Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [6]
Ed Sadlowski, who is a sixty-four-year-old resident of South Chicago and who loves his city’s opera, its museums, and its baseball teams, can’t understand why his wife wants to move to Florida, where the world seems dipped in pastels. Sadlowski loves his neighborhood. Although he’s been retired from the mills and from his union work for twelve years, he still feels most at home among its tired workers and its skeletal factories. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. For him, the landscape of the past that connects him to his neighbors and to the world is palpable here, and Sadlowski fears that the story of his people might disappear if he were to abandon this place. He has become the custodian of its history.
I first became acquainted with Sadlowski in 1976, not in Chicago, but in a steelworkers’ union hall in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when he was making labor history rather than fighting to preserve it. I was attending college nearby, where I eagerly detected rumblings of the coming class war in any worker who spoke derisively of his or her boss (which, I would later learn, included just about anyone who worked for someone else). Then I heard that this maverick, freespoken steelworker from Chicago was running for the international union’s presidency, and that he actually had a chance. So a group of friends and I drove to Bridgeport and climbed the stairs to the second-floor meeting room where, despite our soft hands, long hair, and youth, we somehow thought we’d blend in. To be honest, I don’t remember much of that gathering except for Sadlowski himself, who, dressed in an open-collared polyester shirt, was as eloquent and clearheaded a speaker as I’d ever heard. He talked of how the workers and the bosses have nothing in common. “It’s a class question,” he bellowed. I went away thinking that if this was the proletariat, I wanted in.
Sadlowski, who was a beefy man back then, has become beefier. (He once told a reporter while speaking of an eighty-seven-year-old friend who was physically fit: “He’s as sharp as ever. I wonder what he drinks that keeps him that way.” To which Sadlowski’s wife, Marlene, replied, “Exercise!”) He’s always been a charismatic man—I’ve heard more than one woman say she had a crush on him—but his barrel of a belly now seems to rest precariously on his toothpick-thin legs. It’s more, though, than just his physical bearing that’s oversized. It’s also his appetite for new people, new places, new ideas. His friends have included Studs Terkel and former presidential speechwriter Richard Goodwin. He’s traveled throughout Europe, as well as to Russia, both for pleasure and to meet fellow trade unionists. His house is littered with books, mostly historical works on labor and war: on bookshelves, on tables, on the floor, in the basement, in the sun room. “Eddie’s interests are omnivorous,” says Tony Judge, a mutual friend. “He refuses to be limited by others’ expectations of a labor guy. . . . He loves talk. He loves history. He’ll talk to you about the Crimean War, about the Boer War, about Eskimos, about the union. He’s an enormous furnace of a man who demands that those who come around him throw the door open and shovel like hell.”
Age has been both cruel and kind to Sadlowski. He has had an operation for a brain tumor, which nips at his memory, and he’s undergone three bypass surgeries. Over time, though, his features have softened, giving him a gentler look. He’s still prone to say things that he knows will make others twitch with discomfort. His bushy eyebrows rise and fall with his pronouncements. Once, a labor reporter for the Chicago Tribune introduced himself to Sadlowski at a conference. “He looked at me,” the reporter recounted for a local newsweekly, “and said ‘How unusual. You never see prostitutes in the daylight.’ ” I had heard of this encounter, so when I introduced myself to Sadlowski at a gathering in Chicago, twenty-six years after I’d first