[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 21 (Thursday, February 2, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E257-E259]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


  SALUTE TO CHICAGO ATTORNEY AND FORMER ALDERMAN LEON DESPRES, ON THE 
                     OCCASION OF HIS 87TH BIRTHDAY

                                 ______


                           HON. BOBBY L. RUSH

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, February 2, 1995
  Mr. RUSH. Mr. Speaker, I rise this afternoon to salute a gentleman 
who is a Chicago institution and a lifelong friend of the underdog and 
of the working Chicagoan. Leon Despres, who turns 87 years young today, 
played a crucial role in the Chicago City Council during the senior 
Richard Daley's tenure as major of Chicago. This role, that of the 
loyal and principled opposition, is one that my Democratic colleagues 
and I are growing to appreciate more and more as we settle into our new 
roles in the 104th Congress. Unfortunately, I did not have the honor of 
serving in the Chicago City Council during the 20 years that Mr. 
Despres served there. However, he served as Parliamentarian of that 
body under the late, great 
[[Page E258]] Mayor Harold Washington during my first few years in the 
Council. Len Despres is well known as a tireless advocate of such 
bread-and-buter issues as racial equality, civil rights, fair housing 
and open government. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he advocated 
many of these controversial issues during a time before they were 
fashionable and frequently did so in the face of great opposition. Mr. 
Speaker, the Chicago Tribune published an article about Mr. Despres in 
its January 22, 1995 edition, and I submit this article, which captures 
the essence of Mr. Despres quite accurately to be entered into the 
Congressional Record in honor of Mr. Despres' 87th birthday.

               [From the Chicago Tribute, Jan. 22, 1995]
                           Still in the Swim

                           (By M. W. Newman)

       Leon Despres gets to bed around 9 o'clock on most 
     weeknights and sleeps the sleep of babes and sages. At 4:50 
     a.m. he's up and ready to go. That's the Despres way.
       Thirty-five minutes later, he's downstairs at 59th Street 
     and Stony Island Avenue, waiting in the icy darkness for the 
     CTA's No. 6 express bus. It's a January morning, 4 degrees 
     above zero. A prairie wind shivers in. No problem: Despres 
     has had 86 years of getting used to it. Nearly 87.
       The No. 6 at this hour is a working folks' bus. The 
     passengers are regulars. As on most mornings, Despres is the 
     only white person aboard. Almost certainly he is the only 86-
     year-old. Beyond doubt, on this trip he is the only Loop 
     lawyer, former alderman and certified civic role model, all 
     in one.
       The bus swings downtown along South Lake Shore Drive. 
     Despres loves the lakeside run but notes the pileup of 
     parking lots and convention halls and traffic ramps where 
     trees or open water once held sway.
       ``Civicide'' is one of his words for voluntary 
     treeslaughter. Until a few years ago, he enjoyed bicycling to 
     work on the lakefront until he was rammed from behind and 
     knocked cold by another biker.
       ``I took that as a warning; you can't hear a bicycle,'' he 
     says--and gave up the bike for early-a.m. swimming.
       By about 5:50 on this morning, as on all weekday mornings, 
     he's in the University Club, a polished neo-oldie cloister at 
     76 E. Monroe St. The club building dates from 1908, the year 
     Despres was born at 41st Street and Michigan Avenue. It has 
     dark wood paneling and baronial fireplaces, but he skips all 
     that and is in the basement pool by 6 a.m.
       Despres is not there to float around. He does his 52 laps, 
     a half-mile, moving from backstroke to breast stroke to crawl 
     as steadily as a swimmer a quarter of his age.
       Usually a half-dozen other swimmers join him. But no one 
     else even shows up on this ice-cold morning.
       ``The whole gang chickened out,'' he says with a laugh.
       He's in the water by himself for 42 minutes, comes out lit 
     up and follows with poolside coffee, rolls and bagels: the 
     Despres routine.
       ``It makes my day,'' Despres says in that strong, clear 
     voice of his. ``Absolutely makes my day.''
       But his day is just starting. By 7:45, Monday through 
     Friday, he's in his office at 77 W. Washington Blvd. for a 
     full round of work. He doesn't knock off till 5:15.
       Leon Despres, generally known by his nickname of Len, is an 
     enduring natural wonder of Chicago. For 20 years ending in 
     1975, Despres was the City Council's independent icon, the 
     finger-wagging conscience from Hyde Park snipping at old Boss 
     Mayor Richard J. Daley and the party machine.
       Daley has been dead since 1976 and the machine long since 
     has lost firepower, but Despres goes on. He thrives on 
     lawyering, the hands-on kind. He relishes phone calls, 
     conferences, clients new and old.
       He's not a man for long lunches, and sometimes grabs a 
     salad at Morton's Cafeteria, an old-line hangout for old-line 
     Lop types at 120 W. Madison St. He takes time out only for a 
     half-hour afternoon nap ``to recharge my batteries.'' Office 
     routine elates him.
       ``I enjoy clearing titles, drafting wills, advising 
     people,'' he says. Mind you, this has been going on since he 
     started practice in 1929.
       The man is an institution: the Phi Beta Kappa liberal, 
     independent Democrat and best friend of underdogs who 
     wouldn't go along and consequently never got to be a judge or 
     a congressman.
       In his time in office you couldn't beat City Hall, and 
     Despres didn't. But now try walking with him anywhere near 
     that hall without someone coming up and saying, ``Hello, 
     Alderman.''
       ``Everybody wants Leon's blessing,'' says his friend 
     Herbert M. Kraus, a veteran publicist and civic doer. ``He's 
     a Renaissance man in hustling Chicago.''
       Despres may not hustle, but he gets there just the same. 
     He's tall and erect, with an assured manner, handsome 
     features, silvery hair and a silver tongue to go with it. 
     These days he's trying to take off 10 or 15 pounds. Otherwise 
     he doesn't look all that different than he did during his 
     warrior times in the council.
       ``Leon was born with a great deal of energy and can do 
     whatever he sets out to do,'' says his wife, Marian. She is 
     an eminent Chicagoan
      herself and a member of the Chicago Landmarks Commission. 
     But when he gets up early to go swimming, she confides, 
     ``I roll over and go back to sleep.''


                        `horatio at the bridge'

       Despres' fan club includes some members who at times 
     crossed swords or at least words with him. Seymour Simon, now 
     79 and a former justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, was an 
     alderman and ward committeeman in the Daley vs. Despres 
     years. He calls Despres ``the best alderman in the United 
     States.''
       ``He was Horatio at the bridge,'' says Simon. ``Wise, 
     brilliant, with a great grasp of details and sense of 
     humor.''
       John Hoellen, 80, served with Despres from 1955 to 1975. 
     Hoellen was that exotic aldermanic import, a Republican.
       He and Despres once got into a row over a James Baldwin 
     novel that was required reading at Wright Junior College. It 
     wasn't any of the City Council's business, but Hoellen 
     challenged Despres to read aloud some of the homoerotic 
     passages. Despres replied by asking Hoellen if he would ban 
     the Bible because it had sex in it.
       But all that was 30 years ago. Hoellen now describes 
     Despres as a ``super person, thoughtful, considerate, decent, 
     compassionate.''
       Probably nobody, however--starting with Despres--expected 
     him to go on being a successful lawyer into his late 80s. He 
     is at a peak of achievement, says his 45-year-old partner, 
     Thomas Geoghegan.
       Despres long has been an attorney for labor union, and his 
     clients in the firm of Despres, Schwartz and Geoghegan now 
     include the Teamsters under the reform leadership of Ron 
     Carey.
       In the 1980s, Geoghegan was the firm's point man in an 
     embittering fight to win a settlement for the bereft 
     employees of Wisconsin Steel after it shut down. A $14.8 
     million payout was awarded in 1988. Despres' Steeltown ties 
     go back a long way--to the days when there really was a 
     Steeltown.
       Ed Sadlowski once was the youngest district director in the 
     United Steel Workers of America, with Despres as his 
     attorney. Sadlowski hadn't even been born in 1937 when 
     Chicago police killed 10 labor demonstrators at a Memorial 
     Day gathering. The shooting came to be known in labor history 
     as the Republic Steel Massacre.
       In the stunned aftermath, a protest rally was held in the 
     Civic Opera House. ``Did you know Despres helped to organize 
     the rally?''says an admiring Sadlowski.
       ``He's had 60-odd years of being consistently good. He was 
     over at my house the other day and he's as sharp as ever. I 
     wonder what he drinks that keeps him that way.''
       Said Sadlowski's wife, Marlene: ``Exercise!''


                      Remembering Clarence Darrow

       Like Cole Porter penning a lyric, Despres always seems to 
     know what his next word should be. He can spout in four 
     languages and quotes Thucydides, Ovid, Homer, Shakespeare and 
     the fabled Chicago lawyer of yester-year, Clarence Darrow.
       Darrow died in 1938, but Despres recalls a long talk he 
     once had with the brooding old titan. ``He had an office 
     right in this same building,'' he says. ``We keep his 
     photograph in our conference room. He was an inspiration, a 
     great trial lawyer--selflessly interested in the fight 
     against discrimination and the death penalty.''
       Every year on the anniversary of Darrow's death, Despres 
     helps to conduct a memorial ceremony for him in Darrow's 
     beloved Jackson Park.
       Despres, of course, is not the rumpled, suspenders-thumbing 
     showman and yarn-spinner that Darrow, was. He keeps his hair 
     combed, wears a pressed suit and a neat tie, and cannot be 
     accused of cracker-barrel charisma.
       But Despres has shown how to bring ``justice to the city,'' 
     Geoghegan wrote in ``Which Side Are You On?'' his impassioned 
     book about organized labor published in 1991.
       Despres never has left much doubt about which side he is 
     on. The elder Daley's gumshoes spied on him for years, it 
     turned out after Despres left the council. They may have 
     wondered why they bothered, because he seemed to favor lost 
     causes and oddball fancies like racial equality and fair 
     housing, civil rights, open government, budget economy, 
     freedom from censorship, controls on lead-paint poisoning.
       Despres was even tailed to a Halloween benefit party in 
     1972 at the First Unitarian Church on 57th Street.
       Buy a funny thing happen on the way to the 21st Century. 
     Musclebound Chicago loosened up. Despres has lived long 
     enough to see many of his causes embraced or least grudgingly 
     accepted by the party wheelhorses.
       ``You don't have the top-heavy load of payrollers 
     anymore,'' says Hoellen. ``There's more sensitivity to 
     problems.''
                           battling the boss

       But there's less comic relief. Despres' tiffs with Boss 
     Daley, sire of the present mayor, had an ``Odd Couple'' sense 
     of antic timing. The Boss was maximum leader of the troops, 
     had the votes and presided over the City Council, so he 
     couldn't lose.
       Despres learned early to talk fast before the beet-fased 
     mayor could grow irritated and cut off his aldermanic 
     microphone. That happened at times. ``I couldn't count on any 
     10 minutes,'' Despres explains.
       Seymour Simon summons up remembrance of a Daley-Despres 
     sideshow of the late 1960s. Despres ``was the instigator'' on 
     that occasion, according to Simon, and was needling 
     [[Page E259]] the Boss about his choice of a new police 
     superintendent. It was a ticklish matter. Chicago had never 
     fully reclaimed face after a 1960 ``burglars-in-blue'' 
     scandal that was all but etched on the city seal.
       Daley flared back and called Despres ``a faker,'' Simon 
     remembers.
       That brought Simon into the game. He urged the mayor to 
     cool it. At the time, Simon had begun wearing his hair in a 
     replay of Samson before Delilah got her shears. Baseball 
     players and hard hats often look that way now. But in the 
     1960s hair around the ears looked like aldermanic heresy to 
     the Boss.
       ``Why don't you go get a haircut?'' he snapped at Simon.
       Legend has it that Despres proposed that the council's 
     forestry committee set standards for the foliage of aldermen, 
     though he says he doesn't remember that quip now.
       Even that wasn't the last word.
       Two days later, Daley telephoned Simon.
       ``Sis [Daley's wife, Eleanor] tells me I got to 
     apologize,'' he said.
       ``No need,'' Simon replied. ``We're grown men.''
       ``Sis tells me I got to apologize,'' the Boss repeated.


                            a civic landmark

       Despres rarely heard apologies. Ald. Vito Marzullo 
     despaired of him as a ``nitwit.'' Ald. Thomas Keane, 
     Machiavelli of the council, complained that Despres was a 
     ``loudmouth.'' That was before Keane was sent up for mail 
     fraud.
       Aldermen who stayed clear of prison yelled ``shut up'' at 
     Despres. He never did. What's more, he remained on the 
     council scene after retiring from it by serving as 
     parliamentarian for two mayors: Jane Byrne (``always 
     interesting and she gave great parties'') and Harold 
     Washington (``a great mayor''). It was all in a day's routine 
     for a man used to 100-hour work weeks when he was an 
     alderman.
       Despres never was your trademark civic father. He is a 
     connoisseur of books, opera, theater, architecture, food, 
     fine wines and world travel.
       He founded the Friends of WFMT to support that FM radio 
     station in a struggle with its board. His firm went into 
     battle to ensure that the station would maintain its fine-
     arts character.
       But Despres is first of all and most of all a Hyde Parker. 
     He went to school there, he built his political base there. 
     In 1967 he was mugged and shot there, on 55th Street, and 
     lived to explain that it could happen anywhere.
       He and his wife--who have a son, Robert, in Connecticut, 
     and a daughter, Linda Baskin, in Chicago--have been married 
     for 63 years. They celebrated their 60th by chartering a 
     cruise boat and inviting some 200 friends to join them. In 
     the Despres mode, the voyage was educational as well as 
     sentimental: skyline sightseeing with a tour guide. The boat 
     explored Chicago's Old Ma River, both branches, and Len says: 
     ``It's the greatest Chicago trip. You see the buildings in a 
     way you never saw them before.''
       Despres will be 87 on Feb. 2, a Thursday. He expects it to 
     be a workday as usual. He'll board the No. 6 bus in the 
     darkness, swim 52 laps or maybe more, have a bagel and 
     coffee, and get to work.
       ``I have been very fortunate,'' he says.
       And that is Chicago's own good fortune.
       

                          ____________________