South-Side Chicago style grooms Obama well

WASHINGTON — When I grew up, a long time ago, I wanted desperately to be a foreign correspondent. Names like Marrakech, Kashgar, Istanbul, Bali and Timbuktu rang like strange church bells in my ears, calling me forth to the worship of discovery. Foreign: That was what I was after. I was besotted with the exotic!

And I was lucky. I was able to see all of the strange corners of my dreams.

But now it is oddly clear to me that the most exotic place at all — at least here in America, and at least during this presidential campaign year — is the place I left behind: my home city, my own and beloved South Side of Chicago.

As I would travel around the world, I would mention the South Side only as a whispered threat. You’d be amazed at how well it worked almost everywhere. It seemed that vast numbers of people in the world knew of the South Side — they knew it from stories of Al Capone, of the Mafia and its massacres, and from the plight of the poor black population.

To tell the truth, I learned to use the threat well and gained territory with it quite skillfully, in the way others might employ, for contrary purposes, a background in Lake Forest or Winnetka.

Memorable quotes

The South Side even had its own inspirational quotes. Perhaps not Lincoln or FDR or Kennedy, yet they were ours! Who could outdo the ward committeeman who famously expressed the inner sense of the exclusiveness of the city machine when he said, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent”?

The threat I used in foreign airs was not without roots. My dear and impeccably honest father, Robert Geyer, who was proprietor of Geyer’s Dairy at 79th and Carpenter streets, was fortunate in being a big man; that way, he could physically throw out the Mafiosos and the city inspectors, one about as bad and dishonest as the other in those days.

But the amazing thing is that now, suddenly, that fearsome old South Side has become a place of literary voyaging. “Pragmatic Politics,” boomed The New York Times on the front page on May 11, “Forged on the South Side.” Time magazine followed up with, “How the ward politics in Chicago gave Obama an education that has earned him a shot at the presidency,” and supplemented the words with four pictures of Chicago places, which struck me as though I was reading the National Geographic, taking me to very ... strange ... places.

In short, my South Side has come into vogue because of the voguishness of Barack Obama. Not only has he made it into “the” place for attention in the press these days, but one can imagine we might soon have tourist trips to his — and MY — South Side. Most important is the fact is that the South Side, with all its weaknesses and occasional strengths, has indeed formed this unassumingly elegant and remarkable man.

Learning in the pews

When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for 20 years Obama’s pastor, got into trouble, I was not as critical as many others of his charismatic preaching style because that was the style one heard in most of the Baptist churches, and many other churches, on the South Side. Indeed, Time relates how Obama had a “starchy speaking style” until he began going to black churches on the South Side, “absorbing the rhythm and flourishes of pastors and watching how their congregations reacted.”

Obama also gained from Chicago, and not only the South Side, as he studied the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, and successful, inspirational pastors like Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, founding president of The Woodlawn.

It was in Chicago that Obama honed his nuanced message, because it was a setting where an ambitious, radar-sharp young politician like him had to learn how to move with some grace among the weakened but still real city machine, the new black leadership emerging, the “lake-front liberals” and the moneyed Jewish and other classes.

Many of us raised on the South Side eventually have to admit to something. It is not easy, not given the consideration we can gain from using our background as an ever-present threat. But the fact is that, for those of us not in the poor black population, growing up in the parts of the South Side that we did gave us a wonderful childhood. It was a simple, kindly, neighborly world of miles and miles of Chicago bungalows, of neighbors who watched over all of the children and of families you stayed friends with all your life. (Don’t spread it around.)

The one great strength of being from the South Side or of learning from it, as did Barack Obama, is that the South Side is real; there are real people and real streets and real neighborhoods; there was a simple, genuine sense of what was right and what was wrong, and everyone knew it.

Washington in the last eight years has lost all sense of reality, with its dreams of imperial splendor and its remoteness from the American people. Those leaders could have gained from studying Chicago. Let’s hope that Obama really has.

Universal Press Syndicate