Never a City So Real Read online

  A couple of years ago, our mutual friend Tony Judge suggested that I spend a day with Sadlowski. Tony, a kind of intellectual entrepreneur, is connected to just about everyone in the city, and once a year, the two men drive around Chicago and visit sites that mean something to Sadlowski, like the gravesite of Allan Pinkerton, whose Pinkerton guards were frequently used to break strikes. Sadlowski, Tony told me, likes to urinate on Pinkerton’s grave. “He sees the lineage stuff,” Tony says. “The old grudges are his grudges.” So, with Tony’s introduction, I called Sadlowski, who growled and grumbled, and grudgingly agreed to meet.

  We spent a day in Sadlowski’s Ford Crown Victoria, which has nearly two hundred thousand miles on it, tooling around South Chicago (“Fucked-up nothingness,” he says of the graveyard of factories and forges along the Calumet River). Then, a few weeks later, he invited me to attend a play about a long-ago strike, which he and fellow steelworkers had written and now performed, and then I tagged along with him to a lunch of fried chicken and sausage for pensioners, where the men played poker and talked about the prescription drugs they were taking, and the women, widows of steelworkers, tried their hand at bingo. These people still come to Sadlowski with their problems. Pension checks that are late. Health benefits not kicking in. Sadlowski, who often runs into his former coworkers from South Works over early-morning coffee at the local McDonald’s, says of them, “I’m not romanticizing when I say this, but they’re some of the sharpest guys I ever met in my life. They knew the score.”

  In fact, local history has been a bit more complicated than that. This is, after all, the same community that, over the course of seven months in 1953, threw rocks and bombs into the Trumbull Park low-rise public housing complex to keep blacks from moving in. It’s also the same community that elected Ed Vrdolyak as its alderman for four consecutive four-year terms. In the 1980s, Vrdolyak led the white majority on a city council that reveled in its ability to block virtually every piece of legislation proposed by Harold Washington, who as Chicago’s first black mayor was dismissed, if not reviled, by a portion of the city. But Sadlowski is a man of eternal faith. When looking, for instance, at something like the Trumbull Park experience, he points not to those who threw the projectiles but to the few courageous ones who challenged their friends and families to support the African-American family who moved in. (Sadlowski was also a big supporter of Harold Washington.) It’s not blindness, just Sadlowski’s inclination to buck the prevailing notion that the blue-collar worker in this country always shares the politics of Archie Bunker. “If you’re a working stiff,” he says, “your history becomes distorted.”

  Sadlowski now teaches a labor history class to carpenters and millwrights at a nearby Indiana college. “I just want to get them thinking about the working class,” he tells me. “They don’t even understand that there is such a thing.” (He also was appointed to the Illinois Labor Relations Board, which helps resolve labor disputes involving public employees.) One Saturday morning, Sadlowski invites me to join him and his students, thirty-six men and one woman, for a field trip. All of them are in their twenties and early thirties, dressed in hooded sweatshirts and Carhartt jackets. Each has a cell phone on his (or her) belt. They wear baseball caps announcing their allegiances: Chicago Cubs, Bud King of Beers, Killian’s, Rapala, and Rail Cats (a semipro baseball team that plays in a stadium called the Steel Yard). They look as if they’d rather be elsewhere, and early on, when Sadlowski, sitting in the front of the bus, starts rambling on about his days in the mills, a voice from the back hollers out, “Come on, Ed.”

  “What do you think their attention span is?” he mumbles. “Half a commercial?” But Sadlowski loves these guys. Their lives are constrained by what they know and by where they live, but they know enough to recognize that getting by with what skills they have may not cut it as the world turns, and so have elected to come back to school, to figure out what’s next. (One tells me he wants to become a nurse.) They’ve also had the good fortune to run across Sadlowski, and Sadlowski the good fortune to run across them; they’re cut from the same cloth, and Sadlowski can tell them whence that cloth came.

  At Sadlowski’s direction, the bus driver turns off Burnham Avenue, over the curb, and along a stretch of cracked cement that wends its way through a large field of tall weeds and prairie grass. A quarter of a mile in, Sadlowski tells everyone to get off the bus. According to Sadlowski, the nearby Calumet River was at one time the most industrialized waterway in the world. Now, as the carpenters and millwrights stand there, chilled by the early fall wind, he gestures toward the river and rattles off the names of the companies that once lined its banks: “Interlake Steel. Valley Mold and Iron. South Works. American Shipyard. Calumet Shipyard. Wisconsin Steel. Republic. Acme.” It’s to make a point. A few days earlier in class, one of his students had ripped into people living off the dole, people taking welfare handouts. “Too often, we point fingers,” Sadlowski tells his students. “How can people live like that? I’ll show you how it can be. Forty, fifty years working in a steelmill, doing what society expects of you, and then . . .” He claps his hands together. He has their attention.

  “So where do the guys go?” a young carpenter by the name of Joe Gilmak asks.

  “That’s my point,” Sadlowski says.

  Sadlowski has taken his blue-collar protégés to this field because it’s the site of the Memorial Day Massacre (not to be confused with the Valentine’s Day Massacre, an Al Capone–ordered killing on the city’s North Side); it’s in places like this, Sadlowski tells them, that their lives and livelihoods are rooted. In 1937, the nascent steelworkers’ union was attempting to win recognition at the smaller steel companies, and Republic Steel resisted, locking out its workers. The men and their families had gathered at a nearby tavern, Sam’s Place, and decided to march on the company. As they approached the gates of the plant, Chicago policemen shot into the crowd, and then went after the strikers and their families with pickaxes supplied by the company. Ten men were killed, another eighty-four injured. It would be another five years before Republic recognized the union. Sadlowski takes his students across the street, to a former union hall (now a church-run community center), which still bears a plaque listing the victims and declaring them “Martyrs—Heroes—Unionists.”

  This is a city of plaques and monuments, a city with a long memory, for the famous and not-so-famous, for the virtuous and nonvirtuous. Sadlowski has also led a contingent of steelworkers to the burial grounds (in the suburb Forest Park) of the anarchists hanged because of their alleged role in the Haymarket Affair; a century later, it’s a controversy that still rages. On May 4, 1886, a few hundred men and women gathered at a corner just west of downtown in support of workers locked out at the McCormick Harvester Works (two workers had been killed by the police the previous day), and as the crowd was breaking up, someone threw a bomb into the police lines, killing seven policemen. Eight activists, seven of them foreign-born, were convicted on flimsy evidence, and five were sentenced to death, partly at the insistence of business leaders including Marshall Field, the founder of the department store of the same name. Field also supplied the National Guard with Gatling guns and urged the construction of nearby Fort Sheridan to hold off any future uprisings. Despite protests from around the world, four of the anarchists were eventually hanged. (One killed himself before going to the gallows by biting down on a dynamite cap.) An estimated two hundred thousand people—a quarter of the city’s population—lined the streets to view the funeral procession. Seven years later, at the urging of Clarence Darrow, Governor John P. Altgeld, the first foreign-born man chosen to lead the state, pardoned the men posthumously, to which the Chicago Tribune responded: “Governor Altgeld has apparently not a drop of pure American blood in his veins.”

  Three years after the Haymarket incident, the city erected a monument to the police officers who were killed by the bomb. Nearly a century later, in 1969, during the tumult of that time, someone placed a stick of dynamite betwee
n the legs of the bronze policeman, which toppled it. The city recast it. A year later, someone blew it up again. So the city placed a twenty-four-hour police guard at the statue, and when that proved too costly moved it to the courtyard of the Police Academy, where it stands today, well protected. Memories die hard here. As William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”

  Sadlowski herds the students back on the bus and has the driver motor along the river, past what used to be Acme Steel; along the fence is a FOR SALE sign that notes the property’s assets: “89 acres on Calumet River with dockage.” In the distance is the blast furnace upon which the company had painted a large yellow smiley face. “You work on the fuckin’ thing, it wasn’t smiles,” Sadlowski tells me. If there was a place close to hell, it was the blast furnace, where men would shovel coke and limestone into the furnace; it would get so hot that men had to wear asbestos-lined coats. During his 1976 campaign, Sadlowski had told the Penthouse interviewer that no one in this country should have to work in a coke oven, a place even harder on workers than the blast furnace; there, the tar was extracted from the coal, and noxious gases and fumes were spewed into the factory air. It was a remark that his opposition used in its campaign to suggest that Sadlowski would encourage plant closings. Sadlowski may be a romantic, but not about the work.

  We then head west, across the river, to the preserved Pullman community, which at the end of the nineteenth century was built to be a workingman’s paradise but soon became a workingman’s prison. George Pullman made his money producing the Pullman Palace Car, the equivalent of a hotel on wheels. In 1880 he built the town, a collection of handsome brick townhouses with indoor plumbing, a luxury at the time. The town also had a European-style market square, an exquisite hotel (named after Pullman’s daughter, Florence), and its own school and a church, which was meant to be shared by all denominations. Pullman’s workers became unwitting participants in his ambitious—and misguided—social experiment.

  During the recession of the 1890s, Pullman cut the wages of his workers, but their rents remained unchanged. “He was a ruthless son of a bitch,” Sadlowski tells his students. “But cunning. He’d cut the carpenters’ wages two to five percent, and nobody would come to their aid. It’s not me, they’d say. Then a few months later, he’d cut the tinsmiths two to five percent. Creating divisiveness among the workers. Some might ask why the workers didn’t come together. Man doesn’t work that way. Why do people react that way? A hope that it won’t happen to them. But the unfortunate thing about man’s reaction is he doesn’t learn. Same goddamn thing today. That’s a thing that should be taught in school, but it’s the very schools that are teaching the bigwigs how to screw others.”

  In 1894, Sadlowski tells his students, the Pullman workers finally walked out on strike. Soon after, Eugene Debs’s Railway Union honored the walkout, refusing to work on any train that carried a Pullman car, which was virtually every train in the country. It was a defining moment for American labor—an industrial union bringing together these otherwise fragmented crafts, undergirding the notion that an injury to one is an injury to all. Clarence Darrow, a young lawyer at the time for the Northwestern Railroad, stopped off in Pullman to see what all the fuss was about, and he became so moved by the plight of the immigrant workers there that he quit his job and offered his services to Debs and the union. (Each year on March 13, the anniversary of Darrow’s death in 1938, Sadlowski gathers with others at the Jackson Park Lagoon in Hyde Park, where Darrow’s ashes were scattered; they read from his speeches and ruminate on matters of the day, as Darrow would have liked.)

  Many lives were lost, and the strike was eventually smothered. When Pullman died, four years later, he was buried in the dead of night, in a hole the size of a large room. He had become so despised that he feared his grave would be desecrated, so he left instructions that his mahogany casket was to be buried in cement overlaid with bolted-down railroad ties. “He just got it into his head that someone would desecrate his body, maybe cut his penis off and stick it in his nose,” Sadlowski tells me, making me wonder just how much he’d thought about this. Pullman is buried at the Graceland Cemetery, which, as Sadlowski says, “is as good a book as any on Chicago, and on the rich and how they thought of themselves.” Marshall Field is buried there. So is Louis Sullivan, who died penniless and has a rather modest tombstone, although an elaborate monument was later built by friends.

  As we’re leaving the Pullman church, Gilmak, one of the students, admires the restoration work on the building’s green limestone and thanks Sadlowski for the tour. Gilmak’s grandfather worked at South Works, his dad at Republic, and his uncle at Wisconsin Steel. “Sadlowski,” he told me later, “gave me more respect for those guys.”

  Sadlowski’s neighborhood, once largely Eastern European, is now mostly Mexican-American, a change that not all of the community’s longtime members are happy about. Not long ago, when Sadlowski went to get a haircut, he told his longtime barber that he had just returned from visiting Tucson, Arizona.

  “Yeah, they found a truckload of them spics in the desert there dead,” the barber said. “Should’ve been fifty of the sonofabitches. We wouldn’t have to bother with ’em then.”

  Sadlowski rose from his chair. “I come in here to get a haircut and I got to be subjected to that shit and pay for it? That’s the same kind of crap they said about my grandfather a hundred years ago.”

  “It’s nothing personal,” the barber said.

  “It’s very personal to me.” Sadlowski replied, and left without the haircut.

  This, in the end, is what it’s all about for Sadlowski: recognizing that, indeed, the past is present. It’s easy to come down here and think to yourself, “This is a dying community,” but it isn’t. It’s a changing one, now lined with establishments such as Armando’s Tire Repair, D’Madera Furniture, Ruiz Funeral Homes, and Las Delicias Grocery. Like the carpenters and millwrights in Sadlowski’s class, the neighborhood is picking itself up, brushing off the sulfur, and becoming something new.

  Once while I was visiting his home, Sadlowski showed me the rock garden he had created alongside his bungalow. It’s a collection of stones and waste from the mills. There’s a basketball-size mass of slag from South Works and a piece from another mill, Jones & Laughlin. He shows me a fist-size lump of coke from Acme and a paving stone from a street in South Chicago. There’s a chunk of raw iron he found at the beach by South Works, where his dad and he used to sit, eat shrimp, drink beer and talk, and which is now being turned into a park.

  Unexpectedly moved, I asked Sadlowski whether this rock garden was intended as a monument to what used to be. Sadlowski scowled.

  “This isn’t a monument to the fuckin’ steel mills,” he snapped. He placed a conciliatory hand on my shoulder and explained. “It’s a way to enhance my memories of the guys who worked there—the comradeship, the decency, the knowledge I got from them. I owe everything I have to those people. Without them and without Marlene I’d be physically dead. I truly feel that way.”

  Millie and Brenda

  I’m having lunch at Manny’s, an old-style Jewish delicatessen just south of the Loop, with two longtime friends, Mildred Wortham and Brenda Stephenson. Millie is impulsive and vocal, Brenda more cautious and even-tempered. They’re always in full bloom, bedecked in colorful hip-hugging dresses in the summer, floppy hats and dazzling pantsuits in the winter.

  Both of them grew up in Rockwell Gardens, a West Side public housing complex that in the 1980s had the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of murders, rapes, and assaults of any neighborhood in the city. They have since moved, though they still live on the West Side. For seventeen years, they have worked for a small organization, West Side Future, which assists young mothers in their early years of parenting. Brenda and Millie hand out diapers and toothbrushes (when I became a father, they loaded me down with gear as well), and pass along their wisdom. In a sense, they’re professional busybodies. Once, I tagged al
ong with Brenda as she was doing home visits; just as we were leaving the apartment of a nineteen-year-old mother, Brenda whipped around and demanded, “Are you pregnant?” “No way,” the young woman replied. “Just thought I’d ask when your guard was down,” laughed Brenda, who then kissed the teenager’s son before skipping out the door.

  On this particular day, as we’re finishing our meal at Manny’s, the two start giggling like little girls. Millie asks the question. Well, it’s really more like a statement.

  “So, Alex, I hear you got a little boy on the West Side.”

  I’m befuddled, not sure what or whom she’s referring to.

  Brenda says, “People say he looks just like you. Real soft-skinned. Curly hair.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. I laugh, nervously, which is probably not the best thing to do in the face of such a live rumor.

  “C’mon, Alex,” Millie says, putting her arm around my shoulder. “You can tell us. People say you got a boy by a girl you know’d on the West Side.”

  “You got to be kidding,” I say.

  “Yeah, and people say you don’t go see him, or nothing.”

  I tell them that’s simply not true—not that I don’t see my son on the West Side, but that any such son exists.

  “You can tell us,” Brenda says.

  “There’s nothing to tell.” My voice starts to rise. I know I’m sounding a tad defensive. And though by the time we leave Manny’s they tell me that they believe me, I’m not convinced they do. The next time we get together, Brenda pokes me in the ribs, winks, and asks how my boy is.

  For fifteen years, Brenda, Millie, and I have been having lunch every couple of months—to gossip, to commiserate, to share stories, to catch up. Once, in the middle of lunch at Edna’s, a soul food restaurant on the West Side, two beefy men sat down at the booth adjacent to ours. They interrupted our conversation and started flirting with Brenda and Millie. “Hey, babe, where you live?” one asked. “What you up to later?” The other man, who I later learned was a local minister, squeezed into the booth next to me, leaned over the table, and in a deep baritone voice complimented Brenda and Millie on their outfits. It was as if I wasn’t there. I figured Brenda and Millie were enjoying it, but in fact they were furious on my behalf. Finally Brenda cut the man short, nodded toward me, and said in a level voice, “He’s got us covered.” Both men looked perplexed. They must have thought I was the luckiest man alive. When they left the restaurant, Brenda chastised me. “Next time,” she said, “you tell them you got us covered. Hear me. Don’t let nobody do you like that.”