Sometime in the next few weeks Lou Pardo will oversee the registration of his 100,000th voter–surely a record, even in a city obsessed with politics and campaigns.
Pardo makes no secret about his most immediate goal: he wants to help ignite a grass-roots political movement that would unseat Mayor Richard Daley–the same kind of movement that carried Harold Washington to City Hall.
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In many ways, Pardo is the last of a breed–a lifelong labor, civil rights, and political activist radicalized by the Depression and World War II. He was born in Indianapolis, the son of Sephardic Jews who had migrated from Macedonia. By the age of 18 he was working in a packing plant.
After the war, Pardo returned to Indianapolis; he supported Henry Wallace’s third-party candidacy for president in 1948 and worked in early civil rights campaigns.
“I’ve held every position in the union,” says Pardo. “Most of the guys I worked with were white ethnics, and they didn’t always like the stands I took. I was for the ERA and I worked to get blacks and Hispanics hired. One time some of the guys in the shop didn’t talk to me for a month because I pushed hard to get this Mexican American kid hired. That’s tough, having the guys you work with give you the cold shoulder for a month. But these things pass. I think the attitude about me was, ‘Lou’s got some screwy ideas, but he’ll never steal anything and he’ll always stand up for the union.’”
“One guy said to me, ‘Get your white ass back to Oak Park,’” says Pardo. “I never lived in Oak Park. For 35 years I’ve lived in Austin. I’ve lived there longer than he had. I didn’t need that kind of abuse.”
“Lou taught us that if you want to get registration done you have to take care of your volunteer registrars,” says Lamm. “Lou buys them lunch, gets them bus fare, drives them all over the place. He even gets them card tables to set up their operation. It’s hard to find card tables these days. Lou’s always cruising the thrift stores looking for those tables.”
