By Michael Miner
This sort of influence would exhilarate anyone born to be a wheeler-dealer and embarrass anyone born to be a journalist. But it wasn’t enough influence for Hirschfeld. Unable to resist the temptation to acquire a personal forum, he launched a weekly radio talk show, Ricochet, where his partisan bloviating gained him a reputation as Champaign County’s own Rush Limbaugh. He wrote a newspaper column, “From where I stand…” And on top of all that, he was Chinigo’s personal attorney and the newspaper’s.
McCollum was raised a Unitarian, Hirschfeld an ardent Catholic who would graduate with honors from Notre Dame and Notre Dame law school and send six of his seven children there. Catholics had been as unhappy as Protestants with Vashti McCollum’s suit, which halted all religious instruction in the public schools, and Dannel McCollum reflects, “Given John’s religious predisposition, that sort of guaranteed we’d be adversarial.”
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Foreman, perhaps slyly, chose that July 4 to publish McCollum’s response to Hirschfeld’s diatribe, and he illustrated it with a drawing of the Statue of Liberty. McCollum’s reply challenged the logic of Hirschfeld’s theory that he’d ingratiated himself with a “very small” minority to improve his standing with the majority. He noted, “I spent 10 hours two days last week responding to persons who called to express their objection to the proclamation,” and pointed out that he’d proclaimed a Martin Luther King Jr. Day every year he’d been in office, and if the day wasn’t a holiday it was because a majority of the city council considered a holiday inappropriate, there being none honoring Washington, Lincoln, or any other individual. McCollum announced that he had no intention of rescinding his Pride Day proclamation and said he hoped that “those who have raised the furor re-examine their own sense of charity and tolerance in this matter.”
But power isn’t absolute that depends on another’s goodwill. And Marajen Chinigo ruled. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review written by a former News-Gazette reporter in 1982, when Chinigo was 69, described her as a most autocratic piece of work. It told how she’d claimed the title “contessa” on the strength of an honorary title given her late husband for humanitarian work in Sicily, donated $1 million to Oral Roberts University (where today the graduate center bears her name), and brought Pavarotti to sing at the University of Illinois, dealing with an unfavorable review in her own paper by firing the critic.
Since she was preparing to fire the man who’d been her personal lawyer, Chinigo had begun receiving legal advice from a new team. It was led by her friend and neighbor in Rancho Mirage, the legendary Don Reuben, the former lawyer for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Bears, and the Chicago Catholic Archdiocese. Chinigo even named Reuben to her board of directors.
