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spirits. I like that. Rrrrright. And so with Mr. Stone’s kindred spirit and the miracle of Wamby’s triple play in mind, I was on my way Chicago, The City of I Will. (I’d neither heart nor mind to ask Nelson Algren’s question: “What if I can’t?”)

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    Bound for Glory 4
    Bound for Glory (1920)
Away up in the northward,
Right on the borderline,
A great commercial city,
Chicago, you will find.
Her men are all like Abelard,
Her women like Heloise [rhymes with “noise”]—
All honest, virtuous people,
For they live in Elanoy.
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    So move your family westward,
Bring all your girls and boys,
And rise to wealth and honor
In the state of Elanoy.
—A nineteenth-century folk song
    When Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness and loped off with the Republican nomination on that memorable May day, 1860, the Wigwam had been resonant with whispers. Behind cupped hands, lips imperceptibly moved: We just give Si Cameron Treasury, they
give us Pennsylvania, Abe’s got it wrapped up. OK wit’chu? A wink. A nod. Done. It was a classic deal, Chicago style.
    As ten thousand spectators roared on cue, Seward didn’t know what hit him. His delegates had badges but no seats. Who you? Dis seat’s mine. Possession’s nine-tent’s a da law, ain’t it?
    Proud Seward, the overwhelming favorite, was a New Yorker who had assumed that civilization ended west of the Hudson. He knew nothing of the young city’s spirit of I Will.
    When, in 1920, Warren Gamaliel Harding was similarly touched by Destiny, there had been no such whisperings in the Coliseum. Just desultory summer mumblings (it was an unseasonably hot June: 100 degrees outside, 110 inside; bamboo fans of little use): Lowden, Wood, Johnson. Wood, Johnson, Lowden. Johnson, Lowden, Wood. Three frontrunners and not a one catching fire. How long can this go on? Four ballots are enough. C’mon, it’s too hot for a deadlock. Shall we pick straws?
    But this wasn’t just any conversation city. This was Chicago. Never mind the oratory. Yeah, yeah, we know about the Coliseum where, in 1896, the cry was Bryan, Bryan, Bryan as the Boy Orator thundered eloquently of crowns of thorns and crosses of gold. Nah, nah, let’s settle this Chicago style.
    A hotel room not far away.
    The Blackstone, so often graced by Caruso and Galli-Curci during our city’s lush opera season, was on this occasion beyond grace. Nah, nah, it’s too hot. Maybe the Ohio Gang ran things that day, but with blowing curlicues heavenward from H. Upmann cigars in the smoke-filled room, the deal—Harding, OK?—was strictly My Kind of Town, Chicago Is.
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    AS FOR MY CITY, Chicago, yet, along came Jane Addams. Was it in 1889 that she founded Hull House? The lady was out of her depth, they said. Imagine. Trying to change a neighborhood of immigrants, scared and lost, where every other joint was a saloon and
every street a cesspool. And there was John Powers, alderman of the Nineteenth Ward, running the turf in the fashion of his First Ward colleagues, Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. Johnny Da Pow, the Italian immigrants called him. He was the Pooh-Bah, the high muckety-muck, the ultimate clout. Everything had to be cleared through Da Pow. Still, this lady with the curved spine, but a spine nonetheless, stuck it out. And something happened.
    She told young Jessie Binford: Everything grows from the bottom up. This place belongs to everybody, not just Johnny Da Pow. And downtown. No, she told Jessie, I have no blueprint. We learn from life itself.
    So many years later, years of small triumphs and large losses, Jessie Binford, ninety, is seated in a small Blackstone Hotel room. The Blackstone again, for God’s sake? It isn’t a smoke-filled room this time. My cigar, still wrapped in cellophane, is deep in my pocket. It’s an H. Upmann—would you believe it? The old woman, looking not unlike Whistler’s mother, is