During those five years at 401 North Wabash, I easily wrote a thousand stories. If you count the shorts and obituaries and rewrites, the number is easily twice that much. The vast majority were as fleeting as yesterday’s sunrise. A precious few stick with me decades later. I’ll mention three.
The union organizer. For the paper’s Sunday magazine of June 15, 1969, I profiled a union’s effort to win bargaining rights for employees of a hospital in suburban Oak Park. The organizer was Harry Kurshenbaum, who agreed to let me be his shadow during a months-long campaign to win over the hospital’s workers. It was an ambitious effort by me at what is today called “long form journalism” and what I think of as simply good magazine writing. Happily, it worked, although not for Harry Kurshenbaum. The story begins:
Late one March afternoon some 35 men and women, most of them black, filed into a sunlit room at the Oak Park YMCA and, looking a bit nervous, sat in chairs.
They had just gotten off the day shift at Oak Park Hospital, and they formed the nucleus from which the Hospital Employes Labor Program hoped to unionize the Roman Catholic hospital’s 300 nonprofessional workers.
Harry Kurshenbaum waited while several at the table in the front of the room reported on the union’s just-completed strike at Walther Memorial Hospital and the subsequent representation election which HELP had handily won. Then he got up to speak.
Kurshenbaum is a union organizer. A good one, too. He and Robert Simpson, a street-wise teamster, has masterminded the organizing campaigns in a dozen Chicago area hospitals up to that time, and their “won” record in employe elections was good—10 out of 12. Success like this, when the national average of unions in organizing elections is just over 50 per cent, has made HELP probably the strongest labor union venture in Chicago today.
When Kurshenbaum speaks, people listen. A short, stocky, well-dressed man, he commands attention by voice rather than appearance. The voice is loud. It bounces off walls and bombards listener’s ears. The voice is indignant, it is excited, it is often sarcastic, sometimes sneering but never tired, never bored.
The culprits of whom Kurshenbaum spoke that afternoon were Sister Jennine, the hospital’s administrator, and two “high-priced LaSalle St. lawyers” hired to “thwart the efforts of the workers to be represented and get a living wage.” The nun who ran the hospital and those immediately below her in the hierarchy were authority figures in the minds of these employes and Kurshenbaum’s intent was to destroy that image.
I quoted from Harry’s talk at great length because his words were his strongest weapon. Then the story looped back to his background in unions, starting with a 48-hour sit-down strike at a radio-assembly company that he spontaneously started and successfully led. I recounted the long, frustrating effort to get Oak Park Hospital to agree to an employee vote (non-for-profit workers were not well protected by the National Labor Relations Act). Then the vote itself, a surprising and humiliating defeat for the union. Sister Jennine had gotten the better of Harry Kurshenbaum.
A chat with Cyrus Eaton. So read the headline above a profile of an 85-year-old Cleveland industrialist, one of the richest men in the U.S., who unabashedly mixed a love of capitalism with an affinity for the Soviet Union. Eaton was staying at the Sheraton Blackstone Hotel, and his publicist invited the Sun-Times to send someone to interview him. I must have not looked busy enough, because Jim Peneff called me to the city desk and said it was my lucky day. Off I went, quite uninformed about Eaton or his background.
For all of that, the story that made page 10 on November 17, 1968, reads as if it were written by a seasoned pro and not a 24-year-old kid who was in over his head. Eaton traced his fascination with Russia to 1901, when he was a secretary to John David Rockefeller. The oil baron was visited by the president of the University of Chicago, who had just come back from Russia and spoke glowingly of its potential. Young Cyrus Eaton listened and was mesmerized. Decades later, Eaton got to know Nikita Khrushchev and his successors as Soviet prime minister, Alexi Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev. He took upon himself the mission of being a healing force between the two leading participants in the Cold War.
Richard Nixon had just been elected president, and Eaton saw the possibility of friendlier relations. “My attitude is this: I do not believe that any American is likely to become a Communist. We are satisfied with our capitalistic system and our democracy. Therefore, I feel I can point out favorable things about the Soviet Union without being accused of trying to sell communism to anyone or of becoming one myself.”
I threw everything I could think of at him. For instance, the Soviets had just invaded Czechoslovakia for showing unwelcome signs of independence from Moscow. Shot back Eaton: “The Russians use many arguments to justify the invasion and they are the same ones we use to defend our backing of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the war in Vietnam.”
So were the Soviets right to enter Czechoslovakia, I asked, again hoping to trip him up. “They well know my conviction that force is not the sound way of changing people’s minds,” Eaton replied.
I spent an interesting hour with a man more than three times my age, then went back to the newspaper to learn more about the fellow. The story that appeared a couple of days later remains a favorite of mine.
Death at 100 mph. The morning of Friday, January 17, 1969, began cold and overcast. Over the radio came news of a head-on collision just after midnight between two Illinois Central trains 50 miles south of Chicago—one a passenger train, The Campus, doing 100 mph. Three crew members died, including both locomotive engineers. I called the city desk from our apartment and got permission to go to the accident site, in hopes of figuring out what really happened.
The scene was the community of Indian Oaks, population 25. The railroad had two main tracks from there to Chicago over which trains ran in either direction, directed by signals controlled by the train dispatcher in Champaign. South of Indian Oaks was a third main track, also dispatcher-controlled.
I talked to police, then went in search of Illinois Central’s Chicago Division superintendent, who I found in the cook car of the derrick train picking up the wreckage. I told him what I suspected had happened, and he concurred, adding some other details. I found a pay phone and decided to compose the story on the spot rather than just dump my notes on a rewrite reporter; there were too many technical details. This is the explanation I dictated:
The dispatcher early Friday had routed an 81-car, northbound freight train on the track that ended at Indian Oaks. At this point, the block signal was switched from green (proceed) to red (stop) to halt the freight, because the southbound Campus train first had to pass on the remaining main track.
Three miles before the freight train reached Indiana Oaks, it passed an advance signal that showed yellow. This meant that the freight was to reduce speed to 30 mph or less—whatever necessary to enable it to stop at the next signal at the Indiana Oaks track junction.
But engineer R. W. Dinkleman was hampered by fog, which cut visibility to 75 to 100 feet. Division Supt. F. K. Stanford said he believes Dinkleman, because of the dense fog, misjudged where the Indian Oaks signal would be.
And when Dinkleman did see the signal pop into view at a distance of only a few feet—the signal that showed bright red—his train was still traveling too fast to come to a quick stop, Stanford believes.
As a result, the freight train stopped in the middle of the switch joining Tracks 2 and 3.
Two factors that could have prevented the accident even then did not happen. When the freight fouled Track 2, the block signals for the southbound passenger train automatically turned from green to red. Apparently, though, the Campus had already passed its last precautionary block signal before the accident scene, and the fog prevented the engineer from seeing the red light facing him at Indian Oaks until just before his speeding train hit the freight.
Months later, the Interstate Commerce Commission confirmed every fact in that narrative in its exhaustive report of the accident. I wonder whether any other reporter in Chicago could have deduced what happened or explained it as accurately. In any event, no other reporter bothered to show up.