Buying the Night Flight by Georgie Anne Geyer Page B

thirty years older than me.
    He would tell me the most outrageous stories, and I adored them and him. Once, when TWO was challenging the Daley machine, he told me of being called into Mayor Daley's office. The two men were much alike in character, but with such different callings in life. The mayor wanted Saul to call off a particular TWO offensive (Saul was always thinking of things like having members take over all the toilets in the Loop and just stay in them for several hours!), and Saul, for all his sophisticated knowledge of politics and personality, was stunned by the idea that Daley even thought he would do it.
    As Saul, angry and miffed, got up to leave, Daley called him back. Then the mayor pounded his fist on the desk. "All right, Alinsky," Saul quoted him to me, "tell me what your price is. I'll pay it."
    Saul laughed as though he would burst when he told me that. Saul didn't have a price, just as my father did not, and it said something about Mayor Daley that he thought even Saul did. But then the Chicago machine thought everybody had a price.
    People didn't understand Saul. They called him a "radical," not realizing that he was basically the most fervent possible American and the most conservative anti-Communist. They never understood he wanted to enfranchise the "outs" in order to save the "ins." Nor did he take any guff from anybody, whether liberal, black, or whom ever. When black students at one university announced to him arrogantly that they wanted their own black student union, he said, "Cut out the crap. You don't really want that. Now, say it." And they did. They were playing some of the games of their time, and Saul knew it, if "liberals" didn't. He didn't want this country to break up. And he didn't play fashionable games.
    What he gave me was something very special. I disagreed with a lot of his thinking and even tactics. He could be extremely cruel, although usually only to people he thought could take it. (Often they couldn't.) But Saul was a great balance to my excessive romanticism and to my extreme idealism. He taught me tactics. Just in watching him all those precious years that I knew him, I absorbed what is practical politics, what is strategy, and how one moves tactically in the world. I learned not only how much better it is to win than to lose but how to win and how to win in one's own way.
    Father John J. Egan, known as "Jack," another fantastic, bigger- than-life man and priest, worked closely with Saul in those days -- indeed, this Jewish iconoclast and this Catholic believer were like the oddest pair of loving brothers. They got the Archdiocese of Chicago to support a good deal of controversial community organization, among other "impossible" things. In later years, Jack Egan told me this story about Saul:
    "One day we were walking down Michigan Avenue, and I was a little worried about some of the things we were doing and how people would criticize me. Saul stopped in his tracks. 'Why does everybody have to like you?' he demanded. 'Jack, you do what you have to do. Some people don't like little bald men, some people don't like priests, some people don't like short people or Irishmen. For God's sake, be true to yourself and do what you have to do and everything else will fall in line.'"
    Midwestern "radical" impulses--and they are not that in any other sense of the word anywhere else -- were everywhere around me. Hull House held another deep and very special attraction for me at that time. Jane Addams, Jessie Binford, Edith Hamilton -- they offered another, kinder but no less tough radicalism and love, "social feminism." And they were women: strong-minded, determined, idealistic, tough, politically sagacious women. We had one such woman in my own family, a great-aunt, Alma Foerster, who had been a Red Cross nurse working in Archangel, Russia, during World War II. She was a true heroine, but she was never mentioned to me.
    In the early sixties I repaid Hull House in small manner by saving