We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block - it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America - every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.

My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.

You'd never think of taking a cab if you had to walk a mile down Chicago's Michigan Avenue. But in a bad city you take a cab just to go around the corner.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

I just thought that I had had my fill for a while and wanted to have a family. My husband was moving to Chicago for his job. And so I went along. And it was a great thing that I did.

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

Hollywood is run by people who sit up in their executive office, who are not connected to Mississippi, Alabama, Chicago, South Carolina. They know nothing about that, they don't go to church, and they make their decisions about what they think is right.

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

At Chicago Hope they have a technical staff that works real hard to make that O.R. as realistic as possible.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.

The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.