Richard J. Daley became mayor of Chicago in 1955 when I was three-years old and served until 1976, four years after I left Chicago, so he was the only mayor I knew while growing up on the South Side.

Daley was an old-school machine politician who created a system of patronage in which one hand scratched the back of someone else, who's hand scratched the back of someone else in the form of city jobs and contracts. It created a bloated and inefficient municipal bureaucracy. It wasn't uncommon to see crew of six city workers fixing a pothole in the street with one guy leaning on the shovel as the other five watched him. But on election day all those hands pulled the Democratic level in the voting booth... sometimes, it was alleged, more than once.

Chicago is divided into Wards, which elect aldermen who formed the city council. It was predominantly Democratic but there were a few Republican Wards scattered around the city. I lived in one of them. The unofficial motto of Chicago in the Daley years was "Don't get mad, get even." So if you lived in a Republican Ward you didn't except much in the way of services from the city.

For example, despite the fact my father was a block captain for the Democratic party he had been unable to get a pothole in front of our house fixed by calling the city. It was next to a sewer grate and kept getting larger and larger to the point of threatening to collapse the sewer and swallow the family car. While attending a Boy Scout award dinner where Daley was a speaker my father wrote a note explaining the situation and the fact he was a loyal Democrat and handed it to one of Daley's minions. The note found its way to Daley and the next day bright and early there were six city workers in front of our house, one with a shovel and five others watching, repairing the gaping hole. That's how things worked...

Years later I had joined the U.S. Foreign Service and arrived in Manila, Philippines just after Marcos and his cronies had murdered a long-time rival, which a year later would later result in his overthrow. When a Filipino working for me asked me, "What do you think of the political situation here?" I replied that it felt just like home, but that our mayor was far more subtle at getting even.