Can a country-boy-turned-big-city-journalist reinvent himself one more time?”
The question was posed in 1999 by – and about – John Callaway in his farewell broadcast after 15 years on “Chicago Tonight,” a news discussion show he had made into acclaimed and – to a relatively small but devoted viewership – essential television.
Callaway’s answer to Callaway’s question will appear on the stage of the Pegasus Players Theater Friday evening through April 15 in “John Callaway Tonight,” a one-person, autobiographical love story in two acts.
The performances will represent just the latest level of self-reinvention for the ever morphing journalist. Not long after he bowed out of “Chicago Tonight,” Callaway received a phone call from Carol Marin asking him to do commentary on her 10 p.m., break-from-the-traditional-news-format newscast on WBBM-Ch. 2. When, nine months later, the innovative broadcast was ended – he says, “aborted” – he was again left open to possibilities. (He actually left the show shortly before the bitter end, sensing the station was about to pull the plug because of low ratings.) But he is “not retired,” he says emphatically, formidable trademark jowls aquiver. “Not!”
In his not retirement, the 65-year-old Callaway still is host and senior editor of “Chicago Stories,” the local documentary series that WTTW debuted last year. He has also harbored thoughts of doing some writing and a little travel, but always lurking in the back of his mind has been the performing itch.
“I wanted to do a show,” he says. “I would give speeches to various organizations and, in the question-and-answer sessions, they’d ask about how I got started and so forth, and I’d tell the stories about that. I soon figured out that the audiences were more interested in those stories than the political analysis I was doing. I got to thinking about a way I could bring that autobiographical stuff together in some sort of presentation, an evening of storytelling.”
Right around that time, Arlene Crewdson, the producing director at Pegasus, called with a project idea, and Callaway countered with the idea he had been kicking around about the stories of his life. She asked if he wanted a director.
“Well,” Callaway said, “probably, though nobody was directing when I would give a smasheroo speech at the Wards headquarters or wherever.”
So, keeping the project all-Callaway-all-the-time, he enlisted New York director and son-in-law Dan Foster (Callaway daughters Liz Callaway — Foster’s wife — and Ann Hampton Callaway have become noted cabaret singers and stars on Broadway). Foster listened to Callaway’s saga of dropping out of Ohio Wesleyan University at 19 and hitchhiking to Chicago with just 71 cents in his pocket, “a story I had milked,” Callaway says, “all over town.”
Foster had him tell it again and again, getting him to add details and gestures (“a little acting here and there,” Callaway allows, “not just breezily telling”) and dredging up the stories behind the stories. The 71 cents story begot the Dorothy and Cab story about Callaway’s parents, now a 14-minute narrative in the show.
The result of Foster’s efforts was a compendium of deeper, darker, more touching and revealing stories than the set pieces Callaway had polished at many a party and bar room late in the evening.
The entire Callaway career spans 45 years. He has gone from print to broadcast, local to national and, recently, from impersonal moderating on “Chicago Tonight” to personal commentary on the Marin show. It’s spiraling now to the inner Callaway of “John Callaway Tonight.” This Callaway will go into things he never has publicly discussed before, including his father’s alcoholism.
But he’s not going to omit the 71 cents story.
Neither are we.
Callaway and his older sister, Hampton, grew up in New Martinsville, W. Va., 100 miles southwest of Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, population then about 4,000. It wasn’t in the coal mining area most of us think of as West Virginia, but in the base of the state’s panhandle, “more Ohio or Pennsylvania, really,” Callaway says, “sissy West Virginia.”
It was a nice place to grow up. There was a beautiful municipal pool that his father, editor of the Wetzel Republican, one of the local weekly newspapers, had campaigned for when he tired of reporting the deaths of children swimming in the river. Charles E. Callaway, his son recalls, “had the courage to be a right-wing Republican in a city and state that was heavily Democrat. You could walk into a coal miner’s shack and see a picture of Jesus on one wall and FDR on another. My dad was to the right of Milton Friedman and Attila the Hun, and he and the Colonel (Col. Robert R. McCormick, who ran the Chicago Tribune from the early to middle 20th Century) would have loved each other. I saw his pay stub once, though, and determined that I would never to go into journalism.”
It was a place where young John could play football and basketball and discover he was good at sports (the second act of “John Callaway Tonight” opens with what he calls “a tutorial on the art of the no-step drop kick”). Thanks to his mother, Dorothy, the newspaper’s society editor and a pianist, it was a place of music, of Gershwin and Porter enlivening frequent parties at the Callaway house.
“She’s where my musical interest comes from,” Callaway says. “My father, despite getting a nickname from singer Cab Calloway, looked more like Bing Crosby, with the big ears. Also, he didn’t sing. I sing at the end of the show, `In the Wee Small Hours,’ done as a tribute to my daughters and `Embraceable You’ as a tribute to my parents, especially my mother. Singing works for me if I keep it to a couple of songs — get on, get the hell off.”
Callaway recalls his parents as “New Yorkers in New Martinsville. They read Fitzgerald and Hemingway; they listened to all the network radio shows out of New York, got the Sunday New York Times. My dad once bought a ticket to see the West Virginia team play basketball in midtown Manhattan. Mine was an idyllic childhood, although, because of alcoholism, it wasn’t idyllic. At the same time it was a wonderful family. Any time you get into these kinds of things, you risk venturing into Oprah-land, though I don’t think I do that.”
Callaway’s idyllic but not idyllic childhood would later make him comfortable dealing with something journalists often are not comfortable dealing with — complexity, issues and people not easily seen as all wrong or all right. Also, alcoholism forced him into a position in his family that he later would master professionally, the position of impartial moderator, mediator, referee.
“The dodge has always been that I’ve been the question asker,” Callaway says, “the guy with no opinions.”
On with the 71 cents story.
The parties ended when Charles Callaway became seriously ill. Hospital bills forced the family to give up their rented house and move to “a dump that was too small for a piano. The music died. My mother lived until 1969, but she never had another piano.”
The family’s reduced circumstances meant that Callaway had to work to afford college. His dishwasher job, however, couldn’t keep up with his bills, and he was $800 in debt at age 19, a year and a half into college. He went to the dean’s office to say he needed to drop out for a while to make some money, a traditional ploy, he says, for West Virginians.
“I told the dean I was going to Chicago to work in the steel mills. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe it was from reading Sandburg, or from having read the Studs Lonigan trilogy as a kid. I knew no one in Chicago — not a soul. The dean came up with $50 from the Bertha Enright fund for students who neither smoke nor drank, and that was my stake.”
Not really. His friends said that such a dramatic move, a move worthy of a novel or a movie or a stage play, would be something he would perhaps someday write about. Accordingly, the money he went on the road with should be a dramatic — a literary — amount. “A bunch of wise asses,” Callaway says. “They debated: Was it $31.27? What was it? They finally talked me into 71 cents. I spent the $50 on bowling and pizza and dry cleaning and other things right down to a couple of Tootsie Rolls to end up with 71 cents. Then I went out to the highway to hitchhike to Chicago.”
After hitching across Ohio and most of Indiana, then getting a train ticket for the South Shore line from a kindly minister who had given him a ride, Callaway arrived at the Randolph Street station. It was Feb. 6, 1956. He walked out to the street and fell deeply, forever, in love.
“I saw the theater marquees,” he remembers, “the throbbing city, a real city. You have to understand that prior to that I had spent a few weekends in Columbus and one weekend going to a ballgame in Pittsburgh with my father. When I stepped out of the station, I suddenly sensed that this was my city, that I was in the right place at the right time.”
He had checked his valise at the station for a nickel. It contained a few clothes, the New Testament and the book of the moment, sociologist David Riesman’s “Individualism Reconsidered.”
He straggled along Randolph to a nearby diner, Lucy’s, and spent 35 cents for a slice of pecan pie, an outrageous price by New Martinsville standards. He had 31 cents left. Another nickel bought a copy of the Chicago Tribune (for the help wanted ads). His pocket now contained 26 cents. He sat on a bench in the Greyhound bus station and read the ads.
Wearing a light jacket, he walked north to Passavant Hospital to inquire about a dishwashing job, got there just after the employment office closed, trudged, shivering, back to the Loop, fell asleep in a deep leather chair in a hotel lobby, was rousted out at 11 p.m. He walked to the Lorraine Hotel (now a parking lot) on Wabash and told the desk clerk the following lie: “My name is John Callaway. My father is a newspaper man in Philadelphia, and he was late coming in, and he told me to go ahead and get a room.”
And the clerk said, “Fine.”
Callaway was pleased to find the town so easy, not realizing that the Lorraine then was run by a group of citizens who, during Prohibition, had given the city a widespread, rat-a-tat-tat reputation. He later caught on and sneaked away, leaving his hotel bill unpaid and harboring a longstanding concern that the mob might be on his trail.
“I went to an employment counselor who told me the steel mill idea was impossible, but all the while we were talking, he kept looking at me and then back to a picture on his desk. He turned the picture around, and there was a pretty reasonable facsimile of me. It was his son who had been killed in World War II.He ended up giving me 10 bucks, which was like $100 today, getting vouchers to use at the YMCA hotel where rooms were $9 a week. He found me a job as a clerk at R. Cooper Jr., the General Electric appliance distributor here. I put together pieces of paper that looked alike. I never had a clue what I was doing. At night I went to acting and playwrighting classes. The teacher told me, `Callaway, you’re the worst actor I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. But you’re always talking about your parents and the newspaper business, and there’s a place here called the City News Bureau. I understand that reporters get to cover political dinners and get free food.'”
The conversation would change Callaway’s life, giving him a career. (He never did return to college but, by voracious reading and consuming curiosity, still managed to educate himself.) It also gave him another passion that dovetailed with his love of Chicago: love for journalism. That passion would develop over time. When the City News Bureau idea was mentioned, the phrase that echoed in his brain wasn’t “journalism,” it was “free food.”
That, somewhat truncated, is the 71 cents story, a story that is totally true though not the totality of Callaway’s story. It is the story that gave rise to the other tales of “John Callaway Tonight” and made his wise-ass college buddies prophetic. It turns out it was a story he would someday write, a story worthy of a stage play.
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John Callaway runs Friday through April 15 at Pegasus Players, 1145 W. Wilson Ave., Chicago. For information, call 773-878-9761.
