Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [2]
Jack always, it seemed, pursued oversized ventures. Once the columnist Mike Royko held a kite contest along Lake Michigan, and Jack built one so large that the string tore the skin from his children’s hands. (My wife remembers her father planning to use the kite to tow his canoe across the lake, but she can’t recall whether, in fact, he ever tried it.) Another time, he hooked up the family’s Alaskan malamute, Michi, to a sled he built, and had him pull two of the girls. He was so proud of this achievement that he called the Chicago Daily News, which ran a photo on its front page. Jack liked to boast that he was the one who first raised questions about the killing of the Black Panthers’ twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton and twenty-two-year-old Mark Clark. On December 4, 1969, thirteen policemen stormed the young men’s West Side home. The police contended that the Panthers had opened fire on them, inviting newspaper reporters to take pictures of the bullet holes that had allegedly come from the Panthers’ firearms. The police, undoubtedly feeling cocky about their conquest, kept Hampton’s home open; in the following days, lines of people paraded through the apartment, including Jack—who, upon examining the contour of the “bullet holes,” realized they’d been made by a hammer and nail. Jack said it was he who alerted the newspapers, and, indeed, a subsequent FBI investigation found that the Panthers had fired one bullet whereas the police had fired as many as ninety-nine.
On occasion, I’ll be somewhere, and it’ll come up in conversation that I’m married to a Woltjen. “Jack’s daughter?” they’ll ask. I’ll tell them yes, and they’ll smile and inevitably pass along some story. “He was,” said a friend of his, “one of a kind.”
When Jack’s wife sold their house after his death, my wife decided she wanted only one item: a sculpture her father had erected in his side yard. Its design is simple: an anvil hanging by a thin cable from a tall wooden pole floats a foot above a metal dish filled with bird seed. I suppose that my wife has plans to reconstruct it in our backyard someday. I’m not sure—I’m afraid to ask. Jack once told a reporter, “When the birds come, they kind of look up nervously at the anvil while they eat. I think it’s a beautiful juxtaposition of power and fragility.” The same might be said of his chosen city.
Chicago is a stew of contradictions. Coarse yet gentle. Idealistic yet restrained. Grappling with its promise, alternately cocky and unsure. Nelson Algren—himself a bar of discordant notes—wrote in his prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, “Once you’ve come to be a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” An imperfect place, Chicago is America’s city; it dreams America’s dream.
Chicagoans, it has been said, are tribal, living among their own, a city of insiders whose entire identity is wrapped up in their neighborhood or parish. (I once asked the chief judge at criminal court where he was from, and he replied “Lady of Lords” as if that would assist me in placing him.) The former chief of staff for the city’s current mayor once laughingly told me that he never felt a part of the City Hall gang because, as they would frequently remind him, he wasn’t from Bridgeport, the southwest neighborhood where the mayor and his cronies hailed from. Indeed, Rand McNally sells one poster-size map that breaks the city into 198 neighborhoods (it’s over 200 if you count a few it missed),