A place for people with ‘little dreams’
For them, Slim Brundage created the College of Complexes
Slim Brundage always said he was fated to be the founder of the College of Complexes, a free-speech forum he started in the 1950s that the Chicago police once considered “a gathering place for undesirable persons.”
“Slim liked to say that it was his birthright to run a homeaway-from-home for loonytunes thinkers,” the Tribune once wrote. “He had been born in 1903 in an Idaho insane asylum, where his mother worked.”
Brundage’s pedagogical method was straightforward. After a lecture, the audience was invited to respond.
“Politicians, do-gooders physicians, atomic scientists, lawyers, philosophers, all get their comeuppance, from the characters in the audience who knew everything,” Brundage wrote. “Even so, some have been coming back every year.”
The clientele of the college was nothing if not eclectic. J.J. James, a published poet who for a time moderated discussions at the College of Complexes, where Thursday was poetry night, was in reality Norman Porter, a convicted murderer arrested in Chicago in 2005 after escaping from a Massachusetts prison 20 years earlier.
But most of the college’s habituates took a more prosaic route to the Old Town tavern that, starting in 1951, hosted the College of Complexes, which Brundage called “a playground for people who think.” The tavern’s walls were blackboards covered with chalk-squiggled questions and aphorisms ranging from silly to sublime:
“Can man stop killing man before we’re all dead?” “Who was Freud but a reincarnated Oedipus looking for a rationalization?” “A committee is a group of the incompetent appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.”
Some were written by Brundage, others by professors and apostles of every political and religious creed. Brundage was especially fond of what he called the “little dreamers” — those whose cherished ideas rarely brought them renown.
“Your people and mine are not found in ‘Who’s Who,’” he said. “They only dreamed the little dreams.”
Brundage’s empathy for them corresponded to his sense of being the “King of Failure.”
After his mother died, his father brought him to an orphanage. The orphanage gave him back because, as he noted in a bullet-point autobiography, he had “told the other kids not to say their prayers.”
At 14, he left home for a wandering life and changed his given name, Myron. His socialist father had named him for Myron Reed, a Methodist preacher who taught “the Bible according to Marx,” Brundage wrote. Riding the rails as a young man, Brundage thought Slim more appropriate for a hobo camp.
Brundage wrote books that never got published and was twice married and divorced. He was a piano mover, a house painter and an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, know as the Wobblies.
Engaged in bloody battles to unionize the miners and loggers of the West, the Wobblies advocated the workers’ cause by soapboxing and preaching their gospel on street corners. For that, they were beaten and jailed. It convinced Brundage that without free speech, the Bill of Rights was meaningless.
He signed letters: “Yours for a better world.” It was a riff on the Wobblies’ battle cry.
In Chicago, Brundage listened to soap-boxers while feeding the squirrels at Bughouse Square, as the Washington Square Park on the Near North Side was dubbed. He tended bar at the Dill Pickle Club, where the city’s literati and bohemians met. Caught serving liquor to G-men during Prohibition, he spent 30 days behind bars. He also was repeatedly jailed during his hobo years.
When the Dill Pickle folded in 1933, he formed a hobo debate team that took on the University of Chicago’s squad. The hobos narrowly lost, but the event earned $27.14 in spectators’ contributions.
In 1951, he used the $6,000 in workman’s compensation he got for an accident to open the College of Complexes in a tavern at 1651 N. Wells. It was a risky business. The Cold War was on and someone who expressed radical views was considered a subversive. Ditto for a bar owner who provided a forum for unpopular opinions. From the start, the FBI had Brundage under surveillance.
He had a knack for booking intriguing lectures: The proprietor of a nudist resort spoke about the latest clothing fashions. The wrestler Ruffy Silverstein recited Shakespeare from memory.
He also got respectable members of the intellectual and political establishments to speak at oddball gatherings, which were regularly monitored by the Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad,” which spied on alleged subversives.
A trio of professors from Harvard, Oxford and Northwestern debated: “Is modern philosophy a detriment to science?” Among local luminaries to appear were Ald. Leon Despres, U.S. Rep. Sidney R. Yates and insurance mogul W. Clement Stone.
Brundage repeatedly pestered the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools to evaluate the College of Complexes. Finally they came, did a skit, and presented him with a certificate. Framed and hung on a wall, it read: “A fully discredited institution whose academic standards are far below normal.”
On some nights, Brundage would point to the chalked question on the wall and invite a pair of barflies to debate. Again, audience members were free to heckle. But no one was ever allowed to drown out a speaker or debater. Anyone who tried to got a booming-voice rebuke from Brundage:
“Shut up, and sit down! Around here we listen to one damn fool at a time!”
Many evenings Brundage wore a painter’s white overalls. It wasn’t just shtick, though he titled himself the janitor as well as dean of his college. He often needed a day job.
Over the years, Brundage had to move his college to five different locations, often due to rent hikes or problems paying the bills. Tack that onto his hobo years, and his cynicism
is understandable. It was the bitter humor born of yearning for a better world but realizing it might not be in the cards.
He put a doorbell button on the college’s door. “Push this button and destroy the world,” was written alongside, in addition to a claim that it was a replica of buttons wired to atomic bombs in Washington and Moscow.
In the late 1950s, Brundage tried franchising his playgrounds for people who think. But the satellite colleges in New York and San Francisco failed, complicating his problems with the IRS. The agency decided he owed nine years worth of federal entertainment taxes.
So in May 1961, he closed the doors of the latest college location at 862 N. State St., and went back to being a house painter. From time to time he ran reincarnations of the College of Complexes between winters spent in Mexico.
Eventually he moved to El Centro, California, where he died in 1990. Per his wishes, he was cremated and his ashes interred in Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, traditionally the final resting place of leftist dissenters.
Some admirers found his manuscripts. Reportedly he’d left them with his second ex-wife. In 1997, they were published in a book, “From Bughouse Square to The Beat Generation: Selected Ravings of Slim Brundage.”
For as long as it is on a public library shelf, the alienated will discover kindred spirits in their predecessors who found refuge in the College Of Complexes. Turning the pages of the book, they’ll see something of themselves in Brundage’s anthology of angst: “Life is a glimpse through a dirty window of a moving subway train.”
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