Chicago: Not Just for Toddlin' Anymore

by Con Chapman

I have had ties to the City of Chicago since I arrived on the campus of the University of Chicago at the age of 17, four years as a student there and then ten as a partner at a Chicago-based firm with a Boston office. In the latter capacity I suffered from the Midwesterner's skepticism of people from the east even though I had lived in Chicago and was originally from Missouri. When asked to describe what it was like working in a branch office of the firm, I told people that the Chicago partners would put a missionary on a plane to Boston from time to time to make sure the natives still had their loincloths on. Thus was reversed the snobbery of the Easterner for those poor souls on the plains who are still harvesting wheat and butchering cows while the plutocrats of New York and the belle lettrists of Boston are having their first cocktails of the evening.

This preternatural suspicion may be a reaction to generations of high-toned condescension from the East, or something more fundamental; those who rise to the top in Chicago have generally done something, or descended from someone who did something in recent memory, while in Boston a person can still go far fueled merely by the accomplishments of a distant ancestor. There is the story recounted by Cleveland Amory in The Proper Bostonians of a Chicago bank that writes to a Boston firm for a recommendation of a young applicant. The Boston bank writes that the young man has sterling credentials, having descended from Cabots, Lowells, Saltonstalls and Peabodys, among other Brahmin families. The Chicago bank writes back to say that the information provided was not exactly what they were looking "We were not contemplating using Mr. _________ for breeding purposes."

As for my alma mater, A.J. Liebling described the place as "the biggest collection of juvenile neurotics since the Childrens' Crusade" in The Second City, which surely must be the only book-length put-down of a major metropolis in the History of Western Civilization.  I capitalize the latter phrase because it was a notorious required course that I managed to evade during my undergraduate career at the UofC.  As I result, I have no idea when the Children's Crusade occurred, although I will cop to being neurotic during my time there--once I had learned how from more experienced students. Writer Joseph Epstein recalls a quote from director Mike Nichols about his time at the place disparaged by undergraduates with the tongue-in-cheek motto "Where fun comes to die": "When I arrived at the University of Chicago," Nichols said, "everyone was strange, neurotic and weird--it was paradise."

I am a great admirer of the literature produced by working Chicago writers, that is, the sort who evolve from newspapermen into something grander but still don't aspire to see their scribbling in literary quarterlies. This group would include Ring Lardner, George Ade, James T. Farrell and Ben Hecht, among others.  I would include Hemingway in this group even though he wrote for the Kansas City Star because he was from the Chicago suburbs.

Chicago produces outsize persons--Oprah, Hugh Hefner, et alia--in a way that other Midwestern metropolises do not. Announcer Harry Caray, for example, didn't become a national figure until he moved from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Chicago Cubs, a move that reminds one of the Ambrose Bierce story about the woman who shot her husband because he was leaving her to move to Chicago. "Madam," Bierce's policeman tells her, "if the damned want to go to hell, shooting won't stop them."

111 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 14, 2011