Another Daley is Gone

It is pretty hard to believe that you are going to write those words twice in a lifetime about a mayor of Chicago.

In 1976 I was sitting in my kid's bedroom. It was a cold December night and I was listening to the radio. Richard J. Had been major since I was five years old. I didn't like him very much. He was the older school. He had set the police on me in 1968 because he didn't want us to say anything rude to his fellow Democrats who were convening to nominate a candidate president. We showed up at the dinner table and insulted his guests. The whole city was supposed to put on a clean pair of pants, get a haircut and pass the gravy dish with a nice 'yes sir' or "no ma'am".

Richard J. was our daddy and even though we went jowl-to-jowl with him it still hurt to know he was gone.

It was a different city back then. The stink of the stockyards hadn't quite faded away and the steel mills were still cooking our air with whatever they wanted to put out. The 'boss' would get it done in the 'city that works'.

When he died it was a whole new ballgame.

Richie Jr. wasn't ready yet. We went through the Bilandic, Byrne, Washington and Sawyer. The only progressive hope was Harold Washington and then, like Daley, he had one final pork chop and they carried him off on a slab.

It was Richie M's time.

He was as comforting to us as Wally Phillips on WGN in the morning. The guys who worked in the factories and lived in the bungalows, knew Richard M. was one of our own. We put the 'council wars' behind us, relegated our anarchy behind us and voted Democratic.

But, like all of us, he son was a little bit different than the father.

He liked to ride a bicycle. He didn't have the old man's gut.

He liked greenery and not just the kind that rolled into the campaign coffers. He planted trees! He grew a garden on the roof of City Hall.

He wore a fedora, but it wasn't like the old man's. He didn't look like a gangster. He looked like a rumpled UIC professor.

He moved out of Bridgeport, the back of the stockyards neighborhood where the Irish had been landing from the time they built the Illinois Michigan canal. He moved to the south Loop and then wound up in a condo on the north side. It was all we could do not to demand that he return his White Sox cap.

He changed the city the same way. Industry left. He replaced it with 'paper' industries. Coveralls were traded in for business suits. Poor folks couldn't afford to live downtown and the well-to-do traded their suburban lawns for condos in the new theater district.

The projects came down and mixed income housing was the norm, but really if you couldn't afford the freight you didn't belong.

In the old days you may have felt jostled, but now you just felt pushed.

And now another twenty years are gone and so is another Daley.

And it is time again to reinvent and re-imagine.