Considering that the new pope hails from Dolton, Ill., I thought I'd repost my blog entry from May 12, 2023. I'd thought about reposting it before when the mayor of Dolton was in the news for what I read somewhere is called being mayor while black.
Re-reading this piece and trying to imagine what it was like for the upright citizens of the suburb, I thought of a civilized people being attacked by encroaching barbarians. Their own brave warriors were able to fend off the initial, probing attacks for a while, but eventually they were overwhelmed and forced to flee, leaving all behind, all which the barbarians, being barbarians, could not maintain and ruined.
Anyway, here it is:
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| Happy days in Dolton |
Anyway, one of the stories he told me about his early days working the cop news on the south side of Chicago and the suburbs in that area was how blacks would prey on the businesses and homes of such bedroom towns as Riverdale, Dolton, South Holland, Harvey and others in that area. These towns when he reported on them in the early 1970s were pleasant white communities enjoying a solid middle-class life thanks to all the nearby factories and steel mills that provided employment at good wages.
Each town
had its own police force, which diligently kept the peace and enforced
the law. Of course, the homeowners were peaceable and law-abiding. It
was the outsiders who raided to loot and rob who had to be guarded
against. My relative told me of how when you called the cops they
responded immediately to a break-in, burglary, armed robbery, whatever
it was, and they would pursue the felon no matter what until they got
him. Since each town's cops only had jurisdiction in their community,
they would hand off a hot pursuit of a perp to the next town's cops as
the bad guy fled through them. The Cook County Sheriff's Dept. would
also join in the pursuit, as would the Illinois State Police. He told
me of several such chases in which multiple police cars were wrecked,
one, in which, if memory serves, 14 police cars crashed chasing a bad
guy, and another where the bad guy crashed into a gas station fuel pump,
which exploded in a huge fireball. But they did get the bad guy. And
usually alive, without gunplay. And, he said, regarding fleeing felons,
never mind what the judge would hand them, the cops would tune them up
on the spot. Only then would they face a judge.
Anyway the
second, here are some photos of his that I thought were interesting
illustrations of those days. Most of the photos in his archive, if I
may call it that, are just negatives, only a few prints. So I only had a
handful to select from.
This one on the left looks like a press conference with cops...I don't know. But what interests me is the uniforms and the hair styles, and that guy in the background who looks like a Weegee-type news photog. He's even wearing a trench coat! Note the photo of President Nixon, which fixes it in time.
The
photo on the right is of a cop dusting for fingerprints after a
burglary. Thieves climbed up on the roof of the building and cut a hole
in it and climbed down into the business to rob it but the alarms went
off and the cops were on the bad guys like that. Note the
policeman is armed with a revolver. Probably an old reliable Smith
& Wesson .38. And I bet should he have ever had to use it, he would
have administered a pistol whipping, not emptied the cylinder. Those
times were far less shooty than today. Maybe that's because the police
were more respected in those days, even by criminals, and cops had the
authority and backing for what they needed to do on the spot, and were
certain that any bad guys they nabbed would do hard time.
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This
photo on the left shows the end of one of those epic car chases, ending
as they usually did with the perp crashing his stolen car, and the cops
swarming him and hauling his sorry ass off to the calaboose. It looks
like a Cook County Sheriff's Department deputy and an Illinois state
trooper were in on this bust. I think the car is a Lincoln, but I'm not
sure. Usually the bad guys stole Cadillacs or Lincolns.
To
the right is a photo of the Cook County Sheriff Department deputy
pictured above left counting the recovered loot the robber got. It
would be cataloged and then returned to the store keeper, sometimes the
very same day. They didn't dawdle back then and the red tape was
minimal. Crook robs, cops catch, your money returned, crook goes to the
slammer. Now this photo below is different. It shows a neighborhood get-together in suburban Dolton in 1973. The back of the photo says "pet parade." I suppose it was a kind of street party where neighbors would gather with their pets and enjoy a nice time together. I've colorized it to bring out just how pleasant and enjoyable it must have been, with lots of families, lots of children, lots of dogs -- and, you will notice, everybody is white. It was Leave It to Beaver land for real, prosperous, safe, peaceful and pleasant.
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Today, the factories and steel mills have long since closed and Dolton is more than 92 percent black and just barely 5 percent white, mostly elderly who can't afford to move. It's plagued by crime, drugs, gangs and street violence. Here's a photo I found from a Sun-Times article about Dolton in 2022:
The photo, taken by Anthony Vazquez, shows Martin Luther King Blvd in Dolton. The story says the suburb is like a ghost town with abandoned stores and buildings infested with druggies and the homeless. A crime stats website describes Dolton today thusly:
"Dolton has an overall crime rate of 7,484 per 100,000 residents. This is one of the most dangerous regions in the United States. This means that your chances of becoming a victim of any type of crime in Dolton is 1 in 13 if you reside there for a year."
A couple of more end of police chase photos. The bad guys never got away and never got far. Too bad about those stolen Cadillacs:
