Varnished Truth: From Chicago to Hammond - Memoir of a Pneumacrat

By R.J. Nelson

VARNISHED TRUTH is a memoir of R.J. Nelson's eleven years (1994-2005) as CEO of the Hammond, Indiana Port Authority. Fired without cause from the Chicago Park District as Superintendent of Special Services (all on the lakefront) when Richard M. Daley took office as mayor, he was hired by the HPA, whose main business was a 1300 slip marina a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lakestar Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958943915

R.J. Nelson

R.J Nelson retired as CEO from the Hammond, Indiana Port Authority in 2005. He is a former Superintendent of Special Services and Director of Harbors for the Chicago Park District, Vice President of the historic Grebe Shipyard on the Chicago River, a University of Chicago administrator of Court Theater, and a chaplain at Cornell University. He has sailed across the Atlantic, up the Labrador Coast to the Artic, through the Caribbean islands and all the Great Lakes. He has degrees in English and Theology. Mr. Nelson lives in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago.

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Copyright © 2023 by Lake Star Publishing

All Rights Reserved.

Formatted by Kevin Theis, Ft. Raphael Publishing Company

Front Cover Graphics by Paul Stroili, Touchstone Graphic Design, Chicago

For all those who find themselves in public service.

What is a Pneumacrat?

He or she is a public servant often in good trouble, as the legendary congressman and lifelong civil rights activist John Lewis described his public life.  Though misunderstood, often called loose cannons, Pneumacrats always follow the spirit of the law instead of the letter, unless both are in harmony. If not, Pneumacrats bend or even break the rules.  Their only goal is the common good, often using moral bribery,-----extracting favors that result in greater good not individual gain.

A Pneumacrat strives never to put truth in harm's way.

One

Viewed from a plane hugging the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan on the flight path to Chicago’s Midway airport, Hammond, Indiana is the last in a string of smoke belching industrial towns on Lake Michigan: Michigan City, Portage, Gary, East Chicago, Whiting, and Hammond before those little windows frame Chicago’s magnificent smoke free shoreline. In Hammond the pollution used to be so bad that residents joked, If you want to smoke a cigarette, go inside.

In the winter of 1994 two weeks after New Year’s, in my new city car I drove to my new job at the Hammond, Indiana Port Authority from my house in South Shore. I should have taken the short route. It would have been faster to drive four blocks west from my house, turn left on Stony Island to the Chicago Skyway at 79th, then southeast the four miles to Hammond, but I just couldn’t. Four months since being fired as Director of Chicago’s harbors, I still couldn’t resist old habits and drove as I always did every morning east a couple of blocks to Jackson Park Harbor, pulled over by the Harbor Station, and automatically reached for pen and paper to take notes on what had to be improved.

What was I doing? I cursed my political firing from the city I so loved—and still do, forcing myself to say out loud, So sad, too bad, move on, I repeated the cliché several times, then threw the pen and paper on the floor mat. I watched as a brewing winter storm pushed lake Michigan waves like beer barrels rolling off a truck into the harbor entrance under thick harbor ice, raising it until it cracked and shelved. Water geysered through the fissures, freezing almost instantly in the ten below zero wind. God it was cold.

Across the harbor a deflated and frozen black dinghy twisted half on the yacht club’s dinghy dock and half in the harbor ice. For a moment I thought it was a body, like the one that washed up almost exactly in the same twisted position, a couple of years ago on a hot summer night at a Jackson Park yacht club party. The commodore called me at my home, and I rushed over. The body of an old man was rigid in a dead man’s float pose but with its head turned upward, mouth opened wide as if gasping for breath. While I stared at the bloated body, its shirt split open in several places, a couple of members found an old tarp and covered the body but not the odor. It is not uncommon for drowning victims in late fall to sink to the bottom where the cold-water acts as a preservative, until the following summer when it warms and accelerates decomposition. Gases form and inflate the lungs and intestines causing the corpse to float to the surface and drift until discovered. Had the wind stayed north instead of switching to easterly on shore toward the harbor mouth, the body might have floated all the way to Hammond.

Like that poor soul I floated stiff and lifeless to my new job as Marina Director and CEO of the Hammond Indiana Port Authority. Fired politically from my Chicago Park District job was like being pushed overboard weighted down with disbelief, until I could not hold my breath any longer.

But this winter morning in January, I surfaced as a government official in a government vehicle whose new car smell could not mask the reality of being fired for no cause, no reason, just another castaway from Chicago politics. So sad, too bad, move on.

The Northeast wind gusts shook my blue Ford Taurus sedan as if announcing it was time to go. I turned the car around and made my way south along the lakefront. At Jackson Harbor Lake Shore Drive makes a hard turn east and becomes South Shore Drive hugging the shoreline through Jackson Park, the historic site built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, to be the home of the Obama Presidential Center in 2024, then south along the grounds of the old South Shore Country Club, now the South Shore Cultural Center purchased by the District in the 1970's (By law the Chicago Park District has first right of refusal of any property for sale on Chicago’s lakefront.) Millions were spent restoring the five-story historic club exactly to its Great Gatsby elegance of the 1920's, transformed for community outdoor music fests, and recreation including golf, horseback riding and swimming on its beautiful crescent moon beach. The fabulous interior is constantly used for catered parties, weddings, and ballroom dancing contests. . Barack and Michelle Obama held their wedding reception there. South Shore was the last lakefront complex added to my management responsibilities on Chicago’s lakefront.

The golf course had turned winter brown with mounds of dirty snow and windblown ice clinging to the sand traps. The flags on the seven flagpoles at the entrance arch and main building had been taken down, which seems to happen whenever an administration changes, usually in about six months when flags flap into shreds— especially on the lakefront. Maybe because six months is the period new administrations initiate reviews of the wasteful spending of the previous one. I know because I went through three administrations and the review memos were the same: All maintenance budgets must be cut, and all requisitions approved in advance. Replacing flags is expensive and easily cut from department budgets by those who see little importance in symbols having nothing to do with park recreational programs. But after the shredded flags are taken down and not replaced, citizens and veterans’ groups will complain in force at public meetings and money for flag replacement will magically be found. Richard M. Daley’s first park administration under Bob Penn sent out such memos; when the flags began to shred, all seven flagpoles were de-flagged and my budget for new ones was shredded saving a couple of hundred dollars per flag. Multiply that by 500 or so flags in the parks and as politicians say, That’s real money.

I deplore empty government flagpoles, not because I am overly patriotic, but because it indicates a lack of pride and morale in the organization behind the flag. Hoisting and lowering flags, replacing halyards and swivels, maintaining spotlights, etc. requires time and attention to something symbolic, which bureaucrats believe has nothing to do with actual work. Yet in my experience it has everything to do with work; it symbolizes care and love for and pride in one’s work. At South Shore Cultural Center, it took me less than a week to hoist seven new flags, which I borrowed stole from Soldier Field stadium. I was also in charge of the stadium which was exempt from the cost saving memos. The Chicago Bears insisted on fresh new flags ringing the stadium at every game.

In 1993, Six months into Daley’s second park administration, Forrest Claypool’s cost cutting memos were implemented. The South Shore Claypoles were flagless again, and they were not the only ones. The large flag on the Jackson Park golf course and those in all the harbors also disappeared. In 1993 just before Daley fired me, I made a chart of thirty-three flags flying over lakefront flagpoles. Three years later there were only six. The rest of the flagpoles were empty, including the one on the Park District administration building on McFetridge Drive. Charting flagpoles after being fired? What was wrong with me? I was living in the basement of my mind.

South Shore Drive turns hard east at seventy first street as if trying to get back to the lakefront and reclaim its prestigious Lake Shore Drive name but is forced to veer south behind a wall of high-rise apartment buildings that block the lake view. One of Mies Vander Roe's famous skyscrapers soars forty stories here. Like other neglected buildings after decades of upper middle-class white flight from South Shore, it needs work. At Seventy Third Street Rainbow Beach Park, also hidden behind apartment buildings, stretches for nearly a mile affording one of the most spectacular views of downtown Chicago. Most people think it was named Rainbow after Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition headquarters (not far away), but not true; The name derives from the army’s famous Rainbow Division in World War I in which many south side Chicagoans fought and died. Originally the substantial brown granite monument graced the main entrance to Rainbow Beach from South Shore Drive, but over the years that access was blocked off. The original entrance was closed in the 1950's when race riots broke out over blacks use of the beach accelerating racist panic and white flight. It was a time of great social upheaval on the south side as the old housing covenants and deed restrictions to Negro ownership were struck down by the courts. The monument stands in an abandoned area of the park with yet another empty flagpole.

There was a popular boat launch ramp in Rainbow before the riots. By the early sixties, it was avoided by white boat owners, except by me and my buddies, one of whom owned a ski boat. We launched it there and skied the south lakefront all to ourselves.

Next to Rainbow at seventy ninth the venerable U.S. Steel South Works, once the largest steel producer in the country, is now permanently closed. Dead, cleared to cemetery green stubble, milkweed, and thistles. Except for its old power plant at eighty seventh, the property is as open as a pasture stretching over a mile of lakefront to the Calumet River at ninety first street. The great blast furnaces, open hearths, and rolling mills were dismantled and sold for scrap. The man-made harbors just inside the Calumet River mouth, where twenty-four hours a day lake boats moved mountains of iron ore from the Massabi Range in Minnesota, are now quiet basins rusting like old iron bathtubs. Fish have moved in followed by local fishermen who sit on rusty sheet piling walls and cast for their suppers.

South Works employed tens of thousands of workers, and in the summer of 1959, the year of the great strike, I was one of them, an Observer for the Metallurgy Department recording temperatures, pouring times, and cataloging samples of finished steel. It was suffocating work. The pollution was so bad snot turned black in seconds. There were no face masks. Constant nose blowing became bloody trying to clear the ubiquitous graphite dust that sparkled wherever a rare ray of light poked through cracks in windowless tall sheet steel buildings. I was assigned to the most famous World War II steel producing unit, Open Hearth Number Three, a massive furnace that rotated and poured molten steel into ladles positioned below on railroad flatcars by overhead cranes a hundred feet in the air. Thick furnace doors opened vertically every hour while engineers supervised adding limestone, molten steel from the blast furnaces, chemicals, and other materials. At mealtime, the Melt Foreman would raise one of the doors for a few seconds for hungry workers to hold cheese sandwiches, ribs, chicken, or hamburgers in between pieces of screen wire and cook their food faster than any microwave. Every hour I donned a thick welder's mask and asbestos coat and peered through a tiny window into the open hearth, noting temperatures of around 2,000 degrees and the various colors of the steel sloshing like lava.

I worked the graveyard shift, 11PM to 7AM, and never saw so many accidents in my life: careless crane operators spilling ladles of molten steel fusing ingot trains to their tracks, drunk maintenance workers forgetting to drain water out of or pouring the wrong chemicals into the empty ingots, causing gases to shoot the half ton mold plugs thirty or forty feet in the air. Trains with flat cars full of huge ingots would pull up to the pouring platform, a train station without passengers, while a crane operator three stories overhead positioned the ladle guided by hand signals from a pourer standing about six feet from the ingots. As observer, I stood next to the pourer and made notes. Attached to the ladle was a lever not unlike an old farm well pump handle, and the pourer would press the handle down which would pull a ceramic plug about three inches in diameter out of the bottom of the ladle releasing a golden stream of molten steel. It was his job not only to fill each ingot but check the plug mechanism a minute or so before the liquid steel reached the top. Burn-throughs of the ceramic collars around the plug mechanisms were not uncommon which meant the ladle filled with tons of liquid steel could not be stopped emptying. When this happened, and it happened twice to me that summer, the crane operator high overhead took over and poured each ingot without ability to shut off the flow. Emergency horns blared and I along with the pourer and others crawled behind thick bus stop size shields as molten steel flashed and ricocheted liquid lightning off the walls. Sparks showered everywhere and burned hundreds of tiny holes through supposedly fireproof clothing, although amazingly not our skin. We crouched there until the crane operator had poured all the ingots and then hurried to a small office for new uniforms and the foreman told us to get back to work. The incidents never led to investigations and only required time notations in my reports.

So many accidents so often all workers full or part time were required to memorize the Safety Rule of The Day, and if a foreman or boss of any kind asked you to repeat it, and you couldn’t, you were written up. Two written warnings and you were either suspended or fired.

Sometimes at dawn, when no observations were required, I would escape the hell fire furnaces and walk outside toward the lake along massive retaining walls that kept the mountains of Minnesota iron ore from sliding into the harbor and watch the sun rise across Lake Michigan, a fire ball emerging silently from the water and smog like an atomic bomb sneak attack. And then, as if sighting the sun, its arch enemy, the mighty Bessemer blast furnaces erupted, screeching and howling, hurling their own fireballs into the sky to mark their lakefront territory.

South Works closed forever in 1992. No more belching fire, no ear-piercing alarms or bell ringing trains hauling ingots glowing deep orange all night like jack-o-lanterns. Back then, no birds dared to fly over the mill; now they soar over empty fields of weeds. The great God of Chicago steel is now legend, documented in books and films in the nearby Calumet Park Field house where a dedicated group of retired steelworkers maintain the Southeast Chicago Historical Society Museum. South Works’ one remaining building, the power plant, sat on the lakefront like a smiling Buddha patiently awaiting reincarnation that would never happen. It was demolished a few years later.

Without U.S. Steel and all its economic power, South Shore Drive lost any hope of former glory. Now it stair-steps around east side tenements, trying to get back to the lake edge but never succeeding. These streets are the back stairs of Chicago’s southeast side, where working classes toiled for generations, immigrants from Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Mexico, Central and South America, all trying to climb those worn back stairs to the American Dream.

Here South Shore Drive changes its name every few blocks: Muskegon, Burley, Ewing, and Mackinaw, streets once packed with dozens of taverns with names like Ladle and Crowbar ritually visited by thousands of factory workers before and after their shifts. Now the streets are empty of beer trucks, buildings are burned and boarded up and ubiquitous vacant lots don’t even exhibit For Sale signs. Who would buy them?

And yet churches survive: the landmark St. Michael's gothic cathedral at eighty third street with its priceless German stained-glass windows (now protected from vandals with plexiglass), dozens of smaller catholic churches and a handful of the plainest protestant ones I have ever seen. Poor Black and Latino storefront churches have sprouted like invasive plants. Morning Star Baptist is a converted funeral home with burglar bars added on all windows and doors. Christ Universal Hope church at ninetieth street, most humble of all, sits below grade on the basement foundation of a demolished apartment building with an improvised tar-patched flat roof a few feet above the sidewalk. A walkway descends on one side to rusting sanctuary doors where every Wednesday morning at 7:30AM on my way to work, the doors are opened for long lines of homeless and poor families line up for donated canned foods and leftover prayers of hope. Many times, I thought about stopping and giving a ten or twenty to the pastor, but I never did.

At ninety first street the bridge over the Calumet River raised slowly for a tugboat pushing a string of barges loaded with shredded steel, aluminum, copper, and brass on the way to the Cal Sag canal that connects to the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. The scrap will be unloaded in New Orleans and transferred to ships bound for cheaper steel mills in Japan, China, and India. The barges then return upriver to Chicago loaded with quarried stone, sand, coal, and any number of things. The Calumet is the working river of Chicago, meandering past what's left of heavy industry: specialty steel plants, grain elevators, chemical factories, mountains of salt to be spread on city streets in winter, and vast landfills. These dirt chutes, as called by locals, unload garbage trucked from Chicago’s better neighborhoods and stretch for miles. Nothing grows here except Altgeld Gardens, one of the largest and most neglected public housing projects downwind of the dump sites which residents call Methane Mountains.

On the Calumet River a mile or so south stands the bankrupt and abandoned Wisconsin Steel Plant, where my Swedish grandfather worked most of his life tempering railroad axles in peace time and gun barrels in World War II. The complex is being dismantled girder by girder and loaded on barges for New Orleans and beyond. This area, known to Northwest Indiana Hoosiers as The Region, between the former U.S. South Works and Altgeld Gardens, is where a young black man named Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in the mid 1980's.

At the ninety first street bridge some cars stopped as it raised for a freighter with a cargo of salt; others made U turns on the incline and sped down alternate streets to the ninety fifty street bridge before it would open next impassable for the better part of an hour. I was in no rush, so I shifted the Ford Taurus into park and turned on the radio to WFMT, Chicago’s classical music station. Sleet stuck like cotton to the sky-pointing bridge as the wind funneled down the river from Lake Michigan. A young woman stood against the bridge tender's shack with a parka over her head and jeans soaked below the knees. She looked terrible, pale and shivering, holding her thumb out to hitch a ride. I rolled down the window and offered her a lift. She jumped in and shook the wet snow off her short dark brown hair, then rubbed chapped hands in front of the heater vent in the dashboard. Without asking she turned the fan to high.

Lousy day, ain't it, she said as the counterweights and trunnions on the bascule bridge brought it slowly back down to street level.

Terrible, especially by the Lake. I replied and explained I was the Marina Director of the Hammond Port Authority on my way to work. She said nothing, obviously uninterested in what I did.

I will be turning south on Indianapolis Boulevard to the marina and can drop you off anywhere along the way.

She didn’t say anything for a few blocks until we reached 95th street, the entrance to Calumet Park, Chicago's last lakefront park on the south side before the Indiana border.

You want to fool around in the park? she asked.

Fool around?

Yeah, have some fun, she said, unzipping her parka and turning toward me with her back against the passenger side door. You want to play with these? And with that she pulled up her sweatshirt flashing her breasts, not only to me but to cars driving the other way; Several horns honked in approval.

No, I don't want …please don't do that.

Reluctantly she pulled her sweatshirt down but then grabbed my right hand off the steering wheel and tried to place it between her legs.

No stop it, I said emphatically.

At least let me give you a nice blow job.

She got up on her knees. With both hands, she grabbed my crotch, rubbing with one hand, undoing my belt and zipper with the other. Before I could stop the car, she lowered her face to my lap blowing hot breath reeking of alcohol into my underwear. I was so startled I hit the brakes banging her head against the steering wheel. Shit! I had picked up a local prostitute working the lines of cars each time the ninety first street bridge opened. I would learn later that for generations working girls worked this bridge soliciting mill workers and crew members of the freighters that tied up all along there. But 7:30 in the morning? What if someone recognized the car with its Port Authority logo, a large white sail against an orange sun, on both sides and reported me to the Port Authority Board?

Listen. I'm sorry. I was just trying to give you a ride, I said, forcefully lifting her head off my lap and pushing her back into the passenger seat.

Now, where can I drop you off? I said, trying to zip up my pants.

She pushed her stringy hair back and stared out through the windshield obviously pissed she wouldn’t be getting twenty bucks or whatever she charged. No money from me for a bottle of booze to help her through the day. She pointed to a rundown storefront with bricked up windows and a windowless steel door.

Drop me there.

I pulled over to the curb and put the car in neutral, but she didn't get out. She flashed a half smile, like a used car salesperson making a last attempt at a sale.

Come on inside. I gotta waterbed.

No, really, I have to get to work. Please get out of the car.

Still, she made no effort to open the door; instead opened the glove compartment, which was empty except for the Taurus owner's manual.

Got any cigarettes?

For some reason I remembered my father, even though a chain Camel smoker, always referred to his cigarettes as coffin nails.

When I shook my head, she sighed, and finally stepped out and slammed the car door. I waited, as if dropping off a babysitter, until she fished a key from her jeans, opened the steel door, and disappeared inside. At last. I zipped up my pants and sped away hoping that no one, particularly none of three Port Authority Board directors who commuted along this road to Chicago jobs every day, saw me.

I couldn't believe I picked up a prostitute and didn't know it. And then after getting her out of the car, I waited until she was safely inside her apartment. Would I ever lose my naïveté? I certainly didn’t in Chicago, never thinking I would be summarily fired. Maybe she was a sign to change, become a political whore and take all the bribes I could get. After all we only go around life once, so go for the gusto, right? For a second, I wanted to turn the car around and head for the family cemetery, stand on my family’s tombstones and curse them for bringing me up the right way instead of the wrong way. I did everything I was taught, worked hard, stayed honest, maintained integrity, did good works---did it all and was still booted out of the city I loved so much and ironically still do.

I slapped my forehead again and shouted into the windshield, Move on, bounce back. Countless others have bounced, my dear wife being my best example: After her bank was bought out and eliminated her Vice President job, she never complained; she accepted the political realities of new administrations and moved on. Now it’s my turn, but I can’t get Chicago into some memory cloud. It stubbornly sticks to my soul.

At ninety fifth street the monumental Chicago Skyway Bridge comes into view arcing a hundred feet over the Cal River, then angling down for a mile or so to grade where it merges into the Indiana Toll Road. Built in 1956 when I was a teenager, it was an engineering wonder. When it opened motorists came from all over the city to drive over it, my family included. The toll was twenty-five cents. It was supposed to solve Chicago's south side traffic congestion, a short cut from downtown expressways