THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972: M.W. Newman's "How They Clouted The Old Stock Exchange"
THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972: M.W. Newman's "How They Clouted The Old Stock Exchange"
October 18-24, 1971
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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.
October 18, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Polish jokes not that funny
The Daily News editorial board picks up from last week’s story on Philadelphia millionaire Edward J. Piszek, who is bankrolling a campaign against Polish jokes to the tune of $500,000--$3,280,000 in 2021 money. The News stipulates that ethnic joke crazes have already gone through “the Irish, Jews, Italians, Swedes, Blacks, Scots, English, not to mention Texans….[O]ne school of thought is that you’ve got to be big enough and tough enough to take it. Up to a point, we agree.”
“There are dumb Poles as there are dumb Irishmen and Frenchmen and Canadians and Illinoisans,” the News admits, but “there are Poles who run banks and teach at Harvard and write books and music and discover useful substances like radium.”
It is perhaps not so surprising that Polish jokes were a craze at this time when you consider that the Daily News editorial board felt it necessary to gravely list these accomplishments of the Polish people.
The News concludes: “Most of the Poles we know have a sense of humor and can even smile at a stupid Polish joke, but they shouldn’t have to do it ad infinitum—which is to say, ad nauseum.”
October 18, 1971
Chicago Sun-Times: Pirates take it all 2-1!
That’s the huge top headline on the Sun-Times’ back page, which is the tabloid’s Sports front page. There’s a smaller headline at the bottom, underneath this full page of story and pictures focused on the Pittsburgh Pirates: “49ers blank hapless Bears.”
Roberto Clemente led the Pirates to victory in the 1971 World Series over the “Super Bird” Orioles, losing the first two games of the series and then shutting out Baltimore for the last five. Per custom at the time, Clemente got a new car out of it too.
October 18, 1971
Chicago Sun-Times: Loot, burn, rape; scores jailed
When’s the last time you saw a semi-colon in a headline? Just saying. The downside of Roberto Clemente leading the Pirates to victory over Baltimore in the World Series was a downtown Pittsburgh riot estimated at up to 100,000 people at its peak, leading to hundreds of injuries.
Per the AP, “The crowds scaled lightpoles, set off fireworks, overturned cars, started bonfires, shattered store windows and looted some businesses at the outburst’s height. At least two police cars were commandeered, and police said a fire truck was stripped.
But it’s the next point that will shock:
“At least a dozen rapes were reported. In one, witnessed by a newsman unable to prevent it, a half-dozen youths dragged a young woman from a car and assaulted her in the middle of Fifth Ave.”
October 18, 1971
Chicago Sun-Times: Leftist ex-con hijacks Detroit jet to Havana
Buckle your seatbelts, the early 70s were banner years for skyjackers, and this story demonstrates why the phrase “Take this [insert form of transportation here] to Havana” was a ubiquitous punchline. Per AP, skyjacker Richard Frederick Dixon, 31, of Pontiac, MI “claimed he was a Kansas State University graduate and had a distaste for the American way of life.”
Recall last week's "Today's Chuckle" from the front page of the Daily News on October 12: "Then there was the absent-minded crook who pulled a gun on the bank teller and said 'Take me to Havana.'"
Dixon commandeered the Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 with a gun as he boarded, then kept the gun pointed at the head of 23-year-old stewardess Carol Bollinger for three hours of the ordeal. Eventually the plane landed in Cuba, where Dixon disembarked and asked for political asylum. Some uniformed men led him away, and the U.S. jet flew back to Miami.
Pilot Captain W.E. Buchanan said the Cubans handled the whole thing efficiently. Buchanan had piloted the second commercial plane ever hijacked to Cuba, back in 1961. “Last time, we were met by the whole militia,” he recalled.
Skyjacking was so common at this time, this was only one of three skyjacking stories today. The Daily News gave only six short paragraphs to a Boeing 737 jet hijacked after taking off from Anchorage. This hijacking was still under way at press time, with the plane “believed to be headed for Vancouver, British Columbia.” The hijacker was “a young man with dark hair and moustache” carrying a gun.
October 18, 1971
Chicago Sun-Times: Transcript shows FBI ignored pleas; pilot died
Two semi-colons in Sun-Times front page headlines today. Can’t help noting it. Here the Washington Post’s George Lardner, Jr. reveals that the FBI screwed over pilot Brent Q. Downs, refusing to allow his plane to refuel on Oct. 4 as a hijacker pointed a gun at Downs’ head.
“300-pound real estate man” George Giffe Jr. had rented the twin-engine plane in Nashville with his estranged wife. When she screamed she was being kidnapped, Giffe pulled a gun to hijack the plane to the Bahamas. Pilot Downs landed in Jacksonville to refuel.
After the FBI announced over the plane’s radio that there would be no fuel, and shot out the plane’s wheels, Giffe shot Downs in the back of the head, then killed his wife and himself. Shortly after, “informed sources say someone in the control tower cracked, ‘You can’t win ‘em all.’”
The transcript of pilot Downs begging the FBI to let him refuel the plane is heartbreaking. “Uh, this gentleman has about 12.5 pounds of plastic explosives back here and (pause) uh, I got no (pause) uh, yen to join it right now.”
October 18, 1971
Chicago Sun-Times: Hapless Bears blanked by S.F.
The sad story by Jack Griffin notes that “The offense had been cautious, even so polite, that they created no mischief at all, and the Bears fell Sunday 13-0 to the San Francisco 49ers.”
All Bears encounters this year entail anxious descriptions of Gale Sayers. Today: “Gale Sayers was limping badly on the left side, not from the knee this time, but from a bruise to his foot that he suffered early in the game.”
“Doug Buffone sprawled in his dressing cell and he was hurt, too, but it wasn’t on the outside where another man could see it. ‘I love football,’ Doug said, “I really do. But sometimes it can hurt you. And you wonder why, why?” But Ed O’Bradovich said the defense was ready for a fifth quarter if the 49ers were game. “We were knocking hell out of them, right to the end,” he said.
October 19, 1971
Chicago Daily News: N.Y. art museum seeks five floors of Old Exchange
By M.W. Newman
Famed Daily News writer M.W. Newman covered this story but I, somehow, only copied the front page and missed the story after the jump. Imagine me knocking myself on the head. Here's what little I've got:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted to acquire the entire first five floors of Adler & Sullivan’s masterpiece, already being demolished at 30 N. La Salle. God I wish this had happened.
“’We would like to save as much of that wonderful building as possible and put it on permanent display,’ said Arthur Rosenblatt, architectural administrator of the great museum,” wrote Newman.
The article was accompanied by a doctored photo, labeled “Artist’s conception of how the Old Stock Exchange would look with the top eight floors removed.” Unfortunately, as we know, this big idea worthy of Daniel Burnham never came to be.
Reading the old papers on microfilm, day by day as if in real time, brings a visceral sense of actually living in those days that is completely different than reading text-only stories via a computer search on individual subjects. The most powerful feeling of connection to the past—to the people in that past--comes when a gripping letter to the editor suddenly pops up.
Letters to the editor back then were often surprisingly personal. This one makes you tear up, wishing you knew writer Diana Rena Stubbs and could say, “Everything turned out OK for her.” Here is her letter:
“Dear Editor, I learned today that being a woman is a very hard, spiteful life. But, living is always better than dying. I found out that I have many friends. Each day I live a little more in truth. Lying comes as easy as truth. Children are students to me now; not only mine which I gave birth to, but all black babies.
‘However, that has not always been my feeling. I am becoming increasingly aware that I am not alone. Someone watches over me daily, is near, sometimes unhappy, sometimes joyous, but always driving me to my goal, life. --Diana Rena Stubbs
October 20, 1971
Chicago Sun-Times: Judge won’t halt demolition of the Old Stock Exchange
By Rob Cuscaden, Sun-Times Architecture Critic
“The death knell sounded loud and clear for the Old Chicago Stock Exchange on Tuesday,” wrote Sun-Times architecture critic Rob Cuscaden. The Landmarks Preservation Council had petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to halt demolition the previous week—and the Supreme Court simply ignored it. So the fate of an architectural treasure fell into the hands of a Cook County Circuit Court judge.
“It’s all over,” said Richard Miller, Landmarks Preservation president. “There is nothing more we can do, except watch the scaffolding go up and Sullivan’s masterpiece come down.”
October 20, 1971
Chicago Sun-Times: Syndicate hoodlum slain on West Side
By Walter Spirko
This is a pretty run-of-the-mill hit, but you gotta love the way papers back then threw all the best mob terms into a story. No euphamisms, no “allegedly.” This guy was a syndicate hoodlum, period. Victim Sam Cesario was a juice loan boss, period.
The cop on the scene “reconstructed” the hit this way: Cesario was sitting on a chair in front of 1070 W. Polk with his wife and another guy when two big men wearing hankerchiefs on their faces burst out of a nearby gangway carrying a rifle and gun between them, and yelled at everybody to stay put.
Cesario, a hoodlum but not stupid, jumped up but was knocked back down with the rifle and shot four times with the gun. Cesario died later at University of Illinois Hospital. The pitiless Sun-Times account notes in the last graph that the dead man was known “as a hot-tempered hoodlum”.
October 21, 1971
Chicago Daily News: ‘What kind of city do Chicagoans want?’
The News ran two touching letters mourning the Old Stock Exchange. John J. Popik of Evanston wrote that the destruction of the Exchange “points out the kind of city Chicago apparently wants to become—no longer a city with a past, but one with only a tall and gloomy future.”
Reports that portions of the Exchange might survive in museums didn’t impress Mr. Popik. “Pieces in a museum do not make a building,” he wrote. "People living in it, working in it, playing in it, do. Buildings live because we care, buildings die because we don’t.”
Next, Everett L. Millard of Chicago called out Mayor Richard J. Daley: “Chicago’s greedy pursuit of the fast buck, our indifference to values, threatens to earn us a reputation as Slob City, U.S.A., and our mayor the reputation of the man who made it that way.”
October 21, 1971
Chicago Daily News: Mob triangle hinted
Yesterday we looked at the Sun-Times report on hitman Sam Cesario's own hit, shot four times by two guys who ran out of a gangway as Cesario sat on a lawn chair on the sidewalk with his wife and a friend at 1070 W. Polk.
Today the Daily News takes up the story. The tabloid Sun-Times ID'd the victim as "hoodlum Sam Cesario." As befits a more respectable broadsheet, the News ID's him as “hoodlum Samuel C. (Sambo) Cesario.”
Turns out Cesario may have been shot dead in front of his wife quite deliberately, under a contract from “mob chieftain Felix (Milwaukee Phil) Alderisio." Mrs. Cesario was previously Alderisio's girlfriend.
Alderisio and his then-girlfriend “exchanged romantic glances” during Alderisio’s 1970 federal fraud. After Alderisio went to prison, she married Cesario. Alderisio died of a heart attack a month before Cesario's hit, but police think the contract had no expiration date.
After the hit, “Mrs. Cesario told police she was uncertain of her husband’s occupation, but believed him to be a truck driver”.
Cesario’s killing was the first gangland slaying of 1971, and the 1,0008th since they started counting in 1919-- a much lower number than I would have guessed.
October 21, 1971
Chicago Daily News
By Charles Nicodemus
Chicago Sun-Times
(no byline)
First, let’s stipulate that no Mayor Daley of any vintage ever made the Chicago Skyway free. I forget, how much does it cost now—a pair of seven-league boots, or just a kidney?
In 1971, the Skyway was $7 million in debt and three years behind in interest payments. Sounds like a dream come true now, even after adjusting for inflation ($46 million). The people holding the $101 million in bonds (1972 dollars) were taking a bath.
Today's reports involve the old Chicago Machine's underhanded political tricks, which we all secretly love. Oddly, the News and Sun-Times give completely opposite accounts of Mayor Daley's announcement on whether he would use fuel taxes to pay off Skyway bonds.
Sun-Times: “Mayor Daley said Wednesday that he will attempt to make the debt-plagued Chicago Skyway a toll-free highway without using the city’s share of motor fuel tax funds.”
Daily News: “Mayor Richard J. Daley said Wednesday the city plans to buy up the financially ailing Chicago Skyway’s $101 million in revenue bonds and convert the South Side elevated toll route into a freeway. Daley said the city would use Chicago’s share of state motor fuel tax funds”.
The papers agreed that Daley likely could use the motor fuel tax money to pay off Skyway bonds, thanks to sly work in Springfield--and that the ailing Skyway bonds' value had suddenly jumped, “although traffic flow has not justified any optimism,” as the Sun-Times put it.
The Daily News’ Charles Nicodemus described it this way: “A ‘sneak’ amendment that was maneuvered through the Legislature and signed into law under mysterious circumstances will allow the use of motor fuel tax funds to ‘bail out’ the bondholders of the debt-ridden Chicago Skyway.”
The Sun-Times said Daley could use the motor fuel tax funds to retire the Skyway bonds under a “bill enacted unnoticed in the last session” of the Illinois legislature—because the word “streets” had been replaced by “highways” at the last minute, unbeknownst to the bill’s Republican sponsor.
October 22, 2021
Chicago Daily News: Call out wreckers day after Daley tour
By Terry Shaffer
The headline is deceptive here, because the point of this article is NOT that Mayor Daley toured two abandoned Northwest Side buildings that residents were clamoring to have torn down, and the next day, the wrecking crews arrived. Mayor Daley giving orders carried out was not news.
The point of the article is that Daley fast-tracked those two Northwest Side buildings for demolition, but passed on a tour the previous week of Woodlawn, where Daily News reporters counted 362 abandoned and burned-out buildings.
“Daley neither has directly commented on the conditions in Woodlawn nor officially toured the area since The Daily News series, ‘The Blitz of Woodlawn,’ was printed in July,” writes Terry Shaffer.
In that series, the News “described how hundreds of mysterious fires had swept the Woodlawn neighborhood, destroying scores of buildings and forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes. Since 1967, 30,000 of the community’s 65,000 persons have moved out. There were more than 1,600 fires in Woodlawn during 1970 alone”.
October 22, 2021
Chicago Daily News via UPI: There’s still hope, ladies!
Expectations were high that President Richard Nixon would nominate the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court—he promised wife Pat Nixon, and he included two women among a panel of six judges he sent to the American Bar Association for vetting. The ABA rejected the women for no good reason, and instead, Nixon nominated two more (white) men.
The Chicago Daily News took a perfectly fine, factual UPI story on the issue, and slapped this horrible patronizing headline on it: There’s still hope, ladies!
The UPI story quoted Nixon speaking to the National Federation of Republican Women, claiming that “There will be a woman on the Supreme Court.” To his credit, Nixon actually said that when the ABA considered candidates for the Supreme Court, “the jury should have at least one woman on it.” FWIW.
For a fun look at how Nixon tried to get out the doghouse with Pat on this one, see the recent Politico account following a new dump of Nixon Whitehouse tapes:
October 23, 2021
Chicago Daily News: The barber shop
by John P. Carmichael
John P. Carmichael’s “The barbershop” column in The Daily News sports section—and how many sports writers use a middle initial—analyzes the Bears ahead of their Sunday game with the Detroit Lions. It doesn’t sound promising:
“With Kent Nix and Jack Concannon both sidelined with injuries, coach Jim Dooley has to toss Bobby Douglass into the quarterback role and hope for the best.”
“With either Jim Grabowski and (or) Gale Sayers anywhere near peak, Dooley might be able to eat some ground against the Lions, “Carmichael notes, “but both Jim and Gale have averaged less than three yards per carry…”
On the other hand, writes Carmichael, the Bears’ numbers on punt returns and kickoff runbacks are on par with the NFC leaders, “and thus this loosely knit collection of veterans and cripples has managed to make the 1971 campaign, so far, more artistically profitable than might have been expected.”
Most importantly, the Bears have Dick Butkus—who let’s remember is a native of Roseland. Carmichael quotes LA Rams coach Tommy Prothro on his first professional sighting of Butkus: “Butkus looks fat, clumsy and awkward, but he kicks the devil out of everybody.” That, says Carmichael, “is the best thing the Bears have going for them.”
October 23, 1971
Chicago Daily News, Panorama Section: Battle plan for cultural clashes
By Richard Christiansen
The destruction of Adler & Sullivan’s Old Stock Exchange “seems a particularly blatant example of Chicago butchering,” writes now legendary Chicago theatre critic Richard Christiansen, who left the Daily News when it folded in 1978 for the Tribune, retiring in 2002.
Sounding more like a hardboiled political writer, Christiansen pinpoints why Exchange supporters couldn't win. With all their eloquence, "they still did not have that ultimate value in Chicago: power."
The CSO and Lyric Opera got help from City Hall because their boards were stuffed with powerful rich people, he notes. “Nobody with Establishment clout, political or financial, had any interest in keeping the Stock Exchange building alive," so "it was doomed from the start.”
Wait, you say—what about the Chicago Architecture Center, with its commanding headquarters at 111 E. Wacker, its ubiquitous building and boat tours, its gigantic 4,250-building scale model of the city? According to CAC’s own website, it is now “one of the largest cultural organizations in Chicago.”
But that is now, that was then. In 1971, CAC was still the Chicago Architecture Foundation, created in 1966 to save Glessner House, and just starting to lead volunteer tours.
And then there was Mayor Daley. “Mayor Daley himself is among the least ‘cultural’ of men, avoiding it wherever possible and confining himself to ceremonial appearances at best,” Christiansen observes. “I don’t mean that he’s anti-culture; it’s just that he’s non-culture.”
Christiansen looks ahead to the fight for the Rookery and the Monadnock Building: “No, when the battle next comes, the tactics will have to be bad-mannered and loud and raucous….Manners? Good breeding? Kind understanding? Gentleman, please don’t be ridiculous. This is Chicago.”
Sadly, Christiansen passed away in January 2022. Rick Kogan wrote a touching remembrance of his years with Christiansen in the Tribune, including this salient nugget:
I worked for him, and I worked with him, socialized with him and so it would be impossible to catalog the many things he taught me, indeed taught a generation of newspaper writers. One of the most important of these things was that if you are a critic, you don’t have to be an arrogant ass.
Current Tribune theater critic Chris Jones wrote the Tribune’s obituary for Christiansen, crediting him with being “the single individual who did the most to put homegrown Chicago theater permanently on the global map.”
Christiansen didn’t start out as a theater critic, but in the demanding City News Bureau at the same time as Mike Royko, covering “a steady diet of often tragic news” as Kogan puts it. Christiansen moved up to the Daily News in 1957, and in 1963, after Herman Kogan started the Daily News’ Panorama section, Christiansen got his start covering all aspects of culture. He began covering and promoting small local theater right away—and when Herman Kogan moved on, Christiansen was editing Panorama himself in a few years. Which is how we ended up with his insightful coverage of the death of the Old Stock Exchange Building today in 1971.
October 23, 1971
Chicago Daily News, Panorama Section: “How they clouted the Old Stock Exchange
By M.W. Newman
Legendary Daily News writer Newman gets a two-page spread in the weekend’s Panorama section, with a full page devoted to a horrific photograph of Adler & Sullivan’s Old Stock Exchange encased in scaffolding for demolition. It’s like seeing your Gramma in a hospital bed completely covered in medical machines and tubes.
“The Old Stock Exchange slaughter now taking place amounts to another rubout,” writes Newman, “and a particularly symbolic one, in a city celebrated for violence and destruction.” Mayor Daley could have saved 20 stock exchanges if he wanted to, but Newman sees clearly why this could never happen:
“It couldn’t have been saved because that might have set a precedent for preserving Chicago’s other remaining 19th Century landmarks. And that would deprive our real estate moguls and downtown financiers of their God-given right to the ‘highest and best use of land’—that is, building up to the skies, regardless of the community’s best interests.”
Newman runs through the Exchange’s recent history: Bought by Sudler & Co. in 1957, which four years later invested $400,000 in the building and proclaimed it so well-designed that it was at 100% occupancy. This is the Sudler & Co. whose head, Louis Sudler, was then president of the Orchestra Association. In a separate piece today, Richard Christiansen notes the Chicago Symphony Orchestra got help from City Hall due to the powerful people on its board, such as Sudler.
“Came 1968, and we were in the age of giant ‘redevelopment’ of the Loop, with land values skyrocketing. Anyone could figure for himself what chance a 13-story building (sited on prime La Salle St. land near City Hall) would have…when someone could throw up 40-odd stories in its place. So word got out that the Stock Exchange…was up for grabs.”
In 1968, Newman recounts, the Daily News reported rumors the Stock Exchange would be sold. Louis Sudler “acknowledged there were ‘efforts’ to acquire it,” but claimed he didn’t know what a buyer would do with the building. The same article quoted prospective buyer Jerrold Wexler saying that anyone who bought the Exchange would tear it down. “Do you think Sudler didn’t read it?” sneers Newman.
In 1968, Wexler and others bought the Exchange for $3,310,000 and soon announced plans to demolish it. Somehow, says Newman, when a package was put together to buy the building back and save it, the price “went up to around $16 million” even though the “mayor’s own landmark commission figured $5 million might be more realistic.”
Newman says the Landmarks Commission “had a hard time deciding to even fight” for the Stock Exchange, because “this was to be a crucial test of its power….and the word was out that this was ‘the wrong’ building for that kind of fight.”
Meanwhile, a new batch of connected people bought the building, including famous Chicago personal injury lawyer Philip Corboy. Newman relates the connections of the Stock Exchange’s new owners to Mayor Daley, to powerful law firms, and to huge construction companies, still a who’s who around here—Kirkland and Ellis. Tischman.
Sensible, doable plans were suggested to save the building, but Newman sums up the massive wave washing 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 Buildings Managers Assn. and other downtown heavyweights.”
Newman closes by quoting famed Chicago architectural writer Carl Condit, who observed that “What one age builds is always threatened by the next,” and that the greatest danger besides war is “that works of art may be consumed…like household utensils.”
“We consume and destroy,” Newman concludes. “And in consuming the legacy of our yesterdays and the work of people who left it to us, we consume ourselves as well.”
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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.