“Hey, we don’t have any coverage of City Hall. Is it okay if I set up a news beat?”
“Sure, kid, go ahead, “my editor replied.
I was a journalism student working part-time and summers at the Austinite, a weekly newspaper serving the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. That the paper’s three-person news staff did not cover City Hall was not unusual: Neighborhood and suburban papers in the 1960s had an intensely local focus. It was said that if the Russkies nuked the Loop we would not run a story unless the fallout spread west of Cicero Avenue.
But there still was news to be reported at City Hall, so I began stopping there when I took the El from my classes at Northwestern to the newspaper office at Central and Lake. I introduced myself to the aldermen who represented Austin, Paul T. Corcoran of the 37th Ward and Daniel J. Ronan of the 30th (who later served in Congress), and dropped by their offices once a week. There wasn’t a lot going on beyond the occasional street project or sewer repair. The neighborhood was in decline but had not yet become the high-crime ghetto that emerged a few years later.
And there I was, at age 19, a reporter covering City Hall! I stopped by the press room, mostly to gawk at the byline stars of the downtown dailies who had permanent desks there. Eventually I learned to navigate some of the city government offices, interview bureaucrats and pore through public records in search of story angles.
Once I attended Mayor Richard J. Daley’s regular news conference. I had no questions to ask, but there was a chance he might announce something relevant to my readers. The news-conference room had a long table at the front, several rows of chairs and space for TV cameras at the back. When the mayor entered the room he was suddenly bathed in a golden aura: It took me a moment to realize that the room had built-in floodlights for the TV cameras. The mayor spoke from behind the table and answered questions as radio reporters held up their microphones. When he decided the news conference was over he began ambling toward the exit. Reporters continued to fire questions and followed him with their microphones, dragging their tape recorders the length of the table as the mayor departed: like an unvanquished whale swimming away festooned with harpoons.
In 1962, the biggest city project in Austin was moving the Lake Street El trains from street level to the adjacent railroad embankment. A month or so after the move the unused gatekeepers’ shacks along the old tracks had not yet been removed, and some of our readers expressed concern that bad people could hide in them and prey on small children. When I could not get an answer from the transit authority about demolition plans I called Ald. Corcoran. “The shacks will be gone by next week,” he pronounced. And they were.
Ald. Corcoran passed away in 1964 and his funeral was a news event. Mayor Daley attended, and I waited in the gaggle of news photographers to get a photo as he emerged from the funeral home. When the mayor walked toward his car we raised our cameras. The mayor spotted the cameras and — instinctively and probably unconsciously — flashed a politician’s smile. We lowered our cameras and the mayor changed his expression. We raised our cameras and again the mayor smiled. Finally one of his aides said: “How about a somber shot for the papers, Mr. Mayor.”
The street where the El tracks used to be was renamed Corcoran Place.