Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [12]
There are our eccentrics, such as Lar (“America First”) Daly, the small-businessman who perennially campaigns for office dressed in an Uncle Sam costume. (He turned up on the Jack Paar Show in 1960, leading to the revision of broadcasting’s equal-time political rule.) And Jack Muller, the publicity-loving policeman who enjoys ticketing celebrities’ cars and calling newspapers to announce it. (He has been transferred to a beat where the main territory is a graveyard.)
There is our high society: the Armours, the Swifts, the Hurleys, the Gurleys, and the other blue bloods of Lake Shore Drive and Astor Street, Lake Forest, Winnetka, and Hinsdale. They may sponsor debutante cotillions and yacht parties, but they also endow our universities and colleges, our hospitals and museums, our Art Institute, Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera, and other community assets. They are looked down on by society in New York and New England and looked up to by the “400” of St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and other cities of the Midwest. Many of them winter in the Caribbean and summer on the Riviera, but for such special gala events as the 1959 St. Lawrence Seaway visit of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, they flock back to Chicago to put on their finery and dance (the royal reception was in the Conrad Hilton). A handful frequent the local café society circuit: Jim Kimberly of the paper empire, Mollie Netcher Bostwick (formerly Bragno) of Chicago’s old Boston Store family, and sportsman Fred Wacker. But the average Chicagoan rarely sees the glamorous elite as they make their social rounds.
For all of us who admire beautiful women, this is no small loss. Many Chicago society wives, including Mrs. Charles Percy, Mrs. Leon Mandel, Mrs. John McGuire, Mrs. Charles Comiskey, and Mrs. Homer Hargrave, Jr., could pass for high fashion models – and prove it regularly, when they appear as volunteer mannequins at the annual Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Fashion Show and other exclusive benefits. Many could win contracts as glamour girls. As a matter of fact, many have. Chicago boasts a colony of former actresses of which these names are only a sampling: Colleen Moore (Mrs. Homer Hargrave, Sr.), Martha O’Driscoll (Mrs. Arthur Appleton), Brenda Forbes (Mrs. Merrill Shepard), Colleen Miller (Mrs. Ted Briskin), June Travis (Mrs. Fred Friedlob), Jarma Lewis (Mrs. Ted Bensinger), Linda Cristol (Mrs. Yale Wexler), Edith Luckett (Mrs. Loyal Davis), and skating star Barbara Ann Scott (Mrs. Thomas Van Dyke King).
Barbara Ann, incidentally, still receives dozens of movie, TV, and ice-show offers. But she is the domestic type (her traveling trunk used to include kitchen utensils), and prefers life away from the spotlight. She spends her time operating a beauty salon in suburban Glencoe and cooking for her husband, an ex-Chicago Stadium publicist, who is now number two man in the front office of Joseph P. Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart. Her occasional absent-mindedness has earned her the affectionate household nickname of “Grade.”
And then Chicago has its geniuses who are internationally prominent in their professions.
In medicine you will find such notables as Dr. Karl Meyer, head of the huge Cook County Hospital; Dr. Loyal Davis, famed brain surgeon and former president of the American College of Surgeons. And the researchers and specialists at such hospitals as Passavant, Wesley, and Northwestern University’s professional schools on the Near North Side, Michael Reese and the University of Chicago clinics on the South, and Presbyterian-St. Luke’s, the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and others in the vast West Side Medical Center complex. And the executives of such Chicago-based organizations as the American Medical Association, the International College of Surgeons, the American Hospital Association, and Blue Cross-Blue Shield.
Among the most remarkable of the medical fraternity is Dr. Morris Fishbein, former spokesman for