Mayor Harold Washington spent a large part of his day Friday arguing that a published report of a mayoral ”boo hoo” was a journalistic boo boo.
Followed from appearance to appearance by a gaggle of reporters, the mayor repeatedly denied a newspaper story that said he was ”mopping tears from his eyes” as he defended his administration from charges of corruption in an impassioned speech Thursday night.
”Can you imagine me crying?” the mayor asked rhetorically when cornered Friday morning before a speech honoring Black History Month at a Downtown bank.
”That`s the most darndest thing in the world,” he said, when confronted again after the same speech.
”It was one of the most totally and completely erroneous stories I`ve seen in my life,” he said when stopped after a luncheon of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry at a Downtown hotel.
The mayor was responding to a front-page story in Friday`s Chicago Sun-Times headlined ”Tearful Mayor: Don`t Blame Me.” A second headline read:
”Don`t blame me, Washington weeps.”
The mayor said he had been giving ”a very spirited speech” at a dinner honoring his chief internal investigator, Melvin Alexander, at an Evergreen Park restaurant Thursday night, when ”I started coughing, so I took a drink of water.
”Lo and behold, I began getting calls around 7 in the morning asking,
`What`s going on?` ” the mayor said. He said his office had received 40 calls asking if the report was true.
The story said Washington ”stopped speaking twice to wipe his eyes and forehead with a handkerchief.”
Longtime observers of the mayor noted that he often perspires profusely and frequently mops his brow with a handkerchief. Tears would not be likely to make their way to the mayoral forehead, they noted, unless he was standing on his head.
The mayor`s press secretary, Alton Miller, acknowledged he did not hear the speech but said the mayor ”was on a helluva roll. He was making the speech of his lifetime” when the coughing occurred.
Miller called the Sun-Times article an unprintable word and said he had called the newspaper to protest the report. No Tribune reporter attended the dinner.
Kenneth Towers, Sun-Times managing editor, said he was ”convinced our reporter conscientiously reported what she saw.”
But Towers said that ”in the interests of fairness” the newspaper was carrying a story in its Saturday editions quoting the mayor and others who were at the dinner as saying no tears were shed during the speech.
