Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  Then one Thursday our wonderful city editor, Ritz Fisher, called me up to his desk and said, "Gee Gee, we've got a good one." One of the reporters who covered the Mafia had arranged for a "waitress" by the name of "Irene Hill" to cover a big Mafia wedding that Saturday. I was Irene Hill.

  I spent hours in our morgue studying the mug shots of the leading Mafia figures, and I dutifully bought my waitress uniform in the cheapest place I could find. What perhaps was most strange was how very easy it was. Late that Saturday afternoon, dressed in my "costume," I simply went out to the Tarn o'Shanter Country Club. On the road outside, as usual, FBI men, reporters, and others waited to catch glimpses of the hoods rushing in, in their big black limousines. I walked by and in, in my uniform.

  To my chagrin, however, I was initially placed in an upstairs room where I would not be able to see the participants at all. So as soon as I could, I slipped out and began serving drinks on the patio where everyone was arriving. I quickly spotted Tony Accardo; his right-hand man, Jackie Cerron; Murray "The Camel" Humphreys. I made sure to serve them drinks, noting down every little comment and gesture in my mind.

  Then once again I was relegated to Siberia. After serving my designated table in a corner of the enormous room filled with some two thousand, I realized that since cocktails I hadn't seen any of the "biggies." So I began to wander around with my champagne and finally, to my delight, found the entire bunch, all men and about thirty of them, seated together in a dark side room. I had started pouring the champagne when, to my horror, a swarthy gnome of a man jumped up and pointed his finger precisely at me.

  "Don't give us none o' dat," he virtually shrieked.

  I froze in place, then fled back to the kitchen.

  "You're pretty dumb," said the bartender. "That's the eleven- dollar-a-bottle champagne. That room gets the twenty-five-dollar-a- bottle stuff."

  At 2:00 a.m., weary but happy, I walked out to the road where the FBI and the other reporters still were waiting. A guard motioned us over. "Now, girls," he said, "be sure not to talk to those reporters." I assured him I would certainly do no such thing.

  The next Monday my front-page story appeared, with a picture of me primly attired in my waitress uniform. It began, "The mob went to a party and I went along for the ride."

  But those stories were unusual. More and more, pursuing my early passions, I covered race relations. In those days a white woman could still drive around most black sections of Chicago, even to night meetings; I only had one threatening scene -- and that taught me a great deal.

  In the middle of a bright and sunny weekday I had driven out to West Madison Street to attend a Planned Parenthood meeting in a very poor and particularly dilapidated black section of the city. The once-proud old buildings now had only their fronts to recommend them; once inside, you found that the hallways stank and you picked your way with revulsion over the filth, feces, and refuse. As I walked to the building from across the street after parking my little Volkswagen convertible, I noticed four nice-looking young black men standing on the corner and I greeted them cheerfully, with a big "hello." They responded in kind.

  But up on the third floor, where the meeting was supposed to be, I found only two very drunk, very disreputable black women, their eyes glassy with drugs. I left quickly only to find, as I approached the front door, two strange and very threatening black men entering. There was no question of the threat--a look passed between them and on to me. And they stopped just inside the front door. I took a deep breath and rushed through them, pushing their arms aside. To my continuing terror, outside they continued to follow me. But the four men I had greeted were still at the corner. Incredibly, they formed a line facing the two threatening men and stopped them from following me across the street. In my memory until this day is etched the scene of that strange and fortunate standoff.

  The experience also represented something else to me. Reporters working in a different neighborhood -- or another culture -- must always establish themselves in the turf. The Press must always act as though they belong and also establish friends and collaborators, who become protectors. This is the law of the street. That first time I didn't do it calculatedly. I liked the four young men, but I was also from the South Side of Chicago, so it all came quite naturally.

  Around this time I also met a man who was to influence me deeply, Saul Alinsky. Saul, a big husky man from a Jewish family from way, way behind the tracks, was to become the organizational genius -- and conscience -- for many in his and my Chicago generation.

  He founded and ran the Industrial Areas Foundation, which trained organizers and organized neighborhoods or groups that were powerless, in order to gain power. Saul's methods were highly confrontational, always putting the big powers like corporations and city governments and universities on the spot, and he was not above doing a lot of awful things to empower the "people" he believed in. If you were a friend, Saul could be wonderful company, full of wit and irony and gentler than the most dedicated big puppy. If you were an "enemy," his wit became scathing; his instinct was to kill. In short, people either loved him excessively or hated him excessively. I loved him, but not without an understanding of why he was hated.

  What his critics never understood was that Saul was quintessentially, almost embarrassingly, American. He would never, for instance, go overseas -- he would never go outside the borders of "my country." He loved it with the mystic, stubborn, unquestioning patriotism of the immigrant, even though he was second generation.

  What many -- City Hall, the Democratic machine, big companies, others in power -- hated him for was his "revolutionary" or "radical" philosophy of organizing. In Reveille for Radicals, for instance, called a "manual for ... revolution," he wrote, "This is the story of People's Organizations, ever-growing in number and irrevocably committed to the rallying cry of democracy: 'We the people will work out our own destiny.' They are on the march toward a common goal -- full democracy for the common man."

  It all sounded very radical, but in practice what Saul did was very conservative: to organize the down-and-out quarters of American society into the American system. Thus he might strengthen and in his mind even save it. But it was the way he did it that made him a lot of enemies. He organized against the biggies, whether the University of Chicago or City Hall or Eastman Kodak. What they couldn't see was that in many ways he was saving them and their way of life!

  After I interviewed him for a long series I wrote on The Woodlawn Organization, the first successful black neighborhood organization in Chicago, Saul and I became close friends. There was never anything overtly romantic about our relationship, but there was a special kind of "romance" about it, even though he was some thirty years older than me.

  He would tell me the most outrageous stories, and I adored them and him. Once, when TWO was challenging the Daley machine, he told me of being called into Mayor Daley's office. The two men were much alike in character, but with such different callings in life. The mayor wanted Saul to call off a particular TWO offensive (Saul was always thinking of things like having members take over all the toilets in the Loop and just stay in them for several hours!), and Saul, for all his sophisticated knowledge of politics and personality, was stunned by the idea that Daley even thought he would do it.

  As Saul, angry and miffed, got up to leave, Daley called him back. Then the mayor pounded his fist on the desk. "All right, Alinsky," Saul quoted him to me, "tell me what your price is. I'll pay it."

  Saul laughed as though he would burst when he told me that. Saul didn't have a price, just as my father did not, and it said something about Mayor Daley that he thought even Saul did. But then the Chicago machine thought everybody had a price.

  People didn't understand Saul. They called him a "radical," not realizing that he was basically the most fervent possible American and the most conservative anti-Communist. They never understood he wanted to enfranchise the "outs" in order to save the "ins." Nor did he take any guff from anybody, whether liberal, black, or w
hom ever. When black students at one university announced to him arrogantly that they wanted their own black student union, he said, "Cut out the crap. You don't really want that. Now, say it." And they did. They were playing some of the games of their time, and Saul knew it, if "liberals" didn't. He didn't want this country to break up. And he didn't play fashionable games.

  What he gave me was something very special. I disagreed with a lot of his thinking and even tactics. He could be extremely cruel, although usually only to people he thought could take it. (Often they couldn't.) But Saul was a great balance to my excessive romanticism and to my extreme idealism. He taught me tactics. Just in watching him all those precious years that I knew him, I absorbed what is practical politics, what is strategy, and how one moves tactically in the world. I learned not only how much better it is to win than to lose but how to win and how to win in one's own way.

  Father John J. Egan, known as "Jack," another fantastic, bigger- than-life man and priest, worked closely with Saul in those days -- indeed, this Jewish iconoclast and this Catholic believer were like the oddest pair of loving brothers. They got the Archdiocese of Chicago to support a good deal of controversial community organization, among other "impossible" things. In later years, Jack Egan told me this story about Saul:

  "One day we were walking down Michigan Avenue, and I was a little worried about some of the things we were doing and how people would criticize me. Saul stopped in his tracks. 'Why does everybody have to like you?' he demanded. 'Jack, you do what you have to do. Some people don't like little bald men, some people don't like priests, some people don't like short people or Irishmen. For God's sake, be true to yourself and do what you have to do and everything else will fall in line.'"

  Midwestern "radical" impulses--and they are not that in any other sense of the word anywhere else -- were everywhere around me. Hull House held another deep and very special attraction for me at that time. Jane Addams, Jessie Binford, Edith Hamilton -- they offered another, kinder but no less tough radicalism and love, "social feminism." And they were women: strong-minded, determined, idealistic, tough, politically sagacious women. We had one such woman in my own family, a great-aunt, Alma Foerster, who had been a Red Cross nurse working in Archangel, Russia, during World War II. She was a true heroine, but she was never mentioned to me.

  In the early sixties I repaid Hull House in small manner by saving its buildings. Although I am not at all an organizer myself and hate the very idea of "mobilizing" people, preferring to sit in corners and on the edges watching others, or else singing at a piano bar, I became so angry when the city was going to raze Hull House, along with the entire Near South Side neighborhood, that I organized a "Save Hull House" committee that utterly tormented City Hall. And we won: we saved Hull House. It was during that experience that I had the enormous pleasure of knowing Jessie Binford, a little sparrow of a woman who became, with her myriad social causes, the "conscience of Chicago." She told me of her first meeting with Chicago, straight out of the Iowa cornfields, and of her first meeting with Jane Ad dams: "I arrived in Chicago on an awfully hot July day. Every other place was a saloon, the streets were dirty. The air was heavy. I had left the beautiful Iowa countryside and I wondered if I hadn't made a mistake. And no one paid much attention to me. The next morning, I said to Miss Addams, 'I want you to tell me what I am to do.' And then she said what seemed to be the most wonderful introduction for a young person, 'I wouldn't do anything if I were you for a while. Just look around and get acquainted and perhaps you'll think of something to do that none of the rest of us have ever thought of before.' I don't know, it gave me a kind of freedom. Of not having to conform to an organization right away."

  It was exactly the way we reporters in Chicago started--by just "looking around."

  III.

  From the Streets of Chicago to the Whorehouses of Peru

  "When you see a country in chaos where 200,000 people are trying to get out and 12 people are trying to get in, those 12 are foreign correspondents."

  --A foreign correspondent

  At the Chicago Daily News, in the early sixties, we would sit in the city room overlooking the muddy, churning Chicago River and watch the foreign correspondent "greats" as they came home, sometimes battered by the fray, having waged their battle against ignorance and evil and having at least so far survived. From Istanbul and Seoul and out there east of Suez, they came. The gallant, cultured Paul Ghali, an Egyptian Copt who smuggled the famous diaries of Count Ciano out of Italy during World War II. Bluff, literary George Weller, who was always swimming the Bosporus or virtually any other waterway that had the misfortune of crossing his path. And lean, mean Keyes Beech, with his bedroom eyes and his taut thinking. They were all tough, but Keyes was especially tough -- he had covered every war and had been in a large number of battles since World War II.

  Watching them stride across the city room as I imagined they strode across the world, I would groan inside with yearning. But there seemed, in those first years, not the faintest indication that I could or would ever be a foreign correspondent. I was twenty-seven. And I was clearly a woman. All the correspondents were men in their fifties and sixties.

  But in 1964 I "escaped" the Chicago city desk through a ruse -- I applied successfully for a small grant, the Seymour Berkson Foreign Assignment Grant, which allowed me to work in Latin America for six months. The paper would perhaps never have sent me, and so it was the grant that broke the professional logjam. Larry Fanning, our editor, said simply, "Fine, you can just continue to work for us down there." They fully expected I would then come home, and there seemed no need to burden them with the fact that I knew clearly I never would.

  Why did I without question choose to go to Latin America, thus unwittingly putting in motion for the years of the '70s an impulse, which would bring an entire group of women correspondents to the South? Was it because there were so few correspondents there? Because it was so relatively uncovered? Not at all. I went to Latin America because I loved it; because in my blood and soul I had some deep subterranean affinity for it. Perhaps it was the old, old pull of the South to the Byronesque men and women of the North. I only know I followed my love--and that is the only thing without question I would tell young people for them to be happy: Follow your love. There is no other happiness.

  So it was that I traveled south--south across the Caribbean, down the Andes and the gray sea coastline to Peru. I found myself a little third-floor apartment in an elegant colonial building at 440 Avenida Arequipa, right in the middle of Lima, and I began to learn how to be a foreign correspondent.

  While tutoring two hours a day in Spanish, I was trying to make elementary contacts and interviews, and one of my first subjects-- and lessons as a correspondent--was Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, the great old man of the Aprista Party. In the thirties, when reform and democracy were basically still unknown in Latin America, it was the brilliant Haya who sparked the call for democratic revolution on the entire continent. I had long admired him. I had to meet him.

  Although I was now an experienced reporter at home, I did not know--and there was nobody to tell me -- how to work in a foreign country. So instead of psyching it out and adapting to my new culture, I tried to work as I always had. And it was a mistake. With Haya, for instance, I felt very clever indeed when I got his private phone number from a friend at the American embassy and began systematically phoning him there, day after day and week after week and sometimes hour after hour. Every time I called, a male servant's voice would tell me politely, "Víctor Raúl no esta. "Víctor Raúl is not at home.

  I knew very well he was in the country. I knew very well he had to be home sometime. After five weeks of compulsive calling I found myself breaking into tears of frustration. It was not only Victor Raul --I had been in Peru for a full month and had not had one single major interview.

  Then, by chance, I was introduced to two Peruvian journalists. We were drinking pisco sours in the wood-paneled corner bar of the lovely old Hotel B
olivar when I poured out my tale of frustration. "But it is so easy," one said, shaking his head in wonder and confusion at the innocent gringuita. "We will take you to the Aprista Party newspaper. It is through the editor of the party newspaper that you arrange interviews with Víctor Raúl."

  The other seemed properly embarrassed when he mumbled, "In Latin America, we never call a man at home. It is ... not quite polite. He would never answer professional calls at home." I was appropriately chagrined.

  That very afternoon we went to the Aprista newspaper and were ushered immediately into the editor's office. He was a charming young man, and within half an hour he picked up the telephone to arrange the interview. The next day I met Haya.

  I learned more than one thing that day. Besides the American embassies, one of the best sources in any foreign country is the local journalists. They know their country. What's more, they often have information that they cannot use in their countries, particularly when they are under dictatorships or in countries with censorship. They are glad to get certain information out, which then often comes back to them in a way that they can use. Of course, this is an exchange, both of information and of help and protection.

  As I worked, I became aggravated by such accepted journalistic "truths" as James Reston's "Americans will do everything for Latin America except read about it." I became as defensive about Latin America as a mother cat about her favorite kitten, and later when a Chicago woman told me at a party, "You were always angry about your little countries ... because other people didn't love them as much as you did," I had to admit she was right. In this I was different from many of the sixties and seventies generation of journalists -- I didn't want to "be" something, I wanted to "do" something very particular, in line with my beliefs and my temperament -- I wanted to interpret Latin America because I loved it so. Too, my countries were "people" to me; I loved them, I hated them, but I always interacted with them.