At seven in the morning, with the sun still rising, Al Clark kicks open the front door of the old school. “Ladies, ladies, ladies,” he calls out in his big, booming baritone voice. “How are my three beautiful ladies today?”
“This mo’ fu’,” one kid says, “started pushin’–”
“What did I tell you about calling me ‘man’?”
For a while there was talk of renovating the school. Former mayor Jane Byrne even recruited Chicago Bears founder George Halas as a corporate sponsor. “The Bears were going to help us build a football field out in the vacant lots in the back,” says Embry. “There were plans drawn up. I remember Mike Ditka came here with the old man. Ditka was sitting in the cafeteria smoking his cigar and everything.”
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“It was the pits,” adds Mildred Marshall, a lunchroom aide. “Kids would smoke marijuana right in the building. You didn’t see it, but you could smell it. I saw a kid bash another kid over the head with a chair. Kids would be swearing and fighting right in front of the principal. We had one assistant principal who would come in here with a bullhorn, saying ‘OK, sit down.’ I thought, ‘What’s that bullhorn for? Can’t you just get them to sit down? What do you need that thing for?’ It looked awful.”
Joe Clark, for instance, expelled rule breakers and academic stragglers, and tyrannically controlled teachers, parents, and students. The principal Cregier hired could not limit enrollment; state law required the school to accept all comers. Nor could a new principal simply impose his or her will. The whole point of reform was to put the schools in the hands of democratically elected and run councils of parents, teachers, and community representatives.
