Buying the Night Flight (9 page)

The
Daily News
was a feisty paper, a little raw like Chicago itself, but one that revered and spawned and showcased good writing. It was, in its way, quite literary. But it was not, in those days, for women. Despite my minimal experience (only four months on the
Southtown Economist,
a neighborhood paper), the city editor wanted to put me on the city desk, but the staid old managing editor, Everett Norlander, flatly told me, "We've had two women on the city desk and we'll always have two women." Within a year I became the third, thus breaking a real quota and the first taboo to irritate me.

But the
Daily News
was also a paper quite unlike papers today; it was journalism quite unlike journalism today. We quite simply "reported" what was going on. We did not write columns or our own personal interpretations on the news pages. We reported fires and murders and investigations and the statements of institutions. It was a much straighter and much more honest job then, and it was also a hell of a lot of fun.

We loved one another on the paper--and for a very special reason. We competed brutally with the other papers (there were four then!) but we didn't compete among ourselves. We were out to get the world but nobody was going to divide and/or conquer us. It was another bit of the Chicago tribal morality perhaps, but it was grand. So when one reporter got a prize, everybody celebrated because everybody shared in it; it reflected well on everyone. It was very, very different from journalism today, when
The Washington Post's
"creative tension," in which everybody is pitted against everyone else and everybody ends up hating everybody else, has become more the dreary norm.

In those days we also called ourselves simply "reporters." No, not even "journalists" and certainly not "media" or "media celebrities," good God! Nobody came into journalism in those days for power or to be celebrities; they came in because they wanted to write, or walk the streets, or booze around and raise hell with the world. But those reporters knew the city; they lived in it, not the suburbs, like the editors today, and they loved the city. It was our clay and we were its.

The
Daily News
reporters were almost caricatures of themselves: Ed Rooney and Bill Mooney, the tough-talking reporter's reporters; my longtime boyfriend, Harry Swegle, and Bill Newman, who wrote so well and so sensitively about the city; the brilliant Lois Wille, who helped so much in easing me on as the "third woman"; the rowdy, wonderful Howard Ziff, with his big black beard; Ed Gilbreth, who knew Chicago politics backward and forward .... I wish I could mention them all, for in truth I loved them all. And I sat in the most extraordinary seat in the city room, as fate would have it. In front of me sat Mike Royko, then simply a rewrite man but later to become "the" satiric genius of our generation and a fellow columnist. On my right hand sat Jay McMullen, the crack and wry City Hall reporter later to become the celebrated husband of Mayor Jane Byrne. And on my left was the wonderful Bill Newman, with his elegance of expression and his subtle charm. What a triumvirate!

Then one Thursday our wonderful city editor, Ritz Fisher, called me up to his desk and said, "Gee Gee, we've got a good one." One of the reporters who covered the Mafia had arranged for a "waitress" by the name of "Irene Hill" to cover a big Mafia wedding that Saturday. I was Irene Hill.

I spent hours in our morgue studying the mug shots of the leading Mafia figures, and I dutifully bought my waitress uniform in the cheapest place I could find. What perhaps was most strange was how very easy it was. Late that Saturday afternoon, dressed in my "costume," I simply went out to the Tarn o'Shanter Country Club. On the road outside, as usual, FBI men, reporters, and others waited to catch glimpses of the hoods rushing in, in their big black limousines. I walked by and in, in my uniform.

To my chagrin, however, I was initially placed in an upstairs room where I would not be able to see the participants at all. So as soon as I could, I slipped out and began serving drinks on the patio where everyone was arriving. I quickly spotted Tony Accardo; his right-hand man, Jackie Cerron; Murray "The Camel" Humphreys. I made sure to serve
them
drinks, noting down every little comment and gesture in my mind.

Then once again I was relegated to Siberia. After serving
my
designated table in a corner of the enormous room filled with some two thousand, I realized that since cocktails I hadn't seen any of the "biggies." So I began to wander around with my champagne and finally, to my delight, found the entire bunch, all men and about thirty of them, seated together in a dark side room. I had started pouring the champagne when, to my horror, a swarthy gnome of a man jumped up and pointed his finger precisely at me.

"Don't give us none o' dat," he virtually shrieked.

I froze in place, then fled back to the kitchen.

"You're pretty dumb," said the bartender. "That's the eleven- dollar-a-bottle champagne. That room gets the twenty-five-dollar-a- bottle stuff."

At 2:00 a.m., weary but happy, I walked out to the road where the FBI and the other reporters still were waiting. A guard motioned us over. "Now, girls," he said, "be sure not to talk to those reporters." I assured him I would certainly do no such thing.

The next Monday my front-page story appeared, with a picture of me primly attired in my waitress uniform. It began, "The mob went to a party and I went along for the ride."

But those stories were unusual. More and more, pursuing my early passions, I covered race relations. In those days a white woman could still drive around most black sections of Chicago, even to night meetings; I only had one threatening scene -- and that taught me a great deal.

In the middle of a bright and sunny weekday I had driven out to West Madison Street to attend a Planned Parenthood meeting in a very poor and particularly dilapidated black section of the city. The once-proud old buildings now had only their fronts to recommend them; once inside, you found that the hallways stank and you picked your way with revulsion over the filth, feces, and refuse. As I walked to the building from across the street after parking my little Volkswagen convertible, I noticed four nice-looking young black men standing on the corner and I greeted them cheerfully, with a big "hello." They responded in kind.

But up on the third floor, where the meeting was supposed to be, I found only two very drunk, very disreputable black women, their eyes glassy with drugs. I left quickly only to find, as I approached the front door, two strange and very threatening black men entering. There was no question of the threat--a look passed between them and on to me. And they stopped just inside the front door. I took a deep breath and rushed through them, pushing their arms aside. To my continuing terror, outside they continued to follow me. But the four men I had greeted were still at the corner. Incredibly, they formed a line facing the two threatening men and stopped them from following me across the street. In my memory until this day is etched the scene of that strange and fortunate standoff.

The experience also represented something else to me. Reporters working in a different neighborhood -- or another culture -- must always establish themselves in the turf. The Press must always act as though they belong and also establish friends and collaborators, who become protectors. This is the law of the street. That first time I didn't do it calculatedly. I liked the four young men, but I was also from the South Side of Chicago, so it all came quite naturally.

Around this time I also met a man who was to influence me deeply, Saul Alinsky. Saul, a big husky man from a Jewish family from way, way behind the tracks, was to become the organizational genius -- and conscience -- for many in his and my Chicago generation.

He founded and ran the Industrial Areas Foundation, which trained organizers and organized neighborhoods or groups that were powerless, in order to gain power. Saul's methods were highly confrontational, always putting the big powers like corporations and city governments and universities on the spot, and he was not above doing a lot of awful things to empower the "people" he believed in. If you were a friend, Saul could be wonderful company, full of wit and irony and gentler than the most dedicated big puppy. If you were an "enemy," his wit became scathing; his instinct was to kill. In short, people either loved him excessively or hated him excessively. I loved him, but not without an understanding of why he was hated.

What his critics never understood was that Saul was quintessentially, almost embarrassingly, American. He would never, for instance, go overseas -- he would never go outside the borders of "my country." He loved it with the mystic, stubborn, unquestioning patriotism of the immigrant, even though he was second generation.

What many -- City Hall, the Democratic machine, big companies, others in power -- hated him for was his "revolutionary" or "radical" philosophy of organizing. In
Reveille for Radicals,
for instance, called a "manual for ... revolution," he wrote, "This is the story of People's Organizations, ever-growing in number and irrevocably committed to the rallying cry of democracy: 'We the people will work out our own destiny.' They are on the march toward a common goal -- full democracy for the common man."

It all sounded very radical, but in practice what Saul did was very conservative: to organize the down-and-out quarters of American society
into
the American system. Thus he might strengthen and in his mind even save it. But it was the way he did it that made him a lot of enemies. He organized
against
the biggies, whether the University of Chicago or City Hall or Eastman Kodak. What they couldn't see was that in many ways he was saving them and their way of life!

After I interviewed him for a long series I wrote on The Woodlawn Organization, the first successful black neighborhood organization in Chicago, Saul and I became close friends. There was never anything overtly romantic about our relationship, but there was a special kind of "romance" about it, even though he was some thirty years older than me.

He would tell me the most outrageous stories, and I adored them and him. Once, when TWO was challenging the Daley machine, he told me of being called into Mayor Daley's office. The two men were much alike in character, but with such different callings in life. The mayor wanted Saul to call off a particular TWO offensive (Saul was always thinking of things like having members take over all the toilets in the Loop and just stay in them for several hours!), and Saul, for all his sophisticated knowledge of politics and personality, was stunned by the idea that Daley even thought he would do it.

As Saul, angry and miffed, got up to leave, Daley called him back. Then the mayor pounded his fist on the desk. "All right, Alinsky," Saul quoted him to me, "tell me what your price is. I'll pay it."

Saul laughed as though he would burst when he told me that. Saul didn't have a price, just as my father did not, and it said something about Mayor Daley that he thought even Saul did. But then the Chicago machine thought everybody had a price.

People didn't understand Saul. They called him a "radical," not realizing that he was basically the most fervent possible American and the most conservative anti-Communist. They never understood he wanted to enfranchise the "outs" in order to save the "ins." Nor did he take any guff from anybody, whether liberal, black, or whom ever. When black students at one university announced to him arrogantly that they wanted their own black student union, he said, "Cut out the crap. You don't really want that. Now, say it." And they did. They were playing some of the games of their time, and Saul knew it, if "liberals" didn't. He didn't want this country to break up. And he didn't play fashionable games.

What he gave me was something very special. I disagreed with a lot of his thinking and even tactics. He could be extremely cruel, although usually only to people he thought could take it. (Often they couldn't.) But Saul was a great balance to my excessive romanticism and to my extreme idealism.
He taught me tactics. Just in watching him all those precious years that I knew him, I absorbed what is practical politics, what is strategy, and how one moves tactically in the world. I learned not only how much better it is to win than to lose but
how
to win and how to win in one's own way.

Father John J. Egan, known as "Jack," another fantastic, bigger- than-life man and priest, worked closely with Saul in those days -- indeed, this Jewish iconoclast and this Catholic believer were like the oddest pair of loving brothers. They got the Archdiocese of Chicago to support a good deal of controversial community organization, among other "impossible" things. In later years, Jack Egan told me this story about Saul:

"One day we were walking down Michigan Avenue, and I was a little worried about some of the things we were doing and how people would criticize me. Saul stopped in his tracks. 'Why does everybody have to like you?' he demanded. 'Jack, you do what you have to do. Some people don't like little bald men, some people don't like priests, some people don't like short people or Irishmen. For God's sake, be true to yourself and do what you have to do and everything else will fall in line.'"

Midwestern "radical" impulses--and they are not that in any other sense of the word anywhere else -- were everywhere around me. Hull House held another deep and very special attraction for me at that time. Jane Addams, Jessie Binford, Edith Hamilton -- they offered another, kinder but no less tough radicalism and love, "social feminism." And they were women: strong-minded, determined, idealistic, tough, politically sagacious women. We had one such woman in my own family, a great-aunt, Alma Foerster, who had been a Red Cross nurse working in Archangel, Russia, during World War II. She was a true heroine, but she was never mentioned to me.