THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972: Mayor Daley goes national and Dick Allen goes local
Weekly Compilation April 17-23, 1972
To access all 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.
April 17, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Find briefcase of Nickel in Old Exchange
“The briefcase of missing architectural expert Richard Nickel, 43, was found Monday in the rubble of the Old Stock Exchange Building.
“A police dog located the briefcase in the ruins of the famed building at 30 N. LaSalle, which is being razed, as workmen searched for Nickel.
“Friends of Nickel said they fear he may have been trapped by debris last Thursday while trying to salvage pieces of ornamentation from the landmark.”
….“Nickel, of 1508 Grove Av., Park Ridge, has been going into the Louis Sullivan-designed building daily to recover prized pieces of ornamentation.
“Nickel is considered an authority on Sullivan’s work. He has been at work for 15 years taking photographs for a book intended as a definitive work on the famous Chicago architect.
“A friend, John Vinci, discovered Nickel’s tools and hardhat in the building Saturday and notified police. Nickel’s car was found at 656 N. Franklin, about six blocks from the building.”
For more on the tragedy of the demolition of Adler & Sullivan’s Old Stock Exchange, see here under October 20 and October 23 for articles by Richard Christiansen and M.W. Newman.
Sensible, doable plans were suggested to save the building, but Newman summed up the massive wave that washed away the Exchange: Chicago has a “feeble” landmark preservation law “that offers little protection even to our few designated landmarks, a city administration not interested in enforcing even this legislation, and the active opposition of the Building Managers Assn. and other downtown heavyweights.”
April 17, 1972
April 17, 1972
Chicago Today: Hooton looking for an encore
by James Enright
The Cubs “ended up with a million-dollar performance on the field” because Vice President John Holland didn’t want to cancel the opener due to poor weather after finding out $25,000 worth of tickets had already been sold—not after the money already lost by the baseball players’ strike.
The cheap move was the right one, since Burt Hooton threw a no-hit, no-run game.
“The rest of the story belongs to the 22-year-old Hooton, a carbon copy of Jack Nicklaus in appearance and blessed with a cheery, confident personality that belies his killer instinct,” writes Jame Enwright.
“‘I was only nervous when I thought about it,’ Hooton said after his 4-0 gem over the Phillies, ‘and that was all the time during the late innings because I kept looking up and watching the scoreboard.’”
Hooton switched to a knuckle curveball for the eighth and ninth innings.
April 17, 1972
Chicago Today
By Jeff Lyon
After his no-hit, no-run home opener, Burt Hooton goes to the 1972 Chicago version of Disney World—Joe Pepitone’s Thing, the Cub star’s club at 12 E. Division. The building is a CVS pharmacy now.
There, according to Chicago Today’s Jeff Lyon, Hooton lurked “in a corner, where he wouldn’t have to talk to anybody.”
“Nearby, Joe Pepitone and his brother Bill were ogling the chickies, Ron Santo was cavorting and Glenn Beckert wasn’t exactly hiding.”
April 18, 1972
Chicago Today: Sox admire leader Allen
By John Hillyer
“If you plan to attend tonight’s White Sox home opener against the Texas Rangers, see if you can find the missing player,” challenges John Hillyer.
“You’ve probably read about him all spring. He’s surly to reporters, misses bus and plane trips, skips batting practices, and is a generally disruptive influence on the club.
“His name is Dick Allen.
“Don’t be fooled, now, because the Sox already have a guy by that name, and off what he has displayed so far, the description doesn’t seem to fit.
“This Allen, in fact, is already being regarded as the Sox version of Frank Robinson, a superstar augmented by personal qualities that make him a team leader.
“‘Only better than Robinson,’ said Manager Chuck Tanner, ‘because he’s younger. And with his body, he could play 10 more years, until he’s 40.’”
“Allen seemed to ease into a leadership role during Saturday’s opener in Kansas City, even tho he hasn’t played a single exhibition game.
“‘We were talking afterwards,’ Tanner recalled, ‘and I told him I liked what he was doing, that I wanted him to take charge of the infield.’”
…. “ ‘We’re all in it together,’ [Allen] said during last night’s workout in Comiskey Park. ‘I’m just here to win. There’s a good future here. There are a lot of good, young pitching arms. Coming here has been a big lift for me.’”
Bill Melton “who as the reigning American League home run king could easily have acquired an out-of-joint nose with Allen’s arrival,” has nothing but good things to say:
“He’s the big man on this club, and he knows what he means to us,” says Melton. “That’s got to be a good feeling. And you can see how it has affected him. He gives 100 percent.”
“Allen is perhaps the only player in the majors who wears his plastic helmet on defense, and the story surrounding it might explain his past as well as his present,” writes Hillyer.
“‘I started doing that the first day I went into pro ball,’ [Allen] said. ‘Did you ever see a jockey go out and do his job without a skull cap? You never know what might happen. I went back to the soft cap my first year with the Phillies, but the fans there started throwing bombs, money, apples, stones, anything they could get their hands on. So I went back to the hard hat and I’ve just stayed with it. I don’t like all that changing hats, anyway.”
Hillyer writes that the notorious Philly fans “reportedly haven’t cheered anything since some spectator fell out of the upper deck,” and they were “merciless” to Dick Allen.
“‘We were 26-28 games out,’ Allen said, ‘and they had to take it out on somebody. So they’d come out and jump on me. And the management needed me for a gate attraction, so they just let that kind of crap go on. If they’d really been interested in me as a ball player, they would have tried to stop some of it, maybe called a press conference and tried to clear the air. But they didn’t, so I turned out to be the controversial Richie Allen.’”
Allen’s relationship with manager Chuck Tanner, because they’re both from Western Pennsylvania, is a valuable “hometown factor.” “‘The people are like that there,’ said Allen, making a fist, ‘real tight. It’s not dog-eat-dog around our area like it is in these big, cold-blooded cities.’”
Wish you had a basic idea of how Chicago started, but not up for cracking a history book? I get it. Here’s a fun way to learn the basics—Part 3 of our Wrigley Building Notes Chapter: When Chicago Wasn’t Chicago. It cites several terrific books for further reading, when you’re ready.
April 18, 1972
Chicago Tribune: Hijacker Seized from Jet in Rome
by Michael McGuire
From Rome, the Tribune reports that a U.S. Air Force colonel helped capture a skyjacker calling himself “the reincarnation of Jesus Christ Superstar” on a flight from Geneva to Rome. JCS turned out to be Italian-American Mario Victor Maimone, 30, of New York City. He told the pilot he wanted an audience with the pope, and the U.S. Ambassador.
Maimone claimed to have a bomb in a cigar box, but he only had cigars. Remember cigar boxes, Older Readers?
The U.S. Colonel posed as the American ambassador and lured Maimone off the plane by suggesting they talk in the airport lounge.
You could make this stuff up, but you don’t have to. It’s just 1972. These stories are so common, this one didn’t even make it into the other papers.
April 18, 1972
Chicago Tribune: Agents Nab Skyjacker at O’Hare
A guy who looks a lot like David Cassidy in “The Partridge Family” hijacked a Delta Air Lines jet flying from West Palm Beach to O’Hare. William Herbert Greene III, who later called himself “a drifter hard up for money,” told the Delta crew he “wanted the standard extortion rate for a big jet, $500,000 in small bills.”
And he was not incorrect. That is pretty much the going rate for a hijacking these days.
This guy didn’t even have a gun. He just wrote a note and handed it to the stewardess, Julie O’Neal, who calmly acted as messenger between Greene and the pilot. Since Greene said he had a gun, and anybody who wants to bring a gun on a plane in 1972 can still easily do so, the crew had no reason not to believe him. Although the pilot did, to his credit, as Julie O’Neal to go back and check to make sure the David Cassidy look-alike was “serious.” She said he was.
“Ground preparations for the Delta 880 jet included summoning every FBI agent in the Chicago area, some 50 sky marshals…and a company of Chicago city police under Chief Deputy Supt. James M. Rochford.” But David Cassidy just walked off the plane with Julie O’Neal and surrendered.
“The hijacking was the second at O’Hare in four months. On Christmas Eve, a hijacker who had demanded a $300,000 ransom was seized when the Northwest Airlines plane he was on landed here.”
Greene was born in Berea, Ohio. Coincidentally, a long-time Chicago columnist is also from Berea. Can anyone guess who that is in Comments?
April 18, 1972
Chicago Daily Defender: What’s wrong with Chicago’s top cop?
by Renault Robinson
Robinson, co-founder of the Afro American Patrolmen’s League, lists five issues:
“1) The…[recent report by the Chicago Law Enforcement Study Group including attorney Marshall Patner] report on the police killings of citizens, 79 in 1971; 2) The Police Department’s own report on the decrease of crime in Chicago; and 3) That there is a U.S. Justice Department team of investigators here checking into AAPL charges of Police Department discrimination in hiring and promoting of minorities; 4) That there is a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of police shakedowns and corruption, especially on the Far Westside; and 5) That there is evidence that a Police Department scandal, bigger than the Summerdale scandal, is about to break in Chicago.”
The two reports, writes Robinson, “clearly show that individual policemen, and the police department, as a rule, use excessive, and fatal force, when dealing with black people, more so than any other group.”
The rest, he writes, “demonstrate that Police Superintendent James Conlisk is apparently incompetent as an administrator. He is also contributing to increased police brutality and corruption by his failure to acknowledge that the problems exist.”
…. “The truth of the matter is, however, that Mr. Conlisk, with his high school education, is incompetent to deal with the police problem in Chicago. Mayor Richard J. Daley uses Police Superintendent James Conlisk, Jr. in the same way a ventriloquist uses a wood dummy. Mayor Daley pulls Conlisk’s strings, he opens his mouth, and words come out.”
…. “Superintendent Conlisk himself, should be forced to resign for giving the police department a ‘bad’ image!”
April 18, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Search continues at Old Exchange
by Jon Hahn
“The search resumed Tuesday for architectural expert Richard Nickel Jr., believed buried beneath tons of rubble and twisted steel at the demolition site of the Old Stock Exchange Building, 30 N. La Salle.
“Nickel…was seen in the building last Thursday shortly before a floor and wall gave way and crashed into the basement area. His hard hat and briefcase were discovered by Canine Unit dogs Monday, placed neatly on a table in part of the second floor.
“Workers broke through to the basement area late Tuesday morning but found nothing.”
…. “Nickel’s father, Richard Sr., stood outside the barricades on Washington St. Tuesday, his eyes red from lack of sleep, his hands jammed into his coat pockets in frustration.
“‘They told us, me and his mother, to stay away, that it wouldn’t do any good for us to be in there,’ he said, nodding toward the bulldozers clearing away rubble.”
The old Stock Exchange stood at the southwest corner of Washington and La Salle, kitty corner from City Hall.
April 19, 1972
Chicago Tribune: Police Call Off Search at Old Stock Exchange
“The search for Richard Nickel, 43, architectural expert, was called off by police yesterday…after two days of sifting thru the rubble proved futile.”
…. “After police dogs failed to find Nickel, city officials told the wrecking company to proceed with the demolition.”
April 19, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Rookery building may win landmark status at hearing
“The Rookery at 209 S. LaSalle St., one of Chicago’s few remaining original architectural masterpiece skyscrapers, may win official ‘Chicago Landmark’ status after a hearing Thursday,” the News reports.
The Landmarks Commission will hold a hearing on the Rookery, designed by Burnham and Root in 1886. The Rookery “is the sole architectural survivor of the first LaSalle St. financial district.”
With this article, the Daily News runs two wonderful (thought not well-produced on microfilm) photographs of the Rookery taken by Richard Nickel two weeks ago, which would be a week before he was crushed while salvaging priceless ornamentation in the Old Stock Exchange Building during its demolition. The photographs were part of a folio ordered by the Landmarks Commission for its study of the Rookery’s landmark recommendation.
April 19, 1972
Chicago Today: Harold Drumm fund soars over $8,000
“CHICAGO TODAY readers have put their money where their hearts are, so a brave 13-year-old boy can have an expensive operation without his mother worrying about hospital bills.”
Chicago Today has collected $8,122.35 in the week since Harold Drumm’s right arm was severed four inches below his shoulder as he played in a trash compactor behind the Zayre store at 41st and Ashland.
Chicago’s top millionaire and philanthropist, W. Clement Stone, will match that dollar for dollar. The original operation to re-attach Harold’s arm cost $1,000 [$6,750 in 2022] and medical expenses are about $100 [$675] a day.
WGN’s Wally Phillips is running his own fund drive, combined with an auction of donated celebrity items. Wally has collected over $4,500 so far, and the auction continues—including “Gregory Peck’s pen and autograph, Sandy Duncan’s wig and Richard Harris’ neck scarf.”
“Students from seven high schools on Chicago’s South Side will raise money for Harold at a benefit hootenanny at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the St. Rita High School gym, 6310 S. Claremont Av.” The other sponsors are “St. Lawrence, Brother Rice, Bogan, Queen of Peace, Lourdes and Maria high schools.”
Above, the original St. Rita of Cascia High School, 63rd and Claremont. The school moved to Quigley Seminary South, 7740. S. Western, in 1990 after the Archdiocese closed that school.
Per last week’s papers, Mrs. Drumm is either a bookmaker or a box maker at the Atlantic Container Corp., 25th St. and S. Blue Island Av. The company does make boxes, so it could go either way. It’s unclear which papers got it right or wrong. Recently divorced, Mrs. Drumm hasn’t worked there long enough to qualify for health insurance. Coverage delicately does not mention it, but Mr. Drumm is sadly out of the picture, a strange hole that never gets filled.
Early articles said Harold was playing inside the trash compactor when it “somehow” turned on. Now, most articles say Harold was “playing near” the trash compactor. Understandably, no one wants to blame Harold for just being a typical kid. One article in last week’s Tribune explained the accident a little more clearly. The Tribune said Harold was playing “near” the trash compressor with “several other boys": “The start and stop buttons for the compressor were not covered by a safety device and anyone could have set the machine in motion, police said.”
Harold ran the three blocks to his home. Per the Daily News, Mrs. Drumm “said Harold walked into the kitchen clutching his empty sleeve and said, “Mommy, don’t cry. I’ll be all right.”
Mrs. Drumm called police. Responding officers performed first aid, called an ambulance, and raced to the trash compactor to retrieve the arm.
“We had no idea at all where it was,” Officer James Manganiello told Chicago Today. “We were throwing garbage everywhere, when [Officer John] Jarvis found the arm and took it to the hospital in a squad car.”
The Sun-Times reported the arm was rushed at “70-80-90 mph” to Central Community Hospital for the three-hour operation.
April 19, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Boy lifts, bends sewed-on arm
by John Hahn
For the first time, doctors report at a press conference that Harold Drumm can lift his arm and bend his elbow.
“‘It’s quite an accomplishment,’ said Dr. Wade Malhas. ‘Before this, he refused to even look at the arm. It made him sick.’”
Dr. Malhas has a habit of making unusual statements. Last week, he volunteered the opinion that Harold “is not representative of the so-called new generation of spoiled brats.”
Harold’s story has spread to a prison farm in Tennessee, where the inmates read about him in the Daily News and Sun-Times via wire services in a Memphis paper. The prison has a Jaycees club, and the president spoke to the paper: “‘Though we are saddened by this terrible calamity, we were very impressed with Harold’s bravery under such circumstances,’ explained James K. Jacks.”
The inmates earn $5-$35 monthly, and will be contributing to Harold’s fund.
April 19, 1972
Chicago Today: Full page Sears ad
Oh so 70’s.
April 19, 1972
Chicago Today: WBBM-FM full page ad
As noted last week, Chicago Today runs way more ads for radio stations than any other newspaper. Given that Chicago Today likes to run full-page ads for its own circulation and advertising (see a little further on), I’m guessing this is part of an aggressive ad sales force and pricing.
Many people think the Tribune never expected Chicago Today to last more than a few years, that afternoon newspapers were inexorably a dying breed, and that the Tribune was simply testing new approaches and features in Today because management understood that the stodgy Tribune needed an overhaul. But the enthusiastic push for advertising and circulation makes me wonder if the Tribune held out some hope of keeping Today alive.
April 20, 1972
Chicago Tribune: Landmark Preservation Asked
Under a huge photograph of the Rookery’s dazzling interior lobby, the Tribune quotes W.R. Hasbrouck at the Chicago Landmarks Commission hearings on whether to save the building at 209 S. La Salle.
Hasbrouck is executive director of the American Institute of Architects. “We have an irresistible urge to destroy our landmarks,” he said, criticizing “building owners who are unwilling to have their properties designated landmarks for economic reasons.”
“Oscar D’Angelo, attorney who headed a group that failed to save the old Chicago Stock Exchange Building…challenged the city to ‘put your own house in order.’ He said that the land under the building is owned by the city and leased to the University of Chicago. When the lease expires in 1985, the city will own the building as well as the land, he said.’”
April 20, 1972: The Mighty IC
Chicago Tribune
no byline
“Illinois Central Railroad officials said yesterday they expect to have all 49 commuter stations fully automated within two years.”
Here I will resist adding a laugh-cry emoji.
“The facilities would be complete with automatic ticket machines and close circuit television. The television, the officials said, would enable passengers to receive instant assistance if they ran into trouble with machine.”
Now resisting the urge to add the red-faced emoji with the line of symbols representing profanity across its mouth.
April 20, 1972
Chicago Today: Daley Special on CBS Tonight
Bruce Vilanch’s TV Report
Bruce seems to be warning that tonight’s CBS special on Mayor Daley could be mind-blowing for people like, say, Mayor Daley.
The show is part of a series, “CBS Reports,” which Bruce calls “controversial.” Last year’s “The Selling of the Pentagon,” he says, “blew the roof off Washington, and tomorrow morning I’d be very careful walking down Washington Street.”
Note: City Hall is bounded on the south by Washington St.
The show’s title is “Mayor Daley: A Study in Power.”
The crew is headed by Robert Markowitz and Jane Nicholl Sahlins, who Bruce notes is married to “the man responsible for the Second City cabaret.”
The show’s crew spent nine months here, following Richard Friedman’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign against Mayor Daley in the last election, “snooping” around Bridgeport and “debating life with Studs Terkel.”
Bruce reports it took the producers three months to score an interview with Mayor Daley. Markowitz says they just listened to whatever Daley talked about for about an hour and 45 minutes.
“The mayor’s interview is edited down and sprinkled thruout the show, a practice that leaves him with about seven on-camera minutes and leaves CBS with the inevitable charge of taking words of context,” writes Bruce. “This was anticipated by Markowitz, who feels that he will be attacked by Daley loyalists and Daley oppositionists, for both going too far and not far enough.”
Markowitz says the special looks at the physical beauty of the city and how Daley is one of the most popular Chicago politicians in history, but also shows the city’s patronage, deals, and nepotism. The second half “deals with Daley the man,” and finally, “we reach our conclusion, which may surprise some people.”
“There probably has been nothing like the CBS Reports program except, naturally, Mike Royko’s ‘Boss,’” writes Bruce. “And the two may have a similar dynamic effect. Oddly enough, the Markowitz team never really consulted the columnist.”
Markowicz tells Bruce they. talked to Mike, but didn’t formally interview him because they felt it would be inappropriate to use another journalist as a primary source, which doesn’t entirely make sense since they used Studs Terkel. And because documentaries interview other journalists for their opinions, or to state facts, all the time.
“After nine months, we were all Daley watchers,” says Markowicz.
“And so should all of us,” Bruce concludes.
And so we can, thanks to the wonder of the internet. Here it is! The lengthy montage of Chicago and Daley clips set to the rocking “Mrs. Vanderbilt” (Paul McCartney and Wings,” starting around the 2:30 mark, is an absolute dream.
If you’re a regular THIS CRAZY DAY reader, you’ll probably want to follow Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today too.
April 20, 1972
Chicago Today: Harold learns fate—it’s a miracle
“Tuesday night Harold was lying in his bed at Central Community Hospital where he has been since doctors sewed on his arm after a freak accident on April 9.
“In strolled his doctor, Wade Malhas, to have a late evening check. Harold’s mother, Mrs. Peggy Drumm, of 1739 W. 43rd St., had already left.
“Malhas looked at the limb, which had been severed when Harold was playing near a trash compressor. He smiled and told Harold his arm was going to be all right, it appeared.
“Harold immediately got on the phone and called his mother.
“‘The doctor just came in, mom, and told me this is a miracle,’ the young man told her. ‘I’m so tickled.’”
Surgeons yesterday called the arm graft a “90 per cent success” with circulation restored to the entire arm “with the exception of fingers that may have to be amputated. The boy can move the arm, proving the nerve connections have also healed somewhat.”
“‘It was good work by the doctor and good work by the Lord,’ said Mrs. Drumm last night, while she was sitting with Harold, who was in a chair watching television for the first time since the accident.”
April 20, 1972
Chicago Daily Defender: Bobby Womack to play at the Burning Spear
“Bobby Womack opens a limited three-day engagement at The Burning Spear, Friday, April 21. The versatile singer, whose current hit single, ‘That’s The Way I Feel About Cha,” is rapidly approaching the million sales mark, will be performing at the Chicago nightery through Sunday, April 23.”
The Burning Spear was a South Side club at 5521 (formerly Club DeLisa) owned by Pervis Spann.
Pervis Spann is a legendary figure in Chicago’s Black music community who died just last month, better known perhaps as “Pervis Spann, the Blues Man.”
Daughter Melody Spann Cooper, chair and CEO of Midway Broadcasting, which now owns WVON, told the Sun-Times that her father “went very quickly from being a sharecropper to a shareholder”. Pervis Spann was born in Mississippi and came to Chicago after serving in the Korean War according to his biography at The Historymakers.
Rev. Jesse Jackson and Melody Spann both report that Spann originally named Aretha Franklin “Queen of Soul” during a performance at the Regal Theater.
Spann studied broadcasting and became a local star as one of the “Good Guys” group of DJs on WVON after the Chess brothers bought the station in 1963. He also managed performers like B.B. King, promoted concerts and owned clubs—as well as eventually becoming an owner of WVON, too.
April 21, 1972
Note that a walk on the moon by the Apollo 16 astronauts shares top billing today with Martha Mitchell, who isn’t even married to the U.S. Attorney General anymore. Unfortunately, the microfilm renders her picture a dark blob. Here’s a better look:
John Mitchell resigned a couple of months ago to head President Nixon’s re-election campaign. Martha will get an article anyway today which takes up most of a page. And this is before she has a good reason to become controversial.
April 21, 1972
Chicago Today: Full page ad for a $27,500 ranch house
This would be a $185,625 house today, for $9,281 down and a $1,275/month mortgage payment. Price of living in 1972: Uncalculated.
In 1972, each newspaper has a weekly real estate section, just like today, but even more chock full of enticing ads to lure city folk out to the burgeoning suburbs on the still-relatively-new expressway system.
Many ads include maps and driving directions. Developers quickly bulldozing farms understand that any trek more than one suburb outside the city is still considered by many to practically require a sextant.
If you can’t read this ad, it says:
At Woodland Heights we feel that families who buy a luxury home would like to enjoy the other luxuries of life too. Right?
Enjoy living in this established, close-in community of over three thousand families….Located on Irving Park Rd. (Rt. 19) one mile West of Barrington Rd. Take the Northwest Tollway (Kennedy) to Barrington Rd. and turn South to Irving Park Rd.
This is a perfectly serviceable, nice little ranch. I’m a little surprised anyone would try labeling it a “luxury home” even in 1972, however.
The Woodland Heights development is easy to spot today on the map via Woodland Heights Boulevard. Odd that the ad doesn’t mention the suburb in which the Woodland Heights development is being built—which is Streamwood. Streamwood was incorporated in 1957, so why not name it?
The route to Woodland Heights is still the Northwest Tollway, but renamed the Jane Addams. As you drive south on Barrington Road, you’ve got Schaumburg to the east of you, Streamwood to the west. Irving Park is all the way up in this northern latitude, well north of Devon, because soon after the street exits Chicago, it begins a northwest jaunt as it leaves Schiller Woods.
Here’s what could easily be the model home pictured in the ad, for sale today at almost precisely the price we would expect based on inflation between 1972 and 2022. In fact, it’s slightly cheaper:
And here’s a wider look at the street via Google Streetview. I’ll say this: The virtual house tour shows the backyards are quite generous.
April 22-23, 1972
By John Gallagher
“A 15-year-old girl was shot to death while riding in a car about half a block from the home of Mayor Richard J. Daley.” This happened around 10:30 p.m., oddly not included at the top of the article.
“The girl, Patricia Kirby, of 451 W. 43rd Pl., was shot in the head as she rode with four teenaged friends.
“The driver of the car, John Tovo, 17, of 452 W. 44th St., said that as they passed the corner of 36th St. and Lowe, just south of the mayor’s home at 3536 S. Lowe, he heard a sharp cracking sound.”
Tovo flagged down a police car “near Sox Park at 35th and Shields”.
Homicide detectives were questioning the other teens in the car. “Police said Tovo and the other occupants of the car were in the area looking for some teen-agers who had been in a fight with a brother of one of the car’s occupants earlier Friday night.”
Police technicians were still trying to determine “if the shot was fired from outside or inside the car”.
Patricia Kirby attended St. Mary of Perpetual Help High School, 1023 W. 32nd Street. Per the parish website, St. Mary’s was founded in 1880 as a Polish parish in Bridgeport. The gorgeous church was erected by 1892, and rather amazingly, the parishioners had paid for it by 1903.
I wasn’t aware of this, but becoming debt-free qualified St. Mary of Perpetual Help to be consecrated by Chicago’s Archbishop James Quigley, making it “the first Polish Roman Catholic Church in the United States to be bestowed with this great honor.”
Due to dwindling numbers of parishioners, the grammar school was consolidated with five other area Catholic schools in 1985. The high school closed, and it’s since been demolished. However, again from the parish website, in 2002 “De La Salle Institute opened a high school for girls located in the former St. Mary of Perpetual Help grade school and gymnasium buildings.”
The website may not be entirely updated, because the parish name is now listed as “St. Mary of Perpetual Help - All Saints- St. Anthony,” so presumably the parish was consolidated with two others by the Chicago Archdiocese in its ongoing pruning.
April 22, 1972
Chicago Daily Defender: Chisholm raps bombing
UPI
“Rep. Shirley Chisholm, D-NY, Thursday described the administration’s rationale for escalated U.S. bombing [in Vietnam] as ‘harebrained gibberish.’
“Mrs. Chisholm, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, called on President Nixon to fulfill his 1968 promise to end the war, on the Congress to cut off funds for it now, and on the American public to ‘defeat those members of Congress, Democrat or Republican, who do not at long last face up to what they should have done years ago.”
April 22-23, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Moonmen go digging!
Apollo 16 astronauts take less precedence on the Daily News front page today, which is understandable since they are much further away than Bridgeport. This is, after all, the fifth moon landing.
The Apollo 16 crew “turned their lunar jeep into a garden cart Saturday for a treasure-digging weekend….John Young and Charles Duke loaded the $8 million Rover II with rakes, shovels and other long-handled tools and set out for distant craters and hills.
“Their outing foreshadowed how weekends may be spent by ordinary rock-hunting Americans when trips to the moon become commonplace in the 21st Century.”
April 21, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Daley jauntily steps into his 18th year as mayor
by Henry Hanson
“Chicagoans 17 years old and younger could say with certain authority Thursday: ‘Seen one mayor and you’ve seen ‘em all,’ writes Henry Hanson.
Mayor Daley has begun his 18th year as mayor, a new Chicago record.
Mayor Daley held a “chatty, jovial, jammed City Hall press conference” in which he called for pay raises and more jobs for reporters if they started “reporting the good things.”
Mayor Daley plans to watch that CBS special about him tonight at 7 p.m., “Mayor Daley: A Study in Power.”
“‘‘It will probably be the greatest production of all time,’ chuckled Daley. ‘I know if I’m in it, it’s going to be pretty good.’”
I guess Mayor Daley missed Bruce Vilanch’s review in Chicago Today.
Hanson reports that Mayor Daley’s new license plate, on his mayoral limousine, is “706-222.” That’s Daley’s vote count from his first mayoral election in 1953, versus then-5th Ward Ald. Robert Merriam.
On Monday this week, Hanson writes, Mayor Daley called up Howard Miller for his first day on the air in his new home at WMAQ. Don’t know who Howard Miller is? See here for “Oh my God, it’s time to talk about Howard Miller.”
Howard Miller: “Mister Mayor, it’s pretty early in the morning to ask anyone to be profound, although I’m inclined to think you’re profound 24 hours a day.”
Mayor Daley: “…in my opinion, politics, Howard, is one of the great vocations and the great professions. I put it alongside of the clergy, the great scientists, the educators, if properly done, and it’s unfortunate that many people assail a man or woman who takes politics as their profession when, on the contrary, they should be saluting them and encouraging them.”
“It was almost a parody of the Daleyese style of talk,” writes Hanson, “to which most Chicagoans—although not reporters, who habitually clean up the mayor’s syntax—have become accustomed.” I guess that means Hanson and/or Daily News editors cleaned up this quote—as odd as it may sound to Younger Ears, it’s pretty eloquent for Mayor Daley.
Mayor Daley will turn 70 on May 15.
Lastly, Hanson presents two hilariously opposing views of Mayor Daley’s reign: leading Daley foe independent Democrat and current 5th Ward Ald. Leon Despres, and Ald. Vito Marzullo, one of Mayor Daley’s closest Machine allies, an example of human onomatopoeia if there ever was one.
Despres (somewhat surprisingly) likes Daley’s “lavish support” of the central business district, technical improvements in policing, and even says “public accounts” are better.
“But on the minus side,” Despres continues, “I list the profligate increase in residential property taxes, the frightful expansion of patronage politics, the decline in personal safety, the inadequacy of environment protection measures, the partisan domination of the Board of Education, the decline of the parks, the disfigurement of the lakefront, and above all, the uninterrupted support of color segregation, discrimination and neglect.”
Ald. Marzullo: “I’ve never seen a man more dedicated, more sincere, more hard working, or a man that has the city, the country. and the state on the tip of his fingers than Mayor Daley.
“He’s the seventh mayor I’ve seen, and none of the others could hold a candle to this man,” Marzullo proclaims. “He never lets anything go by without putting his hands in and trying for a remedy. He’ll never shirk any responsibility. He’s a leader, not a boss.”
April 22-23, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Stereotypes and images
Lu Palmer column
Lu Palmer writes today that when a University of Chicago student was killed in a robbery last week in Hyde Park, “many blacks instinctively voiced out loud or under their breaths the question…. “Will the finger of suspicion be pointed at a black person?”
A fatal robbery in Hyde Park is unusual enough at the time that this crime made all the front pages.
Palmer writes that the media labels Black perpetrators, while “refraining from applying a label to white criminals.”
“In the case of the Hyde Park student, the Chicago Sunday papers made it clear that the suspects were black. To its credit, The Chicago Daily News refrained from this labeling.”
Palmer goes on to a meditation on “stereotyping” and labels that you would never read anywhere today, because he lists—and the Daily News prints—every single ethnic and racial slur you’re likely to think of. I won’t print the worst slur for African Americans, even though I’ve noted several times that 1972 and this site are not reviewed by sensitivity readers, and not for the sensitive reader.
So why am I censoring Lu Palmer? It isn’t my preference. Some readers will disagree, but I think it isn’t healthy for a society to treat any word, term or idea as if it were “Voldemort” in a Harry Potter book—for exactly the reason that Dumbledore insists on saying “Voldemort” when nobody else will. I agree with Dumbledore that it gives power to a word that it shouldn’t have over us. And that reason doesn’t even address the obvious Orwellian aspects of the issue.
But for this word, the cultural shift has already swiftly happened. To print the word today, to even allude to the first letter of the word, is now so verboten that to break the taboo, I would need to stop serializing a novel set in 1972 in exchange for a full-time job in culture war engagement.
I think this new practice is the wrong societal choice. I am now part of the problem by going along with it. Even going along with it but stating that I think it is the wrong societal choice will, by itself, offend some people. So there we are.
I must note, for younger readers who may not know, that this shift is recent. Not only in 1972, but until just a few years before this post, you would see the full reference to any word or slur that didn’t include George Carlin’s famous seven words. It’s fascinating that 50 years ago, society was wrangling over completely different sets of words that some people didn’t want other people to be able to say or hear—profanity back then, and some sexual terms.
Anyway, back to Lu Palmer. I wonder what he would say about this topic.
Today in 1972, Lu Palmer writes that ethnic slang names/slurs are OK when it’s “intracultural”:
“Most groups refer to themselves, among themselves, as Polacks, Wops, Dagos, [worst racist slur for Black people, printed in full], even WASPS. When used intraculturally, they are not meant to demean. When used interculturally, they are.” [Note: The term “WASP” is actually extremely prevalent by 1972, even though Younger Readers probably don’t even know what it means in 2022. It literally means “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” but it’s also simply shorthand for “rich.”]
Ethnic groups develop their own labels too, Palmer notes. Blacks in 1972 have begun using the term “Oreo cookie,” he writes, rather than “Uncle Tom,” meaning “black on the outside but white on the inside.” Palmer writes that other groups have invented their own analogies. For Puerto Ricans, “coconut”; “Chinese Toms are bananas and Indian Toms are red apples.”
Palmer writes that comedian Dick Gregory has “managed to give [worst Black slur printed in full] its own dignity,” but lists nearly a paragraph of other Black slurs that “continue to be fighting words.”
“I like what Dick Gregory said in his book, ‘The Shadow that Scares Me,’” writes Palmer:
“America today is so obsessed with color. We have a habit in America of labeling with a color that which we fear or do not understand.
“When I look at a map of the world, I see a country named China. Yet, America constantly refers to that country as Red China. Our fear of Communism causes us to attach the color label. The label symbolizes our fear and resentment.”
…. “Yet, in spite of America’s color obsession, she claims not to be able to understand the slogan ‘Black Power.’ I refuse to believe that a country which has been to the moon and sent back pictures cannot understand two simple words.”
“The most likely reason, Dick,” writes Palmer, “is that the label ‘black’ has created such an image of nothingness that the thought of black power is unimaginable to America.
“Or, come to think of it, maybe she’s too afraid of the idea to admit she understands it.”
April 22-23, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Letters to the Editor
President Nixon’s new escalation of the Vietnam War draws a slew of letters. The last one is especially powerful.
April 22-23, 1972
Chicago Daily News: Cancer Cash
What, you never thought about buying health insurance from your daily newspaper?
April 23, 1972
Chicago Today: Circulation ad
April 23, 1972
Chicago Today: WBBM-FM full page ad
Below, another example of Chicago Today’s advertising gains advertised by the ad above.
April 23, 1972
Chicago Today: Gang link in Bridgeport killing?
by Ed Bush and Gregg Ramshaw
Police have determined the shot that killed 16-year-old Patricia Kirby, as she rode in a car a half block from Mayor Daley’s home at 3536 S. Lowe about 10:30 p.m., was definitely fired from outside the car.
“Police said the young people were cruising the neighborhood looking for a group of youths who had beaten up [18-year-old driver John] Tovo’s younger brother, Charles, earlier in the day. Police said Charles and three friends had been roughed up as they walked thru the Bridgeport neighborhood ‘apparently because they were not from that neighborhood.’”
The Tovo family lives at 452 W. 44th, in nearby Canaryville. “Lt. Thomas Downs of the Deering Street Police District said that street gangs do exist in the Bridgeport area but that the youths involved were not believed to be members of any gang. Downs added that gang-style beatings and retaliation are infrequent in the area.”
….”White youth gangs or ‘athletic clubs’ as they prefer to call themselves, have existed in the Bridgeport area for years. Mayor Daley himself, Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn, and a number of prominent public officials who grew up in the Bridgeport neighborhood were members of the Hamburg Club, or Hamburgers, in their youth. However, white youth gang activity in the area has been dormant for some years.”
April 22-23, 1972
Chicago Daily News: The human side of Dick Allen
by Dave Nightingale
“Tuesday night at White Sox Park, Richard Anthony Allen was officially introduced, for the first time, to 20,944 South Side fans.
“Twenty thousand, nine hundred of them cheered madly, forty-four booed him.
“Those were the best odds he’s known in nine major league seasons….’I really feel wanted,’ Allen repeated time and again.”
“The Philadelphia Phillies wanted Allen once. But not their fans. So Richie didn’t want the Phillies. And after six tempestuous seasons, he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals for the 1970 campaign.”
But despite getting along well in St. Louis, Allen was traded to Los Angeles after one season. “It wasn’t the trade that shocked me so much as it was one newspaper’s ‘explanation’ of the trade. The story said the trade was made to ‘improve team morale.’ That really hurt because when the day comes that I can’t get along with my teammates, I’ll get out of baseball.”
Did you dig spending time in 1972? If you came to THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972 from social media, you may not know it’s part of the novel being serialized here, one chapter per month: “Roseland, Chicago: 1972” —FREE. It’s the story of Steve Bertolucci, 10-year-old Roselander in 1972, and what becomes of him. Check it out here.
I was going to guess Bob Greene, but then remembered that was Bexley.