Asked on camera by Oprah Winfrey about his father, Obama said, “he ended up having an alcoholism problem and ended up leading a fairly tragic life.” When a friend asked Barack to quickly compose some uplifting advice for young black men, Obama e-mailed that “none of us have control of the circumstances into which we are born” and that some will have to “confront the failings of our own parents.” But “your life is what you make it.” A few years later, Barack admitted that “part of my life has been a deliberate attempt to not repeat mistakes of my father,” whom he acknowledged “was an alcoholic” and “a womanizer.” Obama acknowledged that Auma had revealed how their father had “treated his family shabbily” and had lived “a very tragic life.” Even though Barack did not speak about this disquieting news to Asif, Mike, or Jerry, the long-term impact of Auma’s truth telling would be profound. “This was someone who made an awful lot of mistakes in his life, but at least I understand why.”4
In early September 1985, Chicago’s public school teachers went on a citywide strike. It was the third straight fall, and the eighth in eighteen years, that school days were lost to a labor dispute. The Chicago Teachers Union was demanding a 9 percent pay raise and the city had offered 3.5 percent; only 14 percent of union members had actually participated in the strike vote. Independent observers, such as education researcher Fred Hess, told reporters that both sides were being unreasonable, and a Chicago Sun-Times editorial described the union’s behavior as “unconscionable.” Quick intervention by Illinois governor James R. Thompson led to a 6 percent settlement and the loss of only two school days.
That fall, Jerry Kellman was still savoring the triumph he had experienced in early July when the Illinois legislature appropriated $500,000 to fund a computerized CCRC jobs bank that would assess unemployed workers’ skills and market their résumés to potential employers. The big pot of money had been obtained by Calumet City state representative Frank Giglio, a close friend of Fred Simari, the St. Victor parishioner who had been volunteering virtually full-time for Kellman, as well as Hazel Crest state senator Richard Kelly.
The half-million dollars would allow Governors State University (GSU) to hire twenty job-skill-assessment interviewers for ten months to create résumés for unemployed individuals. In news articles about this, Kellman said the program’s success was dependent upon “hundreds” of volunteers stepping forward and pressing employers to hire those workers. Once the funding was confirmed, Jerry made plans to shift Adrienne Jackson to help oversee the new program and began aiming for a massive public rally to kick off the enterprise. Before the end of August, he hired Sister Mary Bernstein, a forty-year-old Catholic nun and experienced organizer, and assigned her to St. Victor to handle CCRC’s Catholic parishes in the south suburbs. In tandem with Mike Kruglik and DCP, the immediate goal was to mobilize as large a crowd as possible for the kickoff rally Kellman scheduled for Monday evening, September 30, a day before the program office at GSU would open officially.
Kellman arranged for the two most powerful individuals in Illinois—Governor “Big Jim” Thompson and Archbishop Joseph Cardinal Bernardin—to speak at the event. Choirs from Joe Bennett’s St. John de la Salle and John Calicott’s Holy Name of Mary would perform, and the invaluable Fred Simari would preside as master of ceremonies. Also featured on the podium would be Lutheran bishop Paul E. Erickson, Methodist bishop Jesse DeWitt, Presbyterian executive Gary Skinner, and the towering young Maury Richards from United Steelworkers Local 1033, whom advance press reports described as “president of the state’s largest”—they might have added “remaining”—steel workers local.
Five days before the rally, the food processor Libby, McNeill & Libby announced that within the next year, it would close its Far South Side Chicago plant on 119th Street; that meant a loss of 450 good jobs. The Sunday before the rally, Leo Mahon praised his St. Victor parishioners like Fred Simari and Gloria Boyda for the time they gave to CCRC’s employment efforts and reminded his congregation that scripture teaches that “the desire for money is the root of all evil.”
On Monday evening, CCRC vice president Rev. Thomas Knutson hosted a pre-rally dinner for the almost two hundred program participants at his First Lutheran Church of Harvey before the 8:00 P.M. rally kicked off at nearby Thornton High School. A racially diverse crowd of more than a thousand, including a watchful Barack Obama and dozens of people from DCP’s Chicago parishes, filled the gymnasium as Fred introduced the speakers, including Loretta Augustine on behalf of DCP. After Maury Richards told the audience, “we’ve lost forty thousand jobs in the past few years,” the governor came forward and began by saying, “My name is Jim Thompson. My job is jobs.” He went on to declare that “jobs are more important than mental health or law enforcement, because unless people are working and paying taxes, there won’t be any resources to pay for those services.”
But the evening’s real star was Cardinal Joe Bernardin, who denounced racism and called for “cultural and ethnic unity in the Calumet region.” He noted how unemployment “cuts across racial and ethnic lines,” and he promised that “the church is here to help you” while stressing that “the real leadership must come from the laity.” Sounding at times like Leo Mahon, Bernardin declared that “every person has a right to a decent home” and vowed that “the cycle of poverty can be broken and community decline can be turned around.” The archbishop pledged further church support for CCRC, and the rally ended with a white female parishioner from Hazel Crest asking the crowd: “Do you want to be part of a community that controls its future?” The audience responded with lengthy applause.
For Obama, the rally and the bus ride back to Holy Rosary provided an opportunity to make some new acquaintances, such as Cathy Askew, who had sat quietly through their introductory meeting at St. Helena. He was also able to talk more with the dynamic Dan Lee, DCP’s board president, and with Dan’s fellow deacon at St. Catherine, the vigorous Tommy West. For Jerry, Fred, Gloria, and most of all Leo Mahon, the rally was a wonderful culmination of their efforts that reached back over five years. Harvey Lutheran pastor Tom Knutson described the rally as “a tremendous experience for the local community.”
Now CCRC’s challenge was to get the new “Regional Employment Network” (REN) up and running. GSU planned to have some skills assessors ready to begin interviewing unemployed individuals by early November, but in early October news broke that an Allis-Chalmers engine plant and an Atlantic-Richfield facility would soon be closing, costing up to nine hundred more good jobs.
Kellman privately had been told a few days before Bernardin’s appearance that the national Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CHD) would be awarding CCRC an additional $40,000 to support the REN program, with an event on Saturday, October 26, marking the public announcement. Obama joined Kellman at the ceremony, and a story in Monday’s Chicago Tribune marked his first appearance in the Chicago press: “Barack Obama, who works with the Calumet Community Religious Conference, said its grant will be used to assess skills of unemployed workers and to aid them in finding jobs.” The first actual assessment sessions kicked off at St. Victor in Calumet City on November 14 and 15, attracting eighty-six applicants ranging in age from nineteen to sixty-seven years old. Six skills assessors prepared a fourteen-page information sheet on each applicant, and Adrienne Jackson wishfully told a local reporter, “There are hundreds of employers out there who need people.” She predicted that REN would interview more than thirteen thousand job seekers during the next eight months.5
Looming most dauntingly was the future of LTV’s East Side Republic Steel plant, where the thirty-three-hundred-person workforce included twenty-four hundred members of Maury