Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [3]
In addition to sharing my Chicago, my sports and television experiences, you will also get to know some of the secrets of a columnist. And along the way, I hope you get to know me – how I operate, my passions (many), and prejudices (few). You will find, for example, that I love action – things to do, places to go, and, especially, people to see. (Didn’t Shakespeare say that “the people are the city”?) That I dislike sleeping, the suburbs, and quiet evenings at home. On second thought, I had better revise that last statement. After twenty years of night-club reporting, I now relish, on occasion, a quiet evening at home when I can read a book or watch a special television program.
You will also learn that I respect quality, whether it is in writing, performing, or the clothes I wear; that I love the theater, the movies, good night-club acts, and sports events; that I like golf but play a 95 game; that I enjoy deep-sea fishing and have one sailfish that didn’t get away, stuffed and hanging on a wall in my office; that I like steaks or hamburgers with beefsteak tomatoes, and Scotch-and-water. And also that I love jazz, comedians, blondes, brunettes, redheads, and eggheads; that I enjoy the quips in Ann Landers’ column, and a year with four real seasons. (California and Florida as a bland year-round diet you and the birds can have.)
My feeling for the town has been growing since July 31, 1912, when I was born into the West Side home of my parents, Max and Olga Kupcinet. My father was a bakery driver. In addition to my beloved mother the household included three older Kups: Ben, Joe, and Sophie. Brother Ben, the eldest, is the only other member of the family ever associated with a newspaper – he is a pressman for the Chicago Tribune; Joe is a veteran physical education teacher and high school football coach in Chicago (his Taft High School team won the city championship in 1960); and my sister, Mrs. Sophie McKerr, is a widow living in Hollywood, Florida. The apartment in which we all grew up at Sixteenth and Kedzie was certainly not plush; we weren’t wealthy, but as they say on This Is Your Life, we “got along.”
Because of shifting population, the old neighborhood today is all Negro. In my youth it was a real melting pot – Polish, Bohemian, Irish – but it was largely Jewish.
Nearby was huge Douglas Park. And there were holiday parades, street-cleaning wagons which shot water to both sides and behind, vaudeville shows, movies, and countless other attractions. And there was the Loop. I still recall the first time I landed there. A group of us had played hooky from school and taken a ride atop the double-decker Douglas Park bus, an incomparable thrill in those days.
Clanging trolleys rounded the bend from Kedzie onto Sixteenth Street right in front of our home. I will always remember Kedzie Avenue and those trolleys. It was the scene of an accident that almost snuffed out my life. Crossing the street when I was about four years old, at what was then Carlisle Avenue and now is Fifteenth Place, I suddenly stooped to pick up a penny. (Even then I was the frugal type.) The next thing I knew I was lying underneath a streetcar. Fortunately, it was the old, high-built “Toonerville Trolley” type which was part of the Chicago scene for so long, and there was safe clearance for one small Kupcinet beneath it. I remember hands reaching under the trolley to pull me to safety after the streetcar had been jacked up. The damage was comparatively slight, even though I wound up with a gash that required six stitches. I never did get the penny, but somehow I’ve had an unduly warm relationship with Jack Benny over the years.
In our own little world of those early days, there was no football to match our games on the cement sidewalk. (It was man to man, and you had to plunge through your opponent to gain three squares in four downs.) And there were no political rallies like those of the 24th Ward Democratic organization, most powerful in the nation and able to deliver