Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [9]
It wasn’t easy for Sadlowski after the loss. He spent the next fifteen years working in various union staff jobs, and for some of that time drinking too much. (“I drank everything,” he says.) “In the end,” a friend observed, “he had to answer to guys who in every way were his inferiors, ham-and-egg guys, guys who should’ve been glad to hold his overcoat. They couldn’t get rid of him, but they reduced him.” He retired from the union in 1992, the same year that U. S. Steel shuttered South Works, where he had begun. But Sadlowski has brushed himself off and started again. He has stopped drinking and is now involved with labor and with his community in a new capacity, as a guardian of their histories.
A couple of years ago, our mutual friend Tony Judge suggested that I spend a day with Sadlowski. Tony, a kind of intellectual entrepreneur, is connected to just about everyone in the city, and once a year, the two men drive around Chicago and visit sites that mean something to Sadlowski, like the gravesite of Allan Pinkerton, whose Pinkerton guards were frequently used to break strikes. Sadlowski, Tony told me, likes to urinate on Pinkerton’s grave. “He sees the lineage stuff,” Tony says. “The old grudges are his grudges.” So, with Tony’s introduction, I called Sadlowski, who growled and grumbled, and grudgingly agreed to meet.
We spent a day in Sadlowski’s Ford Crown Victoria, which has nearly two hundred thousand miles on it, tooling around South Chicago (“Fucked-up nothingness,” he says of the graveyard of factories and forges along the Calumet River). Then, a few weeks later, he invited me to attend a play about a long-ago strike, which he and fellow steelworkers had written and now performed, and then I tagged along with him to a lunch of fried chicken and sausage for pensioners, where the men played poker and talked about the prescription drugs they were taking, and the women, widows of steelworkers, tried their hand at bingo. These people still come to Sadlowski with their problems. Pension checks that are late. Health benefits not kicking in. Sadlowski, who often runs into his former coworkers from South Works over early-morning coffee at the local McDonald’s, says of them, “I’m not romanticizing when I say this, but they’re some of the sharpest guys I ever met in my life. They knew the score.”
In fact, local history has been a bit more complicated than that. This is, after all, the same community that, over the course of seven months in 1953, threw rocks and bombs into the Trumbull Park low-rise public housing complex to keep blacks from moving in. It’s also the same community that elected Ed Vrdolyak as its alderman for four consecutive four-year terms. In the 1980s, Vrdolyak led the white majority on a city council that reveled in its ability to block virtually every piece of legislation proposed by Harold Washington, who as Chicago’s first black mayor was dismissed, if not reviled, by a portion of the city. But Sadlowski is a man of eternal faith. When looking, for instance, at something like the Trumbull Park experience, he points not to those who threw the projectiles but to the few courageous ones who challenged their friends and families to support the African-American family who moved in. (Sadlowski was also a big supporter of Harold Washington.) It’s not blindness, just Sadlowski’s inclination to buck the prevailing notion that the blue-collar worker in this country always shares the politics of Archie Bunker. “If you’re a working stiff,” he says, “your history becomes distorted.”
Sadlowski now teaches a labor history class to carpenters and millwrights at a nearby Indiana college. “I just want to get them thinking about