How did the Sun-Times cover the Chicago suburbs? With a broad brush, is how. The Tribune had a suburban staff numbering in the twenties or thirties. Our suburban editor, my personable and capable boss Cecil Neth, had five of us, almost all ambitious youths in need of seasoning. Our territories were the north, northwest, west, and south-southwest suburbs and northwest Indiana. My beat was the northwest suburbs. I thought it the best because it included O’Hare Airport and also because my sector was growing the fastest. There was more going on there, it always seemed.
Headquarters was Mount Prospect, 20 miles from the Loop, in a suite on the second floor of a building leased by the newspaper’s circulation department. It was in the center of town, literally looking down on the busy Chicago & North Western Railway suburban station. Other sizable towns on my beat included Des Plaines, Arlington Heights, Barrington, Palatine, Elk Grove Village, Wheeling, and Schaumburg.
Mine was a wacky environment. The district circulation manager I’ll call Jack. He was middle-age, fairly big, wore a bushy mustache, and was always on the lookout for an angle. Here’s an example. Jack calls me into his office one afternoon. “Fred, I want to show you something. These are all my monthly bills. All ready to mail. What do you notice about them.” I reply that they could each use a stamp. “Exactly! Fred, you’re catching on. My return address is on each envelope. When the post office tries to collect the postage due, the envelopes will be returned to me. Then I’ll resend them, this time with a stamp. But for a couple of weeks I’ll have use of the money. You should try it, Fred.” I thought to myself that all this didn’t really add up, but congratulated Jack for his hustle—better to get along with him than to have him tell Cecil I’m a jerk.
Starting about 3 o’clock each afternoon, in an adjacent room—the one overlooking the railroad tracks—half a dozen women employed by the circulation department came to make cold calls. There was no way I could help but hear them. Here’s how their spiel went: “Good afternoon, I’m Mary Johnson, calling on behalf of Little Sisters of the Poor [I made up the name]. Our charity provides breakfasts for underprivileged children who would otherwise go to school hungry. Last year we helped 24,000 children in this manner. But we cannot do it by ourselves. The good news is that the Chicago Sun-Times is partnering with us. If you would agree to a three-month trial subscription to the Sun-Times for the modest sum of $25, the newspaper will make a generous contribution to Little Sisters of the Poor in your name. Can I count on your support?”
I was struck by several things. First of all, the women were a cheerful, friendly sort who chatted with each other between calls and took rejection with ease—you had to, or be driven mad by the job. They also doted on me, young enough in most instances to be their son. Second, did you notice that they never quite made clear who was paying them, the newspaper or the charity? Third, this pitch actually worked, according to Jack, or at least well enough that it went on the entire two years I worked out of Mount Prospect. Remember, this was the late Sixties, before robo-calls and do-not-call lists and all that. Telephone solicitors were not universally hated.
About 5:30 on slow afternoons, I’d visit the call center room and take a chair by the window. As I listened up close to six women make their pitch, I’d watch the parade of outbound suburban trains pass beneath me. Most stopped to disgorge scores of tired passengers eager to get home—so eager that engineers of these trains had to be careful not to run over them as their trains accelerated from the Mount Prospect stop. And some trains came by without stopping, on the middle of the three tracks, whistles blaring and making 60 mph. For a guy who loved trains, this was a welcome distraction.
Okay, I said the Sun-Times covered suburbia with a broad brush. What did that mean? Were I to do this again, I would have made appointments with the mayors, city managers, and police chiefs of each municipality and gone to introduce myself. I’d have asked them about the problems they faced and the successes they were celebrating. I’d have been receptive to their ideas of stories worth telling. At the very least, they’d have a face to associate with my name when I called them later.
But I didn’t do this because the newspaper wasn’t interested in the minutia of what was going on in all these places. I kept up with the minutia by reading the suburban daily newspapers. Rather, the Sun-Times was interested in the big stories—breaking news, it’s called today—and the good feature stories or “trend” pieces that applied to many or most of the suburbs ringing Chicago.
By way of example, here are stories I wrote during one week in July of 1966:
July 20: “2 Suburbs File Suit to Prevent High-Rise Apartment Construction” Pretty self explanatory, in that it applied to two municipalities.
July 21: “Mother in Tears” Richard Speck had murdered eight Filipino nurses a few days earlier. One woman survived by hiding under a bed. Her mother landed at O’Hare. This was a sensational crime story—Richard Speck would become a household name—and my job to follow the nurse’s mom as best I could all day. The story reads well, thanks to someone on rewrite who took my notes over the phone and crafted the story.
July 23: “Problem: Getting 50,000 Books To Viet GIs” Two suburban teenagers gathered 50,000 books to send to U.S. troops in Vietnam—quite a feat. But how to get them overseas? One of the girls was pictured sitting on a mountain of books. Less than a month later, I wrote in an update that a young member of Congress named Donald Rumsfeld arranged for the Army to fly the books to Vietnam.
July 25: “Suburb School District Head Retiring” This was a 600-word feature on a respected educator who guided the Arlington Heights schools through an explosive era of growth.
Then a red-letter day for me—my first Sun-Times story about railroads. A 2-year-old Des Plaines toddler had wandered off the unfenced property of his parents’ trailer park onto the Soo Line Railroad tracks. Along came a Soo Line freight, going too fast to stop in time. A brakeman on the locomotive ran onto the front steps of the engine and literally scooped the kid off the track before the wheels of the trains could crush him. I loved that story. It appeared on August 6.
I was getting used to the job, Cecil Neth gave me good feedback and all was well . . . except for an event I could not avoid, active duty in the Illinois National Guard. I was proud to serve, but it came at a professional price, which I’ll explain later.