Anyone who grew up in north
I first met Mr. Duff as a Cub Scout in the basement of the old St. Lucy Church “pine room,” where my father, Bill Sr., was scoutmaster. He and my father became friends.
The Duffs have gotten a lot of bad press in recent years. Last week Mr. Duff died. Hopefully this will cast another, gentler light on him.
Mr. Duff, a tavern owner and city inspector who was also a union boss, took a liking to my father, who tended several rough-and-tumble West Side Irish bars in the ’60s. He once offered my dad, whom he always called Billy, a job as sort of an “assistant.” My dad politely declined, primarily because being one of Mr. Duff’s “assistants” required carrying a loaded gun.
The fact that Mr. Duff held three jobs at once, including a city inspector position, eventually landed him in trouble-not that he much cared. My dad recalled walking into the Duff home on the 200 block of
“Hey, Billy! Look at this,” he bellowed, pointing with a big smile at the television. “I’m on TV!” Sen. Estes Kefauver was on the tube, he recalls, railing against “Mr. Duff from Chicago, the king of the payrollers.”
“He was so proud,” my dad recalled.
Tough as he was, Mr. Duff didn’t simply rely on intimidating people. He used his social skills far more often than muscle. And while he didn’t always honor the law, he always honored his word.
“If he said he was going to do something, he did it,” my dad said. “People trusted him. They knew if they needed him, he’d be there.”
“I don’t have much to say for some of the people he was involved with,” he added.
Mr. Duff has been called “connected. And indeed he was. He was connected to lots of powerful people on both sides of the law, all of whom benefited from his help. The 1960 torchlight parade Richard J. Daley organized for John F. Kennedy was done with the help of union leaders like John Duff.
“He was powerful, really, in politics,” my dad said. “A lot more powerful than people think.” I’ve always enjoyed a knowing chuckle whenever I listened to the current
John Duff also helped those with no power or clout. We grew up poor on the 300 block of
When they laid off all the temporary help after Christmas, my dad didn’t get a check. Instead, he was called into the office and told he was being kept on for another month.
Mr. Duff never said a word to him, but my dad knew.
“He was very quiet about it,” said my father. He wasn’t done, either.
On Christmas morning, 1960, Santa, in the person of John Duff, showed up on our front porch, accompanied by two of the biggest damn elves you’ll ever see. In a home with so little, it was like the sun coming out after a storm. There was something for all of us in the two large bags they toted. A full set of kid’s kitchen appliances for my sisters, board games and cowboy six-shooters and holsters for the boys (it was the early ’60s, after all), candy and other treats. Most memorable, however, was an expensive Lionel train set that actually sent up puffs of smoke from the boiler stack when you dropped in a bit of oil.
It was simply the best Christmas morning the Dwyer kids ever had, one my parents could never have afforded.
The storms of my childhood have passed. My dad’s been clean and sober for over 25 years. Friday afternoon I stopped by a
I’ll leave it to our Creator to weigh the good and ill of John Duff’s life. Sitting on the divine scale, I hope, is the fact that he once brought magic and warmth to a poor, over-burdened mother and her six young kids one Christmas long ago.