Time of Their Life

Shuh-CA-go, Shuh-CA-go, That toddling town, toddling town, Shuh-CA-go, Shuh-CA-go, I'll show you around . . .

Rare is the man who has gone home from a Chicago convention without some choice memento locked in his suitcase of memories. For one middle-aged Texas oilman recently, it was the long, goose-pimpled wait for a rendezvous with a $50 floozy in a plum-colored parlor; for a life-insurance salesman from New Jersey, it was a harmless evening in an elegant and naughty North-Side Key Club; for a mackinawed Dakota farmer back in 1906, it was a dinner at the old Saratoga Hotel, where after ordering a fancy city dish called oysters on the half shell, he devoured the oysters and then crunched through the shells. But though Chicago, in its own sullen and grimy way, has afforded millions of conventioneers a variety of pleasures, its convention facilities have grown woefully inadequate over the years. Last week the city solved that problem with the opening of a brand-new hall, the $35 million lakefront McCormick Place, "larger than the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome and more durable than the Colosseum."

Named for the late Chicago Tribune Publisher and Chicago Booster Colonel Robert McCormick, the new two-floor convention hall can feed 25,000 banqueters, boasts exhibition space equal in size to six football fields. Its central location and modern facilities practically guarantee that Chicago, with its 931 conventions a year (and 1,155,000 visitors), can better even this year's $250 million convention business and maintain its position as the nation's No. 1 convention city.

Pickles & Pies. Chicago got that way partly because of its advantageous geographical location, partly because progress has somehow never stifled the quality of its raw frontier-town spirit. It held its first major convention just 100 years ago, when its streets were still being laid out. The convention hall was a hastily built two-story frame building, the famed Wigwam, where delegates to the Republican National Convention, after brawling with each other in the streets, nominated Abe Lincoln for the presidency.

Since then, the town has played host to 14 G.O.P. and nine Democratic conventions, not to mention the Pickle Packers, Lawn Bowlers, Button Collectors, Flying Farmers, Moms of America, Amalgamated Poultry Sexers, Cigar Box Manufacturers, Match Cover Collectors, Chihuahua Clubbers, International Twins Association, National Cherry Pie Bakers, National Curled Hair Manufacturers, and the Egg Case Fillers of America.

Comedy of Eros. These people and their convention-bound brethren in scores of other organizations no longer go in much for zany pranks. Hardly anybody has dumped 100 Ibs. of green paint out of a 15th-floor hotel window since the American Legion convention of 1920; and there have been very few instances of people tossing water-filled paper bags from hotel windows since the fellows from the National Safety Council and the comedy loving members of the Indiana State Police did it years ago. Mostly, conventioneers get their fun at nightclubs (many of which pay off $1 per customer to cabbies who steer the right way), strip joints like the 606 Club on South Wabash, clubs like the Eros, where the belly dancers give them a fair shake for their money, or at the high-priced brothels ("We have a very important function in this city," says one civic-minded madam).

While convention goers seem somewhat more conservative than they did years ago, Chicago's lusty flavor is as permanent a fixture as the new McCormick Place. "In the old days," says one nightclub owner, "when a man came to town he turned into a naughty boy. He wanted to do something daring, get tangled up with some gal, or look at a gangster. When he went home to Paducah, he'd tell the stories, over and over, so that he got to believing them himself. He'd have Capone shooting up the ceiling and paying all the checks." Al Capone may be gone, but there is plenty of evidence that the old frontier verve still two-steps on.

They have the time, the time of their life,

I saw a man, he danced with his wife, In Shuh-CA-go, Shuh-CA-go, my home town.

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