Where am I? Reflections on 35 years at the Chicago Tribune
June 28, 1985.
Does that date mean anything to you?
It didn’t mean anything to me either until a few days ago when I was applying for unemployment benefits due to the intermittent furloughs imposed on the Tribune’s unionized employees. The form asked when I began working for my employer. I had to look it up, and there it was, a date I’d forgotten: 6/28/ 1985.
Thirty-five years. It seems like forever, and it seems shorter than a sneeze. I hope you’ll indulge a brief reminiscence in honor of that anniversary.
Though I’d forgotten my official hire date, I vividly remember driving my gray Honda Accord into Chicago one evening that June, my sister Melanie at my side, and the terrifying, exhilarating skyline out the windshield. Gridlock and skyscrapers. As a child of the low-slung Sun Belt, I’d never seen anything like it. Where was I? Within a few days, as I prepared to take a job writing features, I’d rented the top of an old coach house a couple of blocks from a grimy street of derelict warehouses. I was told to avoid the grimy street because it was dangerous. The street was called Clybourn, and within a few years it was a shopping mecca. In fact, though I didn’t know it, the neighborhood was already hot property for savvy real estate investors. Within a year, my coach house and the main house were sold, and the new owner kicked me out.
I moved up to Roscoe Street, just west of Halsted Street, in another changing neighborhood. It was called New Town. I rented the top floor of an old three-flat. Within a year, that place got bought, too, as the neighborhood grew trendier and was eventually renamed Boystown.
When I arrived in Chicago, Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, was in his second year of office. It took me a while to comprehend how his election had convulsed the city. I was astonished by the overt racism everywhere. This was the Chicago I’d read about, the one that Black migrants from the South had once considered the Promised Land?
Where was I?
That question popped into my mind often as I roamed around the town, which felt like a collection of villages. One Sunday, I stopped into a church and was surprised to hear everyone speaking Polish. I learned that an astonishing number of people, many of Irish heritage, identified by church parish. I discovered the divide between the South Side and the North Side, and that much of the division was racial but not all. I learned that in Chicago, politics was sport and sport was religion and religion shaped politics.
I felt like a foreigner, fascinated but often perplexed.
I don’t remember what was making news on June 28, 1985, or, rather, I didn’t until this week when I checked out that day’s Chicago Tribune. On the front page was a story about Americans being held hostage on a TWA flight in Beirut. Inside was a mention of plans for a new federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.
There was also a story about the debate over allowing sidewalk cafes. “Has Chicago been longing for the sidewalk cafe?” it began. “Will the city turn into one large piazza now that the city fathers have passed a (rather complicated) ordinance to allow restaurants to put tables on public ways?”
Thirty-five years later, TWA is defunct. MLK Day is a fixture on the national calendar. And in the coronavirus age, the ubiquitous sidewalk cafes have been our salvation.
As for the “city fathers” mentioned in the sidewalk cafe story? That phrase suggests what Chicago — and the Tribune — felt like in 1985. In the city and at the paper, power belonged to men.
I’d walk past the daily front-page planning meetings and look through the glass at the long table ringed by male editors and think: Where am I? Where are the women? It’s 1985, dammit!
Within a couple of years, I left Chicago to be the Tribune’s Southern correspondent based in Atlanta. When I came back five years later to write a column, at the behest of Ann Marie Lipinski, who later became the Tribune’s first, and so far only, female editor, Chicago and the Tribune had progressed, some. And it was only in coming back that I really began to understand where I was. I’d come to see that you can’t understand Chicago without understanding the history of its Black citizens and you can’t understand that without understanding the South.
In the years since, a lot has changed and too much hasn’t. In Chicago, poverty and racial inequities have shifted shape, but they run as deep as ever. The Latino population has grown while Black people have left by the thousands. As for the Tribune, it continues to struggle with diversity in all realms, along with the industry’s financial stress.
And yet I’ve never been prouder of the people I work with. In the midst of a pandemic and economic chaos, my co-workers go out, day after day, every day, and try to help us all figure out: Where are we? What is Chicago? Who is Chicago?
Thirty-five years later, I remain amazed and grateful to be asking those questions in this city and at this newspaper, connected to all the people who care about both.