Within UNO, Danny Solis and Phil Mullins wanted to train the parents of Chicago public school students: “Improving the quality of education in Chicago is the city’s greatest challenge and clearest need.” Citing the research of Fred Hess on Chicago dropout rates, Gamaliel noted how “students are simply not prepared to handle high school classes.” By 1986, that represented a bigger problem than ever before. “Ten years ago in S.E. Chicago, a student at Bowen High School could drop out of school and get a job in the steel mills making more money than their teachers.” That world was gone, and “the major obstacle” to improving outcomes for current students “is the ineptness and mismanagement at the Board of Education level.”
Like IAF, Gamaliel would do trainings, and in early August, a one-week course for sixty community group members took place at Techny Towers, a suburban retreat center owned by the Society of the Divine Word. Obama, having the full IAF training to his credit, delivered a presentation there one day, and among those in attendance was Mary Ellen Montes. “Everyone was awed by Barack,” Lena remembered. “I was getting divorced,” and as a single mother with three children, she now had a full-time job at Fiesta Educativa, an advocacy group for disabled Hispanic students. She was immediately taken with the young man three years her junior. “Barack was extremely charismatic,” and she wanted to see more of him. “We talked quite a bit after I met him at Techny Towers,” and with Sheila Jager in California visiting her family, Barack and Lena spent a number of late-summer evenings together in Hyde Park.
“We went out to eat a few times” and “we just enjoyed talking to each other,” Lena recounted. “He was a lot of fun to talk to and we really enjoyed each other’s company.” Obama would remember some intense making-out, while Lena explained, “I’m a passionate person.” What she termed “the relationship/friendship that we had” became a close one as Barack became part of the UNO–Gamaliel network. Greg Galluzzo believed that “the continuing development of community organizing as a profession is mandatory,” and with Gamaliel often bringing its organizers together, Barack and Lena were now professional colleagues as well as intimate friends.27
Obama had been in Chicago for more than a year, and it had been a more challenging and instructive period than any other of his life. He had learned a great deal about others and himself. He had bonded with Mike Kruglik, Bill Stenzel, and Tom Kaminski, as well as with DCP leaders, such as Loretta Augustine, Dan Lee, and Cathy Askew. He had also made two good friends around his age: Asif Agha and Johnnie Owens. But more changes were coming.
Jerry was shifting his focus to Gary, after being bruised by the failure of his Regional Employment Network, which could not claim to have placed even one unemployed worker in a meaningful new job. Given what was now transpiring at LTV’s East Side mill and at South Works, jobless workers on Chicago’s Far South Side faced even dimmer prospects for employment in the immediate future. Obama later wrote that Kellman had told him that CCRC’s region-wide aspirations, like DCP’s highly disparate neighborhood composition, were fundamentally ungainly and that he “should have known better.” Jerry asked Barack to come with him to Gary, but Barack said no: “I can’t just leave, Jerry. I just got here.” Kellman warned him, “Stay here and you’re bound to fail. You’ll give up organizing before you give it a real shot,” but Barack stood firm. He saw a fundamental human difference between them. Barack in twelve months had established meaningful emotional bonds with half a dozen or more colleagues, while Jerry, as Obama later wrote, had “made no particular attachments to people or place during his three years in the area.”
Obama also made a personal decision that was unlike anything he ever suggested to Genevieve: he asked Sheila Jager to move in with him. “It all seemed to happen so fast,” she later explained. Earlier in the summer, Barack had renewed his one-year lease on his studio, but it was too small for two people. Johnnie Owens was living with his parents and looking for a place, so Barack suggested he sublet the studio. Sheila had no support apart from her graduate fellowship, but Barack offered to cover the $450-a-month cost of apartment 1-N at 5429 South Harper Avenue, a quiet, tree-lined block of three-story brick buildings.
Sheila thought it was “really spacious,” with a living room, an open study, “a good-sized bedroom,” and a large, eat-in kitchen. “I thought it was a bit plush for a struggling couple,” but with Barack’s $20,000 salary and $100 a month from Sheila toward food and shopping, by early October the young couple had set up house. Barack continued to see both Asif and Johnnie regularly, with Barack taking Johnnie to see a fall exhibit featuring the work of French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Soon after moving in with Sheila, Barack tardily responded to a letter and short story Phil Boerner had sent him. Barack confessed to feeling older, or at least overextended. “Where once I could party, read and write, with a whole day’s worth of activity to spare, I now feel as if I have barely enough time to read the newspaper.” He counseled Phil about writing fiction, recommending that he focus on “the key moment(s) in the story, and build tension leading to those key moments.” He also suggested that Phil “write outside your own experience,” because “I find that this works the fictive imagination harder.” Barack spoke of thinking about and missing Manhattan, “but I doubt I’ll be going back.”
Then he introduced Sheila. “The biggest news on my end is that I have a new girlfriend, with whom I now share an apartment. She’s half-Japanese, half-Dutch, and is a Ph.D. candidate” at the University of Chicago. “Very sweet lady, as busy as I am, and so temperamentally well-suited. Not that there are no strains; I’m not really accustomed to having another person underfoot all the time, and there are moments when I miss the solitude of a bachelor’s life. On the other hand, winter’s fast approaching, and it is nice to have someone to come home to after a late night’s work. Compromises, compromises.”
Obama’s pose that fear of cold temperatures underlay his desire that Sheila and he live together downplayed his own decision and initiative. Then he updated Phil on how DCP was now becoming a freestanding organization, “which gives me no one to directly answer to and control over my own schedule. But the downside is that I shoulder the responsibility of making something work that may not be able to work. The scope of the problems here—25 percent unemployment; 40 percent high school drop out rate; infant mortality on a par with Haiti—is daunting; and I often feel impotent to initiate anything with major impact. Nevertheless, I plan to plug away at it at least until the end of 1987. After that, I’ll have to make a judgment as to whether I’ve got the patience and determination necessary for this line of work.”28
The breakup of CCRC, with DCP and the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC) taking its place, coincided with Leo Mahon leaving St. Victor. He had announced seven months earlier his September departure, and he had felt his energy flagging before that. In one of his last pastoral letters, Leo addressed the LTV and South Works news in words that echoed across the previous six years. “Catholic social teaching insists that the workers have first right to the fruits of their labor,” in line with “the Christian principle that workers, not money, come first.” Corporations should put “human concerns ahead of profit and dividends,” but LTV and U.S. Steel had made “clear that power and profit are both more important than people and jobs.” Leo’s advice was the same as in 1980: “let us translate our concern and our outrage into protest and into political action.”29
Following Kellman’s shift to Gary, Greg Galluzzo took on a formal mentoring role to Obama by becoming DCP’s “consultant.” He introduced Barack to a young tax attorney, Mary-Ann Wilson, who at no charge—“pro bono”—would handle the state and federal paperwork necessary to establish DCP, like UNO before it, as an independent, nonprofit corporation.
Illinois, like the Internal Revenue Service, required a bevy of forms and submissions that Barack and DCP members would spend a good portion of that fall completing and signing. A set of bylaws was copied and updated from an earlier version Kellman had drafted in 1984. Illinois articles of incorporation required three directors—Dan Lee, Loretta Augustine, and Tom Kaminski were named—as well as a registered agent. Barack, as “project director,” left blank the space asking for his middle name. A separate,