Last August, I went searching for some of my dad's lost articles in the research department of the Chicago Public Library. I was knee-deep in the microfiche when the librarian who was helping me came over to the table. She said, "You won't believe this. A reporter just called from the Arizona Republic looking for an article your dad wrote 30 years ago."
I knew it was the spirit of my father. But it was one helluva wink.
She was profiling Abe Hamadeh, a Chicago native running for Arizona Attorney General. In 1996, my father had written a Chicago Reader story about Hamadeh's father, a complicated tale of American tribal turf war. Her article came out some weeks later, and Hamadeh lost the election by 280 votes out of 2.5 million cast.
Maybe a thousand people read my dad's story. It made me appreciate how local journalism shapes the local workings of democracy.
He wrote for the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Reader, Catalyst, Crain's, the Defender and People: thousands of articles, a treasure chest of stories. He died of a heart attack in 2005, at 57. Three years later I got him one of his life wishes, a book of his stories and his place on the shelf of the Chicago Public Library.
I always felt there was a TV show in his work. Maybe his stories just needed to age a bit, like the complicated fine wine that is America. This project combines my tools with his, and holds them up to an audience to combat the empathy deficit.
— John Pick
