THE SETTING BY RICHARD CAHAN

Sun-Times photographers hit the street in 1956: Louis Giampa (from left) Larry Nocerino, Bill Pauer, Bob Kotalik, Carmen Reporto, Howard Lyon, Ralph Walters, Bill Sturm, Bill Knefel, Dave Mann and Joe Kordick.

It took about four seconds to take all of the images in this book. But it took dozens of people working seven days a week for more than 60 years to make them.

They are precious.

They look anything but precious. They look tough and gritty and real.

The photographers who took these images were able to do more than simply record what was happening in front of their cameras. They recorded truths-about human life and about the place and times in which these pictures were taken.

This collection encompasses pictures from the Chicago Times, the Chicago Sun, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Times' sister paper, the Chicago Daily News. The Sun-Times and Daily News photo staffs were competitors, but the papers shared the same darkroom and filed photos in the same photo library for almost two decades. The Daily News closed in 1978, but most of its photographs remain in the Sun-Times files.

This book is about modern Chicago, glimpses of the city since the early 1940s when the Sun and the Times were going head-to-head. Based on the photo archive of the Chicago Sun-Times, the book offers a look at Chicago as it battered its way through World War II, endured population booms and busts and transformed itself into the city by the lake we know today. It is based on a collection of prints, negatives and digital files. Some of these photos were easily accessible-filed in alphabetical order by subject or by name in the Sun-Times library. Many had long been forgotten-moved out of the way to an attic in the paper's office headquarters at 401 N. Wabash Avenue. All were recently moved six blocks west to the Sun-Times' new office at 350 N. Orleans Street.

This is a collection of newspaper moments. We see the city in crisis and celebration. And we see personal highs and lows. Newspaper presses see no gray tones; there are few medium moments in these photographs. We have chosen a range of photos that define Chicago. We look at these pictures-very much out of their original context-with Twenty-first Century eyes. From the wide angle of the years, these pictures combine to show us what's in between. Real Chicago.

Wendell Willkie is struck by an egg in the La Salle Street Station on October 23, 1940. After winning the National Headliner Award, photographer Borrie Kanter wrote: "You set your shutter at 1/50th and your lens opening right-and be dere!"

It is one of the great newspaper photos of all time.

Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie is struck by an egg as he campaigns in 1940 at Chicago's La Salle Street Station. The photograph, taken by Borrie Kanter, ran on the front page of the Times with the headline: "It Shouldn't Happen Here."

The subject of the photograph is Willkie-or so it seems. The headline, which is affixed to the photo, makes it clear that the photograph is about more than the egg-faced Willkie. It is about democracy; it's about Chicago; it's about America.

Ever since Chicago emerged from prairie muck to become the Metropolis of the Midwest, the city has stood for America. Not surprising, really; it's situated between New York and San Francisco, between Indiana and Iowa. Yet, Chicago has always meant more than its boundaries or size might suggest. The fictional Sister Carrie, who symbolized rural America, came here because Chicago was so close and so exhilarating. The real Robert S. Abbott, who founded the Chicago Defender, spread the word of Chicago through the Pullman train porters and started a great migration that continues today. Chicago is America's heartland. It is the one city that reflects the whole of the nation.

Sun-Times photographers are a particular breed. Mickey Rito, Bill Vendetta, Louis Giampa and Johnny Arabinko. These are tough names. Armed with Speed Graphics or Nikons, their job has always been the same: Tell the story. Stand down the third-base line at Comiskey Park or stand tough in the line of fire on West Madison Street. They take their job seriously; they are the public eye. Tomorrow their work will be judged by a half-million people.

The paper they work for and the photos they take have a style. Ever since its first editions, the Sun-Times has been Chicago's meat-and-potatoes paper-put out by tireless, hardworking, big-hearted Grabowskis. The term Sun-Timesman, which of course now includes Sun-Timeswoman, has always connoted a journalist who thought of readers first. The goal every day was to touch a chord-to make readers think, to make readers mad.

"This may sound funny," former Sun-Times editor Frank McHugh once said. "But we have always fancied ourselves as missionaries. We want to play a role in the city."

Photographs have always played a crucial part of that mission. Photos-full of life and emotion-are the heart of the paper. Anything can happen in Sun-Times photos because each staff photographer knows, like a free safety in football, that he or she alone must make that tackle.

"We are working guys, not artists," said Jack Lenahan, a photographer whose career at the paper spanned the 1940s through the 1990s. "We never came back until we got the shot."

So what characterizes the Sun-Times photography department?

Ask the staff, and each one will tell you that that their work is constantly hurried. The Sun-Times photo department has always been understaffed. That makes photographers scrappy and resourceful-as well as frustrated. Even on a big story, Sun-Times staffers often work alone. But that makes for direct, straightforward pictures, pared-down to their essence.

More important than the hurry is the humanity of the staff. Sun-Times photographers, just like reporters, connect with their subjects. "It's a culture that is embedded in all of us," said Tom McNamee, a Sun-Times reporter since the early 1980s. For photographers, that culture translates into an unwritten mandate to look for human grace. That is the common thread that binds this work. Sun-Times photographs-whether of movie stars or accident victims-most always suggest dignity.

"I never once got up in the morning and thought, 'Oh hell, I have to go to work,'" said Bob Kotalik, who started as a Times copy boy and retired almost 50 years later as the Sun-Times chief photographer. "I never knew what I was going to do. I could be with the president or Marilyn Monroe."

These pages bear witness to changing ideas about news photography. Take a look at camera contests from the Fifties and you can see at an instant that our taste and standards have changed. The constant, of course, is that readers want to see people. We depend on newspaper photographers to get tight enough so that we can see our neighbors' faces. Too shy to look closely at each other in real life, we depend on the camera to let us linger. We want to see ourselves. So that's how a person looks in jubilation. So that's how a person looks in despair.

These pages also show the transformation of press photography from the one-shot Speed Graphic era through grainy 35-millimeter decades to the streaming digital days of today. The Sun-Times abandoned large-format cameras in the early 1960s and single-lens reflexes in the late 1990s. Darkrooms, shut down years ago, don't even smell of chemical developer anymore.

But the photographs are a continuum. Sun-Times photos-especially those that stand alone without accompanying articles-are like short stories. They are stopped in time. We, as readers, add the beginning of these stories and add the end in our minds. We look at them to soothe us, to challenge us and to teach us.

George Kotalik trained pigeons in 1939 to carry film from news and sports events back to the office. Sometimes they returned. (Photo by Bill Pauer.)

The Sun-Times was conceived in the Tribune Tower. In 1927, Tribune business manager Samuel E. Thomason asked the paper's owner, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, why Thomason's new contract did not specify his responsibilities.

"For 250,000 dollars a year, you'll do as you're told." McCormick reportedly told his underling. So Thomason tore up the contract and walked out. Within two years, he started the Chicago Times, a paper he modeled after the New York Daily News, which he'd helped establish a decade earlier. The Times even included a camera in its logo and declared itself Chicago's Picture Newspaper. On September 3, 1929, Thomas sat in his offices at 15 South Market Street and exhaled as his trucks headed out carrying the first edition.

"Well," he sighed, "There goes the last of what was once $2 million."

In that first edition, Thomason and Times editor Richard J. Finnegan wrote that photographs would be the key to the new illustrated daily because "picture papers say so much in such a little space that they are popular and successful." The Times would be a "paper for folks," they wrote, and promised readers that they could read the 2-cent tabloid from cover to cover in 20 to 30 minutes a day. "In a year that will add from five days to a week to your time for other important things."

Finnegan believed in the power of photographs. "Nothing in any newspaper of that period convinced an important group of our solid citizens on the facts of life as then being lived so thoroughly as the picture of misery under Wacker Drive," he said of a photo showing men asleep near Michigan Avenue. "Here was misery just outside his lower door, but William Wrigley didn't know about it till he saw that picture."

Finnegan hired Tribune photographer Mike Fish as his chief photographer and gathered an experienced staff of newspaper photographers-many from the defunct Chicago Journal. Some were hired because they could move around the city with confidence. Bob Rankin was a auto salesman; Bill Pauer was a motorcycle messenger and Dante Mascione was a musician. Fish was succeeded in the late 1930s by Tom Howard, who was known for using a secret ankle-mounted camera to photograph Ruth Snyder, the first woman ever to die in the electric chair.

September 3, 1929, turned out to be an milestone day in U. S. history because that was the day the stock market reached its all-time high before the Depression. One month and 33 editions later the market would crash, the Roaring Twenties would be over and America would never be the same.

Readership rose during the 1930s, but advertising dropped. The Times managed to hold its own because of its lavish use of photos and because of the ingenuity of managing editor Lou Ruppel, who demanded "Lots of sock!" When Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson in 1936, the paper ran a full page photo of the happy couple on Page 1 with the headline "Long Love The King!" The paper made news-with words and pictures. In 1935, the Times sent a reporter posing as a patient into the Kankakee State Hospital and bannered "Seven Days in the Madhouse!" In 1937, the paper sent reporters and photographers around the country to document Nazis in America. And during the mid-1940s, two Times reporters found information that led to the release of convicted cop killer Joseph Majczek. Their work inspired the 1948 James Stewart movie "Call Northside 777."

Many stories survive about these bawdy years of Chicago journalism, and some of them are even true. One of the best is about Times photographers George Emme and Bob Rankin, who sneaked into a suburban Evanston hospital to photograph the conductor involved in a 1936 El crash. The injured trainman was under tight police guard. The Timesmen, disguised in priests robes, convinced the police that their service was needed by the patient. Once inside, Emme removed his camera from his cassock and took one shot. The Times got its picture.

The Times chronicled crime news in the 1930s: Crowds jam the Cook County morgue in 1934 to view John Dillinger's body after Dillinger was killed by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater. (Photo by Rocco Padulo Jr.)

Marshall Field III, whose grandfather had founded the Marshall Field's department store, returned to the city to take up his family's legacy in the 1940s. Field had woken from a selfdescribed upper-crust stupor during the mid-1930s with a calling to create publications that would improve the world. In 1940, he established the newspaper PM, a radical New York City daily that accepted no advertisements. He came to Chicago in 1941 to create a more traditional newspaper.

The Sun was conceived to skim off the Tribune's morning readership, champion President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and challenge Colonel McCormick's isolationist sentiment. Buoyed by a pledge from 100,000 Chicagoans that they would buy the new paper, Field recruited editors from around the country. The Sun was created on the run. The paper's first employees were hired in September 1941; its printing contract was signed in October. The paper produced its first dummy issues in late November. Eighteen photographers were hired, but they were forced to change film in closets at first because darkrooms were not yet finished.

The Chicago Sun appeared December 4, 1941-three days before Pearl Harbor. Production of the first issue was witnessed by the mayor, the governor, boxer Gene Tunney and newsreel crews. When Volume 1, Number 1 came off the press, Marshall Field held it up as if he had just given birth and declared: "Well, Chicago, here it is. I hope you like it."

The demand for the paper was astounding. Close to 900,000 copies of the 2-cent broadsheet paper sold on its first day. Most dealers were emptied out by 10 a.m. But the start of war put a quick end to one of the main reasons for the Sun's existence-its call for intervention. By the time the smoke cleared above the USS Arizona, the Tribune had joined the ranks, proclaiming on its masthead "Our Country, Right or Wrong."

The Sun flourished and floundered during World War II. Readership was high because Chicagoans relished reading the latest war news, but wartime restrictions and the economy limited advertising. The Sun fought on many fronts, resisting a government order to cut newsprint consumption and challenging an effort by the Tribune to block its membership in the Associated Press. Without the wire service, the paper had to depend even more on its own reporters and photographers.

The expectations that surrounded the Sun when it opened were never realized. Three months after its debut, Milton Mayer wrote in The Nation that the Sun was neither good nor bad. He criticized the paper for lacking direction and distinction. It was, he wrote, a crusader without a cause.

"The Sun doesn't know the town and hasn't touched it," Mayer wrote. "Chicago is a slugging town and a sentimental town. The Sun hasn't waded into anything yet."

By the end of the war, the Sun was shriveling. Circulation was down to 300,000 and the paper was saddled with high payments to the afternoon Chicago Daily News for use of its presses. Meanwhile, the Times had slowly climbed to a circulation of more than 400,000. It was a crafty paper, directed by editors who knew the city. In 1947, Field bought the Times for $5.3 million and announced he would print the new Sun as a tabloid on the Times' presses at 211 W. Wacker Drive. At first, Field ran two papers, but he combined the Sunday papers in 1947 and combined the daily papers in 1948, forming the Sun & Times and eventually the Sun-Times. Field's new paper was printed around-the-clock. By the early 1950s, when the Sun-Times became a strictly morning publication, the paper had a staff of 22 photographers and photo-technicians. That figure has remained fairly constant over the last half century.

In 1957, all of the negatives from the Sun and Times were moved over to the Sun-Times' new office at 401 N. Wabash Avenue. The building was the height of modernity, with dustproof darkrooms and new high-speed presses. Two years later, Marshall Field IV purchased the Chicago Daily News and moved that paper to Wabash Avenue. Field donated all of the News' glass plate negatives, primarily taken during the first three decades of the Twentieth Century, and hundreds of thousands of negatives through the 1950s to the Chicago Historical Society. The Daily News did keep its archival prints, and integrated them into the Sun-Times photo library.

Newspaper photography changed drastically during the 1960s. The relationship between press photographers and police was altered when the Summerdale Police District scandal broke in 1960 and crooked cops became the focus of newspaper photographers.

New technology also transformed newspaper photography. The traditional press cameras, which produced single 4-inch-by-5-inch negatives, were phased out in the early 1960s at the Sun-Times and other papers around the country. The cameras were replaced by 35-millimeter cameras, which produced smaller negatives in a roll. Many Sun-Times staffers welcomed the change to the lighter, more versatile cameras. A few had trouble making the switch and at least one chose retirement over learning new tricks.

The 1960s also launched a whole new generation of photographers. The first photographers at the Sun-Times, like those at other city papers, had not been trained or schooled in photography. Few went to college; they generally came out of the ranks of copy boys. By the mid-1960s, new hires were often generally college educated-some even going to photography school. It was time for this new generation to reshape photography.

Joeseph Majczek walks through Stateville Prison on November 26, 1944. "Some day he hopes to walk out the front door free," wrote photographer Mel Larson. The effort by two Times reporters helped prove that Majczek was innocent of killing a Chicago police officer.

Much from the old school remains. The names of 1940s-era Sun-Times photographers still grace the doors of darkrooms. Present-day photographers continue to cruise the city and retain a second sense of where to hang out by listening to the back talk of police scanners. Cell phones have replaced radio phones with whipsaw antennas. Digital cameras and laptop computers have replaced 35-millimeter cameras. But the process remains the same.

Those who shot for the Sun-Times retain battle scars from their work.

Bob Kotalik is haunted by seeing the bodies of 92 school children and three nuns come out of the Our Lady of the Angels fire. "I felt terrible when I saw the parents out there yelling and crying and screaming because they knew their kids were dead. I didn't like making those pictures," he said.

And Jack Lenahan sometimes walks with a limp-the aftermath of being beaten by more than a dozen police officers during a 1968 antiwar demonstration in the Loop.

Before his death in 1996, photographer Carmen Reporto told his family he wanted no service. "I covered too many funerals and wakes in my life to want one myself."

So, are these photographers artists? If you had suggested that to old-timers such as Louis Okmin, you might get a punch in your face. Now, a few Sun-Times photographers quietly talk about their lives as visual artists. They work for a newspaper, but they certainly lead determined lives of art-using their cameras to communicate. And they certainly produce their share of art.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Text Edited by Richard Cahan, Michael Williams and Neal Samors.

The authors would like to thank the Chicago Sun-Times for the use of its photographs and its unbridled cooperation. This is a joint publishing project. The Sun-Times has offered encouragement and support in the editing process, but has in no way mandated what should be used in the book-and we have valued this editorial freedom. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Chicago Times, a newspaper that merged with the Chicago Sun to form the Sun-Times. This year also marks the start of a new era in Sun-Times history as it moves into new offices. This exceptional archive of photographs and negatives moves with the paper.

In particular, we would like to thank Dan Miller and Jaclene Tetzlaff, who originated the idea. John Cruickshank, Michael Cooke, John Barron, Don Hayner, Nancy Stuenkel, Deborah Douglas, Toby Roberts, Ernie Torres and Dom Najolia made our research possible. Ron Theel and Herb Ballard, keepers of the archive, made us feel comfortable and offered essential clues to worthwhile work. The photo and engraving staff helped gather and prepare photographs in the midst of deadline pressure. Former Sun-Times photographers Bob Kotalik, Jack Lenahan, Gene Pesek, Ralph Arvidson, Kevin Horan & Pablo Martinez Monsivais graciously gave their insight into the past. Special thanks go to Tom McNamee, Jim Fleming, Jim Kirkpatrick, Richard Falstein, Linda Loye and Eric White, who provided essential editorial help. Thanks also to the Newberry Library, the repository of Chicago journalism history.