galoshes blog

Late Central                                                                           murphy

July 5, 1976. 

Fifty years ago now.

I was a cub reporter for City News Bureau of Chicago, working the graveyard shift and trying to stay awake at an old desk with three telephones in the grubby police headquarters press room at 11th and State Streets. 

It also happened to be my birthday. I was turning 22 years old.

The country had turned 200 the day before and there were a lot of fireworks overnight.

To celebrate my birthday I had convinced a co-worker – who was working “rewrite” that night at the CNB offices on Randolph Street – to have a beer or two with me when we got off work. When 9 a.m. finally came around and our 9-hour shift ended, we met up and proceeded to a bar, I can’t remember which one, but one that was open and serving drinks at 9 a.m. (There were several.)

Let me back up here. I had been in Chicago maybe about a month. I still had my senior year in college to complete in New York so I was only spending the summer as an “intern” at CNB, making $95 per week. My Uncle Jim – a Chicago police officer – had very graciously invited me to stay with his family in the apartment where they lived on the Southwest Side.

My first day at CNB I had arrived 10 or 15 minutes late. The editor – the legendary Paul Zimbrakos – looked up and stared at me. Let’s just say that Paul was known for having eyes that when he fixed them upon you they were almost hypnotic. I quickly realized he wanted an explanation for my tardiness on my very first day.

“I thought the bus would get here sooner than it did. I thought…”

The expression on his face told me he wasn’t buying any of it. I knew right away there was no point in explaining that my uncle had told me it would take about an hour for the bus to get from 79th and Kedzie to the Loop. I thought I had plenty of time. Instead, making innumerable stops on Archer Avenue, the bus took like an hour and 45 minutes to get to the Loop. And Paul didn’t care that I was new in town and hadn’t had time to do a test run on this journey beforehand. It probably didn’t help that my hair was kind of long and that I was wearing a denim leisure suit and an open neck shirt made of brightly colored polyester, a look probably more appropriate for a disco. (My mother, who had worked at CNB herself and helped me get this summer job, had decided I needed this “new” outfit.) I also spoke with somewhat of a New York accent.

So, I guess it wasn’t surprising that after I got my two weeks of basic new reporter training from a certain rather eccentric police reporter, I was assigned to the midnight to nine shift where I would stay for the remainder of the summer and to which I would return when I came back to CNB after graduation from college. 

Back to my birthday celebration. It turned out we were pretty thirsty and we went to at least a couple of bars. We may have darkened the door at Billy Goat. At one point I spotted a photo-mat, one of those machines where you sat in a booth, pumped in some quarters and got several sequential black and white photos. I decided I needed some photos to commemorate my 22nd birthday. I still have them somewhere. In one, my coworker – the very affable, intelligent and funny Steve Smothers – photo bombs me.

So, after several birthday beers instead of food for breakfast, we needed to get some lunch. We had made our way to Rush Street by around noon and then spotted a sign at a place at the corner of Dearborn and Division. Called Oliver’s it advertised a half pound burger lunch special. That sounded very good.

The waitress was a cheerful young woman about my age with short blonde highlighted hair, clad in form fitting black. When she asked if we wanted a drink, we ordered a pitcher of beer. Later she took our food order and when she found out it was my birthday, brought us a free pitcher. 

The burgers were tasty and the beer was nice and cold. The booth we occupied was comfortable but not claustrophobic. By then we knew the waitress’s name – Cynthia. She was efficient – and friendly and talkative. She was taking classes at Roosevelt University and would finish college at the end of the summer.

I don’t know how many pitchers we ordered but we were still there when Cynthia said she was getting off work and, as she had come to know us over several hours and it was still my birthday, did we want to go somewhere else with her to have another birthday drink?

Sure we did.

I can’t remember how much we left as a tip but we departed Oliver’s together, bought a bottle of wine and headed to Oak Street Beach. It was a warm – now late – Summer afternoon and drinking wine on the shore of Lake Michigan was a great idea, whichever one of us thought of it. 

(After my first week or so at CNB I was watching the local news on TV with my aunt in the apartment on the Southwest Side. The closing credits rolled against a backdrop of handsome boys and bikini clad girls frolicking and tossing frisbees on a beach. Where the heck was that? “Oh, that must be Oak Street Beach,” my aunt said. My next day off, having procured some swim trunks, I took the long bus ride from 79th and Kedzie to the Loop and up Michigan Avenue to Oak Street. Sure enough there was a beach there, white sand and all, right on the lake surrounded by high rise buildings lining busy Lake Shore Drive. Beautiful people sunbathed and the chilly fresh lake water was wonderful on hot day in the city.)

Cynthia eventually disappeared into a cab, but not before I got a phone number. That night I never made it back to my uncle’s place on the Southwest Side. At midnight, having slept not a wink, I was back in the press room at police headquarters. It was going to be a very long night.

I didn’t know it then, but the young woman who waited on us that day would, several years later, become my wife.

The CTA Bus

The long bus ride back to my uncle’s on the Southwest Side required a transfer at station somewhere on Kedzie. You had to wait for the next bus. Impatient, and not unfamiliar with hitchhiking, I would step out to the street and stick my thumb out to see if I could snag a ride before the bus finally came. One day a guy driving an older model Chevy picked me up. He was a little older than me and the windows of his car were open. I noticed his ashtray was overflowing with marijuana roaches. He saw me staring at them and told me to light one up. He said he was on his way to a tavern on Marquette Park, which was close to where my uncle lived. He could take me that far. His name was Bill. I told him I was new in town working in the Loop and staying with my uncle. Bill said I should come by the tavern sometime. He would introduce me to his friends. When he dropped me off I walked the rest of the way to my uncle’s, passing the Nabisco factory that smelled like Lorna Doone cookies as I trekked across an overpass of some sort on a cracked sidewalk with few pedestrians. I took Bill up on his invite a few days later and dropped into the tavern. Sure enough he was there and he introduced me to some of his friends. Turned out most of these guys, including Bill, were Vietnam veterans, not really that long returned to the Southwest Side. A couple raised their eyebrows when they learned I was a ‘reporter.’ It would turn out that drinking with these guys could be an all day and all night thing. It also would turn out that Marquette Park that summer was a hotbed of racial unrest. But that’s another story.

Fortunately I was lucky enough to find a small room to rent in a big apartment shared with some other guys from CNB on the Near North Side, a very nice neighborhood near all the activity on Rush Street. I no longer had to make the long commute from the Southwest Side. I saw Cynthia, whose family also happened to reside, like my uncle, on the Southwest Side, during the rest of that summer – before I returned to New York to finish college. A normal dating experience wasn’t really possible because I was up all night reporting about crime and supposedly sleeping during the day. This, of course, was the opposite of mostly everybody else’s schedule, including Cynthia’s. The bottom line was that in order to have any social life, I didn’t get much sleep. Cynthia liked browsing through bookstores and so did I so that was something we did together. I would eventually figure out that our preferences at the cinema weren’t really aligned but it wasn’t an issue that summer.

That summer had its own soundtrack of course. Boz Scaggs burst forth from relative obscurity with his album Silk Degrees and Cynthia played that record over and over. Roy Ayers was in synch with the season with Everybody Loves the Sunshine. Do You Think I’m Falling in Love?, released a few years earlier by The Spinners, was still being played a lot and seemed to ask the pertinent question. Elvin Bishop also was on point with Fooled Around and Fell in Love. There was a lot of Fleetwood Mac and the list of other hitmakers that summer is too long to catalog here.

I was back in New York late that summer when Cynthia traveled to the Soviet Union with some students and faculty from Roosevelt, a rather left leaning institution. On the way back she stopped over in New York for a quick visit, bringing a bottle of Russian vodka with her. She came to New York again for a brief visit when I was on winter break from college. After that we exchanged letters, but I wouldn’t see her again until the next summer when I returned to Chicago after spending my last semester “studying abroad” in Paris. She had an office job working with the city now. She had her own studio apartment near Lincoln Park. I was staying with my uncle again – for a brief period anyway – and quickly found myself back at “late central” working midnight to nine.

My pay at CNB was now $100 per week. Soon I got a raise to $110. Fortunately the payments for my student loan wouldn’t start right away.

It was all just beginning.

Some other memories from those early days at CNB:

(Harold Washington) 

When I first came to CNB I was new in town (I have deep Chicago roots but won’t elaborate here) so I didn’t know the names and faces of all the important political players in a very political city. That summer of 1976 “the boss” Richard J. Daley was still “da mayor.”

I came to Chicago with a certain opinion of Daley – shaped by the national media and the chaotic ’68 Democratic convention. I thought ‘hizzoner’ was a corrupt, tyrannical, racist dictator. I get to Chicago and find out a lot of people there pretty much love the guy. 

During my first days on the job – before I was exiled to the graveyard shift – I get sent to Grant Park to cover a demonstration about something I can’t even remember what. It’s a warm summer day and there are a lot of people there. I’m looking around for someone, anyone, to interview but don’t know who anybody is. Finally I spot a man, a dignified looking black man moving through the crowd. He seems to have an entourage so I figure he must be somebody important. I approach and start asking him questions, which he thoughtfully answers. The interview goes on for several minutes with his entourage listening attentively. 

When I run out of questions I start to panic because I remember I have no idea who this guy is. When I ask, sheepishly, can I have your name? – there are audible gasps from the entourage. But he is very cool. He even cracks a small smile. 

“Harold Washington,” he says. 

I manage to blurt out another question: And you are…? 

“A state representative,” he says. 

I stammer out a ‘Thanks’ and retreat before I get slapped by someone in the entourage. I run to a pay phone to call in my story. 

Harold Washington, already well known in the community except to me, would of course go on to be the first black mayor of Chicago, elected for two terms. 

(The Nazis)

I was sent to cover a ‘news conference’ that a group of neo-Nazis held at their ‘headquarters’ at Marquette Park. I guess the big papers and radio and TV stations didn’t want to dignify the proceedings with their reporters and crews but they still wanted somebody to let them know what these wing nuts marching around the Southwest Side, exacerbating racial tensions in the neighborhood, had to say. Their ‘headquarters’ was a storefront building converted to a bunker displaying a swastika. The group had a ‘fuhrer’ – a leader who had put together manifesto like declarations spewing the usual racism and antisemitism. It was a surreal experience, to be in a room surrounded by brown shirts. I asked the leader a few questions and called the city desk. I don’t think we did a story. The group later attempted, infamously, to march in the largely Jewish community of Skokie, with the ACLU defending its right to do so under the first amendment in a case that went to the U.S Supreme Court. Thus, the Nazis got the media attention they craved.

(A Teenager’s Funeral)

I remember attending the funeral of a teenage kid shot and killed in some sort of gang related conflict. I had to interview the distraught family and did file a story for that one, but I think I was the only reporter there.

(The Prosecutor)

One afternoon I was sent to a prosecutor’s office to await the verdict in a murder trial. 

The jury was out and deliberating and I was to wait there for the decision to come down. It would turn out to be a long afternoon as jury deliberations dragged on. 

The assistant prosecutor was a middle aged man with a receding hairline and a comb over. He sat behind his desk, covered with legal documents, waiting for his phone to ring and word to arrive that a verdict had been reached. It seemed he was glad to have some company because for the next several hours he told me all about the case. 

It was a pretty gruesome homicide involving the killing of a store owner. Turned out the owner knew his killers – at that point not yet convicted. 

They allegedly had forced the owner to the back of the store and strapped him into a chair. They tortured him for some reason, maybe to get information about where he kept money or valuables. Eventually they killed him, shooting him in the head execution style I think, but I can’t remember all the horrible details. The victim had been left strapped in his chair. 

There were photos, which the prosecutor showed me. He gauged my reaction as he showed me the photos. I had never seen these kind of photos before and they were hard to look at. The assistant prosecutor talked about how the cops cracked the case and you could tell he had become a little obsessed with seeing these guys get convicted – maybe even get the death penalty. He was very concerned they might get off. 

I didn’t take much in the way of notes because someone else was going to write the story and all I had to do was call in the verdict when it finally came. After a while we stopped talking and I availed myself of the most comfortable chair in the room so I could maybe take a catnap. The assistant prosecutor studied again the legal documents related to the case spread out on the desk before him. From time to time I thought I saw him look at the telephone, anxiously, also a little apprehensively. 

When my shift was up there was still no verdict but I was cleared by the city desk editor to leave, as I had nothing to report. I thanked the assistant prosecutor for letting me hang around all day in his office and he said he had enjoyed my company. 

I didn’t say I hoped these assholes would be convicted as I figured I was supposed to stay objective in the matter. I also was aware that I had only heard the prosecution’s side and the jury was still deliberating, suggesting perhaps all the jurors weren’t convinced of the defendants’ guilt.

I left the prosecutor still sitting behind his desk, waiting for justice to be served. 

It was years later, when for some reason I thought about that day, that I realized I had missed the story. I had spent the whole day waiting to report a verdict, when the whole time the story had been right in front of me. The story wasn’t whether there was a conviction (I can’t remember if there was) in an unfortunately almost run of the mill homicide. The story was how the crime had consumed a man, a dedicated public servant who had doggedly prosecuted the case, who, no matter what happened, would never let it go. The case would stay with him for the rest of his life, for better or worse, long after it was forgotten by others. 

I hadn’t gotten a story that day because I had missed the story. I was young and inexperienced, but I had blown it.

Postscript: One night I was drinking with the Vietnam Vets and their friends. After spending a good deal of time in the tavern, some of us got into a car and cruised through Marquette Park. It was a balmy summer night. Suddenly the guy driving stopped and got out. He proceeded to retrieve an unfolded parachute from the trunk – I’m not sure why it was there but maybe he had been a paratrooper. He wrapped himself in the parachute, curled up on the grass, and fell asleep. He apparently felt perfectly comfortable doing this. These guys acted like the park was their playground and their status as Vietnam Vets seemed to give them a lot of immunity. I had once asked this guy – a handsome muscular fellow who was not wanting in the female department but seemed to like spending most of his time with the guys drinking in the tavern – if he was in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. He had looked me in the eye and nodded. That was it. No more discussion. It was the type of question I was learning most Vietnam Vets, and vets from any war for that matter, didn’t want to answer, especially coming from a non-vet. I admit I was pretty much in awe of guys who had served in Vietnam. Guys who had been ‘in country’ and survived. If I had been only a couple years older I could very well have been over there too. One or two years difference in age could make a big difference back then. Somebody took the wheel and later we drove by to check on the paratrooper. He was still asleep, still wrapped in a parachute, right there on the ground in the park where we had left him.

Next: Part II 

The Coroner’s Inquest, Arson Fire, Near North Homicide and other memories of a cub reporter.