I was born and grew up in Chicago Heights. I attended Roosevelt Elementary School, then Washington Junior High School for 7th and 8th grades and Bloom Township High School.
My parents were never involved in politics, but they were very interested in world politics, as so many people were during World War II. They were Democrats, and they subscribed to the old Chicago Sun and the Chicago Heights Star. I heard world affairs discussed often at the dinner table, but it wasn’t until I was a student at the University of Chicago that I began to pay attention to the political scene.
My dad was a dentist, practicing in Chicago Heights for 50 years. Those years included the depths of the Depression, when people didn’t have money to pay a dentist, so much of what he did was on a barter basis. I remember that we got fresh milk right from the cooling shed at the Niedtfeldt family farm. In return, my father took care of their dental needs.
I tell my kids about it because now that you sometimes schedule an appointment with a dentist three months in advance, they find it hard to believe there was a time when dentists, like everyone else, were struggling to make a living, even returning to the office five nights a week.
A lot of pain and misery was avoided when I decided not to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a dentist. As a kid, and to this day, I am an extremely awkward lefthander. Skinny and badly coordinated and wearing glasses in junior and senior high school, I ended up writing sports rather than playing sports.
The only area where I wasn’t at risk to myself and a total embarrassment was track. I was a slow low-hurdler and a low high-jumper. My favorite sport, though, was baseball, and I was a big Cubs fan.
One of the things that sticks out vividly in my mind is the Sunday excursions I made with my pals to Wrigley Field when I was a preteenager. It was a big deal. We took a bus to the Illinois Central station at 211th Street four miles west of Chicago Heights in Matteson, got off the IC train at Randolph Street and walked over to the “L” on Wabash, which then took us to Wrigley Field.
The Cubs played a lot of double-headers in those days. We would watch both games and hang around afterward waiting for autographs, which we rarely got. This was the team that had Phil Cavarretta, Stan Hack, Bill Jurges, Billy Herman and Frank Demaree. It was during the late ’30s. The one autograph I really wanted was Phil Cavarretta’s. One day I was holding out my score card, and he spit on it. I kept that card with the tobacco stain!
The big treat on the way back home at the end of the day was a stop at Wimpy’s after getting off the “L” on Wabash. Hamburgers were 12 cents, and so were milkshakes. We always tried to save a quarter after the hot dogs and stuff at the park so we could get a hamburger and a shake later. That fortified us for the rest of the trip home.
It was truly an all-day excursion. We’d leave home about 9:30 or 10 o’clock in the morning so we could get there in time to see batting practice. It was 8 or 9 at night by the time we got home. Of course, we could do it only rarely because it took a while to save up our allowances and earnings from running errands and doing chores.
Much later, during the Korean War, when I was in the Army, about to be shipped overseas from Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, I went to a Cubs game in Springfield and saw that Stan Hack was managing the team. I spoke to him and told him he had been my idol as a kid. He was very nice.
I got a little more serious about writing when I got to the University of Chicago. I wound up as editor of the Maroon. (If you work there for more than three months, you were likely to be made editor-in-chief because the turnover was so great.) There was no journalism training; you got no credit and no pay, though I did meet my wife Ann at the Maroon.
In the years following World War II, that campus was a very lively place. The veterans had come back, and a lot of them became political activists. It was also the time that Paul Douglas was a member of the faculty and getting ready to resume his political career. There were huge demonstrations on campus when President Truman fired Gen. MacArthur.
Whatever was happening in the world was reflected and picked up very quickly on that campus. It was then, and still is, a terrific melting pot of ideas. I was in a picket line at Billings Hospital when they allegedly were discriminating against what we then called “Negro” patients.
After graduation, I worked as editor of the Hyde Park Herald while working toward a master’s degree in political science. During that time, we lived at several places, including Blackstone and 55th, 6228 Ellis and 46th and Cottage Grove.
After my discharge from the Army, my wife and I were both hired by the Bloomington Pantagraph. We moved there and started our family. Our oldest son was born in a hospital in Normal, and he now tells his three younger brothers that he is the only “normal” one in the family.
After a time with the Congressional Quarterly in Washington, I joined the Washington Star in 1960 as a political reporter. In 1965 I joined the New York Times, working out of its Washington bureau. But I was there for only 15 months, resigning 5 minutes before I would have been fired as a small pawn in a large power struggle between the paper’s New York and Washington bureaus.
I then came to the Washington Post, where I spend 90 percent of my time as a reporter. My column is really just the tail of the dog.
I come back to Chicago on every possible excuse. In 1951 I was eager to leave Chicago, but it’s much different now, going there on expense account, from when I was there as a student with meager funds.
The Chicago things I enjoy are the Cubs, the Art Institute and, the biggest prize of all, the Chicago Symphony. I grew up attending its children’s concerts. My mother would haul me into town back when Frederick Stock was the conductor. Orchestra Hall is permanently embedded in my head as the place and the way to hear music. I can still feel, as well as hear, what it was like when they played the “William Tell” overture” for us kids. The Chicago Symphony comes to Kennedy Center about once a year, and it’s still as good as I remember it.
