Joy’s Diamond Ring: Romance and Racketeers
By Robert M. Katzman © Sunday, July 11, 2010 (updated 2/8/2021)
First published by Bob Katzman at 10:47 pm on Sunday, July 11, 2010
Not your usual love story.
A fifty-year saga about a Chicago West Side tribal immigrant’s tale, encompassing: Friendship, Jewelry, Gangsters and the real meaning of lifetime friendship, no matter what.
A puzzle with so many pieces, all steadily adding up to Joy’s diamond ring.
On December 31, 1977, New Year’s Eve, I invited my long-time love, Joyce Esther Bishop, then 27, to dinner at a famous old Chicago steakhouse. Specifically, The Kinzie Steakhouse, but which is now far better known today as Harry Caray’s Steakhouse, after the now deceased and legendary Chicago radio announcer for the Chicago White Sox baseball team, famously remembered for yelling: “HOLY COW!!” after every home run hit by the home team.
Aside from Joy’s full-time day job working in the city, she also worked at my original Hyde Park store, Bob’s Newsstand, every weekend. She was either selling newspapers, stuffing the Sunday newspaper’s weekend components inside each paper or keeping an eye on all the numerous part-time employees and/or the endless stream of customers.
This was back in the days when Chicago still had four separate daily newspapers and was the last remaining American city to be so blessed. Now there are only two Chicago newspapers left, both post-bankruptcy, and in their present (2010) shrunken and sensationalized formats, they would have seemed other worldly to either of us in 1977.
The then fiercely competitive conservative Chicago Daily Tribune and the more liberal Democratic Chicago Sun-Times, were rich and mighty Midwestern icons of journalism, seemingly able to last forever, just thirty-two years ago. What happened?
Joy was certain that I loved her, since I told her so every single day (and still do). I was also convinced that she loved me too, in the unmistakable ways women get that idea across to the objects of their affection.
(Read on …)