Obama said his work took him to differing neighborhoods, with residents’ concerns ranging from sanitation complaints to job-training programs. “In either situation, I walk into a room and make promises I hope they can help me keep. They generally trust me, despite the fact that they’ve seen earnest young men pass through here before, expecting to change the world and eventually succumbing to the lure of a corporate office. And in a short time, I’ve learned to care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them. It’s tough though. Lots of driving, lots of hours on the phone trying to break through lethargy, lots of dull meetings. Lots of frustration when you see a 43% drop out rate in the public schools and don’t know where to begin denting that figure. But about 5% of the time, you see something happen—a shy housewife standing up to a bumbling official, or the sudden sound of hope in the voice of a grizzled old man that gives a hint of the possibilities, of people taking hold of their lives, working together to bring about a small justice. And it’s that possibility that keeps you going through all the trenchwork.”
But Obama’s most vivid image was the one Kellman had shown him three months earlier in South Deering: “closed down mills lie blanched and still as dinosaur fossils. We’ve been talking to some key unions about the possibility of working with them to keep the last major mill open, but it’s owned by LTV,” which “wants to close as soon as possible to garner the tax loss,” Barack told Phil. He ended the letter by saying his apartment was “a comfortable studio near the lake” and that “since I often work at night, I usually reserve the morning to myself for running, reading and writing.” He enclosed a draft of a short story dealing with the black church and asked Phil to mark it up and return it. “I live in mortal fear of Chicago winters,” and “I miss NY and the people in it … Love, Barack.”
The letter documented several significant turning points in Barack’s new life. Most important of all was the emotional attachment Barack had already developed toward the people on whose behalf he was working: I “care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them.” The second was that now, more than three months in, Obama was much more comfortable with his weekday work. As his close friend Asif Agha remembered, “in the beginning, he was enormously frustrated because the whole scene was completely chaotic,” but in “struggling with those frustrations,” Asif witnessed Barack “coming together around them as a purposeful person.” Kellman was focused on the jobs bank and his initial contacts with Maury Richards’s Local 1033 at LTV Republic Steel, but Obama’s workday involved interactions with DCP’s core participants—Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd from Golden Gate and Eden Green, down near Altgeld Gardens, Dan Lee and Cathy Askew from St. Catherine of Genoa in struggling West Pullman, Betty Garrett and Tom Kaminski from central Roseland, and Marlene Dillard from the solidly working-class London Towne Homes well to the east—which presented daily challenges that were mundane as well as relentlessly unceasing.
Yet as close as Obama became with Loretta and Dan, as well as to white priests like Bill Stenzel and Tom Kaminski, he had no closer a bond with anyone than Cathy Askew, the white single mother of two “hapa” daughters—half black, half white. Askew was a small-town Indiana native whose family had shunned her after she married an African American who fathered her two daughters, then disappeared entirely from their lives. Cathy taught school at St. Catherine’s, and one of her daughters, Stephanie, had a congenital heart condition that left her less than fully robust. Early on Obama told Cathy about his own father and mother. As a result, “I don’t think of him as really like African American. He’s African, and he’s American,” she said. As he later wrote, Barack also recognized “the easy parallels between my own mother and Cathy, and between myself and Cathy’s daughters, such sweet and pretty girls whose lives were so much more difficult than mine had ever been.”
Having lived with a black man, Cathy saw Barack as something else: “he didn’t look African American to me. I was really glad to find out he was a hybrid, because my kids are hybrids.” From the beginning, she thought Barack “was gawky … very quiet … very thoughtful,” she remembered. In those early months, he “was at a loss for a long time, I think, over where to focus…. I saw him doing a lot of listening to people and trying to pull things out of people. There was no focus. Everybody seemed like they wanted something different and nobody had anything in common.”
Early that winter, Obama organized a meeting at St. Catherine for area residents to voice their unhappiness about police responsiveness to the district commander. Hardly a dozen people showed up, and the commander was a no-show too. Years later, Obama would repeatedly recall that evening. Loretta had been there, as well as Cathy. “He got frustrated. I think he almost quit once,” Cathy said. Obama would recount even his core members saying they were tired and ready to give up, and “I was pretty depressed.” As he remembered, across from the church, in an empty lot, two boys were tossing stones at an abandoned building. “Those boys reminded me of me…. What’s going to happen to those boys if we quit?”9
At the beginning of December, Chicago’s steel industry was back in the news. Eighteen months earlier, Mayor Washington had appointed a Task Force on Steel to study the industry’s future, and its report demonstrated that the entire effort had been a waste of time and energy. Early on Frank Lumpkin and his Save Our Jobs Committee colleagues had hoped the task force would show that their ideas about government investment could revive one or more Southeast Side mills. Washington sympathized with these hopes, but the task force brushed aside Lumpkin and his sympathizers. Its primary academic consultant, Ann R. Markusen, asserted that “Reaganomics and industrial leadership (or lack of it) deserve the major blame” for the plant closings and added that Chicago was “a city in deep, long-term trouble.” She also acknowledged that “national and international forces beyond the grasp of local governments are important determinants of steel job loss.” Task force member David Ranney stressed that in retrospect the “idea that the steel industry in Chicago might recover appeared absurd” and that what the Far South Side experienced during the 1980s “highlights the limits of local electoral politics.”10
During November and December, Maury Richards from USW Local 1033 and Jerry Kellman from CCRC met four times with Chicago’s economic development commissioner, Rob Mier, one of Washington’s most influential aides, to determine how they should react to the loss of a thousand or more jobs if there were even a partial shutdown of LTV’s East Side mill. Mier knew that this would be “a severe blow” to the city because a majority of the steelworkers lived in Chicago, and the mill paid $18 million a year in city and state taxes while contributing $300 million to the city’s economy. The union, CCRC, and Mier agreed that everything possible had to be done to convince LTV to invest $250 million to rebuild a blast furnace and acquire a continuous caster, or alternatively to sell the aging plant to a company that would. “Most of the discussants seem to realize that neither of these outcomes may be possible,” Mier told the mayor. Noting that LTV held defense contracts worth $1.3 billion, Mier reported that “both CCRC and Local 1033 are committed to coordinating a corporate campaign against LTV if LTV refuses” to invest or sell.
Obama, Loretta Augustine, and Marlene Dillard went with Jerry to one or more of his meetings with 1033’s officers and city officials, though no one except Jerry spoke on CCRC’s behalf. On December 19 Kellman and Richards sent a formal letter to the mayor, copied to Mier, asking Washington to “provide the leadership,” in coordination with local congressmen, that would pull together a package of city, state, and federal financial incentives for LTV. The Christmas holidays stalled these actions, but in the press, LTV called its Chicago