DIVISION STREET REVISITED EPISODE 5: MARY WARD WOLKONSKY: The Best of Everything [CHRIS WALZ: “OH, LADY BE GOOD”] In the mid-1960s, a wealthy suburban woman named Mary moved into a daring new high-rise in downtown Chicago. Mary was known as a mover-and-shaker in the city—rare status for a woman—and if she was ready to live downtown, well, Chicago must be changing. Mary's new home was in a development called Marina City, and at the heart of Marina City were two residential towers. Those twin towers were different from all the angular, muscular buildings that populated downtown.  They were cylindrical and scalloped, evocative of flowers or corn cobs. MARINA CITY DOCUMENTARY: One of the tallest concrete structures in the world, called by many revolutionary in both design and concept. And Marina City was novel in another way:  In an era still ruled by coal and gas, the Marina Towers were all electric. Electric heat. Electric light. Electric elevators. As it happened, Mary was married to the man who ran the local electric company - Commonwealth Edison - and when this powerful, glamorous couple moved downtown, it made a statement: Chicago was ready for the future. [PAUSE/SOUND] From her curving balcony in Marina City, Mary could survey the gritty city below, sometimes with a martini in hand. [CITY NOISE—CLATTER, HONKING] The great lake, the noisy cars and L trains, the steel bridges that spanned the dirty river.  And she could dream of Chicago’s possibilities: MARY WARD WOLKONSKY: I just want this city to be the finest in everything…Oh, I wish we had fountains like Madrid or I wish we had beautiful buildings, like Paris… One day in 1965, a guy named Studs Terkel rode one of those new elevators up to Mary’s place. A small man with bright eyes, Studs sat down in her living room and turned on his big reel-to-reel tape recorder. STUDS TERKEL: Miss J. Harris Ward, who I imagine is as involved with our city today as anyone I know… Listening to that recording today, I can’t help but notice how Studs addresses Mary: Mrs. J. Harris Ward. That was Mary’s married name.  In those days it was still routine for women, even influential ones, to wear their husband’s identities in public. [UNDERCURRENT OF STUDS CONTINUING TO TALK?] Studs was widely known as a radio host, but when he came to see Mary, he was working on a book. STUDS: You know what we might call this? “View from the 44th Floor.” Chicago, how impressive it seems with the bridges, the new skyscrapers… The book was “Division Street: America,” and it contained interviews with 71 Chicagoans.  When it was published, in 1967, it became a bestseller, widely praised as a portrait of a country buffeted by change. But if you read that book today, you have to wonder: What happened to those people? To their descendants? What can we learn by connecting their history to our times? I’m Mary Schmich and this is Division Street Revisited.  A show in which we go in search of the descendants of seven of the people in “Division Street: America”, hoping to answer those questions. Today, the story of a woman who enjoyed the freedoms afforded by money and status— and who still bumped into the blockades set for women of her time. A civic leader who enjoyed traditional high society—yet held avant-garde views on everything from architecture to birth control. A public figure who carried her heartaches in private. ELLEN: She was a many-faceted diamond. JERRY: It was hard not to be drawn to her. SUSAN: No one said no to Mary. [PAUSE THAT SUGGESTS A BREAK] In "Division Street: America,” Studs gave Mary a pseudonym—Mrs. R. Fuqua Davies—and noted her age as “handsomely indeterminate.” Here are a few other ways people who knew Mary describe her. ELLEN: She was very beautiful. ELLEN: She was fascinating. JERRY: Elegant ELLEN: Regal. JERRY: Charming. ELLEN: Imperial. APRIL: Smart. ELLEN: Mary walked into a room, and all eyes were on her. She was magnetic. When people talk about Mary, they almost always mention how she looked. Her sassy boots, organza blouses, big necklaces. ELLEN: She always told me if you want to stand out in a room, wear red. [COCKTAIL PARTY MUSIC/SOUND] I cringe slightly as I mention these physical details because describing a woman’s looks can be so sexist.  But they’re important to mention because appearance was so important to Mary. She believed that good taste—looking good—was a key to success. For a person.  Or a cocktail party.  Or, as she told Studs, for Chicago. MARY: I'm delighted by the beauty, which is sort of a mask on the city. I mean, you feel as though if you ripped off this beautiful lakeshore mask that it’s so ugly back of that…In general, there's a lot of tastelessness in this city, do you think so? She was quick to add: She wasn’t talking about people. She just meant the city’s surface. And in Chicago’s ugliness, Mary saw opportunity. For herself and the city. MARY: One of the things that I love most about it is that everything hasn't been done yet…And it isn't that I want a sense of power or domination in a city, but I think you feel happiest in a city where you can identify with it and feel that you're doing something a little bit constructive about it…This city invites audience participation, so to speak. [PAUSE/MUSIC] Mary cultivated her sense of style as a girl growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan,  Her father ran a timber company. Her mother was active in the arts. They doted on their only child. When she was in her teens, Mary’s parents took her on a cruise across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. On the ship, she met a man who was playing the piano. [GERSHWIN MUSIC LACED THROUGH HERE] That man was the famous composer George Gershwin. Think: Porgy and Bess. Rhapsody in Blue. Mary and Gershwin became friends. He wrote her letters that she kept until the end of her life. In 1926, Mary set off on another adventure. She enrolled at Vassar, a women’s college in New York State. [RHAPSODY IN BLUE HERE] This was just six years after American women were granted the right to vote.  It would be another few decades before women were admitted to the elite Ivy League colleges like Harvard and Yale. At Vassar, Mary majored in English. And dreamed of being a writer. After she graduated, she moved to Boston, got a job as a tour boat guide–and cultivated another dream:  MARY: I’ve thought of being all kinds of things. I used to want to go in the diplomatic service. In Boston, she met J. Harris Ward–the Harvard man who became her first husband. And she soon realized that even an ambitious, well-to-do, educated woman could wind up in the cage of social expectation. MARY: I've had all my incipient careers sort of nipped in the bud because when you're a married woman, if your husband moves someplace, why, naturally you do the same. Naturally.  That word contains so much. A hint of wistfulness. And a sense of inevitability. [A BEAT OF WISTFUL MUSIC] Shortly after World War II, Mary and her husband settled in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. He was on his way to becoming chairman of Commonwealth Edison, the powerful electric company. And Mary, for a while, lived what looked like the suburban dream, among the big houses, big trees and country clubs of Chicago’s North Shore. She had three children. (One of her sons is still alive, we’ll hear from him later.) But Mary’s life wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Her only daughter, Katrina, was born with brain damage and would spend most of her life cared for in an institution. That fact was not in Studs Terkel’s book. Some of Mary’s best friends never knew. As her close friend Susan Aaron says: SUSAN AARON: Mary was a very private person. There were a lot of episodes of sadness in Mary's life that she would not talk about. [PAUSE] By the time Mary was in her early 40s, she was itching for a bigger life. MARY: I don't think any suburb can possibly offer the kind of excitement that a city can. I mean, I love the golf and tennis and I love to have a garden and so on, but it isn't all of life. In 1948, she set off on her first big project, organizing daylong trips for women in her social circles. These women were mostly college-educated, married to powerful men.  In the public eye, they were sometimes reduced to terms like “socialite” or “corporate wife.”  Mary called her project Know Your Chicago, and on the program’s trips women could visit places most people never go. A prison, a steel mill, a public housing project. Mary was aiming for more than tourism.  She wanted to give women a way to think about issues and how to solve social problems.  She wanted them to think like leaders. ELLEN: I think it brought women out of the, behind the eaves and into a role where they could have a little presence of their own.  This is Mary’s good friend, Ellen O’Connor. ELLEN: It gave the women a real chance at having an individuality, apart from just being a wife. Ellen’s in her late 80s and she lives in a stately old building on Chicago’s Gold Coast, overlooking Lake Michigan. In many ways her life mirrors Mary’s. After Mary’s husband ran ComEd, Ellen’s husband did. And Ellen eventually ran Know Your Chicago. ELLEN: But there's nobody else who did as much as Mary did as far as opening doors. Nobody was like Mary. After founding Know Your Chicago, Mary went on to help found a series of women’s boards. At the Lyric Opera. The University of Chicago. As head of the women’s board at the Art Institute, she was granted a special privilege: She got to sit on the regular board – the only woman among the men. STUDS: Do you think…when you're on the board, is your opinion as fully respected as that of your male counterparts? MARY: I shouldn't think so, probably…Well….I mean, I don't know just how to answer it…I am on it because I'm president of the women's board. I'm not on it for any other reason. So that my opinion, of course, I imagine, is respected when I'm talking about my own business. But not I mean, I wouldn't even venture an opinion on anything else. [PAUSE] We’ll be back after a break. [BREAK] I’m Mary Schmich and you’re listening to Division Street Revisited. A show in which we follow up on 7 people featured in Studs Terkel’s 1967 book “Division Street: America.” Among Mrs. J. Harris Ward’s many causes, one mattered to her above all. MARY: The great cause that I've worked on for most years of my adult life is Planned Parenthood. And this was a real frustration because there were so few people that you could really interest in this…It never was a social, a fun thing to do. At the beginning of 1965 – the year Studs Terkel interviewed Mary – birth control was still illegal in some states. Not until later that year did the Supreme Court make birth control legal all over the country–and even then it was only for married women. Somewhere along the way, Mary was drawn to the woman who invented the term “birth control” – Margaret Sanger, who also founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood. Mary believed birth control was vital–for women and the world. She even traveled with Sanger to India for a birth control conference. But Mary’s friend Jerry Adelmann–who for decades ran the environmental group Openlands–told me a story. About how, just as Mary’s husband was poised to get the top job at ComEd, Mary was offered a high-ranking position at Planned Parenthood. JERRY: And leadership at ComEd heard that, and they said to her husband that if Mary does that you cannot be the head of ComEd. So Harris came home and told Mary, but he said, “I want you to go ahead and do it.” And she said, “Jerry, it was one of the very few times in my life that I cried. But I said, no, your career comes first.” [PAUSE/MUSIC/SOUND THAT SUGGESTS MOVEMENT] One big reason Mary loved Chicago is that it never sat still. MARY: The thing that does impress me is the constancy of change. I mean it’s always changing. In the 1960s, change wasn’t just constant. It was fast.   Mary watched as new expressways sliced up parts of the city, making it easier for commuters to speed back and forth from their downtown offices to the suburbs.  She witnessed skyscrapers rise, and neighborhoods torn down in the name of urban renewal. She was in Chicago when Martin Luther King Jr. came to town to campaign for civil rights. Mary believed in the civil rights movement. MARY: It's more exciting to me than flying to the moon or anything else. To really try to put this American experiment to the test where it hurts. I mean, to absolutely overturn your convictions and your prejudices is a difficult thing to achieve. But the fact that this is being tried testifies to the vitality of our whole system. At the same time, when it came to civil rights demonstrations, as in everything else, she didn’t like what she called tastelessness. MARY: I can't stand the sight of people lying in the street and being hauled off by their hands and feet. It just really sets the cause back, I feel. The year after her interview with Studs, Mary founded another organization. Bright New City. It was for men as well as women. JERRY: But the focus was really on urban design, on architecture, on planning. What makes a great city? This is Jerry Adelmann again. He met Mary through Bright New City. JERRY: The topics were broad. You know, from affordable housing to what's the future of Navy Pier? And she brought together some of the top thinkers and writers and leaders of their time. Bringing people together–that was at the heart of Mary’s art. [TINY PAUSE] By the early ‘70s, life was changing radically for women. Finally, birth control was fully legalized. Abortion became legal. More women were working outside the house–and getting paid for it. Feminists took to the streets to fight for women’s rights. Street protest was not Mary’s style. And she never wanted to be called a feminist.  She once told an interviewer that she didn’t like “the fighting that goes on to bring equality about.” No, she pressed for change sitting at her dining table, writing letters and making calls to influential people, clipping newspaper stories that spurred ideas and helped her organize events. The Chicago Tribune once painted a vivid picture of her at one of those events. It described her straightening the potted flowers, making sure the VIPs and donors sat up front, and, introducing the featured speaker in impeccable language. [PAUSE/MUSIC] In 1975, J. Harris Ward died. And Mrs. J. Harris Ward became a widow. Never one to linger in grief, she kept working on Know Your Chicago and Bright New City. She helped found the Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago. And then she met a man named Peter Wolkonsky. Peter was a prominent local doctor–and the handsome son of a Russian princess.  He proposed marriage. He was 15 years younger than Mary. Do you think this is crazy? she asked a friend. Follow your heart, the friend said. And so Mary became Mrs. Peter Wolkonsky. [MUSIC BUBBLES UP] By that time, Mary was splitting her time between her Lake Forest house and her large apartment in the Carlyle, an exclusive downtown high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan. She and Peter became known for the cocktail parties they threw at the Carlyle. Peter mixing martinis while Mary buzzed around talking to architects, politicians and city planners. Connections were made. Plans were laid. SUSAN: She made the leaders in every industry sort of sit up and say, “I want to be at that table. I want to be at that salon.”  This is her friend Susan Aaron again, who spent her career in civic planning. SUSAN: And that's a rare gift. That really is. We owe a lot to this woman. Chicago owes a lot to her. [PAUSE/MUSIC]  When Mary was in her 80s, she endured another great heartache. Her son Tony died, unexpectedly, at the age of 56. DAVID WARD: I don't think any woman wants to see her son die before she does.    This is David Ward, Mary’s only living child. DAVID WARD: So that was real sadness in our family….but she was very much  the person who would carry on despite hardships and loss. David’s a retired lawyer. He has three children, six grandchildren. Back in the 1970s, when he worked for the federal government, he acted as an ambassador helping to negotiate the Panama Canal Treaty. Now he lives with his wife an hour north of New York City. As we talked over the phone, he was admiring a big portrait of his mother that hangs in a corner of his spacious, sunny living room.            DAVID: And this is by the famous artist Gardner Cox who painted a lot of Supreme Court justices…[LET IT FADE] I asked David what he thought of the title Studs Terkel gave Mary’s chapter in “Division Street: America.” “Noblesse Oblige.”   DAVID: It suggests that there’s a lot of money there and the noblesse comes from the money. My mother, what she was doing for Chicago didn’t come from money or represent money. She did a lot of fundraising for these causes, but it was not so much in her case noblesse. She was just so interested in these projects…You know, she wasn’t just a rich woman doling out money…She was trying to get a lot of people to work on these things. One thing we’ve hoped to learn as we follow up on Studs Terkel’s stories is: What gets remembered in a family? What gets lost in the rush of time? MARY SCHMICH: Do your grandchildren know about your mother and her civic engagement in Chicago? DAVID WARD: They don't know as much as they should, and they probably will learn more from your podcast, which I'm glad about. And he was glad—a man in his early 90s, sitting at home—simply to hear his mother on Studs’ recording. [UNDERTOW OF MWW] DAVID: I haven’t heard her voice since she died. It's very strange, but it's wonderful, I’m very glad to have heard that. [PAUSE/MUSIC] When Mary was in her early 90s, her husband Peter died of cancer. He was 76.  As always, Mary carried on. Until shortly before her death, she was still getting dressed up and occasionally going out for a nice lunch and a cocktail.  She was also talking to friends about her next big issue: the need for environmentally sound infrastructure in cities. In 2002, at the age of 94, Mary Ward Wolkonsky died.  And on a September afternoon, a big crowd gathered for her memorial at the Lyric Opera, which she’d done so much to support.  One of the musical selections was “Summertime” written by that piano player she’d met on a ship when she was a girl, dreaming of what a woman might become. [SUMMERTIME–ish song] Know Your Chicago outlived the woman who created it. It ended just recently, in part because women’s lives are structured so much differently today.  Which prompts the question: Who might Mary have become if she’d been born a few decades later? When I asked her old friends, they said: An architect. A CEO. A U.S. Senator. Head of the Art Institute. APRIL: She would be the President of the United States. I think she was that good. This is Mary’s granddaughter, April Ward Bodman. She remembers Mary’s talent for combining toughness with elegant persuasion. APRIL: The issue of women in power is such a big thing that we all think about these days. And, you know, could there ever be a woman President of the United States? And what kind of person would that be? I'm not sure that we've seen it yet, but I would totally vote for my grandmother. [PAUSE/MUSIC] As I learned about Mary Ward Wolkonsky, I thought about how much women’s lives changed during the course of her life. And I thought about my mother.  Before she married, my college-educated mother worked as a radio announcer. In 1953, when she was 29, she gave it up to become Mrs. F. George Schmich. Mama always missed that radio job.  Once, when she was old, she told me that she felt like she’d never accomplished much. I assured her she was wrong—she raised 8 kids!—but I knew what she meant. By the time I got to college, all the women I knew assumed we’d go out into the world and work. We kept our birth control pills handy. Back then, I didn’t fully grasp how the women of my mother’s generation were shaped by the limits and expectations of the world they were born into. I doubt younger women fully grasp what shaped my generation. But we’re all products of our moment.  We can all wonder: Who might I have been if I’d been born earlier? Or later? [PAUSE] And that’s an important part of Mary Ward Wolkonsky’s story, of all the stories in this series: They help us imagine how the world used to be, and to see the constancy of change. [WISTFUL “OH LADY BE GOOD” INTO WILL THE CIRCLE] MARY: The young people are not going to be the same today as young people were some other day. I think we're just all conditioned by our times. I don't view them with any alarm at all. I think they're terrific. I even love the way they dance, though I’m practically alone in that. Division Street Revisited is the brainchild of Executive Producer Melissa Harris. Bill Healy produced this podcast. Cate Cahan and Mark Jacob were our editors. Sound Design and Mixing by Libby Lussenhop. Our Associate Producer is Chijioke Williams. The show features original music by Chris Walz. Major funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Additional funders include M. Harris & Co., the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Susan H. Schwartz Charitable Trust, Debra Schwartz, and Julia Stasch. Archival audio comes from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive at WFMT, and the Chicago History Museum. It was digitized by the Library of Congress. Special thanks to Bobbi Zabel and Mike Shymanski. Thanks also to the University of Chicago Library and Special Collections. Additional music from George Gershwin and Epidemic Sound. Division Street Revisited is distributed by PRX. Our theme song is “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”. I’m Mary Schmich.