By Theresa D. Daniels

Maxine and Tom Fineberg have been a couple-about-town together now for over 55 years. You’ve seen them at progressive gatherings of the like-minded and the not-so-like-minded. You’ve seen them at all sorts of meetings, rallies, campaigns, and volunteer settings. And in the days when the union had sharp teeth, you would see them on the picket line.

Interviewing them in their gracious South Shore condo, with its view of the city and the lake (and a doorman to guide me into the parking lot and building), I found them anticipating the arrival of many others besides me with appointments for that day. Someone, for example, was picking up twenty-three chess boards, and those had been gathered together on a marble sideboard in the hall outside their door. Tom said he was glad to see me because this way he could get to read his obituary before he died. I told him this wasn’t an obit; it was a tribute.
Their elder daughter Carol Sue, who along with her husband Steve Metzger has a five-room condo in the same building, came in to continue setting up a workroom for her art matting in her parents’ condo. Tom quipped that now she had six rooms and that the Fineberg’s six-room condo had been reduced to five. A mass of items once stored in that room now covered the huge dining room table, as well as other surfaces. The Finebergs were afraid they would never be able to eat at the table again.

Tom and Maxine’s other daughter, Marjorie (“Margie” to her many Chicago friends) was once a chemistry teacher at Robeson High School. There, she met her husband. Margie, also former president of Substitutes United for Better Schools (S.U.B.S.), is now an instructional designer who lives in New Jersey with her husband, Austin Winther. He teaches science at Rowan University. Their 18-year-old son Paul is the Fineberg’s—as they put it— “only human grandchild.” The grandson was named after Paul Robeson.

I didn’t bite and ask if they had any non-human grandchildren. Now I wish I had. There must be a story there that goes with that, a story that Tom would be glad to tell.

Margie (alias “Rose Wild”) now moonlights as a stand-up comedian who frequently performs in the Philadelphia area and is currently branching out to New York on weekends. If her success continues to grow, she is considering making this a second career.

Possibly to explain their classy dwelling place, Tom told me he was “a multi-thousand-heir” (as opposed to multi-millionaire) because, he says, the variables on his tax-sheltered annuity which he augmented during the last few years of teaching went up real fast under President Clinton before they crashed under President Bush.

Everywhere in the grand apartment, bulletin boards and frames feature photos and news clippings of family, friends, and diverse activities from recent times and from long ago. A fresh-looking wedding picture of Substance editors George and Sharon Schmidt is tacked on to one board from their wedding seven years ago. According to Maxine, the Finebergs have long been Substance supporters, just as they have always supported any cause that champions the rights of working people.

They’ve worked in all of the political campaigns of the like-minded: the Harold Washington campaign, Carol Moseley Braun, all of the Balanoffs. They remind one another of the time that the FBI came to their home to question them in the fifties because their car had been seen parked in front of the Balanoffs’. Tom tells the story of how even in high school, Clem Balanoff’s little sister, Jamie, won her campaign at Bowen to become president of the student council in the late sixties. (The Balanoff and Fineberg children all attended Bowen High School.) The teacher sponsor said no one could win the support of all of the great number of diverse ethnic and racial groups extant there, but Jamie did.

Tom and Maxine have fought for too many causes to name here. For a sampling, there was the battle to save the chess court in Harper Court of Hyde Park several years ago. Alas, a lost cause. They picketed, and the mayor sent his people to negotiate. They would be allowed to bring tables out for a few hours Saturdays and Sundays. The compromise was unacceptable.

During labor candidate Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign (under the “Progressive Party” banner) in 1948, Tom was arrested for the first and only time in his life at a social gathering of campaign workers. The landlord had called the police to say that Blacks and Whites were socializing together on his property. This was during the time in Chicago when Blacks were confined to what was called the “Black Belt.” Black people were not allowed east of Cottage Grove, nor west of Wentworth Avenue, nor south of 63rd Street — and the get-together was not in the area of the city designated for Blacks. In those days, there was no hint of some people’s later (fond?) memories of what is now called “Bronzeville” by real estate developers. Segregation was rigid and vicious, enforced by violent thugs and by the Chicago police.

Then there was the slow-down Tom started in 1942 when a summer job had him making “Wig-Wag” parts in a factory for 32 cents an hour. The women there were not getting equal pay, he said. Despite the slow-down, Tom and the women lost that battle.

Tom’s activism began early. At age five, Tom stood at the top of the three steps leading to his kindergarten classroom, asking his fellow students if they were voting for Herbert Hoover or Al Smith? It was the 1928 presidentail election. If they said “Hoover”, he joked, he pushed them down the three stairs.

The lives of Maxine and Tom involve a cast of thousands, altogether too many to name here. But they tried — Studs Terkel whom Tom worked with on the Action Faction Veterans Committee after his time in the army; Quinn Brisben at Harlan High; notables in their building; political luminaries, and myriad numbers of family and friends. All had their anecdotes with which Tom’s rapid delivery machine-gunned my senses.

There were names attached to every part of their lives, names from when they volunteered as docents at the Harold Washington Cultural Center, names from being election judges in the neighborhood they have lived in for over 30 years, names from when they did volunteer mailings for the League of Chicago Theaters.

There were names attached to a large group photograph showing Tom in Los Alamos, where he spent 21 months of his three-year army stint in the Special Engineering Detachment, part of the Manhatten Project. Tom spent that time testing parts of the atomic bomb that was eventually dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, to end World War II. He says that those working there had thought that they had saved more lives than they killed.


After the army, Tom finished his last year of college at University of Chicago in math and physics. At grad school on the G.I. bill, he was getting C’s at U. of C. because all of his political meeting (he said he was in an intense organization called the “Nate Shilling Club”) got in the way. So he got his masters at DePaul where he got A’s in math and economics.

After subbing day-to-day, Tom then taught math at the old Waller High School (now Lincoln Park High School), Phillips, Fenger, Chicago Vocational, and Harlan High School (from which he retired in 1986). Since retirement, with Maxine a constant companion at his side (they look like they’re still in love), he has continued to do all things chess — to volunteer his time organizing chess tournaments and helping public school students compete in chess. Tom is now the public school chess liaison.

He also works with a committee in the U.S. Chess Federation promoting shorter time controls and more rounds so that there are no ties at the top. The committee succeeded in getting the times for games first down to eight hours and now to six hours. He gets to speak to this issue again in 2006.

Another battle won is that next year, chess in the city will be on a level playing field with the suburbs because it will now be termed a “year-round activity” rather than just a “springtime sport.” The distinctions made between those terms caused a student in Chicago to be ineligible to represent his/her school in chess if she had won a tournament, or at one time, played with adults (since losing adults could be embarrassed). Tom says that if this ruling had not gone on the books, Whitney Young High School would have lost all of its chess players next year because their wins would have lost them their amateur status.

“Without Tom Fineberg,” says Tom Larson, who is the chess coordinator for the public schools, “there would have been no chess in the Chicago Public Schools during the 1980’s and 1990’s.”

As I look at pictures, Tom tells me the stories of the many students he’s dealt with in the chess arena, how they succeeded and what they are doing now. There is always a finely honed story within a story. When he tells me about a student named Tam “Win”, he explains that the last name is Nguyen, but that the first five silent letters make it pronounced “Win”.

He tells me how with the help of Marvin Dandridge, student chess player at CVS from 1972—75, the chess team had won their section for thirteen consecutive years, including city championships in 1975 and 1980. Since then, Dandridge has earned two masters and still comes out to give simultaneous exhibitions and play skittles chess. When Maurice Ashley, the first Black international grand master, was asked by Will Smith, who was then making the movie Malcolm X, who was the best person in Chicago to get a chess lesson from, Ashley told him it was Dandridge. Smith took a two-hour lesson from Dandridge, and then gave him some change—$300.

Tom tells me of other outstanding students, Darren Bolden (now Daaim Shabaaz, a Ph.D. in Florida, with a chess website), James Fagan, Sedrick Prude, and many others. Tom and I turn to Maxine who helps us with the spelling of the names. Tom tells me how proud he was of a supposedly “dumb” kid in a math remedial class, who nonetheless came to be rated “Expert” in chess.

I see a large group shot labeled “The 2004 Reunion of the Marks Nathan Orthodox Jewish Orphan Home”. Maxine tells me that when she was nine-years-old and her brother Jerry was five, their father Sam, a shoemaker, died. When her mother couldn’t find work during the Great Depression, she was persuaded by “a wonderful social worker” (Maxine’s words) to place them in an orphanage. Maxine assured me that this home was not the nightmare pit that orphanages are depicted as being in literature and film. She made wonderful friendships there, she says, and at 16 became the first and only female “mayor” elected to the council of the home.

Maxine and Tom married when she was 21. At age 35, with Tom’s encouragement, Maxine quit her job at the Hyde Park Coop Credit Union and went back to college at Roosevelt University to earn a degree in primary education. She had vowed that what had happened to her mother would not happen to her, and that she would never be dependent on a man’s income to take care of her family, if need be. Tom at this time was teaching at CVS and was involved in the union as delegate.

After receiving her degree and teaching certificate, Maxine taught at Bright Elementary School on the East Side for 22 years, becoming a Chicago Teachers Union delegate and union district coordinator. Her colleagues called her “Norma Rae” (after the movie character from the days when movies were made with union organizers as heroines), and during the many strikes of the eighties, she says she felt that Bright school and the district had the best-spirited picket lines in the city.

Maxine was also at the historic meeting where it was decided through a compromise of the factions and caucuses in the CTU that Robert Healey would be supported, rather than John Desmond. Healey became a disappointment later, Tom and Maxine agree.

Maxine retired in 1988, but even in retirement, she and Tom are still a constant presence at union meetings and functions. Maxine is especially involved in the women’s rights committee and was awarded Woman of the Year in 1999 by the committee of the Chicago Labor Union Women (CLUW) for Women’s History Month.

Born Matel Yahudis, our Maxine Judith (the loose English translation) is almost 77 years old now, and Tom Fineberg (born Schmul Bamis) is what he calls “980 months’ old by the Gregorian calendar” (more than a thousand months by the lunar Jewish calendar, he says, because the revolutions of the moon throw in extra months).

They are two people who have been the backbone of our teachers’ union, energetic promoters of enlightenment in many venues (the business terms might keep this from sounding too idealistic), and beacons for the human struggle to evolve. May their spark continue to light up the Chicago landscape.

They offered me their birthdates, but I decline to print them here. Because this is not their obit.