Chicago History | Spring 2001

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Spring 2001 VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 3

Contents

5 21 3

Tragedy in the Parish Daniel Greene

Stardust and Street of Dreams: Chicago Girls Clubs Alice Murata

Departments From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams

36

Yesterday’s City

52

Making History

66

Index to Volume 29

Amanda Irene Seligman

Timothy J. Gilfoyle

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Karen Doran Gwen Ihnat Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford

Cover: Many Japanese American girls clubs attended the 1948 Fall Festival at Olivet Institute. Courtesy of Pat Amino.

Intern Kate Murphy

Copyright 2001 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6071 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago Historical Society’s Publications Office.

C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS

TRUSTEES

M. Hill Hammock Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Vice Chair John W. Rowe Vice Chair David P. Bolger Treasurer Potter Palmer Secretary R. Eden Martin Immediate Past Chair

Philip D. Block III David R. Boles David P. Bolger Laurence Booth George A. Chivari Michelle L. Collins Kevann M. Cooke John W. Croghan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sharon Gist Gilliam M. Hill Hammock Cynthia L. Hedlund Susan Higinbotham David D. Hiller

LIFE TRUSTEES

Henry W. Howell Philip W. Hummer Richard M. Jaffee Barbara Levy Kipper Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Potter Palmer John W. Rowe Beth Schroeder Gordon I. Segal

Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair Charles T. Brumback John T. McCutcheon Stewart S. Dixon Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss Andrew McNally III Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Newton N. Minow Bryan S. Reid Jr. Dempsey J. Travis HONORARY TRUSTEES

Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago Michael Scott President, Chicago Park District

The Chicago Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Historical Society’s activities.

Chicago History is made possible through the support of the Dr. Scholl Foundation.

2 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

FROM THE EDITORI

3

Tragedy in the Parish DA N I E L G R E E N E

A survivor of the Our Lady of the Angels fire reveals how the disaster devastated her neighborhood.

Editor's Note | On December 1, 1958, tragedy struck Chicago: a ferocious blaze tore through Our Lady of the Angels (OL A) School on the West Side, killing ninety-two children and three nuns and injuring many others. In this article, a survivor of the fire, Joyce Porcaro Kleinaitis, who escaped from the school unharmed, vividly recalls her childhood in the OLA parish and how her family and neighbors struggled to deal with the tragedy. Kleinaitis, an educator, recently completed her dissertation on fire safety in American schools.

O

n Sunday, November 30, 1958, John and Dorothy Porcaro bought a new winter coat for their nine-year-old daughter Joyce. The black coat, decorated with little red flowers, had been held on layaway. John Porcaro, a World War II veteran, worked for the city of Chicago’s Department of Sanitation. Porcaro, his wife, and their two daughters lived on Homan Avenue in the Our Lady of the Angels (OLA) parish. Joyce’s mother emphasized the value of the coat to her daughter. “My mother said, ‘Now, you can’t lose this coat,’” Joyce recalls. “‘It took us a long time to save for this coat.’”

The sky was gray and the temperature climbed from nineteen degrees to just below freezing the next morning, Monday, December 1, 1958. Joyce put on her new coat over her school uniform—a blue jumper with a white blouse and “OLA” logo—and left her house to meet her friend Mary Ellen Pettenon on the corner of Trumbull Avenue and Augusta Boulevard. The two girls trudged more than half a mile to the Our Lady of the Angels School at 909 North Avers Avenue as they did twice each day—once before school began, and once after they had gone home for their lunch break. Joyce remembers, “Mary Ellen and I walked home and we had lunch and then I went to meet her again. I just remember walking all the time. We had plans after school. I just remember that. The last thing I told her was that I was going to meet her at the school corner at three o’clock.” But Joyce and Mary Ellen would never see each other again. Between 2:20 and 3:00 P.M., fire ripped through the Our Lady of the Angels School. The inferno killed ninety-two children and three nuns and devastated a parish.

Immediately following the fire, Joyce was in a state of shock. She wandered outside the school amid the chaos of fire engines, the press, parish leaders, and frantic parents looking for their children. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodFar left: Concerned parents, neighbors, and others crowded in front of Our Lady of the Angels School on December 1, 1958, to witness the fire and rescue efforts. Left: A 1953 photograph of John and Dorothy Porcaro with their daughter Joyce. Five years later, nineyear-old Joyce managed to escape from the inferno at her school.

5

Above: Joyce Porcaro on the day of her First Communion in May 1956. In 1936, George Cardinal Mundelein (below right) appointed Monsignor Joseph F. Cussen as pastor of Our Lady of the Angels. He was devastated by the 1958 fire in his parish.

ness. I left my cigar box in the room and I left my coat.’

And I knew my mother’s warning to me when I had left was, ‘You better not lose that coat.’ I thought, ‘Oh, am I going to get into trouble.’” Joyce had seen her classmates jump from third-story windows, and to this day does not remember the sequence of events that led to her escape from the burning school. Nonetheless, Joyce recalls heading back toward the school after the fire was extinguished to recover her new coat. As she approached the door to the school, her father appeared. “He was carrying my cousin, Arlene, and her face was all black and mine must have been, too.” Tears streamed down her father’s face.

The first church in the Our Lady of the Angels parish opened in 1894 to serve the largely Irish Catholic, working-class members of the neighborhood. The population of the parish increased rapidly around the turn of the century, and the Reverend James A. Hynes ordered the construction of a school. Hynes had come from the neighboring Saint Sylvester parish; he named the new parish for the Our Lady of the Angels Seminary he had attended in Niagara, New York. In September 1904, six Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary opened the 6 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

parish school on the northeast corner of Iowa Street and Avers Avenue. The number of children in the parish continued to increase so rapidly that seven years later a new building opened that served as both a church and a school, increasing the number of classrooms in the parish from eight to eighteen. By 1925, 935 children attended the Our Lady of the Angels School. Father Hynes died in 1936, after serving the parish for more than forty years, and Cardinal George Mundelein named Monsignor Joseph F. Cussen the new parish pastor.

During summer 1940, a rectory opened at 3808 West Iowa Street, and the entire building on the corner of Iowa and Avers, at 909 North Avers, was converted into a school.

By the 1950s, Our Lady of the Angels had become one of the largest parishes in the Chicago archdiocese, encompassing about 150 city blocks five miles west of the Loop and serving approximately 4,500 families. The ethnic composition had changed since the earliest days of the parish. In 1958, Irish immigrants and their descendants still made up about 30 percent of the neighborhood, but Italians, who began moving to the parish during the 1920s, constituted close to 60 percent of the parish residents. The remaining 10 percent of the neighborhood were Poles and descendants of other eastern European immigrants.

During the mid-1950s, the residents of the Our Lady of the Angels parish relied quite heavily on their church to provide the neighborhood with an identity. In fact, while other Chicago neighborhoods—Hyde Park, Bronzeville, Uptown—earned well-known names for a variety of rea-

This aerial photograph from the Chicago Tribune captured the smoke billowing from the school and identified the various buildings on the church campus. One of the initial calls to the fire department directed the trucks to the church rather than the school.

sons, the area near Chicago Avenue and Kedzie Boulevard was known by most residents only as the Our Lady of the Angels parish. Historian Humbert Nelli explains the centrality of the church: “While the roles of other institutions decreased as Italians and their children made use of American newspapers, insurance companies, banks, and trade unions . . . the importance of the Catholic Church increased. . . . The Catholic Church remained flexible enough to provide for the social and religious needs of new arrivals from overseas as well as long-time colony residents and immigrant inhabitants of outer city and suburban neighborhoods.” Descendants of Italian immigrants all over Chicago adapted to American ways quite successfully while retaining an alliance to the Catholic Church “as the only ‘traditional’ institution that offered anything of use or value.”

Anchored by activities at the church and the thriving shopping district on Chicago Avenue to its Italian residents, Our Lady of the Angels parish felt like a small village in a large metropolis. Two journalists have described Chicago Avenue as “a place where women pulled shopping carts and bartered with merchants, where soda fountains and corner saloons stayed open late, and

where the scents of baked bread, sweet confectioner’s sugar, pungent garlic, and fresh produce filled the air.”

Neighbors in the parish knew each other well, said “hello” as they passed each other on the street, shopped together, ate together, and prayed together. “The families of the neighborhood of OLA were a close-knit group who boasted of a ‘convivial spirit,’” Joyce recalls. “Everyone watched out for everyone else. Its residents were proud to say they were from the OLA parish.”

Joyce Porcaro’s family typified the Italian immigrant experience in Chicago in many ways. Her paternal grandparents came to the United States from a small village in Tuscany just after World War I. They settled near Western Avenue and Superior Street in the Holy Rosary Church parish because many other Italian families lived there. In 1928, Joyce’s grandparents moved to the Our Lady of the Angels parish and purchased a two-story flat on the 800 block of North Homan Avenue. Joyce’s grandfather Nicholas worked for the Chicago Transit Authority, and her grandmother Concetta Maria, known to everyone as Mary, worked as a men’s tailor in the Loop. They raised four children; Joyce’s father, John, was the second born.

Tragedy in the Parish | 7

Joyce’s grandparents, Nicholas (shown above in 1917) and Mary Porcaro moved to the Our Lady of the Angels parish in 1928. As their children grew up and married, Nick and Mary (below) hosted large Sunday dinners for the extended family.

8 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

After attending church on Sunday mornings, the Porcaro family gathered for a large family dinner. Joyce remembers, “The big meals were wonderful. My grandmother would spend the entire day Saturday making homemade ravioli, homemade pasta, and calzones. She’d make about five hundred raviolis. We ate prosciutto and cheese, and my grandparents grew grapes in their backyard and made their own wine.” All of Joyce’s aunts, uncles, and cousins would arrive around noon, and anywhere from thirty to fifty family members would enjoy Grandmother Mary’s cooking each Sunday afternoon in the basement kitchen.

Joyce’s father worked during the day and her mother worked at night, so Joyce spent much of her youth with her grandmother. “My fondest memories are of going to the Alamo Theater with her.” During their walks down Chicago Avenue to the theater, Joyce and her grandmother passed the Italian bakery and the fish market on the way to the candy store, where Mary would buy chocolate-covered nuts for the two to share during the movie. Joyce also remembers walking to the Woolworth’s with her friends or cousins to drink hot chocolate and eat cookies for a quarter. “It was a very safe neighborhood,” Joyce recalls. “All of the activities more or less stemmed from the parish. Everybody knew everyone.

The dentist was Italian. The barber. And the funeral home director.” Living in the parish at this time, according to Joyce, was “just like being in Little Italy.”

Life for the 1,632 students at the Our Lady of the Angels School in 1958 was not nearly as much fun as family meals, neighborhood shopping, and movies. The strictly enforced hierarchy in the parish school intimidated young children. “When I was a child, it was just expected that you would behave and that you would get straight As in school,” Joyce says. Even in fourth grade, according to Joyce, “you spent hours on your homework.”

Students at Our Lady of the Angels had to abide by strict rules, and there were consequences if they misbehaved. Joyce remembers that every single piece of paper had to have “JMJ,” for “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” in the upper corner of the page. Once, Joyce made a handwriting error and approached the nun in the front of the class to ask for a new sheet of paper. The nun held that piece of paper in front of Joyce’s face and ripped it to shreds. After that, Joyce said she made very few handwriting errors. Students had to sit in straight lines in the classroom with their hands crossed; if they did not, they often faced corporal punishment.

Lessons were constantly drilled into students’ heads.

“You had to memorize all these religious facts,” Joyce remembers. “The nuns were without sin. I remember that. For me, school was always frightening because if you forgot your pencil box you’d get yelled at. Or if you didn’t have your boots bag, you’d get yelled at.” Joyce

remembers thinking that as a young girl, she wanted to become a nun when she grew up. (She would change her mind when she was in the eighth grade, after seeing Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story.) Students at the Our Lady of the Angels school knew that nuns were not to be disobeyed; the consequences for doing so terrified most of the young students.

At approximately 2:25 P.M. on December 1, 1958, Pearl Tristano, one of the nine lay teachers at Our Lady of the Angels, sent two of her fifth-grade boys to empty the classroom garbage cans into the boiler-room incinerator.

The two boys returned to room 206 five minutes later and reported that they smelled smoke. Tristano, a twenty-four-year-old teacher, told her students to stay in their seats, and she went to the classroom next door to ask Dorothy Coughlan, another lay teacher, what to do.

Coughlan decided to report the smoke to the principal, Sister Mary St. Florence Casey. According to school policy, only the principal could pull the fire alarm. In fact, the alarms were mounted on the wall so high off the ground—at a height of more than six feet—that few students would have been able to reach the alarms even if they had tried.

Upon her arrival at the principal’s office, however, Coughlan could not find Sister Casey, as she was substituting for a sick teacher in a first-floor classroom. (Sister Casey would later be credited with leading all of the children from lower-floor classrooms out of the building safely.) By the time Coughlan returned to her own classroom, the smell of smoke had worsened, and the smoke had become visible in the corridor. Tristano and Coughlan decided to disobey school policy. Tristano told her students to leave their seats, and that she would lead them out of the building in an orderly manner. Coughlan did the same. According to the National Firefighters Protection Association report, “The pupils in Room 207 went out through the cloakroom and down the fire escape stairs, while those in Room 206 went down the annex stairs and outdoors. Smoke was already at [children’s] head level in the second story corridor.”

Shortly after Tristano’s two students reported the smell of smoke, James Raymond, a school janitor whose five children attended Our Lady of the Angels, saw smoke coming from the rear of the building. He shouted to the school housekeeper, Norma Mahoney, to call the fire department. At 2:42 P.M., Mahoney called the fire department; this was the first of fifteen calls that the fire department would receive before 3:00 P.M. In this first call, however, Mahoney reported the address of the school at 3808 West Iowa Street. In fact, the school building was located at 909 North Avers; the housekeeper had given the address of the church, not the school building. Some firefighters were delayed in arriving on the scene because of this error.

The Chicago Tribune documented the aftermath of the fire.

Tragedy in the Parish | 9

At 2:43 P.M., after safely depositing her students at the church, Tristano returned to the school and sounded the fire alarm; this alarm rang only in the school and was not connected to the fire department. Ten seconds later, according to their report, the fire department alarm office received the first call reporting the fire at the correct address.

By the time the two boys first noticed the smoke, most estimates agree, the fire had been smoldering for at least ten minutes, and probably much longer. The fire began in a cardboard trash drum located in the boiler room where the boys from Miss Tristano’s class, and from many other classrooms, emptied the garbage at the end of each day. At the base of the stairwell near the boiler room sat debris, including old test papers, newspapers, and wooden chairs. “Burning was greatly intensified when the window in the stairwell at basement level was broken by the heat, permitting a good supply of fresh air to enter the fire area.” Hot fire gases and smoke rose through the open stairwells in the school, and smoke also entered the second-floor classrooms through the ventilation grills. Because the firefighters had to direct their forces toward saving children rather than putting out the fire, about one third of the school roof burned before the fire could be controlled.

Sister Mary Seraphica Kelley, a red-haired forty-threeyear-old nun with more than twenty years of classroom experience, had just finished teaching a geography lesson to Joyce Porcaro and fifty-five other fourth- and fifth-grade students in room 210 when one of the students noticed smoke entering the classroom from under the door. Joyce recalls, “I just remember that Sister Kelley told us to sit down and wait until someone would come and get us.

We sat at our desks and prayed the rosary. Nobody questioned the nun. We just did what we were told. I remember that it just seemed like a long time. It got very smoky, very dark. I remember hearing screaming from the street and people yelling. What I remember most vividly is that the roof fell. The ceiling just collapsed.” Finally, the students disobeyed Sister Kelley and ran to the windows. The first student to do so jumped from the thirdstory window at 2:44 P.M. “People on the street were saying to jump.” But Joyce was scared; she saw a classmate jump from the window and die from a broken neck after hitting the pavement. The window ledges also were extremely high—more than three feet from the floor— and were hard to reach for small nine- and ten-year olds who did decide to jump. “It was a high climb in order to get up on the ledge. . . . You know, in my mind, I always

Firefighters move through the debris in a destroyed classroom. They found poignant objects such as textbooks still open to lessons and coats hanging in the cloakroom.

10 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Tragedy in the Parish | 11

Newspaper illustrations such as these (above) personalized the unfathomable tragedy. Some parents endured hours of agonizing uncertainty before discovering their children’s fate. Some found their children safely waiting for them at a friend or neighbor’s home; others were directed to a hospital or morgue to identify their children.

thought I was bigger. But when I saw my own daughter as a nine-year-old, I thought to myself, ‘My God, I was just this little thing [at the time of the fire].’”

Joyce has no idea how she was able to exit the school safely. A fireman may have carried her, or possibly a priest. The next thing she remembers is being in the midst of all the commotion in the street. Many of the people in Joyce’s classroom were not as lucky. Sister Kelley died in the fire, along with twenty-nine of her students from room 210, including Joyce’s best friend, Mary Ellen, with whom she had walked to school each day. Fifteen students from room 210, and nearly one hundred other students in the school, sustained injuries from the fire. In total, ninety-two children and three nuns perished at the Our Lady of the Angels School on December 1, 1958. Over the next few days, Joyce would learn the details of the fire piece by piece. She cried all the time when she began to realize what had happened, but school, parish, neighborhood, and Chicago city 12 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Left: The parish’s convent held the wake for the three nuns who died in the blaze. One student remembered wanting to attend wearing his best coat, but realized that he had lost it in the fire.

authorities provided little comfort. Joyce said, “I remember my grandfather saying, in broken Italian, ‘You can’t cry. You’re going to get sick.’ And nobody told me that my friends had died. I think it was three days before my mother told me that Mary Ellen had died. But we weren’t allowed to talk about it.”

Very little talking about the fire occurred at school, save one assembly in the church basement on December 9, 1958. The surviving students gathered, Joyce remembers, and a nun lectured them: “‘Now, I’m going to tell you why the fire happened.’ And she said, ‘God took the good little angels and left you bad children here.’ Well, kids were crying.” Following this one assembly, nothing more about the fire was ever said to the children by any school authorities. An unspoken hierarchy established that the children who had died were angels, and children who were burned or injured were held in second-highest regard, followed by students who were in school and survived, followed finally by students who were home sick on the day of the fire (but were still considered fire survivors). The guilt imposed on survivors by such a hierarchy plagued Joyce and many others for years. But no

Above: An injured student and her sister at St. Anne’s Hospital.

Below: A priest gives last rites to an unidentified victim at the scene of the fire

Tragedy in the Parish | 13

This diagram illustrated how the fire raged through the school.

14 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

The severity of the OLA fire focused public attention on fire safety regulations—or the lack of them—in public and parochial schools.

authorities provided or even suggested any type of counseling for them. Michelle McBride, an eighth grader who survived the fire, recalled, “When people wanted answers as to the cause of the fire, they were cautioned not to question their religion because questioning the safety of a Catholic school building was denying your faith.” Joyce has written, “The fire was not to be talked about at home or in school, and the children who survived the blaze did not know how to comfort themselves. They were told that life had to go on and that they were survivors. The need to be strong and to keep personal feelings to one’s self was the message that the children heard.”

Although children and other members of the parish learned not to question the safety of the school building, the Chicago Fire Department and other investigators found a variety of causes. In 1949, the Municipal Code of Chicago had required that all school stairways be enclosed. Buildings constructed before 1949, however, had the option to ignore this directive, which the Our Lady of the Angels School did. “The stairways at the school were open and there were also substandard doors present on the second floor, which were blocked during the fire.” The ceilings within the school were finished with combustible tile, and the school lacked an automatic sprinkler system. Students could not access, and had been warned not to activate, the alarm-sending

switches. These unmarked alarm switches were not connected directly to the fire department; the nearest fire alarm outside of the school “was one block east and one block south from the school and was not visible from any point on or adjacent to the school property.”

Housekeeping around the boiler room was sloppy. Fire extinguishers were mounted on the wall at a height of nearly seven feet. Although school authorities had conducted fire drills, students had not been educated about how to leave the school if stairways were blocked by fire.

Also, no school authority ever designated a meeting point outside of the school—Joyce had no idea where to go once she exited the burning building, and she suspects that some students who lost their lives had been outside of the building but decided to reenter the school in order to try to save friends or teachers. As the National Fire Protection Association Report concluded, “the . . . deaths in this fire are an indictment of those in authority who have failed to recognize their life safety obligations in housing children in structures which are ‘fire traps.’” The fire at the Our Lady of the Angels School has been used consistently to demonstrate the necessity of fire-safety education and compliance in schools across the nation. Joyce argues, “I think that Our Lady of the Angels should be a model for what not to do and how not to handle a crisis like that.”

Tragedy in the Parish | 15

On December 10, Cardinals Francis Spellman (right) and Albert Meyer presided over a funeral for twenty-seven children at the Northwest Armory (below). The cause of the fire was never ascertained. In 1962, Judge Alfred J. Cilella (bottom) determined that a thirteen-year-old boy’s confession was inadmissible in court.

16 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Despite a formal inquest, the definitive cause of the fire remains unknown to this day. The official investigation into the fire began on December 10, five days after Cardinals Albert Meyer and Francis Spellman presided over a funeral for twenty-seven children at the Northwest Armory. The inquest was not conducted by a grand jury; instead, a sixteen-member fact-finding panel convened by the Cook County Coroner’s office investigated the cause of the fire and its aftermath and concluded that the fire may have stemmed from a student smoking in the basement stairwell.

Three years later, in January 1962, a thirteen-year-old boy confessed to setting the school fire. His confession corroborated evidence gathered by the arson squad after the school fire, but Judge Alfred J. Cilella, a devout Italian Catholic, eventually made the difficult decision to dismiss the confession. The judge ruled that a polygraph test operator had coerced an inadmissible confession out of the young boy after holding him in custody for many hours. Cilella never formally doubted his decision, but those close to the judge claim that his decision plagued him for the remainder of his life.

Like Cilella, those who were touched by the fire at Our Lady of the Angels School felt a palpable difference in family and neighborhood life following the tragedy. Many people associated with the fire coped with the tragedy through a tacit communal denial. Joyce knows that parents who had lost their children looked at her with suspicion because she had lived. “Nobody would talk about their feelings. As if to say, ‘If we don’t talk about the fire, it didn’t happen.’” The nuns were even stricter after the fire, Joyce recalls. Due mainly to envy and suspicion, her parents could no longer maintain friendships with other parents who had lost a child in the fire.

The child survivors faced both logistical and personal challenges immediately following the fire. Joyce had to attend Orr Public School for the remainder of the 1958–59 school year. She recalls, “I felt like an orphan, because I didn’t have a classroom, and I didn’t have my teacher, and I didn’t have my supplies, and I was always reminded that I was a guest there.” Nightmares and fears compounded these feelings, but Joyce had nobody to talk to about her anxieties. “I didn’t sleep at night, because I was afraid that since God hadn’t taken me during the fire, He certainly was going to come get me when I was sleeping. It was such a lonely period because my friends had all died. I couldn’t talk about the fire. The public school parents sometimes didn’t let their children play with me because that was bad luck. Something was going to happen to their children. I did have several occasions where parents would come up to me and they would say, ‘How come you got out and my child is dead?’”

Christmas came less than four weeks after the school fire, but Joyce’s mother, like many parents in the neigh-

innocence of the survivors; it stole their childhood and their trust in being secure and safe. The fire destroyed a community and broke down years of undying faith in religious devotion to their Church.”

Our Lady of the Angels opened a new school in time for the 1960–61 school year. The school was blessed on October 2, 1960, but neither the school building nor the surrounding area included a memorial to the victims of the fire. Joyce recalls, “There was no memorial. We would have a Mass every December first, and the media would come out and take pictures of us. There would be an article every year in the newspaper.” (In 1960, a granite monument was erected by Monsignor Cussen at Queen of Heaven Cemetery, in Hillside, Illinois, where twenty-five victims are buried.) borhood, remained wary of celebrating after the tragedy.

Much to Joyce’s disappointment, her mother insisted that the family should not observe the holiday, and suggested that they should not have a Christmas tree in their home. Joyce remembers, “My mother thought, ‘We just can’t do that. What will the neighbors think?’”

Finally, Joyce’s father relented. “We got a tree,” Joyce recalls, “but we had to have the drapes closed.” The subdued family celebration took place, hidden from the watchful eye of increasingly suspicious and resentful neighbors. Joyce admits, “I never have enjoyed Christmas since. Even with my own children, it was just too stressful for me.”

Joyce recalls one exception to the discord that plagued the parish after the fire. Her best friend Mary Ellen’s mother was pregnant, and her newborn daughter arrived the week after the fire. Joyce remembers, “The baby was born on the day of Mary Ellen’s funeral.” Mary Ellen’s mother invited Joyce over to see the baby, and even let her hold the newborn. She gave Joyce “this little pin that Mary Ellen had worn, and it had a little picture of her.

For some reason, that made me feel a little bit better. For her [Mary Ellen’s mother], I think it was better that she saw me, because it made her remember Mary Ellen. But her relatives didn’t like that I was coming over. They didn’t like it at all.” Joyce also remembers going to visit Mary Ellen’s mother the day that Joyce was confirmed.

In honor of her friend, Joyce took the name “Ellen” for her confirmation name.

The special bond between Joyce and her late friend’s mother, though, was the exception rather than the rule in the parish following the fire. The memories of the fire endured: two years after the fire, one child was still bedridden, and students with visible burn scars roamed the halls of Our Lady of the Angels; in 1965, twelve children had to undergo skin graft operations; and financial wrangling over insurance bills continued well into the late 1960s. Joyce has written that the fire “took away the

Above left: Shocked neighbors at the scene of the fire. Above: School pictures of fire victims, including Joyce’s best friend Mar y Ellen Pettenon (third from the left in the bottom row), were published in the December 4 edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Still, no one in the parish talked about the fire. The tension escalated so much that Joyce’s family felt it would be best to move out of the parish. “My mother and father stayed in the parish until I graduated from eighth grade.

But it just wasn’t the same parish anymore.” The Porcaro family was not alone; many families left, trying to leave bad memories and broken friendships behind. “A lot of people moved from that neighborhood,” Joyce says. “A lot of people stopped supporting the church. It was just a different atmosphere in the air. It was like the death of a neighborhood. The trust was gone.”

The ethnic composition of the Our Lady of the Angels parish changed markedly following the fire. Italians and other white families moved out of the parish throughout Tragedy in the Parish | 17

the 1960s, in part due to the lasting legacy of the fire, and in part due to block-busting tactics of profit-hungry real estate agents. Throughout the 1990s, the school-age population of the parish declined. Our Lady of the Angels School, with an enrollment of just over one hundred students, closed in 1999.

Joyce Porcaro Kleinaitis has learned many lessons as she has struggled with her memories of the tragic school fire. Today, Joyce works as a middle-school principal in the Chicago suburbs, and notes that many of her fellow survivors have become educators or have entered other caretaking professions, including fire fighting. Joyce strives to protect her students and to “make school a place enjoyable for children.” She recently completed her dissertation, which recounts the fire at the Our Lady of the Angels School and examines its effects in prompting school safety regulations. “I’ve prided myself on this dissertation,” Joyce said recently. “I hope that it did lend some dignity to the children who lost their lives, so that it wasn’t in vain that they died.”

Above: In 1960, a new school opened on the site of the old one. Joyce Porcaro was in room 303. Below: Joyce at her eighth-grade graduation in 1963, after which her family moved out of the neighborhood.

In the wake of the fire, many families, haunted by bad memories and broken friendships, decided to leave the parish.

Daniel Greene is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 4–5, CHS, ICHI-26980; 5, courtesy of Joyce Kleinaitis; 6 top, courtesy of Joyce Kleinaitis; 6 bottom, CHS; 7, Tribune photo; 8 top and bottom, courtesy of Joyce Kleinaitis; 9, Tribune photos; 10–11, CHS; 12, Tribune photos; 13 top, Tribune photo; 13 bottom, CHS, ICHI-26694; 14, Tribune photo; 15, Tribune photo; 16 top and center, Tribune photos; 16 bottom, CHS; 17, Tribune photos; 18 top and bottom, courtesy of Joyce Kleinaitis; 19, Tribune photos.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For an excellent and thorough chronology of the Our Lady of the Angels fire, read To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire by David Cowan and John Kuenster (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998). For more on the Catholic church in the city, see Catholicism, Chicago Style (Campion Book) by Ellen Skerrett (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1994). For a look at the Catholic school system in Chicago, see The Education of an Urban Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833–1965 by James W. Sanders (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977).

18 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Left: Police lines formed to hold back the growing crowd while firemen desperately tried to extinguish the flames. Below: Newspapers published the victims' names and photographs.

Tragedy in the Parish | 19

20

Stardust and Street of Dreams: Chicago Girls Clubs ALICE MURATA

1948 Fall Festival at Olivet Institute, where Aiko Suzuki was crowned Miss Autumn and received a twenty-five dollar savings bond. Courtesy of Pat Amino.

Editor’s Note In December 1941, about 350 Japanese Americans lived in Chicago.

By 1944, that number had risen to fifty-one hundred; eventually, more than twenty thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry settled in Chicago. The reason: the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes to internment camps and then to inland areas. Against the backdrop of America’s war against Japan, these new Chicagoans struggled to rebuild their lives and establish a sense of community in their new homes.

More than 85 percent of the migrants were young. In their new homes, they looked for new ways to socialize with their peers. A primary way of doing this was forming girls clubs, which Alice Murata discusses in this article.

This article is an outgrowth of REgenerations: Rebuilding Japanese American Families, Communities, and Civil Rights in the Resettlement Era, a collaborative Civil Liberties Public Education Fund grant project between the Japanese American National Museum and the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society to explore and document the impact of the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II. Ten individuals’ memories were documented in video oral history interviews in each of four Nikkei communities: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose.

Pat Amino (formerly Aiko Suzuki)’s memories of her experiences in one of the girls clubs are the basis for this article. Amino was interviewed on March 30, 1998, by Dr. Mary Doi as part of this project.

Alice Murata is a professor in the Department of Counselor Education, Northeastern Illinois University, and director of the Oral History project for the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society.

21

T

Origins of Girls Clubs

he architect for the girls clubs was Abe Hagiwara, a trained social worker who came from a Cleveland YMCA, where he had gained experience working with troubled youth. Hagiwara thought that Japanese Americans’ prewar living conditions in centralized Little Tokyos had allowed for them to easily be herded into concentration camps. After such a stressful experience, Hagiwara realized, Japanese Americans needed support as they assimilated into 1947 Olivet Institute Dance. First row: Sachi Sugimoto Yasunaga, Thelma Tanaka mainstream America. Hagiwara Uchida, Rulie Kaneko Yamamoto, Margaret Morita Hiratsuka, Jeanne Kasuguma Kawako, Fukuye Sakamoto, Paula Haga Kitahata, Emi Hamaka. Second row: Grace argued that organization into Oishi Kishaba, Norrie Yamagiwa Andow, Margaret Makino Miyamoto, Coach Thomas small cohort groups would faciliMayahara, Coach Harry Sakamoto, Sue Okubo Oshita, and Aiko Haga Tsuru. Courtesy of Margaret Hiratsuka. tate Japanese Americans’ adjustment to a new city.

By 1948, Hagiwara helped to create more than one hundred such clubs, eighteen of them girls clubs, which he organized into the Girls Inter-Club Council. Girls clubs were decentralized, self-originating groups organized by the Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) girls. The council’s charter indicated that they wanted to serve as a clearinghouse for social activities, sponsor community activities, and create educational programs. Through this group, ideas for social and service projects were exchanged, leadership training was given, and joint activities were sponsored, such as teas, bazaars, and lectures. Newsletters disseminated information about club activities. Each club, which had about fifteen same-age members elected their own officers, charged dues, and held regular meetings.

The first group to form was the Jolenes, which is French for “born beautiful,” in January 1947 at Hyde Park High School; other groups at that school included the Debonnaires and the Colleens (first known as the Tyrolenes). YuKyes, which means “friends” in Japanese, were made up of Hyde Park graduates. The Philos were based at Wells High School, while girls at Waller High School formed the Silhouettes and Charmettes. Other clubs were church based, such as the Maya Devi from the Midwest Buddhist Church. The Tinga-Lings were initially the Chi Sigs, but changed their name to that of their sponsor, a chocolate shop, and then later became the Bambis.

The Meta Aldelphons formed with interest in promoting good race The Ting-a-Lings named their club after relations. Other clubs included the Estelles, Chaletines, Cidys, a local soda shop on Division Street near Clark. CHS photograph.

Dawnelles, Gremlins, Mam’selles, Serenes, Sorrelles, and Velvett.

22 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Pat Amino belonged to the Silhouettes. Describing her first day at Waller High School (now Lincoln Park Academy) in September 1945, Amino remembered, “I’ll never forget that first day of registration.

I go into this room where they tell you to go, and there’s about Serenes Championship Team 1949. Front row: Coach Kiyo Arata, Penny a hundred Japanese Americans Ishimoto, Coach Tom Yokoi. Second row: Tsune Mayeda, Fumi Takehara, Ets Mizukami, Hide Suzuki, Aiko Suzuki, Mary Ann Ouye, Mary in there. We’re all greeting each Nakayo, Meggie Hatada, Dottie Mizukami. Courtesy of Pat Amino. other. Never saw them before in my life but I like to meet people. I go to everyone and ask, ‘What camp were you in?’ That was our breaking ground.

It was so much fun.

And so I said, ‘Hey, with this many at Amino’s experience Japanese, let’s start a with relocation camps, Japanese club.’ And ressettlement in this character named Chicago, and with the Silhouettes Curley says, ‘Are you was typical of many other crazy, girl? We’re at war.

Japanese American girls. Amino . . . We can’t start a was born and raised in Boyle Japanese club.’ I just Heights in Los Angeles. Her laughed about it but that father died when she was two was my first idea of havyears old, so her mother worked ing a club. I think every to support the family. Shortly high school must have after the December 7, 1941, started what’s called a bombing of Pearl Harbor, two girls club. I remember askFBI men came to pick up her ing the first day, ‘Do you mother, a Japanese schoolwant to start a club? What teacher. The family had a picture shall we name it?’ Well, let’s of Jesus on the wall. Amino’s see, Silhouettes is a good mother told the agents that name so we picked “Jesus is my Lord and Savior,” Silhouettes. At almost the and they decided, “‘We can’t take same time, my sister’s club her, she’s Christian.’ They had started. She was a member of pity on us.” The family was kept the Sorelles. Then, my intact and evacuated to Poston, Silhouettes ledger. Courtesy of Pat Amino. younger sister, Hide, started a one of ten concentration camps club called Charmettes. Then my that housed Japanese Americans older sister, Shibby, in beauty school, met all these ladies and they forcibly removed from the West started a club. It’s funny, we must have all started at the same time.”

Coast during World War II.

Relocation Camps

P

Chicago Girls Clubs | 23

W

Coming to Chicago

hile interned, Amino’s two older sisters left camp temporarily to do seasonal work, such as canning tomatoes for months at a time in Utah. Later, Amino’s sisters left permanently for Chicago, a leading industrial center whose economy was booming due to the war. Amino’s sisters joined blacks from the south and rural farm workers in responding to Chicago’s urgent pleas for workers. In August 1945, Amino, then a fourteen-year-old, traveled alone by train to join her sisters in Chicago. Her sisters had jobs and housing. Shortly thereafter, Amino’s mother and her younger sister joined them in Chicago, so their entire family was reunited.

N

Chicago’s Nisei

isei girls arrived in Chicago ready to adopt new lifestyles. In 1945, half of the evacuees were younger than twenty-four years old. Seventy percent of the females were younger than twenty-five years old, and only one-third of them were married. Available housing was in the marginal areas of overcrowded slums filled with crime and delinquency. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) designated buffer zones in which Japanese Americans were forced to reside.

A

Crowded Housing

mino resided in an attic apartment of a three-flat building split into twelve units. Overcrowding was typical; building codes permitted housing to be subdivided because of the shortage of accommodations. The five members of Amino’s family shared one bedroom while one slept on the living room couch. The bathroom was shared with other families.

Jolenes meeting: Yeko Yamamoto Shishida, Minnie Himamato, Lily Ito, Betty Kawanaga Fukuda, Teri Nakaguchi, Noreen Nishiyama Enkoji, Terri Yamashita, Lil Nitahava.

Photographer Ken Mazawa.

24 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Chicago Girls Clubs | 25

26 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

M

The Generation Gap

ost Nisei teenagers did not like to remain at home in cramped spaces. Their Issei (first-generation Japanese Americans) parents did not want their adolescent daughters to hang out in neighborhood bars, strip joints, or gambling houses with yogores, or zoot suiters, who sported flashy clothes and nonconformist conduct. Many Issei worried that their daughters would become prostitutes, get pregnant, or live with men without being married. They wanted their daughters to remain “good” at a time of rapidly changing sexual mores. Japanese American parents thus preferred the organized activities of girls clubs to the many surrounding negative influences of city neighborhoods. They maintained high aspirations for their offspring.

T Opposite: Ting-a-Lings 1949 basketball team sporting team jackets as they head for the playoffs. First row: Grace Oishi Kishaba, Sue Okubo Oshita, Mary Akiyama Tokuhisa. Second row: Norrie Yamagiwa Andow, June Kushino Ogino, Aiko Haga Tsuru, Margaret Makino Miyamoto, Thelma Tanaka Uchida.

Courtesy of Margaret Hiratsuka.

Silhouettes at the Street of Dreams Dance, Lincoln Hall, on September 3, 1947. Courtesy of Pat Amino. Clockwise from furthest left: Ets Mizukami, Aiko Suzuki, Yo Ishimoto, Takayo Tsubouchi, Emma Kushino, Rose Morihiro, Dorothy Kanii, Marion Shiota, Helen Kitahata, Betty Kushino, Alice Matsuno, Lucy Uyeda, Toby Ozone.

A Close-knit Circle

he Silhouettes was a tightly knit circle of Nisei girls. They were emotionally close with shared pasts of prewar living in West Coast communities, degrading camp experiences, and discrimination. They had similar values and beliefs as well as shared future concerns of education, jobs, and finding marriage partners.

Club members saw each other often and offered timely support and help in confronting confusing challenges of integration.

The Silhouettes never terminated anyone from their club. They identified with and took care of each other. They demonstrated cohesion and group loyalty by wearing club jackets, matching plaid blouses, and club patches. They had nicknames for each other and often talked about guys. They had classes together and held meetings at each other’s houses, so they knew each other’s parents and families.

They had fun going out every weekend on sleigh rides, hayrides, to talent shows, bowling alleys, and Blackhawks games. They also took occasional trips to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Chicago Girls Clubs | 27

I

Love and Marriage

sseis hoped that their Nisei daughters would enter into a good marriage and raise children. Both generations knew that the days of the picture bride and prewar use of baishakunins, or matchmakers, to arrange marriages were over.

The Issei women’s belief that compatibility developed during a marriage as women fulfilled their obligations and responsibilities to their husbands differed from their daughters’ romantic ideals of marrying for love. Chicago Nisei women did not want to follow in their mothers’ footsteps and perpetuate service to their husbands and then sons. Instead, many of Chicago’s Nisei chose to adopt American ways of selecting a man to love and marry as outlined in popular magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Girls clubs provided a distinctive new way to court, allowing Nisei girls to have fun and meet boys at the same time.

Evelyn Hidaka, Betty Kawanaga Fukuda, Yeko Yamamoto Shishida, and Teri Nakaguchi in front of Hyde Park High School. Photographer Ken Mazawa.

Issei expected their daughters to conform to a standard norm of proper behavior. Nisei girls remained sensitive to their parents’ wishes, but were free to develop independently in a manner of their own choosing. Amino’s mother encouraged her to behave in ways that would not bring shame to their family. She was comfortable when Amino was with her “good” Nisei club sisters, safe at supervised events with many young Nisei youth.

After Amino came of age, her mother encouraged her to go out with Japanese boys. When she dated Caucasian boys in high school, Amino recalls, her mother “almost had a fit,” telling Amino, “‘No, no, no good.’ That’s why all of us married Japanese,” Amino recalls. She eventually stopped dating Caucasian boys, thinking they were not as good as Japanese boys.

28 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Sorelles Hayride. First row: George Kittaka, Yuri Suzuki Nishioka, Unknown, Teri Wakumoto Kuzuhara, Harold Kim. Second row: Unknown, Esther Hiyama Kittaka, Betty Yoshida, Amy Tani, Yuri Kinishi, Fran Watanabe Wada, Asako Narahara Watanabe, Florette Kayumi Kim. Third row: Unknown, Unknown, surname Ogawa, Ikuro Kinishi, Dan Kuzuhara, Unknown, Unknown. Photographer Ken Mazawa.

Chicago Girls Clubs | 29

O

Stardust and Street of Dreams

ne of the main purposes of the Silhouettes was social, a way to meet people. “We’d have dances. We’d go to North Avenue beach and have weenie bakes,” Amino recalls. “We’d have such a good time, playing our form of volleyball. We’d stay out there all night, but nobody said anything or thought anything of it because we were so innocent.” Girls club members enjoyed activities such as swimming and card games during these parties. The music of Frank Sinatra, Vic Damone, and other popular singers blared Wesak Dance. Photographer Ken Mazawa. from the radio as they danced.

The Silhouettes sponsored dances with romantic names such as “Stardust” and “Street of Dreams.” They rented the gym at Olivet Institute for twenty-five dollars, put up festive decorations with balloons, and hired a band to play Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey tunes. Beverages were sold and some dancegoers snuck liquor into the dance. Dance organizers charged a nominal admission fee with hopes of raising funds. At dances, beauty contests frequently were held to encourage Nisei men to attend, although even when they did appear, Amino recalls that a “few Nisei men were good dancers, but many stood around.” She “did not know what the boys were doing there. They did not dance.” Some dances were designated “Girl’s Choice,” where turnabout permitted girls to ask boys to dance. Some shy boys had dances and dates arranged for them.

One year, the Jolenes declared an annual TWIRP (The Woman Is Required to Pay) season, which allowed girls to ask boys out. At midnight during a TWIRP dance, boys resumed asking girls to dance. Kaz Kita admonished shy boys in a Chicago Shimpo “Teen Stuff” column: “Two steps is better than no step.” Japanese American girls considered the ideal mate tall, personable, considerate, and lots of fun. The girls expected boys to know how to dress and not to wear a Preening for the “Miss Portrait of Spring” contest, co-sponsored by girls clubs and the sports, bright, or plaid shirt with Inter-Club Council, in the fabulous Tropical Room of the Sheraton Hotel. Tsune a suit or to come to the dance Taniguchi, June Tamanaha, Jane Kobukata, Terry Yamanaka (winner), and Claudine Coleman. Photographer Ken Mazawa. without wearing a tie.

30 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

T

Playing for Fun

he girls clubs also organized sports teams through the Chicago Nisei Athletic Association (CNAA), formed in 1946 to offer baseball, softball, basketball, bowling, golf, and swimming programs. The Silhouettes played basketball and later softball at Olivet, a northside community center. The CNAA did not outwardly encourage competition, yet many girls played to win. Sporting events Silhouettes 1949. First row: Dorothy Kanii, provided a place for Nisei to socialize, and Amino’s mother and the Toby Ozone, Marion Shiota. Second row: Eiko Yamaoka, Betty Kushino, Lucy Uyeda, other Issei parents did not attend sports games. Pat Amino’s team Emma Kushino, Aiko Suzuki, Yo Ishimoto, played primarily to have a good time. She was recruited to play basTakayo Tsubouchi. Third row: Rosie ketball for another club, the tall Serenes, so that they could win tourMorihiro, Alice Matsuno, Ets Mizukami. naments against out-of-town teams. The Serenes emerged as champiCourtesy of Pat Amino. ons for the second time in the Minnesota Invitational in 1949 and went to Denver to play exhibition games. On days that the Serenes did not play, they checked out the guys on the boys teams, which sported names such as Collegians, Comets, Dandies, Penguins, and Saints.

Serenes vs. Ting-a-Lings Playoff Game.

Grace Oishi Kishaba, Tsune Mayeda, Aiko Suzuki, Ets Mizukami, and Norrie Andow. Courtesy of Pat Amino.

Ting-a-Lings. First row: Margaret Makino Miyamoto, Unknown, Margaret Morita Hiratsuka, Sachi Sugimoto Yasunaga, Grace Oishi, Aiko Haga Tsuru.

Second row: Tom Mayahara, Massie Kaseguma Kawako, Norrie Yamagiwa, Sue Okubo, Thelma Tanaka Uchida, Rulie Kaneko Yamamoto. Courtesy of Margaret Hiratsuka.

Ting-a-Lings 1947. First row: Margaret Makino Miyamoto, Margaret Morita Hiratsuka, Thelma Tanaku Uchida, Grace Oishi, Massie Kaseguma Kawano. Second row: Harry Sakamoto, Sue Okubo Oshita, June Kushino, Norrie Andow, Aiko Haga Tsuru, Unknown, Mary Akiyama Tokuhisa, Tom Mayahara. Courtesy of Margaret Hiratsuka.

Chicago Girls Clubs | 31

Jolenes Care Dance, November 27, 1948 at North Avenue Y, 1508 Larabee Street. Kaz Kita, president of the Jolenes, presents check for $290 to Jane Donager, director of the Chicago Care Office. Members of all the girls clubs—including the Charmettes, Chalelaines, Debonnaires, Estelles, Mam’selles, Philos, Serenes, Silhouettes, Ting-a-Lings, and YuKyes—were hostesses and received letters of gratitude from donation recipients. Left to right are Lilly Nitahara; Ryoichi Fujii, editor of the Chicago Shimpo, a Japanese American newspaper; Kaz Kita; Jane Donager; Marji Kikuchi; Eleanor Hikida; Lily Ito; Evelyn Hidaka; and Louise Ogawa. Courtesy of Marji Kikuchi.

32 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

T

Caring for Others

he girls clubs performed charity work. Amino recalls, “We were all so social minded.”

The Silhouettes co-hosted the Japan Relief Dance sponsored by the Jolenes with members of Charmettes, Chalelaines, Debonnaires, Estelles, Mam’selles, Philos, Serenes, Ting-a-Lings, and YuKyes. The money raised was presented to the CARE organization, an international war-relief group. The Mam’selles and other groups raised scholarship funds for girls and sent food and clothing to charity.

Nisei girls cared a lot about dress and makeup, and fashion shows became another popular way for girls clubs to raise funds. Club members donned glamorous outfits. Amino was tall and modeled.

With fabric Amino selected and paid for, Kow Kaneko, a local designer, made Amino outfits to model in a fashion show that she kept after the event. Ms. Kaneko and some girls assisted the Chicago Urban League, a Negro Social Welfare Agency, to raise funds to “expand Negro employment possibilities” by participating in a fashion show. A talent competition with baton twirling, imitations of Al Jolson and Betty Hutton, as well as singing and playing musical instruments benefited the Martha Washington Home. The Silhouettes helped raise money for scholarships, cancer research, to purchase furniture for the Chicago Resettlers Committee and the American Friends Committee, and to support Chicago Nisei Athletic Association activities. Through these fundraising efforts, the Silhouettes projected a wholesome, clean, American image.

G

Learning to Lead

irls clubs also offered opportunities to develop leadership skills. Indigenous advisors helped organize and guide group programs. The sister of a Silhouette member served as the group’s advisor, although she was only a year or two older than the teens she advised. “We used to have hayrides,” Amino recalls, “and our advisor would be necking away, in front of all of us, and we’d say, ‘Hey, she’s supposed to be our advisor.’” This was mitomonai, or embarrassing, to the Silhouettes because one of their understood practices was no public necking.

Later, some advisors became national leaders, including Lillian Kimura, the executive director of the YWCA and national president of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL).

Chicago Girls Clubs | 33

A

After High School

fter Amino graduated from high school, she continued to participate in Silhouette activities.

Post-high school activities included a career day, job counseling fair, and charm school classes in makeup and clothing at the Ellis Community Center. Girls clubs provided high school graduates with an opportunity to talk informally about sex.

A few girls club members married just after finishing high school, but most went to college.

Preparation for the future was important. Long courtships were typical. Amino knew her husband for five years before they wed; they dated for three years while she attended business college and he finished a degree at Illinois Institute of Technology. He visited Amino in her parents’ home almost every weekend, and she met him at events she attended with club sisters. She went on group dates with him where three or four of her club sisters joined three or four of his friends.

Friendship among Japanese American youth across the country blossomed when sports teams played in various cities. Amino met George Inai when the Serenes played basketball in Denver. Top row: Scottie Mizukami, Penny Ishimoto, Maggie Yokai, Penny Ishimoto. Second row: Maggie Hiro Takaki, Mary Nakaso Takaki, Mary Ann Ouye. Third row: Maggie Hatada. Fourth row: Aiko Suzuki, Aiko Suzuki. Bottom row: Ets Mizukami, Ets Mizukami, Aiko Suzuki, and Yo Ishimoto. Courtesy of Pat Amino.

Maya Devi were part of the Midwest Buddhist Church and met at Olivet Institute in 1947. First row: E. Chikaraishi, T. Hattori, Y. Nakamura, Unknown, J. Yamamoto.

Second row: M. Arao, F. Morita, Y. Furukawa, H. Izumi, S. Chikaraishi, K. Ishii, M. Yamamato. Third row: A. Kurisu, J. Asakura, S. Harada, A. Yamamoto, Y. Ishibahi, S. Shimizu, Y. Ishibashi. Courtesy of George Katahira.

34 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

From Girls to Wives

A

fter marriage, Amino continued to play basketball and participate in other club activities. Then, she remembers, “My whole club got married in one year. Twelve of them, so we went to a lot of weddings. Then a year after that, they all had babies except me—so, baby showers.” Members drifted away from girls club activities after they had children.

My Ideal Dance, November 13, 1948 at the Woodlawn Boys Club. Allen Hagio croons to the new queen, Takayo Tsubouchi of the Silhouettes, for her looks, poise, personality, and talents. Her court includes Fuku Sakuma of the Philos, Marji Kikuchi of Jolenes, and Shirley Kawanaga and Dorothy Okamoto of the Debonnaires. Courtesy of Pat Amino.

G

Silhouettes Reunion, Las Vegas 1995.

Emma Kushino Horiuchi, Candi Yasui, Takayo Tsubouchi Fisher, Lucy Uyeda Yamauchi, and Pat Amino (Aiko Suzuki).

Courtesy of Pat Amino.

Lifelong Friendships

irls clubs officially disbanded in 1953. The Silhouettes had lasted for eight years, from when the girls were fourteen to twenty-two years old. When Amino looks back to her association with girls clubs, she appreciates the “security the Silhouettes provided in insecure times.” She recalls the girls’ happy times together with fondness. The Silhouettes offered social associations through which Nisei women found marriage partners in unusual, distinctive ways after the war.

Although the organizations disbanded nearly fifty years ago, many former members retain their strong emotional bonds and work at keeping their friendships alive. They keep in touch with each other even though they reside in many different states.

In retirement, some former members have found time to socialize and enjoy walking, bowling, golf, and card playing together. The girls club members still hold well-attended reunions every two years.

Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following individuals with much appreciation for their help with this article. A big thanks to Pat Aiko Suzuki Amino for so generously sharing her club stories and photos; to Aya Fukuda and Helen Takiko Oda for sharing their pre- and post-war memories; to Darcie Ike the REgenerations Project Director; to Mary Doi, the REgenerations Chicago Coordinator and interviewer of Amino on March 30, 1998; to Sojin Kim for assisting in editing a previous version of this article; to Ken Mazawa, a photographer who documented Japanese American life in Chicago on film and shared his wonderful treasury of photographs; to Pat Amino, Margaret Hiratsuka, and George Katahira for lending their girls club pictures; and to Lil Nitahara Nakawatasae and Noreen Nishiyama Enkoji for identifying some people in photos. Deep gratitude is acknowledged for the institutional support received from the Japanese American National Museum, the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society, and Northeastern Illinois University. Many, many thanks to Rosemary Adams and the Chicago Historical Society for bringing this article to print.

Chicago Girls Clubs | 35

YESTERDAY’S CITY I

The Street Formerly Known as Crawford A M A N DA I R E N E S E L I G M A N

I

n 1944, streetcar conductor Carl Cheever called out “Crawford Avenue” to announce a stop on a street that was legally named “Pulaski Road.” In response to what he perceived as a deliberate provocation, Polish American printer Michael Orzsehkwsk shouted out a series of insults at the conductor, jumped on him, and tore his coat. Assuming an air of innocence that implied he was unfamiliar with the bitter history prompting Orzsehkwsk’s assault, Cheever asked, “What difference does it make?” Although the difference between calling a street Crawford or Pulaski might seem trivial, to Chicagoans in the middle of the twentieth century it was no laughing matter. The tussle between Cheever and Orzsehkwsk reenacted in microcosm a conflict that lay dormant during World War II, but that consumed enormous energies during the Depression and postwar years. For almost two decades, starting in 1933, West Garfield Park business owners battled Polish American civic activists, backed by the Democratic Party Machine, for the name of a street that cut north-south through eighteen miles of Chicago’s West Side. By the time the merchants conceded defeat in 1952, they had spent an estimated thirty thousand dollars and countless hours trying to restore the name Crawford Avenue to Pulaski Road.

The idea of naming a street in Chicago for Casimir Pulaski, the Polish count who died in service to the United States as a general during the American Revolution, dates to early in the twentieth century. Just before World War I, a member of an old Polish Chicago family tried unsuccessfully to have Lincoln Avenue renamed for Pulaski. But the Napieralski family dream of honoring the Polish American patriot did not come to fruition until Mayor Anton Cermak consolidated Chicago’s Democratic Party into a “house for all peoples,” a multiethnic coalition that dominated city politics for much of the twentieth century. In October 1933, newly appointed Mayor Edward J. Kelly easily won the agreement of Emily Napieralski, president of the Polish Women’s Alliance, that a street in Chicago should be 36

Chicago’s Polish community wanted to name a street for Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski (above); business owners and others fought to retain the street’s original name.

renamed for Pulaski. They quickly settled on renaming Crawford Avenue as a suitable means of honoring the Polish general.

Napieralski and Kelly failed to anticipate the outrage with which this decision was greeted by people who lived and worked in the immediate vicinity of the street in question. Business owners whose enterprises centered on the commercial intersection of Madison Street and Crawford Avenue spearheaded the opposition, with widespread support from local residents. These merchants objected to the change on several grounds: they had an intangible investment in the identification of their businesses with the name “Crawford”; it would cost a significant sum of money to change their stationery, signs, and advertisements to reflect the name “Pulaski”; and the name “Crawford” honored a local founder, while Pulaski had no specific connection to the Chicago area.

Lurking behind their objections, and recognized as such

by Pulaski’s proponents, was a sense that the name “Pulaski” was too ethnic to represent West Garfield Parkers, who had largely shed their ancestors’ immigrant histories in favor of unhyphenated Americanism.

The street at the center of this clash lay five miles west of the city’s “zero” line of State Street. At the start of the twentieth century, with the guidance of City Club member Edward Brennan, the city council began to rationalize Chicago’s street names, eliminating duplicates and systematically numbering other streets according to their distance from the downtown. As part of this project, in 1913 aldermen gave the name “Crawford Avenue” to a stretch of Fortieth Street already known as “Crawford Road” between Ogden Avenue and Archer Avenue.

This choice of names celebrated Peter Crawford, one of the West Side’s earliest property owners and civic leaders. Born in Scotland in 1795, Crawford had followed his parents to Delaware County, New York, in 1825. Peter Crawford and his wife, Juliet Sophronia Hubbard, had five children, one of whom died in childhood. The surviving Crawford family members migrated to Milwaukee, but moved south to Chicago in 1844.

Crawford, trained as a carpenter, started out in Chicago as a lumber dealer, but like other early arrivals to the city, also tried his hand at the booming real estate business.

The first 40-acre segment of Garfield Park was formally opened to the public in August 1874. The West Side neighborhood developed around the large recreation space.

Yesterday’s City | 37

Above: Land baron Peter Crawford was known for his devoted civic activism. Right: Garfield Park sprung up not far from Peter Crawford’s many real estate holdings.

In 1848, he purchased 160 acres of land from the trustees of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Crawford understood the potential value of property located along travel routes and shrewdly selected a parcel beyond Chicago’s city limits, along the Southwest Plank Road.

He later shored up the value of that land by providing space for a depot to the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad.

Crawford backed his financial investment with vigorous civic activism. He was one of the original organizers of Cicero Township, which included sections of what later became the village of Oak Park and the Austin neighborhood in Chicago. Crawford was responsible for digging drainage ditches that transformed thousands of acres of swampland into property suitable for building and farming. He held several local public offices as well, including justice of the peace and road commissioner.

Juliet Crawford also contributed to the area’s appeal; in 1930, more than four decades after her death, the city honored her for planting trees in the vicinity of Ogden and Karlov Avenues. Peter Crawford died in November 1876, leaving an estate valued at $600,000; when the fight over the street named for him broke out in the 1930s, Crawford’s supporters made much of the fact 38 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Yesterday’s City | 39

Garfield Park developed into a solid, working-class neighborhood that featured the Graemere Hotel (above) and many residential two-flats (right).

that Crawford had contracted his fatal illness, pneumonia, while riding to the polls through a downpour to cast a ballot for Rutherford B. Hayes for president.

The city of Chicago had not yet grown out to meet Peter Crawford’s farm and Cicero Township when he died. Within the decade, however, signs of the area’s urban future were emerging, especially in the vicinity of the shopping district where merchants later rallied to defend Crawford’s name. Land was set aside for Garfield Park in 1869, although its landscaping was not finished for several decades. In 1878, investors founded a “gentlemen’s club,” which became the infamous Garfield Park Racetrack, setting a seedy tone for the area until anti-gambling forces closed it in the early twentieth century. By the time the city council gave the name “Crawford” to the entire stretch of Fortieth Street, much of the “Madison–Crawford district” was filled with small businesses; over the next two decades, department stores, theaters, and hotels joined the local commercial mix.

The proprietors of these businesses led the defense of Crawford Avenue.

When Emily Napieralski set out to fulfill her father’s dream of having a Chicago street named for Casimir Pulaski, she did not have a particular location in mind.

In October 1933, she asked Alderman John Toman to help her. Toman arranged a meeting for Napieralski and Mayor Kelly, who had been appointed to fill the term of the assassinated Anton Cermak. Chicago’s Polish community was uneasy about the replacement of a Slavic 40 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

mayor with an Irish one, who might not fulfill the patronage promises that Cermak had made to them. Recognizing the anxiety of Polish American Democrats, Kelly was eager to reassure them of their status within the party coalition. He readily agreed to Napieralski’s request that the city honor Pulaski, and offered her Crawford Avenue, a prominent road that ran through some of the wards where Polish Chicagoans lived.

Almost immediately, businessmen in West Garfield Park gave notice of their opposition to the renaming, vowing that they would “bitterly fight the change to the end.” On October 29, the Midwest Athletic Club (at Madison and Hamlin Streets) hosted a protest meeting sponsored by local civic and business organizations, including the Garfield Park Businessmen’s Association, the Lions Club, and the Rotary Club. The two hundred participants at the meeting voiced objections and offered alternatives to the name change that were frequently repeated over the next two decades. Most notably, they asserted the right of property owners to control the name of their street on the grounds that they had a commercial interest in the stability of the area’s name. They promised to produce petitions substantiating the desire of a majority of local property owners to retain the name “Crawford.” George Madigan, whose Madigan Brothers store sold dry goods in the Madison–Crawford shopping district, accused Mayor Kelly of pandering to Polish voters. Madigan threatened that the Crawford advocates would seek legal injunctions to prevent the change. If

The shopping district at 4000 West Madison was at the heart of the Crawford–Pulaski struggle. Many merchants did not want an address change for their businesses.

Mayor Kelly succeeded despite their efforts, Madigan warned, Crawford supporters would campaign against him in the next election.

Lurking beneath the property-rights argument was a veiled sense that the name “Pulaski” was too readily identifiable as Polish. Crawford’s supporters exercised great care in expressing their opposition to Pulaski Road. They were careful not to impugn Pulaski himself, and they frequently offered suggestions for alternative means of honoring the general, such as posting plaques recounting his significance. One Crawford activist even claimed to have raised eight thousand dollars in subscriptions toward some other memorial for Pulaski. Over the years, Crawford supporters also proposed naming a different roadway for Pulaski. Suggestions included the Outer Drive Bridge, built by the Works Progress Administration; or Augusta Boulevard, which ran through Park District property; or the newly constructed Congress Expressway. Nonetheless, critical observers could detect the hostility embedded in bitter comments such as those that appeared in a West Side newspaper alongside a “clip and send” coupon shortly after the Midwest Athletic Club meeting: “His Honor, the Mayor, can assure himself of the good will of these Polish people, numbering many thousands, by changing the name of OUR Crawford Avenue.” More often, however, when making reference to the ethnicity of Pulaski’s supporters, the Crawford faction accused their rivals of promoting divisiveness by elevating a member of a distinctive ethnic group at the expense of the melting pot.

The first round of the Crawford–Pulaski showdown unfolded speedily in the last months of 1933. The city council’s Committee on Streets and Alleys held several “exceptionally lively” hearings before large crowds of partisans. The Crawford Avenue proponents drew an array of interested observers and speakers, including the grandchildren of Peter Crawford. They gained special satisfaction from the support of Edward Brennan, who spoke on behalf of the Chicago Historical Society, which had made him an honorary life member for his work on street names. Brennan urged the city council to honor Pulaski with a street whose name had no other historical significance. Brennan argued, “We have no Bowling Green, as has New York; no Commons, as has Boston; no Independence Hall, as has Philadelphia. All of our landmarks were wiped out by the fire. All we have left of historical significance is names, and the Historical society is opposing the wiping out of the names of the families which helped build Chicago.” Pulaski’s advocates, for their part, were led by public officials of Polish descent who accused their opponents of exercising “racial prejudice.” Suggestions for several alternatives were circulated: the city council voted down a proposal to rename Augusta Boulevard for Pulaski, and Emily Napieralski reportedly personally rejected the substitution of Central Avenue for Crawford. On December 12, the city council voted to rename Crawford Avenue for Casimir Pulaski, and Mayor Kelly signed the ordinance immediately.

Yesterday’s City | 41

Headquarters of the Polish Koscivsko Guards. Polish civic groups like this one fought for the right to name the street after their famous war hero.

42 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Crawford supporters did not view the city council’s action as the last word on the matter. Before the year was out, a group of merchants filed for a court-ordered injunction against the name change. Their primary claim was against the loss of their investment in advertising their location. But, nodding to the severe effects of the Great Depression on city finances, they also criticized city officials for “squandering” taxpayer money on the change at a time when the teachers and other public employees went unpaid for months on end. A judge issued an injunction forbidding the city to post signs marking Pulaski Road, but in early March an appellate court reversed that decision, upholding the city’s right to make the change. By September 1934, the city was erecting street signs with the new name, only to find that the signs disappeared regularly, stolen by “gangs of boys” and “angry householders.”

West Garfield Park merchants, now organized under the auspices of the Crawford Avenue Association, continued their legal challenge in the state courts. Assistant Corporation Counsel M. C. Zacharias, who defended the city, was elected president of the United Organizations in Defense of Pulaski Road in 1938. The Crawford Avenue Association lost its case on every tier of the state court system and finally made an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court in November 1934. The following April, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the state legislature had delegated to cities and villages the authority over the names of their streets; therefore it was up to the Chicago City Council, not to the courts, to decide whether “Crawford” or “Pulaski” would prevail. The ruling explicitly rejected the claim that property owners along a street had “vested property rights” in its name.

The court’s argument that the state legislature had given Illinois cities the right to name their own streets provided fodder for the next several rounds of the Crawford–Pulaski fight. At a 1936 meeting of the Crawford Avenue Association, O. F. Duensing, a former Olson Rug Company advertiser who had become the proprietor of his own public relations company, observed that the key to restoring the Crawford name was to have the state legislature force the city to recognize that property owners had an interest in the street’s name. Accordingly, the Crawford Avenue Association successfully lobbied the legislature for a new law enshrining the rights of property owners. Passed during the 1937 legislative session, the law required a city to change the name of a street if the owners of property along 60 percent of its frontage submitted an appropriate petition.

This pamphlet (right) played up Pulaski’s role in the Revolutionary War as a reason to honor him with a street name, stating, “It is a disgrace to tear down the name of a person who sacrificed his life for the freedom of this country.”

Yesterday’s City | 43

Having readily persuaded state legislators to cooperate, the Crawford Avenue Association set about collecting signatures on petitions asking for the renaming of Pulaski Road. In Illinois, finding out who owned a piece of property was not a simple matter; state courts had made it easy for property owners to obscure their identities if they wished. Undaunted by this obstacle, the Crawford Avenue Association hired a firm to contact owners. After the group spent a year and seventy-two hundred dollars on the task, Alderman Thomas J. Terrell presented to the city council a raft of petitions calling for the restoration of Crawford Avenue. The first batch was filed on July 11, 1938, with supplements delivered September 7. O. F. Duensing explained to reporters that the Crawford Avenue Association had enjoyed spectacular success in contacting more than twenty-two hundred owners of property along both sides of the street. Only half of the property owners in question lived on the street itself, and several hundred of them lived out of Illinois. They had not asked the city, state, and federal governments that owned several thousand feet of frontage to sign the petitions. Nonetheless, the association had collected signatures representing owners of 115,000 of the 163,207 feet of property that fronted the street. Only three hundred people refused to sign. By gathering approval from owners of more than 70 percent of the frontage, the Crawford Avenue Association hoped to have more than enough authenticated signatures to meet the 60 percent requirement that the state legislature had set.

Pulaski’s advocates took note of the July 11 petition and tried an ingenious tactic to preempt the restoration of Crawford Avenue. They were aware of another Illinois law, which forbade duplicate street names within a municipality. They reasoned that if some other street in Chicago bore the name “Crawford,” then the long “Pulaski” road would be safe from further changes. They identified Haussen Court, which was only a block long and ran diagonally to the city’s grid, as a good candidate.

By mid-August, forty residents of Haussen Court had filed a request that their street be renamed for Peter Crawford. Missing from the list of petitioners was Eda Haussen Bartels, a seventy-five-year-old resident whose father had given the street its name. Alderman Terrell fulminated against the Haussen Court maneuvering: “This dastardly means to keep Crawford avenue from having its rightful name restored will forever be a blot on the Polish people of Chicago.”

The Haussen Court petition reached the Chicago City Council in August 1938, before Crawford advocates filed their second set of petitions. Alderman Terrell, who was shepherding the Crawford Avenue restoration effort through the legislative process, feared that the Pulaski faction wanted the Haussen Court petition to slip unnoticed through the council. To prevent this, he raised a 44 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

ruckus at the September 21 hearing of the Committee on Streets and Alleys, forcing the chairman to schedule a special meeting on October 3.

If the intent of the postponement was to quell the strong emotions over the street’s name, it failed miserably. Crawford and Pulaski supporters brought a combined crowd of four hundred observers, who spilled beyond the confines of the hearing room into an adjacent hallway. Committee members hastily voted to postpone decisions on either of the streets until after the November election and, in the meantime, sent both of the petitions to the city map department to verify the authenticity of the addresses and signatures. Even this procedural move aroused controversy, as the partisans bickered over the propriety of removing the petitions from City Hall for duplication. At least one Crawford advocate left the hearing sure of victory, writing to a Chicago Tribune columnist, “Confidentially, the Polish aldermen have sent a white flag and an emissary to ask terms of surrender and procedure to ‘save face.’” He further crowed, “Crawford Avenue is now in the bag.” The elderly Eda Haussen Bartels, who did not attend the hearing, was reportedly made ill by the excitement. Crawford supporters pointed to her death the next day as a further sign of the malfeasance of Pulaski’s advocates.

When the staff of the city map department issued their findings in April 1939, both sides of the debate were disappointed. The map department ruled that both petitions fell short of the required number of signatories.

The Haussen Court petition represented only 1,174 feet of property, but needed the consent of owners of 1,264 feet. The other petition fell short of the required representation of 104,714 feet by 5.57 percent. The map department had ruled several of these signatures invalid on technical grounds, finding that only some of the owners of various properties had been consulted.

On behalf of the Crawford Avenue Association, O. F. Duensing vowed to continue the fight. He offered supplementary petitions for the restoration of the name of Crawford, reporting that they represented more than 10,000 additional feet, which should have been enough to make up for the previous shortfall. The supplementary petitions did not follow the same route as their predecessors. Instead of referring them to the map department for validation, the city council asked Corporation Counsel Barnet Hodes to decide whether the aldermen were legally obligated to accept the additional signatures. A key member of the Democratic machine, Hodes ruled in July that the city could not be compelled to accept the signatures in separately submitted lots. Hodes explained that his decision was based on the primacy of state law: if a city council ordinance governed street names, the city council could act however it wanted on petitions; but since the law in question came from the state legisla-

This pamphlet denounced the movement to call the street Crawford, claiming that as co-founder of Cicero, Crawford wasn’t even a bonafide Chicagoan.

Yesterday’s City | 45

ture, aldermen had to act very carefully not to defy the will of the people of Illinois.

Before World War II interrupted the struggle, Pulaski’s supporters fired one last shot in their effort to preserve the street’s new name. In 1939, they enlisted the help of state senator Peter P. Kielminski in sponsoring a law that would have made moot the question of the supplementary petitions. At the request of several “Polish societies” that had worked to get the honors for Pulaski, Kielminski quietly shepherded through the state senate a bill that reversed the 1937 law that enabled property owners to petition for street name changes. Had this bill passed into law, it would have given city governments the option of ignoring such petitions. When the bill came up for a vote in June 1939, Kielminski explained to his colleagues only that it involved street names, and that it “made discretionary the provisions that are now mandatory.” He did not explain that the bill would be immediately applied to a highly publicized pending case in Chicago.

The bill passed unnoticed through the state senate, but attracted attention when it reached the House of

Representatives. The Crawford Avenue Association and commercial interests, including the Chicago Association of Commerce and the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, sent representatives to the capitol in Springfield to lobby against the bill. The Chicago Tribune also got into the act, editorializing, “These maneuvers have had a most unfortunate consequence. They have created in the popular mind a disposition to suspect that Americans of Polish blood are trying to set themselves up as a race apart, willing to antagonize the whole community in pursuit of peculiarly Polish aims.” The bill never did take effect, however, as it was one of several killed in parliamentary maneuvering at the end of June.

Germany’s invasion of Poland that September put the wrangling over the street’s name on hold. Crawford’s supporters muted their legal challenges, but kept up their campaign of passive resistance to the change to Pulaski. Streetcar conductors continued to call out “Crawford” at stops, as evidenced by the fisticuffs between Michael Orzsehkwsk and Carl Cheever in 1944.

The West Side Historical Association persistently adver-

February 1939 photograph of the Polish American Democratic Organization. Mayor Edward J. Kelly, who signed the 1933 ordinance to rename Crawford Avenue for Casimir Pulaski, is first from the left.

46 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

tised its address on Crawford, and a local librarian wrote an area history without mentioning Pulaski. Chicagoans continued to send letters addressed to “Crawford Avenue,” and the United States postal service continued to deliver mail that lacked a “Pulaski” address. The merchants at the heart of the pro-Crawford campaign continued to advertise their shops with the old name, and one even sent letters of correction to correspondents who placed his business on “Pulaski Road.”

Only one blip of overt antagonism marred the wartime truce. Late in 1944, it became clear that the Soviet Union intended to retain control of eastern Poland after the defeat of the Nazis. In protest against a communistdominated future in their homeland, Poles in Chicago took out an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune with the headline “The Poles are Also People With Human Rights.” In response, West Garfield Parkers took out their own advertisement in the Chicago Daily News, an editorial titled “An Open Letter to the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (in reply to your recent advertisement pleading for the ‘Rights’ of Poland) and to Mayor Edward J. Kelly.” The letter, written by the publisher of the Garfieldian, was sponsored by eight West Side civic and business organizations. The letter argued, We cannot condone Russia’s land grab of eastern Poland. But we also think back to 1933 when our own Crawford avenue suddenly was no more . . . simply because political influence from the old Poles of Chicago forced through the change of an old established and well known street name to Pulaski road, without even requesting the approval of property owners who pay the taxes on that street. . . . We no more believe in the fairness of annexation of Polish property without Polish consent now, than we believe in the fairness of ‘annexing’ a time-honored familiar street name which belongs to us here on the West Side, and which was taken from us . . . not only without our consent . . . but with our deepest disapproval more than 11 years ago.

Crawford partisans said this exchange rekindled the debate over the street’s name, but several years passed before new legal action in the campaign occurred.

In 1948, the Crawford Avenue Association initiated the final round of the fight for the city street. With more meticulous legal supervision than they had employed ten years before, Crawford advocates once again tried to In this 1945 letter to the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent, the Garfield Park Businessmen’s Association called for solidarity in wartime, despite the 1933 renaming of Crawford Avenue for Pulaski “simply because political influence from the Poles of Chicago forced through the change of an old established and well known street name.”

Yesterday’s City | 47

make use of the 1937 state law requiring the city to change the name of a street where owners of 60 percent of the frontage petitioned. Attorney Manley K. Hunt gathered signatures from 1,483 property owners and filed them at city hall on June 21, 1949. In January 1950, after checking the validity of the signatures, the city superintendent of maps ruled that the petitions did indeed represent a legitimate request from more than 60 percent of the property owners. He sent the petitions back to the city council for action.

Despite the 1943 death of Emily Napieralski, the guiding force of the movement, Pulaski supporters organized a legal action to prevent the restoration of the name “Crawford.” Optometrist Bernard Wichlenski filed a lawsuit on behalf of three people who owned six parcels of property. Wichlenski, a staunch advocate of Pulaski Road, held office in both the Polish American Business Men’s Club of Avondale and the Present Pulaski Road Defenders Committee. His lawsuit sought to forbid the city to change back the name of the street. Twice, however, judges threw Wichlenski’s case out of court.

This pro-Pulaski action proved unnecessary, for the city council refused to act on the new Crawford petitions. The administration of the new mayor, Martin H. Kennelly, perpetuated Mayor Kelly’s support of Pulaski Road. The council referred the petitions to the Committee on Streets and Alleys, where they were allowed to sit without a vote.

After nearly a year, in late December 1950, attorney Hunt filed a request for a “writ of mandamus,” an order from a court to the city council requiring it to act on the petitions. The suit charged Mayor Kennelly, all fifty aldermen, and three other public officials with dereliction of duty.

The case, regarded by some observers as a “political hot potato,” was assigned to the courtroom of John Sbarbaro.

The city’s legal strategy was to delay the case as long as possible. Judge Sbarbaro denied a motion from the city’s attorneys to kill the suit in February 1951, but he did permit three continuances in the case. Finally, in May, testimony from Charles Rozmarek, the president of the Polish National Alliance, induced Sbarbaro to disqualify himself from the case. The Superior Court reassigned the case to Judge Walter O’Malley, a judge in west suburban Aurora.

In Judge O’Malley’s court, Crawford’s proponents savored the anticipation that they would finally prevail.

Judge O’Malley indicated his impatience with the stalling tactics of the city’s legal team, ruling against its last-minute A group of Polish men enjoy Lincoln Park in this 1950s photograph

by Stephen Deutch. Many Chicago immigrants maintained strong ties to those of the same nationality, which led to the strength of Polish civic groups.

48 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Yesterday’s City | 49

1959 Albert Chambin photograph of the Polish Daily Zgoda building at 1201 North Milwaukee. Poles currently make up the second largest immigrant group in Chicago, second only to Mexicans.

50 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

effort to substitute a new group of lawyers. In September 1951, persuaded that the petitions had been meticulously checked, Judge O’Malley issued an order to the Chicago City Council that it restore the name “Crawford Avenue” to Pulaski Road. He threatened the mayor, the aldermen, and city officials with jail if they failed to comply.

This apparent victory of Crawford’s advocates was short lived. In December, Alderman Joseph S. Gillespie offered an ordinance to change the name of Pulaski Road back to Crawford Avenue. Five aldermen voted for the ordinance, and forty voted against it, in defiance of O’Malley’s order. Aldermen also expressed their rebelliousness by voting in favor of withdrawing from the case and voting against a proposal to rename the Congress Expressway the “Pulaski Skyway.” The aldermanic insubordination was well-founded. The city appealed Judge O’Malley’s ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court. In

In September 1951, Judge Walter O’Malley gave Crawford supporters a short-lived victory by restoring the name “Crawford Avenue” to Pulaski Road. This decision was soon overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court.

November 1952, the court ruled unconstitutional the 1937 state law requiring the changing of street names on the petition of owners of 60 percent of the frontage. The defeat in the state supreme court marked the end of the advocacy for the restoration of Peter Crawford’s name to Chicago’s West Side street. Crawford supporters never mounted another legal challenge. The city posted permanent signs reading “Pulaski Road” in September 1953.

The 1952 decision that confirmed the name “Pulaski Road” applied only within the Chicago city limits. The northern and southern suburban municipalities through which the street ran retained the name of “Crawford.”

In 1976, in observance of the American bicentennial, Thaddeus Kowalski, the president of the Illinois division of the Polish American Congress, led an effort to extend the general’s name into the suburbs. He was successful in several southern municipalities, including Alsip and Midlothian, although long stretches of the road there still bear signs with Crawford on one side of the street and Pulaski on the other. Kowalski also persuaded the Cook County Board of Commissioners to make the change in unincorporated sections of the county. Other suburbs, including those north of Chicago, did not cooperate.

Thus, traces of Peter Crawford remain visible only on roadways far from his original farm and on a few old buildings and businesses along Pulaski Road.

In 1984, the Chicago City Council created a new mechanism intended to honor worthy recipients uncontroversially: the honorary street name, designated with a brown sign placed alongside the standard postal address, was supposed to preempt hostility over the elimination of long-established names. By the end of the twentieth century, almost 860 (approximately one-fifth) of Chicago’s streets bore an honorary street name as well as an historical one. The honorary street names allowed the celebration of local civic activists and provided a new

way for aldermen stripped of patronage opportunities to reward loyal supporters. But even this system has generated divisiveness. In April 2000, the city council aroused public wrath by voting to reward Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, with his own honorary street.

These controversies over the renaming of a street are hardly unique in Chicago or the nation’s history. Rarely in the twentieth century has the Chicago City Council permitted the renaming of a street. Failed initiatives included efforts to identify Clark Street as McKinley or Broadway, State Street as Roosevelt, Michigan Avenue as Zero, Western as Woodrow Wilson Avenue, Chicago Avenue as East Way, and Harlem Avenue as Main Street.

Proposed changes were most successful when the street name being eliminated was one of the city’s numbered streets: Eighth became Balbo, Twelfth became Roosevelt, Twenty-second became Cermak, and Thirty-ninth became Pershing. But in Chicago and throughout the South, political opponents of the assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. often resisted efforts to name major streets in his honor. In Fresno California, in 1995, the city council passed, and then rescinded, an ordinance to rename several streets after Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers of America.

What is the difference between calling a street Pulaski or Crawford? One Crawford advocate dismissed the effort to call the street Pulaski on the grounds that the general had been dead for so long, “he would not know about any additional honors bestowed upon him.” But to the living, who memorialize the past, the name of a street retains potent symbolism.

Amanda Irene Seligman is assistant professor of history and urban studies and associate director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 36 background, photograph by author; 36 inset, CHS; 37, CHS; 38 left, CHS; 38–39, CHS; 40 left and right, Garfield Park brochure, CHS; 41, Garfield Park brochure, CHS; 42, CHS, ICHI-03021; 43 top and bottom, CHS; 45 top and bottom, CHS; 46, CHS, ICHI-13906; 47, CHS; 48–49, CHS, ICHI-23631; 50, CHS, ICHI-24540; 51, Tribune photo.

Yesterday’s City | 51

MAKING HISTORY I

Chicago’s Emissaries of Culture: Interviews with Eppie Lederer and Lois Weisberg T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

F

ew Americans immediately recognize the names Esther “Eppie” Lederer and Lois Weisberg. Yet only a handful of Chicagoans have wielded as much influence not only in the city, but throughout the United States. As Chicago’s commissioner of cultural affairs for more than a decade, Weisberg has instigated some of the city’s most renowned cultural programs, such as Gallery 37 and Cows on Parade. According to Mayor Richard M. Daley, “when you consider how the quality of life in Chicago has improved over the last ten years, you have to give a lot of the credit to Lois Weisberg.” Similarly, Chicago Tribune editor Rick Kogan once remarked that anyone who wants to understand the United States in the second half of the twentieth century only has to read the advice columns of Eppie Lederer, better known by her pen name: Ann Landers.

52 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers) (left) is the recipient of the 2000 Joseph Medill History Maker Award for Distinction in Journalism and Communication. Lois Weisberg (right) received the 2000 Harold Washington History Maker Award for Distinction in Public Service.

Lederer and Weisberg are native Midwesterners. The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lederer was born Esther (Eppie) Pauline Friedman on July 4, 1918, in Sioux City, Iowa. There, she grew up alongside her identical twin sister Pauline (Popo) Esther Friedman, who likewise became a renowned advice columnist—Abigail Van Buren, or “Dear Abby.” Their father, Abe Friedman, was a peddler before he purchased a grocery store and movie theaters in Sioux City. The Friedman twins were virtually inseparable as children, eventually attending Central High School and Morningside College in Sioux City.

Lois Weisberg was born Lois Porges in 1925 in Chicago. Her parents, Mortimer and Jessie Porges, the offspring of European Jewish immigrants, remained devoted to maintaining their Jewish faith in the United States. “I was born near the Austin community, at Loretto Hospital. We lived at 21 North Pine which was right across the street from the Robert Emmett Grammar School,” recounts Weisberg. She remembers Austin as a community of relatives. “We all lived in the same neighborhood—uncles, aunts, cousins.” Lois’s family eventually moved to 216 North Parkside, a few blocks from Austin High School, where Weisberg graduated near the top of her class in 1944.

Weisberg’s childhood exemplified the prominent role of Chicago city neighborhoods in fostering community during the first half of the twentieth century. “There was no issue of safety,” recollects Weisberg. “We played everyday in the alleys next to our house—alleys were playgrounds.” At the same time, the city possessed “a terrific playground system.” Weisberg remembers that “across the street from our house was a school playground,” while a few

Above: Eppie Friedman (left) and her twin Pauline as Morningside College coeds in Sioux City.

Lois Weisberg (in her Girl Scout uniform, above) grew up in Chicago's Austin neighborhood (left), which she remembers as a community of relatives.

Making History | 53

blocks away was Columbus Park, “where I learned everything,” from tennis to ice-skating. Most importantly, remarks Weisberg, “we actually had the freedom to go by ourselves to these places.”

Both Weisberg and Lederer were influenced by fathers who led by example.

Mortimor Porges was a prominent attorney who worked as an assistant attorney general for Henry Horner, the first Jewish governor of Illinois. Porges also befriended Earl Dickerson, an influential African American leader and political official. On one occasion, when Dickerson was denied admittance to the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Springfield, Porges defended Dickerson and encouraged him to sue the hotel. Weisberg recalls that her father acted as the patriarch for her large, extended family. She vividly remembers relatives frequently knocking on their door to socialize and commiserate and facetiously adds, “he gave them advice about how to live.”

Lederer’s father was also noted for his range of diverse friendships. For example, Abe Friedman maintained ties with many Catholics and contributed to a variety of Roman Catholic charities. His example prompted Eppie Lederer to serve on the board of the National Council of Christians and Jews. With her sister, Lederer befriended the prominent Catholic priest Fulton Sheen, convincing him to remove the offensive parts of a catechism that blamed Jews for the crucifixion of Christ. Lederer even became a close friend of the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame. Her close connection to Catholics has continued throughout her life; Lederer, in fact, was one of the last people at the deathbed of Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in 1996.

Both Lederer and Weisberg were raised in families active in the Democratic Party. Indeed, Democratic politics were a fixture of Weisberg’s childhood.

In addition to her father’s close association with Illinois governor Henry Horner, Weisberg adds that “two of my uncles were Democratic Party precinct captains, and lived in the neighborhood.” Coincidentally, they “had Irish accents.” Weisberg has followed the lead of her father and uncles, and has played an important role in the administrations of two of Chicago’s most prominent mayors: Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley.

After marrying Jules Lederer in 1939, Eppie, her husband, and their daughter, Margo (born in 1940), spent the next fifteen years living all over the country, including stops in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Chicago. After settling in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Lederer became a devoted Democratic Party activist. A supporter of Senator Gaylord Nelson, Senator William Proxmire, and Representative Henry Reuss, she served as Democratic Party County Chairman in 1954, and eventually befriended Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. During the early 1950s, the party recruited her as a potential candidate to run against the controversial Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.

54 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Lois Weisberg’s father worked as an assistant attorney general for Henr y Horner (above), the first Jewish governor of Illinois.

Left: Eppie (right) and her sister were twin brides in the Shaare Zion synagogue’s first double wedding.

In 1954, Lederer and her family moved to 1000 North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. She immediately planned to get involved in city politics. But the influential Democratic Party leader Col. Jack Arvey, who Lederer recalls as “a very decent guy and a friend,” discouraged her. Lederer remembers Arvey’s specific advice: “I don’t think you’re going to fit in here. You’re coming from a very idealistic place.”

Arvey’s advice proved to be a blessing in disguise. In 1955, Wilbur Munnecke, a Field Enterprises vice president and personal friend of Lederer’s, approached her. “You know our advice columnist, Ruth Crowley [who wrote under the name Ann Landers], died very suddenly, and we’re Making History | 55

Left: Eppie Lederer with Hubert Humphrey, Philip Klutznick of the United Nations, and cartoonist Bill Mauldin.

Below: “Ann Landers” (front row, second from right) and her Sun-Times staff, c. 1970.

having a contest to discover someone who will take her place. Does that interest you?”

Lederer hesitated. “Well, I’m not sure.”

Munnecke replied, “Well, just for the fun of it why don’t you get in the contest?”

“Who will I be competing with?”

“They’re all professional writers.”

“Well, I won’t have a chance,” concluded Lederer.

Munnecke was not dissuaded. He advised her, “the major ingredient is common sense and maybe a sense of humor and general knowledge. Why don’t you do it just for the fun of it?” So Lederer threw her hat into the competition with approximately twenty other women. To her surprise, as well as some of the editors at the Chicago Sun-Times, she won. On October 16, 1955, Eppie Lederer became “Ann Landers.”

56 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Lederer attracted the attention of the editors at the Sun-Times by employing innovative ways of seeking expert advice before offering her own. During the contest, for example, when someone wrote to her with a legal question, Lederer telephoned Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, another personal friend. For medical advice, she contacted physicians at the Mayo Clinic.

“I called the people in their various disciplines and got their opinions and asked if I could use their names. I won the contest, and that’s how I became Ann Landers.”

Like Lederer’s, Weisberg’s professional development followed a circuitous route. Weisberg originally seemed destined for a career in drama. Early on, her mother encouraged her to take acting lessons, or “what they called elocution lessons in those days,” says Weisberg. At the age of five, she began attending the Barnum School of Expression and Dramatic Art at the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. During her junior year of high school, Weisberg was one of seventy-five students chosen for the Cherubs Program at the Northwestern University School of Speech. After briefly attending the University of Illinois, Weisberg’s dramatic interests brought her back to Northwestern, from which she graduated in 1948.

Ironically, Weisberg’s involvement in drama convinced her that she wanted to do something else with her life. “I remember standing on the stage and doing this play, and I thought: ‘What am I doing here? I don’t want to be an actress. I don’t appreciate having all those people out there looking at me. I want to be backstage. I’m never going to do this again.’ The truth is that after we finished that play, I never set my foot on a stage again. I quit being an actress.” At this point, the early professional careers of Lederer and Weisberg inadvertently became linked. Weisberg recounts that her speech degree at Northwestern included a specialization in radio.

“When I graduated, radio was on the way out and television was coming in. Although I had no background in television, I got a job working for a television show called It’s Baby Talk.” The program was hosted by a professional nurse who dispensed advice to new mothers about how to raise their infants. Her name was Ruth Crowley, better known as the first Ann Landers.

When Lederer took over Ruth Crowley’s column, Ann Landers was syndicated in twenty-six newspapers. By the year 2000, the number exceeded twelve hundred. Lederer attributes much of her success to Larry Fanning, a newly hired editor at the Sun-Times when Lederer began working there in 1955. “He really taught me how to write the column,” she remembers. “He was a newspaper man, and that was my lucky break. He really knew the business.” At first, Lederer was overwhelmed with the volume of mail she regularly received. “I didn’t know what to do with it,” she now admits. Fanning encouraged her to read the letters, identify the most interesting, and concentrate on those. He taught her how to edit lengthy letters, eliminating, in Lederer’s words, “a lot of extraneous material. He really taught me how to do it.” Fanning also disabused Landers of any notion that she was a journalist. Modestly, Lederer insists that she “couldn’t make a living as a

Lederer takes time out to play with her grandchildren Andrea, Abra, and Adam Coleman.

Making History | 57

journalist.” In her words, “I’m an advice columnist. That’s what I do, and I don’t call myself a journalist. Some people call me a journalist. I have received journalism awards, so apparently somebody thinks I’m a journalist. But I don’t view myself as a journalist.”

Nevertheless, in the second half of the twentieth century, Lederer redefined the advice column, an enduring fixture of American journalism. Such columns, which new immigrants eagerly absorbed in their efforts to Americanize, began to appear in newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century, beginning with Emily Post’s lessons on etiquette. From 1901 to 1951, the nation’s leading columnist was Dorothy Dix, syndicated in three hundred papers with an estimated readership of sixty million.

Advice givers are a common phenomenon in Jewish culture. “The Bintel Brief” (literally “bundle of letters”) was published for seventy-five years in New York City’s Jewish Daily Forward. Isolated immigrant Jews in inner-city ghettos often sent letters to Jewish columnists, scholars, and community leaders to ask for advice. Subsequent columnists—including Rose Franzblau, Joyce Brothers, Ruth Westheimer, as well as Eppie Lederer’s “Ann Landers” and her sister Abigail Van Buren—were Jewish. Lederer acknowledges that her Jewish background contributed to her success. “I think Jewish culture had something to do with it—being sympathetic to other people and their problems because the Jews through the centuries have been persecuted and have had problems.”

As Eppie Lederer became Ann Landers, Lois Weisberg masterminded the event that triggered her career as Chicago’s unofficial cultural emissary. In 1956, Weisberg single-handedly organized a festival marking the centenary of the birth of the dramatist and writer George Bernard Shaw. For the first time, Weisberg displayed the talents that eventually would bring her international renown: an ability to identify an ignored or little-known cultural issue, conceive of a way to celebrate and honor it, and recruit the famous and not-sofamous to organize and sponsor the event. As she has throughout her career, Weisberg usually worked behind the scenes with little fanfare. By the end of 1956, Weisberg had attracted many of the world’s leading playwrights, actors, and literary scholars to Chicago to celebrate Shaw.

One product of the Shaw Centenary was Weisberg’s founding of the Shaw Society, and the establishment of the Shaw Society Newsletter. Yet, after five years editing the newsletter and producing Shaw’s plays all over Chicago, Lois Weisberg’s involvement with the Shaw Society was one of her first forays into cultural activism.

58 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Weisberg admits, “I got bored. I decided that I wasn’t going to do it anymore.

I had already done thirty-four plays.” She had other ideas, one of which grew out of the newsletter. “I wanted to do a newspaper of my own, and so I started something called The Paper, one of the first, if not the first, underground newspaper. It was a lot of fun.”

Although The Paper only lasted two years, the publication had considerable impact. Weisberg featured the work of many Chicago writers, as well as interviews with Lenny Bruce, Thelonius Monk, and other celebrities and artists.

The Paper invited attention, in part, because of Weisberg’s willingness to take journalistic risks. “I only had four pages, and I wanted to do something down the middle so I wouldn’t waste any space. So I used to have a column which went right down the middle of the page every time the paper came out. It was called ‘Off the Wall Talk.’” The column usually consisted of an interview by Weisberg with a prominent or controversial artist. In retrospect, Weisberg believes the column “was really off the wall. I had interviews with Lenny Bruce and those kinds of people. They were fun and they were usually stoned on something.” Nevertheless, she adds, “they were very good interviews.”

Weisberg savors her experience at The Paper. Of all her activities, editing The Paper was “the most meaningful—not historically but in terms of my own self-satisfaction. Out of all the things that I’ve done, that little newspaper was my favorite.” Weisberg explains that because “it was totally mine, I had jurisdiction over it and I would write for it and I could think of things and put them down. I love working with the people who work for me. But this little, silent, quiet paper I did all by myself. It was my favorite project, my creativity all by itself. If I were an artist, it was my expression. My artistic talent was in that newspaper.”

Shortly thereafter, Weisberg gave birth to two sons, Jacob and Joseph, and needed a better-paying job in order to care for them. For nine years she served as the director of public affairs at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Then she worked for five years as director of development for Business and Professional People of the Public Interest (BPI), a public interest law firm.

From BPI, she moved on to the Chicago Council of Lawyers, where she served as executive director.

While working at BPI, Weisberg founded her two most influential civic groups—Friends of the Parks and South Shore Recreation. Weisberg vividly remembers the event that gave birth to the former. “I was out riding a bicycle in Lincoln Park with one kid in the front and one kid in the back, and we couldn’t get any milk. We couldn’t get any orange juice, and I started to look into the concessions. Why couldn’t you get those things in the park? The more I looked at it, the more I felt somebody had to do something about it.” Weisberg proceeded to organize meetings to discuss problems with the parks.

“You couldn’t get any information out of the Park District,” she remembers. In response, Weisberg established Friends of the Parks to serve as a defender and proponent

Weisberg says of The Paper: “Out of all the things that I’ve done, that little newspaper was my favorite.”

Friends of the Parks grew out of Weisberg’s search for refreshments in the park for her children; today the organization is a leading civic advocate for park issues in Chicago.

Making History | 59

for all Chicagoland parks. Today the organization is a leading civic advocate for issues relating to parks, recreation, and the environment throughout metropolitan Chicago.

Weisberg laughs in retrospect: “I just wanted orange juice for my kids!”

Weisberg’s interest in the South Shore Railroad originated during her childhood when her family spent summers in the Dunes areas of Indiana and Michigan. “We had a little cottage that my father rented from a colleague. It was on the lake in South Haven. My mother would take both of us [Weisberg and her sister June], and we would go up there for the whole summer. They didn’t even have a bathroom. We took a bath in a tub out in the lawn.” The cottage actually became an extension of her Austin neighborhood. Weisberg remembers that “all the relatives would come, so there were just tons of relatives up there. They would commute on weekends and take the train to St. Joe, Michigan, because that was as far as the train went.”

While working at BPI, Weisberg managed to take two months off each summer to devote to her children. By then, her family had a small house near the Dunes to which they commuted via the South Shore Railroad. One day the railroad company announced it was abandoning service. “I started to call people,” Weisberg says, and she soon established the South Shore Recreation of Bi-States Citizens’ Committee to fight for keeping the railroad alive.

60 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

On September 13, 1995, Friends of the Parks honored Lois Weisberg with a tree in Grant Park.

Weisberg’s work with South Shore Recreation differed from Friends of the Parks in two significant ways. First, unlike Friends, the South Shore organization attracted residents from Indiana and other areas in Illinois, in addition to Chicago. Second, her opponent was not a public agency like the Chicago Park District, but a major corporation: the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. In retrospect, Weisberg chuckles, “They wanted to go out of business, and this lady comes along who sounds insane, who is going to try to interfere with their going out of business.”

Weisberg organized demonstrations to convince the public of the need to maintain the railroad. On one occasion, to demonstrate the railroad’s link to lake recreation, a large group showed up at the South Shore Railroad Station in the early morning with blow-up rafts. Weisberg remembers having “a big press conference and all the people blew up their boats and sat in them.” The rafts were then deflated, put on the train, and the group traveled to a day’s outing on the lake. The goal, reiterates Weisberg, was to demonstrate the railroad’s connection with recreation in metropolitan Chicago.

Above and below left: Lois Weisberg fought to keep the historic South Shore Railroad line (which traveled from Chicago to Michigan City, Indiana) from closing.

Below: Weisberg with the South Shore Railroad staff in 1977.

Making History | 61

South Shore Recreation may prove to be Weisberg’s most historic contribution. Not only was the rail line saved, but “there’s a message there about transportation and parks,” she insists. “The South Shore Railroad was the only railroad that ran through a national park and it would not stop in the park. I had a hard time to get these people to change and think that the railroad could stop in the park.” More importantly, the campaign to save the railroad touched upon another key issue. “The project was about saving energy,” insists Weisberg. “It was about recreation and transportation.” If Weisberg had her way, she proclaims, “I would save the whole system of railroads in the United States.”

Just as Weisberg attracted attention by mobilizing citizens against larger interests, Eppie Lederer openly addressed controversial issues in her Ann Landers column. In 1955, for example, venereal disease and contraception were not discussed in the print media. During the ensuing two decades, Ann Landers became one of the first journalists to publicly discuss issues of sexuality. Over the course of the twentieth century, Lederer believes, Americans became “much more frank. They’re much more open.

They’re reading more about sexual problems, sexual dysfunctions. They know more about it so they’re writing more about it.” Lederer also believes as readers familiarize themselves with the column, “they’re very comfortable with me, and they feel that they can talk to me about anything.”

Lederer recognizes that sexuality has always been a contentious issue.

“Now we’re just hearing more about it because it’s more out in the open.” Public forms of sexual advice underwent a transformation during Lederer’s tenure as America’s foremost advice columnist. During the 1950s, concerns focused on necking, petting, and telephone calls between teenagers. In her early columns, Lederer encouraged female readers “to hold onto [their] virginity” until marriage. In 1968, she identified “guilt, self-deprecation, worry, and a sullied reputation” as the penalty for premarital sex. By 1981, however, Lederer admitted that while she had not changed her values, she had changed her point of view on virginity. In 1993, Landers recommended masturbation as “a sane and safe alternative to intercourse, not only for teenagers, but also for older men and women who have lost their partners.” By the end of the century, discussions of cohabitation, single parenting, and helping parents accept their gay offspring were routine.

Homosexuality is a case in point. At first, Lederer considered homosexuality a “deviant disorder” as designated by the American Psychiatric Association. Later studies, however, convinced her that homosexuality was genetic, not deviant. Lederer’s changing opinion, in her words, “was the result of my evolution. I learned more about it. When I would read these letters about their lives, they educated me. I began to really see what it was to be closeted, to live a life [in which] you had to hide who you are.” In the end, Lederer believes her readers unwittingly bestowed to her a greater sense of empathy. “When I was younger, I was a very hard-line moralist. Right was right. Wrong was wrong.” Today, she believes, “I am much more compassionate.”

Some have criticized Lederer’s defense of homosexuality, abortion rights, birth control, and masturbation. Yet, Lederer is quick to proclaim, “I’m not a revoluDue to her huge following, Ann Landers sells booklets (often advertised at the end of her column) featuring some of her most popular topics, including “How We Met,” “Gems of the Day,” and “How to Make Friends and Stop Being Lonely.”

62 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

tionary person. I know that I could educate people if they listened to me and trusted me. When I started to get so many letters on homosexual problems, I thought this was an opportunity to educate people.” Lederer believes her column has influenced both heterosexuals and homosexuals alike to reconsider homosexuality as deviant. She states, “This is one of the important things that I think I have done. I have educated people and they understand homosexuality much better because of what I’ve written.”

For Lederer, the loosening of family structures has proven far more important than any “sexual revolution.” In 1975, she wrote that “children are not getting proper parental discipline or knowledge of proper values. Small wonder that so many teenagers are stoned on pot, snorting coke, smoking crack, crashing cars, and this generation of young people will be running our country in twenty years. I find it scary.” Twenty-five years later Lederer admits the difficulties of parenthood have increased. “It’s hard to raise good kids. It used to be that ‘no’ meant ‘no,’” she remembers. “Now, they have too many choices, too many places to go. Television has made a tremendous difference in the lives of kids. It has given them some wrong ideas too, and often more information at a younger age that they really shouldn’t be having. But how do you keep a kid away from the television set? Most kids have sets in their rooms. You can’t keep them away from it.”

Lederer believes that any advice columnist has to possess strong opinions.

“You have to have a point of view and have the courage to state what your view is and stay with it,” she insists. A column striving for neutrality is, in her mind, “a waste of time. You’re not saying anything or you’re not doing anything. You’re trying to ride two horses that won’t work. You’re working both sides of the street.” Emphatically, Lederer declares, “You have to have a point of view and stick with it, and that’s what I do.”

Weisberg’s civic advocacy with Friends of the Parks and South Shore Recreation soon attracted the attention of Chicago’s elected public officials. While serving as Mayor Harold Washington’s director of special events from 1983 to 1988, she played a leading role in the founding or expansion of the Taste of Chicago, the Chicago Blues Festival, the Chicago Gospel Festival, citywide neighborhood festivals, and the Chicago Holiday Sharing It Program. As commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs since 1989, Weisberg launched the Chicago Cultural Center (1991), creating a full-fledged, centrally located office to highlight Chicago’s creativity and diversity. She established the Chicago Coalition of Community Cultural Centers (1991) to strengthen and develop cultural centers throughout the city. Most significantly, Weisberg became a leading practitioner of “cultural tourism”—promoting the arts through tourism and attracting worldwide media coverage, illustrated most prominently by the programs Botero in Chicago (1994) and Cows on Parade (1999).

Lederer with Father Theodore Hesburgh, former president of the University of Notre Dame, at a 1987 anti-nuclear rally in Chicago.

Lois Weisberg with Mayor Harold Washington (left) and Bishop Desmond Tutu (right).

Weisberg at a press conference for one of her most popular projects, Cows on Parade, on June 15, 1999.

Making History | 63

Representative of Weisberg’s creative pragmatism was Gallery 37. When major construction in Chicago temporarily ceased because of economic recession in the early 1990s, city block number 37 stood vacant directly across from Marshall Field’s on State Street. Weisberg transformed the empty lot into Gallery 37, a summer arts program for inner-city youth. The program proved so successful that Gallery 37 received the Innovations in American Government Award from the Ford Foundation and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Weisberg’s advocacy of cultural tourism represents a largely unreported transformation in the role of Chicago’s municipal government. Whereas tourist promotion was a historic function of the convention bureau in Chicago and elsewhere, Weisberg noticed that convention promoters focused on only a small segment of the tourist market. She admits, “I saw cultural tourism as an opportunity to do something that I have been trying to do for the last fifteen years—get tourism out of the hands of the convention bureau and bring it over to the city.” Because the convention bureau was understandably focused on conventions, it ignored leisure tourists, who in fact outnumber conventioneers. For years, Weisberg remembers, “Nobody paid any attention to the city in terms of tourism.” Finally, with the approval of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the city assumed responsibility for tourism promotion.

Today, Weisberg maintains, Chicago is “the only city in the United States that has control of tourism.”

Throughout her professional life, Weisberg has displayed a rare knack for anticipating the cultural marketplace. From the Shaw Centenary to Cows on Parade, Weisberg has promoted events scorned by skeptics as doomed failures. In each case, Weisberg has more than proved her critics wrong; she has displayed a cultural “Midas touch,” turning empty space or dismissed ideas into artistic gold. Weisberg remains modest. “I do have a feeling of, ‘If I like it then they’re going to like it.’ It’s just an instinct.”

More importantly, Weisberg admits that “my main interest is gathering a group of people who are going to produce this thing—whatever it is—to have a lot of fun and learn something from the process. You can’t do this by yourself.” Weisberg is emphatic on this last point. “I have to get oceans of people helping me before it’s going to work. They spread the word, and pretty soon you’ve got just enough people so that you can do something.”

Lederer remains a traditionalist in her approach to writing her advice column. “My formula has worked very well for me and I see no reason to change it,” she insists. She is critical of the Internet; although her column appears on the Chicago Tribune website, Lederer claims “they dragged me on it.” In her mind, “there’s too much garbage on the Internet. I want to stick with the mail and not the stuff that’s on the Internet. Anybody can put anything they want on the Internet. I’m not interested in that kind of mail.” Lederer believes that those who write traditional letters offer more “substantive” questions and issues, adding that “there’s much less foolishness; much less pornography.” In fact, Lederer still writes her column from a typewriter, proudly admitting she does not have a computer in her office. While she concedes that her assistants use computers, “I don’t have one and I don’t want it.” She is quick to add, “I plan to die at the typewriter.”

64 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Weisberg at Gallery 37, a program she founded that offers young people job training in the arts and mentoring relationships with professional artists.

Weisberg shakes hands with Hillary Rodham Clinton in front of Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago.

The 2000 Making History Award Winners: (left to right) Garry Wills, John H. Johnson, Lois Weisberg, Eppie Lederer, and Lester Crown.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920.

The careers of Lederer and Weisberg exemplify their abilities to adapt to changing circumstances. Both are not easily discouraged. Both are unabashed optimists. “I believe all trouble has some built-in blessings,” Lederer insists. “Life has been kind to me. I have been blessed with excellent health, boundless energy, and a pretty good head. I learn from people who are smarter than I—and the world is full of them.” Lederer could be speaking for herself and Weisberg when she remarks, “you might say I was raised with solid, Midwestern values.”

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 52, CHS; 53 top, from Dickinson Magazine; 53 bottom left, CHS, ICHi-31510; 53 bottom right, courtesy of Lois Weisberg; 54, CHS, DN 103, 510; 55, courtesy of Genelli Studio; 56 top, photograph by Ralph Arvidson, reprinted with special permission from the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.©2001; 56 bottom, photograph by Dwayne Hall, reprinted with special permission from the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.©2001; 57, photograph by Jack Clenahan, reprinted with special permission from the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.©2001; 58 CHS, The Shaw Society Newsletter; 59 top, CHS, The Paper; 59 bottom, CHS, Friends of the Parks newsletter; 60 top, courtesy of Lois Weisberg; 60 center, CHS, Friends of the Parks newsletter; 61 top, CHS, from Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad pamphlet; 61 center, courtesy of Lois Weisberg; 61 bottom, CHS, South Shore Line Time Tables; 62, pamphlets courtesy of Eppie Lederer; 63 top, photograph by Dom Najolia, reprinted with special permission from the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.©2001; 63 center and bottom, courtesy of Lois Weisberg; 64 top and center, courtesy of Lois Weisberg; 65, CHS. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Lois Weisberg wrote a memoir of her childhood, “The Vanishing Time,” in Chicago Magazine, Februar y 1995. Recent biographical accounts include Malcolm Gladwell, “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” New Yorker, January 11, 1999; and Laurie Levy, “Lois Weisberg, the Woman at the Cultural Hub of Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 2000. The best place to begin learning about Eppie Lederer is through the publications of Ann Landers, her most recent volume is The Best of Ann Landers: Her Favorite Letters of All Time (New York: Fawcett Books, 1997). A short introduction appears in “Miss Lonelyheart: Eppie Lederer,” in F. Richard Ciccone, Chicago and the American Century (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1999). Eppie Lederer’s daughter, Margo Howard, has written a memoir of her mother, Eppie: The Story of Ann Landers (New York: Putnam, 1982). Other accounts include David Grossvogel, Dear Ann Landers: Our Intimate and Changing Dialogue with America’s Best-Loved Confidante (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1987), which features an interview with Lederer.

Making History | 65

Index to Volume 29 This index includes author, title, and subject entries. Illustrations are indicated in italics. If a subject is illustrated and discussed on the same page, the illustration is not separately indicated.

A Abbott, Merkt, and Company, 2:42 Abbott, Robert, 2:64 Adams, Myron, 2:30 Adams, Rosemary K., “From the Editor,” 1:3; 2:3; 3:3 African Americans in Chicago’s stockyards, 1:4–21 at the YWCA, 1:22–39 Alamo Theater, 3:8 Albert, Allen, 2:32 All-Channel Television Receiver Act (1962), 1:72 Alsip, 3:51 Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, 1:12 American Federation of Labor (AFL), meatpacking industry and, 1:4 American Friends Committee, 3:33 Americans United to Save the Arts and Humanities, 1:70 Amino, Pat Aiko Suzuki, 3:21–35 Anderson, Arthur, 1:69 Anderson, Jim, 1:53 Annetti, Jack, 1:53, 55 Aqua Lung, 1:43, 48 Archer Avenue, 3:37 Architecture, department store, 2:26–43 Arie Crown Hebrew Day School, 2:69 Armour meatpacking plant, 1:4, 8, 12, 15 Art Institute of Chicago, 1:70 Arvey, Jack, 3:55 Aspen Skiing Company, 2:65 Augusta Boulevard, 3:41 Austin community, 3:38, 53 Aykroid, Tom, 1:53

B “The Backbone of the Union,” article by Paul Street, 1:4–21 Back-of-the-Yards, 1:14–15 children in, 1:11 Balbo Street, 3:51 Bambis (girls club), 3:22 Bara, Theda, 2:11 Barnes, Ross, 2:50 Barnum School of Expression and Dramatic Art, 3:57 Bartels, Eda Haussen, 3:44 Baseball, founding of National League and, 2:44–57 Bates, Daisy, 2:72 “The Beach Boys: Chicago’s First Junior Lifeguards,” article by Chris Serb, 1:40–57 Beckley, Jefferson, 1:12 66 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Belmont Harbor, 1:43 Bennett, Edward, 2:31–32 Bernardin, Joseph Cardinal, 3:54 Big Brother Organization, 2:11 Bilbo, Theodore, 1:59 “The Bintel Brief,” 3:58 Blackmore, Dick, 1:53, 55 Black Revolution, 1:62, 64 Blanchard, Florence E., 2:14 Boileau, Louis August, 2:29 Boileau, Louis Charles, 2:29 Bon Marché store, 2:29, 30 Botero in Chicago (cultural program), 3:63 Boynton, Virginia R., “Fighting Racism at the YWCA,” 1:22–39 Brady, William A., 2:23–24 Branch, Taylor, 2:68 Brandeis University, 2:69 Brennan, Edward, 3:37, 41 Bronzeville, 3:6 Brothers, Joyce, 3:58 Brown, Arthur, Jr., 2:31 Brown, Pete, 1:12 Bruce, Lenny, 3:59 Bruns, Bobby, 1:53 Bryan, Catherine, 1:59 Bryan, John H., 1:58–72 Bryan Brothers Packing Company, 1:59 Bryan Foods, 1:64–65 Burdine’s, 2:42 Burgess, E. W., 2:7 Burke, Betty, 1:7, 8, 11, 17 Burnham, Daniel, 2:31, 42 Burnham, Hubert, 2:32 Burns, Tom, 1:50 Business and Professional People of the Public Interest (BPI), 3:59, 60

C CARE organization, 3:33 Carnegie Corporation, 1:70 Carr, George, 2:41 Carson Pirie Scott, 2:29 Carter, Orrin N., 2:14 Casey, Sister Florence, 3:9 Caylor, O. P., 2:55 Cayton, Horace, 1:7, 14, 15–16 Censorship, motion picture industry and, 2:4–25 Central Avenue, 3:41

Centur y of Progress International Exposition, 2:26, 30, 32, 34–36, 41, 42 Cermak, Anton, 3:36, 40 Cermak Road, 3:51 Chalelaines (girls club), 3:33 Chaletines (girls club), 3:22 Chambin, Albert, 3:50 Chaplin, Charlie, 2:5, 6, 21 Charmettes (girls club), 3:22, 23, 33 Chavez, Cesar, 3:51 Cheever, Carl, 3:36, 46 Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, 3:61 Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, 3:38 Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company, 2:62 Chicago, University of, 2:69 Chicago Association of Commerce, 3:46 Chicago Avenue, 3:7, 8, 51 Chicago Blues Festival, 3:63 Chicago Coalition of Community Cultural Centers, 3:63 Chicago Cultural Center, 3:63 Chicago Daily News, 2:20 Chicago Defender, 1:7, 11 Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 3:63 Chicago Examiner-Herald, 2:20 Chicago Fire Department, 3:15 “Chicago Fortunes: Interviews with Lester Crown and John H. Johnson,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 2:58–72 Chicago Girls Clubs, 3:21–35 Chicago Gospel Festival, 3:63 Chicago Historical Society, 3:41 Chicago Holiday Sharing It Program, 3:63 Chicago Japanese American Historical Society, 3:21 Chicago Motion Picture Commission, 2:4–25 Chicago Nisei Athletic Association, 3:31, 33 Chicago Orchestral Association, 1:70 Chicago Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee, 1:8 Chicago Park District, 1:57; 3:59 Chicago Resettlers Committee, 3:33 “Chicago’s Emissaries of Culture: Interviews with Eppie Lederer and Lois Weisberg,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 3:52–65 Chicago’s stockyards, African Americans in, 1:4–21 Chicago Stockyards, 1:55 Chicago Transit Authority, 3:7 Chicago Tribune, 1:55; 2:11; 3:7, 9, 46 Chicago Urban League, 3:33 Chicago White Stockings, 2:45, 49, 50, 54 Chi Sigs (girls club), 3:22 Christopher, Warren, 1:61 Cicero Township, 3:38, 40 Cidys (girls club), 3:22 Cilella, Alfred J., 3:16 Cincinnati Red Stockings, 2:46–47 Cincinnati’s Union Station, 2:30 City Beautiful movement, 2:42 Civic Opera House, 1:71 Civil Liberties Public Education Fund grant project, 3:21

Clarendon Beach, 1:40–41, 43 junior lifeguards at, 1:40 Clark Street, 3:51 Clemens, Samuel, 1:12 Clinton, Bill, 1:69; 2:72 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 3:64 Coach, 1:66 Coca-Cola, 1:66 Cole, Jim, 1:17 Coleman, Abra, 3:57 Coleman, Adam, 3:57 Coleman, Andrea, 3:57 Colleens (girls club), 3:22 Collegians (boys club), 3:31 Colleran, Eileen, 1:55 Collins, Ken, 1:12 Comets (boys club), 3:31 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), meatpacking industry and, 1:4, 7–8, 12 Consolidated Foods Corporation, 1:58, 64, 66 Conway, Dan, 1:55 Conway, Fran, 1:43, 53–55 Corbett, Harvey, 2:31 “Corporate Consciences: Interviews with John H. Bryan and Newton N. Minow,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 1:58–72 Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1:72 Coughlan, Dorothy, 3:9 Cows on Parade (cultural program), 3:52, 63, 64 Cram, Ralph Adams, 2:30 Craver, William, 2:53 Crawford, Juliet Sophronia Hubbard, 3:37, 38 Crawford, Peter, 3:37–38, 40, 41 Crawford Avenue Association, 3:43–44, 46, 47 Crawford Avenue, 3:36–51 Cret, Paul, 2:31 Crowley, Ruth, 3:55–57 Crown, Edward, 2:68 Crown Center for the Humanities at Loyola University, Edward, 2:69 Crown Company, Henry, 2:58, 59 Crown Field House, Henry, 2:69 Crown Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, Henry, 2:69 Crown Space Center, Henry, 2:69 Crown, Irving, 2:68 Crown, Lester, 2:58–72; 3:65 Crown Administration Building at Northwestern, Rebecca, 2:69 Crown, Rebecca Kranz, 2:59–60 Crown Building at Illinois Institute of Technology, Saul R., 2:69 Crown Auditorium at McCormick Place, Arie, 2:69 Crown Building, 2:65 Cummings, Nathan, 1:64–65 Curtiss Candy Company, 1:55 Cussen, Monsignor Joseph F., 3:6, 17 Index to Volume 29 | 67

D Daley, Richard J., 1:55 Daley, Richard M., 3:52, 54, 64 Daly, Tom, 1:40, 52–53 Dandies (boys club), 3:31 Dawes, Charles, 2:31 Dawes, Rufus, 2:31, 36 Dawnelles (girls club), 3:22 Debonnaires (girls club), 3:22, 33 Dell, 1:69 Democratic Party Machine, 3:36 Department store architecture, 2:26–43 Deutch, Stephen, 3:48–49 Dever, William, 2:30 Devlin, James, 2:53 Diamond, Bob, 1:55 Dickerson, Earl, 3:54 Dinneen, F. G., 2:14 Disney, 1:69 Dix, Dorothy, 3:58 Doi, Mary, 3:21 Dooley, Bob, 1:43, 57 Dooley, Claire, 1:57 Dooley, Grace, 1:57 Dooley, Robbie, 1:57 Douglas, William O., 3:57 Douwe Egberts, 1:66 DuBois, W. E. B., 2:64 Duensing, O. F., 3:43, 44

E Ebony (magazine), 2:65–68 Edison, Thomas, 2:24 Educational Television Facilities Act (1962), 1:72 Edwards, Buddy, 1:43 Eiffel, Gustave, 2:29 Ellis Community Center, 3:34 Empire State Building, 2:63 Eskilson, Stephen, “Sears Beautiful,” 2:26–43 Essick, Ray, 1:53 Estelles (girls club), 3:22, 33 Evans, Marion G., 1:39 Evers, Maude, 2:11

F Fairbanks, Douglas, 2:5, 21 Fair Employment Practices Commission, 1:26 Falkoff, Milt, 2:63 Famous Players, 2:23 Fanning, Larry, 3:57 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 1:58 Federal Writers’ Project, 1:7, 8 Federated Stores, 2:42 Ferriss, Hugh, 2:32 “Fighting Racism at the YWCA,” article by Virginia R. Boynton, 1:22–39 Fire of 1871, Great, 2:49 68 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Fire, Our Lady of the Angels school, 3:4–19 Foley’s (Houston), 2:42 Ford Foundation, 3:64 Foster, William Z., 1:17 Fox Valley Villages, 2:65 Franks, Bob, 1:43 Franzblau, Rose, 3:58 Frazier, Charles E., 2:12, 13 Frazier, E. Franklin, 2:66 Friedman, Abe, 3:54 Friedman, Pauline (Popo) Esther. See Van Buren, Abigail Friends of the Parks, 3:59–61, 63 “From the Editor,” column by Rosemary K. Adams, 1:3; 2:3; 3:3 Funkhouser, M. L. C., 2:12, 13, 20

G Gallery 37, 3:52, 64 Garfield Park, 3:37, 40 Garfield Park Businessmen’s Association, 3:40, 47 Garfield Park Racetrack, 3:40 Gavin, Jerry, 1:48 Geary, Joseph P., 2:12 Geddes, Norman Bel, 2:32 General Dynamics, 2:62 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 2:14 Gilbert, Wilbur, 1:52 Gilfoyle, Timothy J. “Chicago Fortunes: Interviews with Lester Crown and John H. Johnson,” 2:58–72 “Chicago’s Emissaries of Culture: Interviews with Eppie Lederer and Lois Weisberg,” 3:52–65 “Corporate Consciences: Interviews with John H. Bryan and Newton N. Minow,” 1:58–72 Gillespie, Joseph S., 3:50 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 1:68 Girls Inter-Club Council, 3:22 Goldman, Lisa, 1:55 Gore Commission, 1:67 Graemere Hotel, 3:40 Greene, Daniel, “Tragedy in the Parish,” 3:4–19 Greene, Shecky, 1:54 Greenfield, Sheldon, 1:54 Greenwald, Harold, 2:65 Gremlins (girls club), 3:22 Griffith, D. W., 2:21 Gruen and Krummeck, 2:42 The Gutter Magdalene (movie), 2:18

H Haberski, Raymond J., Jr., “Reel Life, Real Censorship,” 2:4–25 Hagiwara, Abe, 3:22 Hall, George, 2:53 Hall, Pat, 1:48 Hanes Corp., 1:66 Harding, Warren G., 2:24–25 Harlem Avenue, 3:51 Hartigan Beach, 1:57

Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, 3:64 Harvey, John, 1:52 Haussen Court, 3:44 Hayes, Rutherford B., 3:40 Hays, Will H., 2:7, 24 Hebrew Union College, 2:69 Hecht Company, 2:42 Hefner, Hugh, 3:51 Hell to Pay Austin (movie), 2:18 Herbst, Alma, 1:8 Herndon, Angelo, 1:26 Hesburgh, Theodore, 3:54 Hillshire Farm, 1:66 Hilton, Conrad, 2:60 Hodes, Barnet, 3:44 Holabird, Burnham, and Bennett, 2:32 Holabird, John, 2:31 Hollander, W. K., 2:20 Holy Name Society of Chicago, 2:14 Holy Rosary Church parish, 3:7 Honorary street names, 3:51 Hood, Raymond, 2:31 Horner, Henry, 3:54 Hulbert, William, 2:44–57 Humphrey, Hubert, 3:54, 56 Hunt, Manley K., 3:48 Hurley, Timothy, 2:14, 21 Hutton, Oscar, 1:7, 11, 17, 19 Hyde Park, 3:6 Hyde Park High School, 3:22 Hyman, Allen, 1:48, 55 Hynes, James A., 3:6

I Ida Crown Academy, 2:69 Illinois, University of, 3:57 Illinois and Michigan Canal, 3:38 Illinois Institute of Technology, 3:34 Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, 3:46 Industrial Workers of the World, meat packing industry and, 1:11 Innovations in American Government Award, 3:64 Insull, Samuel, 2:31 Irwin, Walter W., 2:23 Irving Park Road, 2:42–43 It May Be Your Daughter (movie), 2:18 It’s Baby Talk (television show), 3:57

J Janes, Les, 2:36 Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 3:33 Japanese American National Museum, 3:21 Japanese American relocation camps, 3:23 Japanese Americans, Chicago Girls Clubs for, 3:21–35 Japan Relief Dance, 3:33 Jardien, Bob, 1:55 Jardine, John, 1:54 Jardine, Len, 1:54 Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper), 3:58

Jewish Theological Seminary, 1:70; 2:69 John Paul II, 1:69 Johnson, Gertrude Jenkins, 2:59 Johnson, Hank, 1:7, 9, 11, 16, 19 Johnson, John H., 2:58–72; 3:65 Johnson, Johnny, 1:4 Johnson, Leroy, 2:59 Jolenes (girls club), 3:22, 30 Jolly Go-Getters Club, 1:27, 28 Jones, Jacqueline, 2:66 Joy Makers Club, 1:29

K Kahn, Ed, 1:44 Kahn, Ely, 2:38 Kaneko, Kow, 3:33 Karlov Avenue, 3:38 Kelley, Sister Mary Seraphica, 3:10, 12 Kelly, Edward J., 3:36–37, 40–41, 47, 48 Kelly, Kitty, 2:20 Kennedy, Bob, 1:52 Kennedy, John F., 1:62 Kennelly, Martin H., 3:48 Kenny, C. D., Co., 1:64–65 Ketchum, Morris, Jr., 2:42 Kielminski, Peter P., 3:46 Kimura, Lillian, 3:33 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1:62; 2:68; 3:51 Kita, Kaz, 3:30 Kleinaitis, Joyce Porcaro. See Porcaro, Joyce Kleine, George, 2:17 Klutznick, Philip, 2:60; 3:56 Knights of Columbus, 2:14 Kogan, Rick, 3:52 Kosciolowski, Sophie, 1:7, 12 Kowalski, Thaddeus, 3:51 Krainik, Ardis, 1:71 Kraus, Adolph, 2:14

L Landers, Ann. See Lederer, Eppie LaPlanche, Jean-Alexandre, 2:29 “A League of His Own: William Hulbert and the Founding of the National League,” article by Tom Melville, 2:44–57 League of Industrial Girls, 1:26 Lederer, Jules, 3:54 Lederer, Margo, 3:54 L’Eggs hosiery, 1:66 Leone, Phil, 1:53 Leone, Sam, 1:43–45, 48, 50, 53–55 Leone Park and Beach, Sam J., 1:55, 57 Lifeguards, Chicago’s first junior, 1:40–57 Lincoln Avenue, 3:36 Lincoln Center, 1:71 Lincoln Park Academy, 3:23 Literary Digest, 2:11 The Littlest Magdalene (movie), 2:18 Loewy, Raymond, 2:41, 42 Index to Volume 29 | 69

Lombardi, Vince, 1:44 Lord and Taylor, 2:41–42 Louis, Joe, 1:16 Lyric Opera and Symphony, 1:71

M Madigan, George, 3:40–41 Madigan Brothers store, 3:40 Madison Street, 3:37 Mahoney, Norma, 3:9 Making History award winners Bryan, John H, 1:58–72 Crown, Lester, 2:58–72 Johnson, John H., 2:58–72 Lederer, Eppie, 3:52–65 Minow, Newton N., 1:58–72 Weisberg, Lois, 3:52–65 Mam’selles (girls club), 3:22, 33 Marblehead Lime Co., 2:62 March, Herbert, 1:14, 19 Marshall Field’s, 3:64 Martha Washington Home, 3:33 Martin, Albert C., and Associates, 2:42 Material Service Corporation, 2:58, 60, 62 Mauldin, Bill, 3:56 Maya Devis (girls club), 3:22 May Company, 2:42 Mayo Foundation, 1:70 Maypole, George, 2:13, 14 McBride, Michelle, 3:15 McCarthy, Joseph, 3:54 McClellan, George B., 2:8 McCormick, Chauncey, 2:31 McCormick, Medill, 2:31 McCormick Place, Crown Auditorium at, 2:69 McKenna, Joseph, 2:8 McVey, Cal, 2:50 Meigs Field, 2:32 Melville, Tom, “A League of His Own: William Hulbert and the Founding of the National League,” 2:44–57 Mercantile Exchange Building, 2:60, 61 Merrill Lynch, 1:69 Meta Aldelphons (girls club), 3:22 Meyer, Cardinal Albert, 3:16 Michigan Avenue, 3:51 Midcontinental Building, 2:65 Midlothian, 3:51 Midwest Athletic Club, 3:40, 41 Midwest Buddhist Church, 3:22 Mikva, Abner, 1:59, 61 Miller, Jim, 1:50 Milliron’s Store, 2:42 Mills, A. G., 2:56 Milner, Frank, 1:52 Minow, Doris Stein, 1:58 Minow, Jay A., 1:58 Minow, Jo, 1:70 Minow, Mary, 1:70 70 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

Minow, Newton N., 1:58–72 Monk, Thelonius, 3:59 Montrose Beach, 1:42 Motion picture industry, censorship and, 2:4–25 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 2:7, 24–25 Mundelein, Cardinal George, 3:6 Municipal Code of Chicago (1949), 3:15 Munnecke, Wilbur, 3:55–56 Murata, Alice, “Stardust and Street of Dreams: Chicago Girls Clubs,” 3:21–35 Murphy, Brian, 1:55 Museum of Science and Industry, 2:69 Mutual Film Corporation, 2:8 Mutual v. Ohio, 2:8

N Napieralski, Emily, 3:36–37, 40, 41, 48 National Association of Broadcasters, 1:62 National Association of Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), 2:23 National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent, 3:47 National Council of Christians and Jews, 3:54 National Fire Fighters Protection Association report, 3:9, 15 National Gallery of Art, 1:70 National Labor Relations Act, 1:14 National League, founding of, 2:44–57 National Trust Council of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1:70 NBC Cityfront Center, 2:65 Negro Digest, 2:64 Nelli, Humbert, 3:7 Nelson, Gaylord, 3:54 New York Mutuals, 2:46 Nichols, A. H., 2:53 Nimmons, Carr, and Wright, 2:41 Nimmons, George C., 2:36, 41 Northerly Island, 2:32 Northwest Armory, 3:16 Northwestern Law Review, 1:61 Northwestern University, 1:70 Northwestern University School of Speech Cherubs Program, 3:57 Notre Dame, University of, 1:70 Novack, Anna, 1:7

O Oakbrook Shopping Center, 2:60 Oak Park, 3:38 Oak Street Beach, 1:53–54, 56 Oberholtzer, Ellis P., 2:18, 20 Obermeyer, Pete, 1:43 O’Connor, Mary, 1:57 “Off the Wall Talk” (column), 3:59 Ogden Avenue, 3:37, 38 Old Orchard Shopping Center, 2:60 Olivet Institute, 3:30, 31 O’Malley, Walter, 3:48, 50, 51 Orchestra Hall, 1:71

Orr Public School, 3:16 Orzsehkwsk, Michael, 3:36, 46 Our Lady of the Angels parish, 3:6–7 ethnic composition of, 3:17–18 life at school, 3:8–9 students attending school, 3:6 Our Lady of the Angels parish school fire, 3:4–19 causes of, 3:15–16 deaths from, 3:12 rebuilding of school after, 3:17 reporting of, 3:9 start of, 3:9 Owens, Jesse, 1:16

P Pace, Harry, 2:64 Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee (PWOC), 1:4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14–15, 19 Women’s Organizing Committee, 1:7 Palmer House, 2:60 The Paper, 3:59 Parnes, Louis, 2:42 Penguins (boys club), 3:31 Pershing Road, 3:51 Peterson, Charles, 2:30–31 Pettenon, Mary Ellen, 3:2–13, 17 Philadelphia Athletics, 2:46 Philip Morris, 1:66 Philos (girls club), 3:22, 33 Pickens, William Dean, 1:12 Pickford, Mary, 2:5, 7, 21 Pigott, Rich, 1:55 Playtex, 1:66 Polish American Business Men’s Club of Avondale, 3:48 Polish Koscivsko Guards, headquarters of, 3:42 Polish Women’s Alliance, 3:36 Porcaro, Concetta Maria, 3:7, 8 Porcaro, Dorothy, 3:5 Porcaro, John, 3:5, 7–8 Porcaro, Joyce, 3:4–18 Porcaro, Nicholas, 3:7, 8 Porges, Jessie, 3:53. See Weisberg, Lois Porges, Mortimer, 3:53, 54 Post, Emily, 3:58 Poston, 3:23 Preece, Harold, 1:7, 15 Present Pulaski Road Defenders Committee, 3:48 Procter and Gamble, 1:66 Proxmire, William, 3:54 Pryor, L. L., 2:20 Public Broadcasting Act (1967), 1:72 Public Broadcasting Service, 1:70 Pulaski, Casimir, 3:36, 40, 41 Pulaski Road, 3:36, 47

Q Queen of Heaven Cemetery, 3:17 Quigley, Martin J., 2:14

R Racism, fighting, at the YWCA, 1:22–39 Rainbow Beach, 1:43 junior lifeguards at, 1:40 Ramey, Jimmie, 1:52 Ramey, Samuel, 1:71 Rascob, John J., 2:63 Raymond, James, 3:9 “Reel Life, Real Censorship,” article by Raymond J. Haberski Jr., 2:4–25 REgenerations: Rebuilding Japanese American Families, Communities, and Civil Rights in the Resettlement Era, 3:21 Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, 3:59 Rehnquist, William, 1:61 Reuss, Henry, 3:54 River Oaks shopping complex, 2:60 Riverside Plaza, 2:65 Riverview Park, 1:3 Rockefeller Center, 2:30 Rogers, Cathy, 1:55 Rogers Park Beach, 1:43, 44, 48, 53, 54 junior lifeguards at, 1:40 Roosevelt Road, 3:51 Ross, Norman, 1:54 Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, 1:70 Ryan, Arthur, 2:21, 23

S Saints (boys club), 3:31 St. Anne’s Hospital, 3:13 St. Clair Drake Catholic Church, 1:15–16 Saint Sylvester parish, 3:6 Sara Lee Corporation, 1:58, 66–67, 69 Sbarbaro, John, 3:48 Schlaff, Max G., 2:18 Schlesinger and Mayer, 2:29 SCUBA, 1:43, 51 Sears, Richard, 2:38 Sears, Roebuck and Company, architecture of stores, 2:26–43 “Sears Beautiful,” article by Stephen Eskilson, 2:26–43 Seligman, Amanda Irene, “The Street Formerly Known as Crawford,” 3:36–51 Selig Polyscope Company, 2:4–5 Serb, Chris, “The Beach Boys: Chicago’s First Junior Lifeguards,” 1:40–57 Serenes (girls club), 3:22, 31 The Sex Lure (movie), 2:18 Shackled Souls (movie), 2:18 Shadur, Milton, 1:59 Shaw, George Bernard, 3:58 Shaw Centenary, 3:58, 64 Shaw Society, 3:58 Shaw Society Newsletter, 3:58 Sheen, Fulton, 3:54 Sheldon, Rowland C., 2:11 Sheldon, Sidney, 1:54 Shiman, Dick, 1:44, 53, 55 Index to Volume 29 | 71

Silhouettes (girls club), 3:27, 30, 33–35 Sinclair, Upton, 1:7 Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 3:6 Skidmore, Louis, 2:30 Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, 1:71 Sklar, Robert, 2:24 Slaughter, Mildred, 1:33 Snaith, William, 2:41 Sorelles (girls club), 3:22, 23 South Riverside Plaza, 2:65 South Shore Railroad, 3:60 South Shore Railroad Station, 3:61 South Shore Recreation of Bi-States Citizens Committee, 3:59–63 Southwest Plank Road, 3:38 Spalding, Albert, 2:45, 50 Speares, Byron, 1:43 Spellman, Cardinal Francis, 3:16 Springer, Joe, 1:52 Standard and Poor, 1:66 “Stardust and Street of Dreams: Chicago Girls Clubs,” article

by Alice Murata, 3:21–35 State Street, 3:51 Stevens Hotel, 2:60 Stevenson, Adlai, II, 1:61 Stockrighter, Frank, 1:52 Street, Paul, “The Backbone of the Union,” 1:4–21 “The Street Formerly Known as Crawford,” article by Amanda Irene Seligman, 3:36–51 Strikes, by Wilson and Company meatpacking plant, 1:4, 5, 7 The Suicide Club (movie), 2:18 Sullivan, Louis, 2:29 Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, 2:64 Sutherland, Harry, 1:43 Suzuki, Hide, 3:23, 24 Suzuki, Shibby, 3:23, 24 Swift and Company meatpacking plant, 1:4, 8, 9, 12, 14

T The Tainted (movie), 2:18 Taste of Chicago, 3:63 Terrell, Thomas J., 3:44 Thomas, Elmer, 1:8, 11 Thornton, Dick, 1:54 Till, Emmett, 2:66 Ting-a-Lings (girls club), 3:22, 33 Tishman, Robert, 2:65 Toman, John, 3:40 Touhy Beach, 1:40, 43, 48, 53, 55, 57. See also Rogers Park Beach “Tragedy in the Parish,” article by Daniel Greene, 3:4–19 Tristano, Pearl, 3:9, 10 TWIRP (The Woman Is Required to Pay) dance, 3:30 220 Club, 1:50 Tyrolenes (girls club), 3:22

U Union Stockyards Transit Company, 1:11 United Farm Workers of America, 3:51 United Organizations in Defense of Pulaski Road, 3:43 United Service Organization (USO), 1:26 72 | Chicago History | Spring 2001

United States Lifesaving Association, 1:57 Uptown, 3:6 Urban, Josef, 2:38 Urban Investment and Development Co., 2:60

V Van Buren, Abigail, 3:53, 58 Van der Rohe, Mies, 2:65 Vaughn, Jesse, 1:12 Velvett (girls club), 3:22 Vinson, Fred, 1:61

W Waldorf-Astoria, 2:60 Walker, Ralph, 2:31 Waller High School, 3:22, 23 War Relocation Authority, 3:24 Washington, Harold, 3:54, 63 Washington Nationals, 2:46 Water Tower Place, 2:60 Weightman, Phillip, 1:12, 14, 19 Weisberg, Jacob, 3:59 Weisberg, Joseph, 3:59 Weissmuller, Johnny, 1:53–54 Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago, 1:34 Wells High School, 3:22 West, Dorothy, 2:64 West Garfield Park, 3:36, 40, 43 Westheimer, Ruth, 3:58 West Side Historical Association, 3:46–47 White, Deacon, 2:50 Wichlenski, Bernard, 3:48 Wightman, Grace, 2:12 Wilkerson, Catherine Cameron, 1:59 Wills, Garry, 3:65 Wilson, Doris V., 1:39 Wilson, Woodrow, 2:24 Wilson and Company meatpacking plant, 1:4 The Woman of It (movie), 2:17 World’s Columbian Exposition, 2:32 Worthy, James, 2:41 Wright, Harry, 2:45 Wright, Richard, 2:64 Wrightwood Park, 1:53

Y Yesterday’s City “The Beach Boys: Chicago’s First Junior Lifeguards,” 1:40–57 “A League of His Own: William Hulbert and the Founding of the National League,” 2:44–57 “The Street Formerly Known as Crawford,” 3:36–51 Young, Andrew, 1:58 YuKyes (girls club), 3:22, 33 YWCA, fighting racism at, 1:22–39

Z Zeckendorf, William, 2:60 Zoes, Fred, 1:48