FORMER CULTURE CZAR DIES
She had the respect of both Harold Washington and Richard M. Daleyand was friends with both Lenny Bruce and Maggie Daley. She was comfortable hitting up John D. MacArthur personally for money. She was lauded in the New Yorker and has a credit on the liner notes of Allen Ginsberg’s 1959 recording of “Howl.”
Oh, and Lois Weisberg had a hand in creating many of the cultural institutions that make the city of Chicago such a vibrant place.
Ms. Weisberg, 90, who died Wednesday at her home in Florida, was the tireless, idea-spouting, chainsmoking (before she gave it up) commissioner of cultural affairs through most of Daley’s administration.
From 1989 to 2011, she had a hand in almost everything that lent sparkle to the city, from helping create Millennium Park to re-opening Navy Pier as a tourist mecca to suggesting to Maggie Daley that the city turn a white elephant Loop embarrassment, the grassy field of Block 37, into Gallery 37, an artistic mecca for school kids. She turned the abandoned Chicago Public Library main building into the event-packed Chicago Cultural Center, made “Taste of Chicago” a success, and over saw creation of the Blues Festival and the Gospel Festival.
“Most of us make an effort to think outside the box now and then,” said Kimberly Costello Keefe, who served under her in the Department of Cultural Affairs. “Itwas no effort at all for Lois, who never really saw or understood the box to begin with. Nothing was off limits, unthinkable, impossible and that’s why her legacy is so broad and diverse.”
In the mid-1970s, aghast at Chicago’s neglected public parks, then “considered rubble-filled, dangerous political fiefdoms,” Ms. Weisberg formed Friends of the Parks. She single-handedly saved the South Shore Line from Chicago to South Bend by pressuring Rep. Sidney Yates and organizing school trips to the Dunes to show the line’s value.
“Lois has this thing — whatever it is — that brings people together,” wrote Malcolm Gladwell, in a worshipful profile, “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” in the New Yorker in 1999, the year she brought an obscure Swiss event, “Cows on Parade” to Chicago.
Not everything she touched worked, of course. The followup to the cows, bringing pingpong tables to city streets the next year, failed to come near its success. She was also behind the “complete chaos” of the Bears 1985 Super Bowl victory parade, though— Rahm Emanuel take note — she admitted she made a mistake, by locating the parade on La Salle Street and preparing for 150,000 spectators. Half amillion showed up.
Lois Porges was born on the West Side of Chicago, daughter of Mortimer and Jessie Porges. Her father was an assistant attorney general for Illi- nois, her mother was a housewife. She grew up in Austin and went to Austin High School. She took elocution lessons and at 16 was the only teen in a local theater group.
Ms. Weisberg first attended University of Illinois, then transferred to Northwestern University, graduating in 1946. There she met Leonard Solomon, a pharmacy student, and they married shortly after graduation.
She was doing radio plays with her childhood friend, Sondra Gair, and became interested in George Bernard Shaw. She then noticed his centennial, July 26 1956, was nearing, and would be uncelebrated in Chicago. So she waylaid John D. MacArthur at the Pump Room and squeezed $10,000 from him, persuaded the city’s adult education council to let her throw a Shaw birthday party for 800 at the Sherman Hotel.
“That’s how it started,” she once said.
Her home on Scott Street turned into a salon for writers and musicians and artists. Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane would show up. Her parties might have Dizzy Gillespie and Ralph Ellison. William Friedkin, who would go on to direct “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” stopped by often.
In 1959, she sponsored beat poet Allen Ginsberg to visit the city, and recorded him reading “Howl”—“Lois Solomon” is credited on the album’s liner notes. Off-color comic Lenny Bruce was a houseguest, to the consternation of her mother, who came to call.
“Bruce had been in the shower and opened the door wearing only a towel,” Ms. Weisberg later recalled.
She and Solomon divorced, and in 1962 she married Bernard We is berg, a well-known civil liberties lawyer who became a federal magistrate.
She joined Mayor Harold Washington’s staff in 1983 as executive director of special events.
In July, 1987 she quit, but in 1989 Daley appointed her head of his new Cultural Affairs Department.
“What an odd pairing. They worked very fruitfully together for a very long time,” said her son, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of Slate.
In 1991, Ms. Weisberg oversaw the transition of the city’s landmark central library to the Chicago Cultural Center. In 1999, her “Cows on Parade” brought an estimated $200 million in commerce to the city.
“If you’re talking city arts festivals, exhibits, concerts, grass-roots arts funding, you’re talking Lois Weisberg,” M.W. Newman wrote in the Sun-Times in 1991 calling her “the den mother of the arts.”
In January 2011, when Daley was merging the Department of Cultural Affairs with the Department of Special Events, Ms. Weisberg quit.
“One of themain reasons I am leaving is that I am angry about the way the mayor has treated me,” Weisberg told the Tribune. “Not to askme about [the merger], not to get any input from me about something like this merger, and about privatizing the festivals, strikes me as just wrong.”
In addition to her sister, June Rosner, and Jacob Weisberg, survivors include Joseph, her other son from her marriage to Bernard Weisberg, as well as a daughter from her marriage to Leonard Solomon, Kiki Ellenby, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren. Her daughter Jerilyn Fyffe died in2011.
What was Lois Weisberg’s secret that allowed her to live such a full life?
“She didn’t understand the obstacles and difficulties,” said Jacob Weisberg. “She thought a good idea was a powerful force in theworld.”
Funeral services will be Monday 1:30 p.m. at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago.
“She didn’t understand the obstacles and difficulties. She thought a good idea was a powerful force in the world.” Jacob Weisberg, on his mother, Lois Weisberg (right)