the daley machine, the old richard j. daley machine was still around. richard j. daley was around. >> yes. >> there was a budding black independent political movement at -- around the area where the university of chicago. and i thought, boy, this would be a really interesting place to be. >> yep. >> and that's why i went there. at that time i worked at the university of chicago. now i run an institute of politics there, but at that time there was no such thing. >> yes. >> and i couldn't find anybody who wanted to talk about anything that happened after the year, like, 1800. >> yeah. [laughter]. >> and so for that reason i started working for newspapers, in part, to slake my interest in politics. and it was an incredible education. >> yeah, to cover that group of politicians at that moment. >> yes, it was quite a time to be there. >> now, leaving journalism to go into politics, which you did after a while, that is something that we see much more these days, and in some ways it's more out of necessity. a lot of reporters with the business downsizing, they think this