By Ben Joravsky
“We lived in a three-flat at 21st and California, purchased by my grandfather with the pennies he saved,” he says. “When I think about who I am I see parts of my father, my grandfather, and my mother. There’s a real stubborn streak in us all, and we’re all wise guys. We had these exchanges where the style was to get in your put-down before they got in theirs. My mother loves to read. Her story is that her father was a tailor, and he had a little shop one block east of California at Cermak. She came home with library books, and he threw them in the potbellied stove. She was mortified. And her reaction was to fill our home with the things her father said she couldn’t have. I grew up in a house where there were books everywhere.”
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His parents scrimped and saved enough money to send him to Saint Rita High School, then at 63rd and Claremont. They might as well have saved their money and sent him to the local public school. It was a time of conformity, and the harder the priests of Saint Rita pushed, the harder Wulkowicz pushed back. “I was a skinny kid with a big nose and acne, and I got crummy grades. They had tracks back in those days–the science track, the business track, that sort of thing. All the scum was sent to refrigeration class. That’s where I was. It was the greatest bunch of people–a collection of misfits who went on to become serial killers or Nobel Prize winners. You know, the typical dregs of the Catholic system.”
Dybek says Wulkowicz was “the first guy I’d seen who intellectually defended himself against something which in some vague way I suspected was screwed up–in this case our high school. He did it through noncompliance and practical jokes. Imagine Gandhi with a sense of humor–that was his nonviolent resistance. Ironically, he was generally regarded in school as someone who was stupid, even though he was brilliant. He scored off the charts on the SAT or whatever the test was–he had the highest score in the school. This place was so stupid that they were trying to find out if he cheated. Of course if you get the highest grades how can you cheat? Whom are you copying from? They didn’t know what to make of his score. It was ultimately regarded as one more weird thing this fuckup did to screw up the system.”
His proposals were well received outside of Chicago–the Lake Shore Drive ramp proposal won the Presidential Design Award, the highest engineering honor bestowed by the National Endowment for the Arts. But even though he offered his ideas to city officials free of charge, few were adopted. Many local engineers and bureaucrats regarded him as simply an eccentric. And if they didn’t take him seriously, it was because they didn’t have to–he had no clout, no political connections. That never seemed to discourage him. “I’m a bulldog who’s not smart enough to understand I can’t do something, and there lies the capacity to get it done,” he says. “I don’t mind banging my head against a wall, because sooner or later I figure I’ll find the door and get in.”
In July he was out of a job. A year later, representing himself, he filed a suit charging “wrongful retaliatory discharge.” The Park District countered that he hadn’t been singled out but was one of about 100 employees laid off in a budget-saving move. In 1997 the case was dismissed.
