News Stories: A Memoir

By Peter Nolan

The book is a memoir that chronicles my many years as a broadcast newsman from Niagara Falls to Chicago in the latter half of the twentieth century. A former Federal Judge and Governor gets out of prison,, a policeman on trial for trying to drown his son,, an alderman runs off with 100K in federal funds,, the death of President John F. Kennedy, The disappearance of Rosemary Kennedy, homecoming for Jimmy Hoffa, how Geraldo Rovera scooped me, are just some of the stories included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642370041

Book preview

NEWS STORIES

Published by Gatekeeper Press

2167 Stringtown Rd, Suite 109

Columbus, OH 43123

www.GatekeeperPress.com

Copyright © 2018 by Peter Nolan

All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

ISBN: 9781642370034

eISBN: 9781642370041

Printed in the United States of America

For my Parents,

Ralph and Geraldine Nolan

And in memory of

Dan Houlihan and Dick Ciccone.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

PART I: NEWS THAT WASN’T BREAKING

The Angel Of West Madison Street

Jim Crow At The Abraham Lincoln Hotel

Death Of A President

Niagara

Twin Brothers

A Missing Woman

Two Cops Dead

An Oral History

A Prisoner Of War

The Hunters

Breakdown

The Election

The Fetcher

Miflin Street

Providence St. Mel

Chicago Housing Authority

The Fisherman

Inheritance

A Tip From The FBI

Justice

Stateville Prison Riot

City Savings And Loan

Sludge: Chicago’s Liquid Gold

The Mayor Of Rosemont

PART II: THE CHARACTERS

Andy Mcgann

A Model Inmate

Bobby Rush

Bull Jive

Epton Before It’s Too Late

Otto Kerner

Hoffa

Lunch With Sid Luckman

Crossing The Rhine

Chick Mccuen

Pat Boyle

PART III: TINY TALES

Live Television

St. Gabe’s

Forgiveness

Snow News

The President In Town

Back Pay

That Nice Little Lady At The Loan Company

How Geraldo Scooped Me

PART IV: THE COMMENTATOR

They Buried Jimmy Nolan

New Mayor Takes Bodyguards From The Old Mayor

Driving The Kids To Florida

An Economic Story

Health Scare On Scotch

Nasty Politics

Ted Kennedy And Roger Mudd

Roland Burris

Wasteful Bureaucracy

The Eighteen Wheeler Behind You

None Of The Above

Back To School

About the Author

About the Back Cover

Photo Section

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank Rob Price and Tony Cellini for their fine work in getting this book published. Many thanks to Bob Boone of Young Chicago Authors for writing the Foreword. Over the years I worked with many wonderfully talented people, news managers, producers, writers, reporters camera crews, engineers, at WMAQ and WBBM-TV, too many too mention here. I thank them all. Some of my friends and colleagues were generous with their advice during the writing of this book: Joe Howard, Jim Strong, Mike Houlihan, Bill Cameron, the veteran city hall reporter, Jim Stricklin and Dick Kay. Thanks to Bill Crawford for his time and advice. Gratitude to Alderman Ed Burke of the Chicago City Council and his assistant, Donal Quinlan for providing archival material. Thanks to Joe Winston of Sawgrass Productions for his technical help with photos. M.J. Keller helped as my assistant during the final months of this project. My son, Stephen, read the manuscript and offered advice. Patrick and Matt Nolan and Anna Mazzucchelli were always available to answer my cyber questions. So was Monte Parker my El Conquistador neighbor. Thanks to Tine Mazz, Mary Nolan and Cara Lanscioni for their encouragement. Special thanks to staff members of the Newberry, and Glenview libraries who were always so helpful during my research. Chicago’s Harold Washington Library has an excellent Municipal Reference Section. Two staff members there, Sarah Erekson and Morag Walsh, were of great help on this project. Thanks to Stephen Seddon for the index.

—Peter Nolan

FOREWORD

Peter Nolan may have been a no nonsense reporter in a no-nonsense city, but at heart he was a great storyteller. He knows how to start a story, develop it and bring it to a close. He knows how to put in the right detail at the right time. He writes in a clear, simple, caring way. He’s there next to you sharing something important.

Like all great storytellers, Peter takes us to fascinating places. This might be the field outside of Altgeld Gardens where the local kids hunt rabbits. A street in Madison Wisconsin in the early 70’s, with traces of tear gas lingering after a night of anti war riots. A courtroom with the lawyer and his client—a severe stutterer—singing to each other. A school on the west side fighting for survival. A battlefield in Europe at the end of WW II.

Peter fills his stories with fascinating people. Some we know already—Jimmy Hoffa, Otto Kerner, JFK’s sister, Bernie Epton. But while these are familiar he finds something new to say about them. (One of his pieces is called Lunch with Sid Luckman) Mostly Peter’s people are not so well known at all, but they should be. The Angel of West Madison Street, the Fetcher, the fisherman, the model prisoner.

He has picked his stories for a reason. Some exhibit quiet heroism. Some show Chicago at its most typical. Other stories are utterly surprising.

Some add to our understanding; others make us question what we thought we knew.

This book should reach a lot of people: the serious Chicago scholar looking for more particulars, the weekend scholar satisfying his curiosity, a student of human nature, or just someone looking for a good story.

Whoever you are, you are going to enjoy this book. When you’ve finished, put it on the shelf next to books by Mike Royko and Ben Hecht.

—Bob Boone,

author, founder Young Chicago Authors

INTRODUCTION

When I left television news for good in 1986 I brought with me the scripts I had written over the years in Chicago and I put them in boxes. And I put them up in the attic where they rested until I moved to another, smaller house after all our kids had left home.

The scripts came with me and they were placed up in the rafters of our attached garage because there was no attic in the new house. There they remained for another nine or so years until I brought them down and began to sort through them.

I even bought some loose leaf folders and one of those punch hole gadgets and arranged the scripts in these folders according to date.

For awhile I wasn’t sure why I was doing this. I think I wanted to have them for my children and my grandchildren. Probably I wanted to let them know Papa was a broadcast journalist during a very interesting period of the twentieth century, the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

I worked in Television News in its infancy. And I was there many years later when it probably began its decline. I was at a television station in the mid 1960‘s when the entire staff gathered in a studio. The owner pulled a switch and the audience watched their picture go from black and white to full color. We went from film to video tape. In the early days women at the stations where I worked had jobs as secretaries, book keepers, and receptionists. At WKBN TV in Youngstown, Ohio, there was one woman in our newsroom, Doris Saloom, the secretary. In my mind she was capable of running the place but her title was newsroom secretary. When I came to Chicago in 1968 I was writing for a pioneering woman anchor, Jorie Lueloff. When I wrote on the midnight newscast my boss was a young female producer, Lucyna Migala. Valetta Press, secretary to the famous old commentator, Len O’Connor, was promoted to network field producer. Women took on jobs as camera operators and sound technicians. By the time I was through, women may have outnumbered the men. People of color started coming to work in our newsroom. NBC was a leader in this effort. It was good.

I don’t pretend to be that important. I was in the business before radio and television news people had gained the celebrity status they have today, although the transition was definitely beginning in the eighties. The biggest, most visible job I ever had was delivering a nightly commentary on the ten o’clock news on Channel 5 (NBC) in Chicago from 1978 to 1981. I’ve included some of those commentaries in one of the chapters. It’s funny as so many years pass, the old issues become the new issues. I remember when I was in Niagara Falls, New York in 1963, one of the big issues was something called railroad relocation. Like so many American towns and cities automobiles were being delayed by trains crossing main roads. One of our listeners sent me a clipping from and old Niagara Fall Gazette in the early 1900’s. The banner headline read: City Council to tackle railroad relocation.

Most of the stories in this book were broadcast at one time or another. The few that were not were stories I came upon that I found compelling. My hope is that you, the reader, will have the same impression.

About a half century ago someone in the newsroom at WMAQ-TV Chicago clipped a cartoon from the New Yorker and posted it on the bulletin board, It showed a man standing in front of a closed. door He’s confronted by a TV reporter with microphone and camera. You’ll never believe what’s happening in this room, the man exclaims. Tell me about it says the reporter.

Television today has become radio. You can see the people talking away in the studio but that’s all. Analysis masquerades as the real thing.

—Peter Nolan

Glenview, IL

January, 2018

PART I

NEWS THAT WASN’T BREAKING

THE ANGEL OF WEST MADISON STREET

Circa 1987

On one of the steel girders holding up the elevated tracks there was a small stenciled number. It was number thirty-one. Perhaps it was an identification number of some sort, of interest to engineers or maintenance people from the Chicago Transit Authority.

Yet the businessman, standing there under the elevated tracks with the priest made a great fuss over it. Isn’t that incredible, he said, pointing up at it. It was thirty-one years ago that I met you, Monsignor. On this very spot. Thirty-one years ago this month. The good Lord has his signs, said the priest.The businessman wore an expensive summer suit. He was stocky with a round Irish face. The priest was bigger and older. He had a ruddy face and a shock of white hair. The priest was Monsignor Ignatius McDermott, the pastor of skid row, the padre of West Madison Street in Chicago. A man, who for forty years, ministered to the drunks and the down and outers. He picked them up from the dirt and gave them a bowl of soup and a clean place to sleep. He had roamed the streets at night for forty years. Sometimes he protected them from jack rollers and sometimes he just stopped to visit in their bars or their chicken-wired flop houses. When they went to the hospital to have their diseased limbs amputated he went to see them. Always he urged them toward sobriety. Few of them ever escaped the confines of skid row. Oh, there might be a brief foraging expedition to North Clark Street or Uptown. Once in awhile someone might drift to another city and another bottle gang and was never heard from again. But most of them never got out. This was the end of the line until they put them in a box. Father Mac gave them a funeral service too, and a decent burial. But this man, the businessman standing under the el tracks with Monsignor McDermott, was different. He had become a millionaire in real estate, billboards and chain restaurants. The road had ended here at Van Buren and Lasalle Streets thirty-one years ago. And it also had begun.

He grew up in New York City, East Harlem, the same neighborhood where Jimmy Cagney grew up. They were poor. The family moved from one cold water flat to another.

As soon as he was old enough he learned how to hustle money along Third Avenue. He sold day old flowers and recovered copper wire from vacant buildings, selling it to junk dealers. And he had a job cleaning out the vats at some cider stands. That’s where he took his first drink. When he was cleaning out the vats in the morning he would drink the hard cider and then go off to grammar school with a buzz on.

Before long drinking became the most important thing in his life. He worked only to get money for booze. He drifted from job to job. Life became a blur of alcoholic binges and bar room fights. All the while his Irish mother said rosaries for him. He even stole money from her to get a drink. His encounters with the law were getting serious, grand larceny, assault, robbery. One day he found himself in front of a judge who was threatening to send him to jail. He swore on the bible that he’d never take another drink in his life and somehow the judge gave him a pass. Still, he didn’t stop drinking. His health deteriorated. He was throwing up blood. Only then did he decide to quit. He got help and he stopped drinking. He stayed sober for three and a half months.

Some friends got him a job offer with a major firm in Chicago and he went there to start a new life. The year was 1955. He took up residence in a North side apartment with four other alcoholics The businessman recalled all of this when he came back to visit Father Mac, more than thirty years later.

"I had worked at the new job only three days. One day one of my roommates came home with a bottle of bourbon and it was all over. I drifted to skid row and stayed in flop houses. The binge went on for about thirty days. Even the worst alcoholic must take a pause from drinking to let his body rest. It was during one of these periods that I decided to end it. I was twenty-three years old and my life was over. There’s a quiet resignation that takes place when you’re gonna knock yourself off. I remember I had been in a fight and I must have been kicked in the head. For a number of days this stuff kept draining from my ear. It looked like black coffee. I went across the street under the el tracks to Pixley and Ellers to get a cup of coffee but mainly to get napkins to stop this stuff from coming out of my ear. As