“Pritzker has hitched his political future to the SAFE-T Act. The Illinois Black Caucus is for it, Attorney Gen. Kwame Raul was there as the law was passed in the middle of the night. Why didn’t Kwame say something?”
By John Kass
I was born near the Union Stockyards on the South Side of Chicago.
Early on I learned it was a great neighborhood, with hard, tough, and direct people with big and true hearts. It wasn’t a neighborhood for dreamers. It wasn’t a neighborhood of huggers. And it wasn’t a neighborhood for saps.
We were all taught to have sharp eyes and the lessons were painful. The men worked at the stockyards or in the can factories on Western. They drank and played 16-inch softball. The women stayed home, minded their kids and their parents and the church. Or they’d sip in silence. It wasn’t ideal.
We’d sit out on the front porches of our two flats, whole families together, commenting on the passing circus of the world.
In Back of the Yards then, nobody had money but the politicians. The rest of us had been thrown together into the giant cast-Iron melting pot, and it was up to each of us to fight our way out of there.
I said it was an honest neighborhood. It wasn’t a neighborhood of fake kindness and virtue signaling, so it wasn’t Oak Park. Nobody would dream about placing a ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ sign in the postage-stamp front yards. Everyone would mock you for a fool. Even the nuns of Visitation Parish would snicker.
It wasn’t a neighborhood of hugs. It was a neighborhood of fists, and we all knew it. And still I loved it and miss it. My cousins lived in two-flats up and down the block. There were fights in the alleys and outside the taverns, and in Sherman Park too, where men like Mr. “Moon” Brannigan became a softball legend.
You didn’t whine. You didn’t complain. There’s no virtue in taking a beating but if you were expected to take one, you kept your mouth shut about it. They took real beatings from cops, metaphorical beatings from judges and aldermen, and bloody beatings from the street gangs.
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