If things go Mayor Daley’s way, there will be a new airport on the southeast side sometime early in the next century. It will stretch from 103rd Street to 150th in Calumet City, and from the Calumet Expressway to the state line. It will employ 40,000 people and generate billions in tax revenues. It will rejuvenate South Chicago and other worn-out communities. It will encourage investors to build hotels and restaurants on the former sites of toxic dumps and abandoned steel mills. It will generate jobs for the area’s poor, most of them black and Hispanic. It will be the most expensive public works project in Chicago’s history. It will prove that Mayor Daley is a man of vision. It will accommodate 600,000 flights a year and millions of passengers. They’ll probably call it the Richard J. Daley Memorial Airport.
“When people say Hegewisch is a slum I say, ‘What do you know? Have you ever been here? Have you ever seen how we live?’” Ciezak says. “Hegewisch is no slum; we take care of our property.”
Ciezak was born in 1917 in a house at 13346 S. Burley Ave. not far from where he currently lives. He went to grade school at Saint Florian’s and graduated from Bowen High School. He didn’t leave Hegewisch until 1942, when he was drafted and sent overseas. His younger brother, Henry, enlisted. Henry died in Europe, killed by a German sniper just a few days before VE Day. He was 24. Before the war, he had never been out of Hegewisch.
“When he went into the service, I wrote him letters,” says Helen. “I wrote to all of my brother’s friends.”
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He decided against journalism (the pay was too low for a fellow with a family) and took a job in sales for a factory in Gary that made screws and bolts. He stayed there for 40 years. He helped organize the Hegewisch Little League; he coached a team; he had two children, a son and a daughter. Both graduated from college. Both are accountants.
Over the years politicians, wars, and fashions came and went, but Hegewisch pretty much remained the same.
“Why should we?” says Joe.
