Get a move on, Santa!” shouted Sister Bernadette.
Leaping out of his car, Jolly Old St. Nick (a.k.a. patrolman Wayne Sipich, star No. 7484) bounded up the front steps of the orphanage two at a time. As usual, he was running late. When he ran through the doorway of St. Joseph Carondelet`s noisy assembly hall, he was huffing and puffing as if from racing to answer a 10-1 (officer needs help) radio call.
A nun shoved a chair under his six-foot-four-inch frame and Sipich made up for lost time by going directly into his Santa Claus routine. One after another, the kids got a chance to recite their Christmas wishes, before each left his lap bearing a gym-bag load of toys donated by the Chicago Patrolmen`s Association. It was Officer Sipich`s toughest assignment of the day.
”How`d you like to have to ask these kids: `You been good little boys and girls?` ” he whispered to a reporter. He was pointing to row after row of children who bore all-too-visable witness to their fathers` and mothers` sins. For a couple of minutes, Sipich`s tied-on beard framed a young scalp covered with burn scars and more than one of the kids looked up to Santa with bruised eyes. St. Joseph`s offers asylum to children who have been abused by their parents.
When his annual appearance at the Near South Side institution was finished, Sipich explained that it was here that he first started swapping his blue uniform for a Santa suit for two weeks every year. Today, he will make his Christmas Eve rounds in his battered Chevy with licence plates that read
”XMAS 80,” capping his 10th season as Officer Santa.
Not long after joining the Chicago Police Department, about a decade ago, he was assigned to the 21st District, whose territory covers the housing projects and crumbling tenements that dot the lakefront between Lake Meadows and Hyde Park. One night on patrol, he spotted a kid wandering the
neighborhood long after the hour when it is safe.
When he pulled over to the curb to ask for an explanation, the boy wouldn`t say a word, Sipich recalled. Standard procedure would have been to bring him into the station house, while radioing for a social worker to transfer him to an emergency shelter. Even before becoming a cop, though, Sipich was never one to go by the book.
”I called the dispatcher to say that I was going on lunch break,”
Sipich recalled, on the way to his next Santa stop of the day. ”Then I rode the kid over to McDonald`s in my squad car. We must have munched hamburgers and drank malts for maybe an hour in silence. He just sat there and stared at me with those defiant eyes of his. But finally he cracked a smile and said that his name was Marcus and that he`d run away from St. Joseph`s.”
After that, Sipich would visit his young friend whenever he drew a beat near the orphanage and soon Marcus` counselors reported that he was a greatly changed boy. Up to then, his personal answer to the years of parental torture that had brought him to St. Joseph`s was to withdraw into himself and refuse the company of anyone, children and adults alike. Let the staff take their eyes off of him for even a minute, and Marcus used to be out the door and down the street Now, he loved to brag about his tall, blue-suited friend and to regale the other kids with the story of his night on the town at McDonalds.
Just before his first Christmas on the force, Sipich stopped by the orphange to ask the director if he could leave a few toys for Santa to deliver to Marcus. ”Officer,” the nun had replied, shaking her head sadly, ”I`ve been out here 13 years, and I`ve yet to see a Santa set foot in this neighborhood.” It was a challenge Sipich could not refuse.
”As a rookie, you`d almost rather go into the projects alone than have to step into your precinct commander`s office,” Sipich said. He was parking alongside the Ickes Homes on South State Street, while recalling his first year on the force. His car`s cheery license plate brought an unaccustomed sign of the season to the forest of bleak, high-rise slabs, none of whose thousand- and-one windows were illuminated by even a single Christmas tree light.
It had taken a while to screw up his courage, Sipich recalled, but finally he had gone to his superior to ask for an hour off on Christmas Eve, so that he could pay the orphange a quick visit in a rented Santa suit. The scene fulfilled all of his anxieties: The commander`s shoot-first-question-the-survivors-afterwards approach to police work had inspired his men to nickname him ”Captain Blood.”
As Sipich stammered out his request, the captain didn`t even raise his eyes from the paperwork he had been attending to. ”I`ll look into it,” he gruffly replied. Sipich was hardly optimistic.
At the next day`s roll call, though, a schedule change was announced. Rookies always work the holiday shifts, but Sipich was given all day off, not just the hour he had requested.
Officer Sipich has never worked a Christmas Eve since, at least not in a patrol car. Word quickly got around the 21st District about a Santa who wasn`t afraid to make ghetto house calls and an ever-increasing flood of requests started coming in for Sipich`s services. Beginning with Captain Blood, every subsequent commander has responded by freeing Sipich from patrol work for the holiday season and allowing him to spend his tours of duty dressed as Kris Kringle. For Sipich, it is a respite from the deadly uncertainties that come with the territory of being a cop.
”I once watched a man die, right here,” he said, while passing by the project`s scruffy playground in his long white beard and red suit.
Like so many inner-city tragedies, Sipich recalled, it was a case of a good kid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The victim, an honor student who had made it out of the projects, was visiting a sister who hadn`t when he got caught in the middle of a street-gang gun battle. As the badly wounded man was being loaded onto a paddy wagon, the boy`s sister begged Sipich for a minute to talk to her brother. It was once of those issues that they don`t cover at the police academy.
”I told her we couldn`t wait. She`d have to talk to him at the hospital,” Sipich recalled. ”But he was gone before we got there. Since then, isn`t a day goes by that I don`t think about that kid, dying, all alone like that. If I`d just said yes, at least he could`ve been looking into his sister`s face when it all went dark on him.”
When Sipich arrived at the Ickes Homes` daycare center, the children had already been put down for their mid-day nap. So as he went from room to room, the kids got up from their cots not knowing if they were awake or dreaming.
”Santa? Is you really here?” one five-year-old asked, while rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
The boy`s classmates climbed all over Sipich`s generous lap to whisper in his ear. ”Listen to their shopping lists,” Sipich said, motioning to his companion to come within hearing distance. ”Middle-class kids ask Santa for everything that`s being pushed on TV this year. But hear that? This one wants `a ball.` That one over there said `a toy.` A boy told me that he`s doing okay, but his kid brother needs some gloves for winter. I guess when you got nothing, a little something is enough to make you happy.”
Santa`s next stop proved that rule of thumb is not limited to children.
”Could you use some reindeer juice?” Sipich asked, when his tour of duty in the projects was done. Then he headed for his precinct mates` favorite debriefing spot, a no-nonsense bar and grill on the edge of the ghetto. Because of its location, the place serves a mixed clientele. At shift`s end, the cops stop in to share horror stories before re-entering the world of family and home. The tavern is also inhabited by low-life types who look like the mug shots hanging on the walls of their drinking companions` squad room.
Stepping behind the bar to serve himself, Sipich fetched a pair of beer bottles and drinking glasses. Then he released the elastic straps, and slipped out of his beard, explaining that it is hard to eat or drink with it in place and, given the replacement price, he`d hate to ruin it with food stains. From the back of the bar, there came a very vocal dissent to Sipich`s pragmatism.
”Hey, man, what you doing?” one of the non-police patrons plaintively asked. ”Don`t you know it`d break my heart to know there`s no Santa Claus?” The problem with police work, Sipich said by way of acknowledging the question, is that you are asked to play Santa 12 months a year. Whatever their problem is, when there is no one else to call, folks dial 911 expecting that an officer can solve it. His last tour in a beat car, before going on Christmas-season duty, had proved that anew.
Mostly, it had been a routine shift, at least as things go in the 21st District: A couple of armed robberies, hot-pursuit of a burglary in progress, a futile chase up ten flights of housing-project stairs and a case of sodomy complicated by a strong suspicion that the young victim`s mother was covering up for her live-in boy friend. ”What do we have here,” asked a late arriving cop, as his colleagues questioned the woman about the inconsistencies in her story.
”Sex abuse, with a side order of bull—-,” a fellow officer replied.
Then right in the middle of the day, Sipich answered a call from a nursing home where an 88-year-old woman had swallowed some cleaning fluid. Although they had got it out of her stomach in time, regulations require that every such incident be investigated. The nurses assumed that the woman`s act was inspired by senility, but Sipich saw it differently. The moment he took a seat alongside her bed, she seized his hand and smiled at him, like he was a long-lost friend.
”Over and over again,” he recalled, ”she kept saying: `Get me out of here, can`t you? Take me home with you, won`t you, Mr. Policeman?` It made me think she knew perfectly well that a cop would come when she drank that stuff. She wasn`t any more senile than you or me. Her only problem was that she was all alone in the world.”
Requests like that lonely old woman`s, Sipich added, make the ones the kids ask him as Santa Claus seem easy by comparison.
Over the years Sipich`s emotional investment in his Christmas-season special duty has increased, and has long since crossed the boundary into his civilian life.
Each December, he mounts an ever more elaborate display on his Canaryville two-flat. This year, a buddy helped him string a wire to the street lamp, from which he suspended plastic reindeers and a sled, as if the Jolly Old Man was just flying off from the roof to the next stop on his route. The neighborhood kids know the place as ”Santa`s House,” and parents often bring by children who have reached the age of doubt, in the hopes of restoring their faith for another season.
For his Christmas Eve run, Sipich himself pays special attention to just that class of youngster. By special request, he will, with a hearty ”Ho! Ho! Ho!”, rouse children who suspect their parents of putting the presents under the tree. His route is determined by ties of friendship and family, and includes stops to visit with kids he met when they were in some hospital or orphanage, as well as those of neighbors who have moved to other parts of town.
In fact, if your own children are beginning to lose the faith, why not position them tonight somewhere along Officer Santa`s way? From Chinatown, where some of Sipich`s family still live, he will be going on to Bridgeport and Canaryville, then out to Wyler Children`s Hospital in Hyde Park, and to suburban Oak Lawn. Just tell the little ones to look for a beat-up Chevrolet with ”Xmas 80” license plates: For his urban run, Saint Nick leaves his reindeer and sled safely behind.
And if the kids ask if that is the real Santa Claus, tell them: Of course it is! Can`t you tell by that Smith and Wesson bulge underneath the jingle bells hanging from his fur-trimmed suit?
