Tom McNamee, The Chicago Sun-Times
Copyright 2006 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
This is the doorbell the police chaplain rang at 4 in the morning 37 years ago.
I push the button, and Mrs. Frank Rappaport comes to the door. That’s what the newspapers called Constance Rappaport back then -- Mrs. Frank Rappaport -- quaintly putting the “Mrs.” in front of her husband’s name. It was meant to show respect.
“Yeah, sure, hi,” she says, cheery as the day is sunny. “C’mon in. I’ve been cleaning up.”
She is 68 now, no longer 32, but still blond and petite. I can see the woman in the photos -- the stunned widow -- that ran in the papers after Frank was killed.
“We can talk in here,” she says, gesturing to the chairs and couch, “or maybe the kitchen.”
This is the living room where the chaplain told her Frank wasn’t coming home.
It would have been dark. The kids would have been sleeping. And she would have figured it out before the chaplain spoke a word.
“The priest, he was sitting right about here, I suppose, but it was such a fog,” she says, pointing to the couch. “He didn’t have to tell me a thing. You see a priest at your door in the middle of the night, and you know.”
And when, I ask, do you stop knowing? When do you let it go? When does night creep away?
“Oh, I think about him every day,” she says. “Not in a sad way, you know, but every day. Some little thing will come up, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s like Frank.’ Realistically, I know he’s gone. But still, if he walked in the front door, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
This is what guns and fury and foolish words -- “Off the pigs” -- will get you:
A cop’s widow, half fantasizing for 37 years that her man might walk in the door, raising three kids alone on a cop’s pension.
Where’s the honorary street sign for her?
PANTHERS WEREN’T JUST TALK
Here’s the problem, the big ugly news story that pulled me down to Hegewisch on Friday to visit with Constance Rappaport:
A Chicago alderman wants to rename a West Side street for Fred Hampton, head of the radical Black Panther party here in the 1960s. Hampton has his fans because the Panthers ran food programs for poor kids and -- more to the point -- lashed out in angry, threatening defiance against racism and police brutality.
Hampton’s admirers see him as a martyr. In a horrendous police raid on his West Side apartment in 1969, he and another Panther, Mark Clark, were gunned down.
Critics of the Panthers, on the other hand, wonder why anybody would want to honor the leader of a group that openly advocated taking up arms against the cops. When the Panthers weren’t serving milk to children, they were calling for blood -- “Pick up your guns and fight the pigs.”
To my way of thinking, nobody deserves a street sign.
Police brutality against African Americans was an everyday fact of life in the 1960s -- and, to a lesser extent, continues to this day -- and I believe Fred Hampton was murdered. So if anybody should ever propose a street sign honoring the moron who led that police raid, I’d say let’s pass.
I’d also pass on street signs honoring the police goons who famously tortured suspects with cattle prods, the thugs in uniform who shot first and asked questions later, and the overexcited guardians of law and order who clubbed demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
But that said, what kind of town honors a man who led an organization that killed cops?
Because the Panthers weren’t just talk.
A mere three weeks before the cops shot Hampton dead in his bed, two Panthers killed Rappaport and another police officer, John Gilhooly. The two Panthers gunned down the officers in a gangway. The Panther who shot Rappaport -- Spurgeon Winters -- then was killed in the shoot-out, too.
And then somebody got on the phone and woke up the chaplain.
NEVER AN EXCUSE TO HATE
Constance Rappaport is showing me around the house. It is full of light and flowers. She shows me a wall of family photos in a bedroom. In two small pictures, Frank is thin and handsome and sports that tight brush haircut favored by tough guys in the 1950s.
“When I first saw him, I saw James Dean,” Constance says with a laugh. “He had that T-shirt with the cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. It was just that bad boy -- although a lot of it was show.”
Frank often worked two jobs when they first got married, usually lugging stuff in warehouses, and they scraped up the down payment for the house in Hegewisch. It was only after they had three children -- Susan, Michael and Patricia -- that Frank joined the police force. He needed that steady pay and benefits.
“He was not a do-gooder, so I can’t say that,” Constance says, laughing again, explaining why Frank became a cop. “Basically, I think, he liked the action.”
Two years later, he was dead.
“He always told me, if anything happens, it’ll happen at night,” Constance says. “He went to work at 10 that night. Just walked out the door. And that was it.”
This bedroom was once the girls’ room. This was where Constance sat her children down on that awful morning and told them their daddy was gone.
“Your father was killed last night,” she said.
The kids were confused.
“Are we going to have to move?” asked 8-year-old Michael.
“No,” Constance said, wrapping her son in her arms, “we aren’t going to move.”
And, true to her word, the Rappaport family stayed put -- physically and emotionally. No downward spiral. No going nuts. Constance raised her children just fine, by herself, and all the kids now have families of their own.
Why, Constance asks me now, would the city name a street for a Black Panther? “Ask any police widow, black or white, if that makes sense,” she says.
But she also says she never let Frank’s death be an excuse to hate.
“Frank’s partner on the force was black,” she says. “They were the best of friends. At the funeral, he kept saying, ‘It should have been me.’ ”
The last room Constance shows me is her bedroom. This is the room where she cried.
“I didn’t cry for Frank until two days later,” Mrs. Frank Rappaport says. “I was sitting at the sewing machine, sewing something and, I don’t know, something happened.”
Tom McNamee’s “The Chicago Way” column runs Mondays in the Chicago Sun-Times.
e-mail: tmcnamee@suntimes.com