Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [0]
by
Irv Kupcinet
GARRETT COUNTY PRESS DIGITAL EDITION 2012
First published by The World Publishing Company
Copyright © 1962 by Irv Kupcinet.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine. Printed in the United States of America.
for more information, please address: www.gcpress.com
The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
– EURIPIDES
To my wife Essee, daughter Karyn,
and son Jerry, I humbly dedicate this book.
Without their compassion and understanding,
I never could have met the demands of
a daily column, which too often
deprived me of their companionship.
Without the column, there would be no book.
Perhaps all would have profited -
family, column, and book - had I stuck
to my last and become a beachcomber.
1. Me and My Home Town
For nearly twenty years, or ever since I began writing “Kup’s Column” in the Chicago Times, now the Sun-Times, I’ve been following my town’s daily drama and recording some of its history, checking its blood pressure, taking its pulse. In that time I have come to know many of its faces intimately, and it has many – from the stockyards to plush executive suites, from the slums and skid row to the Gold Coast. I’ve become acquainted with its politicos and merchant princes, its financial wizards and writers, and with the educators, clergy, sports heroes, hoodlums, and other conspicuous citizens and celebrities of our community. I’ve reported murders, scandals, marriages, premieres, and national political conventions (of which Chicago has had more than any other city-twenty-three). I’ve been amused, intrigued, outraged, enthralled, and exasperated by Chicago. And I’ve come to love this American giant, viewing it as the most misunderstood, most underrated city in the world. There is none other quite like it, my “City of Big Shoulders.”
Chicago is America’s second largest city, the nation’s convention capital, crossroads for air and rail transportation, steelmaker and “stacker of wheat.” It’s the town of Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg, Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Montgomery Ward, Adlai Stevenson, P. K. Wrigley, Mike Todd, Sally Rand, and Al Capone.
It’s where one mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, threatened to “bust King George on the snoot,” and where four decades later another mayor, Richard J. Daley, played host to Queen Elizabeth as two million citizens cheered; where the violent days of newspaper history, later dramatized into The Front Page were actually lived; where the skyscraper was originated and a river was made to run backward; where both the Atomic Age and the hootchy-kootchy dance were introduced; and where they still argue over the truth of a rumor that the city’s name means “skunk.”
“Reeking, cinder-ridden, joyous,” one of its most famous writers, Ben Hecht, called it. “Exciting, impressive, one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” said one of its visitors, Germany’s Prince Otto von Bismark.
It’s all this and more, is Chicago.
Just 130 years ago it was a frontier town so swampy and nondescript that a visitor, asking the way to Chicago, was told, “You’re in it, stranger, you’re in it.” Today it is a metropolis of 3,800,000 persons (7,000,000 including its suburbs), with a financial district (LaSalle Street) second in importance only to Wall Street; a “Little White Way” (Randolph and Rush Streets) exceeded in entertainment variety and vigor only by the “Great White Way” of Broadway and the Strip in Las Vegas; and a concentrated shopping district (State Street) second to none. Everyone knows of its stockyards and steel mills, but it is the bustling capital of mail-order, paint, sporting goods, electronics, candy, cosmetics, and job-printing industries.
It has beauty – a twenty-nine-mile shoreline along Lake Michigan, framed by more parks than any other city in the world, and one of the most photographed of all skylines. It has squalor – slums, segregation,