On Friday, August 9, 1968, Jim Peneff, the day assistant city editor, called me in from Mount Prospect for a chat. I had an idea of his agenda. I’d been covering the northwest suburbs for more than two years and done a pretty good job. I faulted myself (although not to others) for not being more aggressive in meeting people and sniffing out good stories. But I was as dependable as a railroad watch. I hoped Peneff would suggest a new assignment, one that would bring me downtown to the city room.
First, I need to digress: Everybody loved Jim Peneff. He was then 56 years old and proving to be a leader reporters wanted to please. Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, his parents brought him to the U.S. at age 11 months. Bob Greene once wrote of him: “In a world of soaring and clashing egos, Peneff is a man of humility; those of us who worked for him never saw him try to make himself look good on the strength of his reporters’ work.” When he talked to you, Jim would lean forward, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up and his tie askew to reveal salt-and-pepper chest hair. He wouldn’t look you in the eye, but instead come close to talk to your ear rather than your face. You felt you were getting the confidential skinny on whatever the topic of conversation was.
What Peneff said to me that Friday was simply this: “Fred, how would you like to be our labor writer? It’s a tough assignment but I think you’re ready for it.” What you need to understand is that to Jim Peneff, the labor beat was the best job on the newspaper. After banging around during the Great Depression—he attended but I do not think graduated from a small Illinois college—Jim landed a job on the pre-merger Chicago Times in 1944 and soon was covering labor. He stayed on that beat for 15 years. His experiences on that beat defined the man. So what he was offering me was what he would call the crown jewel.
And how did I react? “I’m not so sure, Jim. I don’t know much about unions and don’t really care, either.” But he persisted. “Good, then you’ll play things right down the middle.” What happened to the guy who got this beat six months ago, I asked? He was too weak, Jim replied, adding that poor Paul would henceforth cover real estate from a desk far back in the city room.
I am forever grateful that Peneff didn’t lose patience with me. “Look,” he finally said, “the United Steelworkers are having their convention here in nine days. Let’s do this. You come downtown next week and work up a story for that Sunday’s paper about the issues that will be on the table. Then cover the convention for us and see me in a week. If you’re still not interested, I’ll find something else for you to do.” What’s there to lose, I thought? I said yes.
I’ll stop again and retell an old Chicago story. Managing Editor Henry Justin Smith of the Chicago Daily News hired Carl Sandburg as a reporter in 1914, impressed as he was by the young man’s plain-spoken poetry (“. . . hog butcher of the world” and all that). But Smith didn’t know what to do with Sandburg, who didn’t display much initiative. So he sent him to cover the convention of the American Federation of Labor in Minneapolis. For three days, not a word from his correspondent, so Smith used Associated Press reports. On day four, violence and gunfire erupted at the tumultuous labor meeting, and still nothing from Sandburg. Defeated, Smith wired him to come home. Wired back Sandburg: “Dear Boss: Can’t leave now. Everything too important and exciting. Sandburg.”
So this was my Sandburg moment, to put up or shut up. The next Monday I made some phone calls and put my hook in the mouth of a whale, so to speak. One fourth of the Steelworkers’ 1.2 million members were blacks. But not one black sat on the union’s 32-member executive committee. Only one of its 14 department heads was black (and he ran the civil rights department). The leader of a protest group named the National Ad Hoc Committee told me his group of delegates, backed by non-delegate supporters of the cause to put blacks on the executive committee, would picket the convention on its second day.
This was a juicy story. Unions like the United Steelworkers called themselves champions of social justice, and here, at least at first glance, they weren’t walking the walk. And matters were made more complicated by the fact that all of the executive committee members were elected, three as national officers and the other 29 as district directors. This meant the union’s president, I. W. Abel, could not simply appoint a handful of blacks to an enlarged board.
To make a long story short, I hauled in that whale of a story. The other three Chicago newspapers (and their experienced labor writers) had not a clue this was going to happen. And the story I broke dominated the convention. By a 2-to-1 voice vote, delegates decided against creating a 33d seat on the executive committee to represent black members. Many delegates voting no were themselves black. Shouted Jimmy Jones of Pittsburgh during the debate: “I say to my black brothers: Get yourselves elected in your district. Then you can stand up like a man—not as somebody appointed by president Abel.”
In the end, the National Ad Hoc Committee sat down in private with Abel for a heart to heart. As did Jimmy Jones, he encouraged them to seek office in the next winter’s district director elections. And soon enough, black Steelworkers showed up on the executive committee.
And I was there when Jim Peneff got to work that Thursday morning, to inform him I absolutely, positively wanted to be the labor writer. Jim grinned and shook my hand. I was launched on a great adventure, one that would long outlast my tenure at the Sun-Times.