The defending champions, a crew of eight or so Italians, their hair gray and faces lined, stand behind a table loaded with plates of macaroni, pasta e fagioli, and eggplant parmigiana.
Spitz surveys the room. It’s packed with tables, each stacked with a variety of enticing, delicious-smelling foods. Over in the far corner is the Cajun table, prepared by a group of blacks from the west side., Close by is a table piled high with fried chicken. There’s a Ukrainian table, too, as well as one for the Chinese, Mexicans, and Poles.
They thought of everything.
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The cooks and food servers are behind their tables now, and the room is filling up with senior citizens, who, from the looks of them, are ravenous and ready to eat. They shuffle down the hall and wind their way around the tables, piling their paper plates high with food. The cooks from Chinatown have positioned themselves at the front of the room and do brisk business with their egg rolls.
He takes a bite out of a guacamole salad and sips a cup of coffee. He’s on the run, Ahrens explains, and won’t be able to stay for the postlunch prize ceremony. There is another senior citizen function to attend-this one on the northwest side.
Jim Sparling, the college’s founder, was dedicated to the proposition that all qualifying applicants– blacks and Jews included –should be admitted. In the 1940s, that attitude was considered radical. Ahrens graduated with the class of 1949 (his class president, by the way, was a young black student named Harold Washington) and went to work for Sparling as a top assistant. In 1956, Daley named him to a commission then investigating how to take care of a growing elderly population. It was a natural appointment. Ahrens was in charge of continuing- education programs at Roosevelt.
“I got back to my office and Harry Golden of the Sun-Times was on the line. He asks if it’s true that I am leaving City Hall and I say, yes it’s true. Harry says what about your assistant, Andree Oliver? Is she going to stay? Well, Andree told Harry that ‘I have worked with the best; I’m not working with a hack.”‘
