I've been to other big cities, but Chicago's still my favorite

“CHICAGO TRIPTYCH": A memory essay in three sections

ACT ONE: SUMMER 1969

Just 12 months before, the city had borne witness to perhaps the most egregious and ugly display of police brutality since the height of the Civil Rights struggle. Uniformed cops, under the direction of their corrupt and quasi-criminal Mayor Richard Daly, using truncheons and other means of violent law enforcement, had beaten, battered and bruised hundreds of young people who had gathered for the Democratic Convention, a systematic abuse of power that a government investigation later termed “a police riot.”

Into that simmering cauldron of urban unrest, my father — a respected professor of political science — decided to immerse his young family the following summer. Certainly aware of the volatile environment and understanding better than most the potential for increased tension as Richard Nixon began his first term, he nonetheless decided that the City of Broad Shoulders would be an ideal location for a vacation visit.

He had grown up in South Bend and studied at Indiana University in Bloomington, a couple of nice, quiet Hoosier towns located about 90 miles east, and he traveled to Chicago often, via a passenger train called the South Shore Limited, times of freedom and discovery he recalled with great fondness. They also exposed him to Major League Baseball, and he soon became a Cubs fan.

How in the world he circled Aug. 19 for a trip to the ballpark as he typed our itinerary that January, I’ll never know, but the odds that he got tickets to a no-hitter were astronomical, maybe 20,000 to 1.

After side trips to the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium and the Field Museum of Natural History, it was time for an afternoon at Wrigley Field and a game between the Cubbies and the Atlanta Braves, a team that featured Hank Aaron, who would, a few years later, become the game’s all-time home run king.

But lefty Ken Holtzman didn’t care, authoring the first (and perhaps only) no-hitter without striking out a single batter.

My father, his wife and their three children became witnesses to history that summer afternoon in Chicago, and even though the Cubs would squander their nine-game lead, allowing the New York Mets to win the pennant — and eventually the World Series — we Deweys, sitting in seats along the third-base line, were blessed.

ACT TWO: FALL 1972

As a senior in high school, I wrote two columns for every edition of the “Panorama,” the student newspaper, which was entirely run by the students in the journalism class. Every aspect — from the writing and photography to ad sales and printing press operation — was under our (for want of a better word) control, and it was great.

But ours was not a wealthy school district, so it remains a mystery to me how selected members of the newspaper staff found themselves checking into the Palmer House, one of Chicago’s finest hotels, located in the heart of downtown, an area known as “The Loop.” It was a short cab ride to Rush Street, the bohemian enclave, where record stores offered hard-to-find imports and bootleg albums featured on underground FM stations.

My best friend and fellow frequent contributor to what we believed was excellent journalism in that pre-Watergate era rigged the system so that we ended up sharing a room on the seventh floor, from whose windows we could drop things like the Gideon Bible to the street below. We considered yanking the TV from the wall and letting it fall, but we settled on quaffing yards of ale instead.

Ostensibly in town for a national convention of high school journalists, we decided early on that we had better things to do than to hear some speaker tell us how to write better than we did. Consequently (and perhaps intentionally), we went our own ways, he in the company of a comely girl from North Carolina and I with a quiet staff member I had no recollection of ever meeting before.

She wore glasses, enjoyed songs like “Me and Mrs. Jones,” fancied the sandalwood incense I burned in the room’s ashtray and didn’t seem to mind that we hardly ever ventured outside, even as my friend and his new pal took in a screening of “Jeremiah Johnson.”

Chicago, we agreed, had been very good to us, and we felt blessed.

ACT THREE: WINTER 1976

Disco sucked, I knew that. Hell, everyone I ran around with did too.

What was even worse was skulking around Notre Dame nursing a broken heart, the painful reminder of an ill-fated love that had gone down in flames halfway through my junior year. When the offer came to move into an off-campus house, about five miles from school, I decided to live life as a senior with no ties to the place.

Well, aside from continuing to make the dean’s list, which I did.

Punk rock was in its infancy, and given the inflated and ego-driven drivel being purveyed by popular groups like Styx and the aforementioned blight on the music landscape known as disco, I gravitated toward the Ramones, Television, X and the Sex Pistols.

But the artist who forever changed my life was Patti Smith. Her 1975 debut LP, “Horses,” a monumental achievement in lyrical intensity and stripped-down rhythms, was a revelatory experience.

I had introduced her to a select few ND students who, I knew from past discussions that lasted well into the night, were ready for her particular brand of rock ‘n’ roll poetry. I mean, some folks on that Catholic campus felt a real revulsion to Patti’s imagery, including the first line of the first song on her first album. Try this on for size:

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

For people intoxicated by the Bee Gees and their slick and shallow disco brethren, her kind of raw, visceral gut punch was sacrilegious.

Naturally, it became my personal quest to witness her passion and power in person, especially after studying “Radio Ethiopia,” Patti’s second LP, one that explored new ideas as it excavated new ground.

Guess where she and her band were soon scheduled to appear?

That’s right … Chicago, in the venerable Aragon Ballroom, a venue long respected as the Second City’s cathedral of rock.

Of course, being the middle of December, snow blew in off Lake Michigan as my musical friend and I made our way to the concert, he doing a masterful job keeping the car between the white lines as I manned the tape deck, keeping the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead in heavy rotation as the traffic slowed to a crawl.

We made it in time for the opening act, Sparks, who — to lift a line from “Spinal Tap” — cranked their amps to 11, which was a tasty sonic hors d’oeuvre for the main course, the Patti Smith Group.

The Aragon, built in 1926, might have hosted more crowded events over its 50-year history, but nothing as transcendent as the one we witnessed as a blizzard tore through and Patti blew the roof off the place, reminding me again that Chicago was a blessing.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where attitudes toward disco might have softened.