To access all website contents, click HERE.
Every 221 years, a massive onslaught of cicadas hits Chicago when two separate broods synch their schedules and emerge simultaneously—the 13-year variety and their 17-year buddies.
Every 88 or 108 years, we win the World Series—depending what side of town you live on.1
And every 50 years, the Bears threaten to move to Arlington Heights while a top Illinois politician threatens to redraw the state’s Congressional districts mid-decade instead of waiting for the next census.
What’s that? You don’t remember the last time, in 1975?
Pull up a chair. The details are just as loud and ugly as the cicadas, but thankfully less crunchy under your feet.
Last century’s Bears/Redistricting convergence is also more fun than the 2025 version, because it features the real Mayor Daley in both onslaughts. Younger Readers, this is the Chicago history equivalent of “It stars Brad Pitt.”
Here’s a quick review of 2025’s convergence in case you’re not up on your current events—or skip by scrolling down to “1975 Convergence: The Daley Double.”
2025 Convergence: The Bears and Chicago — first comes love, next comes a nasty break up instead of marriage
You might say the Bears’ current Arlington Heights threat is from February 2023, when the team paid almost $200 million for the racetrack site. But it only took a few months for the Bears to cry about Arlington property taxes, then set up meetings with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and some eager suburban leaders.
Game back on.
By year’s end, the Bears were surveying Soldier Field’s south parking lot. Lakefront domed stadium fever spiked as 2025 began, and the Bears touted a $2 billion private investment commitment. Mouths watered over visions of a domed stadium plus hotel, “innovative retail” whatever that means, restaurants, a pedestrian bridge to Northerly Island, yada yada yada.
At the NFL’s 2024 annual meeting, Bears president/CEO Keven Warren was all “Right now, we’re putting our energy to downtown Chicago, to the museum campus.”
Next, Warren and Mayor Brandon Johnson co-hosted a flashy presentation at Soldier Field on April 24, 2024, featuring an AI-created video of the nearly $5 billion project’s domed stadium and its sumptuous surroundings. AI Chicagoans picnicked and frolicked on an open field surrounded by the old Soldier Field colonnades. See “The J is for Johnson” in Mike Royko 50+/- Years Ago Today for more on the uncanny resemblance between Mayor Brandon Johnson and Mayor Richard J. Daley themselves, and their failed lakefront stadium schemes.
Onstage for the big day, Mayor Johnson lavished praise on Kevin Warren as if the Bears CEO was going to be every Chicagoan’s best friend, priest and dad rolled into one, besides building us a domed stadium just to be nice. My favorite Johnson quote, which you won’t see in other accounts:
“And you know he (Kevin Warren) loves this city and loves people so much that you know he sets out days in the week where he actually fasts and prays, and as someone who is deeply tethered to faith, I appreciate you and I honor the leadership that you have brought to the city of Chicago and to this organization.”
One year later, we learned prayers only get you so far.
Right away there were signs that the Johnson-Warren love affair would not be fully consummated, though the dalliance took an entire year to run its course. The day Johnson and Warren announced their stadium engagement, as it were, an unimpressed Gov. JB Pritzker commented during an unrelated appearance in far south suburban New Lenox:
“I’m highly skeptical of the proposal that’s been made, and I believe strongly that this is not a high priority for legislators and certainly not for me, when I compare it to other things,” said Pritzker, pointing out that even the then-current Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs had just lost a voter referendum on funding renovations for their stadium.
Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, making his own unrelated appearance that day in west suburban Maywood, poured another bucket of cold water on the cute young couple:
“I want to say to you publicly what I said to Kevin Warren privately last week. If we were to put this issue on the board for a vote right now, it would fail, and it would fail miserably.”
Yet, right after the presentation, Mayor Johnson sat down with NBC Sports Chicago’s Laurence Holmes and bristled when Holmes mentioned that Johnson’s Democratic colleagues didn’t seem down with a new domed Bears stadium on the lakefront:
“I run the city of Chicago,” Johnson told Holmes. “It’s not about just keeping the Bears in Chicago—which we have a commitment from the Bears to remain in Chicago—it’s also about the transformation that exists there.”
Unasked and unanswered: Did they exchange class rings?
Holmes still wondered if Chicagoans would support the Bears’ stadium plan.
“We’re talking about 24,000 jobs — who’s opposed to that?” Johnson retorted. “We’re talking about 43,000 jobs for the region — who’s opposed to that? The Bears and the organization putting in over $2 billion to make sure this stadium is built with private funds — who’s going to be opposed to that?”
Just about everybody who wasn’t in on it.
In the 2024 fall Assembly session, Pritzker and the legislature refused to hand the Bears $900 million in new bonds from the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, much less consider paying for another required $1.5 billion in infrastructure work.
A Harris poll that summer found 72% of Chicagoans thought a new stadium should be financed entirely or mostly with private money.
Johnson promoted the languishing lakefront plan again in early 2025, while others made a brief attempt to interest the Bears in the old Michael Reese hospital site. The Bears turned up their stubby snout at it.
In spring, young CEO’s minds turn to their big stadium plans. So in early April, Kevin Warren admitted the Bears’ “focus” was no longer laser-locked on the lakefront. Kevin Warren might have been going steady with Chicago, but he was stepping out with Arlington Heights on the side.
“One thing I have said before is that these are not linear processes or projects,” said Warren. “They take time. They take a lot of energy and effort. And I am very, very pleased with where we are.”
In other words, Kevin Warren and the Bears were just not that into Mayor Johnson and Chicago.
But breaking up is hard to do. So in late April, newly-installed Chicago Park District chief Carlos Ramirez-Rosa pledged to work to keep the Bears at the lake.
About 29 miles northwest, Arlington Heights was busy approving a new economic impact study on their Bears project.
And it turned out the Bears had already sent a snarky letter to the park district demanding monthly meetings to go over the Bears’ concerns about Soldier Field and get “information” on its “maintenance.” Translation: The Bears wanted their records back.
Everybody was gossiping about the break up by late May. Mayor Johnson was all “I never really liked the Bears anyway. I just felt sorry for them.”
Now we’re in the dog days of late summer 2025, and the Bears are trying a tush push on what’s called “megaproject legislation” for their Arlington stadium plans, trying to shove it past the Springfield goal post during the Assembly’s short veto session coming up this October 14-30.
The megaproject designation would freeze the Bears’ property taxes on their Arlington property, letting them instead negotiate a much lower fee with the surrounding suburbs, since Pritzker and other Democratic leaders won’t hand out bonds or cash. That bill already went nowhere in the Assembly’s spring session.
“It is very, very important that it passes because without that legislation, we are not able to proceed forward,” Warren said during a recent press offensive, calling for passage this fall and “moving dirt” before New Year’s.
Warren has a habit of insising everything needs to happen now, now, now.
After the April 24, 2024 stage show, for instance, he told reporters the Bears had presented a formal proposal at that point because “every year that we wait it’s a $150 to $200 million dollars of increased costs that ultimately we’ll have to figure out, but we don’t think that’s prudent.”
In April 2024, Warren insisted that stadium legislation needed to move in the Assembly’s spring 2024 session, “not even in a fall (2024) veto session…because even if we’re approved in a fall (2024) veto session we wouldn’t be able to get into the ground because of the weather, it would push it back a year. If we’re approved in May (2024) then that would allow us to begin construction to put people to work next summer (2025) and that would allow us 36 months later to open up our building in 2028.”
In other words, Warren showed everybody a nice video on April 24, and he wanted a $5 billion deal done within four weeks.
Today, in August 2025, the Bears still want a deal done yesterday. But how can they two-time Arlington Heights with Chicago anymore? At some point, you’re stuck with the girl you paid $197 million to dance with.
Look for a save-the-date card for the Bears and Arlington, because the Bears want to own their a stadium with Disneyesque hotel, restaurants and retail just like all their other cool NFL team friends.
And how did the 1975 Bears love triangle go with Chicago and Arlington Heights? Scroll down or click here for “1975 Convergence: The Bears and Arlington Heights, Kissing in a Tree.”
Follow Chicago week by week in the city’s daily newspapers from 1972!
2025 Convergence: Redistricting, Trump Resistance Style
Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is punching back at Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s attempt to pass a revamped Congressional map in his state legislature, shifting five seats from safe Democratic representatives to Republicans. That’s because Republicans rule Congress right now by a slim 219-212 majority. Technically Democrats could erase that by flipping just three seats in the 2026 elections—if they can keep everything they’ve already got.
Every seat counts, so the outlook is cloudy. Some experts don’t believe Texas’s already gerrymandered map can really produce three to five more Republicans. Greg Abbott is sure as hell gonna try.
Recall that this whole mess started when Abbott reacted to President Donald Trump’s contention that he “got the highest vote in the history of Texas” in the 2024 presidential election, so Republicans “deserve” five more Congressional districts there. Normally, of course, states redraw these maps right after each national decennial census, and stick with it for ten years.
Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom instantly launched publicity campaigns, starring themselves, denouncing Trump and Abbot. They’ve attacked Trump and threatened to redraw their own maps in everything from Pritzker’s stop on Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” throwing back a shot of Malort—
—to Newsom’s tweet trolling Trump in all caps.
Pritzker and Newsom are battling each other for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination right now as much as they’re fighting the good fight against Trump, but whatever. It’s a fun warm-up. Pritzker’s billionaire joke fell flat at last year’s Democratic National Convention, so he clearly workshopped his unapologetic I’m-a-billionaire routine before trying it out again on national TV with Colbert. Newsom either has a fabulous staff of Hollywood comedy writers put out of work by AI, or fabulous AI. Either way, it bodes well for a fun 2028 campaign cycle.
Newsom’s potential stab at redistricting looks considerably more serious than Pritzker’s, with California’s map more likely capable of eking out a few more Democratic seats. Illinois’ current map is already so gerrymandered that it will be tetchy indeed to invent new Democratic representatives without conjuring them out of thin air. Republicans were only able to win three out of 17 Congressional seats in 2024, even though Trump won Illinois with 44% of the vote. That’s why Illinois got an “F” from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project’s redistricting report card for the 2021 election cycle, though Pritzker blamed the egregious gerrymander on anonymous kindergarteners instead of a Democratic-controlled legislative map….that he signed off on after campaigning for governor with promises to push for a state constitutional amendment establishing a nonpartisan redistricting commission.
Still, JB is right in there—or trying to look like it, anyway, to jumpstart his presidential campaign.
“As far as I'm concerned, everything is on the table,” Pritzker told reporters, flanked by a few of the dozen or so Texas Democratic legislators who fled to Illinois to thwart Abbott’s Texas remap by denying their state legislature a quorum.
Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch’s spokesperson says nothing’s happening on an Illinois remap right now. And if anything is going to happen, Springfield will have to hop to it before candidates hit state election filing deadlines in late October.
But who knows? Democrats already pushed through our current ultra-gerrymandered map in 2021 because they hold supermajorities in both halves of the state legislature.
And if Pritzker can’t get it done all by himself, House Minority Leader Tony McCombie (R-Savanna) told WBEZ that if “Speaker Welch wants to do it, then it will be done.”
Or start our Mike Royko biogaphical series, The Life and Death of High-Rise Man.
1975 Convergence: The Daley Double
Before jumping into 1975 Chicago, safety demands that 2025 readers acclimate themselves to Mayor Daley’s 1955-1976 reign, like a diver moving slowly through the watery fathoms to avoid decompression sickness.
Take these first few paragraphs to either recall or understand that “Mr. Mayor” meant something completely different during the heyday of Chicago’s Democratic Machine.
For instance: In 1975, as we look at the Bears’ first threat to move to Arlington Heights at the same time as a mid-decade state redistricting effort, the entire state was waiting to see what day Mayor Daley wanted to hold Illinois primaries.
You see why Mayor Brandon Johnson often seems jealous of Mayor Daley, even as Johnson decries corrupt old Machine politics and talks about transparency and democracy and collaboration. Who doesn’t really just want to tell people what to do and see it happen—and get revenge on anybody who gets in your way?
In spring 1975, Democrats—aka Mayor Daley—controlled both chambers of the Illinois legislature. Mayor Daley’s people had passed a bill in the House moving the state primary from March to the first Tuesday in May, starting in 1976. His bill in the Senate moved the primary to the second Tuesday in May. Maybe Mayor Daley was keeping his options open a few more weeks while he decided on his spring vacation dates. Who can know.
Illinois Republicans opposed both Daley’s May dates. They favored an April primary, because their farmer constituents were busy planting crops in May.
Mayor Daley’s urban Machine neither planted, nor did it sow. Mayor Daley chose the second Tuesday in May.
The finalized primary bill landed on the desk of Democratic Gov. Dan Walker, a first-term governor who’d run a primary campaign against Mayor Daley and the Democratic Machine.
In 1971, Walker had capitalized on his name by walking 1,200 miles across Illinois to campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to run against incumbent Republican Gov. Richard Ogilvie. Walker refused to appear before Mayor Daley’s Democratic Party slate-making committee to ask for backing in the primary. As the committee met at a Springfield Hotel, Walker made a show of walking six more miles around the capital instead. The committee’s backing, said Walker, would mean “you cannot meet people’s needs because machine needs comes first.”
Walker went on to beat Mayor Daley’s candidate in the Democratic primary, Lt. Gov. Paul Simon, and then Gov. Ogilvie in the general election.
This picture gives you an idea of how Mayor Daley felt about Dan Walker:
In 1975, Gov. Dan Walker vetoed Mayor Daley’s primary date bill.
“Walker’s veto had been widely predicted by fellow politicians who said the governor was not inclined to push back the election date because it would just give a prospective primary opponent that much more time to campaign against him,” noted the Daily News’ Charles Nicodemus.
A prospective primary opponent, Nicodemus did not need to add, backed by Mayor Daley. The Tribune editorial board heartily agreed that Walker’s veto was, “despite all his rhetoric,” in “his own interests,” not the public’s.
So you might think the primary bill was an example of Mayor Daley’s failure. Not really. Machine Democrats had relished the thought of campaigning in better weather, though the March primary date is often considered a ploy to reduce voter turnout, favoring Machine candidates. Either way, what difference did that really make to Mayor Daley, who spent Election Day at his Democratic Party headquarters?
In contrast, the veto didn’t work out so well for Gov. Walker.
The following March 16, Daley backed Illinois Secretary of State Michael Howlett in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Howlett trounced Walker, while Illinois farmers leisurely planted their crops later in May. Howlett would lose the general election to Republican Jim Thompson, but I bet Mayor Daley preferred Gov. Thompson to Gov. Walker. The point is, even when Mayor Daley lost one skirmish, he generally won the war.
And that all happened three years after the Shakman decree, the federal consent decree which began dissolving the Machine’s (Mayor Daley’s) most powerful weapon—handing out patronage jobs to loyal Machine flunkies who would then work for Machine candidates on Election Day.
Besides political offices, the Machine (aka Mayor Daley) at its peak controlled about 40,000 patronage jobs to reward the little people who got politicians elected in exchange for collecting government paychecks, according to Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor’s mammoth, well-written biography “American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation.”
And Mayor Daley kept a close eye on every single one of those jobs. Each job was handed out by a Machine official whose own job came from Mayor Daley, so 40,000 people knew their jobs came from Mayor Daley.
Now even our Youngest Readers understand what “Mayor Daley” means, and we move on to the 1975 Illinois redistricting.
(For more, check out Part One of the coming mini-biography of Mayor Daley, part of The Great Chicago Reporter Rebellion series.)
1975 Convergence: The Mid-Decade Gerrymander
Now that your blood is used to the pressure of 1975 politics, it will be less surprising to hear that as Mayor Daley contemplated moving the state’s primary election date, he also decided to redraw Illinois’ 1971 congressional district map. I mean, why not?
Mayor Daley’s map ambitions emerged because in 1975, Democrats—aka, Mayor Daley—controlled both houses of the Illinois legislature. During the 1971 redistricting, the Illinois House had been dominated by Republicans, while the Senate was evenly split between the parties. The 1971 map was the first after a new state constitution went into effect in 1970, in time for that year’s census.
The 1970 census wasn’t kind to Chicago, and Daley didn’t much like the map that came out of it. Change, he felt, was in the air.
Here’s how it went down in 1971, without getting too far into the weeds: Per the new constitution’s redistricting rules, after the General Assembly failed to pick a map within 30 days, a three-judge federal panel chose instead. The judges—two Republicans and one Democrat—voted 2-1 on partisan lines for a map that even the Tribune called “engineered” by Republican Illinois House Speaker Robert Blair.
Remember, in 1971 the Tribune was still being partially edited from newspaper heaven by deceased owner/publisher Col. Robert McCormick. The Colonel was so ferociously conservative, he called President Herbert Hoover “the greatest state socialist in history.” Naturally, the Colonel considered Franklin D. Roosevelt a Communist—“Although I don’t know if he carried a card,” he told a reporter in 1951.
The lone Democratic judge on the panel charged in a dissenting opinion that his Republican colleagues’ chosen map was “a pure partisan effort by the Republican leadership in the Illinois House” where “no incumbent Republican is threatened with the loss of his seat in Congress.”
A Trib editorial noted that “Mayor Daley’s Democrats will lose two Chicago districts because of a population shift to the suburbs in the 1970 census. That reduces the number of Chicago districts from nine to seven.”
Mayor Daley complained that the 1971 map discriminated against Chicago and against the Democrats overall…but he also settled a score. The 1971 map just happened to shove U.S. Rep. Abner Mikva, who lived in Hyde Park’s rebellious 5th Ward, into the same congressional district as loyal Machine U.S. Rep. Ralph Metcalf.
Mikva hadn’t endorsed Daley for a fifth term in the 1971 mayoral primary over challenger Richard Friedman.
Abner Mikva, knowing it made no sense to run against a powerful Daley-backed Black politician on the South Side, gave up and moved to Evanston.
Settled on the North Shore by 1972, Abner Mikva ran for Congress in the 10th District and lost to Republican Sam Young—then came back for a rematch in 1974 and beat Young by less than a tenth of a percent of the vote.
Abner Mikva had been back in Congress for less than two months when he refused to endorse Mayor Daley for a sixth term in the Feb. 25, 1975 mayoral primary.
Abner Mikva had been back in Congress less than six months when Illinois Senate President Cecil Partee introduced Mayor Daley’s new congressional map into the Senate, a map that pulverized Mikva’s new district. Daley’s proposed map would be revised four times along the way, but every version screwed Abner Mikva.
Mayor Daley, surely on purpose, had Cecil Partee introduce the new map while he himself was away on a Daley family vacation in the Florida Keys, missing the initial uproar that greeted his invention.
Daley’s maps put Mikva in veteran liberal Democrat U.S. Rep. Sidney Yates’ 9th district. Mikva said the idea of running against Yates was “a bridge I don’t even think is going to be built.” The rest of Mikva’s 10th district went into Daley loyalist Rep. Frank Annunzio’s 11th.
Beat Frank Annunzio? Not likely! Annunzio was so loyal to Mayor Daley, he’d moved in 1972 from his home in Chicago’s 7th Congressional district to the Northwest Side’s 11th District to run instead for the seat then being vacated by U.S. Rep. Roman Pucinski, who was running against Republican U.S. Senator Charles Percy’s seat.
Mayor Daley had told Annunzio to move because the 1971 Illinois legislature redistricting put Annunzio in the same district as Black Democrat U.S. Rep. George Collins, and Black Democrats persuaded Daley that Collins should stay put. Seriously.
Like Mikva, Frank Annunzio had moved between worlds when Mayor Daley got out his redistricting pen. Mikva moved from the South Side of Chicago to the North Shore. Annunzio lived at 400 E. Randolph, proper name “Outer Drive East,” a snazzy new apartment building less than ten years old in 1971.
Outer Drive East perched all by itself back then at the end of Randolph, the pioneer for every other high-rise you see now in the “new East Side.” Again from the marvelous John Chuckman’s Photos on Wordpress, here’s a postcard of Buckingham Fountain with the the brand new Outer Drive East in the background—note the empty space between the Prudential Building on Randolph at Michigan Avenue, and Outer Drive East, at the new tip of Randolph.
Here it is under construction, with a view looking back west at the Loop.
Finally, here’s a 1960s postcard of the classy La Tour Cafe Francais, which once sat atop Outer Drive East.
You see it, right? Frank Annunzio must have felt like a young political God living the good life, but when Mayor Daley pointed, Annunzio moved from his cool lakefront high-rise digs to the deep Northwest Side bungalow belt. Abner Mikva knew Annunzio would have the full backing of Mayor Daley’s Machine in the coming redistricted election.
Illinois Senate minority leader Republican William Harris said Daley’s map was “drawn in secrecy in Chicago City Hall.” Check. Plus, Senate President Cecil Partee introduced the remap bill quietly on Saturday, April 12— jjjjjust making the deadline for new bills in the session ending that June 30, while leaving less than three weeks before the May 2 deadline for committee consideration.
When Mikva heard about Mayor Daley’s new map that weekend in 1975, he called a Sunday press conference at the LaSalle Hotel. Mayor Daley’s map, Mikva told reporters, was “a vindictive attempt to gain tighter City Hall control of the suburbs” and “an effort to punish independents.”
Mikva reminded everyone, not that he needed to, that he hadn’t endorsed Daley for re-election. For the second time.
“This fact seems to stick in the craw of some machine politicians so much that they want to use the Democratic majority in the House and Senate in Springfield to wipe out any vestiges of a party that is not under the thumb of the Chicago Machine,” Mikva declared.
But Senate President Cecil Partee called Daley’s concoction “a togetherness map. Our plan puts back together townships, cities and counties which, to the dismay of the people of this state, are separated in many areas as a result of the court-imposed map of 1971.”
“That’s accurate enough, in that it would increase the togetherness of U.S. representatives under the thumb of Mayor Richard J. Daley,” harrumphed a Daily News editorial headlined “Carving it up for Daley.” The Daley map, as the News put it, “gives the city tentacles” by putting only two districts entirely inside the city, with “seven more knifing into the suburbs”. The Machine’s tentacles were meant to bring less obedient, ever increasing suburban Democrats to heel, while punishing rebels like Abner Mikva.
The Daily News editorial repeated what everybody knew, that the ‘71 map was drawn by then-Republican House Speaker Robert Blair, giving Democrats just 10 out of 24 Congressional seats. “But Democrats proved that map was not invincible last year by increasing their representation in Congress to 13 out of 24 seats,” the News added.
To paraphrase “Animal Farm”: “All Democrats are equal but some Democrats are more equal than others.” Under the 1971 map, Chicago Democrats controlled only 7 of those Democratic seats. Mayor Daley aimed to make it nine.
Daley’s map, the Daily News editorial concluded, was “so clearly drawn to favor Daley interests over all else as to hoist warning flags as to its potential adverse impact on Illinois’ politics.”
Still, unlike 2025’s redistricting brouhaha, nobody in 1975 complained that it was unthinkable to rejigger the map in the middle of the decade. It just seemed like Mayor Daley’s map was a bit over the top.
A couple of days later, Mayor Daley held his own press conference when he got back from vacation—see “The Bears and Arlington Heights Kissing in a Tree” below for the Bears portion of that memorable day. The other big topic was Daley’s map, and Abner Mikva.
Mikva, said Mayor Daley, was a “partisan, narrow-minded bigot” for not wanting to combine city wards with suburbs in congressional districts. The 1971 map, Mayor Daley proclaimed, was a “fiasco” to “build a Chinese wall around Chicago.”
A few weeks later, Mikva called the map’s second version “a joke,” adding, “That’s not a map, that’s a spaghetti.” The second map created a 10th District that tossed Mikva together with next-door Republican U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde, who was plucked out of his 6th District.
“They have turned it into a city-suburban war,” said Mikva.
“It’s just raping the suburbs,” said Hyde.
The Daley map looked better to Ald. Roman Pucinski, the Machine stalwart who’d left his safe Congressional seat a few years earlier to challenge U.S. Senator Charles Percy. Pucinski lost, badly, and ended up back in City Council after tasting the glamor of Washington. When you reach for the stars, you better be ready to fall back to Earth.
Rremember, Frank Annunzio moved from Outer Drive East to the Northwest Side to fill Pucinski’s Congressional seat. Daley’s 1975 remap protected loyal Frank’s seat and rewarded Pucinski too, by annexing Pucinski’s 41st ward, along with three more city wards, to the rest of Republican Rep. Henry Hyde’s district.
“That setup would leave Hyde with Oak Park, River Forest and his hometown of Park Ridge as the only suburban base for fighting Pucinski’s assault from Chicago,” noted a Daily News Insight analysis.
Hyde responded by alluding to a famous quote from 19th century British statesman Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Apparently in the ‘70s, politicians could just allude to famous quotes and assume that everyone would know what they were talking about, but in 2025, it’s better to be told the allusion first:
“Let me put it this way,” Hyde told The Daily News’ Insight column. “The Democrats back home, if given half a chance, would never make a liar out of Lord Acton.”
In the middle of all this, the Illinois Legislative Correspondents Association performed its fourth annual gridiron show, the biggest show in Springfield we can assume on the evening of May 13, 1975. A featured sketch included a parody of the “Guys and Dolls” classic “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York,” sung for Cecil Partee rather than Nathan Detroit.
The final version of Daley’s map squeaked through Cecil Partee’s senate about two weeks later—but with the minimum of 30 votes needed for a majority. “I just can’t imagine running in the district they have carved out,” said Mikva. “It’s as much a monstrosity as it looks.” Henry Hyde’s house was located inside that monstrosity.
Revenge is sweet, but it has a way of coming back up when you eat too much of it. That’s what Mayor Daley learned when his map hit a bitter bump in the road named Clyde Choate.
Oh, Clyde Choate. What a name. You just can’t make that up, as they say. On November 11, 1971, not long after the 1971 remap became final, Mike Royko wrote a column about Clyde Choate which is as timeless and powerful as “Paradise Lost,” according to me when I originally covered the piece in Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today.
Background: As a young man, Clyde Choate fought in World War II and won the Medal of Honor for single-handedly defeating a German tank—using a bazooka to blow off its turret, shooting soldiers who jumped out, and dropping a grenade inside to finish the job. Here’s Mike’s masterful opening:
“There is no other honor in America quite like it,” wrote Mike. “Play in the World Series, become the heavyweight champ, or Miss America, or even win an Oscar. That medal is, or at one time was, the great distinction.”
“And that’s when things went wrong. How nice it would have been if he had kept selling cars. But with that medal, the big one, the Oscar, the Most Valuable Player Award, you don’t go through life selling cars. Within a year, he ran for public office. And the next thing you know, Clyde Choate, hero, became Clyde Choate, politician.”
“He joined the nondescript city hacks and Downstate yahoos that comprise the majority of the Legislature. They gather in Springfield to chomp steaks, swill booze, listen with slack-jawed greed to lobbyists and goof up this state worse than an invasion of crawling catfish.”
“Choate’s medal did it for him and to him.”
Mike was alluding to Choate going to Springfield and taking up with Paul Powell.
Younger Readers, Paul Powell is perhaps the most notorious of Illinois’ notoriously corrupt politicians. A Democrat, he was Speaker of the House of Illinois’ House of Representatives for decades before ascending in 1965 to Secretary of State until his death in 1970.
After Powell’s death, they found $750,000 in small denominations in the closet of the hotel room where he lived in Springfield. Enough of that cash was stuffed into an old shoebox so the shoebox became Paul Powell’s enduring legacy. His estate was $3 million plus a shady 61,290 shares of stock in seven Illinois racetracks, though Powell never made more than $30,000/year. See here in THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972 for a 1972 one-year anniversary recap of the Paul Powell debacle in the Daily News by John Camper, prominently featuring Powell’s $18,000-a-year secretary ($154,000 in 2025 money) who shared the hotel room with him and stood to inherit some of that shady stock, valued then at $700,000 ($6 million in 2025 money) from Powell’s will.
“Now Powell is gone, and his epitaph is a hodge-podge of jokes about shoeboxes,” wrote Mike. "The words of [Choate's] army citation aren’t nearly as well known as ...his preposterous amendments to ethics bills...aimed solely at killing any and all ethics legislation."
When Mike wrote that column in 1971, it had just turned up that Clyde Choate somehow owned thousands of shares of the shady racetrack stock, a scandal that would put former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner in jail.
“That racetrack stock,” wrote Mike. “Powell owned some. The mayor’s old law partners owned some. The ex-governor [Otto Kerner] owned some…It is the mark of being an influence peddler.”
“Maybe we ought to give our heroes big pensions that entitle them to a life of ease. It’s embarrassing to see one of them turn out to be just another hustler.”
Soon after the column ran, Clyde Choate threatened to punch Mike in the nose, giving Royko another good column’s worth of material. “At an unscheduled press briefing in a Springfield bar, State Rep. Clyde Choate told a reporter that the next time he saw me, he would punch me in the nose,” wrote Mike.
Mike was merely disappointed “by the very ordinary way Choate phrased the threat,” because Choate was from rural downstate Illinois, “and one of the talents of rural people is their colorful use of belligerent language.” Especially because Powell, Choate’s mentor, was famous for an old classic Illinois political line indicating that an official is capable of perceiving money to be made in public service: “I can smell the meat a’ cookin’.”
So you understand that Clyde Choate was not the meek type. And Mayor Daley—along with his own nemesis, Gov. Dan Walker—had crossed Choate one year earlier, in 1974, after the Democrats won control of the Illinois House.
In 1974, Mayor Daley backed Clyde Choate in the hot contest for Speaker. Daley’s forces ran up against Gov. Dan Walker’s, who hated Choate. It took 89 votes to name a speaker, and ballot after ballot, nobody could make the magic number.
Days passed. After 38 rounds, Daley and Walker agreed on the most nondescript, inoffensive compromise candidate, Rep. William Redmond. But Choate wouldn’t drop out. More days passed, then a week. On the 93rd ballot, Redmond finally won after a group of Republicans crossed over and gave him their votes.
If Mayor Daley hated Abner Mikva, if Mayor Daley and Gov. Walker hated each other, it was nothing compared to the blazing hatred of Clyde Choate for Daley and Walker combined.
When Mayor Daley’s 1975 map first went public, common wisdom assumed it would pass, since Democrats (aka Mayor Daley) controlled both houses of the Illinois legislature.
But Clyde Choate controlled at least 17 votes in the House.
As the map passed out of the Senate and the tender loving gaze of Senate President Cecil Partee, Clyde Choate allowed as how in the House, “we’re too busy in this session to be screwing around with a remap.”
“I couldn’t stop it by myself,” said Choate, “but there are a lot of dissatisfied members in here.”
“Daley’s people now are making deals to get the map through the House, where its chances are considered slim,” reported John Camper on June 1, with less than a month left in the legislative session.
As the days went by, the dealing intensified. “Among other things, it’s rumored that some women House members have been told that their votes for the map might be exchanged for votes for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by the Senate,” wrote the Daily News’ Diane Monk on June 4.
Two Lake County Democratic committeemen in the House rebelled when Speaker Redmond suddenly backed the Daley remap without consulting the House Democratic Conference. Those two representatives had helped vote Redmond in as House Speaker, over Choate, during the crazy 1974 Speaker contest. Now, they switched allegiances.
Daley’s remap finally made it out of the House Executive Committee on a tight 15-11 vote, but not before a rowdy meeting that featured the “new pro-machine Democratic women’s clubs in the North Shore suburbs,” wearing “little badges with red, white and blue ribbons” and led by none other than future Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne.
Jane Byrne, then co-chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, had “organized the clubs to counter the trend toward independent politics along the exclusive North Shore,” according to the Daily News’ John Camper.
Byrne’s contingent all read statements to the committee, including her 17-year-old daughter Kathy Byrne. The ladies claimed Mayor Daley’s map would be good for Democrats. They contended that Rep. Abner Mikva had barely won his district anyway, so he’d lose the next election regardless of his district boundaries.
From Camper’s account:
“Are we going to go on and on with these payrollers reading the same stuff over and over,” demanded Rep. Roscoe Cunningham (R-Lawrenceville).
“There’s not one payroller in the room!” shouted Mrs. Byrne, who is the $32,000-a-year director of consumer affairs for the City of Chicago.
$32,000 is $193,000 in 2025 money, by the way. Not bad for a woman in 1975!
In the end, Clyde Choate got even with Mayor Daley and Gov. Dan Walker, reported the Daily News’ John Camper and Diane Monk, which might surprise you since we know Gov. Walker couldn’t possibly have wanted to help Mayor Daley in any way, much less in his remap attempt.
“Daley lost his bill that would have increased his control of the state’s congressional delegation and gotten rid of independent Rep. Abner Mikva (D-Ill.),” wrote Camper.
“Walker lost because his legislative forces were unable to keep the map alive so the governor could veto it and win badly needed support fro pro-Mikva liberals.”
Clyde Choate went to dinner during the tense last hours of the long House vote days before the end of session, per the News, so it wouldn’t look like he was the mastermind. Choate left his people with marching orders to kill the map by taking out the bill’s enacting clause. So, basically, rather than shoot the bill in the head, Choate carved out its heart and left it to bleed to death. The political night is dark and full of terrors.
As the final votes went on, Walker supporters began changing their votes to keep the dying bill alive, but Choate’s people banded together and beat the map 84-82.
“Walker’s putting his people on it was the most cynical political ploy I’ve ever seen,” an anti-Walker independent told the News. “And it was so beautiful because it gave Clyde a chance to stick ‘em both, and he wasn’t even here.”
Another independent told the News that the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) “would have crawled on its belly to Walker if he’d been able to veto the map, and it wouldn’t have cost him a cent. Usually you need to institute expensive programs to get the liberals behind you.”
And, of course, even if Daley had gotten the map past Clyde Choate, all the Democrats in Daleyville would never have been able to gather a 3/5 vote to overcome a Walker veto without Choate’s help.
And so ended the great 1975 redistricting battle, but the Bears threat to move to Arlington Heights was still in the works.
1975 Convergence: The Bears and Arlington Heights, Kissing in a Tree
Just as Mayor Daley arranged for Cecil Partee to introduce his 1975 remap while he was out of town on a Daley family vacation, thus missing the initial clapback from Abner Mikva, the Bears picked that same weekend with Mayor Daley gone to suddenly announce they were leaving town to build a new house in the suburbs.
Papa Bear George Halas revealed the plans “at a hastily called press conference,”per the Sun-Times. No one ever explained why, since Papa Bear could have crooked his finger and summoned the city’s sports reporters at any time. Or anybody else, for that matter. Did Papa Bear prefer to avoid Mayor Daley’s instant wrath? It’s hard to imagine, but no other reason has ever been proffered.
Papa Bear at that point was Bears board chairman, with son George Jr. “Mugs” Halas as president. Their planned stadium would boast 80,000 seats and, they insisted, cost just $25 million—around $200 million in 2025 dollars. What a bargain! The new Bears stadium would be modeled on the then-new Buffalo Bills facility in Orchard Park, NY.
The project called for Arlington Heights to issue $30 million worth of bonds, build the stadium and own it. Madison Square Garden Corp. of New York, which ran the Arlington Racetrack at that time, would run the Bears stadium too. The Bears would share the site with the racetrack, as opposed to the 2025 version, in which the racetrack has already been razed.
“Allan Cohen, president of Madison Square Garden, expressed surprise that the Halases called the press conference,” wrote the Sun-Times’ sports editor, James Mullen. “‘I think it’s premature for us to say anything until we present the plan to the village first,’ he said.”
Arlington Heights village president-elect James Ryan said he expected to see the plan within a month.
“It’s been 11 years since a committee was formed in Chicago to study the feasibility of a new stadium and we’re still in Soldier Field,” Mugs complained to reporters. Mugs and Papa Bear said the search for a new home was officially over. The Bears had an option to stay in Soldier Field until 1976, and they hoped to flee to the suburbs by ‘77.
The Bears planned for over 100 “executive suites,” then a new-fangled invention the Tribune described this way: “Executive suites are glass-enclosed ‘living rooms’ usually located between decks of the stadium. They are leased to individuals who would rather watch games in comfort than cold. New stadiums thruout the country have had ‘tremendous success’ selling them, Halas Jr. said.”
As always, stadium dreamers see things differently than finance and construction experts.
According to Mugs, the spring of 1975 was “an opportune” time to sell bonds because “Interest rates are dramatically down.”
“The bond market is not good; it’s horrible,” a Chicago municipal bond broker told the Tribune.
“Any decent stadium will cost at least $50 million,” said E.B. Kelly, board chairman of the managing underwriter for then-new stadiums in New Orleans, Kansas City and Pontiac, per the Tribune.
What about Mayor Daley, away in Florida? Papa Bear said Mayor Daley “naturally has knowledge of this, but we haven’t mentioned it to him specifically.” A strangely squirrely answer, I would say, for a Chicago legend.
So how did it go with Mayor Daley? Well, if Daley had rented a house for the summer, the whole thing would have been blown away like a forgotten summer romance.
But Dad got home early and blew up.
Daley was “pugnacious” at his first post-vacation press conference, wrote Daily News City Hall reporter Jay McMullen—who would soon marry soon-to-be mayor Jane Byrne.
“Daley laced his replies to reporters’ questions with ‘What the hell,’ several times,” McMullen recounted. “The mayor, tanned from his Florida vacation, came out smiling.”
But, McMullen went on, “his mood turned somber as he was asked about plans to build an 80,000-seat stadium for the Chicago Bears in northwest Arlington Heights, if the suburb’s village board agrees to sell revenue bonds and build the facility.”
“Arlington Heights is not going to be foolish enough to underwrite a big bond issue for eight football games,” Daley barked at reporters.
More importantly:
“They won’t use the name of Chicago if they move to Arlington Heights. They’ll never use the name Chicago as long as I’m mayor. They’ll get the greatest contest they ever got in their life (if they try to use Chicago’s name.) They will like hell be called the Chicago Bears.”
Although the papers refrained from using exclamation points in those days, we can assume that each of Mayor Daley’s sentences used one in real life.
The Bears, ranted Mayor Daley, started “from nothing in Chicago.”
“There’s only one place to play if they are a Chicago team—that’s Soldier Field,” Daley went on. “It is the greatest field in the United States, and we’re going to keep it that way, contrary to (suggestions from) editorial writers.”
“The City of Chicago will not build a professional football stadium for anyone,” Daley insisted, forgetting that he’d presented his own proposal for a brand new lakefront stadium for the Bears four years earlier. (See here for that nutty story.)
Like a bunch of kids, reporters ran from Mayor Daley’s press conference to check in with Papa Bear.
“I’m aware of the (mayor’s) statements and I have no comment,” said Halas.
Mayor Daley handed Mike Royko a ready-made column for the day. The “performance,” wrote Mike, was “done in living color, mostly blotchy, angry red.”
Mike scoffed at Mayor Daley’s scoff that the Bears could move to Arlington Heights and keep “Chicago” in their name.
“And how will the Great Dumpling stop George Halas (who has been a Chicagoan longer than Daley) from using the word Chicago?” asked Mike, using one of his nicknames for Mayor Daley.
If Daley thought he had a copyright on “Chicago,” Mike wondered, “is he going to sue such suburban companies as the Chicago Cork Works of Nile….And what about the Chicago Tavern on Route 50 in Wisconsin?”
What about, in fact, “his own sacred name,” Daley?
“There’s a Republican lawyer named Richard J. Daley, who ran for judge and lost. Maybe Mayor Daley will go into court and demand that this other Daley change his name to something like John Hoellen. With a Chicago judge, the guy might have to do it.”
Note: Republican Ald. John Hoellen had represented the 47th Ward since 1947 before offering himself up as a sacrificial lamb to provide a Republican opponent for Mayor Daley’s final mayoral campaign in 1975, which had just wrapped up as the Bears to-do took off. Mayor Daley had beaten poor Ald. Hoellen 536,413 to 136,874.
The summer wore on. A business and civic committee got together to study new stadium possibilities in Chicago or renovating Soldier Field, which, as we all know, is what eventually happened.
The stubborn villagers of Arlington Heights weren’t quick to agree to issue $30 million in bonds—especially in time for the Bears to begin building in September of 1975, as they claimed they needed in order to move by 1977. My, doesn’t that sound familiar.
The Bears promised a 35-year lease. They promised the stadium would support itself. The bonds would only result in an annual debt of $2.9 million, they insisted.
At a village board meeting, Mugs Halas stood up and promised the Bears would pledge $2 million in revenue every year for five years…which by the team’s own estimates left a $1 million deficit—a little over $6 million in 2025 money. And Arlington Heights would be on the hook for it. “Board members groaned in derision,” reported the Tribune.
Village Board president James Ryan started talking about a voter referendum by August, speculating that it could be done in time for the Bears’ deadline of breaking ground by October 1. But by September, “record high bond rates” meant the whole idea was indefinitely postponed, Ryan announced at a press conference.
“The stadium is now dead,” announced one village trustee. The board made it official that November, voting down the Bears 5 to 3. It was, at least, a closer score than many in the team’s losing 4-10 game 1974 season,
Do you think Mayor Daley won? Well, he said Chicago would never build a new stadium for the Bears…four years after presenting his own giant plan for a new lakefront stadium that went nowhere. But in the end, Mayor Daley was right on this one.
We’re not counting a crosstown series. That wondrous event hasn’t happened since 1906 when the Sox beat the Cubs. Given current conditions, who knows when it will happen a second time to establish a cycle. Also, I know the Cubs won the Series in both 1907 and 1908, but that made the whole set-up too difficult so I went with 1908 for a 108-year cycle.
Wondering where you landed? At its core, “Roseland, Chicago: 1972” is the story of Steve Bertolucci, 10-year-old Roselander in 1972, and what becomes of him. Check it out here. Immerse yourself in 1972 via other site sections including THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972, a peek into Chicago newspapers that year, and Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today. When a post uncovers some interesting Chicago ephemera, or current events hop that way, we also fall down the Chicago History Rabbit Hole. Find all the sections on the home page here.
To get new Chicago History Rabbit Holes and other section posts directly to your emailbox, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE!
.