Never a City So Real Read Free Page B

shipping it west by rail and eventually east by the St. Lawrence Seaway. By the 1960s, the mills employed eighty thousand men and women; they cascaded in from Poland, from Yugoslavia, from Mexico, and from the American South. Steel mills and refineries lined up along the dredged Calumet River and along the Lake Michigan shoreline, extending twenty-two miles from South Chicago to Gary, Indiana. This stretch of boiling steel was the equivalent of an industrial mountain stream, the source for can openers and knives, refrigerators and cars, bridges and skyscrapers. It fed this country’s insatiable hunger for consumption and comfort. It was, in short, the nation’s lifeblood.
    The local population is still so dependent on the mills that the daily newspaper in Hammond, Indiana, which is just over the Chicago border, runs a box score every Wednesday of the region’s steel tonnage and capacity. Nonetheless, there are only fifteen thousand working in the mills now; the owners grew complacent, so accustomed to their oligopoly that they forgot how to compete. Between the mills that still roll steel, there are hundreds of acres of vacant land littered with abandoned factory buildings stripped of their exteriors, brick coke houses collapsing in on themselves, and railroad tracks and bridges that have turned a muddy brown from rust.
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    Ed Sadlowski, who is a sixty-four-year-old resident of South Chicago and who loves his city’s opera, its museums, and its baseball teams, can’t understand why his wife wants to move to Florida, where the world seems dipped in pastels. Sadlowski loves his neighborhood. Although he’s been retired from the mills and from his union work for twelve years, he still feels most at home among its tired workers and its skeletal factories. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. For him, the landscape of the past that connects him to his neighbors and to the world is palpable here, and Sadlowski fears that the story of his people might disappear if he were to abandon this place. He has become the custodian of its history.
    I first became acquainted with Sadlowski in 1976, not in Chicago, but in a steelworkers’ union hall in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when he was making labor history rather than fighting to preserve it. I was attending college nearby, where I eagerly detected rumblings of the coming class war in any worker who spoke derisively of his or her boss (which, I would later learn, included just about anyone who worked for someone else). Then I heard that this maverick, freespoken steelworker from Chicago was running for the international union’s presidency, and that he actually had a chance. So a group of friends and I drove to Bridgeport and climbed the stairs to the second-floor meeting room where, despite our soft hands, long hair, and youth, we somehow thought we’d blend in. To be honest, I don’t remember much of that gathering except for Sadlowski himself, who, dressed in an open-collared polyester shirt, was as eloquent and clearheaded a speaker as I’d ever heard. He talked of how the workers and the bosses have nothing in common. “It’s a class question,” he bellowed. I went away thinking that if this was the proletariat, I wanted in.
    Sadlowski, who was a beefy man back then, has become beefier. (He once told a reporter while speaking of an eighty-seven-year-old friend who was physically fit: “He’s as sharp as ever. I wonder what he drinks that keeps him that way.” To which Sadlowski’s wife, Marlene, replied, “Exercise!”) He’s always been a charismatic man—I’ve heard more than one woman say she had a crush on him—but his barrel of a belly now seems to rest precariously on his toothpick-thin legs. It’s more, though, than just his physical bearing that’s oversized. It’s also his appetite for new people, new places, new ideas. His friends have included Studs Terkel