Interview with Julian D’Esposito # IST-A-L-2014-040 Interview # 1: August 4, 2014 Interviewer: Mike Czaplicki COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Czaplicki: Today is Monday, August 4, 2014. My name is Mike Czaplicki. I’m the project historian with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. I’m here today in Chicago, at the offices of Mayer Brown, to interview Julian D’Esposito, who was Gov. Jim Thompson’s chief counsel and chief of staff, and fulfilled various other functions in government over his long, distinguished career. This interview is part of the Gov. Jim Thompson Oral History Project. So how are you today, Julian? D’Esposito: I’m fine, thank you. I appreciate the chance to speak with you. Czaplicki: Thanks for sitting down with us, we really appreciate it as well. We always start these things pretty straightforwardly, and we begin at the beginning, to ask when and where were you born? D’Esposito: I was born sixty-nine plus years ago, August 6, 1944, so my seventieth birthday is this Wednesday. Czaplicki: Oh, just coming up. D’Esposito: I was born in New York City when my father was in the navy during the Second World War. Czaplicki: Happy early birthday. D’Esposito: Thank you. Czaplicki: Your father, where did he serve? D’Esposito: He ended up serving in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, because when he and my mom got married, the ship he had been ordered to report to left port early. I’m not certain about this, but I believe he was a radar officer on the USS Texas, Julian D’Esposito Interview # IST-A-L-2014-040 which was deployed to the invasion of North Africa. But he was on leave to get married, and when he and my mom got to Newport, the ship had sailed. So he was then sent to Brooklyn, where he spent the rest of the war defending New York from attacks. Czaplicki: (laughs) So he should have been on a battleship? D’Esposito: He should have been on a battleship, but spent it in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; which was probably a good thing, because when he did go to sea from time to time, he got deathly ill, which is a trait that I’ve inherited from him. I’m not a good sailor. We lived in Brooklyn Heights until I was about a year and a half, and then we returned to Chicago. Czaplicki: Was your mom from Chicago or from New York? D’Esposito: Both my mom and dad were from Chicago. My father had lived in a couple of other places as his father moved through his career, but they were both from Chicago when they got married. Czaplicki: How did your family come to settle here? I think our last meeting, you mentioned that your name would be D’Esposito, is that correct? D’Esposito: It’s D’Esposito (Des-póse-i-to) in Italian. My grandfather pronounced it D’Esposito (Des-po-si-to) because he thought that was easier for others. My grandfather was an immigrant from Sorrento, Italy, at the turn of the century, who went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He had a civil engineering background, although not a formal degree in that sense, because he came over here quite young, in his late teens. He worked for the railroad and must have demonstrated a tremendous capacity. He came out to Chicago as the assistant to the chief engineer for the Union Station project, and when that gentleman died, he was named chief engineer for that project and designed one of the leading consolidated rail terminals in the country. Then he went from that job to a consulting engineer position, where he worked either for the city or for the Works Progress Administration on both the State Street and the Dearborn Street subways. Czaplicki: The first subways in the city. D’Esposito: And the Stickney Water Treatment Plant, and the Daily News Building. He actually developed the concept of air rights in Chicago, because the Daily News Building is built above the Union Station tracks. Also, there are some articles in Western Engineer that he wrote, about putting the caissons down to support the Union Station project.1 So he was a very accomplished gentleman. 1 Joshua D’Esposito, “Some of the Fundamental Principles of Air Rights,” Railway Age 83 (October 22, 1927), 757-759; “Foundation Tests by Chicago Union Station Company,” Journal of the Western Society of Engineers 24 (1924), 33-40; “Chicago Union Station,” Journal of the Western Society of Engineers 30 (1925), 447-60. 2 Julian D’Esposito Interview # IST-A-L-2014-040 I don’t know the detail on this, but he ran as a reform candidate for the Metropolitan Sanitary District at some point. Czaplicki: I think 1930 or ’31. D’Esposito: And was trounced handily.2 I believe his wife never voted again, in disgust that her husband could have been rejected by the voters. But he always had a deep interest in civic activities, and I think in part, that was something that I learned from him. Czaplicki: Did you have much of a relationship with him when you were growing up? D’Esposito: He died when I was ten, but yes, I did. He and my grandmother lived about a mile from our house in Wilmette, so I spent a lot of time with him. One of my fond memories is going to the racetrack with him on regular occasions after he retired. Czaplicki: Which track would you go to? D’Esposito: We would go to Arlington, although I think we also went to some of the ones on the far South Side. Czaplicki: Like Washington Park? D’Esposito: Yeah, Washington Park was still open at that time. We would drive what seemed to be endless distances, and he would smoke a big, stinky cigar, with the windows closed all the time, and I would get sick at about the same street corner every trip. He was a very accomplished man and not a soft lap; he was pretty demanding, and he may have had to be, to be successful as an Italian immigrant at that time. Czaplicki: I knew your name was ringing a bell in my head. I’ve done a lot of work on the New Deal, and I came across his name several times in engineering reports. I think it was the PWA and the Federal Works Administration. He was the Illinois administrator. D’Esposito: Right. Czaplicki: Any old family lore about some of the old mayors, like Dever or Thompson, or Cermak and Kelly? 2 Despite securing the Tribune’s endorsement in the 1930 race for four open seats, D’Esposito finished sixth, 9,200 votes behind the fourth place finisher. “Latest Bulletins on City and State,” Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1930. 3 Julian D’Esposito Interview # IST-A-L-2014-040 D’Esposito: No. I think he was reasonably close to Martin Kennelly, who himself was kind of a reformer; I think my grandfather was closer to him as a result of that. I was not conscious during his life, so I really wasn’t engaging in any— Czaplicki: Yeah, I didn’t know if any stories got— D’Esposito: No, he wouldn’t be telling me, as an eight-year-old, too many of those stories, I don’t think. Czaplicki: No Roosevelt meetings or… D’Esposito: No, no, unfortunately. I do have a bunch of his papers that I look at from time to time, just to see what was going on. Czaplicki: Like correspondence? D’Esposito: There’s correspondence and he kept a diary for a few years, kind of daily anecdotes. I’ve not read through it. That’s one of my retirement interests, to sort through some of that and see if any of that has any value going forward. Czaplicki: Yeah, that’s amazing, that would be fascinating material. What’s your earliest memory growing up? D’Esposito: I don’t remember any of New York. We spent the first months of our return to Chicago living with my grandparents on Linden, right across from the Bahá’í Temple, and then moved to Wolcott and Lawrence, just west of what was then the North Western tracks, near a Sears that’s on Lawrence. We lived there until I was in kindergarten in 1950, and I remember several different things: going to kindergarten there; walking down to the Bowman Dairy barn that was a block north of our apartment, getting ice out of the trucks, and sucking on the ice on a hot summer day; there was a playground in the back, and I got my first bicycle there; there’s some pictures of me wearing an outlandish cowboy outfit. Those are the kinds of things I remember. My two sisters were born and a fourth child was on the way. I don’t remember whether it was a two or three bedroom apartment, but it was too small in any event, so my dad bought a house on Linden Avenue in Wilmette and we moved there in 1950.