Chicagoans are inordinately proud of their city's political squabbles: it is comic theatre of the highest (and lowest) order, despite its very real ramifications for the city's residents. .
Most Chicagoans like to claim some relative as an insider in city politics, much as in Hollywood you might be related to MGM's casting agent or Johnny Carson's secretary. For instance, my uncle was one of Mayor Daley's, henceforth referred to as Hizzonner, 's right hand men in the days of the old machine. Really. He was a circuit court judge whose crowning moment was his decision to rule no-fault auto insurance unconstitutonal in the State of Illinois, thereby receiving the endless gratitude of multitudes of insurance-claim lawyers, which I have no doubt often took the form of thin envelopes left on his desk.
Chicago's political history includes thousands of anecdotes, which unfortunatley have never been systematically collected by any oral historian that I know of. Here is a promising dissertation subject indeed for anyone interested in political folklore. Many of them are real historical footnotes, others are apocryphal stories which could have happened, or never happened, anywhere. An example of the latter is the story of the saloon keeper, no friend of the local law, who was sitting in his establishment one day when an off-duty policeman came aroundwith a collection tin and asked him for two dollars. When asked what it was for, the fellow said, "We're burying a policeman." The innkeeper immediately handed him a ten dollar bill, saying "Here, bury five of them." .
A real anecdote is the story of the Crouch brothers, Ira and . They were among the first hotel keepers in the city. If you go to the Lincoln Park Zoo, around the north end you can see a granite tomb surrounded by a tall iron fence. It is the brothers' grave. They were buried there when that section of Lincoln Park was the major graveyard for the city, back in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
