`There’s a bug on your shoulder!” “Your zipper’s undone!” “It’s snowing outside!” These announcements each year are followed by a mad scramble on the victim’s part and then the shout, “April Fool!”
Yes, April Fool’s Day is coming up next Thursday, a favorite of youngsters and grownup pranksters alike. This lighthearted holiday is celebrated in many places, including Chicago. But in Chicago, we don’t confine our foolishness and inanities to the first of April.
Throughout the year, we have odd celebrations, anniversaries and persons who get their 15 seconds of fame for unusual behavior. Furthermore, we’ve had our share of generally harmless folks who have marched not only to a different drummer, but to a completely different band.
So let’s visit the sites of some notable foolishness. But there’s one spot where we won’t stop. City Hall over the years has produced enough April (not to mention January, March, August and December) fools to fill up dozens of these stories.
But let’s start our magic mystery tour nearby. . . .
HOW A-MOOSE-ING! Cook County Building, 118 N. Clark St. If you caught a newscast between New Year’s football games, no doubt you’re familiar with Jim “Moose” Murphy, the subject of annual news stories. While some people start the year in frivolous pursuits such as swimming in Lake Michigan, “Moose” has a mission. Armed with a lawnchair, television and food, he would park himself inside the County Building waiting to secure the first county picnic permit of the year for his Moose lodge.
CLOWNING AROUND: Former site of Comiskey Park, 35th and Shields. Colorful characters hung out at the old Sox park, and we’re not just referring to ballplayer-turned-boxer Art “the Great” Shires or hustling outfielder Minnie Minoso. Nor do we mean Ribbie and Roobarb, 1980s mascots who were comparative duds. No, two of the more notable Comiskey regulars were fans not paid by Sox management. Andy the Clown daily wandered through the stands, lighting up his red nose and exchanging jokes (sometimes insults) with his fellow fans. Equally bewildering was the Drummer Boy, a balding, middle-aged man who walked up and down the aisles playing his snare drum and never saying a word.
NO BULL: Chicago Stadium, 1800 W. Madison. Bennie the Bull has delighted Chicago fans for years, and has even drawn a technical foul or two. In the 1970s, his popularity was nearly equaled by that of Superfan, a rotund Bulls rooter. Superfan jumped, did somersaults and even ran a lap or two around the court during time outs.
RONNIE WHO? Wrigley Field, Addison and Sheffield. Perhaps the most legendary of Chicago fans was Ronnie Wicks, better known as “Ronnie Woo.” Nobody who ever saw him in action needed to ask how he got his name. Without warning, Ronnie would start up a chant of “Cubs WOO! Cubs WOO! Cubs WOO!” that might last five minutes or more.
SAFE AT FIRST? Lexington Hotel, Michigan and Cermak. The whole nation heard about it in 1986, and many of them watched. Geraldo Rivera, for the first time, would show what was hidden inside one of Al Capone’s vaults. Was there money? Bodies? Guns? Nope, just a couple of empty beer bottles.
OH, BROTHER! 5200 block of South Keating. For years, if you turned on the news July 14, you were assured of another annual story. Southwest Side resident John Matar received another gag gift from his brother, Sam. Gifts to John included hundreds of dented golf balls, an elephant, and a boulder. John got back at Sam after the boulder was delivered. Sam went home to find a ton of gravel poured on his front lawn, accompanied by the note, “The boulder had babies!”
THE SPIDER DOESN’T FLY: John Hancock Center, 875 N. Michigan. One 1980s Chicago legend was “Spider Dan” Goodwin, a freelance adventurer who delighted in scaling super-tall buildings while dressed in a Spiderman costume. He conquered Sears Tower, much to the consternation of city authorities, and laid low for a while. Then he started ascending Chicago’s other high-rise landmark, the John Hancock Center.
Spider Dan, however, is not the April Fool we’re commemorating here. That honor goes to William Blair, Chicago’s fire chief at the time. Blair had the bright idea of telling firefighters to try to stop the climber by using torrents of water from fire hoses, an act that might have sent him tumbling to his death. The story had a happy ending. Spider Dan reached the top of the Hancock, paid a token fine and promised thereafter to ascend Chicago skyscrapers by either stairs or elevator. Blair, the fire chief, was soon relieved of his post.
ONE-MAN PARADE: Michigan Avenue, Wacker Drive to Van Buren. Chicago has its share of annual parades, honoring nationalities, lifestyles, military, etc. But arguably none has been more unusual than the Cinco de Mayo Parade led by “Chef” Ramon Cervantes, a local activist. Cervantes-dressed in a huge sombrero adorned with campaign buttons and a sandwich board covered with stories about himself, and waving a large Mexican flag-was the parade’s leader, follower and everyone in between. Despite his annual boast of involving hundreds of people in a parade honoring the Mexican holiday, Cervantes almost always marched alone.
DYING TO RUN: Oz Park, Webster and Halsted. The Chicago Marathon isn’t the city’s only annual race. Every year, waiters and waitresses in downtown French restaurants compete in a Bastille Day race to see how fast they can go and how little wine they can spill. But for the purely unusual, those wait staffers never matched April races sponsored in the 1970s by the late Oxford Pub. Oxford athletes tore through Oz Park in four-man casket races (dead bodies optional).
T IS NOT FOR TREE: Lake Forest. “I think that I shall never see/a poem lovely as a tree.” Bouncer-turned-actor Lawrence Tero (“Mr. T”) obviously never shared poet Joyce Kilmer’s sentiments. Mr. T bought a home in suburban Lake Forest, then took his trusty chainsaw and cut down all the trees on the property. His irritated Lake Forest neighbors showed righteous indignation, but that’s about all they could do. Mr. T was perfectly within his rights.
BUGHOUSE SQUARE: Washington Square Park, Clark and Superior. In the old days, one needn’t travel far from downtown to encounter “pinkos,” “weirdos” and other eccentrics. You merely had to go to Washington Square Park, universally known as “Bughouse Square.” Locals still occasionally engage in bizarre discourses here, but their audience is more likely squirrels, birds and spirits.
FLIGHTY LOVEBIRDS: Auditorium Theater, Wabash and Congress. An alley near this theater provided one of the stranger stories of 1988. Police found a car with the engine running in the alley behind the theater. There was no sign of the owner, Wheaton College student Scott Swanson, or his girlfriend, Carolyn MacLean. A nationwide manhunt produced no clues.
Eventually, the twosome emerged. They had found love, they said, and wanted to escape the rest of the world. The rest of the world, however, was not universally sympathetic, including the Army, to whom Swanson owed an ROTC obligation.
RITES OF SPRING: WGN studios, 435 N. Michigan. So you can’t make it to Punxsutawney, Pa., for Punxsutawney Phil’s annual Groundhog Day spectacle. You can see the next best thing in Chicago. WGN radio sports anchor Chuck Swirsky, clad in a groundhog costume, walks out to Pioneer Court to look for his shadow. He usually sees it, and Chicago is stuck with six more weeks of winter.
The radio station also has a more frequent unusual visitor. A lady named Lennie, the “Friday flasher,” opens her coat in front of the station on the sidewalk. No, she doesn’t really “flash.”
AIRED TODAY: WXRT studios, 4949 W. Belmont. Several Chicago radio stations do something different on April Fool’s Day, but only eclectic rock station WXRT has turned the day into an art form. One year, the station described the opening of an all-Chicago restaurant by “the regular guy,” the station’s film critic (the “Cermak Road Room” featured Chinese-Czech food; the “Milwaukee Avenue Room” reportedly offered Polish-Puerto Rican cuisine). Last year, the station announced its plans to become a “pay radio” station at 8 p.m., a spoof done so convincingly that it drew a picketer.
WHAT’S MY LION? Brookfield. It’s stale, sophomoric, and telephone receptionists at the Brookfield Zoo hate it, but dozens of people every year call friends and leave telephone messages that Mr. Lyons or Ms. Bear called, then give the zoo’s telephone number.
ONE MAN’S TREASURE: Glencoe. Themis Klotz thought she was making an artistic political statement with her front yard “peace garden” entitled “The Monument to Humanity No One Will Be Left to Build after George Bush Has His Winnable Limited Nuclear War with 20 Million Americans Acceptable Loss.” Neighbors and Glencoe city fathers disagreed. In late 1991, they ordered her to divest her yard of the rusted kitchen cabinets, weeds, broken lawn chairs, hubcaps, piles of tin cans, water heater, electrical cable, sand and 1986 station wagon she used to illustrate her point.
Have a nice day.
