How I discovered The Chicago Way

This sounds improbable, but I swear it's all true

I learned much of what I know about how Chicago works from a used tire guy named Paul.

I was sent to him when, at 18, I refused to give a mechanic two days’ pay to replace the baldest of four bald tires on my first car, a 1968 Chevy.

“There is no way you can control this boat in the snow with that tire,” he said.  “Go see Paul at Pratt and Ravenswood, if you can make it that far. He’ll sell you an old tire for a price even you are willing to pay.”

I asked him for the address. He looked at me funny. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I don’t think you can miss it.” 

I rarely drove on Pratt because I thought there was nothing to look at. I was wrong.

I would soon see a shack made of corrugated steel and wood, with a stovepipe sticking out of the top, belching black smoke. It seemed misplaced in time. It would have fit nicely into “How the Other Half Lives,” Jacob Riis’ book about 1880s slums.

The rest of the property was just snow and tires. The tires were piled all over the lot in no discernible pattern, except for a couple of one-tire-wide stacks that reached more than two stories in the air. The precarious-looking stacks looked like they had been put there by The Cat in the Hat.

It looked impossible for them to remain balanced. I realized upon closer inspection that they were frozen solid. I found out later that after a few dozen piled tires froze together, they threw some more up there, and they froze, too.

Inside the shack, there was barely room to stand, with stacks of tires, a tire machine, a test tank, one small man, one taller man and an old oil burner. The burner was cracked and perched at an uncertain angle, looking like it, too, had been imagined by Dr. Seuss. Its door was open, exposing the flame, either to get more oxygen, or in a desperate attempt to squeeze out more heat.

The little guy was stomping around, trying to warm up, with frosty clouds coming out of his mouth. The big guy had no room to move. He seemed ticked that someone had opened the door and let the cold in.

The little guy, who turned out to be Paul, seemed happy to see me, however. He asked what I wanted, and then said, “The black guy will do that for you.” I asked the black guy what his name was. Paul seemed slightly embarrassed that a customer wanted to refer to his employee as something other than The Black Guy. Only slightly.

All at once, Paul swore lightly and said, “Look who’s coming.” The other man said, “Inspector?”

Paul smiled grimly, and I wondered for a moment if he would have locked the door if I wasn’t there.

Then he locked the door.

The man outside knocked on it. “It’s cold out here,” he said. Paul opened the door.

“It’s cold in here, too,” the man said.

He was about 60 and wore a fire department uniform and a duster. “Hello, Paul,” he said. Then he looked around, which took about two seconds.

“My God,” he said.

“You can’t be operating that,” he said. “That ventilation isn’t working,” he added. “You need another way out of here.”

Oddly, Paul agreed. I guessed that any argument was ridiculous. 

I had read that tire fires are notoriously hard to extinguish, because they don’t cool down much when you pour water on them, and the tires’ innards hold pockets of air that keep feeding the flames. Sometimes, I had read, big tire fires take weeks to put out. And all that time, they pump toxic fumes into the air.

The fumes were not a big issue yet. The EPA was still a novelty. Almost everyone over the age of 11 smoked cigarettes. 

But I assumed I had walked into the beginning of the end of Paul’s used tire lot.

Everybody stopped talking. The inspector found a few inches of floor to shuffle his feet. Paul scratched his head. The Black Guy pounded his arms to stay warm. Sorry, I can’t remember his real name anymore. 

I didn’t say anything, either. I had been completely ignored by everybody so far. Paul broke the silence.

“You like the tires mounted backward so the blackwalls show, right? So four blackwalls, right?”

The inspector nodded, and went outside.

Nobody said anything. I would know Paul for years, and we never talked about the day that a fire inspector had shaken him down, trading his integrity for four used tires, mounted backward. For at least the second time. 

Before long, the shack caught fire. It spread to the tires stored outside. The Chicago Fire Department managed to put it all out without anybody getting hurt badly.

There were no repercussions about the bribery, probably because nobody told anybody about it. Even though there was a witness.

The mess was bulldozed, and the lot acquired by S & C Electric, the top employer in Rogers Park. S & C makes high-voltage equipment, and, thankfully, does not seem to emulate Dr. Seuss in its operations.

Paul moved to a regular storefront on Western Avenue. A few years later, there was a fire in that store, and Paul’s business was burned out again.

I assumed that Paul would not be allowed to get another business license to sell used tires, because his previous such attempts at entrepreneurship had ended with too much drama. I certainly didn’t think anyone else would rent to him or sell him insurance. 

He told me that he was going to retire. I said immediately that he had an excellent idea there.

But one day, I couldn’t help noticing that much of the North Side of the city was being rapidly darkened by massive clouds of thick black smoke.

It smelled like rubber.  

I turned on WBBM radio. The fire was in a tire store. Guess whose.

It took the better part of three days to put that one out. It got a lot of play in the media, mainly for the spectacular pall of airborne inky goo that blanketed much of the city. No one was killed, but that was probably lucky.

American firefighters are probably more often threatened by a toxic component of what’s on fire than by any other cause. And under any circumstances, tire fires are dangerous. Two firefighters were killed by a backdraft in a 1998 South Side tire store fire, the first time in 13 years that multiple Chicago firefighters had been killed in a single fire.

Paul was not involved. At least, as far as I know.

I was not a journalist during Paul’s incendiary saga, so I didn’t write about what preceded it. But I also never told any reporter about it, or anybody in law enforcement.

Who would believe me?

It would be hard to convince people of the quid pro quo without a document establishing the inspector’s receipt of the tires. And I didn’t like the idea of ratting people out.

But I had actually seen something that prosecutors would have wanted to know about. I should have told them. Somebody could have died because I didn’t.

I think of this whenever somebody decries Illinois corruption, and says something like, “Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” They usually blame politicians.

It’s likely that many people have had experiences like mine, however. They say nothing, like I did, because it’s too hard to imagine someone being convicted. It’s unsure. The act of accusing someone is fraught with risk.

There may be dozens of people around the state of Illinois who should be thinking about their priorities right now, the way I failed to do years ago. Soon, if circumstances progress the way they’re trending, there will be criminal charges levied against Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. And he will probably wiggle out of them, because he’s apparently very good at keeping arms’ length from bad stuff he seems involved in.

But there are people out there who think they may have the goods on old Mike. They may not be able to make him go away. But they should try.