A Mobilized Feast for Mayor Daley

FROM a door of Chicago's cavernous McCormick Place came the glorious skirl of bagpipes and the thunderous roll of drums. Smartly clad in black jackets and Kennedy tartan kilts, the Eleventh Ward Shannon Rovers began their march down the 600-ft.-long red carpet. The walls reverberated to the strains of the Garry Owen march, the favorite tune of the guest of honor, the present and almost certainly future mayor of the city of Chicago--Richard J. Daley.

Mobilized last week by Chicago's top union officials in appreciation of Mayor Daley's "service to the working people," the banquet was touted as the biggest under one roof in the chronicle of mankind.* After Daley made his way to the dais, flanked by a praetorian guard of Chicago's labor elite, dinner was served to 10,158 labor leaders, rank-and-file members and their wives and girl friends.

sb

The banquet committee, formed and chaired by genial William Lee, head of the Chicago Federation of Labor, was well prepared for ravenous onslaught. Indeed, the supply list suggested not so much a banquet as the formation of Democratic labor battalions to march on Republican strongholds. For the guests' delectation, there were 11,000 filet mignons, 3,500 lbs. of potatoes and 1,800 lbs. of carrots. The appetizer was 2,200 lbs. of fruit cocktail. Desserts: 11,000 creme de menthe parfaits. Lest throats become parched, 2,010 qt. of liquor and 130 cases of beer were readied at 80 bars.

The guests began filing in at 5:30 p.m. at the approximate pace of a World Series crowd. While they drank to tinkling background music of polkas and show tunes, the mayor and his wife joined a select group of 150 VIPs in a snug cocktail setting behind the speaker's platform. The union leaders pawed their way toward the mayor, beaming for bulb-popping cameras as they pumped his hand.

Sometimes Daley smiled; sometimes he looked grim. Often, to give his aching right hand a rest, he clasped hands behind his back. Finally, at 7:15 he and his escorts left the cocktail party to travel two blocks by limousine to the other side of the building for the grand entrance. As Labor Official Tom Haviland put it: "If he had walked, he would have had to shake 9,000 hands."

sb

Haviland had one of the more thankless jobs: arranging the seating for the status-conscious laborites. There were 1,100 tables spread over 31 acres of bare concrete floor. Haviland dodged the worst of the problem by parceling out blocks of tables to the locals and councils to let them wrangle it out themselves. The size of the blocks was a telling reflection of Chicago labor's power distribution--the Teamsters commanded 275 tables, while the building trades got 190 and the steelworkers 50.

As soon as the mayor was settled at one of the two head tables, the guests reseated themselves before their blue-rimmed Pyrex plates. At each plate stood a campaign brochure and a Daley button. Swiftly, hundreds of yellow-jacketed waiters and waitresses began scurry ing about with groaning trays. If the steaks were not exactly sizzling, it was hardly their fault. The heated carts had to be wheeled up to three city blocks to reach one of the four service kitchens.

As host, Lee mounted the rostrum at 8:15 and started the long round of dignitary introductions. Protocol demanded that all of the 102 plenipotentiaries be introduced. The loudspeakers were almost wholly ineffective, and by the time Daley --presented as "the greatest mayor of the greatest city in the world"--stepped up to speak, nearly half the crowd had departed. Daley confined his remarks to a few innocuous platitudes about his roots in labor and job security, then exited to a standing ovation. The biggest indoor feast in history was over.

As a longtime Daley friend, Lee stoutly maintained that the affair was "strictly nonpolitical." Said he before the dinner: "It's so the working people of the city can pay tribute to the mayor for all his consideration toward them. You won't see politicians and a lot of big names here." Perhaps. But the record should show that Daley, who has served four terms as mayor of Chicago, is standing for re-election on April 6.

* According to the Guinness record book, the largest previous indoor banquet was held by Freemasons at the Olympia in London on Aug. 8, 1925. Eight thousand attended.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.