When the name Edwin Eisendrath surfaced a few weeks ago as someone putting together a team to buy the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader, I said it was good news. The former 43rd Ward alderman’s younger brother John had been a Reader staff writer in the early 80s and most likely he retained some affection for the paper. Perhaps that affection might save the publication.
Minutes before Edwin and I spoke by phone I’d been reading “Why is this man running?,” the story Joravsky wrote about him in 1990 when he was trying to unseat congressman Sidney Yates. (He didn’t.) “It was a nice piece,” I say. “It went on forever.”
The brothers’ mother, Susan, came from a politically important west-side family and their stepfather, Lewis Manilow, was a rich developer, arts patron, and Democratic Party activist.
(Here, the Beachwood Reporter offers a more dispassionate look back at that race.)
“We are close now, we have been close always,” Edwin says. “We talk to each other every day. I would do anything for him, I think he would do anything for me.”
