Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [15]
Despite his tough exterior, Jimmy has revealed a tender heart by sponsoring such activities as an annual Christmas party for the blind at the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel. For twenty-five years these sightless party guests have been the only ones to “see” Petrillo perform on his favorite instrument, the trumpet, which he learned to play at Hull House.
There is a rumored eccentricity of Petrillo’s which I’ll confirm. Due to a deathly fear of germs, he shakes hands only by extending a pinky. A perfect “sound-alike” for James Caesar Petrillo is his younger brother, WBBM’s musical director (and ardent baseball fan), Caesar James Petrillo.
Then there are the managerial tycoons who have helped to make Chicago the giant of commerce and industry that it is.
You probably know some of the great names from the city’s past – Marshall Field, Philip D. Armour, Gustavus Swift, George M. Pullman, Cyrus H. McCormick, Potter Palmer, A. Montgomery Ward, Richard Sears, Alva Roebuck – and yes, Samuel Insull, the light-and-power emperor whose domain crashed under fraud charges in 1931.
These were the momentous names of a momentous age. They built Chicago’s railroads, factories, and office buildings. They pulled in its tides of immigrants from farms and foreign countries. They shipped its products around the world.
Whatever they did, they did it big. George Pullman not only built railroad cars, but hired 600 men with 6,000 jacks to raise whole blocks of Loop buildings four feet above the swampy muck, to provide solid footings for the construction of sidewalks – without halting business in any of the structures. Potter Palmer, whose wife was an international society queen, moved the retail center from Lake to State Street and crowned it with a hotel so elegant that the barbershop was paved with silver dollars. Sam Insull, once Thomas A. Edison’s private secretary, conceived and built the modern light-and-power business. And McCormick’s International Harvester mechanized the farm belt.
“Make no little plans,” advised architect Daniel H. Burnham, who planned the city’s magnificent park and boulevard system – and Chicagoans never have. Even our civic parasites operated on the grand scale – transportation magnate Charles Yerkes, for one, once tried to slip a $500,000 bribe to a governor of Illinois (and got nowhere). But the sharp promoters were eclipsed by the legitimate builders. A. Montgomery Ward spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a thirteen-year court battle to preserve the city’s lakefront for public use. Julius Rosenwald, of Sears, Roebuck, gave away $63,000,000 for such causes as the Museum of Science and Industry and subsidized five thousand American schools for Negroes.
The big-time spenders are gone now. In fact, wealth and power are spread so thin that it took a Fortune magazine survey to reveal to most Chicagoans that one of the nation’s richest men is in our midst: John D. MacArthur, owner of Bankers Life & Casualty Company and the youngest of a famous quartet of brothers (the late playwright Charles; Alfred, head of Central Standard Life Insurance Company; and the late Telfer, a suburban newspaper publisher). MacArthur went into business during the Depression, with a capital of $2,500. Since then, he has mail-peddled so many policies at a dollar a month that Bankers Life is now the largest company in its field, owned lock, stock, and fine print by one man. His personal fortune amounts to more than two hundred million dollars.
Yet, despite his tremendous success, John has the reputation of being an eccentric and a tightwad. An eccentric, maybe;