Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [13]
As the home of the American Bar Association and of such distinguished law schools as De Paul, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and Kent College, and as the place where some of the nation’s most significant civil and criminal cases are tried, it is only natural that Chicago should have an abundance of noted legal talent.
The Chicago bar includes eminent barristers whose names make headlines in cases involving everything from corporate affairs to divorce – Weymouth Kirkland, Albert Jenner, William Kirby, Stanford Clinton, Russell Topper, Donald Ruben, Harry Busch, James Dooley, Harold Smith, George Crowley, Frank (Spike) McAdams, Ben Davis, Edward Rothbart, William Boyden, Donald Page Moore, Thomas O’Connell, A. Bradley Ebcn, Norm Becker, David Levinson, and Arthur Friedlund. It includes Sid Korshak, whose income from representing Hollywood stars and other prominent personages is reputed to exceed $700,000 a year, which makes him probably the number one legal fee-earner in the nation. It includes such famous criminal lawyers as George Bieber and Michael Brodkin, known as “B and B,” and Charles Bellows. And Arthur Morse, who is also “father” of college double-header basketball in Chicago, as well as operator of the Edgewater Beach Playhouse; and Luis Kutner, who has won release for a number of wrongly imprisoned men. And William Scott Stewart, the last of a colorful old school which enlivened Chicago courtrooms for many years – a group which included Clarence Darrow, Ben Short, W. W. Smith, George Gunther, Emmett Byrne, and “Ropes” O’Brien. (“Ropes” won that sobriquet for being the assistant state’s attorney who sent more men to the gallows than any other prosecutor of his time.)
Then there is the science field. Big news has come out of the research centers at our universities. It was at the University of Chicago, beneath the grandstand of Stagg Field, that the first uranium reactor was built by the late Enrico Fermi and his brilliant team. (The original atomic pile is buried now and the staff has moved to suburban Argonne National Laboratory, which the university supervises for the Atomic Energy Commission.) Also prominent is the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The third largest independent, nonprofit research and development lab in the nation, it is a leader in research in rocket fuels, noise abatement and acoustics, ceramics and metals, and the chemical effects of nuclear radiation. I.I.T. holds almost every major patent for the tape recorder. And in this field you will find such well-known pharmaceutical houses as suburban Abbott Laboratories and the safety-testing Underwriters Laboratories.
Two of Our Town’s best-known chemists: Dr. Percy Julian, who helped alleviate the suffering of millions through his role in developing cortisone, but who was almost denied free choice of a home in Oak Park because he is a Negro; and octogenarian Otto Eisenschiml, the oil-products researcher, who also is a best-selling Civil War author. With Ralph G. Newman of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop and other Chicagoans, he helped found the first of the now widely distributed Civil War Round Tables. (Newman, incidentally, with his vast historical knowledge of that period, helps me each February to create one of the most popular “specialties” of my column, a report of a simulated visit with Abe Lincoln on his birthday to obtain his views on past and present affairs.)
Education is another field in which Chicago has distinguished itself, not only in quality, but in quantity. There are 18,000 teachers and 450,000 students in the public schools alone. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago administers the largest parochial school system in the nation.