Hamburg Heaven

Monday, Apr. 19, 1971 By KEITH WHEELER
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BOSS: RICHARD J. DALEY OF CHICAGO by Mike Royko. 215 pages. Dutton. $5.95.

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Burn the jacket, tear off the covers, excommunicate the author, and erase every proper noun, a book about Chicago remains, beyond any mistaking, a book about Chicago. The essential juices of the place somehow force any author to write with a special accent about the only city on earth where the likes ol Big Bill Thompson and Al Capone could coexist as civic leaders. In Chicago, there is indeed a certain interchangeability between politics and other lines of work. "The Hawk," Mike Royko writes, "was the outside lookout man at a bookie joint. Then his eyes got weak, and he had to wear thick glasses, so he entered politics . . ."

Royko is a newspaperman, a columnist and commentator for the Chicago Daily News. Though his book is essentially a hatchet job, released more or less to coincide with the campaign for last week's mayoralty election in Chicago, Royko sees Mayor Richard Daley as an inevitable product of the Chicago environment. The mayor was born into a workingman's family in Bridgeport, an Irish neighborhood in that South Side region known, without comment, as Back of the Yards. He was born to membership in the Hamburgs, an athletic club whose members took their exercise by beating the bejesus out of any blacks and Slavs foolish enough to stray onto the wrong side of the street. As young Hamburgs grew older, fatter and more sophisticated, the bonds of brotherhood held and forged a collective political power. The proto-mayor eventually used it to propel him into office.

The only really atypical aspect of Daley's youth was the size of his family: he was a greatly cherished only child. In a milieu where family solidarity was a virtue (and a power source) prized even above gang loyalty, Daley thus suffered a certain limitation—until he married into the numerous clan of Eleanor Guilfoyle. As an officeholder, he consolidated his family position by exploiting the rich grab bag of political patronage on behalf of the Guilfoyles. As Royko observes, "Eleanor's parents might well have said that they did not lose a daughter, they gained an employment agency."

All along, Royko insists, Daley never abandoned the original set of convictions he grew up with, though as his power increased, it became prudent to appear at least polite to other values. It did not astonish Royko when the mayor stayed inside his modest Bridgeport bungalow—he still lives there in his eminence—and not even the curtains twitched during the few nights in 1964 it took his neighbors to give the heave-ho to two Negro students who moved in a block and a half down the street.

Consequently, Royko confesses puzzlement that Daley's most consistently loyal constituency is in the black ghetto wards. Their loyalty, though, may be due to the diligence of Democratic precinct workers, who remind the voters that the continued receipt of welfare checks is somehow inextricable from the franchise. Then, being thorough in their work, says Royko, they accompany the voter into the polling booth to make sure he does not forget.