I don’t know if it was the bravest thing I ever did or if it was the most foolish, I’ll let you decide. But before I get into it, you’ll need a little background information on how I happened to be in the situation.
It was 1980. I was working, correct that, I was a full-time volunteer for Richard M. Daley’s campaign for State’s Attorney. I was his Scheduler, which is a fairly important role in a campaign. The Scheduler is responsible for working closely with the Campaign Manager and the candidate to determine the events she/he will attend each day. In Rich’s campaign, because his father had been the longest serving Mayor of Chicago and immensely popular, we received far more invitations than was possible for him to attend. So, I had to decide which ones we’d accept and which ones we needed to send a surrogate to. These decisions were nearly always made based on where we needed the votes.
I had gotten involved in the campaign through my brother. In November of 1979, Patrick had already declared as a candidate for State’s Attorney when Rich Daley called him and asked if he’s stop by his house for a chat after Thanksgiving dinner. In that meeting, Rich told my brother he was intending to run for State’s Attorney and asked him to drop out and throw his support to him. Knowing that he couldn’t match Daley resources and name, he said he would but had one favor: would Rich hire his little sister. You see, I had been one of Ted’s hardest workers. I guess he knew I’d be disappointed.
At any rate, I found myself walking into the legendary 11thWard Regular Democratic office on 31stand Halsted the following Monday. It was, as all Ward Offices tend to me – old and musty. Immediately upon entering was a good size waiting room with old folding chairs set up and where all those seeking favors would wait for a meeting with the ward committeeman. Separating the chairs from the rest of the office was an old metal railing with a swinging gate. The offices of the Alderman, Committeeman . . and Rich Daley (who was both the Committeeman and State Senator at the time) were well beyond the gate.
Rich asked me a few questions then told me he needed a Scheduler; did I want the job. I did. He sent me to a wonderful woman, his secretary, Gloria to get set up. In fact, Gloria was much more than his secretary, she was his rock. Rich had a tendency to get upset fast, and Gloria knew just how to calm him. But I digress.
I was put at a long folding table in a large meeting space located to the side of the offices. There I was presented with a telephone and an overflowing file of requests for his appearance. Some requests were in the form of a letter or formal invite, others were notes taken on yellow telephone message slips and still others were mostly illegible notes scratched out by Rich on index cards. I would find out that he carried index cards with him at all times and wrote all sorts of things on them: names and phone numbers of people he met, dates for meetings he’d been invited to, questions he wanted answered. After a day on the campaign trial, most of the index cards would land on my desk for interruption and routing to the correct spot.
I would never have made it with through those first weeks if not for Gloria and her assistant, Laura. I’ve long forgotten their last names but will never forget their kindness and help. They were from “the neighborhood” (Bridgeport in the 11thward) as was everyone who worked there was until I came along. It wasn’t easy to be accepted if you were from outside the neighborhood. Bridgeport people tended not to trust outsiders – – – i.e. those who didn’t have at least five generations in the neighborhood. Gloria and Laura[1]accepted me and therefore everyone else did too. These friendships were invaluable to me in my work for the Daley’s.
Unfortunately, my stay with Gloria and Laura was brief. The Daley Campaign for Cook County State’s Attorney officially opened its office downtown at 211[2]West Washington just after the new year. It was a rundown place on the 3rdor 4thfloor (I don’t remember which floor, but I do remember the rickety elevator that took us up there). Bill Daley’s (the campaign manager) office was on one side in the front facing Washington Blvd. and Rich’s office was on the other side. They had the only offices with windows. The place was long and narrow with make-shift offices lining the way to the back. Mine was one of these.
The next few months are a blur of activity. Daley was in a hard-fought primary election against Ed Burke. Burke was a sitting alderman who, at that time, had most of the Democratic committeemen behind him. It was a dirty campaign.
After nearly three months of activity, I found myself sitting in the campaign office on election day with nothing to do. The phones had stopped ringing and requests no longer came in. Everything now depended upon the results of the election. If we won, we would go on to the general election against Bernie Carey.
There were only a few of us sitting around when Bill Daley mentioned they needed a poll watcher in a tough precinct on the west side. At that time, the west side of Chicago was composed mainly of really poor African Americans living in dilapidated buildings and public housing. Much of the west side had been burned down in the riots after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination twelve years earlier and it was still struggling to rebuild. It was pot-marked with scores of empty lots where stores and houses once stood until burned down in the ’68 riots.
I volunteered to go. I didn’t want to just sit in the office all day. I wanted to be doing something. After warning me that it wouldn’t be easy, Bill Daley had me driven and dropped off at public housing high-rise somewhere on west Madison.
My job, as a poll watcher for Daley, was to watch the voting process to make sure no votes were being stolen and that the election was being conducted in an open and fair manner. I couldn’t interfere or stop the voting process, but I had every right to watch every detail of what was happening, ask for the names of voters and write them down.
The precinct I was in consisted of the entire Public Housing high rise building which was mainly for senior citizens. Not bad, I thought. Safe.
The seniors were being brought down from their apartments in groups of five or six by the local precinct captains. That was okay. Most of them needed help walking anyway. But then I noticed a pattern. Nearly all were accompanied into the voting booth by a precinct captain.
A voter can have someone in the booth with them but only if: 1) they physically need help, 2) special paperwork has been completed with the reason for the needed assistance and 3) the name and relationship of the person helping is recorded. None of that was being done.
So, as was my right as a poll watcher, I objected every time it happened – – which was almost always – – and would write down the name of the voter and the person in the booth with them. I couldn’t stop the process, but I could record it and verbally state my objection to the vote.
After several of my objections, one of the poll-workers gave me a hard-sinister stare and slowly rose from her chair at the table. “This doesn’t look good,” I thought. She was a Black woman about my age, only much taller with broad shoulders. She had the look of someone who had been in more than a few street fights in her life. Despite the many “wrestling” matches I had with my brothers growing up, I was certain she could wipe the floor with me if she choose to do so.
I can still see her in my mind’s eye as she rose up from her seat – – – still giving me what I considered an “evil eye” – – – and walked slowly towards me. She stopped a few short inches from my face. Her malicious looking brown eyes glared into mine like she was trying to penetrate my brain. After what seemed like an eternity, she hissed, “Do you want two broken legs?” Long pause. “Do you want to end up in the River?” I took it as rhetorical questions and thought it prudent to stay silent. I tried to appear calm, cool and collected.
If she intended to scare me, she did. I remember thinking that it was a good thing I had on jeans, so she couldn’t see my legs shaking. I stood bolted to the spot for a few minutes until I knew I could walk without falling over. The first thing I did was to go the phone booths just outside that room and call my nanny, Ann Grogan. Keep the kids in the house, I told her. Watch them and keep them close. Then I called the campaign office. Send out the US attorneys asap, I said.
When the US attorneys arrived, I shared my notes on what I considered to be illegal voting. They checked the records and strongly warned the workers that the rules had to be followed and that they would be back to make sure. They also took copies of my notes as evidence in case they decided to prosecute.
Shortly after they left, I went back to the phones to report back to the campaign office. While I was on the phone with the office, a tall, muscular older white man came in and picked up the phone next to me. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but later found out he was Ed Quigley, the powerful ward committeeman on the west side. After interviewing Quigley in the 60’s, Mike Royko described him as . .
“wearing a silk suit, a silk shirt, a silk tie, a diamond pinky ring, diamond cuff links,
and a jewel studded wristwatch.”[3]
That pretty much summed up the man who was next to me at the phones.
I overheard him forcefully telling someone on the other end of the line “to get this young broad out of his ward” no matter what they had to do. “Put her in the river if you have to,” he yelled. Apparently, he didn’t know the “young broad” was standing right next to him – – shaking like a leaf.
I nervously relayed his conversation to Bill Daley on the other end of the line. He wanted to send a replacement and bring me back to the office. No, I said, I started this and I will finish it. Besides, they know that I know what I am doing. They may be even more afraid of me than I was of them – which was substantial.
He immediately sent out the biggest, tallest, strongest looking man he could find to sit with me for the remainder of the day. That man happened to be the husband of Rich’s secretary in Springfield. I don’t recall his name anymore, but he was a farmer downstate and despite his appearance he was one of the gentlest men I ever met.
As for the voting, once the US attorneys were called in and the ward people realized that I was staying, the voting nearly stopped. My guess is that they figured there was no use bringing the seniors down to vote if they couldn’t control what they did in the voting booth. So, my farmer friend and I spent the rest of the day talking about our kids.
After the polls closed and the votes counted (that precinct had the lowest turnout ever and we won it for Daley!) Bill sent an off-duty police officer to pick us up. He drove his car right up on the sidewalk and as close to the door as he could. As I exited the door, he grabbed me and hustled me into the car. Then pulled away at a high rate of speed. I remember thinking that the campaign must have taken Quigley’s threat even more seriously than I did.
Back at the office, one of the attorney volunteers, Marv Brunstien, who had been in contact with the US Attorney’s office for me, made a medal out of tinfoil which he presented to me for good work, stopping voter fraud, and for surviving the day. I saved that piece of tinfoil for years but no longer know what happened to it.
So you judge. Was I brave or foolish? My guess is a little of both.
Looking back, I was young and idealistic. I desperately wanted a fair and just world where everyone was treated equal. In college I had fought for civil rights and for everyone to be given a fair shot at success. In this instance, the attempt to steal votes insulted my sense of justice and fairness and I was willing to fight against it. It was only a small thing in a much larger picture, but I am happy I did it.
[1]Sadly, Gloria died of breast cancer not long after my meeting her; I still feel badly that I was never able to express to her my gratitude for her kindness and help. I later discovered that Laura’s father and my grandfather had been good friends.
[2]This address is approximate. The building, now gone, was across the street from what was then Illinois Bell headquarters at 212 West Washington.
[3]From his obit published in the Chicago Tribune, October 1988
Growing up in Chicago in the '50's 