On the busiest shopping day of the year, Arnold Klein is driving to his temp job at the Brickyard Mall.
Klein quit school at 16 to work in a defense plant. “I was an inspector testing things for the B-52 bombers. I can’t say what.” He moved on to a job at the old Schwinn bicycle factory in Humboldt Park, where he remembers “riding the saddles down the conveyor belt.” In 1964 he became a painter and joined a trade union. “I made good wages, didn’t need no second job.” He married twice and has two children. In October he witnessed the birth of his first grandchild.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
About ten years ago Klein got sick. He spent two years recovering from open-heart surgery, and he still has health problems. “I got all these troubles with diabetes, arthritis, and open-heart. I need surgery right now, but I can’t do it ’cause I might end up in a wheelchair, my doctor said.” He moved into the Lawrence House, a “retirement hotel” in Uptown. “I have my own apartment, do my own cooking there. I do turkeys, I do roasts. I hope I can get out. There’s quite a few people this year, the year 2000, that I met that passed on.
“You know who I had a picture with? Jerry Taft, ABC weatherman. He came in and talked a little bit and took a picture. Then later on he brought his family in. Cool. I had a five-by-seven, and I don’t know what I did with it. Beautiful picture: He’s got his leg over my leg. We had a ball!”
Santa remains his only steady gig. He arrives at Brickyard by 8:30 and spends the next 20 minutes or so changing into his red suit and beard. “At about five minutes to nine, the security guards come and get me. They escort me. That’s great. You feel important, you know? Once I get into that suit, I’m a whole different person right there. I feel good. I feel wonderful about myself. This is the time of year when I lock into it–I lock into myself right before Christmas.
“You gotta know what the kids are thinking and stay, like, one step ahead of them. I ask children their favorite colors, their favorite cereal that they eat. And I always tell them to go to the dentist. I ask, ‘What would you like for Christmas?’ And now it’s more computers, Barbie dolls, electric cars, and so forth and so on. If they want a baby sister, I go, ‘Ho ho ho, Santa can’t provide that. Only mommy and daddy can do that.’ Sometimes boys ask me, ‘Santa, can I have a gun?’ A gun is the worst thing. Santa doesn’t make guns. Santa makes educational toys. You got people getting shot in their own homes and Santa doesn’t like that.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joy Bergmann.
