[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 55 (Wednesday, May 6, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E774-E775]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         ``BREAKING THE RULES''

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. SIDNEY R. YATES

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                         Wednesday, May 6, 1998

  Mr. YATES. Mr. Speaker, among the outstanding civil servants working 
for the people of Chicago is my good friend, Lois Weisberg. As 
Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, Lois has sponsored a series of 
cultural events which have brought a glow to the City of Chicago and to 
Mayor Richard Daley.
  Today, an article appears in The Chicago Sun Times which truly 
delineates the warm active personality and character of Lois Weisberg. 
I am sure my colleagues will enjoy reading this perceptive account of 
her life and activities:

               [From the Chicago Sun-Times, May 6, 1998]

                           Breaking The Rules


                   renegade arts maven adores her job

                          (By Lori Rotenberk)

       Her movements and the rapidity of her speech defy age. Both 
     are nonstop.
       So, too, her brain. And so, too, the puffs on her cigarette 
     (``I'm quitting!'') sending a snake of smoke from her ruby 
     lips.
       Every little thing about her seems to travel at the speed 
     of sound. Even her black city-issued car, as it pulls out of 
     a downtown alley and into the Chicago night.
       The cops wouldn't dare.
       Lois Weisberg, the city's renegade Commissioner of Cultural 
     Affairs, turns 73 today. In her eighth decade, she is still a 
     woman who treads the fringe.
       ``Ugh. I can't work where everybody follows the rules,'' 
     Weisberg says, ``My whole life has been about breaking 
     rules.''
       This attitude has helped her leave a dramatic mark on the 
     city--even if you don't know her, you know the programs she 
     has created over the years, Blues Fest, Gospel Fest, many 
     ethnic fests, the watchdog group Friends of the Park.
       A typical idea: She put a birthday hat on the Picasso at 
     Daley Center to celebrate the statue's birthday. ``Everyone 
     thought I was crazy when I suggested it. They didn't know how 
     to do it. I didn't know how to do it. Then I found a group of 
     Mexican nuns who made papier-mache. They delivered it in a 
     big truck. And that's when I began to learn how to get around 
     all of the bureaucracy.''
       Last month, Weisberg received an award from the Illinois 
     Arts Council for her contribution to city arts and culture. 
     Soon, one of her favorite programs, Gallery 37, the 
     nationally recognized student summer art program in the Loop, 
     will raise its tent along State Street.
       Weisberg is the scratch to Mayor Daley's itch.
       What he dares to imagine, she's damned to create.
       To say she loves her work is a mistake. Weisberg adores it, 
     lives it. She stays awake until 3 a.m., answering all of her 
     own correspondence. ``Everything I see, hear and do gives me 
     an idea,'' she says.
       Acquaintances and friends alike speak of her huge and good 
     heart. Weisberg admits she can't say no to anyone. ``I try to 
     do something for everyone who asks me for help,'' she says.
       ``Lois Weisberg is one of those unique people who can think 
     very creatively and very practically at the same time,'' 
     Daley says. ``I can call Lois with an idea and know without a 
     doubt that she will find a way to make it happen.''
       Born on this day in 1925, Weisberg grew up in Chicago's 
     Austin neighborhood. She walked the streets with her nose 
     always dug into a book, the odd child ``of two perfectly 
     normal parents.'' Later, she briefly attended the 
     University of Illinois, then transferred to Northwestern, 
     where she graduated with a degree in radio. ``Right at the 
     end of its golden age,'' Weisberg says accusingly. ``I 
     couldn't find a job anywhere because television was coming 
     in. So I got a job writing a TV program called `Baby 
     Talk,' a simply horrible program.''
       She winces at the memory. She wears eyeglasses studded with 
     rhinestones, lighting up that Muppet face like the Chicago 
     Theatre marquee, and clatters around the mosaic floor of the 
     Cultural Center in white leather boots, faux fuzzy fur around 
     their ankle-high tops.

[[Page E775]]

       Friends say Weisberg, a widow for several years, sorely 
     misses her late husband, Bernard, who was her best friend. 
     She has two grown sons, Jacob and Joseph.
       But she doesn't lack for interests.
       ``Would you like to know the things I really love doing?'' 
     she asks, ``Riding the Broadway and Clark Street buses, just 
     to keep in touch with humanity. And I like to sit up in the 
     front with a bunch of grocery bags.'' An avid gardener, 
     Weisberg also likes country music and collects egg cups and 
     frogs.
       Since she so dislikes rules, what is the last she may have 
     broken?
       ``I can't tell you,'' Weisberg jokes. ``But I do drink 
     martinis or straight vodka, and that makes me a drinking, 
     smoking, horrible person.''
       Hardly. There was a time, too, when Weisberg was an antsy 
     housewife who preferred to keep her hands in the arts rather 
     than the dishwater.
       Having always had a yen to direct, she pulled together 
     actors to form the Chicago Drama Quartet.
       Weisberg combed books for plays to perform and one day came 
     across George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah. ``I didn't 
     know a thing about Shaw,'' she says.
       The Burgess Meredith dropped in on a performance. Assuming 
     Weisberg was a Shaw scholar, he asked her to speak to a group 
     of fellow actors about the great Irish playwright. She found 
     a book about him and learned Shaw had been born exactly 100 
     years before.
       ``I read the first page and never read past that,'' 
     Weisberg explains. ``It said Bernard Shaw was born on July 
     26, 1856. I had never heard anything about this man, this 
     great writer who was having a 100th anniversary and no one 
     knew it.''
       So she made sure everyone would know.
       Weisberg invited guests from around the world to celebrate 
     Shaw. She made the papers worldwide with stories about the 
     Glencoe housewife who was so good as to remember Shaw when 
     everyone else forgot. The New York Times wrote an editorial, 
     and Chicago became the Shaw capital. The Sherman Hotel, at 
     the request of Weisberg, created the Bernard Shaw Room, 
     and his plays were performed there for several years. In 
     it was born the Bernard Shaw Society, then the Shaw 
     newsletter.
       Around that time, Weisberg received a call from a friend at 
     the University of Chicago. The campus magazine, Big Table, 
     was being censored, and its writers had invited the beat 
     poets of the era to town to raise money for the publication. 
     Would she lend a hand?
       Weisberg gave them the Shaw room, where Allen Ginsberg 
     would give the first public reading of ``Howl.'' She 
     advertised that anyone with a beard would get in free. The 
     line of bearded men would around the block. The beats were 
     front-page news for days.
       Ginsberg stayed in touch with her.
       ``Allen would send postcards from all his travels.'' 
     Weisberg recalls. ``I have postcard on the wall somewhere 
     here that says, `Lois, you have to try this LSD.' I didn't 
     even know what it was.''
       Then she began an underground newspaper called the Paper, 
     in which she interviewed jazz and literary greats. Dizzy 
     Gillespie was one of her great friends.
       From there it was on to head the department of public 
     affairs for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Then on 
     to a public interest law firm and later the executive 
     director of the Chicago Council of Lawyers.
       Paid political life began in the 1980's when she joined the 
     administration of Mayor Harold Washington and became head of 
     special events. Discouraged to be working with a `zero 
     budget,'' she informed fans of Venetian Night that there 
     would be no fireworks that summer. ``But come out anyway,'' 
     she urged at a speech, ``and enjoy the air. It's free.''
       So was she until Daley recruited Weisberg as his special 
     assistant. Since then, the city hasn't been quite the same.
       Last year, when Illinois poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks 
     turned 80. Weisberg made sure Brooks' poems were handed out 
     at L stops and passed out by patrol officers on bikes along 
     the lakefront.
       Oh, and there's plenty more. Weisberg promises. And the 
     ideas spill and spill. Are you going to stay forever, until 
     you are way up there in your 70's?Weisberg is asked. ``I 
     love, love my work,'' is all she will answer.

     

                          ____________________