By Ted Kleine
The museum, at 9801 S. Avenue G, memorializes what Stanley calls “the forgotten part of Chicago.” Like many young men who grew up in East Side, Stanley graduated directly from Bowen High School to a job in the steel mills. He worked 40 years for Wisconsin Steel and by the time it closed in 1980 was the personnel manager. “The steel mills ran real good from 1939 until they closed,” he says. “For all that time they used to say, If you can’t find a job on the southeast side, you can’t find a job. The average high school graduate worked in the mill. He had the job lined up before he graduated. We had some who had three generations. People with just mediocre jobs could have a house and a car. People with dirty jobs were making more than people with white-collar jobs.”
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By 1982 Vrdolyak was chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, and the next year he became captain of the bloc of white aldermen who stonewalled Mayor Harold Washington. Vrdolyak’s headline-making power gave a psychological lift to southeast-siders, who’d long felt slighted by City Hall politicians, especially Mayor Richard J. Daley.
“One of the problems you have in the class is that the history of this community is not necessarily the history of the people who live here now,” Sellers says. But he’s persuaded his Hispanic students to study the history of the Irish, Poles, Serbs, Croatians, and Swedes who preceded them on the southeast side because the history of their neighborhood–labor, immigration, the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, ethnic succession–“is the history of the city.” o
