As director of the Mayor`s Office of Special Events, Kathy Osterman handles bread and circuses for the City of Chicago.
Her training began when she was growing up as Kathleen Mary Lonergan in a home with three brothers and two sisters. ”I was the oldest girl, which in an Irish Catholic family means you are in charge of the world,” she says.
This experience of issuing orders comes in handy when you`re planning parties with guest lists in the hundreds of thousands. One of Osterman`s main duties is to see to it that when the weather gets warm, the citizens of this great metropolitan area can get together on a regular basis for good food and fine music or simply to soak up a spectacle, the more entertaining and dramatic the presentation the better.
In a way, her operation compensates for our lousy winters and the less enchanting concerns of municipal government such as property taxes and Denver Boots, problem schools and potholes that can swallow a Toyota.
Thus from June into September, everybody can look forward to an array of festivals, feedings, art fairs, fireworks, air and water shows, parades, theatrical productions, concerts and galas in number and variety sufficient to sate the need of any populace for fun and games or a fondness for lugging a picnic basket and blanket to Grant Park.
So think of the next few months as summer vacation for adults as well as students.
Of course for Osterman (pronounced with a long ”o”), this is the busiest time of the year, and this season, in particular, promises to be exceptionally full.
This is because of the addition of two really special events to the normally heavy lineup of festivities. Both are related to two more of her primary tasks, which are to showcase the city`s best attractions for out-of-towners and tourists and to roll out the red carpet for important visitors.
One of these events is major league baseball`s All Star Game, to be played at Wrigley Field on July 10, and the other is the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which is expected to bring more than 200 of the top elected officials of the nation`s largest cities here June 15 through 20.
It was the summit of political hard-ballers that was the focus of Osterman`s attention on a recent Friday morning in her office on the seventh floor of City Hall.
The room is large and sunny. It has a teal-colored carpet, a couch, two upholstered chairs, an imposing trio of tropical plants, a massive TV set with a videocassette recorder, a desk of dark wood and two tall windows that look out onto Washington Street.
The walls are covered with framed posters and pictures, five featuring Mayor Richard M. Daley, who hired Osterman as community affairs supervisor when he was Cook County state`s attorney and who persuaded her to resign as alderman of the 48th Ward to join his administration.
Enhancing the sense of comfortable clutter on this day were newly printed posters for the Gospel Festival (June 2-3), Blues Festival (June 8-10), Taste of Chicago (June 27-July 4), Sky Nights (Aug. 10-11), Jazz Festival (Aug. 30- Sept. 2), and Viva! Chicago (Sept. 8-9), the Latin American music festival.
Osterman was leaning forward in one of the upholstered chairs, a pack of Marlboro Lights and a white-foam cup of coffee on a table by her side, going over the calendar for the mayors conference with Leslie Fox, a staff assistant, and Kathryn Fitzpatrick Lynch, a consultant from the convention bureau, who were seated on the couch and the other upholstered chair.
The atmosphere suggested a living room rather than an office, which suits Osterman`s informal management style.
Then, too, if she were at her desk, she probably would have been obscured by the enormous spray of flowers that were left over from the first-anniversary bash her employees gave for her a few days earlier.
Not totally obscured, however, for Osterman is not a tiny person. She has fair, freckled skin, strawberry blond hair, a healthy sense of humor, a wonderful laugh and a penchant for huge hats.
At the moment, she was talking about transportation, which she said would be complicated by the many spouses, children, aides and bodyguards who will accompany the mayors here and will also have to be hauled around to a welter of functions.
”The key is logistics,” she said. ”People have to be taken to where they`re going and picked up without any delays. We have things planned for almost every minute of every day, but people won`t get tired if we`re organized to the second. It`s the waiting around that exhausts people, and we can`t have that.”
She began with the arrivals on Friday, June 15, at Midway and O`Hare airports and proceeded through the closing ceremony five days later. On Saturday the 16th, she noted, the mayors will ride in a ”Just Say No” anti- drug parade along Michigan Avenue that will be televised nationally by the ABC network.
Incidentally, the press office of the U.S. Mayor`s Conference reports that Mayor Marion Barry of Washington probably won`t participate because his trial on drug charges is to begin on June 4.
The unindicted mayors who come to Chicago will be treated like kings. They and their families will be wined, dined and feted in sumptuous and unusual settings, including the floor of the Board of Trade, where they`ll meet the city`s corporate fat cats and bigwigs; the Art Institute of Chicago, where they`ll get an private showing of the Monet exhibit; the Museum of Science and Industry, where they`ll feast on a range of ethnic dishes; and Navy Pier, where they`ll have dinner, then dance, then board an excursion boat to view the sparkling skyline at night and enjoy a dessert of Chicago`s own Dove Bars.
They`ll see the White Sox play the Oakland A`s on Sunday, sample a series of blues and jazz clubs that night and tour Lincoln Park Zoo on Monday. They`ll also travel to some of the city`s more diverse and, of course, presentable neighborhoods, and they`ll have one night on their own to try the city`s restaurants, which have been encouraged to offer complimentary wine and other tokens of respect. The mayor`s wife, Maggie, will host a breakfast at Tiffany`s for the spouses.
”Be sure you know every route the buses and cars will take,” Osterman told Fox and Lynch. ”We want to avoid street construction. Also we need to know which mayors are bringing their own security and who needs cars and who needs vans.”
To provide these lavish political perks, Osterman has solicited almost $1 million from local businesses to go with another $1 million from the coffers of the mayors conference. The sponsors include Marshall Field & Co., Waste Management Inc., Illinois Bell, JMB Realty, Sears, Roebuck and Co., and Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc.
”After five days, we want all these people to have a feel for Chicago,” she said. ”We want them to see that we`re a city of families and a city that reflects the entire world. We want them to see our diversity and to get a feel for our people and our culture. We want them to see the beauty and strength of Chicago. . . .”
Irrepressible booster
Osterman tends to go on and on about the wonders of the city. She is an irrepressible booster, which by itself wouldn`t suffice for a position that has grown increasingly sophisticated and challenging.
When Col. Jack Reilly was director of special events for Mayor Richard J. Daley, there was no Taste of Chicago and no 80 neighborhood festivals, as there are today.
He was instrumental in the first Venetian Nights, the procession of boats that made its debut in 1958, but the highlight of his stewardship was the St. Patrick`s Day parade on State Street.
The short-lived ChicagoFest made its appearance in 1978 during the administration of Michael Bilandic, who succeeded the elder Daley, and the Taste of Chicago came along in 1980 when Jane Byrne was mayor.
The special events directors under Bilandic, Byrne and Harold Washington expanded the activities of the office, which is financed with $3.7 million from the hotel and motel tax (about 55 percent of the total) and about $10 million from revenue from the five major festivals.
Osterman takes credit for computerizing the city`s schedule to prevent conflicts and for ensuring that all events are geared to families, especially the Taste of Chicago, the Supreme Biggie of city soirees, which last year attracted 3 million people.
She says that she agonized about leaving the City Council but that she`s happy with her decision. She doesn`t appear to lack the requisite abilities;
her record reflects a keen political savvy, an instinct for organization, a talent for leadership, a willingness to take on tough chores and the tenacity and vision to see them through.
Sticking up for the U.S.
She was born in 1943 in an Irish, Italian and Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx of New York City. Her father, Mark Lonergan, was head of group sales for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., and her mother, the former Mary McCarthy, stayed at home to rear their six children.
When Kathy was 10, the family moved to Montreal, where she resisted assimilation and slurs against her native country from classmates and teachers in the parochial schools she attended.
”Maybe you shouldn`t print this because I don`t want the people with the British consulate here to misunderstand, because I think the world of Great Britain, but I would never sing `God Save the Queen` because of all the anti- American things I heard,” Osterman said.
”One nun who didn`t like America would refer to the `cowardly Americans` when she taught the Revolutionary War, and I would always speak up. The nuns told me I was cheeky and opinionated.
”One little girl from Boston, who was a teacher`s pet, wouldn`t say anything. One day I told her: `You`re a disgrace. You`re going to lose your citizenship.` I even stomped her lunch box flat.”
22 years in one apartment
The next year, her parents were divorced, and her father was transferred to Chicago. Kathy and two other siblings settled with him in suburban Park Ridge. The day they arrived, Queen Elizabeth was visiting Chicago, and irony of ironies, Osterman said, ”everyone was singing `God Save the Queen,` the song I`d been tortured for not singing all those years in Canada.”
She attended Rich Township High School and Bloom Junior College, then found a job at a Chicago bank, moving to the North Side, which she hasn`t left.
She was married to Harry Osterman, an artist, in 1965. (They were divorced last year.) She is the mother of two sons, Harry Joe, 22, and Matthew, 18, and rents the same second-floor apartment in the Edgewater neighborhood where she has lived for 22 years.
She met Daley in the late `70s when she was social director of Lawrence House, an Uptown retirement building. She coordinated his first campaign for state`s attorney, then, among other things, helped his office establish support programs for victims and witnesses.
She has also served as president of the Edgewater Community Council and on the boards of the Uptown Chicago Commission and Friends of the Parks. A denizen of Ardmore Beach near Hollywood Avenue, she founded Operation Lakewatch in the early `80s after swimming was prohibited for many days because of pollution.
The organization enlisted the aid of boaters, fishers and residents who lived along Lake Michigan and who monitored pollution levels and reported polluters, leading to a marked reduction of beach closings and an improvement in waste disposal methods.
Two years ago, she was elected alderman in the 48th Ward, resigning last May. Now she oversees a staff of 58 and a $14 million budget, pushes her philosophy of family participation, worries over every detail, preaches logistical efficiency and, if necessary, belts out ”God Save the Queen” with gusto.
