early 1979 to cover the seemingly quixotic mayoral campaign of Jane Byrne. I didn’t know it then, but a campaign that seemed like a welcome respite would become another watershed in my career—and in Chicago political history.