July 9, 2010 Southwest News-Herald - City & Suburban
Old Days with Mayor Richard M. Daley
I was manning the “Arabs of Chicagoland” cultural display at the Arabesque Festival two weeks ago, which featured historical photographs and stories I have been collecting for the past 35 years.
All of a sudden, from behind me, I heard someone yelling my name. “Ray Hanania. Ray Hanania.”
OK. Was it the FBI? The INS? Homeland Security? No. It was Mayor Daley.
I’m thinking, oh this is bad. I can handle the INS, FBI and Homeland Security. But Mayor Daley. He’s probably going to start complaining about how he doesn’t like what I write.
Memories of covering the mayor as a City Hall reporter for 16 years flashed back, and they weren’t pretty. At one press conference, Daley declared he was “furious” at a series of stories I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times challenging his administration’s claims of fairness to African Americans.
Of course, that was quite a contrast to the day he declared his candidacy for Cook County State’s Attorney in 1980 and he declared that I was “the most objective and fair reporter in Chicago” as a prelude to announcing his candidacy — after he told me he was going to run for Cook County Clerk.
Well, we’ve both aged a lot from those days at Chicago’s City Hall, when Jane Byrne was mayor and she was obsessed with destroying Daley and the 11th Ward along with Bill Lipinski’s 23rd Ward and Tom Hynes’ 19th Ward.
She was booted out of office but the changes she set in place continued opening the door for Daley to come back and run and win the office of mayor in 1989.
Daley smiled when I said, “Hi, Mayor. You’re smiling and calling my name. I figured you would be calling me names.” Daley laughed in his characteristic chortle and shook his head.
“I understand the media,” Daley said. “You have to write what you have to write.”
Daley picked up copies of my two books at the cultural display that was hosted by Ziyad Brothers Importing and Wild Garden Hummus Dip and he laughed again. “There it is,” he laughed pointing to my humor book titled I’m Glad I Look Like a Terrorist: Growing up Arab in America.
When I gave him a copy of the book in November 1997 at the Arab Heritage Month celebration, he told the audience he’d read it but he couldn’t say the title in public. And he also took a quick flip through my other book Arabs of Chicagoland, which was the basis for the cultural display.
Daley and I reminisced about the old days for a few minutes and I asked him to come on my radio show, which he said he’d do. (Even I know a mayor doesn’t control his own life, though. His overly protective aides run his schedule, so will he be on the radio show? Maybe. Maybe not.)
But before he left he paused at one of the photos hanging up in the tent booth. It was a picture of his father greeting the ambassador from Morocco at his City Hall office. Behind him was Col. Jack Riley, then the city’s special events director.
Riley had called me up one morning in 1975 when I was a student of then Professor Milton Rakove at the University of Illinois at Chicago (then called Circle Campus).
“That was my very first story as a writer,” I told him. “I took the picture of your father and wrote the story.”
Daley patted me on the back and shook my hand. He was polite and always smiling. No animosity at all. Daley understands that politicians and columnists don’t get along, even if we wanted to.
It’s the nature of the beast. And as an old friend of mine, Harry Golden Jr., used to say, “It’s all a paper moon.”
(Ray Hanania is an award-winning columnist, radio talk show host and a Chicago area media consultant. He may be reached at rayhanania@comcast.net.)
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