I saw the Pope in 1979, when he came to visit the Catholics in Chicago.

From the top of my newsstand at Randolph and Michigan, right in front of the old Chicago Library.

It was really an amazing site, looking down over the heads of at least a hundred thousand Catholics, waiting for the Pope-mobile to pass by.

Considering the terrors of my earlier life in a small Jewish community on the south side of Chicago, completely surrounded by sometimes hostile Irish Catholics, I felt totally at ease.  I might not have been the only Jew in that sea of the faithful that cold Saturday, but I sure didn’t see any others pass by my newsstand.

But there wasn’t going to be any trouble that day.  Everybody there was on their best behavior, waiting to be blessed by the Pope.  I don’t think anybody was going to take a chance on burning in Hell in Eternal Damnation by picking on the solitary Jew near their vast outdoor Mass that day, considering that their Savior had a Bar Mitzvah, too, just like me, and He might not like it.

It sure was an exciting and historic day for the city, and I was really happy to just be there and be part of it.

But I almost missed it.

Because I almost lost that fabulous newsstand.

It’s really quite a story, with my own personal savior, although, not Jesus in this case.

No…not exactly like…Jesus Christ…at all.

Still…

Maybe…I better go back to the beginning, before I bought that stand, two years earlier.

***

During my war with Chicago’s previously only periodical distributor, when we fought over magazine accounts daily, all over the city, there was one plum location that was better known than any other, because of its enormous visibility to tens of thousands of Chicagoans, daily.

It was the huge newsstand at the corner of Randolph and Michigan, sitting outside of the city’s architectural gem of a public library. It was sixteen feet wide and six feet deep, at a time when a legal, regulation newsstand was six feet by four feet.

It was also perched at the top of the stairs of the entrance to the major downtown Chicago underground train station.  No other newsstand had such incredible visibility.

It didn’t sell the most newspapers or magazines, and it was hell to endure the frigid winds of Chicago’s terrible winters, but it was definitely a status symbol to the company who supplied it with its periodicals.

It even had a link with Chicago’s famous Capone era crime spree when a Chicago Tribune reporter, Jake Lingle, who was cozy with the mob, somehow crossed the wrong guy and after buying a newspaper at the Randolph and Michigan newsstand, on June 10, 1930, went down the long stairway. But instead of meeting a train, he met his Maker, in the form of a Capone ordered bullet.  It was the 39^th Gangland killing of that year.

In the early stages of the Distribution War, 1976-1980, the big other company never dreamed that the prime Randolph Street location was in play.  But the newsstand’s owner had three other stores, bookstores, and I was their supplier of magazines.

They were early defectors who switched to my side, the insurgent guerilla force, in the teeming metropolis of eager readers.

That huge newsstand was still under the thumb of the big guys, until one day in September 1977, the owner of the stand called me to ask me to meet him to discuss something.  We were friendly, but not friends.  He was my customer, I respected him, gave his stores good service and I was grateful for his early vote of confidence when I first mounted my challenge to the city’s monopoly.

We met at the McDonalds on Wabash Street, near the newsstand, where he laid the situation out for me.  He (1) hated the big distributor, for his own private reasons, (2) found that he could not apply the same management practices that he used to run his bookstores to the big outdoor newsstand, (3) knew that I owned and operated a small chain of newsstands, successfully, and (4) needed the money to pay off some other debts.

I was quite surprised, and excited, that this fabled newsstand could possibly be mine, when as I was growing up and then started my own newsstand at fifteen, twelve years earlier, that downtown location had always been referred to as the “Queen of the Newsstands”.

But I didn’t let the seller know that.

He and I had a good rapport, were both politically somewhat left of center, and shared a sense of solidarity that my challenge to the big guy was ostensibly hopeless, but worth the fight for the principle alone, that no company should hold a city, large or small, captive in a vice-like distribution grip.

I had a fair-sized stable of counter-culture type magazines that the larger company disdained to distribute because, among other objections to them, apparently felt that they were too limited in their readership for them to bother with.

But shared perspectives aside, business was business, and I waited for his price.

I pretty much knew the sales of the place, which gave me an advantage over other possible buyers of the stand, and also knew what I felt was a fair price.The seller asked for $100,000 for it, I countered with $85,000 and he responded with $90,000 total price, with $20,000 down, the rest paid out over time.

I looked at him, over the two Cokes, and the large fry order we were sharing on the table, weighed the risks, let a couple of beats pass, and then I said to him,

“It’s a deal!”

and I offered my hand as a contract to seal our verbal agreement.

He smiled, shook my hand firmly, and the whole affair took five minutes.

While the contract and the money would soon be dealt with, as far as we were concerned, the deal was done.

We didn’t need to sign anything at McDonalds to guarantee our agreement.  Our word and handshake were sufficient enough and as binding, in our world, as anything written.  There are people like that in the world, even today, and we were two of them.

The funny thing was that I had just agreed to pay that huge sum, $90,000 in 1977 dollars, (about $440,000 in 2022 dollars) for a metal structure that wasn’t attached to the ground, had no real heat, or bathroom, and especially, had no lease with the City of Chicago, the library or even a legal permit.

It just …was…and we both assumed that since it had first opened on that corner in the  early 1920’s, that it always would be there.  How many people would make such a deal?

Well, we both knew that if the seller chose to offer the location to the city’s main distributor, and they knew that I was the other possible buyer, they would have snatched it up in a second, at his asking price or perhaps somewhat more.  It was that much of a prize.

But the seller’s antagonism with the other company was such that he did not offer it to them, even though he needed the money. It was an act of defiance for him that he offered it to me at all.  I understood all of this as we briefly negotiated, and him, too.

Later, I heard tales from a friend of mine who worked for that other company, that as a group of executives came out of a strategy meeting about how to stymie the growing momentum of my tiny company, a secretary informed the group of my sudden acquisition of that bestof all newsstands.  The leader of the meeting stood there, dumbfounded, at this startling news, and then threw the notes of the meeting that he was holding in his hand up into the air, in disgust, and walked away, alone, down the hall as the many pages floated down and scattered all over the floor.

Another, to me, revealing incident occurred on the day of the closing, at my lawyer’s office.

My lawyer asked me, as I was about to sign the agreement to buy the business, that since the owner and I agreed to include the inventory as part of the whole package, how did I know that he didn’t secretly transfer significant amounts of inventory to his other three bookstores, to in effect, screw me out of maybe a thousand dollars?

I looked at my lawyer with surprise and just replied, simply,

 “Why, he wouldn’t do that.”

My lawyer smiled his impish smile, as he watched me sign the agreement.

 “Y’know”, he said to me, “when I was drafting this agreement, I called the owner’s father who was representing his son, to ask him about some minor thing, when the father told me that he had asked his son, how did he know that I didn’t load up the newsstand with a bunch of additional inventory, after we had reached our purchase agreement, so that I could present the son with one final fat invoice for magazines delivered?

The son replied to his father,

 “Bob wouldn’t do that.”

I looked at my lawyer curiously, and wondered why was it that lawyers were always surprised when two people acted honorably toward each other?

Was it possibly because if too many people acted that way, eventually, there would be significant unemployment among lawyers?

The sale went off without a hitch, all sides were content, and I continued to supply the former owner of that huge newsstand’s other three bookstores.

I worked a few mornings at the stand to try to get the feel of the place, as I broke in some new employees.  It was summertime and the air was pleasantly warm, T-shirt weather.

I remember my surprise when I arrived at the stand the first time, at 5 a.m. to open it and get everything set up, and the first commuter trains began to disgorge their many passengers: Chicago’s Downtown workforce.

I watched with mild interest as the first few pretty girls, reallypretty girls, came up that long stairway to go to their secretarial and office jobs.  This was 1977, remember, and girls were still called…well…girls!

But as train after train pulled into the station, and thousandsupon thousandsof good-looking babes poured out of that train station, swaying gracefully as they sashayed past my newsstand, I thought to myself, in my utter amazement at this mesmerizing river of tits and ass, so THAT”S where they keep all those gorgeous girls that I rarely see.  Underground!!!!!

The first Saturday after the sale was completed, I waited until closing time, about 6 P.M., and pulled up in front of the steel newsstand in one of my delivery trucks, a good sized van, filled with fresh, still fragrant lumber.  And one very substantial heavy steel sledgehammer.

I had decided that the stand as it was, was too small to make a really great magazine display, which was my main product, after all.

Even though the stand was steel, it was too shallow front to back to adequately protect my employees, magazines and newspapers from strong cold winter winds and sudden rain squalls. I knew that the business was about fifty years old, and that none of the other previous owners had felt the necessity to change the structure, but that didn’t mean that they were maximizing the economic potential of that terrific location.  I’d decided after some thought that it would be a potentially better return on my investment if the dimensions were changed to twenty feet wide from left to right, by six feet deep, by eight feet high with an eight foot extended roof, for better protection from the harsh sunlight, and the rain squalls.

Prior to me, the main emphasis was on selling thousands of newspapers to commuters, but there was little profit in that.  My experience with my other newsstands was that every time there was a price increase for the four Chicago daily newspapers, the percentage of profit that would go to the newsvendor would be cut.  So, that was not a star I wanted to hitch my wagon to.

Magazines cost more than newspapers, had a better percentage of profit, especially if Iwas the magazine distributor, and if I quadrupled the magazine display capacity, I might attract new customers that really didn’t need the final stock market numbers, but still wanted something to read.

So, with a small band of energetic employees, we swiftly unloaded a really significant stack of lumber parallel to my van, near the curb, and then completely removed everything of value from the newsstand and loaded it neatly into the van.

My employees then disappeared down the stairs to the train station, and went home, while I lovingly caressed the scarred head of my heavy sledgehammer and considered where to start the destruction.

There were few people on the street by then, about seven p.m., as Downtown Chicago emptied out pretty fast twenty-nine years ago. The notion that, someday, tens of thousands of people would actually livedowntown was so farfetched an idea that it never crossed my mind.

I took off my shirt, hung it behind the driver’s seat of the van, and got to it.

The old steel stand was composed of four four-foot sections welded together to form one long unit.  There were numerous small welds on the front, top and back of each place where one section met another.  If I could crack those old welds, I could separate the sections, and with some help that I knew I could probably get, push the four sections down the street and into the alley just west of the library, where they would disappear come Monday.

The real question was: could I destroy that old steel stand, dispose of it, and then replace it with a larger, completely new wooden newsstand, essentially built by myself, working all night, and still have time to paint it a dark color so that maybe nobody would notice it was totally different from the fifty-year old previous newsstand, by five a.m. Monday morning?

In just thirty-four hours?

 And, oh yes, with no construction permit from the City of Chicago.

Aw, what the hell, sure–I could do that!!!

I wailed away, shirtless, on the top of that famous newsstand with my sledgehammer, and made those old welds cry.  Bam! Bam!! Bam!!!

No one stopped me.  No cop came over and asked me what in the world did I think I was doing, before arresting me for numerous good reasons.  The racket was really loud, but Downtown was empty in 1977, and I was becoming worried that I wouldn’t be able to draft some kind soul to help me push the remnants of my destruction west down that long block to the alley.

So, how did I do that?  Get some husky young man to volunteer his services to further my objectives?

Well, I kept my eyes open, while beating the hell out of that old newsstand, hoping that the wooden handle of the sledge wouldn’t shatter from the endless concussions of steel against steel.  I hadn’t thought to bring a spare sledgehammer.  I was filled with confidence, but not caution.

Then, when a reasonably healthy-looking fella came up the stairs from the train station below, I’d call out to him and say,

“Hey, pal!  You look pretty strong!  Think you could give me a hand with thisthing?  I gotta get it down the street, into the alley before midnight(like it was my job), but it’s just too much for me alone.  They’ll be a few bucks in it for ya!”

 Rare was the vain young man able to resist such slobbering compliments to their manhood.  Short of putting on lipstick and shaking my hips, I never failed to find a guy to help me. Never.

I didn’t always offer a tip, and some guys, very macho, like that heavy work was really nothingfor them, refused the money.

They’d push those heavy pieces with me, making a terrible sound of steel screeching against concrete for hundreds of feet, down to the alley, wish me well and walk off anonymously, into the night.

No wonder women say, “Men are so  easy!”

We are.

At one point, at about one a.m. on Sunday morning, when I was trying to build the framework for the wooden newsstand, I found that I could not hold up both ends of a twenty-foot long two by twelve inch plank, by myself.  I guess it never occurred to me that thatpart might be a problem.  What to do?  What to do?

Just then, a very tall, athletic looking black woman was walking in my direction toward the train station steps.  She wasn’t rushing, so I figured: hey, what can I lose by asking?

I very politely, not like the siren call to the guys at all, asked her if it was possible that could she please, just hold up the six-foot vertical plank long enough for me to whack a few nails into the twenty-foot long roof support?

I said I’d be fast and offered her my gloves so she wouldn’t get any slivers.

That tall lady, in her early thirties I guessed, rolled her eyes at my excessive courtesy and told me to hurry up because her train was due in only a few minutes.

With good humor and a little impatient foot-tapping, she held the support up long enough for me to make three long nails sink into the heavy wood, then said she had to go and ran down the stairs to catch her train.

I think that at that time, I assumed that there were nice people everywhere, ready to help just for the asking, if you needed them.

Uncountable were the times that I offered or agreed to help push someone’s car out of a snow drift, often with other volunteers.

My feeling was that God kept a special account of the people who helped or didn’t help when a situation warranted it.  I wasn’t sure about that, so I wanted to make lots of deposits in that “account” just in case.  Then, if I ever was stuck sometime, somewhere, someone would come help me.  Someone always did.

This was, by the way, a different account from the one for the kids who were naughty or nice, though I guess you could be in both of them.

Maybe Santa…is God.

Or God…is Santa.

I have to think about it.

I worked all through the night.  It was cool that evening, and the workload was daunting.

Joyce, my wife, brought me some big roast beef sandwiches and a large hot cocoa, which I gobbled down voraciously, afraid to sit down lest I fall asleep.

At dawn, with the structure largely completed, I put my tools into the van, locked the doors, crawled into the driver’s seat, pulled a warm old blanket over me, and slept for four hours.  I had a windup alarm clock to wake me later that Sunday morning.

I slept the sleep of the dead.

About nine a.m., I started in again.

three hundred twenty square feet.  Then, in overlapping rows, just like my friend Arnie, a Norwegian carpenter with too much love of the grape, who taught me how to construct a waterproof roof , after my first newsstand burned down in Hyde Park November 28, 1970.  I put heavy rolls of granulate-covered roofing paper over the tar-like paper, and nailed everything in place with galvanized roofing nails.

Next, I pulled the pre-assembled magazine racks out of my van and installed them inside the newly enclosed space, which was quite a bit cozier than the old steel stand, even with an exposed twenty-foot front opening.

Then, and finally, I pulled five four-foot by eight-foot sheets of heavy duty plywood out of the van, along with a box of oversized barn-type hinges, three to a section, and installed, very tediously, a folding two-door security gate on the left, and the same, but with three folding sections, on the right.

Getting those two very heavy folding doors with five sections to accurately meet in the front of the stand was a bitch, but after some reworking, cursing and praying, I got the two parts to line up, then I added two very heavy duty hasps with some fierce looking Master locks to keep them closed at night to protect my inventory and—Voila!!—a new, 1977 model handmade newsstand, was born.

 

By then it was about six p.m. on Sunday evening, and still no one had even casually inquired about what had happened to that other fifty-year-old previous newsstand.

I called in my reserves from Hyde Park on the South Side of the city where my main newsstand was located, and four guys were driven Downtown by my wife complete with several gallons of very dark brown exterior house paint and brushes for everybody.

The five of us, Joyce being the designated driver and not a painter, attacked that newsstand like boll weevils descending on a cotton patch. With no time for a primer, we let the first coat serve that purpose on the fresh, dry wood.  Then as soon as it dried, we did the whole stand again, every bit of it, including all the hardware, so that the closed structure looked as anonymous and small as possible, snuggled up against up city’s 1897-era main library.  We were done with it by ten o’clock that night.

My crew ditched the empty paint cans and the used brushes in a dumpster near the abandoned parts of the former newsstand in that same alley, and then they caught a ride back home with my wife, who had been dozing in the van.

I gathered up all my tools and after a long moment to enjoy what I had done, alone and with my guys, I loaded up my van, parked now for two days on a main street in Downtown Chicago, without one tiny curious peep from a local cop, and zipped out of there. I tried not to think about how many laws I’d broken, and silently prayed I could pull this transformation off without any fallout.

The funny thing is, no customer ever said to me, or later, to one of my employees working at that newsstand,

 “Say!  Whatever happened to the good old shiny steel newsstand that was sitting here for fifty years?”

Nobody seemed to notice the day-to-night difference in size, color and personnel.

But then, why should anyone really care about who their newsvendor was, or what his little shack looked like?

It was just, y’know, a place to buy a newspaper. No big deal, right?

Right.

We thought I was home free, when I found out that there was indeedsomeone who noticed the big changes on that famous corner.

Two guys from the City of Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation.

But they weren’t there to compliment us on the minimalist architectural style of  the new newsstand on the very busy corner of Randolph and Michigan.

And they weren’t smiling, either.

The two men, large serious men in suits, flashed city employee I.D.s at me and curtly informed me that my newsstand was in violation of Chicago’s long established, standard issue, four-foot by six-foot newspaper stand, and whatwas I going to do about it?

No novice in this kind of situation, after my being in this business for twelve years, and quite used to being preyed upon by urban vermin on “official business from the City”, I smiled politely at those two big goons and patiently mentioned that this newsstand had been (almost) this size since the 1920’s, so of course the good people at the Department of Streets and Sanitation musthave noticed it, in all that time.

So, why were they here now, if the stand had been acceptable, as it was, for over fifty years just four blocks east of City Hall?

The gruffer of the two retorted to me that he didn’t want any crap from me, that there was a tough new boss back at Streets now and he wanted everything uniform in the Downtown area so Chicago would look good…for the tourists.

This was new territory for me, so mustering my confidence and invoking the time honored question that my father had taught me so well, to be used in all sticky and potentially unsolvable situations:

“Was it possible to resolve this little problem in some other mutually satisfactory way…..Gentlemen?”

 To my surprise, contrary to many years experience with that question being quietly answered with a certain mumbled number, the gruff guy said:

“Forget it, buster.  Our boss really wants this done, and this can’t be cured with a couple of double sawbucks.  I’m writing you up a citation of your violation(he was a poet, too) and I am giving you two weeks to bring this paper-stand up to code, or I’ll be back here with a crane to drag this shack off to the dump.  Got it, pal?”

 “Oh, and by the way,”

He continued, as the two of them were turning to go back to their bland city-issued car,

”Don’t try to grease any palms in the first ward Alderman’soffice.  Our boss is tight with the Mayor and it won’t do you any good.”

 He said this with a contemptuous sneer, over his shoulder, as he walked away.

He must have read my mind.

I’ve got real trouble, here.

Now what?

I’ve got a $90,000 investment being seriously threatened, no lease, no permit, a radical department head in City Hall that won’t be bribed, two nasty delivery boys that enjoyed seeing me squirm, and two weeks to make it all go away.

And to think that some people get upset over parkingtickets!

After a couple of days of struggling with this problem, unsuccessfully, while trying to run two outside newsstands, one real brick store, a distribution company and an increasingly cranky pregnant wife, I called my Dad, Irving, who with his long familiarity with corrupt city officials, cops, less-than-kosher lawyers and other unsavory types, could usually pull some magic rabbit out of a hat.

But, to my dismay, after a number of calls to connected people, he found that the Streets guy really was a hard ass, with no respect for half-century old landmarks like my recently acquired treasure, and that the guy actuallyintended to enforce the law.

Unprecedented!

 Plus, I was now down two more days, leaving just ten days more to fix this thing.

I was really worried, had my hands full trying to keep everything going while still immersed in a distribution war, and I was completely out of ideas.

My Dad, calmer than I was, suggested that I let him give it another try.

“ Who knows?” he said to me, “ Sometimes, impossible problems can get resolved in amazingly uncomplicated ways.                                 All you need…is a little faith.”

 But another three days passed by, and my faith was becoming frayed around the edges.

Just…one…more…week…to save my landmark newsstand.

Then, my Father called.

He told me to take it easy, that there just might be a new angle to this.

He said that he had discussed the problem with my Mother, Anne, and that I should call her.

 “She told me that she just might know a man that could help you.”

 My…Mother.

The woman my Father divorced, in a rage, thirteen years before.

The woman who beat me, unmercifully, for nine years with whatever was handy at the time.  Who threw me out of her house at two-thirty in the morning, in the rain, two weeks before I graduated grammar school, at fourteen, thirteen years ago.

The woman I never spoke to.

Not on her birthday.

Not on Mother’s Day.

She…was going to help…me.

Another day passed before I could make myself do it.

My Mother.

 I couldn’t stand the thought of her, let alone talk to her.

But I was really stuck, this time.

If that big newsstand was towed away, and I still had a $70,000 note to pay, it could sink my business.                                                                  Fifty some people would lose their jobs, employees I had known for years.  Not to mention the disaster that would befall my own family.

Whatever my Mother thought she could do to help, I had to try.

My Mother was an interior decorator at the time, beginning in the Fifties, when women, mothers, rarely worked. She had an office in the basement of our house, was down there all the time when she was home, and I rarely saw her.

If…I was lucky.

But to everyone else, outside our little family, she was funny, charismatic, charming, sophisticated and extremely talented concerning color, furniture, lighting, fabric, flooring, and how to tie it all together.

And my Mother…was a beauty.

After her death, in 2001, at eighty, my sister and I found box after box of love letters from all kinds of men: soldiers from World War II, jewelers (she designed jewelry, then), businessmen—all from before she married our father in 1946, when she was twenty-five years old.

She was fluent in Yiddish, wrote poetry in English and men of a certain age just found her fascinating.  And not just Jewish men.  Greeks, Italians, and people descended  from all around the Mediterranean Sea area found her unusual “independent woman” personality and voluptuous figure, irresistible.  She could make powerful men do things for her, with a smile that…maybe…promised more—but never did, as far as I knew, while she was married.

She was really something…if…you weren’t her little boy.

I saw a cop stop her for some violation, probably speeding, going south on Jeffery Avenue at 73^rdStreet near the railroad tracks, in Chicago, when I was about ten, in 1960.

The poor guy never had a chance.  Within ten minutes, he not only didn’t issue a ticket, but profusely thanked my Mother for her offer to get him good furniture at wholesale prices.  As she was about to get back into our car, I heard him call out to her to feel free to call him anytime, even at his home, if everhe could help her.

So, she had a way with men, and my Father knew it, because he had been one of them. When he called her, he already knew she would know who to call, to help her son.

And, she did.

I called her, late that night when I could force myself do it, sitting at my desk in the basement of my house, and…as if we had notbeen estranged for the last thirteenyears…launched right in to my dilemma, and my desperation to make it go away.

There was a silence, for a moment.

I could just see the white smoke from one of her endless Pall Mall cigarettes curling around her face, like a little cloud, as she began to answer me.

 

“Call this man, Bob,” she said to me in her husky voice, from too many cigarettes.

“He’s a big man in the rackets, here in Chicago, and you’re in his area.  I told him about your trouble with the city, and he offered to help.  Here is his number.  Call him.  Go see him. Be very, very polite.”

“His name…is Mario Bianco.”

 “Good luck, Bob.  I hope this works out for you.”

 

 Then she hung up, just like that.

I sat there at my desk, looking at the phone for a long while.

Then I turned off the light.

And I sat there in the dark for a good while longer.

This was something I knew nothing about.  And I didn’t want to know.

This was like playing with loaded guns.

I shivered.

The next morning, I called the number that my Mother gave me.

 

Mario Bianco wasn’t “in the rackets”.

He was the rackets.

How did my Mother know him?

My Dad told me she decorated his house.

I guess he really liked her work.

I imagine, it was a cash deal.

 

An accented male voice answered the phone, and after I told him who sent me, he told me a time and place to come meet Mr. Bianco.

Is it really necessary for me to state, even though it is nearly thirty years later, and almost all the major players in this drama are dead, that Mario Bianco is not, and was not his real name?

You think I’m stupid?

I went to an old office building on the West Side of Downtown Chicago, as I was instructed.  I went in the door and noticed that there were no names on the directory of businesses in the building.  The lobby was small and musty.  There was no trash or anything lying around on the floor, but the whole feeling was old, worn out, past it’s time.

The building was a few stories tall, so I took the automatic elevator to the fifth floor, also as instructed, and got out on five when it stopped.

There was a hallway, dimly lit, with some of the fluorescent bulbs burned out, and I looked for a name so I would know where to knock.  But none of the several offices had any names on them, until I went around a corner and saw, in peeling gold letters, “Bianco Enterprises”.

“Well, Mom,”I soberly thought to myself…

 ”I guess, this is the place.”

I knocked on the door, and very soon a thin, dark complected  man, about my age, late twenties, opened the door and motioned me inside.  I followed his instructions and stood in the middle of a suite of offices, some with lights on, some not.  All the doors were closed and there were no other names written on the doors of any of the offices.  It smelled like this place hadn’t opened a window in a long, long time.

My host told me to wait where I was, which, of course, I did.

Then he went away.

And I waited.

And waited.

Shifting from one foot to the other, in the musty gloom, I thought about the meaning of life and decided that thiswas not part of it.  Then, the elevator door opened, and when I turned to the sound, saw a short, maybe five foot four, even darker-complected man, about sixty something, very…um…well-fed.

His hair was steely gray, and his face was jowly and immobile.

He had small, very dark eyes and I could see that they were sharp.

He walked past me without speaking, opened the door with his name on it and then beckoned me to come inside.  There was not a lot of conversation in this building.

When I entered his office, the younger man reappeared, suddenly, and closed the door behind me.  I was imagining, uncomfortably, that for some unfortunate souls, going up that elevator was a one-way trip.

Then the older man spoke, with a distinct Italian accent, but I wasn’t there to guess what region he was from, and he said to me,

“So…how is your Mother?”

“Is everything ok with her?”

I quickly assured him that she was very well, and she sent her greetings to him.

He nodded, with a small smile. He did notintroduce himself to me.

He offered his hand, which I immediately shook, and told him how much I appreciated his taking the time to see me, as busy as he must be.  His hand was quite large, very calloused, hard, and muscular.  But when he shook my hand, he made no effort to squeeze it as tightly as he could have, to show me his power.

He was gentle and courteous to me, always with the younger man off to the side, who remained silent, but very observant.  Mr. Bianco quickly got to the point.

“Tell me about these men who are bothering you. 

What did they look like? 

Do you have their names?”

I told him.

He wrote nothing down.

I saw no paper or pens, anywhere.

Then he said,

“Show me the citation they gave to you.”

I did so immediately, and he squinted at it, in the dim light of his ancient, empty office, nodding as he read it.  He called the other man over to him and showing him the note, said something to him that I could not hear, though they were but a few feet from me.

The younger man nodded, looked at the name at the bottom of the notice again, and returned it to me.  His expression was different, somehow, but he remained silent.

The older man then looked at me, right into my eyes, and he said,

“It is good when a son shows respect to his Mother. 

Your Mother says you are good to her.  Is that so?”

I nodded.  Nervously.

“Do you call her, make sure she has everything she needs?”

I paused, this time, and cleared my throat.

Then I looked directly at him, something I sensed was important to him.

“I do…not…call her as much as a ‘good son’ should.  But I will, from now on.”

The older man looked at me, steadily, appraising me.

Was I worth his time?

Where…was this going?

Was I about to have…a problem?

I think Mario Bianco knew a great deal.

And I think he could tell when a man was lying to him.

So that was why I didn’t lie to him.

I decided that the truth would make him have more respect for me, even if the answer was not what he would have liked to hear.

Then he said,

“Do that.”

I nodded that I understood.

He smiled, a little.

Then, as if he just remembered why I had come to him, he said,

“About these men, this notice.  Don’t worry about it.  We…will take care of it.”

He then moved toward me and gently took my arm, guiding me out of his office and back toward the elevator.  His assistant pushed the button.

The door opened.

Then he said to me,

“Tell your Mother that I wish her good health. She is a fine woman.”

“You…will…look after her?”

Not really a question, at all.

I assured him that I would.

Again, he offered me his hand.

I shook it again, but I noticed that this time, his hand held mine a little longer, and a little firmer.

He smiled at me.

I thanked him for seeing me, and helping me.

Then I said, with understandable hesitation,

“Can…I…do…anything…for…you?”

He waved away my question, dismissing it.

Then he turned, and…he was gone.

Our meeting, was over.

His young assistant motioned me into the elevator.

He did not say… ”Good-bye”.

 His eyes watched me as the door closed.

And I shivered…again.

A few days later, I was working at my Randolph and Michigan newsstand, busy with the rush hour final-markets customers, who wanted what they wanted, fast, and with the correct change just before they raced down the long Illinois Central stairway.

With the swift river of people swirling around me, grabbing papers, running for their trains, I didn’t notice the two large men walking up to my newsstand, with angry expressions on their faces. They were the two guys from Streets and Sanitation!!  I was…surprised.

 The gruff one spoke first, roughly grabbing my bicep.

“Didn’t I tell you that ya had…two weeks…to cut this shack down?        

Now, dummy, we’re gonna have to haul it away!”

 I was so surprised to see them, that before I could catch myself, I blurted out,

“But…Mario Bianco said…!!”

I never got to finish the sentence.

I will never forget the look on their faces.

Those two big men just recoiled from me, as if I were…radioactive.

 They literally bounced away from me, with a look of absolute terror in their eyes I will never be able to erase from my memory.

I had unknowingly committed a sin.  I had spoken the name of my benefactor, out loud, in public.  People looked at me, strangely. I was confused.

What do I do now?

 But my former fierce tormentors from Streets were suddenly pleading with me.

“We didn’t come here.  We were never here.  Forget everything.”

They were begging me, as they stumbled backwards to their car.

I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Please,” the gruff one called out to me from his open window.

“Please, please, don’t tell them we were here.”

“Oh my God, I am so sorry…”

But they had driven away before I could hear any more.

I watched as their red tail lights became lost in the rush hour traffic.

They never came back.

Now I knew…what real  terror…looked like.

I see it now, from a distance of thirty years later, as a matter of degree:

I’ve known small-time drug dealers in the late Sixties who always had a joint or two to sell, but I’ve never known anyone who sold heroin.

I’ve known some young women of flexible virtue in the neighborhood around my Hyde Park newsstand who were available by the hour, but I’ve never known anyone who trafficked in sex-slaves snatched from other countries.

I’ve known where to (quietly) buy a handgun in a side street very near the University of Chicago, but I’ve never known anyone who sold hand-held rocket launchers to terrorists.

I’ve known people, many people, in the Sixties and Seventies, with a bottomless loathing for the administrations of both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, because of their stupidity concerning the endless Viet Nam War, but I never knew anyone who would blow-up a government building to express their frustration.

Finally, I’ve known small-time thieves who, unsuccessfully, tried to sell me stolen bundles of brand new Playboy Magazines out of the trunks of their cars, but never, ever, have I known, before or since that brief moment in time in 1977, any person of the bone-chilling, casually deadly, criminal magnitude of…..Mario Bianco.

 

Before all this happened, I hadn’t spoken to my Mother for a long time.

It would never be possible to forgive her for the terrible things she had done to me.

The wounds were gone from my body, but were still etched…deep in my mind.

But I found out that there is no telling what a mother will do, when someone threatens her son.

Even…my Mother.

Whatever my stonelike heart felt or didn’t feel for her, she had done something for me that could have been done by no…other…person.

I never expected to be in her debt.

I had to do…something.

I began to call her.

Sometimes, we would go out to a movie, or for dinner.

I saw her on Mother’s Day.

I took her out on her birthday, February 13^th.

It was notat all easy.

She could be a very difficult person to be with.

But I felt I owed it to her, to give her back her son.

So, for the next twenty-three years, until her death, I continued to look after her, and made certain that she never felt alone.

You may think I was just doing this out of fear of the Godfather.

But…I would have done it, anyway.

Still, for a long time, whenever I called her, I always had this odd feeling that…someone…was looking over my shoulder, watching me dial her number.

And smiling.

Sometimes…impossible problems can get resolved in amazingly uncomplicated ways.

But who would have dreamt that my intense effort to save my giant newsstand from some petty tyrants from City Hall would lead me to a deadly Crime Lord who not only protected me from their threats, but also whose not too subtle suggestions would result in my reclaiming my Mother, after living nearly half my life…without one.

He made me see the good in her, and to accept my responsibilities as a son.

So, what could I do for a man like…Mario Bianco?

He wanted nothing from me.

He was really only being kind to me out of respect for…and friendship with…my Mother.

I knew that.

 

Still, I had to do something.

I sent him…flowers.

Lots…of flowers.

I signed the note that went with it:

Mille Grazie, Don Bianco

Ciao!!

***************

Publishing News!

(Currently seeking representation as a speaker/poet for hire)

Bob Katzman’s two new true Chicago books are now for sale, from him!
Vol. One: A Savage Heart and Vol. Two: Fighting Words

Gritty, violent, friendship, classic American entrepreneurship love, death, heartbreak and the real dirt about surviving in a completely corrupt major city under the Chicago Machine. More history and about one man’s life than a person may imagine.

Please visit my new website: http://www.dontgoquietlypress.com
If a person doesn’t want to use PayPaI, I also have a PO Box & I ship anywhere in America.

Send me a money order with your return and contact info.
I will get your books to you within ten days.
Here’s complete information on how to buy my books:

Vol 1: A Savage Heart and Vol. 2: Fighting Words
My books weigh almost 2 pounds each, with about 525 pages each and there are a total together of 79 stories and story/poems.

Robert M. Katzman
Don’t Go Quietly Press
PO Box 44287
Racine, Wis. 53404-9998 (262)752-3333, 8AM–7PM

Books cost $29.95 each, plus shipping

For: (1) $3.95; (2) $5.95; (3) $7.95; (4) $8.95 (5) $9.95;(6) $10.95

(7) $11.95; (8) $12.95; (9) $13.95 (10) $15.95 (15) $19.95

I am also for hire if anyone wants me to read my work and answer questions in the Chicago/Milwaukee area. Schools can call me for quantity discounts for 30 or more books. Also: businesses, bookstores, private organizations or churches and so on.

My two latest books are available in the Racine Wis Public Library. Both books are labeled: 921 KAT. ROB on their spines, in autobiography Dept.

Signed Books are also for sale at:

Studio Moonfall Bookstore, 5031 7th St. Kenosha, Wis, email: hello@studiomoonfall