Chicago: Dave Garroway’s Kind of Jazzy Town

I would never admit this to Joyce, but I made a mistake once.

It happened on a transcontinental train, and it was so long ago I can almost blame it on my youth. The mistake was: I didn’t go to Chicago when I could have.

I was 19 and had been working as an announcer for a little radio station in Arizona when I was hired by a bigger little radio station in Muscatine, Iowa.

Seeking a Quicker Exit

Full of youthful impatience, I approached the railway conductor and asked if it wouldn’t be possible for me to leave the train in some city closer to my destination.

At first he didn’t believe me.

“Now let me get this straight,” he said. “Your fare is paid through to Chicago, where you catch another train that takes you to Muscatine, Iowa, and yet you want to get off earlier and miss Chicago completely?”

“Well, sir,” I said, “why should I go all the way to Chicago when Muscatine is almost 200 miles this side of it?”

“Because,” he said, “that’s where the train tracks go. Chicago is the rail hub . . . the center of, well, everything.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “but then I’d be stuck there for a whole day before I could catch my other train.”

“ Stuck ?” The conductor looked at me for a few moments. “I’d rather miss Omaha than Chicago and I live in Omaha.” He muttered something about “youth,” sat down with a timetable and a map and muttered something else about what was going to happen to the world in the hands of a generation like mine.

He let me off at Cedar Rapids. After a long bus ride I got to Muscatine and spent most of the following year kicking myself.

I’m not saying Muscatine isn’t much now, but it certainly wasn’t much then. No theme parks, national monuments, scenic bridges or Taj Mahal-like structures, except, of course, for the button factory.

Muscatine had long been known as the pearl button capital of the world. It had also claimed to be the only city “where the Mississippi flows west.” Whoopee.

Hard Row to Hoe

Except for the radio station in a farmhouse two miles out of town where I worked, literally from sunup to sundown, there was nothing to do in Muscatine. And when you’re 19 and a stranger in town, that’s a pretty hard row to hoe.

Late at night, though, particularly when it was very cold, I could tune in Chicago. Close to midnight, Dave Garroway was on WMAQ, playing records and talking about some of the world’s great jazz.

Garroway wasn’t just bright, he was brilliant. And he seemed obsessed with the desire to share all of the good things with his listeners, whom he talked to as if we were all close friends.

He talked about music and he talked about his town till you felt it was your town, that you too were part of the life of that great city. And Garroway’s Chicago did live.

It worked, it played and it sang. It was alive, raucous, beautiful, comfortable and exciting. It was “The City That Worked,” Carl Sandburg’s “Hog Butcher to the World,” “The City With the Big Shoulders.”

It was the focus of all America’s transportation and most of her communications and commerce. It was Oz and Samarkand and Xanadu. To Garroway it had all the vitality of a beating heart.

Every night before going to sleep, pictures formed in my mind, and they were in colors as bright as Garroway could paint them. One of my strongest desires became getting an announcing job in Chicago, to go there and be a part of it all.

But it never happened.

I wondered over the years, as those sharp colors slowly faded to pastel, whether I’d ever even get to see Chicago. And then I traded in those dreams for others and seldom thought about the city at all.

Getting to Town

That ended a few months ago when my wife and I were attending a convention in Kansas City. A side trip to Chicago was offered for a relatively small additional fee, so we took it.

I had heard that going to the Windy City by way of O’Hare Airport was about as happy an experience as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre or the Chicago Fire.

Having been reprogrammed by a generation of movies and television, I kind of expected that the wind would be whipping freshwater Popsicles off the lake and throwing them at a lot of gangsters patrolling the gray and gloomy city with Tommy guns.

What I’d heard was wrong. On the morning we arrived, the airport was as good and the service as fast as we had had at any major terminal in the world. There was a mild breeze and a few buttermilk clouds but otherwise the weather was perfect.

There were other surprises.

Since we were part of a convention group, we had our own bus transportation from the airport into town. Being among a lot of journalists, Joyce and I had assumed that everyone would be pretty blase. But whatever sophisticated conversation there was faded abruptly when our bus driver started pointing out the city’s major buildings.

My fellow passengers were listening with the same rapt attention as the people we had been with when our first European tour bus had entered Rome. Eyes were wide open and mouths agape.

Joyce, who had worked in Chicago years earlier, leaned over and whispered, “They’ve brought us to the wrong city. This can’t be Chicago. It’s so clean. No one could wear white clothes in the Chicago I used to know.”

Racing a Train

For a while, on the freeway into town, we raced a train. I was told later that the fact there was no graffiti on it was a fluke, but it was shiny bright when we saw it and we were impressed.

“That train,” said the driver, “will take you all the way from O’Hare into the city. Remember that when you come back, and you will come back.”

“Where’s the Merchandise Mart?” someone asked. “Isn’t it the world’s largest commercial building?”

“Maybe in floor space,” the driver said, nodding toward an area of skyscrapers. “It’s down in there somewhere. Now, over to your right, that building with the twin spires. . . .”

Perhaps, I thought, sophistication just doesn’t work on Chicago. We came to believe it over the next few days. Our fellow journalists were just like any other tourists.

Just standing on Michigan Avenue, staring at Marshall Field’s, Tiffany, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s and the other stores on the Magnificent Mile set Joyce and most of the other women in our group to hyperventilating.

“This is the greatest shopping city in the universe,” Joyce said, as we stood looking in a store window. “And someday I’m coming back here and I’m bringing all our plastic and not going to bring you.”

I laughed, but I don’t think she was kidding.

We stayed at the Lenox House, a small old theatrical hotel on Rush Street. All the rooms had been newly renovated and all had pull-down beds. They also had kitchens, which can be a considerable saving. We didn’t spend much time in our room anyway.

We took a train to Evanston so Joyce could visit Northwestern University, her alma mater. We visited the Field Museum of Natural History, the Art Institute, galleries and landmarks. We honored some of Chicago’s famous chefs by gaining weight before their eyes. And, of course, I ate Frangos chocolates from Marshall Field’s.

We listened to big bands and small jazz combos (Chicago-style, naturally) and watched a full Stephen Sondheim musical at a dinner theater.

At a production of “Shear Madness” (at the Mayfair Theater) whatever sophistication might have been left in our group fell away as we drank wine and laughed and tried to help the actor/detectives solve the crime the play was about. It was OK--the audience was supposed to help and the more noise the better.

Ride on the River

We saw some of the world’s great architecture during a boat ride on the Chicago River, chased some of Chicago’s ghosts (including John Dillinger’s at the largely unchanged Biograph Theater) and visited the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Joyce wanted to find out if they had any recordings of the radio serial “Terry and the Pirates.” She had played the part of Burma in the series when she was a girl. They did.

On our last night we went with old friends to the top of the Hancock Center, where we had drinks and watched a fireworks display. It was several blocks away and about the same distance below. The Hancock Center is one of the tallest buildings in the world. Off in the distance we could see the lights from ships on Lake Michigan.

“There’s nothing like it, you know,” one of our friends said. “And no place in the world I’d rather be.”

For a while the four of us sat in silence just looking down at the city. When an emergency vehicle sped up the avenue with red and blue lights flashing, I realized that the color was all back. The pictures in my mind that had bled away to pastels over the years were back; they were bright again and I knew they wouldn’t fade anymore.

“It’s a wonderful town,” I said.

For a moment I thought I’d heard the voice of an old friend, Dave Garroway, but more than likely it was an illusion. It was just one word.

“Peace.”