Michael Scott was one of the first political operatives I met after I moved to Chicago. That was back in 1982, and I was writing for the Chicago Reporter. The editor, John McDermott, decided to have three reporters cover the three-way race heating up in the mayoral Democratic primary. The candidates were Harold Washington, Jane Byrne, and Richard M. Daley.
Scott and the campaign’s other black staffers had a separate suite in the campaign office, at 127 N. Dearborn. When I dropped in I’d make a beeline for him, and we’d sit around talking politics and sports, our two favorite subjects.
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Harold Washington even gave him a job, appointing him deputy director of the Mayor’s Office of Special Events in 1983. I remember seeing him at City Hall shortly afterward. As Scott made his way around the perimeter of the council chambers, Alderman Bill Henry, another west-sider, jokingly called him out: “Michael Scott—from the west side. The man’s got more lives than a cat.”
Scott often operated in back rooms, and in 2006, we got a rare glimpse into one of them, when three west-side activists with a camera—Derrick Harris, Mark Carter, and Paul McKinley—burst in on a meeting Scott and schools CEO Arne Duncan were having with state senator Rickey Hendon and Congressman Danny Davis in the back of Edna’s, a west-side soul food restaurant. (I reported on the ambush in “The West Side’s Funniest Home Videos” in the Reader on March 9, 2006; last week the video surfaced on YouTube.)
Scott is the coolest cat in the room. To the invading activists he raises his coffee cup in a toast and says, “Welcome.” He even gets the last word.
I was shocked when they found Scott’s body facedown in the Chicago River, a bullet in his head. I never, ever imagined his life would end like that. The guy I met 27 years ago was so smooth and unflappable, scoffing at his critics and rolling his eyes at their accusations. Like Bill Henry said, Michael Scott had many lives. I figured he had at least a few more left.
