Goodbye '70s, Hello '80s Chicago Politics in Jane Byrne's Era And the Day Jane Byrne Booted the Tribune Out of City Hall The Boot An unusually prominent front page story appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Sunday, June 22,1980. It reported details of Mayor Jane Bryne's transition team report and revealed me to [...]

The Tribune is Booted from City Hall In June 1980, as Jane Byrne was starting her second year as Chicago’s first woman mayor, a strange media brouhaha briefly transfixed the city. She had become enraged at a Chicago Tribune story and in a fit of anger had banned the paper’s City Hall reporter from occupying space in the building’s [...]

The Machine Weakens After Daley's Death With the anti-Daley vote thus split, Daley was reelected in the Democratic primary election in February 1975 with 58% of the vote. Singer came in second with 29%, Newhouse with 8%, and Hanrahan 5%. In a striking change to the usual playing field, Daley’s share of the vote was much smaller than [...]

Dick Simpson The transition report had been undertaken at Byrne’s request shortly after she defeated sitting Mayor Michael Bilandic in Democratic primary election in early 1979. A prominent member of her transition team was longtime independent City Council Alderman Dick Simpson. Simpson had graduated from the University of Texas in 1963 and then pursued a doctorate degree with [...]

Bill Singer I had first met Singer in the summer of 1966 after my second year of law school. I was serving then as a summer clerk at the Ross, Hardies, O’Keefe, Babcock, McDugald & Parsons law firm in Chicago. He was had already started there as a new associate lawyer recently graduated from Columbia Law School. After [...]