THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972: Dick Gordon tackles George Halas
THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972: Dick Gordon tackles George Halas
December 20-26, 1971
To access all site contents, click HERE.
Why do we run this separate item peeking into newspapers from 1972? Because 1972 was part of the ancient times when everybody read a paper. Everybody, everybody, everybody. Even kids. So Steve Bertolucci, the 10-year-old hero of the novel serialized at this Substack, read the paper too—sometimes just to have something to do. These are some of the stories he read. If you’d like, keep up with the 1972 papers every day on Twitter, @RoselandChi1972.
December 20, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Hanrahan threat: ‘I’ll run’
by Charles Nicodemus
After doing the wrong thing for weeks, Mayor Daley’s Democratic Central Committee slatemaking committee (aka Mayor Daley) decides to do right Monday morning after getting hit with weeks of outrage.
Daley’s slating committee took back its endorsement for Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan, under indictment for allegedly obstructing the investigation of his office's raid that killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969.
But they waited until the absolute last possible minute: 11 a.m. on the day nominating petitions are due at 5 PM in the County Clerk’s office.
Among the blowback Daley and the Chicago Democrats got for backing the indicted state’s attorney, Rev. Jesse Jackson was organizing a Black voter coalition against Hanrahan. More importantly, it seems, last Friday the Illinois Supreme Court refused Hanrahan’s plea to quash the indictment.
Daley says Hanrahan is out “because there were many people around the county talking (unfavorably) about the candidate who had been on the ballot”. Daley switched the endorsement to Traffic Court Judge Raymond Berg.
“Two top Democratic leaders told The Daily News that Hanrahan has threatened to fight the machine,” writes Nicodemus. “However, Hanrahan in a brief discussion with The Daily News, repeatedly refused to clarify his political plans.”
Note that in 1971, the Chicago Democratic Party is so routinely referred to as "the machine" that they don't even bother capitalizing it here.
December 21, 1971
Let’s start with the top Daily News headline:
Mike Royko’s column today breaks the story of the Machine’s frenzied hours yesterday forging voter ballot petitions after Mayor Daley announced he was switching the Democratic party’s endorsement for Cook County State’s Attorney from indicted incumbent Ed Hanrahan to Traffic Court Judge Raymond Berg. The petitions were due by 5 PM in the County Clerk’s office.
The rest of the Daily News front page covers the frenzy generated by Mike’s report. See this week’s compilation of Mike Royko 50 Years. Ago Today for the rundown on Mike’s blockbuster column.
The other headlines: “Two groups open probe of petitions” by Philip J. O’Connor; “Some deny signing petitions” by William F. Mooney; and “Thousands backing me—Hanrahan” by Charles Nicodemus.
It’s a big day!
First, recall that Hanrahan is under indictment for allegedly obstructing the investigation of his office’s 1969 raid that killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Mayor Daley’s Democratic Central Committee slating committee endorsed Hanrahan for re-election anyway despite incredible blowback, but took it away after the Illinois Supreme Court last Friday turned down Hanrahan’s suit to quash his indictment.
So the Machine had to collect six thousand registered voter signatures in six hours for new candidate Judge Berg. Royko says they managed it—by having county and city workers forge 20,000 signatures in just five hours.
Now the BGA, the IVI, and the Independent and Republican candidates are all launching investigations. Royko quoted county employees who said they signed multiple signatures on many petitions.
“This is silly. I’m positive those are valid signatures,” Berg told the News.
And from a “veteran precinct captain at City Hall”: “We could get 50,000 legitimate signatures in that length of time if we had to.”
“’I never signed anything,’ said Mrs. Maude E. Kury of 3730 N. Wilton, when asked Tuesday by The Daily News how her signature appeared on the nominating petitions of Judge Raymond Berg.” Mrs. Kury was a Republican precinct captain.
Meanwhile, Hanrahan says “thousands of people” are “urging him to buck the Democratic organization and run for re-election,” writes Nicodemus. Hanrahan says he’ll announce his decision Wednesday.
Nicodemus reports Mayor Daley wants Hanrahan to resign now so he can appoint Berg to the position. Daley is “said to be planning to offer Hanrahan an eventual Illinois Appellate Court judgeship” or some other office.
Yesterday an angry Hanrahan told his patronage employees to tell their sponsors he felt like he got stabbed in the back.
Today, Nicodemus says it sounds like Hanrahan may not try to run against the Machine after all. If a deal gets made, “it is expected that both Hanrahan and the organization’s leaders would deny” it.
December 22, 1971
Chicago Defender: A.S. Doc Young, GOOD MORNING, SPORTS!
Doc Young often fills his column with short bits like today, including: “Charlie Finley, owner of the Oakland Athletics, knows he owes Vida Blue more than a raise. He should be HAPPY to pay Vida $100,000 in 1972. He should be HAPPY, if not ecstatic!”
“The late Dr. Ralph Bunche was a fine athlete at UCLA. He never lost hs love of sports. He was a regular at World Series games in New York…And ‘tis said, Jesse Jackson was once a fine quarterback.”
“It’ll be something like poetic justice if Ed Hughes gets fired as coach of the Houston Oilers. He’s the guy who said he didn’t know any black in this country who is qualified to be an assistant coach on HIS staff. Can you imagine that in 1971?”
December 22, 1971
Chicago Defender: Box of dirt is stolen
“Denver (UPI) Miss Margaret Hickman was redfaced as she told police about the box that was stolen from her unlocked car. ‘It was very embarrassing to try to explain to them that someone had stolen a box of dirt,’ she said.”
“The dirt came from an elevator shaft at the Mountain Bell offices where she works. She had lost the diamond from her engagement ring down the shaft and janitors boxed all the dirt for her when they were unable to find the gem.”
FYR (For Younger Readers): “Mountain Bell” is the nickname of Denver’s local AT&T company. Back then, AT&T—or as everyone called it, “the phone company”—had a complete monopoly on all local and long distance phone service. (There used to be a difference between local and long distance.) Individual franchises were named after their regions, with “Bell” tacked on—for inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Wikipedia gives a rundown of the 1982 forced break up of AT&T.
The only thing crazier than the phone company’s previous hegemony is, I suppose, the current craziness of phone company competition and the advertising we’re now subjected to. Just imagine: You didn’t use to hear commercials 20,000 times a day for different phone services!
We would be remiss here if we didn’t tell you to watch the incredible, hilarious 1967 movie “The President’s Analyst,” starring James Coburn, which is built around the presumption of the phone company’s complete global control. You will be shocked at the prescience, and you’ll wonder why James Coburn and Godfrey Cambridge in particular aren’t better remembered. But also—Arte Johnson and the FBR! The New Jersey family! Genius.
Ways to watch: You can rent it for $3.99 or buy it for $12.00 on Amazon or Apple. TV. YouTube only has clips as far as I see. Here’s James Coburn getting back to New Jersey with the New Jersey family. Here’s the amazing Godfrey Cambridge scene at the start, where he’s in a “session” with analyst James Coburn. This scene is dramatic, by the way.
December 22, 1971
Chicago Defender: PUSH to push an independent
Although the Rev. Jesse Jackson announced his new organization, PUSH, would begin on Christmas Day, deputy director Thomas Todd held a press conference about Mayor Daley dumping incumbent State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan for Traffic Court Judge Raymond Berg.
Todd announced PUSH may support “an independent ‘people’s’ candidate,” at the press conference at the Roberts Motel, 63rd and Prairie. Todd said the Democrats dumped Hanrahan “because of the mounting protests” and for the best interests of the party, not the people.
December 22, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Boy paralyzed by bullet/Yule wish: ‘I want to be able to run’
by Phillip J. O’Connor
“Joshua Taylor Jr., 14, has only one Christmas wish.
“‘I want to be able to run again—so that I can play football,’ said the boy, who was virtually paralyzed from the waist down by a sniper’s bullet Dec. 7.”
Joshua and a friend were walking back to the Sexton School at 160 W. Wendell after eating lunch at their homes in the Cabrini-Green public housing complex at 624 W. Division, when Joshua was shot by a sniper firing from a fifth-floor balcony with a .22 caliber rifle. Four youths “fled after the shooting and are still being sought.”
“I want to be able to run again—so that I can play football,” Joshua told the Daily News’ Phillip J. O’Connor.
Joshua’s hero is the Bears’ Gale Sayers, who is finishing a diminished season after coming back from a second knee surgery. “‘He did it and so can I,’ said the youngster, who has a ready smile despite his misfortune.’”
Surgeons at Henrotin Hospital removed the bullet that hit Joshua’s spine. He’s a Daily News paperboy, and customer John E. Sullivan started a fund to help pay Joshua’s medical expenses at National Boulevard Bank, 410. N. Michigan Avenue.
“His grief-stricken mother, Mrs. Wydell Taylor, has been at his bedside much of the time since the shooting,” writes O’Connor. “‘I’ve prayed a lot since he was hurt,’ she sobbed. ‘I hope he won’t be paralyzed for life. He was a good football player before this happened to him.’”
At this point, Joshua can’t move his right leg, and can only wiggle the toes on his left foot. The Taylors have six other children, and Mrs. Taylor said “she and her husband, Joshua Sr., 37, a Yellow Cab driver, don’t know how they’ll pay staggering medical bills.”
December 22, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Hanrahan to run!
By John Gallagher
Daley says split proves strength
By Jay McMullen and Tony Fuller
Tuesday morning, Mayor Daley switched his endorsement for Cook County state’s attorney from indicted incumbent Ed Hanrahan to Traffic Court Judge Raymond Berg. Today, Hanrahan says he’s running anyway.
Hanrahan is indicted for allegedly obstructing the investigation into his office’s 1969 raid that killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Today he says dropping out of the race would hand the Black Panthers “a propaganda victory.”
“Some politicians want me off the ticket because they think black people won’t vote for me,” said Hanrahan. “That’s an insult to the intelligence of black people. Let them make their own decision. They know…that no previous state’s attorney has ever done so much to protect them from street gangs and other criminals who terrorize them in their neighborhoods.”
Hanrahan made the announcement at the Civic Center—which we know now as the Daley Center, named after the real Mayor Daley. He “ducked questions…but told a Daily News reporter on his way out, ‘I told you I was a fighter.’”
Across the street at City Hall, Mayor Daley held his own press conference.
“Mayor Richard J. Daley said Wednesday that State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan’s decision to run for re-election as an independent proves how great the Democratic Party is,” reports McMullen and Fuller. “Daley, at a news conference, appeared buoyant and confident. ‘Well, all of us recognize anyone has the right to run. We’re having an open primary,’ the mayor said.”
Meanwhile, Hanrahan and organizations including the BGA are investigating Mike Royko’s scoop yesterday that Daley’s Machine had city and county employees forge 20,000 signatures in five hours Tuesday to meet the deadline to get Berg on the ballot.
December 23, 1971
Chicago Tribune: Gordon’s Remarks Stupid, Says Halas
by George Langford
Dick Gordon’s ongoing feuding with the Bears breaks into the papers. It’s never good when Hitler comes up.
In a 2019 Tribune article by Will Larkin placing Gordon at #55 in the 100 best Bears players ever, Larkin ledes this way:
Dick Gordon was an enthusiastic participant in the Swinging Sixties, and he was a leader in the fight for players’ rights.
Neither attribute made him popular with the Bears’ conservative front office.
Larkin says Gordon fought with the front office for all of his seven years “over his contract demands, practice habits, downfield blocking, even his wardrobe and Afro hairdo.”
You may recall from THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972 on November 17, the Daily News’ Jack Schnedler wrote about Gale Sayers’ ongoing knee issue and added: “Gordon, whose pass-catching talents draw double coverage from most teams,” didn’t practice that week, but “He was a vision of sartorial elegance in red velvet cape, purple cap and black walking cane to support his sprained left knee.”
In 1970, Dick Gordon made a Bears record of 13 touchdowns, plus 71 receptions, leading the NFL. He’s been unhappy with compensation among other things for a long time, and refused to sign his 1971 contract so he can become a free agent for the 1972 season. For his1971 performance, Gordon will be honored to join the Pro Bowl for a second consecutive year.
But first, at a Sport magazine luncheon, Dick Gordon made some remarks about his relationship with the Bears that infuriate Papa Bear George Halas. Gordon also said some things in an article in Sport magazine’s then-current issue. (Sport magazine was similar to Sports Illustrated, but stopped publication in 2000.)
The entire text of Gordon’s remarks is unclear, from the luncheon or the article. I can’t find access to the defunct Sport, and we get only partial quotes from the luncheon in the 1971 media coverage. I don’t see a Gordon quotation calling Halas literally “racist.” Halas’ return diatribe implies that Gordon called him racist in the article, but even there, it sounds possible that Halas took it that way.
The Trib’s Langford says Gordon “claimed the Bears offered him only a $4,000 raise after he had led the National Football league in pass receiving in 1970,” without specifying whether that was at the luncheon or in the article.
Langford then gives several direct Gordon quotes from the luncheon:
“Somebody over there at 173 Madison [address of the Bears’ office] has something against me. I don’t know who it is, but somebody has an underlying hate for me.”
Bears management “doesn’t have an open mind. It is incapable of dealing with the modern liberated ballplayer, of understanding his thinking. We are treated like serfs…”
“There used to be a generation gap between the coaches and players, but this is no longer true.” Langford points out this is Gordon specifically saying he’s not talking about the coaches.
Now Halas strikes back with a written statement. But it’s so rambling—and a little odd in places really—it sounds like Halas was yelling it at a room full of reporters. Here’s a good sampling:
“I would like to clear away the effects of some stupid remarks by Dick Gordon at a magazine-sponsored luncheon Monday when he said someone ‘hated’ him and that he was a victim of a Bears’ management ‘conspiracy,’” says Papa Bear’s statement. “If I hated Dick Gordon, I would not have helped him in three critical personal situations within the past football season. He knows what his problems were and how much more serious they would have become if I had not given him a lift. He knows he could have done nothing himself in any of those trouble areas—and he knows that he has yet to acknowledge what I did or to express even a simple ‘thank you.’”
Papa Bear says the magazine article “is laced with racist quotations…In other passages, he repeats charges of how blacks are generally treated unfairly and infers he also is abused. That’s a scurrilous lie. My philosophy is simple and unchanged: Black and white are beautiful colors except when worn by unworthy people.”
“I know no man alive whom I hate—be he a coach, a player, a sports columnist, or hack writer who substitutes opinion for fact. Only individual I ever hated in all my 76-plus years was Adolf Hitler. I implemented that emotion by going for my second hitch in the Navy on Nov. 1, 1942, at the age of 47, with the understanding that I would be sent overseas. I put in 39 months and enjoyed every minute of it, whether in the jungle or on a flag ship. In the wildest flight of imagination, no writing critic would ever compare Gordon with Hitler. Besides, I like the way Gordon catches a football, but I am thru accepting cheap shots with a smile.”
I don’t recall Dick Gordon coming up in Papa Bear’s autobiography, “Halas By Halas,” written with Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey. The book doesn’t list Dick Gordon in the index, and I didn’t see him mentioned in a quick review of the short chapters covering the time period after Halas’ coaching years. If I come across more, I’ll amend this post.
December 23, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Daley Wish: A merry Yule to all
Bear in mind, this is on the front page: “Mayor Richard J. Daley wished the people of Chicago a Merry Christmas and happy New Year.”
“It is my wish that everyone will enjoy the blessings of family and friends in this happy season,” Daley said in a statement. “May we all work to achieve the age-old dream of peace on earth and good will toward men.”
“We hope that those with relatives and friends serving in Vietnam will be able to welcome them back soon in good health to the family circle. Let us be understanding of one another and do what we can as individuals to bring the holiday spirit into our community and country.”
So, just to recap, Mayor Daley’s press office issued this generic holiday statement, and the Daily News put it on the front page. Interesting!
December 23, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Bob Hope Offer: $10 million for PWs’ freedom
UPI
Bob Hope “made a surprise visit” tothe capital of Laos and asked Nguyen Van Tranh, first secretary of the North Vietnamese embassy, to arrange for a visa so Hope can go to Hanoi to try to offer $10 million for American POWs.
This is strange. Hope is a close personal friend of President Nixon. He says he didn’t tell Nixon what he was doing.
U.S. officials say they in principle oppose paying ransoms like this for the obvious reason—“this might produce many difficulties…if and when diplomats are kidnapped by terrorists.”
December 24, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Bears’ Sayers helps boy realize a dream
by Phillip J. O’Connor
Bears halfback Gale Sayers “hobbled on crutches” into Henrotin Hospital’s intensive care unit to visit Joshua Taylor Jr., paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet as he walked back to school after lunch on December 7.
"Hey! You get better. The Bears need you,” Joshua told Sayers.
“Sayers, who had a cast removed last Friday after treatment at Illinois Masonic Hospital for infection in his left knee, responded, ‘Keep on fighting! You’ll make it!’”
Joshua is a Daily News paperboy, and Sayers is “special consultant” to the Daily News “carrier boys program.” He brought Joshua a $500 scholarship check from the Gale Sayers Chicago Daily News Educational Fund, and an autographed football. As Gale Sayers gave Joshua the football, Joshua said, “My friends are going to be surprised when they see this.”
As Sayers left, he said he couldn’t understand why the gunman had fired at Joshua. “I can’t understand. What fun is that? This poor boy hasn’t had a chance to live yet.”
“Police said Joshua and his friend were fired upon for no apparent reason by one of the four youths on the balcony.”
December 24, 1971
Chicago Tribune: In the Wake of the News column, by David Condon
Sports columnist David Condon is upset that the Dick Gordon-George Halas controversy is public, and definitely doesn’t want to take sides. The lede paragraph barely makes sense and we’ll skip it.
The problem, writes Condon, is between “George Halas, who on the sixth day created the Chicago Bears” and “Dick Gordon, who, as a very excellent football player, is a rare commodity in our town. Halas and Gordon have reached the point where they no longer exchange Christmas gifts. Eleanor Page, our society editor, says they seldom are invited to the same parties in Lake Forest.”
Condon says Gordon shouldn’t have “popped off about the Bear organization and hate,” but Halas shouldn’t have stirred “up odor anew by a rebuttal”. He sees both sides—Gordon may feel he has a “legitimate beef,” and Halas felt he had a right to respond.
If there’s one thing Condon knows, Halas is not a racist. But he also doesn’t think Dick Gordon “is a fellow who romps around hollering about racism.” If Dick Gordon just meant that Halas “is a frugal soul,” Condon agrees—but anybody who built up the Bears from nothing is bound to be frugal and not everybody understands that like they should.
“My criticism is that the feelings need not have been vented in public. If they had settled the issue man-to-man, the farce would not continue to smolder thru columns such as this.”
“I hope these fellows can shake hands. My attitude is that I hope Gordon gets more money, whether in Chicago or elsewhere, and I’ll be the first in his corner if anyone ever discriminates against him because of color. Similarly, I’ll fight anyone who calls Halas a racist or who fails to understand his frugality.”
“Yes, this is Christmas season and I ain’t mad at no one, I can even say I favor televising those two pro football games on Christmas Day—it gives Mom and Pop something to occupy their time while the kiddies are viewing those skin flicks down in the Loop.”
December 24, 1971
Special Edition: DICK ALLEN WATCH
Tribune: In the Wake of the News column, by David Condon
Unfortunately this is all we get on Dick Allen watch this week.
“….Richie Allen, still unsigned by the White Sox, hung up when I long-distanced him yesterday.”
December 25-26, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Capture halts skyjack terror
by Robert Signer and Edward H. Eisenberg
‘You’re gonna die with me,’ hostage told
by John Linstead
One passenger, 85, ‘wasn’t too worried’
by John Linstead
About 15 minutes into a Northwest Orient flight from Minneapolis to Miami via Chicago, a stewardess started serving coffee in the first class section. Everett Leary Holt, 25, of 128 E. 38th Street in Indianapolis, jumped up, put a gun to her head and yelled, “There’s enough dynamite in this bag to blow up the whole plane!”
Holt had a briefcase, and told the passengers, “If I drop this, we’ll all go.”
Perhaps worst of all, Holt next forced all the first class passengers into coach. Then he fired two gunshots and ordered the stewardess to take him into the cabin, and to tell the pilot that he’d killed a passenger.
Holt told pilot Capt. James Mancini he wanted $300,000 and two parachutes brought to the plane when it stopped at O’Hare. Back in Chicago, Northwest manage to get a Continental Bank official to scare up the cash, and Air Force personnel based at O’Hare provided the parachutes.
FBI and Chicago police surrounded the jet after it taxied to a remote corner of the airport. A brave Northwest official brought the money and parachutes on board. Hijacker Holt let all the passengers off except Jack Jackson, 35, from Minneapolis, and also kept the crew members. T`he crew members sneaked off as buses arrived to transport the departing passengers.
At that point, law enforcement snapped floodlights onto the plane and called over a bullhorn that the hijacker had nowhere to go, and to give up. Holt jumped out a rear exit and was arrested.
The story sounds a little different from passenger Jackson’s POV:
“The hijacker kept me, another passenger and three stewardesses after he let the rest of the passengers off,” Jackson told reporter John Linsted. “He made a mistake when he took the captain to the back of the plane and told him to get off. He had left the rest of the crew in the cockpit, and by the time he had marched us all up there, they had evidently sneaked out a forward hatch. He tried to talk to the tower and didn’t know how to use the mike.”
Then the hijacker made Jackson and the others sit down in a back row of seats and buckle their seat belts. “He kept saying, ‘You’re all gonna die with me,’” Jackson went on. “So we’re sitting there while he was rummaging around in the kitchen or first class…The police were outside the window, and then they turned a light on. I could hear them talking about me…One said, ‘There’s the hijacker.’ Someone else said, ‘No, that’s the passenger.’ Then somebody said, ‘No, he’s dead.’”
Then, said Jackson, the FBI broke down a door and ran in, screaming for everyone to stand and put their hands up. “I did, and that’s when I noticed I was all alone,” said Jackson. “The three stewardesses and the other passenger must have sneaked out the back way while the hijacker was up front. The FBI ran right past me and arrested [the hijacker] in first class.” (This conflicts with the official version above, but we’ll let it pass.)
This is how common skyjacking is at this time: Recently released hostages joke about it with reporters afterward. 85-year-old Samuel Scheppman of Minneapolis was en route to O’Hare to visit his son in Hoffman Estates. “The pilot told us we’d stop at O’Hare to pick up the ransom money and then probably fly on to Miami,” Scheppman told the News. “I was kinda looking forward to that.”
Samuel Scheppman said he wasn’t deterred from flying again. Jackson said he’d fly again too: “Maybe the next time, they’ll screen the nuts out.”
Officials led Holt off afterward smiling—in jeans, an army jacket, and “his long, page-boy hair held down by a leather headband”. Translation: Hippie.
Finally, the News noted the similarity to another hijacking last month of another Northwest Orient jet. “The hijacker in that incident parachuted from a three-engine Boeing 727 after $200,000 in $20 bills was turned over to him…the man has not been found.”
That man, of course, is D.B. Cooper.
December 25-26, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Lu Palmer column, Irony in Daley’s plight
Lu Palmer analyzes the recent political insanity roiling Chicago politics.
To review: Mayor Daley originally endorsed Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan for re-election even though he’s under indictment for allegedly obstructing justice in the investigation of his office’s 1969 pre-dawn raid that killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Then after weeks of blowback, including Rev. Jesse Jackson organizing a black voter boycott against Hanrahan and the Illinois Supreme Court quashing Hanrahan’s suit to dismiss the indictment, Daley switched the endorsement at the last minute to Traffic Court Judge Ray Berg. Hanrahan says he’ll run anyway against the Machine—and Mike Royko broke the story that Daley’s Machine forged the last-minute voter petitions to get brand new candidate Berg on the ballot. The only term for this, for Daley, is “clusterfuck.”
“It would be the most ironic twist of all if blacks were responsible for the ultimate destruction of the Democratic machine, which Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley controls with an iron fist,” writes Palmer. “For years, Daley has milked black Chicagoans of their votes to further entrench him as one of the nation’s most powerful politicians.”
“Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan’s police on Dec. 4, 1969. It is entirely possible that Hanrahan hammered the nails in the Democratic party’s coffin just as he did for Hampton for Clark.”
Palmer thinks Hanrahan is running against the Machine for vengeance. “What makes his office so important to the Daley machine is the fact that it can investigate and prosecute. Up to now, Hanrahan’s investigations and prosecutions have been dictated by party loyalty. Now that loyalty is no more.”
Palmer notes that Rev. Jesse Jackson has pointed out that means Hanrahan can investigate and prosecute all the Machine people who forged signatures on ballot petitions for Hanrahan’s slated replacement, Traffic Court Judge Ray Berg:
“He can demoralize precinct captains by putting the fear of God in their hearts. He can lock up ward committeemen. Hanrahan has the authority and the machinery to break up Daley’s Democratic Party by exposing all its corruption.”
Palmer finishes: “Blacks could take credit for this amazing fall of an amazingly corrupt political machine. They would have done something in death—Fred’s and Mark’s—that they had not been able to accomplish in their lifetimes.”
Do you dig spending some time in 1972? If you came to THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972 from social media, you may not know it’s part of the book being serialized here, one chapter per month: “Roseland, Chicago: 1972.” It’s the story of Steve Bertolucci, 10-year-old Roselander in 1972, and what becomes of him. Check it out here.
Any idea if any of the streaming services currently carry "The President's Analyst"? I haven't seen that in so many years, I think last time I rented it on VHS from a particularly well-stocked Blockbuster Video (which had a monopoly not unlike the Phone Company, ironically)