This is the time to sit down and say Neath. Eunice is a difficult act to follow and an impossible one to surpass. Eloquent though my whiff’s speech has truly been, and transcendent though its topic was, I cannot allow this occasion to pass without a much more prosaic yet personal word from this former citizen of Chicago and of Illinois.
Chicago is my favorite city!!! No metropolis and its citizens have ever received a newcomer like myself with more sensitivity and hospitality and generosity. From my first moments after arriving on the 20th Century train from New York, to the welcome and excellent room I got at the Bismarck Hotel (to be near the Merchandise Mart), this city and its citizens were and have been always marvelous to me. I would have stayed here, happily, all my life.
Think of these facts:
Our first home was here in Chicago. Yes, I carried Eunice over the threshold of the apartment I had rented at 220 E Walton...an apartment where my interior decorator and my secretary disappeared out the back door at the very moment the happy groom carried his bride into the front hallway where fresh flowers greeted her, and into the bedroom where gardenias in profusion welcomed this Boston girl to the city of “broad shoulders.”
No city, except Chicago, would have appointed such a newcomer to the Board of Education and elected him President of it when he met the legal residency requirement of five years by a bare 4 months! No city, except Chicago, could have better provided the superior medical services for my wife and our first two babies, and the recreational opportunities in Lincoln Park for them and for Eunice and me.
Where in the world except Chicago could the Shriver Family visit the zoo with their children, play golf, shoot traps, ride horses and drive in our pony cart with the children, swim in the lake, and also at a club pool -- all within 15 minutes of our front door at 2430 Lakeview Ave. Where but at the March Mart could I have met and worked with the leaders of American industries -- home furnishings, appliances, carpets, antiques, the newest creations of America’s top designers, radio and TV, and big corporations like Quaker Oats, the CTA, Field Enterprises -- all under one roof. And no where was there a city government like Mayor Dick Daley’s, or a Park District like Bill McFetridge’s, or a lake like Lake Michigan, or newspapers like The Tribune, The Sun-Times, The Daily News, and The American, or politicians like Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Arvey, Bill Tushy, Martin Kennelly, Marshall Korshak, Judge Abe Marovitz, or Dan Cantwell, or Universities like De Paul, Illinois, Roosevelt, the University of Chicago, Rosary, Mandeleiu, St. Xavier’s and most important of all Loyola!!
Finally, with Mayor Daley and his Mother, with our nation’s most preeminent religious leader, your Eminence Cardinal Bernadin, and with all of you in this audience tonight, I think Chicago is ready for the 21st Century. May Loyola University, Stritch Medical School, and the Jesuits of the Chicago Province, prosper and serve all the people of Mid-America for decades and even centuries to come. ´
