Rising Star

by David Garrow

  For Obama, the rally and the bus ride back to Holy Rosary provided an opportunity to make some new acquaintances, such as Cathy Askew, who had sat quietly through their introductory meeting at St. Helena. He was also able to talk more with the dynamic Dan Lee, DCP’s board president, and with Dan’s fellow deacon at St. Catherine, the vigorous Tommy West. For Jerry, Fred, Gloria, and most of all Leo Mahon, the rally was a wonderful culmination of their efforts that reached back over five years. Harvey Lutheran pastor Tom Knutson described the rally as “a tremendous experience for the local community.”

  Now CCRC’s challenge was to get the new “Regional Employment Network” (REN) up and running. GSU planned to have some skills assessors ready to begin interviewing unemployed individuals by early November, but in early October news broke that an Allis-Chalmers engine plant and an Atlantic-Richfield facility would soon be closing, costing up to nine hundred more good jobs.

  Kellman privately had been told a few days before Bernardin’s appearance that the national Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CHD) would be awarding CCRC an additional $40,000 to support the REN program, with an event on Saturday, October 26, marking the public announcement. Obama joined Kellman at the ceremony, and a story in Monday’s Chicago Tribune marked his first appearance in the Chicago press: “Barack Obama, who works with the Calumet Community Religious Conference, said its grant will be used to assess skills of unemployed workers and to aid them in finding jobs.” The first actual assessment sessions kicked off at St. Victor in Calumet City on November 14 and 15, attracting eighty-six applicants ranging in age from nineteen to sixty-seven years old. Six skills assessors prepared a fourteen-page information sheet on each applicant, and Adrienne Jackson wishfully told a local reporter, “There are hundreds of employers out there who need people.” She predicted that REN would interview more than thirteen thousand job seekers during the next eight months.5

  Looming most dauntingly was the future of LTV’s East Side Republic Steel plant, where the thirty-three-hundred-person workforce included twenty-four hundred members of Maury Richards’s United Steelworkers Local 1033. Since midsummer, LTV executives had been demanding tax abatements from Governor Thompson and Mayor Harold Washington; the city had responded with proposed investment incentives, as the East Side plant, just like Wisconsin and South Works before it, desperately needed significant modernization if there was any chance of long-term survival. LTV had more than $2 billion in debt, had lost more than $64 million in 1984, and its losses for 1985 could be triple that figure. Richards told reporters the only way to save aging U.S steel plants was a commitment from the federal government.

  Frank Lumpkin told a congressional subcommittee that the underlying issue was more fundamental: “jobs or income is the basic human right, the right to survive.” Throughout the late summer of 1985, Frank had been writing to Chicago’s daily papers, saying that unemployed workers “are fed up with programs for training and retraining when jobs don’t exist and with job search programs that only provide employment for those who run them.” His bottom-line demand was clear: “the federal government must take over and run these mills—nationalize them—for the good of our country and our community.”

  In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich profiled former Local 65 president Don Stazak, who now worked as toll collector on a nearby interstate rather than for U.S. Steel. “I thought of the company as a father,” he told Schmich. In early November, Maury Richards and his 1033 colleagues decided that their situation was so dire that previously full-time officers like the local’s president would return to work in the mill rather than draw union paychecks.6

  In late September, Obama got news that was almost as disquieting as Auma’s revelations about their father: Genevieve wrote to confess that she had become sexually involved with Sohale Siddiqi. Soon after Barack’s late July departure for Chicago, Genevieve had flown to San Francisco to visit a friend before returning to New York on August 14. That evening she and Sohale “went to a Bonnie Raitt concert together and did ecstasy, that’s what did it,” she later recounted. Her own struggles with alcohol had not improved in the wake of Barack leaving and with the beginning of another school year at PS 133, yet Barack thanked her for “your sweet letter” when he wrote back to her. “The news of Sohale and you did hurt . . . in part because I was the last to know—the Pakis were sounding awfully stiff the last time I spoke to them. But mainly the hurt was a final tremor of all the mixed-up pain I had been feeling before we parted—watching something I valued more than you may know pass from what is, what might still be, to what was.”

  But Barack’s first two months in Chicago leavened his heartache. “It seems that we have both ended up where we need to be at this stage in our lives,” so while “the pain of your absence is real, and won’t lessen without more time, I feel no regrets about the way things have turned out.” He ended by saying he hoped to get back to New York sometime in the months ahead. “All my love—Barack.” Reflecting back years later on what had transpired, Genevieve mused that Barack was probably “very disappointed with me,” for given Siddiqi’s dismissive attitude toward life, Barack no doubt “thought Sohale was an empty shell for a man.”

  In Chicago, Barack’s work environs offered him better opportunities for self-reflection than his once-a-week reimmersion in the easy camaraderie of the Pakistani diaspora when he met up with Asif Agha. Jerry Kellman’s invaluable sidekick Fred Simari saw Barack at Holy Rosary almost every weekday that fall. Simari recalled Obama as “quiet, laid back,” “extremely bright,” and as someone who “seemed like he really studied everything.” Father George Schopp had the same impression: Barack was in “learning mode,” just “watching and reflecting.” In addition to his daily work discussions with Jerry, Mike, and Mary Bernstein, Barack also interacted with Holy Rosary secretary Bonnie Nitsche and the parish’s most committed volunteer, Betty Garrett. “We took him as our son from jump street,” Betty said of herself and Bonnie. The two regularly pestered Barack and Holy Rosary’s forty-one-year-old pastor, Bill Stenzel, about their cigarette smoking, which was allowed indoors only in the rectory’s kitchen. This addiction brought Barack and Bill together more than would otherwise have been the case, but that fall Obama also visited every week with St. Helena’s forty-five-year-old Father Tom Kaminski. Like Leo Mahon and George Schopp, Bill and Tom were both progressive and challenging priests, men whose religious faith accorded far more closely with Joe Bernardin’s Catholicism than with the hierarchical, top-down archdiocese that John Patrick Cody had ruled. Bonnie Nitsche and her husband Wally thought that Bill’s strong but gentle spirit made Holy Rosary’s small multiethnic congregation into “a microcosm” of what a community would be if you “got rid of prejudices.” The rectory “was like one big office,” Bill remembered, with the organizers on one side of the first floor, and Bill and Bonnie on the other.

  From the beginning, Bonnie thought Barack “was more together, more poised” than his older coworkers, and Bill recalled that Barack became “very curious” about religious faith while suddenly being surrounded by so many committed Catholics. “He had a curiosity about what’s this phenomenon” and a “very respectful” attitude toward faith. Obama asked if he could attend Sunday mass, and Bill can recall him sitting with the congregation. Jerry Kellman was about to convert to Catholicism, and he understood how “the churches we dealt with were extended families,” ones that exposed Obama to “a broad sense of religion.” For Barack “his sense of church and his sense of God became very much a community experience,” and “it was a very formative period” for him, Jerry explained. Obama often drank coffee with Tom Kaminski, and they talked “about all sorts of things,” including family, but Fred Simari believes that Obama’s time in the kitchen at Holy Rosary had the most impact. “Bill Stenzel spent a tremendous amount of time with Barack,” and “some of that spiritual-type formation” that Bill exuded “wore off on Barack, there’s no doubt.”

  That fall, Barack continued his one-o
n-one conversations with pastors like Bob Klonowski of Lebanon Lutheran in Hegewisch and Catholic parishioners like Loretta Augustine at her home west of Altgeld Gardens. “It was surprising how receptive people were to talking with him,” Loretta remembered. Tom Kaminski noted “what a terrific listener he was” and watched as Barack’s acceptance spread. At the three-month mark, Obama’s $10,000 trainee salary was doubled to $20,000, the apprentice director salary that Kellman had advertised five months earlier.7

  Meanwhile the warfare between Harold Washington and the city council majority opposed to him, led by South Chicago’s 10th Ward Alderman Ed Vrdolyak, was constantly in the headlines. Washington had accepted UNO’s invitation to speak at its annual fund-raising banquet on October 30, where the mayor would present a thank-you award to the archdiocesan Campaign for Human Development (CHD). Attendees were greeted outside by picketers led by South Deering Improvement Association president Foster Milhouse, who told reporters, “We want UNO out of our neighborhood, and we want Father Schopp and UNO out of St. Kevin’s.” The far right’s complaints continued with a letter to the editor of the Daily Calumet denouncing CCRC and UNO and calling for concerned citizens to “rid their communities of these revolutionaries.” An anti-UNO rally at the Calumet City American Legion hall featured Foster Milhouse and attracted a crowd of about a hundred, and another letter to the Daily Cal thanking the paper for its coverage warned of the philosophy of the “anti-God idolizer of Lucifer” Saul Alinsky.

  With UNO adding affiliates in other Hispanic neighborhoods, Mary Ellen Montes chaired an evening meeting that drew a crowd of two thousand. Mayor Washington, Governor Thompson, and powerful Illinois House speaker Michael J. Madigan all joined Lena on stage, but afterward she denounced Thompson’s refusal to commit $6 million for a new West Side technical institute. UNO and other Southeast Side groups continued to fight against any expansion of the area’s overflowing landfills, but with city officials all too aware of Chicago’s looming garbage crisis, Washington’s aides maintained an ominous silence on the issue. City officials had finally acknowledged that the well water samples from the isolated Maryland Manor neighborhood south of Altgeld Gardens “definitely contain cyanide,” but the projected cost of $460,000 to extend water and sewer lines to those taxpayers’ homes postponed any remedial action, even though the Tribune and the Chicago Defender ran prominent news stories about the problem. More than a year would pass before the work was carried out.8

  In mid-November Obama was finally able to write a long letter to Phil Boerner. “My humblest apologies for the lack of communication these past months. Work has taken up much of my time,” but now “things have begun to settle into coherence of late.” Barack described Chicago for Phil, calling it “a handsome town” with “wide streets, lush parks,” and “Lake Michigan forming its whole east side.” Although “it’s a big city with big city problems, the scale and impact of the place is nothing like NY, mainly because of its dispersion, lack of congestion.” Chicagoans are “not as uptight, neurotic, as Manhattanites,” and “you still see country in a lot of folks’ ways,” but “to a much greater degree than NY, the various tribes remain discrete. . . . Of course, the most pertinent division here is that between the black tribe and the white tribe. The friction doesn’t appear to be any greater than in NY, but it’s more manifest since there’s a black mayor in power and a white City Council. And the races are spatially very separate; where I work, in the South Side, you go ten miles in any direction and will not see a single white face” excepting in Hyde Park, a considerable exaggeration on Obama’s part. “But generally the dictum holds fast—separate and unequal.”

  Obama said his work took him to differing neighborhoods, with residents’ concerns ranging from sanitation complaints to job-training programs. “In either situation, I walk into a room and make promises I hope they can help me keep. They generally trust me, despite the fact that they’ve seen earnest young men pass through here before, expecting to change the world and eventually succumbing to the lure of a corporate office. And in a short time, I’ve learned to care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them. It’s tough though. Lots of driving, lots of hours on the phone trying to break through lethargy, lots of dull meetings. Lots of frustration when you see a 43% drop out rate in the public schools and don’t know where to begin denting that figure. But about 5% of the time, you see something happen—a shy housewife standing up to a bumbling official, or the sudden sound of hope in the voice of a grizzled old man that gives a hint of the possibilities, of people taking hold of their lives, working together to bring about a small justice. And it’s that possibility that keeps you going through all the trenchwork.”

  But Obama’s most vivid image was the one Kellman had shown him three months earlier in South Deering: “closed down mills lie blanched and still as dinosaur fossils. We’ve been talking to some key unions about the possibility of working with them to keep the last major mill open, but it’s owned by LTV,” which “wants to close as soon as possible to garner the tax loss,” Barack told Phil. He ended the letter by saying his apartment was “a comfortable studio near the lake” and that “since I often work at night, I usually reserve the morning to myself for running, reading and writing.” He enclosed a draft of a short story dealing with the black church and asked Phil to mark it up and return it. “I live in mortal fear of Chicago winters,” and “I miss NY and the people in it . . . Love, Barack.”

  The letter documented several significant turning points in Barack’s new life. Most important of all was the emotional attachment Barack had already developed toward the people on whose behalf he was working: I “care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them.” The second was that now, more than three months in, Obama was much more comfortable with his weekday work. As his close friend Asif Agha remembered, “in the beginning, he was enormously frustrated because the whole scene was completely chaotic,” but in “struggling with those frustrations,” Asif witnessed Barack “coming together around them as a purposeful person.” Kellman was focused on the jobs bank and his initial contacts with Maury Richards’s Local 1033 at LTV Republic Steel, but Obama’s workday involved interactions with DCP’s core participants—Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd from Golden Gate and Eden Green, down near Altgeld Gardens, Dan Lee and Cathy Askew from St. Catherine of Genoa in struggling West Pullman, Betty Garrett and Tom Kaminski from central Roseland, and Marlene Dillard from the solidly working-class London Towne Homes well to the east—which presented daily challenges that were mundane as well as relentlessly unceasing.

  Yet as close as Obama became with Loretta and Dan, as well as to white priests like Bill Stenzel and Tom Kaminski, he had no closer a bond with anyone than Cathy Askew, the white single mother of two “hapa” daughters—half black, half white. Askew was a small-town Indiana native whose family had shunned her after she married an African American who fathered her two daughters, then disappeared entirely from their lives. Cathy taught school at St. Catherine’s, and one of her daughters, Stephanie, had a congenital heart condition that left her less than fully robust. Early on Obama told Cathy about his own father and mother. As a result, “I don’t think of him as really like African American. He’s African, and he’s American,” she said. As he later wrote, Barack also recognized “the easy parallels between my own mother and Cathy, and between myself and Cathy’s daughters, such sweet and pretty girls whose lives were so much more difficult than mine had ever been.”

  Having lived with a black man, Cathy saw Barack as something else: “he didn’t look African American to me. I was really glad to find out he was a hybrid, because my kids are hybrids.” From the beginning, she thought Barack “was gawky . . . very quiet . . . very thoughtful,” she remembered. In those early months, he “was at a loss for a long time, I think, over where to focus. . . . I saw him doing a lot of listening to people and trying to pull things out of people. There was no focus. Everybody seemed like they wanted something differ
ent and nobody had anything in common.”

  Early that winter, Obama organized a meeting at St. Catherine for area residents to voice their unhappiness about police responsiveness to the district commander. Hardly a dozen people showed up, and the commander was a no-show too. Years later, Obama would repeatedly recall that evening. Loretta had been there, as well as Cathy. “He got frustrated. I think he almost quit once,” Cathy said. Obama would recount even his core members saying they were tired and ready to give up, and “I was pretty depressed.” As he remembered, across from the church, in an empty lot, two boys were tossing stones at an abandoned building. “Those boys reminded me of me. . . . What’s going to happen to those boys if we quit?”9

  At the beginning of December, Chicago’s steel industry was back in the news. Eighteen months earlier, Mayor Washington had appointed a Task Force on Steel to study the industry’s future, and its report demonstrated that the entire effort had been a waste of time and energy. Early on Frank Lumpkin and his Save Our Jobs Committee colleagues had hoped the task force would show that their ideas about government investment could revive one or more Southeast Side mills. Washington sympathized with these hopes, but the task force brushed aside Lumpkin and his sympathizers. Its primary academic consultant, Ann R. Markusen, asserted that “Reaganomics and industrial leadership (or lack of it) deserve the major blame” for the plant closings and added that Chicago was “a city in deep, long-term trouble.” She also acknowledged that “national and international forces beyond the grasp of local governments are important determinants of steel job loss.” Task force member David Ranney stressed that in retrospect the “idea that the steel industry in Chicago might recover appeared absurd” and that what the Far South Side experienced during the 1980s “highlights the limits of local electoral politics.”10