Chicago History | Fall 2002

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

Copyright 2002 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.

On the cover: In 1948, Corpus Christi kindergartners perform under Marcus Chism’s direction. Image courtesy of Catholic New World, Chicago.

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Fall 2002 VOLUME XXXI, NUMBER 2

Contents

4 24 36 54

Ministering Hope to Chicago’s Black Belt Suellen Hoy

Chicago’s Global Communities Peter T. Alter

Departments Yesterday’s City Arthur W. Schultz

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Ministering Hope to Chicago’s Black Belt S U E L L E N H OY

Missionary sisters broke racial boundaries with their work in the city’s African American neighborhoods.

Police arrested six Daughters of Charity (five pictured above) from Marillac House on June 12, 1965, for blocking traffic while demonstrating at State Street and Madison Avenue. At that time, protesting Catholic sisters received a lot of media attention, but their civil rights activism began long before the 1960s.

C

rowds of impoverished Eastern European immigrants, the severe living and working conditions they confronted, and the generous response of a corps of settlement workers: these are the typically remembered images of immigrants arriving in Chicago a century ago. Most activists in the settlement-house movement—such as Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, who together founded the renowned Hull-House on Halsted Street—were female, white, middle class, and Protestant. Their contributions to citybuilding are generally well-known, but those of another group of women—missionary sisters to Chicago’s black belts—are not. Although female and white, they differed from their settlement-house counterparts in that they were working class and Catholic. They were also unique, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton observed in their classic 1945 study, Black Metropolis, because they were among the few white people who actually lived their lives in black neighborhoods.

4 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

Although more than seventy sisters lived and worked in the black neighborhoods of Chicago’s South and West Sides before World War II, they remained invisible to most white Chicagoans. All that began to change in the 1960s when Catholic sisters became involved in the modern civil rights campaign for racial justice. In July 1963, newspapers and television cameras captured the images of seven Franciscan sisters picketing in front of Lewis Towers on North Michigan Avenue to protest the discriminatory policies of the Illinois Club for Catholic Women. In March 1965, the national media carried dramatic photographs of these “new nuns” marching in full habit from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. And in June and August 1965, Chicago newspapers publicized the story of six Daughters of Charity from Marillac House who were arrested, fined, and subsequently found guilty of blocking traffic in a downtown demonstration against public school superintendent Ben Willis and his policy of “double shifts” in overcrowded buildings. Yet the pres-

The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament commenced operations in 1891, one year after a small group of women in Washington, D.C., established the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Drexel could readily have been a founding member of DAR since her maternal ancestors were living in Pennsylvania before the American Revolution and, according to family tradition, one was a Continental soldier. Instead she chose a radically different path. Drexel sought to minimize rather than emphasize class and blood lines. She and her community of women religious attempted to follow a New Testament directive to “show no partiality” in the practice of their faith, except to favor those most in need.

In 1894, Walter Elliott, a prominent white priest in New York City, discovered to his dismay that Drexel’s agenda could not be altered. After she refused his request for five hundred dollars for a special project, Elliott wrote to a friend that “she said in effect ‘no poor white trash need apply.’ Only black and red are the team they [Drexel and her sisters] will back.” Drexel’s commitment to assisting African Americans and Native Americans remained firm until her death in 1955.

Besides devoting her life, Drexel spent her entire $20-million inheritance (a sum roughly equivalent to $268 million today) on their behalf.

Katharine Drexel as a young woman, about age sixteen. Drexel, the second of three girls of Francis and Hannah Langstroth Drexel, was born on November 26, 1858, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

ence of sisters in the streets as highly visible witnesses to the Christian principles of justice and charity has a history that began decades earlier, in classrooms without media attention.

Historians find it nearly impossible to pinpoint precise moments of major change, but in 1891, American Catholics took a determined first step on the long, hard road to securing justice for all. During that nadir of race relations in the United States, a white Philadelphian and heiress in her early thirties, Katharine Drexel (canonized in 2000), founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. Until then, Catholic bishops and clergy assumed that blacks were Protestant and rejected any notion that the American Catholic church as a whole had a responsibility to them. Drexel did not share that attitude. Instead she decided to commit her life and fortune to the nation’s most oppressed by demonstrating her belief that they too were God’s people and deserving of support and care.

Mother Katharine Drexel (right) and her sister, Louise Drexel Morrell, at the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1920s.

Ministering Hope | 5

While much of Drexel’s work was discredited or ignored by white Catholics, her efforts did not go unnoticed by the American Catholic church’s first black priest, Father Augustus Tolton, pastor of St. Monica’s in Chicago. Shortly after his arrival in 1889, Tolton started an aggressive fundraising campaign to build a church for black Catholics at Dearborn and Thirty-sixth Streets. He appealed almost at once to Drexel for a “helping hand.”

In a second appeal in 1891, he apologized for “vexing” her but again explained his overwhelming needs. If Drexel felt vexed, her response did not indicate it. She sent an initial one hundred dollars and over time contributed approximately thirty thousand dollars before Tolton died in 1897. He appreciated her generosity, remarking that she stood alone “in the whole history of the church in America” as the only person who had offered her “treasury for the sole benefit of the Colored and Indians.” At the end of the nineteenth century, except for Drexel, the record of the Catholic church was hardly impressive on matters of race.

Fifteen years after Tolton’s death, Drexel responded again to an appeal from the pastor of St. Monica’s, then Father John Morris, an Irish American. This time she sent teachers rather than funds. On a muggy day in August 1912, six Blessed Sacrament Sisters, accompanied by Drexel (or Mother Katharine as she was known and addressed) arrived by train in Chicago. Their goal was to open a parish school, first in the convent at 3669 South Wabash Avenue, and in time move it to the former Eighth Regiment Armory at Thirty-seventh Street and Wabash Avenue. Both convent and armory were located in the city’s expanding Black Belt on Chicago’s South Side, where more than 75 percent of the growing African American population lived. In 1912, a sizable number of white people still lived between Twelfth and Thirty-ninth Streets, Wentworth Avenue, and Lake Michigan, but ten years later, few whites remained—and almost no white women other than these nuns. Their schools were intended for black children, but segregation was never their policy; the sisters did not exclude whites, but almost none ever came. Because Mother Katharine used her inheritance to cover the sisters’ living expenses, children who attended St. Monica’s paid no tuition in the first years and only a small amount later. School enrollment grew from 150 students in 1912 to near 1,000 in 1925. During that time, the number of Blessed Sacrament Sisters increased from six to sixteen.

The appearance of these nuns on the South Side marked a turning point in the attitude of the Archdiocese of Chicago. By opening a parish school, the nuns were responding to the long-standing demands of black Catholics who wanted a Catholic education for their children. Participants in the African American Catholic congresses, which held national meetings between 1889 6 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

Born enslaved in Missouri, Augustus Tolton (above) grew up to become the American Catholic church’s first African American priest. In 1889, Father Tolton became pastor of St. Monica’s (below) at Dearborn and Thirty-sixth Streets.

The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament arrived in Chicago in 1912 and remain active in the city today. Above: In August 1944, Sister Frances Therese (Anna) Kallay distributed free milk to children who attended a Catholic Youth Organization day camp in Madden Park. Below: An assembly of parishioners, priests, students, and sisters in front of St. Monica’s on Easter Sunday in 1914.

Ministering Hope | 7

Sister Paul of the Cross Kiniry came to Chicago in 1912 as St. Monica’s first school principal and convent superior.

and 1893, recognized this need. Attendees at the first Congress in Washington, D.C., pledged “to aid in establishing, wherever we are to be found, Catholic schools, embracing the primary and higher branches of knowledge.” Yet, before 1912, the archdiocese had made no concerted effort to educate black children, the majority of whom were not Catholic.

The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, although white, had not grown up surrounded by family privilege. Unlike Drexel, who was probably the most powerful woman in the American Catholic church, most members of her religious community came from East Coast, working-class, Irish homes. Only one of Chicago’s pioneering six had parents who were both born in the United States. Yet, like their founder, the sisters committed themselves to “service and sacrifice” on behalf of America’s most underprivileged. Drexel made sure that her missionary-teachers understood what this important but unpopular calling might require. She asked each young woman, before admitting her to the community, to complete a questionnaire. Two questions directly asked the candidate whether she would “object to tending and washing Indian and Colored children” or nursing them when they were sick “even with contagious diseases.” Drexel intended her benevolence to be hands-on and practical.

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Sister Paul of the Cross served as superior of this small group of nuns who launched the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament’s long history in Chicago (several members of the order still live and work at St. Elizabeth’s on Fortyfirst Street and Michigan Avenue). Formerly Katy Kiniry, Sister Paul of the Cross had grown up the daughter of Irish immigrant parents in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where she worked as a seamstress until joining the Blessed Sacrament Sisters in 1891 at age twenty. When Kiniry wrote Mother Katharine of her desire to enter the convent, she explained, “We are poor and I am obliged to sew for a living at $4.50 per week.” She had given all her earnings to her parents to support their large family and, if accepted into the community, had little or no money to bring with her. Despite the immediate hardship her departure might cause at home, she wrote that she felt called to “the duties of a Missionary Sister” as a way of offering her life “to the service of others.” In 1899, Sister Paul of the Cross was among the first sisters sent to St. Francis de Sales in Rock Castle, Virginia, where she taught domestic science, among other subjects. She remained there until asked to open a new mission in Chicago. Sister Paul of the Cross was fortyone years old when she came to St. Monica’s in 1912.

For the next twenty years, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament staffed the only parish schools in the city’s Black Belt. Then, in 1933, six Franciscan Sisters from Dubuque, Iowa, arrived at Corpus Christi parish at Fortyninth Street and South Parkway (now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive). For the most part, these sisters were German and German American. Unlike the Blessed Sacrament Sisters who usually came from eastern cities and immigrant families of about six to eight children, the Dubuque Franciscans were raised on Iowa farms or occasionally in small towns and frequently had between ten and twelve siblings. Philippine Wieneke, the fourth of eleven children born to German immigrants, is a case in point. She grew up on a farm outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and attended rural public schools before entering the Franciscans in 1881 at age fifteen. In 1920, Wieneke, then Sister Dominica, became mother general of the entire congregation. When she stepped down in 1932, she surprised all by volunteering to lead the first band of Franciscans to Chicago’s South Side. These sisters came to Corpus Christi at the invitation of the pastor, Father Nicholas Christoffel, a Franciscan friar. In a letter to Dubuque in 1932, he described the enterprise “as large and promising,” the people as “poor,” and the day-today work as “missionary.”

As it happened, the Franciscan priests and sisters who worked together in Chicago also shared a missionary outpost in Chowtsun, China. Chowtsun and Chicago seem to have little in common, but from 1884, when the American bishops created the Commission for Catholic Missions

The beautiful Corpus Christi (above) was built by Irish Americans between 1914 and 1916 at Forty-ninth Street and South Parkway, now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. It became a black parish in 1932. Below: Mother Dominica (Philippine) Wieneke with schoolchildren on the large front porch of the Corpus Christi convent, c. 1939.

Ministering Hope | 9

Above: In 1934, about 150 students attended St. Elizabeth’s High School in the old Swift Club building at 4100 South Michigan Avenue.

Sister Guadalupe (Helen) Hartman served as the school’s librarian. Below: Sister Margaret (Ignatius) Kingston (far right) and Father Joseph Eckert (front row, center) are shown here with the 1938 graduates of St. Anselm’s grammar school.

10 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

among the Colored People and Indians, the challenge of conversion connected the Chinese to African Americans and Native Americans in the minds of most Catholics and their missionaries. Since blacks were generally not Catholics, they resembled in official church eyes the unconverted Chinese or Native Americans, more than the already Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Italy, or Mexico. In the interwar period, the words “race” and “ethnicity” overlapped, but for Catholics “converted” and “unconverted” were clearly opposites. All non-Catholics, whatever their cultural differences, were separate and apart. Thus they commanded, and at times received, the special attention of Catholic missionaries. In the case of the Dubuque Franciscans, those who went to Chicago or to Chowtsun volunteered for the assignments. In all other circumstances, they were assigned to a particular location without an opportunity to choose one place over another.

Black Catholics in Chicago, like many immigrant Catholics, had parishes of their own. The policy of the Catholic church in northern cities had been to segregate blacks just as it had previously segregated “ethnics” into “national” parishes. After thousands of southern blacks migrated north during World War I and the racial climate grew increasingly hostile, however, what was once seen as a “pastorally appropriate” policy before the war became a “racially desirable” one after it. Although it became apparent that the barriers against African Americans were racial rather than simply ethnic, some Catholics believed that segregation into separate schools and churches strengthened black Catholic identity and did not promote discrimination. During the interwar years, Chicago’s three black parishes—St. Elizabeth’s (1924, incorporating the earlier St. Monica’s), St. Anselm’s (1932), and Corpus Christi (1933)—

In the spring of 1943, students turned out en masse to see the jeep St. Anselm’s purchased with war stamps.

developed into vibrant places as black Catholics claimed them as their own. Although they functioned as national parishes in most ways, they were considered missionary enterprises, and, in this respect, they differed from parishes for Germans, Poles, or Italians.

The Blessed Sacrament and Franciscan Sisters who taught in the parish schools viewed themselves as missionaries as well as teachers. From 1912 until World War II, the majority of women entering both of these religious orders came with an eighth-grade education. Few had completed high school (still a luxury that many immigrant and some native-born girls could not afford) but almost all had work experience: factory or clerical jobs for the Blessed Sacrament Sisters and farm chores for the Franciscans. Although less educated than most settlement workers, missionary sisters likewise recognized the importance of residing among those they hoped to help. By becoming their neighbors, the sisters could better understand their needs and identify more closely with them across class lines. In fact, compared to settlement workers, the sisters’ backgrounds more nearly resembled those of the black families among whom they lived. One German American missionary-teacher highlighted this striking difference. When commenting on the sisters’ ongoing efforts to improve their pupils’ education, she observed that the sisters could lift up themselves at the same time.

On Chicago’s West Side, where there was a much smaller African American population, the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth opened St. Joseph’s Mission School at Loomis and Thirteenth Streets in 1933. St. Joseph’s was a part, but a separate part, of the large Jesuit parish of Holy Family, then comprising mostly Italians. In the 1890s, the Irish and German parishioners who had built the impressive Gothic church on Roosevelt Road had not welcomed the Italians, and in turn, the Italians refused to accept black migrants in the 1930s. As a result of continuing neighborhood conflicts, Jesuit pastor Father Raymond B. Walsh established a separate mission under the leadership of Father Arnold J. Garvy, an elderly but dedicated Jesuit. Father Walsh then successfully appealed to Mother Regina Wentowska “to find a corp[s] of at least three or four [sisters] to open up a school for colored children in this parish.” Not until the late 1950s did the main school of Holy Family parish accept African Americans.

Unlike the missionary nuns on the South Side, the Sisters of the Holy Family were largely Polish and Polish American. Founded by a Polish noblewoman in Rome in 1875, this order of women religious considered itself an international organization and prided itself on its willingness to go wherever needed in the interests of the Catholic church. A handful of the sisters had come to Chicago in 1885 to teach the children of Polish immigrants in St. Josaphat parish at Belden and Southport Ministering Hope | 11

St. Joseph’s graduating class of 1937, including entertainer Bobby Short (second row, far right).

Avenues. There the nuns worked primarily as teachers, and later as nurses, among Polish Catholics, but they did not restrict their services to Poles. Thus, despite the fact that St. Joseph Mission was to be housed in a decrepit building and that their students would be very poor, these community leaders unanimously accepted the new work and considered it “a high honor,” according to minutes of a 1932 meeting of the sisters’ provincial council. Mother Melitona Mach, a forty-six-year-old native Chicagoan with more than a decade of teaching experience, became St. Joseph’s first school principal and convent superior in 1933.

Their acceptance of a religious vocation and belief in the transforming power of literacy motivated these young, working-class Catholic women of Polish, German, or Irish backgrounds to live and work for years, frequently entire lifetimes, in black neighborhoods on Chicago’s West and South Sides. Settlement workers generally avoided or disavowed any claim that their work was religiously inspired, arguing that missions (Protestant or Catholic) were much too prone to proselytizing. Thus, settlement workers often separated themselves from such efforts and became more secular and scientific, but in the process, they also became more removed from the religious cultures and day-to-day needs of the city’s most underprivileged—a group that repeatedly placed their faith in prayer and education to rise above their oppressed past.

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All of the women who entered religious communities believed they had been called by God to a life of service in the church. Many, however, found other attractions as well. Some women, who had never been far from their family farms, saw adventure in a life lived out of a single piece of luggage; others left behind troubled homes or monotonous jobs with no regret. Most working-class women, whose circumstances were constrained and who had few of the educational advantages of middle-class settlement workers, joined congregations of teaching and nursing sisters to take advantage of the opportunity for self-improvement and service.

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, active religious communities offered scores of young Catholics an exciting alternative to the choices available to most American women. The communities provided a sure path of social mobility for those who wanted both an education and a career, and Catholics traditionally accorded special status to nuns (higher than the laity though well below the ordained clergy). Besides improving their own lives, these women also hoped to better the lives of others. One of the most compelling reasons for taking the veil was to engage in an enterprise of good works, ones that were not only pleasing to God but also socially beneficial and widely respected. Thus joining a religious community meant the beginning, not the end, of a useful and admired life.

Yet the motives of the comparatively few sisters who chose to link their lives to African Americans in poor urban neighborhoods were fueled primarily by the power of religion. These missionary-teachers demonstrated an idealism and generosity of spirit that is more commonly associated with zealous missionaries to foreign lands. In choosing to enter the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, for example, a number of potential candidates expressed a strong desire to give themselves “entirely to the service of God.” Still, the mundane efforts of home missionaries received little notice and even less support from the clergy and hierarchy of the Catholic church.

While it is clear that most Blessed Sacrament Sisters became well-educated during their years of service, it is also clear that there was little status to be gained in following the lead of Katharine Drexel. Despite the publicity she and her order received at its founding, the order never numbered more than about five hundred women, and many of them were recruited in Ireland.

One young woman who entered from Lismore in Ireland’s County Waterford in 1913 stated that her aunt—who had once lived in America—vehemently objected to her joining a convent in the United States and “working for the Blacks.” Another young Philadelphian remarked in a letter to Drexel in 1915 that her mother had “not yet given in, and I am only afraid she will not, even at the last.” During the 1920s, both of

these women lived on the South Side and taught at St. Elizabeth’s. Sister Norma Drexler, a Franciscan who grew up in Dyersville, Iowa, wanted “to offer herself completely” to God. She remembered that her mother was “worried to death” when she volunteered for the Corpus Christi mission in 1933.

What did “missionary” work include? For Catholic sisters, racial uplift and evangelization meant education.

Above all else, the sisters were educators, and their primary work was in the schools. Since they had personally benefited from classroom instruction, the sisters never doubted its rewards. Nor did the African American migrants. Educational and employment opportunities motivated thousands of African Americans to leave the South. As one man wrote to the Chicago Defender in 1917: “I have some children. I lost my wife just a year ago and I would like to get a place where I could prop[er]ly educate them.” For parents who wanted a better life for their children, neighborhood Catholic schools could not be ignored. In Black Metropolis, Drake and Cayton reported that families in the Black Belt found the parochial schools attractive because they “offered a more thorough education in a quieter atmosphere with adequate discipline and personal attention for all students.”

In short, the sisters consistently provided good teaching in an environment that, according to writer Rosemary L. Bray, was “quiet, polished, respectful, and orderly.”

Sister Paulita (Maureen) O’Donovan, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1914, taught first grade at St. Elizabeth’s from 1936 to 1940. In November 1938, Fathers Francis Wade (seated) and Vincent Smith from the Society of the Divine Word visited her classroom.

Ministering Hope | 13

Sister Norma (Alma) Drexler was one of the first Franciscans to arrive in Chicago. She taught at Corpus Christi from 1933 to 1953 and, in a small notebook, kept a record of the names of her 1,739 pupils during those twenty years. Above: Sister Norma with two students on an outing to Jackson Park. Right: Alma Drexler in Dyersville, Iowa, at the time of her high school graduation.

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In 1946, Sister Luke (Clara) Hanig’s string ensemble (above) performed before the Corpus Christi student body. Two years later, kindergartners in Sister Rosalima (Celestine) Wingert’s rhythm band prepared to take center stage under Marcus Chism’s direction (below).

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In the work of evangelization, the school was the most important parish institution. The sisters shared the assumptions of pre–Vatican II Catholics, who believed that there was no salvation outside the church.

Therefore, besides lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, art (especially crafts), and music, the nuns instructed their students in the tenets of the Catholic faith and in its liturgical rituals. As a result, many of the students (also their parents) became Catholics and participated fully in the sacramental life of their parishes. Father Joseph Eckert, a Society of Divine Word priest who was known to many as the “Great Evangelizer,” served as pastor of three black parishes during nearly twenty years on the South Side. He prided himself on his activist approach of going out and getting converts among the unchurched. Yet, he understood the value of the missionary-teachers and their schools.

In 1932, when Father Eckert became pastor of St. Anselm’s at Sixty-first Street and Michigan Avenue, he wrote to Drexel and requested “a nice staff of fine teachers.” He remarked that St. Elizabeth’s, where he had previously been pastor, was “in fine running order” because of the “efficient teaching done by the Sisters.”

Several times during the 1930s, he appealed to Mother Katharine to send more nuns so that St. Anselm’s would not need lay teachers. Cost was not the problem. In fact, Mother Katharine generally paid the lay teachers’ salaries when she could not send sisters, but Father Eckert insisted that parents wanted their children in sisters’ classrooms. Sister Janvier Williams, a 1948 graduate of St. Elizabeth’s High School and a retired teacher herself, knows the reason: the sisters “were hard on us, but they made us learn.” That, she believes, is why “so many [of us] were successful when we graduated.”

Contrary to conventional wisdom, missionaryteachers spent few hours inside their convents. They divided most days between the school and the neighborhood. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament actively engaged in “home visiting” and routinely visited the sick in Provident Hospital. While the Franciscans and the Sisters of the Holy Family appear to have visited homes only under unusual circumstances, the Blessed Sacrament Sisters did so daily in the early years and later twice weekly. For about an hour after school, they went to the homes of their students, occasionally walking them there, but usually dropping in unannounced. A former student, Gwen Smith, remembered that she was afraid the sisters would disapprove of her mother’s smoking. Therefore, whenever they appeared on her block—“they walked everywhere, always in twos”—she would run home and warn her mother that “the nuns are coming” so that she could hide her cigarettes. During visits, the sisters discussed problems related to school and church, difficulties of living in the 16 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

Father Joseph Eckert (above) proved a master at converting entire families (below) during his tenure as a pastor in Chicago, from 1921 to 1940, of St. Monica’s, then St. Elizabeth’s, and finally St. Anselm’s.

During the interwar period, the Blessed Sacrament Sisters assisted Father Eckert in preparing adults, as well as children, to become active Catholics.

city, and family troubles. They knew what it meant to be poor and “never seemed surprised by what they saw or heard,” according to Smith and her sister Yvonne.

The nuns often returned with food, clothes, or medicine. Although the Franciscans did not regularly visit homes, broadcast journalist Warner Saunders, who attended Corpus Christi schools between 1941 and 1953, recalled numerous field trips to parks, museums, and libraries. Additionally, one of his teachers enrolled him in the Art Institute of Chicago because he showed a “proclivity toward art.”

On the eve of World War II, the first and only group of African American missionary-teachers arrived in Chicago. Five Oblate Sisters of Providence settled in

Morgan Park and opened the Holy Name of Mary school to 110 children in September 1941. Mother Mary Claude Hudlin, a forty-five-year-old native of St. Louis and former public school teacher, led this pioneering band of African American nuns from Baltimore.

A month later, the Chicago Defender announced their arrival with the headline “5 Race Nuns Placed in a Parish Here” and printed each sister’s name. A Catholic missionary magazine observed in January 1942 that the Oblates had “taken their place beside the Blessed Sacrament Sisters and the Franciscan Sisters and the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth” in an “‘all-out’ effort” to bring Chicago’s African Americans into the Catholic church.

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Above: The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament were active home visitors. Recent converts Mr. and Mrs. John P. Triplet of St. Anselm’s welcomed Sister Frances Therese (Anna) Kallay into their home at Christmastime in 1937. Below: Gwen Smith (front row, center) with her fifth-grade St. Elizabeth’s classmates in 1944. Smith believes that she received a “solid education in the basic subjects” and “learned what’s right and wrong,” a trait that was helpful all her life.

18 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

This 1917 cartoon from the Chicago Defender reinforced a commonly held belief in the power of education to overcome prejudice.

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Sister Lucy Williams (above) grew up in Corpus Christi parish and returned to teach there from 1956 to 1964. Sister Mary of Nazareth Johnson (below) organized some of the youngest Holy Name of Mary students into a rhythm band in 1948.

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Founded in 1829, the Oblate Sisters of Providence began educating and evangelizing African Americans nearly sixty years before the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Yet not until the middle of the twentieth century did religious communities of white women welcome blacks. Until then, African American women who wished to become Catholic sisters were encouraged to join the Oblate Sisters of Providence or the Sisters of the Holy Family, a black community in New Orleans. Over time, however, white women religious grew to recognize that exclusion and segregation were both forms of discrimination and sinful. Sister Lucy Williams, a Corpus Christi graduate, joined the Dubuque Franciscans in 1953; she was the first black woman to do so. Sister Lucy entered because she “respected and admired the sisters.”

Admitting that she lived through some difficult days, Sister Lucy said that she stayed because “the community changed.” In the beginning, a number of sisters considered her a “problem.” Now, she says, they think of her as a “gift.” Over the years, she has helped them to better understand the damaging effects of racism.

On October 11, 1941, the Chicago Defender (right) announced the arrival of the Oblate Sisters of Providence. Until their convent was completed, the sisters (below) lived in a house on 112th Place and assembled students in a makeshift chapel. Pictured from left: Sisters Clotilde Smith, Anthony Garnier, Claude Hudlin (principal and superior), Juliana Brent, and Providentia Pollard.

Ministering Hope | 21

Sister Caroline Hemesath, OSF Tolton Biographer

Sister Caroline (Lucy) Hemesath is the primary biographer of Father Augustus Tolton, America’s first black priest who worked in Chicago. In From Slave to Priest (1973), she wrote that her interest in Tolton dated “from the year 1933, the first of my nine years as a teacher of Black children in Chicago.”

Sister Caroline was a Dubuque Franciscan and one of Above: In 1947, Sister Caroline taught art to seventh-grade the pioneering group of nine who arrived in Chicago in pupils in Corpus Christi’s Madonna Club from the school’s print collection of masterpiece paintings of Mary. Left: Sister the summer of 1933. At Corpus Christi, she taught Caroline in the 1920s. eighth grade until 1938; in 1946, she returned to teach seventh grade until 1951. During these years, Warner Saunders, now a broadcast journalist, was one of her University of Notre Dame. She then began looking for a brightest students. Saunders remembers her well, espebook publisher. She was not successful until 1973, cially her height (Sister Caroline was very tall) and her when Chicago’s Franciscan Herald Press published admonitions after he and his friends “pulled pranks.”

From Slave to Priest. Although it is no longer in print, it Sister Lucy Williams (now at St. Thomas the Apostle in remains the only book-length biography of Tolton.

Hyde Park), who knew Sister Caroline first as a teacher After retiring, Sister Caroline remained active. She and then as a colleague, said that she understood and taught music to underprivileged children in Dubuque. In loved black people—Sister Caroline was “black inside.”

1969, she wrote to a friend in New York that all of her It was unlikely, however, that Sister Caroline knew any lessons were offered “absolutely free.” She had collected African Americans until she came to Chicago. She was “violins, trumpets, etc. from the attics of my relatives, also born on a farm east of Ossian, Iowa, on July 28, 1899, [from] schools that have been closed, and also [from] one of nine children of William F. and Catherine Bohr friends” for her students to use. Besides giving music Hemesath. Sister Caroline joined the Franciscan comlessons, she started a second book, Our Black Shepherds: munity in 1916 in Dubuque where she finished high Biographies of the Ten Black Bishops of the United States school in 1921, received a diploma from the Dubuque (1987). It contained a brief introduction by Joseph Academy of Music in 1928, and earned a bachelor’s Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, and in the preface, Sister degree from St. Xavier College in Chicago in 1937. Her Caroline recalled her work in Chicago as the time in interest in the history of African Americans developed which she became “fully convinced that Blacks are among during the 1930s, and she began doing research on God’s most beautiful people.” She also wrote that “gradublack Catholics in Chicago, particularly Father Tolton. ally and unwittingly” she developed “an affinity [for She sought out and spoke to individuals “who were African Americans] that never dies but continually Father Tolton’s parishioners—people who had been expresses itself in a defense, support, and appreciation of closely associated with the priest, with his all members of the Black race.” mother and sister.” In 1942, she received a In 1974, Sister Caroline gave the prinmaster’s degree in American history from cipal address at the dedication of the hisCatholic University of America in torical marker honoring Father Tolton in Washington, D.C. Sister Caroline’s master’s Quincy, Illinois, where he was raised and thesis was titled, “History of White Policy is now buried. At that time, she also lectoward the Chicago Negro from 1865 to the tured on Tolton’s life at Quincy College.

Present Time with Particular Reference to Two months short of her ninety-seventh Religious Factors.” birthday, on May 31, 1996, Sister During the 1950s and 1960s, she conCaroline Hemesath died in Dubuque. tinued her research on Tolton’s life, while Without her dedicated efforts, we would teaching history and German at Briar Cliff know even less about Augustus Tolton, a College in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1966, she Sister Caroline Hemesath faithful and courageous pastor, who wrote a short article on Tolton for Ave published her biography of “justly merits the title of father of all Maria, a Catholic magazine published at the Father Tolton in 1973.

African American priests.”

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Pauline Lewis Williams’s diploma from St. Monica’s.

In the end, white missionary-teachers were transformed by the world they set out to change. In the process of linking their lives to those of African Americans, the sisters gradually came to understand the insidious reach of racism in America. Despite their cultural differences, the sisters’ generosity of spirit, willingness to sacrifice, and openness to God’s grace demonstrated their enduring belief in Christian ideals and the transforming power of education. In 1905, Katharine Drexel wrote a missionary priest that, after “fourteen years’ experience working for non-Catholics amongst these Colored People,” she was “sure they will make good Catholics if some one will take up the work of instructing them.” Poverty and ignorance were the result of circumstances, not race. Pauline Lewis Williams, a 1925 graduate of St. Monica’s, said the Blessed Sacrament Sisters treated everyone “with respect, like human beings.” She learned to feel “inferior,” Williams insisted, only after she left their school. In the institutions they built, these missionary-teachers successfully educated and evangelized generations of children to become solid members of American society and the American Catholic church, and they did so at a time when people in power showed little regard for the needs and rights of African Americans.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4, courtesy of Theresa McDermott, Chicago, image from National Catholic Reporter, 23 June 1965; 5–6 top, courtesy of Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (SBS) Archives, Bensalem, Pennsylvania; 6 bottom–7 top, courtesy of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Archives and Record Center, Chicago; 7 bottom–8, courtesy of SBS Archives; 9 top, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration; 9 bottom, courtesy of Sisters of St. Francis (OSF) Archives, Dubuque, Iowa; 10 top, courtesy of SBS Archives; 10 bottom, courtesy of St. Anselm’s Parish and Ellen Skerrett, Chicago; 11, courtesy of Catholic New World, Chicago; 12, reprinted with permission of Bobby Short from Black and White Baby (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1971); 13, courtesy of Catholic New World; 14–15 top, courtesy of OSF Archives; 15 bottom, courtesy of Catholic New World; 16 top, courtesy of Ernest Brandewie, South Bend, Indiana; 16 bottom–17, courtesy of SBS Archives; 18 top, courtesy of Catholic New World; 18 bottom, courtesy of Eric Smith, South Holland, Illinois; 19, reprinted from the Chicago Defender (4 August 1917); 20 top, courtesy of OSF Archives; 20 bottom, Courtesy of Oblate Sisters of Providence Archives, Baltimore, Maryland; 21 lower left, courtesy of Catholic New World; 21 right, reprinted from the Chicago Defender (11 Oct. 1941); 22, top left and bottom, courtesy of OSF Archives; 22 top right, courtesy of Catholic New World; 23, courtesy of Pauline Lewis Williams, Evanston, Illinois.

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For more on African American Catholics, see Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1995), and Albert J. Raboteau, African-American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). On American Catholics and race, see John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996), and William A. Osborne, The Segregated Covenant: Race Relations and American Catholics (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967). On Catholic sisters in general, see Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and on Katharine Drexel in particular, see Lou Baldwin, Saint Katharine Drexel: Apostle to the Oppressed (Philadelphia: Catholic Standard and Times, 2000).

Suellen Hoy is a guest professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent publication is “No Color Line at Loretto Academy: Catholic Sisters and African Americans on Chicago’s South Side,” Journal of Women’s History, Spring 2002.

Ministering Hope | 23

Chicago’s Global Communities P E T E R T. A LT E R

Recent immigrants from Mexico and Romania reveal their perspectives on Chicago, one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities.

Editor’s note: From its earliest days, Chicago has welcomed immigrants, a tradition that continues in the twenty-first century. In this and two upcoming issues, Chicago History will feature excerpts from five of more than eighty oral history interviews conducted as part of Global Communities: Chicago’s Immigrants and Refugees, a documentation project by the Chicago Historical Society. These interviews offer a glimpse into the lives of men and women from India, Mexico, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam. Surprisingly similar and starkly contrasting stories emerge as these immigrants open their personal and group histories to Global Communities.

C

hicago has seen a tremendous demographic change since 1945. Historically a city largely populated by European immigrants and African American migrants, Chicago attracted people from all over the globe after World War II and, by the 1990s, became one of the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse cities in the world. To capture this great shift in the city’s demographics, the Chicago Historical Society conducted a three-year documentation project, Global Communities: Chicago’s Immigrants and Refugees.

Global Communities addresses a significant void.

According to the 2000 federal census, roughly 28.4 million American residents are foreign born, representing about 10 percent of this country’s residents. Perhaps we have immigrants and refugees in our daily lives as coworkers, neighbors, or friends. Yet, most of us know very little about these newer Chicagoans and their histories and cultures.

24 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European immigrants and African American migrants permanently settled in Chicago. Many refugees, displaced by the effects of World War II, also arrived in Chicago in the late 1940s. This post-1945 influx was only a small beginning of what became a massive post-war immigration from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America.

Immigration law also played a major role in the history of these recent immigrants. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 removed the former national quota system that limited immigrants’ entry into the United States according to the countries from which they came. The legislation ended this legalized discrimination against immigrants from Asia, Africa, and North and South America who were previously deemed “undesirable.” The act also placed special emphasis on family reunification and encouraged trained professionals to immigrate to the United States. Due to this act, the great post-1965 influx of diverse immigrants to the United States and Chicago began.

Global Communities documents the history of five recent immigrant and refugee groups to the Chicago area, covering portions of the Asian Indian, Mexican, Polish, Romanian, and Vietnamese communities. Public historians, volunteers, and a participant in the Chicago Historical Society’s National Museum Fellows Program for Minority Students conducted research and produced oral and video histories, as well as video and photographic documentation. In addition, project staff members collected two- and three-dimensional artifacts that represent the lives of these immigrants.

Olivia Hernandez

Above: Olivia Hernandez at her desk at the Juan Diego Community Center in South Chicago.

The South Chicago neighborhood held a Stations of the Cross reenactment on Good Friday in 2000. The procession started at St. Bronislava Roman Catholic Church and ended at Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church (below). The congregations of both of these churches gradually have changed from Polish to predominantly Mexican.

O

livia Hernandez came to Chicago in October 1970 from San Jose de la Isla in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas. With her three children, she joined her husband who was then working at Wisconsin Steel in Chicago’s South Deering neighborhood. Olivia settled with her children in the South Chicago neighborhood on the city’s Southeast Side. After experiencing the problems brought about by industrial decline in the region, Olivia founded the Centro Comunitario Juan Diego (Juan Diego Community Center), a social service organization serving primarily recent Mexican immigrants of the area. Olivia is executive director of the organization, which is now housed on South Commercial Avenue at Eighty-eighth Street in South Chicago.

CHS: Why did you come to the United States?

Olivia: In my town [in Mexico] we were very poor. We had no job opportunities. And everybody talked about how the United States had big opportunities for everybody, [laughs] and we decided to come to the United States. . . . My husband was already here [working at Wisconsin Steel], and I followed him with my three little girls. We were planning to stay in the United States for one year. And the plan was my husband would work one year, and we would go back to Mexico and bring a little money. But I stayed here. When we came, we never went back to Mexico, because we had a lot of problems here, immigration problems. We had a divorce. We had other kids, and we had family problems. And I decided to stay here in the United States with my six kids.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 25

The site of Wisconsin Steel, where Olivia Hernandez’s husband worked, shortly before it was torn down in 2000. The mill sat deteriorating for twenty years, a symbol of the demise of the steel industry on the Southeast Side.

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Chicago’s Global Communities | 27

Above: South Commercial Avenue, a busy retail strip in the 1970s, later fell on hard times with many boarded-up storefronts. It now offers a mixture of Mexican clothing shops, bakeries, and groceries as well as general interest stores.

When Wisconsin Steel closed without warning in 1980, three thousand people lost their jobs. The Wisconsin Steel Save Our Jobs Committee, a coalition of white, African American, and Latino steelworkers, sued the company for lost wages, benefits, and pensions.

Right: The group’s newsletter.

What was South Chicago like when you first came here?

When I came from Mexico, this community was very beautiful, beautiful. Commercial [Avenue] had beautiful stores, expensive stores. This neighborhood was a beautiful neighborhood. When I came here to South Chicago from Mexico, the community had a lot of jobs . . . They had Wisconsin Steel and U.S. Steel. They had a lot of factories . . . around here. They had a lot of opportunity for work.

And when I came from Mexico, the Mexican community lived in the Bush [neighborhood], on Buffalo [Avenue] over there. And right here [on Escanaba Avenue] was a beautiful community. And like three years later the factories started closing.

Olivia described the massive mill and factor y closings and their devastating consequences for South Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s.

When Wisconsin Steel closed [in 1980], thousands of people [lost their jobs]. When U.S. Steel decided to close a department, [another group of] people [lost 28 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

their jobs] . . . The businesses left. A lot of people lost housing. They moved to other communities looking for jobs. . . . And I noticed the governor, the police, they didn’t pay attention anymore to the community. Since poor people live here in the community, they didn’t put attention [here]. They put attention in other communities. They forgot South Chicago . . . Everything was down, and I love South Chicago. I didn’t want to move from South Chicago. I had a lot of opportunities to move, and my daughters [said], “Come on, move from South Chicago. Come on, move.” I said, “No, I don’t want to move. I love South Chicago.” . . . And I saw the abandoned buildings, and the Commercial [Avenue] buildings closing, and there’s a big change, and we started with the gang problems, and graffiti problems, and garbage problems. And I passed through all these things, and I [became] involved in the schools.

Olivia explained her growing interest in South Chicago’s schools.

I wanted my daughters safe in school and to have a good education.

When I started in the Bilingual Council, I learned a lot about education. We needed better education in the schools. We needed bilingual education, and I started to fight for these programs. When my kids graduated from grammar school, they passed to high school, and I continued to be involved in their high school education.

By 1980, Olivia’s children attended James H. Bowen High School in South Chicago.

In 1980, Bowen was like a jail. Nobody had control over this high school. The white people had moved. There’s more Hispanics coming up and a few African Americans.

And the school is like moving, different cultures, different races. And I started to notice the [problems] like this, and we organized the parents . . . and we started fighting for school reform. When we won the school reform, we ran for the local school councils, and I’m still on the local school council [laughs].

Above: Many Juan Diego staff members become involved with local schools. This 2000 flyer shows Rosa Perea, Olivia’s daughter and Juan Diego worker, as a candidate for the local school council at Arnold Mireles Academy.

To address South Chicago’s problems on a larger scale, Olivia joined a women’s group at Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church.

We started looking [at] the problems in the community, and we decided to do something . . . working with the police, working with the mayor, and [starting] clean-up days. . . . We organized in the blocks like a chain. The people on the block call the police when we hear something. . . . We went to the different organizations in the community and asked for help for the different problems, and nobody listened to us. Nobody helped us. And we decided . . . well, maybe we need to open one community center.

The community center, Juan Diego, started modestly in November of 1994.

We decided to open this center on my porch in my house. I remember my family was very angry with me because all day people come, people go, and finally we found a little amount of money from some nuns from Philadelphia. They gave like four thousand dollars, and we rented an apartment on Commercial [Avenue]. And we started, by helping people writing letters, making appointments, calling to the IRS, calling to immigration.

Juan Diego’s programs focus on recent immigrants to South Chicago.

We have a lot of programs in Juan Diego, especially for immigrants. The immigrants come from different countries in South America, from Mexico. They come Left: After changing locations several times in South Chicago, the Juan Diego Community Center moved to South Commercial Avenue at Eighty-eighth Street after a community-supported fund drive.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 29

undocumented. They come. Some days we receive people here. They have no place to live. They have nothing to eat. We are looking for place[s] for these persons. We have emergency food, and we ask for clothes around the community. There’s a lot of people [who] bring very, very good clothes, jackets, blankets, shoes, for these people. . . . A lot of immigrants come to South Chicago and live in South Chicago for three, four years. When they have a job, they move into another neighborhood. . . . They figure, “Well, I have job, and I have a little money to move to the East Side or Hegewisch.” Or, maybe in ten years they buy a house in another community.

This is a moving community.

What kinds of other challenges do recent immigrants to South Chicago face?

We have a lot of immigrants. Especially the kids, they have no documents. They have no right to go for health [care]. They have education but a bad education. For health care, it’s very, very hard to find somebody. And all these kids, they need glasses. They need to go to the dentist, and nothing’s helping. . . . The Department of Public Health here on the corner, Ninety-ninth [Street] and Exchange [Avenue], is a little, little clinic. They receive only the family practice, like pregnant women and little kids. But they have no service for adults, like for men, for women. Like me, they don’t receive me. . . . In the clinic, we have no X ray. When we need X rays for the poor people, we need to go to Englewood, or Roseland, or Cook County Hospital. . . . If we need a mammogram, we need to go to Englewood or Roseland. We have no service for mammograms here, no X ray, no tuberculosis tests.

Juan Diego and other community centers throughout South Chicago distribute brochures like these. In low-income areas with Mexican and other Spanishspeaking immigrants, these publications help explain key issues such as how to receive financial help to buy or rent a home and tips for pre- and neonatal care.

30 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

We have nothing here, no dentists. We have no eye doctors in this clinic. And supposedly this clinic is for the poor people. We have other clinic[s], but they are very expensive . . . Two people from Juan Diego are on the board for the clinic. And [the board is] very angry because we started looking, start asking about why we don’t have these services in South Chicago. [The clinic staff] said, “It’s very easy to take the bus to Englewood.” Yes, [that]’s right, but we need the service here in South Chicago.

Olivia and the staff at Juan Diego fight this lack of health care.

We [now] have mammograms every month here in South Chicago. . . . We have asthma classes, diabetes classes, domestic violence classes. We have different classes on health in the community. We go out to the schools, church[es]. We go house to house talking about the services we have. We have a food pantry. Very healthy food . . . And we organize classes, health classes.

Right now, we have a group of twenty-seven persons in the diabetes classes . . . We do outreach about AIDS education. We give out condoms and information.

Juan Diego sponsors additional educational programs.

We have an after-school program . . . talking with these kids and their parents about how parents [can] recognize [if] their kids have joined gangs. And

South Chicago teens at a Hip-Hop Summit behind Street Lingo clothing store on South Commercial Avenue. Israel Sandoval, the owner of Street Lingo, runs events like the summit to promote his store and to bring together neighborhood teens and young adults to dance and listen to music in a safe environment.

we have another group of forty-eight girls to learn about health, about cooking, about sewing, about different things. And this is for nine months . . . two days in the week for nine months. We tried working with these little girls and these little boys to keep them from getting involved in the gangs, because we have a lot of gang activities and a lot of drugs. But the one good thing is [that] we don’t have a lot of graffiti now. Like five years ago, we organized high school students to go to paint [over] the graffiti and clean the streets, and [it’s] not the best, but I think the community is changing.

them. And I see a lot of improvement in the community, like the train station is moving and a lot of stores are coming. At the last meeting for the Chamber of Commerce, they announced the Walgreens moving to another corner. So I think it’s very good. . . . Solo Cup is opening a new factory [in South Chicago] . . . The only concern . . . [is] that they don’t pollute the lake. We’re concerned about that, Solo Cups bobbin’ up and down. And we want . . . these jobs for these people [of South Chicago], not to bring [in] other people.

Gangs present a particular problem for Juan Diego and the people of South Chicago.

Olivia described her concerns for community residents, as corporations look to develop unused industrial sights in South Chicago and build housing along South Chicago’s lakefront.

We organized block clubs, and we report to the police the gangs’ activities and drug activities. We have right now six blocks organized around here. We complain.

We have a lot of meetings with the police, the aldermen, talking about the graffiti, the cleaning, the different gang activities in the community. Like three years ago, we have a lot of shootings, a lot of shootings, all day . . . And this block was the most dangerous block in the city, Eighty-ninth [Street] and Escanaba [Avenue] . . . Seven years ago on this block, we had in three weeks six shootings. Six young people died. . . . We organize our own meetings with the police, the aldermen. We bring the police [here] and the commander.

Have you seen results from these efforts?

We still are having shootings, but not like three years ago. And the gangs, now nobody organizes

South Chicago has come to improve a lot, but the only thing I’m very worried with is where do they go, the poor people? We can’t pay this expensive rent. We can’t pay all these taxes. Where do we need to go? Maybe East Side? I don’t know. And there are . . . a lot of poor people in South Chicago. . . . This is my concern now. Because I read in the newspaper in three years the houses [in South Chicago] will be very expensive. If we want to buy a house . . . we need to buy now. And the taxes for my house are up. Maybe I can’t pay for my house, and I lose my house because different people come to live in the community. This is my concern now. When we went to the meetings, I tell the alderman and other people, “You need to think about the people who live in the community now, because where will we go?”

Chicago’s Global Communities | 31

George Baba

some connection . . . in Los Angeles, so I guess they got us a place to stay for a little while. When we finally got into this place and put all our bags down, we crashed on the floor. We were so tired. . . . For two days, we didn’t wake up. When we did wake up, there were roaches everywhere . . . all over our stuff. I guess my parents weren’t used to seeing that back where we came from. That was a surprise. So we lived in L.A. for awhile. My parents were managers of an apartment building in Santa Monica. Then we moved to a suburb of Sacramento. I remember that place. It had a huge yard, basically, with a lot of trees, which I would love to go climb in the summer. And there were five other kids my age living in my building or the building right next to it, and we played. That was something real nice that I remember.

When you went to kindergarten in Los Angeles did you have to learn English?

Above: George Baba on North Avenue Beach, Chicago, 2002.

Below right: Many immigrant groups strive to retain their religious practices in America. The Church of the Holy Nativity at 2820 West Ardmore Avenue is one of two Romanian Orthodox churches in Chicago. The city’s Romanians lack one central neighborhood and live throughout the Northwest Side.

G

eorge Baba was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1978. George’s grandparents raised him in their village, Nehoiu, in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains near the city of Brasov, while his parents worked toward their university degrees in Bucharest. After completing their studies, George’s parents were unwilling to make the moral “compromises” necessary to advance their careers in the visual and performing arts in communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. George’s parents formally requested to leave Romania in 1981; shortly thereafter, they lost their Romanian citizenship. Two years later George and his parents legally left Romania. They spent two weeks in Rome getting their immigration documents in order before coming to the United States in the summer of 1983 with their belongings packed into fourteen suitcases.

CHS: What are your earliest memories of coming to the United States?

George: I vaguely remember when we first came to California from Romania. We didn’t have a place to stay or anything, just a bunch of luggage. My dad had 32 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

From what I remember, I was not in any [special] English classes when I was in kindergarten. I remember getting into fights a lot with the other kids.

I was frustrated. Of course, this was a few months after we had gotten here. It was the fall of 1983, I believe, when I went to kindergarten. We came from Romania that summer. I was only here a few months, and I had never spoken English before so it was totally new. And I remember getting into fights with kids and being frustrated, because I couldn’t understand many times what they were saying.

How long did your feelings of frustration persist while you were in school?

Honestly, since I was moving around from school to school, the other kids were kind of hesitant to let me in, and I wasn’t always accepted . . . and the same thing happened when I came to Chicago for sixth grade. . . . I was just trying to pick up the same sports, the same interests. . . . I did basketball and skateboarding. They were both big in sixth grade. So I picked up skateboarding. I do, actually, still skateboard a little bit. I really got into it actually, from then. So that kind of helped break the ice a little bit.

But it was still hard.

Above: The Church of the Holy Nativity, originally built in 1935, was once the Mount Cavalry Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Below: Chicago’s other Romanian Orthodox church, the Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church of Saint Mary at 4225 North Central Avenue on the Northwest Side, features a monument to Romanian American war veterans.

What role did your family play in your being accepted?

My mom, she speaks six languages all together, but she prefers speaking Romanian. Even when we were in public many times, she would always be speaking with me in Romanian. Especially when I was a little kid and trying to fit into these different places, she would be speaking Romanian. I would say, “Mom, speak English!”

That was part of fitting in. That was a real big deal to me for her to speak English so people wouldn’t know that we were from Europe. But now it’s not a big deal at all. I Chicago’s Global Communities | 33

think it’s real cool now that we can speak Romanian and other people [do] not know what we are talking about . . .

[Food] was another big thing. I said many times [to my mom and grandma], “Come on guys, I have a hard enough time trying to get along with the kids at school.”

But they would pack lunch for me which was my grandmother’s cooking. It was Romanian food. Many times I wouldn’t take my lunches. I would throw it away on the way to school. I would try to get my mom to buy the food all the other kids had so that I could fit in. She was really reluctant to do that. She would say, “It’s not healthy for you. It’s not good for you.”

Do you interact with the larger Romanian community beyond your family?

[In Chicago], there are two Romanian churches. I go there sometimes with my grandma, and I have met some people there, some Romanians . . . A lot of them speak English in church. [Sometimes] I go with my sister and my brothers to church. They understand Romanian well, and they speak okay. But they always prefer to speak English, actually. I remember some of the other older people, they say towards me and my mom, “Why don’t you teach these kids Romanian?”

That makes them really upset in the Romanian church

to hear Romanian kids speaking English. They say, “You should teach them Romanian.” And I usually tell them, “You should mind your own business.” This isn’t Romania . . . [but] I understand them, and there is a lot of truth to what they’re saying . . . My brothers go to a Catholic school . . . with all English-speaking kids. And then basically my grandma is really the only one to speak Romanian all the time in the house. It is hard for them to really develop a liking towards Romanian. I would like them to speak Romanian. They do speak it, but they prefer English.

George has made four visits to Romania over the last seven years.

Going back to Romania in ’95 and seeing how it was as a culture, I much better understood the culture as a whole.

I was really happy that I did go back. I made many friends. I met many of my old relatives. It made me want to go back the following year and again the year after that just because I liked it so much. I did feel close to the culture, and I am really happy that I did go back. And I still want to go back. In terms of living there, it would be really hard to live there. . . . It’s a third-world country.

The economy is really bad. Many people live . . . in poverty. It would be hard to get adjusted to it, I guess.

Romanian Impact magazine keeps Romanians abreast of issues such as dealing with immigration procedures and return trips to the homeland. Center Focus Publishing, a Romanian publishing house on Irving Park Road, prints the newspaper in Romanian with some English. Center Focus also prints the Romanian American Yellow Pages.

34 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

What were your feelings while in Romania?

I basically felt, “What the hell am I doing here? This isn’t my home.” I feel that for every other part of Romania, except for the part where I grew up with my grandparents. That was the only place . . . that I had memories of and that I remembered . . . Everywhere else in Romania I had to get used to, and I didn’t know anything about [those places]. And I was waiting to go to the place where I did grow up with my grandparents. It had changed in many ways even though it’s such a small place, and it’s isolated. It’s in the mountains. There were different buildings, churches, and new buildings. I was especially anxious to see that place, but all of Romania was a learning experience. I had to get used to it. I didn’t feel like I was going home.

Left: Semproniu Iclozan, a celebrated Romanian artist, painted Citizen of the Moon in the late 1980s after he and his wife came to Chicago. Like George Baba’s parents, the painter’s citizenship was revoked by the Romanian government. He painted this image of an American flag inside a UPS box with a moonscape when he lacked citizenship in any country. Above: The Romania–NATO Alliance, constituted in July 2001, promotes the integration of Romania in NATO, which it hopes will help make Romania more open to foreign investment. Below: The list of cities on the Balkan Travel Agency window at 3935 North Pulaski Road includes Timisoara, a Romanian city, as well as several other cities in the Balkans. Many Romanian immigrants, including George Baba, return to their homeland for visits when they can.

How did Romanians react to you?

Many times what happened to me in Romania was that people who would be speaking with me would say, “Well, you have a very strange accent, you must be from the mountains somewhere.” And I would say, “Yeah, in fact, originally I am.” But I really wouldn’t let on too much that I was from America.

Many times you have to be careful in Romania who you tell you are American, because you might get robbed. Because everyone knows Americans have dollars. . . . There were people that I met and I tried to give them the same thing, “I’m from the mountains.” And they would say, “No you’re not. You live in America, right?” So there were people that did know right away. Even though I am Romanian, and I do speak Romanian, many people just know, because my culture is not the same.

Peter T. Alter is a public historian at the Chicago Historical Society and the project coordinator for Global Communities.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | All images are from the Chicago Historical Society collection. 25 top, photograph by John Alderson; 25 bottom, photograph by Virginia HeidenreichBarber; 26–27, photograph by the author; 28 top, photograph by the author; 29 bottom, photograph by John Alderson; 31, photograph by the author; 32–33, photographs by Jay Crawford; 35 middle, photograph by Jay Crawford.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 35

YESTERDAY’S CITY I

Albert Lasker’s Advertising Revolution A RT H U R W. S C H U LT Z

T

he advertising business was already in its formative stages in 1898, when eighteen-year-old Albert Davis Lasker arrived in Chicago from Galveston, Texas, to work as an office boy at the Lord & Thomas advertising agency. The industry had grown from “shop signs” (the earliest billboards), posters, and broadsides to ads in newspapers and magazines— some displays even used images. Advertising agencies such as Lord & Thomas were evolving from basic advertising brokers to major creative forces in the industry. But no one was prepared for a creative force like Albert Lasker.

By the end of his career in 1942, Lasker had made more money than anyone else in the history of advertising by pitching directly to consumers, giving them a “reason why” to purchase the many products he promoted. His penchant for memorable advertising slogans and his use of mass media to disseminate them not only revolutionized the advertising industry but dramatically reshaped American popular culture. His American National Business Hall of Fame citation in 1975 declared Lasker the “Father of Modern Advertising.”

But back in 1898, Lasker seemed more interested in becoming a journalist than an ad man and planned on staying at Lord & Thomas only for the summer. Founded in 1873 and owned by Daniel Lord and Ambrose Thomas, the agency operated out of a single office with less than forty employees. In a speech to the Advertising Federation of America years later, Lasker remarked, “There was nobody there to train me. I was just given a desk. I asked everyone the same question: ‘What is advertising?’ Nobody could tell me. Even Mr. Thomas just referred me to the company’s slogan, ‘Advertise judiciously.’ Others said things like, ‘Keep everlastingly at it’ and ‘general publicity’ and ‘protect the market.’ None of them made sense to me.”

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Ambrose Thomas (below), partner at Lord & Thomas (above), and one of Lasker’s first advertising mentors.

Although at first he intended to be a journalist, Albert D. Lasker (seen here in the early 1900s) revolutionized the advertising world.

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When Lasker first began working at Lord & Thomas in 1898, the company’s offices were housed in Chicago’s Trude Building at Randolph Street and Wabash Avenue.

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By the time he turned twenty-four, even without knowing the definition of advertising, Lasker had risen through the ranks to become the top producer and a junior partner at Lord & Thomas. Then one evening, a messenger brought Thomas and Lasker a written note.

Coincidentally, it read: “I’m downstairs in the saloon and I can tell you what advertising is. If you wish to know, send the word ‘Yes’ down by messenger.” It was signed, John E. Kennedy. Although Thomas elected to ignore the note, Lasker volunteered to see Kennedy with Thomas’s reluctant approval. Lasker later recalled Kennedy as a strong, handsome man with a military bearing, blonde hair, and a handlebar mustache.

Reportedly a former Royal Canadian Mountie, Kennedy had learned his trade writing advertising for the Hudson Bay Company and for patent medicines such as Dr. Shoop’s Restorative.

Lasker remembered this first meeting vividly all his life, reminiscing, “It was six o’clock when I asked the messenger to have Kennedy come up. I left the building at three o’clock the next morning. When I went home, I knew what advertising was. What was it that Kennedy told me that night? It is simple. I can tell it to you in five words. He told me: ‘Advertising is salesmanship in print.’

And then he said, ‘Give the consumer, in an interesting way, the reason why it is in the consumer’s interest to buy wares you have to sell. Convince the reader that he should buy because it is in his interest to buy, rather than because you want to sell [it to] him.’ That night, one of the most momentous things in my life occurred. . . . Modern advertising was born.”

Lasker hired John Kennedy on the spot. Together they established the first copywriting training program in advertising history. They hired nine newspaper reporters and taught them to write copy that sold products by keeping the consumer in mind. Lord & Thomas publicized the hiring of Kennedy, announcing that he had joined the agency for an annual salary of sixteen thousand dollars, making him the highest-paid copywriter in the business, according to an article in Judicious Advertising. New York advertising agency head J. Walter Thompson traveled to Chicago to advise the young upstart Lasker to stop his foolishness before he ruined the business; no copywriter was worth more than three thousand a year.

With the “salesmanship-in-print” credo established, Lasker believed he knew the secret to successful advertising. After Kennedy left the firm for a lucrative freelance career, Lasker hired Claude Hopkins, now widely accepted as one of the greatest copywriters in advertising history. Hopkins, already very wealthy from a prosperous advertising career, was on the verge of retiring when Lasker cajoled him to take on a single, short-term assignment. Hopkins worked for Lasker for the next eighteen

Above: John E. Kennedy, reportedly a former Canadian Mountie, honed his copywriting craft by promoting patent medicines such as Dr. Shoop’s Restorative before coming to work at Lord & Thomas in 1904. Below: Claude Hopkins was already a successful advertising copywriter when Lasker convinced him to replace Kennedy in 1907. The new partnership went on to make millions of dollars.

Yesterday’s City | 39

Lasker and Kennedy replaced negative ads (left) with more positive ones, such as this 1904 example (right), the first in a successful series promoting washing machines.

years. In a 1909 speech, Hopkins commented, “No man ever turned Albert Lasker aside.” Again, Lasker announced Hopkins had been employed for a salary of fifty thousand dollars, by far the largest amount ever paid to any copywriter at the time. Hopkins said, “About the only disagreement I had with Mr. Lasker referred to his desire to overpay me.” Lasker described their partnership: “He was the greatest man I ever was with, a great writer. My role with Hopkins was to do the selecting of the ideas to be developed.”

During his career, Lasker worked with nearly four hundred major companies. Four accounts in particular— Palmolive, Pepsodent, Kotex, and Lucky Strike—reveal how he implemented his salesmanship-in-print and reason-why advertising concepts to earn money for both his clients and himself. He utilized the consumer’s desire for beauty and health (Palmolive and Pepsodent), love of radio (Pepsodent and Lucky Strike), and need for convenience (Kotex). He discovered entire new advertising markets (Kotex and Lucky Strike) and media outlets (Lucky Strike and Pepsodent). In the relatively new ground of advertising, Lasker blazed a tremendous trail.

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Palmolive Soap When the B. J. Johnson Soap Company, a small firm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, developed a new soap made from palm and olive oils, Lasker positioned it as the country’s first beauty soap in 1908. Although several soap brands had been on the market for some time (including Ivory, Cashmere Bouquet, and Woodbury’s), Lasker’s strategy made Palmolive the best-selling soap in the world. This soap fortune culminated in the construction of Chicago’s famous Palmolive building and earned Lasker millions.

Lasker recognized that a unique beauty claim could be made for this new soap, a claim woven of its special ingredients that dated back to Cleopatra. Palmolive’s advertising promised women that, with continued use, this new beauty soap would produce a healthy, rosy complexion, thanks to the combination of pure imported palm and olive oils blended with cocoa butter. As the advertising evolved around the product’s beauty positioning, Lasker developed Palmolive’s world famous slogan, “Keep that schoolgirl complexion,” a promise few women could resist. A major consumer benefit grew out of the successful introduction of Palmolive’s soap: Lasker’s plan to reduce the price of Palmolive to ten cents a bar forced higher-priced competitors to follow.

This 1921 Palmolive ad, touting Lasker’s famous slogan, “Keep that schoolgirl complexion,” referenced ancient beauty secrets as well as the soap’s inexpensive ten-cent price.

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Pepsodent Toothpaste In 1916, Lasker and Hopkins created an advertising campaign for Pepsodent toothpaste that made both of them millions of dollars and the owner of the product even more. Hopkins called it “the greatest success in my career,” while Lasker bragged, “I am Pepsodent.” The campaign exemplified their modern advertising credo and benefited both the advertiser and the public.

When Douglas Smith, the owner of Pepsodent, came to Lord & Thomas with a new formula for toothpaste, Lasker was skeptical. Dentifrices had been sold since the Civil War, and scores of brands already flooded the marketplace, making any new product extremely difficult to sell. This new formula depended on hard-to-explain technicalities and cost twice the price of its competitors.

The owner persisted, so Hopkins started a six-month study of scientific journals. He read about plaque on teeth that harbored bacteria, called it “film,” and suggested that people run their tongue over their teeth to detect the “film” that hid the natural beauty of their mouths. The headline of one early advertisement read: “Magic lies in pretty teeth—Remove that film.”

Lord & Thomas proposed a low-cost yet rigorous testing of hundreds of Pepsodent advertisements, each keyed to measure results. Each advertisement would carry a coupon offering a free tube of Pepsodent or some other incentive; consumer response would determine the selling power of the ad. These tests had to be inexpensive as the newly organized Pepsodent Company had little capital.

For the first test, only one thousand dollars was spent in a single market. Sales from the ad paid for the test. Tests in other cities weighed different appeals and offers and confirmed the findings. By a process of elimination, the tests uncovered the most effective headlines and offers. The tests proved that consumers responded to promises of better-looking teeth and a free sample.

Pepsodent was launched nationally—without a sales force. Its first advertisement appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, then the country’s largest-selling magazine; readers brought twenty-three thousand coupons from the ad to retailers for a free tube, which encouraged stores to stock Pepsodent. This method achieved distribution at low cost and stimulated a quick trial of the product by consumers; the early testing had already reduced risk. Within eighteen months, Pepsodent was the world’s largest-selling toothpaste; it was eventually sold in seventeen countries and advertised in several foreign languages.

The Lord & Thomas early account histories refer to the deplorable state of mouth hygene prior to World War I. Inspired by dental guidlines, Pepsodent’s advertising urged,

“Clean your teeth twice a day; see your dentist twice a year.” As millions of Americans followed this advice, the dental health of the nation improved markedly and the number of practicing dentists rose. Doctor Charles H. Mayo reflected in a medical convention address, “Amos ’n’ Andy [characters in popular Pepsodent-sponsored radio program] are doing more than anyone else in the world to get people to care for their teeth.” Albert Lasker proudly summed up his experience with Pepsodent: “The main thing advertising of dentifrices has done is [to] keep the people thoroughly alive to the needs of oral hygiene, saving them untold suffering and sickness.”

Lord & Thomas’s 1923 (right) and 1924 (opposite) ads for Pepsodent offered mail-in coupons for a free “10-Day” tube of toothpaste.

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This 1925 Kotex ad from The Ladies’ Home Journal eliminated vague terms such as “meets the most exacting needs,” which confused consumers, and directly spelled out the product’s advantages.

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Kotex World War I created a critical shortage of surgical cotton for hospital use. Ernst Mahler, a Viennese chemist who came to America to work for Kimberly-Clark, a small Wisconsin paper manufacturer, perfected a new wood product he named cellucotton. Composed of layers of soft, fluffy material derived from wood, it was several times as absorbent as surgical cotton. Army hospitals and Red Cross centers in Europe received shiploads of cellucotton, and nurses in France soon discovered that a piece of cellucotton wadding wrapped in gauze made an effective sanitary napkin. Word of the new use of this material led the Kimberly-Clark Corporation to begin manufacturing such a product for use by American women in the early 1920s: Kotex.

As the first disposable sanitary napkin, the product faced severe marketing and advertising obstacles. Retail druggists, the vast majority of whom were male, did not believe such a product could be marketed. Initial Kotex advertising, developed by a small Wisconsin agency, was cautious, indirect, discreet, and ambiguous, as publications demanded. The word “menstruation” could not be used, and inoffensive expressions such as “meets the most exacting needs” and “guards against emergencies,” gave women few details on how, when, and why to use this revolutionary product. Consequently, advertising had little effect. Women did not buy Kotex in the few drug stores that would carry it. As Mahler noted, “The product was so revolutionary in concept that it did poorly in its first three years, and Kimberly-Clark lost a considerable amount of money promoting it. Several members of the firm thought the product should be abandoned.” In a 1938 interview, Lasker recalled Lord & Thomas’s first look at the account:

In 1928, Kotex published Marjorie May’s 12th Birthday (above, the 1938 version) to help mothers talk to their daughters about puberty. After the campaign, Kimberly-Clark received thousands of letters from girls and women asking for more information about the company’s feminine hygiene products. In this letter (below), a fourteen-year-old girl states, “If you send [the Kotex information booklet], I won’t have to ask my parents.”

A few of us talked to our wives asking them if they used Kotex and found out they didn’t because they didn’t like to ask the druggist for it. So we developed a simple idea of putting plain wrapped packages in stores so that women could take a wrapped package without embarrassment. Next to the display we placed a sign: “This is Kotex which you have seen advertised. Just take one and leave sixty-five cents on the counter. You need not see the clerk.” The business boomed by leaps and bounds.

Lord & Thomas recommended straight-talking advertising that told women of Kotex’s benefits and relieved any sense of shame in buying it. According to a 1974 Advertising Age article, when The Ladies’ Home Journal objected to the copy, Lasker visited the magazine’s legendary editor Edward Bok, asking him to have his female secretary read the advertising that Bok felt would offend his readers. The secretary enthusiastically supported the Yesterday’s City | 45

Lasker (left) and tobacco magnate George Washington Hill first teamed up in 1923 to create the advertising campaigns that made Lucky Strike cigarettes number one in the market.

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Lucky Strike Cigarettes Lasker found even greater success with Lucky Strike cigarettes. Percival Hill, chief executive officer of the American Tobacco Company (ATC), and his son George Washington Hill hired Lasker in 1923. Percival Hill died in 1925, but George Washington Hill and Lasker went on to make tobacco advertising history over the next nineteen years until Lasker retired. They drove Lucky Strike to the number-one position in sales over Camel and Chesterfield, making ATC hundreds of millions of dollars and increasing Lasker’s personal fortune.

In 1923, ATC produced several cigarette brands, including Lucky Strike. The company made up only 20 percent of the market, however, while Camel held 50 percent and Chesterfield 25 percent with their single brands.

In a 1938 interview, Lasker described the situation:

Lasker geared the 1920s Lucky Strike “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” campaign to appeal to women, a previously untapped market for cigarettes.

copy, saying, “Why, Mr. Bok, this is really a wonderful thing. I certainly think we should run this in the Journal.

Women deserve to be told about it.” With sales increases, the price of Kotex decreased to encourage wider use. In 1923, a box of Kotex cost sixty-five cents; in 1934, it cost only twenty cents, despite many improvements. Lasker always advocated price reduction as soon as possible to expand the market.

The next innovative advertising campaign for Kotex involved a special educational program aimed at teenagers. A series of advertisements called “Are You in the Know?” used a quiz format to offer young girls tips on dating, manners, grooming, fashion, etiquette, and, of course, when and how to use Kotex. The campaign built acceptance of the product with young women who would use Kotex for decades. Another campaign, based on a booklet titled Marjorie May’s 12th Birthday, was designed to help mothers talk to their daughters about menstruation. Millions of other free booklets followed, each helping to establish Kotex as the leading personal hygiene product in the country. In Kotex, Lasker had found a way to market a previously unmarketable product.

The American Tobacco Company was late in starting. Up to 1923, they must have had fifty brands, each with a very small advertising appropriation. They were really out of it! We did some tests at first. I said to the son, “You’re spending $400,000 a year. I’m going to work with you on certain ideas.

If in two years we can’t have this account up to $5 million in advertising, the brand can’t live. But when we get to $5 million, I never want to hear from you how much our commissions amount to. You won’t be paying us. We will have earned them [the commissions] ourselves.”

At the time of Lasker’s first Lucky Strike campaign, smoking by women was considered taboo. Lasker recalled, “My wife was ordered not to smoke in a restaurant. It filled me with indignation.” Tapping a previously undeveloped market, Lasker decided to address Lucky Strike advertising directly to women, which was extremely daring for its time; editorials damned the campaign and experts claimed the approach would alienate consumers. The Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau received protests. The advertising, which challenged the candy business, urged women to “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

Women responded overwhelmingly, so much so that the confection industry brought a suit against ATC, charging unfair competition. The campaign made Lucky Strike number one in sales, passing Camel.

Lord & Thomas also pioneered radio advertising, introducing Lucky Strike through musical programs such as Your Hit Parade, which featured popular songs each week. Hill wrote to Lasker in 1928: I want you to know that radio has done an excellent job for us. In the past two months, the sales of Lucky Strikes have increased 47 percent more than all other cigarettes combined. We feel this remarkYesterday’s City | 47

In Lasker’s last campaign before retirement, “Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War” (1942), the cigarette package changed from green to white in a patriotic effort to save copper wartime materials.

able increase in sales is largely due to our broadcast programs. Our advertising appropriations will be materially increased in 1929, made possible because of the increased sales during the period we have been broadcasting.

Lord & Thomas required their personnel working on the Lucky Strike account to attend frequent field trips to production plants and tobacco auctions. On one such trip to an auction, a copywriter picked up discarded cigarette packages from the floor and found that Lucky Strike accounted for three-fourths of them. Lasker cut the ratio to two-to-one and created a new campaign: “With men who know tobacco best, it’s Luckies two-to-one.” Sales and market shares grew again, leading to the next campaign, which simply stated, “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco”; ads featured famous depictions of tobacco scenes. In radio advertising, a device simulating a telegrapher’s key tapped out the letters “LS/MFT,” followed by an auctioneer’s chant and the slogan, “Sold American!”

Lasker’s last campaign before retirement was “Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War.” A year’s supply of green ink on the Lucky Strike package contained enough copper to provide bronze for four hundred fight tanks. To support the war effort, the company replaced the green ink with white and promoted the switch in their advertising, which some critics considered exploiting patriotism for commercial purposes. Lord & Thomas account executive Emerson Foote recalled, “This was one of the most notorious campaigns we ran. It broke about the time of the North Africa invasion in 1942. We received a lot of hate mail, but the curious thing is that Lucky sales went up substantially.”

Lasker retired in 1942, and Hill died in 1946. Without the team, the magic was gone, and Lucky Strike’s market share shrank considerably.

Besides persuading consumers with campaigns and slogans, Lasker also influenced people in advertising.

Like many others, William Benton learned the business 48 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

from Lasker and then opened his own agency, Benton & Bowles. After he retired from advertising he became a U.S. senator—and Lasker was his largest contributor.

Lasker drew members of his own family into the business. His eldest daughter Mary became a senior executive on the Kotex and Kleenex accounts and was elected a vice president. After her advertising career, she married Leigh B. Block. In 1980, the Blocks donated funds to Northwestern University for the construction and endowment of a gallery, which eventually became the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. Lasker’s eldest son Edward worked in Lord & Thomas’s New York offices and was instrumental in bringing Bob Hope to radio (on a Pepsodent-sponsored program). Edward left the company to enlist in World War II; after the war he moved to California and became a successful lawyer and businessman.

Albert Lasker’s interests and energy brought him success in his many ventures outside the advertising world.

As part owner of the Chicago Cubs, he devised the Lasker Plan for major league baseball in 1920, which recommended a new board comprising individuals outside of the sport to replace the National Commission after the Black Sox scandal of 1919. This suggestion led to the installation of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the first commissioner of organized baseball. Lasker sold his Cubs interest to William Wrigley in 1925, whose family eventually sold the team to the Tribune Company.

One of Chicago’s most prominent philanthropists, Lasker gave millions of dollars to the University of Chicago, established the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation for scientific research, supported Jewish charities for decades, and contributed to campaigns throughout the Depression.

The Albert and Mary Lasker art collection, started after his retirement, consisted of 168 works, including 17 Picassos, 12 Matisses, and paintings by Van Gogh, Monet, Braque, Renoir, and Degas. Simon and Schuster published a volume featuring the collection in 1957.

Edward Lasker (left) followed in his father’s advertising footsteps for a while but eventually became a lawyer and businessman in California.

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Lasker was thrilled with Judge Landis’s appointment as the first commissioner of baseball. In this 1930 letter, Landis challenges Lasker to a round of golf on the Mill Road Farm private course.

Mill Road Farm, Lasker’s palatial estate near Lake Forest (seen here c. 1930), featured luxurious gardens, a pool, and a private golf course.

Lasker’s $3.6-million estate, built in 1926 on 480 acres near Lake Forest, Illinois, was legendary. It included a fifty-five-room French manor house designed

by Chicago architect David Adler, a twelve-car garage, three gatehouses, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a thirty-seat theater, a purebred herd of guernsey cows, ninety-seven acres of gardens (including a topiary garden), several greenhouses, six miles of hedges, stables and a paddock, and a private golf course. In all, the estate totaled twenty-seven buildings. Lasker, reportedly the largest employer in the Lake Forest area, had a permanent staff of fifty plus an additional one hundred employees to care for the golf course and gardens in the summer. Lasker also owned an eighteen-room house in Chicago’s Gold Coast for the spring and fall, a home in Miami Beach, and a large apartment in the Ritz Hotel in New York City for use during his frequent business trips.

With the outbreak of World War II, Lasker donated the estate to the University of Chicago, sold his Gold Coast home, and disposed of his Florida property. He moved to New York with his third wife Mary (Flora, his first wife, died in 1936 and his second marriage to Yesterday’s City | 51

In his third wife, Mary, Albert Lasker found a partner in art collecting and philanthropy. The two created the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation in 1942 to support medical research. Today the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards are among the most coveted in medicine.

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actress Doris Kenyon ended in divorce in 1939) and dissolved Lord & Thomas so that his three managers, Emerson Foote, Fairfax Cone, and Don Belding could form their own company—Foote, Cone & Belding—to service Lasker’s accounts. Lasker also helped launch new careers in medical research with the prestigious Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards. Since 1962, more than half of the recipients of the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize.

Albert Lasker died of cancer in 1952, but his legacy to advertising survives. The Wall Street Journal once described him as the “most influential voice in American advertising.” Countless companies have reaped the benefits of marketing directly to the consumer. It’s nearly impossible to imagine what today’s ubiquitous advertising world would look like without the prominent influence of Albert Lasker and his dynamic approach to advertising.

Arthur W. Schultz, retired chairman and CEO of Foote, Cone & Belding, spent his career with the company.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 36 top, courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation; 36 bottom, courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and Foote, Cone & Belding, Chicago; 37, courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation; 38, photograph courtesy of Foote, Cone & Belding; 39 top and bottom, courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation; 40, courtesy of Advertising Age and the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation; 41, Item #BH0999. Ad* Access. 1999. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. [http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/] Courtesy of Colgate-Palmolive; 42, Item #BH2183. Ad* Access. 1999. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. [http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/ adaccess/] Courtesy of Unilever United States, Inc./PEPSODENT® is a registered trademark of Chesebrough-Pond’s; 43, Item #BH2189. Ad* Access. 1999.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. [http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/] Courtesy of Unilever United States, Inc./PEPSODENT® is a registered trademark of Chesebrough-Pond’s; 44, Item #BH0240. Ad* Access. 1999. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. [http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/] Reprinted with permission of Kimberly-Clark Corporation.

All rights reserved; 45 top, reprinted with permission of Kimberly-Clark Corporation. All rights reserved. Image courtesy of Harr y Finley, Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health; 45 bottom, courtesy of the author; 46, photograph by Daniel Berns. Courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation; 47–48, images courtesy of James Shaw; 49, courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation; 50–51, CHS, X1665.1991.423.13; 51 right, courtesy of the author; 52–53, courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.

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MAKING HISTORY I

Civic Entrepreneurs: Interviews with Richard L. Thomas and Arturo Velasquez Sr. T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

I

n the second half of the twentieth century, business and civic leaders Richard L. Thomas and Arturo Velasquez Sr. made indelible, but largely unrecognized, contributions to Chicago. After more than three decades of working at the First National Bank of Chicago (then known as First Chicago and now Bank One), Thomas assumed the top position in 1992 and transformed the company into one of the ten leading commercial banks in the United States. His work was recognized with the Daniel H. Burnham Award for Distinguished Leadership from the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce in 1993 and the Crain’s Chicago Business Executive of the Year Award in 1994.

After coming to Chicago as a child, Velasquez created and built his own multimillion-dollar enterprise in the heart of the city’s Back-of-theYards neighborhood. Although he remains unknown to many Americans, Velasquez retains an honored place among Chicago’s Mexican community. Carlos Tortolero of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum once wrote that Velasquez is considered “the most important Chicago Mexican of the twentieth century” and that the Velasquez family “is like the Kennedy family for the Mexican community” of Chicago.

Arturo Velasquez Sr. was born in 1915 in Tototlan, Jalisco, Mexico, at the height of the Mexican Revolution. His father, Eliseo Velasquez, owned a small shop and was sympathetic to the Cristero movement, which opposed the anticlerical measures included in the constitution adopted in 1917. Eliseo Velasquez’s opposition to the revolutionary government eventually forced him to move his family first to Zacamistle and then Cerro Azul, both in the Mexican state of Veracruz. In 1924, Velasquez’s father migrated to Gary, Indiana, where he

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The Chicago Historical Society awarded Richard L. Thomas the 2002 Marshall Field History Maker Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation.

found work in a steel mill. Velasquez and his mother, Juanita Flores Velasquez, joined Eliseo the following year. He vividly remembers the immigration process at that time: “My mother and I passed [the Mexican–United States border] with a fee of eight dollars a crossing,” claims Velasquez. “They gave us a little piece of paper that said ‘You are now a legal resident of the United States’. . . . Eight bucks for two people. No questions asked.”

Life in Gary was hard. After a few years, Velasquez’s father returned to Mexico. Velasquez’s mother remained in the United States with the young Arturo because of the uncertainty of the revolution in Mexico. They moved to Chicago to live with Juanita’s sister, but this was during the Great Depression, and Velasquez’s mother could not find a job. When a young man offered them a ride to Guadalajara, they too elected to return to Mexico. While traveling through New Mexico, however, their car overturned.

“We didn’t know what to do,” recalls Velasquez. “My mother has no money and I’m a little kid.” But then a man appeared and offered them a job picking sugar beets. “What the heck are the sugar beets?” Velasquez remembers asking. “My mother looked at me and said, ‘Well, it’s a job.’”

For more than a year, they labored alongside one another as migrant farm workers in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa and finally accumulated enough savings to return to Chicago in 1929. Living in the Chinatown neighborhood near Alexander and Twenty-fourth Streets, Juanita Velasquez opened a small restaurant, or tacqueria, while Arturo attended Haines Elementary School. By the time he graduated from the eighth grade, Velasquez had attended thirteen different schools, both in Mexico and across the Midwest. Shortly thereafter, he went to work at the Peanut Specialty Company, a candy factory at 400 West Superior Street, earning twelve dollars per week.

Left: In 1993, Thomas received the Daniel H. Burnham Award for Distinguished Leadership from the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. Thomas (second from left) and his wife Helen (center) pictured with their children at the awards ceremony.

Below: Arturo Velasquez Sr. received the 2002 Bertha Honoré Palmer History Maker Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership.

Velasquez and his wife Shirley are members of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.

Making History | 55

The February 28, 1988, issue of Sunday: The Chicago Tribune Magazine featured Velasquez and his family on the cover (above). The accompanying article (opposite) detailed Velasquez’s roles as husband, father, entrepreneur, businessman, community affairs activist, and education advocate.

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Making History | 57

In 1953, Thomas graduated from Kenyon College (below) and was honored with the E. Malcolm Anderson Cup, an annual award that recognizes the student who has done the most for Kenyon during the year. Forty-one years later, Crain’s Chicago Business honored Thomas with their Executive of the Year award (above) for his corporate and civic achievements.

Richard Thomas’s childhood was more geographically stable. He was born in 1931, in Marion, Ohio, to Marvin C. and Irene Harruff Thomas. “My father was in charge of the composing room at the Marion Star, which was actually started

by Warren G. Harding many years earlier,” recounts Thomas. “Neither of my parents went to college, nor did the parents of most of my childhood classmates.”

The Great Depression directly affected Thomas’s childhood. “These were not easy economic times,” Thomas says. “From a very early age all of us had odd jobs. I mowed a lot of lawns and worked in a shoe store, grocery store, collected bills, worked on railroad section gangs when I was in high school, delivered papers certainly.” Thomas believes that his family weathered these difficult circumstances, in part, because of their strong ties. “We were close as a family, and we all pitched in to make things work. The paycheck sometimes didn’t last until the next payday, so there were some pretty tight times.”

In high school, Thomas excelled both as a student and an athlete and eventually won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The day he arrived at the academy, however, he failed the physical examination because of an enlarged spleen, a condition that never bothered him before or since. Thomas returned home and enrolled at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio.

There he excelled in the classroom and on the baseball field. In 1953, he graduated summa cum laude, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Copenhagen.

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Like many immigrants, Velasquez wanted to find a source of economic independence. He dreamed of becoming an airplane mechanic but by accident became interested in jukeboxes. His mother had purchased one for her tacqueria and suggested that Arturo install it and try to make a little money.

“In those days, the manufacturer sold jukeboxes and other equipment, and they would send salesmen to locations [where] they were going to open up a restaurant,” Velasquez remembers. He purchased and installed several more machines, founded Velasquez Automatic Music Company, and today he is still in the business.

From the beginning, Velasquez identified the neighborhoods with growing numbers of Mexicans—Little Village, Pilsen, and Back-of-the-Yards—and began peddling his product door-to-door. “I followed them [Mexican immigrants] every place they went,” states Velasquez. “They took to me like ducks to water.”

Other jukebox distributors in the Chicago area failed to see the potential market, ignoring the then-small but ever-growing Mexican community. “They didn’t know the language. They didn’t know their customs. They didn’t know their music,” explains Velasquez. At the same time, he adds, “If I saw a group of Mexicans that came in from southern Mexico, I knew what to do with them. If they came from northern Mexico, I knew what to do with them.”

Velasquez was soon supplying most of Chicago’s Mexican restaurants, taverns, pool halls, and ice cream parlors with their music. “The Mexican coming here is nostalgic,” adds Velasquez. “His music reminds him of his country.”

Above: Thomas (32) played on the Kenyon College basketball team.

Below: Velasquez began his career installing jukeboxes in restaurants, pool halls, and ice cream parlors. Velasquez (right) stands with a salesman and a Comet– Fireball model Rockola jukebox at one such location, Tacqueria Mexico, formerly on Halsted Street.

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Velasquez (left) and Frank Pudula of Melody Music Corporation stand beside a Rockola jukebox at a music operator’s convention in 1961.

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Throughout his professional career, Velasquez recognized the contradictory forces that pull at Mexican immigrants. He employs a family metaphor: “I feel like Mexico is my mother. The United States is my very beautiful stepmother.”

If somebody asks him to choose one, he admits, “I love them both, but I love it here. I have to stay here. This is it.”

Velasquez’s entrepreneurial sensibilities led him to create his own market.

“I would see someone . . . interested in having a little restaurant, and in those days for two or three hundred dollars you could put up a restaurant.”

Velasquez would loan those people the start-up money, help them apply for a license, and then supply them with music and a jukebox.

After Thomas’s year in Copenhagen, he returned to the United States and worked briefly for the Inland Steel Corporation before being drafted by the army.

Upon his release, he matriculated at Harvard University, was selected as a George F. Baker Scholar, and in 1958, he received his master’s of business administration. Thomas then began working as a trainee in First Chicago’s commercial banking department. He quickly rose through the ranks: elected an officer in 1960, a vice president in 1963, senior vice president in 1969, executive vice president in 1972, and president in 1974. From 1965 to 1966, Thomas also served as the first general manager of the bank’s first international branch in London. “In those days, it was pretty traditional to stay with your original employer for a long time,” says Thomas. “I didn’t come here [to First Chicago] with the idea that it was going to be a stepping stone to something else.”

Shortly after completing his Fulbright scholarship, Thomas was drafted by the army. He stood in uniform (above) for this snapshot with his mother on December 31, 1954. Upon his discharge, Thomas matriculated at Harvard University’s Business School. During his second year, the faculty selected him as a George F. Baker Scholar (below).

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The Chicago Junior Association of Commerce and Industry named Thomas as one of its “Ten Outstanding Young Men of 1966.” According to a Chicago Sun-Times article (above), recipients were selected “for distinction in their work and for dedication to the community’s welfare.”

Thomas never did work for anyone else but remains impressed with how easy it is to apply bank training to other forms of business. “I think that if you learn the discipline of how to make credit judgments and if you learn how the system works, you can take that and go to a number of other kinds of activities. I think that experience serves you very well,” said Thomas. He adds, “In the commercial banking industry, you also learn more about managing an organization than you do if you went into investment banking. I think the investment banks tend to be more focused on deals. How to make an organization work together isn’t as important as it is in a commercial bank.”

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From 1965 to 1966, Thomas served as the general manager of First Chicago’s first international branch in London. By the spring of 1967, First Chicago also operated offices in Frankfurt and Tokyo. Thomas (center) is featured in this advertisement that ran in Business Week, TIME, and U.S. News in April of that year.

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Thomas’s career at First Chicago stalled in 1972 when Gaylord Freeman, then chief executive officer, declared a succession contest. Thomas was among the final candidates but was thwarted by his perceived fiscal conservatism and unwillingness to deplete the bank’s reserve to cushion against unexpected losses. Thomas was passed over for the top position not once but twice, first to A. Robert Abboud in 1975 and then Barry Sullivan in 1980. At various times over the next decade, Thomas considered leaving First Chicago in search of other opportunities but several factors kept him at the bank.

Staying at First Chicago proved to be a wise decision. In January 1992, Thomas became chief executive officer. At the time, the bank was suffering from a series of financial setbacks. Thomas promised to accomplish three goals: “Number one: clean up the balance sheet and get some earnings.

Number two: start to work right away on who your successor is going to be.

Number three: keep the bank in Chicago.” Thomas quickly restored both confidence and financial health in the ailing bank. He cut the bank’s dividend, wrote off approximately two billion dollars worth of bad loans, reined in marginal businesses, and boosted First Chicago’s stock price. By mid1995, the value of First Chicago’s stock had more than doubled, rising from twenty-five to sixty dollars per share. This success positioned the bank for a merger with Detroit’s NBD Corporation, which created the nation’s seventhlargest bank and, most notably, kept the headquarters in Chicago.

In light of the recent accounting scandals involving major American businesses such as Enron, Arthur Anderson, and WorldCom, Thomas’s fiscal philosophy, which hurt him in the 1970s and 1980s, now appears prophetic. Thomas has always argued that the primary concerns of internal auditors should be the client and the corporation’s audit committee, not senior management. “Like it or not,” Thomas later wrote, “the role of the 64 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

In 1992, First Chicago selected Thomas as chief executive officer. His perceived fiscal conservatism, which hurt him during the 1970s and 1980s, became an attractive trait to the ailing bank in the early 1990s.

auditor is to speak up when others might not want to—to express contrary views when others might prefer to gloss over the facts.” Thomas believes that auditors are responsible not only for the fiscal health of their immediate client but also for “safeguarding the employment of their fellow workers and the well-being of their communities.” Thomas worries that because of the recent accounting failures “the whole corporate governance system at the moment is in jeopardy.”

In retrospect, Thomas believes that the pinnacle of his career was his stewardship role during his four years as chief executive officer. “That’s got to be number one because I played a major role in keeping this bank here in Chicago and in serving our shareholders and customers,” he states. “I feel very good about that and . . . [about] providing some great careers for some important people.”

In more than three decades at First Chicago, Thomas witnessed a dramatic transformation in banking. When he started out, face-to-face relationships were critical. “When I was a young officer here,” reminisces Thomas, “we were a major bank to three world-class entrepreneurs: Nate Cummings, A. N. Pritzker and Henry Crown.” These men are, respectively, the founders of the Sara Lee Corporation and the financial enterprises of the Pritzker and Crown families. “We were the lead bank for all three of those men, their families, and their companies,” claims Thomas. While “business was mutually rewarding for them and for us,” he admits, “it was often informal, a handshake deal, oral guarantee, quid pro quo.” By contrast, notes Thomas, today, “business has become so litigious that you can’t operate on that basis anymore.” The field is also “so technology intensive and information intensive that you have to run at a much more rapid pace today to keep up with what’s going on,” he claims. Simply put, “It’s a more complicated business.”

Like Thomas, Velasquez had to adapt to changing technological realities during his professional career. When he started, jukeboxes played size 78 records. After World War II, the music industry switched to size 45 and in the mid-1980s, compact disks. “It was like going into business three different times,” recounts Velasquez. Yet by 1990, Velasquez owned twenty-five hundred jukeboxes, video game machines, and pool tables in more than five hundred locations. Then grossing two million dollars per year, Velasquez Automatic Music Company was one of Chicago’s largest Mexicanowned enterprises and companies handling currency-operated machines.

Velasquez also notes that his current client base differs considerably from the founding days of his company. At that time, “You could get a letter of support from a relative and come here illegally. In time, you became a citizen. You went to school and . . . mixed into the crowd neatly,” notes Velasquez. “But today, how long does it take you to become legal? Years.” Furthermore, “the rules have changed all together,” he adds.

“You’re going to have to come into

Velasquez (left), a leader in his religious community, with the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin.

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In the spring of 2001, Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful Hispanic American ran an article on Velasquez, focusing on his commitment to achievement and education: “He has achieved his goals, and now he wants to see other Mexican immigrants get the preparation they need to achieve theirs.�

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the country the right way or else you’re not coming in. If you do come in the other way, people are going to take advantage of you and the worst enemy that an immigrant has is his own people. Your own people will take advantage of you because they know you don’t have the skills.”

In the second half of the twentieth century, Thomas witnessed a dramatic change in the structure of American banking. Bank One, the Chicago-based successor to First Chicago, is now the only major commercial bank headquartered in Chicago. Thomas emphasizes that global financial centers are no longer defined by banking institutions.

“Certainly the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, the Mercantile Exchange, and the Chicago Board of Trade are international players” in determining the city’s standing in the hierarchy of global finance. The presence of large, international insurance companies such as Aon, Allstate, and Kemper are now equally important. Chicago remains “a formidable financial community,” Thomas points out, “but not in the way we thought of it ten or twenty years ago when you had a handful of global banks and global investment banking firms [headquartered here].”

Thomas is also quick to attribute changes in Chicago’s banking climate to local conditions, not simply the often-cited explanation of globalization. “I don’t think Chicago has ever quite lived up to its potential as a financial center. That dates back to the antiquated branch banking laws we had that kept the large banks in Chicago constrained and disadvantaged, vis-à-vis the banks in New York and the West Coast,” Thomas believes. As evidence, he points out that LaSalle Bank is now owned by the Dutch and Harris Bank by the Canadians, while Continental Bank, once the nation’s largest by some measures, has disappeared. “I would say all of those [developments], one way or another, are results of our outdated banking laws that prevented these local institutions from living up to their potential,” argues Thomas.

Although Thomas and Velasquez significantly shaped their professional fields, many will remember them for their civic activities and philanthropy.

Velasquez, for example, was a founder of the Mexican American Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Chicago (1955), the Illinois Federation of Mexican Americans (1958), the Mexican Civic Society (1969), and the American Legion Manuel Perez Post #1017. He has served as a director of the Azteca Lions Club since 1962 and the Cordi-Marion Settlement House since 1978 and on the Back-of-the-Yards Council since 1966.

Velasquez’s business acumen and civic activity also pushed him into politics. In the 1960s, while working with Daley assistant Jack Riley, Velasquez became a key liaison between the Mexican community and Mayor Richard J. Daley. During those years, Velasquez organized the Mexican American Democratic Organization of Cook County, which for a time served as the unofficial political voice of Mexicans in Chicago and encouraged immigrants to seek citizenship. He later served on Mayor Jane Byrne’s City of Chicago 68 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

For more than thirty-five years, Velasquez (above) has been an active member of the Azteca Lions Club. The group has honored Velasquez many times during his years of service, most notably with their “Distinguished Service Award” in both 1966–67 and 1986–87 and their “Man of the Year” award in 1973. In honor of his many accomplishments, Velasquez was inducted into the Senior Citizens Hall of Fame on May 20, 1993 (below).

Above: In 1975, Mayor Richard J. Daley (fourth from right) appointed Velasquez (third from left) to the Board of Trustees of the City Colleges of Chicago. Below: Velasquez served as the secretary of the City Colleges from 1984 to 1987. During that time, he signed House Bill 608 with Illinois Governor James Thompson (left) to turn over thirty-two acres of vacant state land to the City Colleges.

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Committee on Aging and, in 1983, on Mayor Harold Washington’s transition team. Velasquez says that “without our [the Mexican community’s] involvement in politics, we were really helpless.”

Education, however, remains Velasquez’s most prized civic activity. As a child, he attracted the attention of a local priest in Gary, Indiana, who arranged for him to attend a grammar school attached to the University of Notre Dame.

Although he had to leave after one year, Velasquez still has vivid memories of that experience. Since then, Velasquez has believed that “an education is the best thing you can do for your family.” He has served as a trustee of the Chicago City Colleges (1975–87) and the National College of Education (1988–present) and on the advisory board of Holy Trinity High School (1985–present).

Velasquez’s children share his civic enthusiasm for education. His son, Arthur, was the first Mexican American elected to the board of trustees of the University of Illinois (1974–80), and he later served as a trustee at St. Xavier College on Chicago’s South Side. Similarly, Velasquez’s daughter, Carmen, is a leading consultant on bilingual education and was the first Mexican to serve on the Chicago Board of Education.

Richard Thomas’s civic activity helped keep him in Chicago in the early 1980s.

By some accounts, Thomas was better known in the nonprofit and cultural sector than the men for whom he worked. He was a trustee at Rush–Presbyterian–St. Luke’s Medical Center, Northwestern University, and Kenyon College. From 1997 to 1999, he chaired the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago which produced Chicago Metropolis 2020 (2001), a planning blueprint for the twenty-first century modeled after Daniel Burnham’s famed 1909 Plan of 70 | Chicago History | Fall 2002

Velasquez stands with students from Holy Trinity High School, where he has served on the advisory board since 1985.

Right: Velasquez (right) and his son, Arthur, display a rare 1945 jukebox.

Below: In 1988, Saint Xavier College conferred the degree of Doctor of Public Service upon Velasquez. His citation recognized Velasquez’s “successful career in business, his commitment to higher education, and his determined efforts on behalf of the Mexican and Hispanic community.”

Chicago. And in 1998, Thomas donated five million dollars to Kenyon College, creating the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing and a scholarship fund endowment.

But Thomas will always be remembered for leading the Chicago Symphony/Lyric Opera Facilities Fund with John Bryan of Sara Lee from 1986 to 1991. “My role in the Facilities Fund has to be a source of great satisfaction,” states Thomas. “This was never done before on this scale.”

Although planners initially considered a new facility, Lyric and Symphony officials agreed to restore and modernize the existing structures. Thomas points out that “the fact that we raised one hundred million dollars in the corporate community was unprecedented.” He believes that no other city raised so much money so quickly for a cultural institution. “When I look back at it, we couldn’t get that done today. There aren’t enough corporations left enough in the Loop to pull that off.”

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Although Thomas and Velasquez flourished in vastly different professions and community activities, both are effusive in their appreciation for the opportunities they found in Chicago. “If you don’t do it here, where else are you going to do it?” asks Velasquez. In words with which Thomas would concur, Velasquez believes Chicago “gives you the opportunity to give back what you really want to give back, to the people you want to help out. You can help out here in so many ways.”

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.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 54–55 top, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas; 55 bottom, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr. Reprinted with permission of Stuart–Rodgers Photography Ltd., Chicago; 56–57, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr. Copyrighted 1988, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 58 top, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas. Reprinted with permission of Crain’s Chicago Business; 58 bottom, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas; 59 top, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas. Reprinted with permission of Kenyon College Athletics; 59 bottom–60, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr.; 61 top, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas; 61 bottom, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas. Reprinted from the Harbus News (27 Sept. 1957); 62, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas. “Name 10 Outstanding Young Men of 1966,” reprinted from the Chicago Sun-Times (14 Sept. 1966) with special permission from the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc. @ 2002; 63, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas. Reprinted with permission of Bank One Corporation, Commercial Banking Advertising Department. 64, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas. Chandler, Susan, “First Chicago selects chairman,” reprinted from the Chicago Sun-Times (9 Nov. 1991) with special permission from the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc. @ 2002; 65, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr.; 66–67, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr. Image reprinted with permission of Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful Hispanic American; 68–70, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr.; 71 top, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr. Copyrighted 1988, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 71 bottom, courtesy of Arturo Velasquez Sr.; 72 top, courtesy of Richard L. Thomas; 72 bottom, courtesy of The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The professional careers and civic activities of both Richard Thomas and Arturo Velasquez Sr. remain largely unstudied. The leading sources of Thomas’s business philosophy appear in Bank Management (May/June 1994 and May/June 1996) and in the Chicago Sun-Times (21 June 1987). For more information on Velasquez, see Greg Burke, “Viva Velasquez: Making the American Dream Come True—and Sharing It,” Chicago Tribune (28 Feb. 1988) and Conrad Fox, “Art Velasquez,” in Latino Leaders (May 2001).

T H E 2 0 0 2 M A K I N G H I S T O R Y AWA R D S were underwritten through a generous grant from The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust. The Trust honors the memory of Elizabeth Morse (right), daughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, a nineteenthcentury Chicago industrialist and land developer. The Trust supports programs that encourage self-reliance, foster self-esteem, and promote the arts, with an emphasis on helping children, youth, and the elderly of Chicago’s disadvantaged communities.

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Thomas (left) served as the president of the Economic Club of Chicago from 1983 to 1985. During that time, President Ronald Reagan made an appearance at an Economic Club luncheon.