OUR FELLOW

By William E. Barnhart

Presented to The Chicago Literary Club
Monday, October 9, 2000

"If I had had the courage to run in and hold the farmer, the whole thing might have ended there. The rest would have helped me to keep the two separate. But I was cold all over. My mind and body would not work.... I only know that the farmer pulled a long pocket knife out of his coat, pushed aside the table, and plunged the blade into the unprotected breast of the drunkard's wavering body. Then he ran out of the back door, with the saloon pack at his heels, screaming and shouting in filthy language. I saw the dying man prone on the floor, his blood slowly coloring the sawdust in which he lay. There was my own strained face in the mirror behind the bar. A dog began to bark fiercely in the yard. I stood motionless for a long time, fascinated by the horror of the murder, until I saw the frightened bartender run to lock the front door. I got there before him, burst through, and jumped on my bicycle." The scene was a bar in Portage, Indiana. The narrator, an unnamed young man with a bicycle who finds himself, "silent and morose," peddling furiously and mysteriously into a starless night toward the home, where he had never been, of the dead man's parents, whom he had never met, who greeted him like a long-awaited messenger. "We've been waiting for you," says the mother. "Your super's waiting for you."

The author of this tale of the supernatural was Arthur Alois Baer, the nineteen-year-old son of a Chicago dry goods merchant who dreamed of being a writer and apparently had a pretty good start on his goal. Raised in a conservative Jewish home at the turn of the century in Chicago, Baer must have been a prodigious reader or a dedicated patron of silent movies to glean such details as sawdust on a barroom floor and the instinctive move by the bartender to lock the front door immediately after a fracas. Indeed, Baer displayed all the early warning signs of a man destined, for better or worse, to a life as an artist. His rich outpouring of stories, poems, plays and editorials in his high school and college years reveals an uncommon breadth of literary insight and writing ability that almost none of his friends and associates in later life ever knew.

American literature celebrates many men and women who turned their talents from other pursuits, including business, to make major contributions as artists. Poet Wallace Stevens, a lawyer and insurance company executive, comes to mind. But the history of American business does not tell us of many artists who turned to business. Put another way, we know something of how business experiences can shape an artist's creative instincts. Stevens, one of America's great poets, once said: "It gives a man character as a poet to have daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life." But we know little about the ways in which a well developed creative writing talent may enhance a life in business enterprise.

Often, the artist-businesspersons's work is unknown. Frequently, achievements in business bear no obvious link to artistic ability. Nonetheless, a writer's vision and the discipline of good writing must contribute more than just words on a page. Skillful literary expression certainly denotes broader attributes. The life of Arthur Baer, a member of The Chicago Literary Club from 1944 until his death in 1975 and the namesake of our annual fellowship, provides some clues about the ways in which a writer's talent influences a successful non-literary career. The poet in Arthur Baer was never far removed from the merchant, banker and community activist.

Baer was born in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day 1896, the second son of Herman and Fannie Baer. He was born at home, two blocks from the family store near 102nd Street and Vincennes Avenue in the city's Washington Heights neighborhood, a small, bustling commercial center along the Rock Island railroad, kept vibrant by the giant Chicago Bridge & Iron Company plant nearby. Six years earlier, the area had been annexed to Chicago. Before the ubiquity of automobiles and expressways, neighborhood business centers -- village squares within the city -- punctuated Chicago's map, along rail and streetcar tracks and at important street intersections. In the early days of the store, simply called Baer's, shoppers traveling by buggy tied their horses to the railing outside and stepped across a wood-plank sidewalk. They entered to find furniture, carpets, dresses, shoes, shirts, celluloid collars, kerosene lamps and dozens of other items common to the inventory of a general store. For children, penny candy was displayed prominently and dispensed frequently for free.

Little is known of Baer's older brother, Victor, who died in his teens. Residents of the neighborhood who remember Arthur say the two great influences on his life were his father and his wife. Herman Baer, according to one recollection, was "a handsome, blue-eye man with a full, sandy moustache and the center-dip hairdo that was popular in his day." Arthur Baer's full face, thick lips and heavy eyelids resembled more closely his mother, who was born in the Austrian province of Bohemia and married Herman in 1889. But in explaining his character, those who knew Arthur recall Herman. Baer often paid tribute to his father's struggles against repression in his youth and his pride in immigrating to America. In a graduation speech to nursing school students in 1965, Baer addressed his father's background:

"He knew what freedom meant more intimately than I will ever know. He was born in East Prussia and as a young man was apprenticed to a draper, who paid him nothing for the three years of his apprenticeship and beat him when he did not learn swiftly enough. Then the German army took him, and he underwent severe disciplines. When he was released, he ran away, still a boy, to London, where he learned several trades and learned the rigid class system of the British social groups at that time.... Finally, he came to America.... His citizen papers were his proudest possession, to his very death."

In a paper for the Literary Club, Baer described his father as a "pleasant boastful man, who took great pride in extolling the generous hospitality of his parents." In the East Prussian village of Lilzit, they opened their home so frequently as an oasis for travelers that Herman believed his parents were operating an unlicensed inn. Providing service and hospitality to friends and strangers was a characteristic imbedded in the Baer genes. Herman was not yet twenty-five years old when he established the store on Vincennes Avenue. His difficult encounters in early life and his efforts to make the store succeed imparted a seriousness of purpose, maturity and sense of obligation upon Arthur -- traits that were revealed in his years in Calumet High School, where we find the first evidence of a fledgling writer.

Years later, as a college senior, he wrote this self-portrait: "About eight years ago there was in our high school a young man who presented all the symptoms of becoming a long-haired poet of the Victorian type. He was in a continual state of abstraction; he often forgot to eat; he was a faithful and brilliant student of the classics; and was, in short, for high school, quite impossible."

As a school project, Baer assembled a book of pressed wild flowers, picked in his neighborhood and the nearby Indiana and Michigan dunes, the locales of many of his early poems. His craft as a writer took early form on the staff of a student publication called "Temulac." As a high school junior wishing farewell to the graduating class of 1913, the year Woodrow Wilson became president, editor Baer wrote with gravity well beyond his years. Listeners to the following passage should imagine what they might have written at age seventeen about their departing high school upperclassmen.

"They surely realize that there is a tremendous struggle before them -- that it is their generation that must be ready to meet the big problems of the future. We are coming to new and strange times; each day the problems of humanity, of right and wrong, are becoming more involved; each day new ideas are springing to life. The world must have men and women who can solve these problems and who can advance new theories. This handful of our friends should constitute a section of that great army of people who will fight for civilization, for the progress of the nation and world in coming years. But first, let each one of these graduates draw up an individual code of principles by which he intends to judge all his deeds during his course of life. And let each one hold to his own code, unwavering, unrelenting, until he has attained success. To be truly human, the law of mankind demands that the man or woman be unselfish. If these comrades of ours learn to feel that they are not here for themselves alone, that all their efforts should be made wholeheartedly for their fellow-men and for the good of all people, and that the true ambition is the one wherein man aspires only to truth, honor and respect, then we shall be proud of them and say that they have performed their duties well, as Calumet desired."

Arthur did not confine himself to such weighty subjects. In the same year, he wrote the school song: "We have heard of schools galore, and we'll hear of many more, but there's none to rival you, O, Calumet. Shine afar, Maroon and Blue, colors of the brave and true, every heart beats strong for you, O, Calumet."

We know that Arthur's heart certainly beat strong at old Calumet. Many boys have romantic crushes on their high school teachers. For Baer, it was a life commitment. His English teacher was a brilliant young woman named Alice Margaret Hogge. Alice was sickly as a child and had been schooled by an uncle at home until age eleven. She graduated from John Marshall High School at age fifteen. Her father, grain broker Morgan G. Hogge, was a friend of William Rainey Harper, the first president of John D. Rockefeller's University of Chicago, which opened its doors in 1892. When Alice enrolled in the school, women were being actively recruited, in part because of the demand for teachers in the western states and the financial need of the school to boost enrollment. In Chicago, women's organizations, including the Fortnightly, raised money and urged the establishment of genuine co-education at the new institution. In the 1901-1902 academic year, more women were admitted than men. After three years of study, Alice received her degree in 1905, at age eighteen. She would return to the campus in the 1940s as a tutor, helping gifted and precocious teenagers whom the university admitted at an early age.

Alice was ten years older than Arthur and a gentile, two momentous barriers in those days to his romantic intentions. Nonetheless, he assured her that one day they would marry. Meeting Alice released the poet in Arthur. His unpublished and often handwritten verses to Alice, a collection of which is housed at the Ridge Historical Society in Chicago's Beverly Hills/Morgan Park neighborhood, constituted a lifelong expression. Arthur assembled booklets of verses for Alice and often bound them with ribbon between leather covers.

In a 1915, he gave Alice a handwritten volume titled "Spring Lyrics." In it is a poem titled "A Touch of Ambition:"

Now in the evening silence
The shadows rise and fall,
And the voice of the spring in the twilight,
The colored, scented twilight,
The quiet, restful twilight,
Comes with a world-old call,

Call to a lazy living
Which I do not even greet,
For I'm going to work, e'n in twilight,
To fight and dare in the twilight,
Do deeds, gain gains, in the twilight,
And lay them all at your feet.

When Baer compiled this book of verse he was a freshman at the University of Chicago. Alice, who was living with her family in Woodlawn, had urged him to attend college in nearby Hyde Park. "Otherwise," she recalled later, "he would have gone down to the University of Illinois, which was a country club."

Few college students ever take more away from the four years of study they invest towards a bachelor's degree -- or give more back. The lonely freshman wandering the Quadrangle, as he described himself, became a model student and established a lifelong affection for the school. He found a home, he wrote later, in the office of the student newspaper, The Daily Maroon, on Ellis Avenue. It was his twilight occupation. But his literary skills also found voice in his student plays and in student literary magazines. As a university official recalled shortly after Baer's death, "He came to the Midway, after all, only a month after the 'Guns of August' had sounded and graduated only a few months before the armistice. The Great War overshadowed his college years, and the pages of the Daily Maroon, for which Arthur worked as a reporter, daily editor, news editor and -- as a senior -- president and managing editor, are filled with stories that reflect the impact of the war."

Alice hardly was forgotten, but his scope of vision clearly expanded inside the Quadrangle. Here is another poem, published in Baer's freshman year in a student magazine, the Chicago Literary Monthly. Notice the similarity and differences from the poem he wrote in the same year to Alice. The title is "Ambition," which is also the subject:

Twinkling passionate light,
Hid in the mist of night,
Now dim and now bright,
And now gone.

I shall follow thee
Over a rolling sea
Over a trail where many fail
And the best fall like the stricken quail,
Alone and silently.

I shall strive to see
The goal you promise me.
A promise of truth! A tooth for tooth
If you dare to anger free-hearted youth,
Who lives but to follow thee.

Lead on! lead on for me,
Scorning all destiny.
I'll follow you bold till the centuries are old,
And the powerful fire of youth has grown cold.
Lead on! I follow thee.

The Cap and Gown yearbook of 1918 said of him "Arthur Baer is a problem in Liberalism, Socialism, Free Thought and Editorials. He was managing editor of the Maroon this year; wrote the best editorials ever printed in that newsless sheet; and read books way over the head of Mr. Herrick, which is going some."

"Mr. Herrick," was Robert Herrick, a professor of English and one of the Harvard University graduates recruited to be part of the original faculty at the university. Herrick, who was forty-eight when Baer matriculated, and Herrick's younger associate, Robert Morss Lovett, forty-three, were major influences on Baer's student life. Both were liberal political and academic thinkers. Herrick, a novelist as well as a teacher, became known as a sharp critic of the university and of Chicago itself. In his book about the literary life of the Midwest in the early 1900s, Chicago Renaissance, Dale Kramer writes: "Robert Herrick, an exception to the professional mossbacks, had been teaching English at the University of Chicago since its founding... A New Englander, he was repelled by the crudity and greed of Chicago's Builders and their imitators. This being evident in his work, the attitude of most local newspaper critics ranged from cool to horrified.... In his craftsmanship, he was superior to Dreiser, and as a realist he took a gloomier view of the modern world."

In 1926, Herrick published the novel Chimes, a thinly disguised critique of the University of Chicago in its early years. As one reviewer wrote, "Herrick creates a verbal image of an institution laboring under its too rapid growth, the materialistic philosophy of its founders, and its obvious lack of tradition.... In impeccable language and style, contrasting markedly with the crudeness of his topic, the author describes the ideals, the intellectual controversies, scandals, personal relationships, jealousies, and work that go into the building of a large university."

Robert Morss Lovett would become an even greater figure in American liberalism. The election of the scholarly Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912 energized American liberals like Lovett. Wilson's initial pledge to keep the United States out of the war in Europe and to achieve peace without victory raised hopes that the world would find a better way to resolve its differences and that the rich and vain capitalists who had instigated war for selfish ends would be challenged by a new breed of democrats -- with a lower-case d -- from the working classes. Even after Wilson sought a declaration of war in April 1917, Lovett and others were hopeful, looking forward to a peace agreement crafted by the newly empowered United States that would advance internationalism and the cause of Wilsonian democracy.

On May 27, 1917, Lovett addressed an overflow crowd in Chicago's magnificent Auditorium. "We believe that the power and influence of the United States are capable of imposing on the world the terms of a righteous and lasting peace," he said. "I am not afraid that this country will prove a slacker in war. If I have any fear it is that in the heat of the conflict we shall forget in some measure the ideals of democracy and world peace with which we set out."

Four days before Lovett's Auditorium speech, The Daily Maroon announced that Arthur A. Baer had been named president and managing editor. These were heady days for Baer, who immediately voiced from his new position an empathy for fast-moving world events. In these years the managing editor of the four-page Daily Maroon wrote a daily editorial. Baer titled his first editorial, published May 24, 1917, "The New Policy."

"To find a middle course between the hysteria and the horror of world conditions and world thought at the present time is the only remedy for the pain that must come to every social-thinking individual," he wrote. "It is the opinion of the present writer that there is another field for the college editor or for any person who writes sincerely and faithfully; in short, that he may try with all his heart not to represent, not to better, but simply to help others to make an attempt, however feeble it may be, towards assuaging the pain of life, modifying the terror and the horror of world destruction in the minds of those who 'look on.'"

Shortly before the university's summer recess, as anti-German sentiment mounted in Chicago, he wrote:

"The United States must aid, we presume, to crush the dogma of Prussianism in order to uphold the creed of democracy. It must not hate the German people. We have not advanced to the present state of civilization in order to become cynics, pessimists, haters."

During that summer, Baer's parents sent him to the West, where he worked in logging and mining camps and developed a lasting appreciation for those who worked with their hands in the outdoors. His senior-year play, "Gardens," was, according to a reviewer, "a deeply moving piece of symbolism by Arthur Baer. His picture of the flower-loving miner in the grip of circumstances and his simple refusal to knuckle under brought a brief silence after the curtain which meant more than the enthusiastic applause that followed."

Upon his return to Hyde Park to begin his senior year and resume his leadership of the Maroon, Baer wrote, "the university seemed complacent, satisfied, uninterested in the great problems of men and women." In his final academic year, six hundred students drilled daily on the Midway and classmates began to be called away. The Maroon published lists of men in active duty and, inevitably, names of casualties. With friends going off to war, he wrote, "what was the use of staying here, attending classes, running the Maroon, and all the rest. These were little things, not important, not vital, not worth much really." Nonetheless, he conceded, "everything that is worthy must go on. Art and literature and the struggle for social justice must go on, even though relentless war tries to sweep everything before it."

Jingoistic sentiment against his father's homeland intensified in Chicago and at the university. Baer refused to conform. "We who are not immediately absorbed by the problem of sticking a bayonet through a German breast have this responsibility to bear: to prepare ourselves in mind and body for the period of reorganization." Many Baer editorials followed the lead of the liberal magazine, New Republic, which a few years later would name Lovett as editor. Baer advocated internationalism and praised the British Labor Party for its plans to reform England's class-driven society after the war. He wrote, "The classes that bear the burden desire to have something to say about the size of the burden and the length of time it must be borne."

His editorials advocated the women's suffrage amendment, then being debated in Congress. When his year as managing editor ended, Baer named Rose Fishkin as the Maroon's day editor, placing her in line to become the paper's first female managing editor. A fellow student recalled: "Arthur invited Miss Marion Talbot, the long-time greatly respected and somewhat feared Dean of Women, to accompany him to the annual Washington Prom. To her credit, be it said that she did so, white gloves and all." Talbot, an associate of the first dean of women, Alice Freeman Palmer, was a life-long champion of women's rights and among the first nine women appointed to the faculty when the university opened.

At his graduation convocation, an archbishop of the Anglican Church thanked Americans and especially the American boys for their efforts. "Here, as in England," he said, "a voice has been heard, breaking in on the ordered course of study and the familiar intercourse of college life, summoning the university to sacrifice itself for service to the nation. Without hesitation, the summons has been obeyed." But he called on the students not to lose sight of a greater purpose: "Even here in this great country, with all its wealth and resources, there are lives meager and narrow, lives of men in the slums of the cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments. Such lives men and women trained in our universities can enrich and enlarge."

As soon as he graduated, with Phi Beta Kappa honors, Baer enlisted in the Navy. As a biographical sketch put it, "he was assigned to a freighter shipping sugar from Cuba -- an ignominious way to serve his country, he felt." Germany surrendered in November 1918, and Baer was mustered out of service in New York City in early 1919. That was the year that The Dial, a small magazine of literary criticism and left-wing political thinking, moved from Chicago to New York City at the insistence of its new financial backers. Robert Morss Lovett, whose son had been killed the previous August in Belleau Wood, had just been named editor of the fortnightly publication. "The year 1919 was one of yeast-like ferment," Lovett wrote in his autobiography. "The makers of the new world were as busy in New York as in Paris. The great name of Reconstruction covered a multitude of movements and enterprises, to which the Dial was editorially committed."

America's liberals and socialists were flush with new prescriptions for the post-war world, many based on Wilson's Fourteen Points and his proposal for the League of Nations. Lovett immediately received job applications from returning soldiers and sailors, eager to translate their budding worldliness onto the pages of the magazine, whose antecedents dated back to the mid-nineteenth-century transcendental movement of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"About this time the lost generation was coming back from Europe," Lovett wrote. As well as he could at the cash-starved magazine, Lovett hired young writers to generate book reviews. One of the applicants at The Dial's office on West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village was Arthur Baer. No direct account survives of Baer's brief immersion into the world of New York writers. But we may rely on the memoir of another applicant to sense Baer's excitement:

"The ten months I spent in the Navy, from April 1918 to February 1919, terminated, without my knowing it, the hardest part of my literary apprenticeship. I was to have lean days, certainly, for many years afterwards; but never any doubts about the career I had chosen.... Almost as soon as I was mustered out of the Navy, the fortnightly 'Dial' took me on as a writer of book reviews; and after I had done a few, Robert Morss Lovett, then the Editor-in-Chief, offered me a post as Associate Editor. This was far better than any of my dreams. More than once in the brief period that followed I said to myself: 'This is the happiest time of my life! I could not hope to have better days.' I never uttered truer words."

This was the recollection Lewis Mumford, who would become one of the great American essayists, critics and biographers of the mid-century era. Alas, events took a different turn for Arthur Baer, whose modest dream was to become book editor of the New York Times. Baer contributed several capsule reviews to The Dial. Unfortunately, Lovett did not identify his reviewers in the magazine, so Baer's contributions are unknown. An offer of a more permanent position never came. Years later, Baer said he may have been too eager. He recalled applying to be the assistant to a New York drama critic. According to a biographical sketch, "when asked what he wanted most to write, he said, 'Anything!' -- and that blew it." Unable to secure even a subsistence income, Baer returned to Chicago and Alice Margaret Hogge. We can only imagine how his life might have unfolded if The Dial under Lovett's leadership had remained in Chicago, where Baer could have lived at home and courted Alice.

Baer contacted another University of Chicago associate, classmate Harold Swift, a member of the Chicago meatpacking clan, and obtained a job in the Swift & Company advertising department. In 1921, he presented another bound volume to Alice. The poems comprised his proposal of marriage, including this two-line entry:

I will bathe your feet in my humility
And set you free proudly.

The booklet ended with a prose appendix: "On the twenty-second day of the month of June in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-one, please, Poggy, marry me. Arthur Alois Baer." She did. "He bothered the life out of me, so I married him," Alice recalled years later.

Around the time of their marriage, Alice became the principal of the Kohn School at 104th and State Streets, a position she held until 1945. Meanwhile, Baer's career as a professional writer ended when his father was disabled by a heart attack. He left Swift & Co. after a year's employment to run the family department store. Arthur and Alice Baer, who did not have children, traveled throughout the world in years to come. But their lives were anchored firmly in the Washington Heights community, which later became known as East Beverly. When Baer took over management of the store at about the same age as his father was when the store was established, the small commercial district was changing, thanks to the automobile. But the store and Baer's style of unquestioning personal service prospered, and the staff grew from five to thirty clerks.

In 1929, as the country entered the Great Depression, officials of the struggling Beverly State Bank, nearby at 103th Street and Vincennes Avenue, asked Baer to become a director. The two-story brick bank had been organized in 1923 by executives of Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, the United Autographic Register Company and other employers in the area. After the 1933 bank holiday, Beverly Bank was one of the first in Chicago to reopen, reflecting the support of the community's major employers. In 1942, Baer, who continued to manage the dry goods store, was named a vice president, a post he took without pay on condition he receive two months vacation each year for the travels he and Alice so enjoyed. He began to modernize the bank's operations, applying principles of retailing to the task of attracting and retaining bank customers, even as the community around the bank began to change. The bank opened a drive-up window, the first in the area. The bank grounds were landscaped beautifully with trees and flowers, a Baer trademark. In 1944, he became the bank's president. In the same year he joined The Chicago Literary Club, which became an outlet for stories and essays about his many travels. In 1960, Baer sold the department store and became the bank's chairman. He built Beverly Bank into one of the Chicago area's largest and most profitable banking organizations, owning banks as far away as Wheaton, Illinois.

But where was the artist Arthur Baer, the romantic who every year at Christmas gave Alice a book of verse? He wrote nine papers for The Chicago Literary Club and considered his election as president for the 1966-1967 season the greatest accolade ever bestowed upon him. Baer never aspired to fame. He told an interviewer shortly before his death, "I have been in the public eye... but actually I am not in favor of publicity for myself, because I always feel that the good things in this world are accomplished by groups of people rather than by an individual." Addressing a group of fellow bankers, he quoted investment banker Francis Du Pont: "The best way for men to get acquainted with each other is to know what each thinks about business. I believe the association of men in business is the foundation of civilization."

Baer had come a long way from his student days at the University of Chicago. Unlike his professor Robert Herrick, he never faulted the university. As a first-generation American, his liberalism never inspired him to reject American institutions. On the contrary, he became one the school's most faithful alums. Soon after graduation, he spearheaded a drive to create a memorial to men and women of the University whose lives were lost in the Great War. The memorial is affixed to the west wall of Rockefeller Chapel. The Class of 1918 held the school's record for consecutive annual class gatherings, most of them in the Baer's backyard on South Damen Avenue in North Beverly and all of them devoted to maintaining old ties to classmates and the university.

Yet the artist in him kept alive his keen sense of observation and his eagerness to consider new ideas. In a speech to fellow bankers he remarked, "I find myself inclined to act and let the chips fall where they may. Fortunately my officers are more practical." An expression still associated with Arthur Baer in the Beverly Hills/Morgan Park neighborhood is this: "The art of living is the greatest art of all." Baer found his art in business.

Shortly after Baer's death, Charles D. O'Connell, the University of Chicago's dean of students, proposed an answer to the question of finding the artist in the banker: "He had an innate sense of the cultural continuum," O'Connell said, "in literature, art, and music, and all the affairs of men, which somehow helped him see the present more clearly than most of us because he could distinguish between what would pass and what would endure.... This strange and truly remarkable ability to be deeply involved in life and yet at the same time to retain a gentle -- I am tempted to say luminous -- detachment from its most turbulent distractions remains for me the central paradox of Arthur Baer."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baer's beloved Beverly community was in turmoil. Serious doubts emerged about whether it would endure. Homeowners and businesses were pulling up stakes, convinced that their neighborhood would be next target of block-busting real estate agents who already had hit neighborhoods immediately to the east, transforming them from white to black occupancy in a matter of months. For years, the Beverly area had fought valiantly against such a fate. Leaders of the community would buy properties for sale to hold them off the market. But the defensive posture, which included the worst kind of racial profiling and opposition to open occupancy regulations, was not working.

Many Beverly residents had moved from racially changing neighborhoods elsewhere on the South Side and now faced the prospect of moving again. Crime increased in a community now on the front line of racial change. In 1967, a local book store owner declined to contribute to a new business association, citing personal hardship. "Today my typing is poor," he wrote, "because of the recent injuries sustained Jan. 9 from hoodlums waiting in the shadows of the Morgan Park Post Office. Dealing with one eye is difficult, I find."

Like others in his beloved neighborhood, Baer feared integration because of what it had come to mean elsewhere in Chicago -- a quick conversion from white to black. The Chicago newspapers and such notable writers as Father Andrew Greeley had pronounced the end of the neighborhood as a bastion of white middle class life on the southwest side. "At this point, nothing much can be done to save Beverly," Greeley declared in an article in Chicago Today.

Fortunately, members of Beverly's substantial Catholic community had become energized by the inclusive and democratic spirit of Vatican II. Earlier in the century, Catholics, not African-Americans, had been the outsiders perceived to be invading the largely Protestant Beverly neighborhood. Cross-burnings and other demonstrations of hate had greeted Catholics, who established the first parish there in 1920. Suspicions and resentments between Catholics and old-line Protestants remained fifty years later.

On July 11, 1971, L. Patrick Stanton, an advertising executive and chair of the community relations committee at Christ the King Catholic Church in North Beverly, entered the pulpit at each mass that Sunday morning -- the first time a layman had been so permitted in the church. Using flip charts common in his business, Stanton challenged his fellow parishioners to see the community's problem in a new way.

"Integration is inevitable," he declared, because many African Americans could afford to buy in Beverly Hills/Morgan Park and were blocked by overt racism from relocating to many nearby suburbs. But re-segregation, from all white to all black, was not inevitable, he insisted. It was a subject many members of the church would not discuss in public. But Stanton broke the ice. The answer, he proposed, was to end the neighborhood's exclusionary, defensive policies and begin a positive marketing campaign, which he called "Beverly Now," through a new community organization, to present the values of the historic and architecturally distinguished community to all comers. The neighborhood needed to sell itself to current residents as well as outsiders, he said. Despite his rhetorical skills, Stanton knew that money talked, and he asked for financial pledges to establish the commitment of community organizations. Christ the King, under Father Ed Myers, pledged $15,000 to initiate the project.

The initial reaction to Stanton's message was mixed, but word spread, and soon other churches and organizations asked him to make his presentation to their members. A critical, unspoken issue, Stanton recalled, was whether the community's Protestant establishment would accept the advice of a liberal Catholic who had lived in the community only thirteen years.

"Out of the blue, I got a phone call from somebody I had never met but certainly had heard about," he recalled. It was Arthur Baer. Stanton remembers Baer's remarks today: "Well, I've been hearing about some of the things you're into, and we should get together to have a little talk."

By the 1970s, Baer rarely took a high-profile role in community affairs, preferring to offer support in the background. No one was more old-line Beverly that Baer, who was not a practicing Jew and who had long-standing relations with the most recalcitrant Protestant residents and business owners. He would not directly arrange lunch meetings between city officials and community leaders, for example, but his presence on the guest list caused key people to attend, and he invariably picked up the tab. "Everything that took place, Arthur Baer had his finger in it," Stanton recalled. In that sense, Stanton said Baer's phone call to him "must have been very tough for him. Who in the hell did I think I was?"

In fact, Baer probably knew exactly who Stanton was and understood completely his attempt to apply business marketing principles to a community problem. In the mid-1960s, Alice and Arthur Baer, in their most remembered community activity, undertook with their neighborhood friend Eleanor Pillsbury to build a community art center on the campus of Morgan Park Academy on 111th Street, a private school with close historical ties to the University of Chicago. The $756,000 facility, opened in 1969, would be named the Beverly Art Center and would house the Vanderpoel collection of turn-of-the-century paintings by James Whistler, Maxfield Parrish, Lorado Taft, Mary Cassatt and others. But there was no doubt about the greater purpose of the project.

In a solicitation letter written in May 1968, a month after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Baer made no mention of paintings or the arts. "The Beverly Art Center will be an enduring cultural institution, reflecting the unusual educational and economic level of our community," he wrote. "It will lend a stability and focus to our community that few 'home towns' anywhere can claim to possess. It will be an important factor in influencing our children and grandchildren to continue to live here."

Long before Stanton addressed his church, Baer had applied the salesmanship of a veteran retailer and retail-oriented banker to his community's problems. "Beverly is the best suburb left in the city limits," he told a community meeting in 1970.

Stanton and William Coughlan, who headed the Beverly Hills/Morgan Park Human Relations Commission, met with Baer in Baer's Beverly Bank office. Stanton recalled: "He showed me some notes he had made about the need for an organization, and a list of people who should be on the board -- all WASPs." Baer proposed that the existing neighborhood organization, the Beverly Area Planning Association, oversee the effort. But he told Stanton, "I'll get the money."

In short, Baer quietly helped to put the "Now" into "Beverly Now." Funds were raised. Personnel and other resources at Beverly Bank were diverted to the new marketing campaign, to the point of annoying bank officers who wanted the use of their copying machine back. The mission of the Beverly Area Planning Association, representing old-line residential organizations, was transformed under new leadership. The neighborhood's Catholic churches displayed tireless leadership. In the end, Andrew Greeley's forecast proved to be an incitement for renewal and a false prediction of despair.

When we search for the artist in the banker Arthur Baer, we must not forget his last paper for the Literary Club, delivered two months before Patrick Stanton rose in the pulpit of Christ the King Church. Titled "Mr. Gookin and the Monetary System," the paper reviewed the history of the Federal Reserve System and its role in the economy. Baer noted that in a Literary Club paper of 1909, the club's long-time secretary-treasurer Frederick William Gookin had presented a harsh critique of the nation's banking system and called for a "scientific" approach to managing credit though a central bank, similar to institutions in Europe. Five years later, Congress created the Federal Reserve.

While endorsing Gookin's analysis of the need for a central bank, Baer took exception to Gookin's premise that the Fed, as it is affectionately known today, would be a system based on scientific principles. Baer noted that Gookin, despite his many years as a banker, was known in later life primarily for his interest in the arts. Gookin decorated our early Club yearbooks with the Japanese style of design that he, along with Frank Lloyd Wright and others, had helped import to America in the late 1800s.

"Mr. Gookin, being fundamentally an artist, gratuitously abandoned to science the solution of banking problems," Baer wrote. "The trouble is that banking is not an exact science. Neither is economics. Neither is the monetary system. We still have work to do, new prescriptions to write."

SOURCES
The Ridge Historical Society
The University of Chicago Regenstein Library
The Newberry Library
The University of Illinois at Chicago Library
The Harold Washington Library

Books: Norman Foerster, ed. American Poetry and Prose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957.
Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed, The Story of the University of Chicago, 1890-1925. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1925.
Dale Kramer, Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life of the Midwest, 1900-1930. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966.
Robert Morss Lovett, All Our Years, the Autobiography of Robert Morss Lovett. New York: The Viking Press, 1948.
Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford -- the Early Years. New York: The Dial Press, 1982.
Richard J. Storr, Harper's University: The Beginnings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Interviews: Mrs. Eugene (Sue) Delves, Joan Wynne Murphy, L. Patrick Stanton.

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