I measured coffee into the pot and shuffled to the front door. The Trib was in the hall on the mat, neatly folded rather than thrown down with its inside sections spilling out, as was usually the case. The talk I had with the newsboy when I gave him his year-end tip seemed to be paying off, at least for now. Sitting with a Lucky Strike and a cup of black coffee at my small kitchen table, I went through the paper. The banner story, as it is every January 1, told how the New Year’s Eve crowd jammed the Loop, and what a wonderful time they had. I figure the type for this piece just gets saved and reused year after year.
A few pages back was the headline HITLER MAKES A NEW YEAR VOW — GREATER ARMS, under which the guy calling himself Fuehrer was quoted as saying “Expansion of German fighting forces is a political necessity.” As I worked through the front section, I grinned for the first time in 1938. My day-old piece about a raid on a South Wabash handbook ran almost as I had written it, including the lead: “Bookie Carl ‘Ace’ McCabe had a deuce of a time Friday when a trio of Chicago Police in four minutes wrote him up on five separate charges of illegal gambling.” I never thought it would clear the copy desk, although that cretin of a slot man on the day side, Jasper Cams, made sure there was no byline on the story.
The lead editorial warned that “There will be no comfortable coasting in 1938” and that “Times call above all for fortitude.”
“Just what I needed to hear,” I muttered into my cup. “A stiff-upper-lip lecture to break in a new calendar.” I silently mouthed the name of the Trib’s chief editorial writer and followed it with several of the words the paper refuses to print.
Turning the page, I groaned at the three-column photo printed there — the city’s number one publicity hound and self-proclaimed do-gooder had struck again. The man who reporters privately refer to as “Goody Two-Shoes” had held another of his “Let’s Do Battle Together for a Clean Chicago” rallies, this one on the sidewalk in front of City Hall on New Year’s Eve afternoon. The extended caption (there was no story) read: “Some 100 or more interested citizens and casual passers-by listened attentively as reformer and heir to a steel fortune Lloyd Martindale exhorted them to ‘get rid of those despicable vermin known by the all-too-polite label of organized crime.’ Martindale, who many speculate is setting his sights on running for mayor in 1939, urged his listeners to demand ‘better police protection, better government leaders, and a better year ahead for all residents of our great city.’”
He closed by lambasting Mayor Edward J. Kelly as “a tool of the Nittis, the Riccas, and all of those other repugnant throwbacks to the Capone era who think it is their birthright to ply their nefarious businesses: gambling, white slavery, and drug dealing.”
It sounded familiar, and for good reason. On a blustery fall afternoon some three months earlier, Martindale had pulled the same stunt in front of Police Headquarters at 11th and State, and all of us in the pressroom begrudgingly — and under orders from our city editors — trudged outside to cover his harangues.
“Goddamn windbag knows how to get publicity, I’ll give him that much,” Anson Masters of the Daily News muttered to me as Martindale, tall, with salt-and-pepper hair well-barbered and impeccable in a three-piece blue serge suit, stood on a crate on the sidewalk and spoke into a bullhorn. He gave the newspaper photogs his sharply etched profile and berated the police for, among other things, “cavalierly allowing the crime syndicate to operate unchecked and unfettered throughout the length and breadth of our great metropolis.”
The 15-minute diatribe, delivered with the style and fervor of a sawdust-trail evangelist, drew applause and cheers from a couple of dozen spectators, most of them middle-aged women, who almost surely had been brought along by Martindale and his sidekick, a red-haired fireplug named Lumley.
About ten uniformed cops stood off to one side watching the performance, shaking their heads and making behind-the-hand comments to one another. As we trooped back into the building, I asked a lieutenant I knew casually what his opinion of Martindale was. “Well, what do you think?” he shot back, rolling his eyes. “Don’t quote me, not that anyone would be interested in my opinions, but he’s a bullshit artist, and if he ever becomes mayor, which I seriously doubt, I’m moving to the suburbs. And I hate the suburbs.”
I looked again at the photo of Martindale, fist in the air and jaw jutting like the prow of a battleship as he stood in front of City Hall, and I wished I had the same doubts about Martindale’s success as the police lieutenant. It seemed to me that Martindale really could end up running the city. After all, look at what good old-fashioned stem-winding oratory got Huey Long down in Louisiana: a governorship, a Senate seat, and a bullet.
I tossed the paper aside and proceeded to waste the afternoon. None of the football games on the radio interested me, although I’d read a lot in the sports pages about Whizzer White of Colorado and how good he was and that he should have won the Heisman Trophy instead of some Yale swell named Clinton Frank. So, while I had a can of tomato soup and an apple, I listened to some of the Cotton Bowl game; however good this Whizzer may have been, he wasn’t good enough this time because Rice beat Colorado.
This was Saturday, which meant I had the next day off too, and around 7:00 I decided to catch a movie at the Chicago Theatre — “Wells Fargo” with Joel McCrea and Frances Dee. I peered into the bathroom mirror and poised my comb, trying to decide if the patch of gray behind my left ear had begun to spread. Given that the rest of my hair is sort of dusty-colored, it didn’t seem to stand out all that much anyway. I put on a white shirt and my navy blue suit, and the bright red tie with swirls that Norma used to say made me look like a floorwalker at Marshall Field’s. As I slipped on my overcoat, I noticed that the right sleeve was fraying. I snipped off the loose ends with the kitchen scissors and went to the front closet, where I grabbed the new dark blue Dobbs hat — my Christmas present to myself.
Down on the street, the wind swirled and had teeth. There were no cabs in sight; maybe all the hackies were hung over like the rest of us. I waited 10 minutes for one, then gave up and grabbed a southbound Clark streetcar. I was one of just six riders, and three of the others — two old geezers and a double-chinned woman in a brown babushka — were asleep. The woman snored softly, the purse she clutched to her mountainous bosom rising and falling with each breath. A young couple held hands and gazed unblinking at each other, their mutual enamor blocking out the mean surroundings.
I settled into a cold wicker double seat and started in on the Trib sports section I’d brought along for company, but the bare bulbs gave off so little light that I finally gave up. As we clattered toward the Loop, I looked out on a succession of darkened storefronts — butchers, dry cleaners, drug stores, auto mechanics, currency exchanges, grocers, haberdashers, and a Woolworth’s five-and-dime. Other than the austere and depressing lobbies of the transient hotels, only the saloons were open, their neon window signs for Schlitz and Pabst and Blatz cutting through the murk like welcoming beacons.
I grew up in the comfortable boredom of Pilsen, a well-scrubbed Bohemian enclave of apartment buildings and small houses on the Near Southwest Side. After I got married, we lived in a brick six-flat in the Logan Square neighborhood up Northwest. Now, for the last two years, I’d had a taste of what I felt was the real Chicago: North Clark Street. If any thoroughfare throbbed to the rhythms of the city, this was it. I hated living alone, but at the same time, I loved Clark Street.