My birthplace was just outside of Chicago, a fact for which I have always felt a degree of shame. How could I be born outside of West Virginia? Yet it is so . . .and I sometimes find it hard to recall just which of the towns around Chicago heard my first whine.
Still, all my life, Chicago people have been important in my life. Phillip E. Johnson changed my life and he was born and raised in Aurora near where Dad went to seminary. My dissertation advisor Deborah Modrak was educated at the University of Chicago and was a model teacher and scholar during my time at Rochester. Hope and I sealed our engagement when I visited her at Wheaton College to climb the tower there together. Our beloved priest Father Richard Petranek is from Chicago as listening to even one word from him will remind a man.
There are others, so many others, for whom I owe so much. Chicago made them and for that, this not-really-a-son-of-Chicago is thankful. So let me pause and be thankful for Chicago and any happiness that Chicago feels on the Cubs (finally!) winning the World Series. After all, I owe Chicago more than my earliest oxygen.
What is there about that place? When I read about Chicago, one central fact strikes me: Chicago is the capital of the Mid-West, but has never quite got done being new. When I visit, as I often have to do for work, Chicago is always different. It hasn’t faded away like Buffalo or gentrified like Pittsburgh. Chicago is still edgy even though there is nothing frontier about her.
Chicago is the oldest new city in America. It has a downtown, with all the problems every downtown has, but is also a series of towns radiating from a center site. When I hear my friends from Chicago talk to each other, the block on which they grew up matters. That is a bit like New York, but then there is no New York snobbery.
Chicago had a convention that gave us Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Starting with the University of Chicago, the city has been a hub for world class education (think Fermi and Great Books) outside of New England. Chicago was the money hub for the much of the Great Lakes region . . . New Orleans with brawn in the nineteenth century. All that Victorian and Edwardian wealth ended up in piles of world class art and cultural events all the city. Chicago is fun to visit, though perhaps my visit to Hope in college still colors my memories.
To me Chicago is romantic. As a Packer fan, Chicago is also where good quarterbacks go to die and where good football is played every year when the City is blessed like clockwork with the Packers. Just as Santa comes once a year, so Chicago has never failed to receive God’s greatest football blessing: a Packer game in the Fall.
Chicago gets Green Bay football and world class pizza.
Chicago folk love Chicago most when they criticize it and best when they don’t live in it. Perhaps the weather has something to do with it. One cannot say anything as an outsider without noting the wind, but the wind did not make such an impression on me early in my visits. Rochester has clouds, rain, and wind off Lake Ontario with cold and even less sun, but Rochester always felt like it accepted the weather. Whenever I was in Chicago, people resented, fought, and bragged about it. Nobody is to blame for the weather, even God allows His cosmos to function without (generally) tinkering with the system, but every time I have been to Chicago people acted as if someone caused the weather and that someone was just a big . . . jerk.
Chicago people swear better than anyone not in New York. Houston may never be as urban, because the Southern Gulf manners remain a bit too urbane for the toughest, profane curse at the Bears. Chicago was the city of the nineteenth century: fires, fairs, and immigrants, but having taken most of the twentieth century off, the Cubs at least have won again.
That is just fine and makes me smile because I think of all that Chicagoans have done and are doing either there or abroad and bless them. So much good would be lost (not just in my life!) if the City had burned in the Great Fire and stayed burned. Chicago: so American that we could not exist without her.
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