The seventh- and eighth-graders at DeWitt Clinton Elementary School on the northwest side are a lively bunch, gregarious and gawky, as are most early teens on the threshold of that social and academic mine field otherwise known as high school; but like prisoners in the dock, they stiffened and eyed me cautiously as I entered the school gymnasium, knowing that I was one of the guests invited to judge the seventh- and eighth-grade history fair.
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The project at the end of the table next to the door focused on the history of the Chicago Bears, consisting of a two-by-three-foot poster board painted with the Bears emblem and pictures of Walter Payton and Mike Ditka, as well as a white cardboard model of Soldier Field (I recognized its scoreboard and rounded end) with a 1988 Bears roster on the 50-yard line. I asked the student, who looked like a Future Fullback of America, why he picked the Bears. He told me he’s been watching the Bears since their Super Bowl season and liked them. I asked about some players on the team, and he supplied ready evaluations. Did he know George Halas? Gale Sayers? Red Grange? He furrowed his brow for a moment and told me that Halas was the old owner of the Bears, but admitted not knowing who the other two guys were. He got points for honesty.
During one architecture presentation, a student crept up behind and put a party hat on the head of the speaker. With admirable restraint, the project owner–I wish I’d shaken his hand–re-moved the hat and continued his talk. After I thanked him and proceeded to the next project, he strode angrily to the end of the aisle, saying, “What the hell’s the matter with you, putting this thing on my head while I’m trying to talk to the judge?”
“Well,” the girl drawled as she tried to buy time, “he ran an effective political machine,” though she shrugged and said she didn’t know exactly what a political machine was; she probably thought it was some kind of vote tabulator. Points for a refreshing political naivete, which I didn’t give to the owner of the Adlai Stevenson project, who thought Lyndon Johnson was a Republican.
Other 19th-century notables included John Jones, a free black who came to Chicago and worked as a tailor, holding $100,000 in assets shortly before the fire; Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, a social crusader who worked with the city’s impoverished for decades; and Bertha “Queen of Chicago Society” Palmer, although she was noted in the project as a crusader for women’s rights (“She discussed women’s rights with the president!”). Ernest Hemingway and Chicago’s poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks represented literature.
