By Rick Kogan
Tribune staff reporter
Published March 12, 2006
BACK WHERE HE CAME FROM, Tom Dreesen is standing at the corner of 155th Street and Lexington Avenue in down-at-the-heels south suburban Harvey and here comes a ghost.
"Tom, Tom, Tom Dreesen. Do you remember me?" shouts an approaching woman who is the worse for life's wear and tear, with a face a decade older than her fortysomething years and wearing a tattered brown coat. She says her name and Dreesen says, "Hey, I . . . Sure, sure. How you doing? How's your brother?"
Dreesen is here to pose for a photo. The woman is here to attend an AA meeting in the Harvey 100 Club, which was once the Odd Fellows Hall and earlier the Harvey Methodist Church. That was a long time ago.
Dreesen and the woman talk for a couple of minutes. He slips a $5 bill into her hand, and then the woman walks with about a dozen others into the AA meeting and Dreesen says, "I knew her whole family. . . It makes me sad. There are still good people here but . . . When I was growing up Harvey was thriving. There was industry here and it was a microcosm of America: Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Spanish and black. People worked in the community, banked in the community, shopped in the community, ate and drank and played in the community. But the factories began to die out, the shopping centers moved to the outskirts. So it's not the same town I knew. Thomas Wolfe was right. You can't go home again. You can never get back what was. And then, here I am."
In the 30-some years since he left Harvey, Dreesen has, among many things and in no particular order, made more than 500 TV appearances, including 61 on "The Tonight Show"; was an opening act for, to name just a few, Smokey Robinson, Tony Orlando, Gladys Knight, Liza Minnelli, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra. In fact, he was Sinatra's opening act for 13 years, the master of ceremonies at the legendary singer's wake and one of the pallbearers at his funeral.
When David Letterman was ill in 2003 he asked Dreesen to be guest host on his show. "I cannot say enough good things about the guy and his comedy," says Letterman. "He is one of my oldest friends and a born storyteller. And he's got such a good heart."
His friends are many and loyal and devoted. "Tom is everything one could want in a friend and more," says Dennis Farina, another local guy made good.
But for all of his success, Dreesen, 63, remains haunted and ever-influenced by Harvey and what happened to him here, bad and good. "It's the basis of my comedy, the foundation of who I am. My life? It really has been kind of surreal, when you think about it," he says. "From shoeshines to Sinatra."
Let's start the story just down the block and 58 years ago.
There is little Tommy Dreesen. He is 6 years old. He is sitting on the curb on 155th Street. It is a day of celebration. Schools are closed for a parade honoring Harvey's most famous son, baseball's Lou Boudreau, who had won that year's American League MVP award as a Cleveland Indian. And little Tommy is having a most unrealistic fantasy: "Maybe they would do this for me one day."
It's unrealistic because after the parade he goes "home" to a shack in the shape of a railroad car behind a factory. He is the third of the eight children of Glenore, a waitress, and Walter, who works for Acme Steel and plays trumpet in a band. They are alcoholics. His mother would eventually stop drinking. His father would not. Both are now dead.
"We were raggedy-ass poor," Dreesen says. There was no shower, no tub, no hot water. "And sometimes there were five of us kids sleeping in one bed."
In his condominium in California, Dreesen has a sign: "If it is to be, it's up to me."
"That's just another version of what my older brother Glenn used to tell me when we were kids: 'If we're gonna do it, we have to do it by ourselves.' There was really never a 'Hey, kid, let me buy you a new bike.' None of that."
Instead there were rats burrowing into the house, broken windows plugged with rags. "If we had holes in our shoes, we put cardboard in them," he says.
"When I graduated from grade school, Glenn, who was going into the Navy, got me a watch, my first watch. Two months later, I couldn't find it. I asked my mom if she'd seen it and she just put her head down and looked at my dad, and I knew he had pawned the watch for money for beer.
"I said, 'You know, I never liked that watch that much,' because I felt sorry for him. He never... he never threw a ball at me, never put his arm around me, never took me to a ball game. I eventually came to learn that it was his loss. That's what I told myself when he died. I actually wept, but I was weeping more for what he missed out on. He wasn't a bad guy. He wasn't mean, never beat us. He was just weak."
He talks about shining shoes at Harvey's many saloons and setting pins at its bowling alleys, about caddying at Ravisloe Country Club, never having new clothes, not being able to graduate from Thornton Township High School. It's like something out of a modern-day Dickens novel, so it is jarring when he finally says: "Now, I don't want to portray that I was an unhappy child."
The happiness, what there was, came from his siblings, especially older sister Darlene.
"She was 18 months older and as far back as I can remember, she's holding my hand, helping me across the street, walking me to school. I was an altar boy, went to mass six out of seven days a week. And Darlene would be right there. When I sold newspapers, Darlene sold them on the corner with me. When I had a paper route, Darlene was helping me.
"When she was 14 years old, she got a job in a little corner grocery store. She would get a dollar an hour. By the end of the week, she had no money coming in because she had used it to buy bread and bologna and stuff to bring home. She never complained. My parents would be out drinking and she'd be the one watching over her brothers and sisters. She never had a childhood. None of us really did."
In 1982, Dreesen created "Day for Darlene," a 26-mile run through the south suburbs to raise money to help fight multiple sclerosis. Darlene died of the disease in 1989, and Dreesen has ever since done charitable work to help find a cure for MS.
"I think about her every day. She was just the sweetest person in life and . . .," he says, pausing, as tears well in his eyes, "and she . . . when she finally started to live-she got married and got pregnant with a son-she got sick. She went from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair. But she never complained. She didn't have anything to give but her love and she gave it free and took care of her brothers and sisters and, and she never went to a prom, never went to a . . . "
Dreesen stops talking. He's choked up.
A minute later, he says, "All the other kids, they're doing pretty good."
Glenn operates the Dreesen Photography studio in Homewood; Judi owns her own beauty shop in Peotone; Margie works for a newspaper in Peotone; Dennis is in the home repair business; Wally lives in Memphis, where he is a singer and actor; and Alice is a homemaker in Florida.
I think we all learned to get along on our own. We helped each other, but our parents weren't in the picture in any positive ways," he says. "And we were all able to find role models outside the family."
For Tom that would have been a man named Frank Polizzi, who was married to his mother's sister Marge and who owned the Cedar Lodge, the bar where Glenore Dreesen sometimes waitressed and Tom shined shoes. "He was the toughest person I ever knew," says Dreesen. "He threw steelworkers out of there two at a time. He had a line in his bar and he told anybody making trouble, 'Now you can go.' And that was usually that."
Dreesen is sitting in a quiet upstairs room at Gibson's, the Chicago steakhouse and celebrity hangout where everybody seems to know him.
"I don't know if I really should be talking about this . . . , " he says, stopping to pour some tea.
"OK. When I was 11 or 12 and I started to realize where babies come from, I began to wonder why I didn't look anything like my father. Walter Dreesen had blond hair and blue eyes," he says, his speech measured and his eyes downcast. "Do you really think I should be talking about this? Well, I began to realize that I looked a lot like my uncle, Frank Polizzi."
We are traveling back again to Harvey and there is 12-year-old Tommy saying to Polizzi, "I need to talk to you. I've got these mixed-up feelings."
"What do you mean?" asks Polizzi.
"I think you're my father," Tommy says. He is scared because he knows Frank is an explosive guy. But he continues, "I look like you. I look like your son. And I don't look like anybody in my family."
Polizzi takes the boy's hand and they walk around the block.
"I'm going to tell you a story," says Polizzi. "I am your father.
"But I need you to know I had affection for your mom and your mom had affection for me. I'm saying this because I don't want you to think that we were some one-night stand, back seat of a car kind of thing. Now, if you want, you can go tell the world. That's your decision. It will ruin your mother's marriage and it'll ruin mine, but you're entitled."
The boy says nothing.
"And I didn't talk to Frank for a long time," Dreesen says. "I was angry and I was disappointed and confused. I was desperate to talk to somebody but who could I talk to without ruining everything?"
He escaped all of this--Dickens now dancing with Freud--by enlisting in the Navy. For four years he traveled the world, fell in lust with an older woman in Brazil who taught him the art of lovemaking, and fell in love with books, a good many about what he calls "the powers of the mind," namely positive thinking and self-determination.
"I read everything I could get my hands on but in all the reading I did, there were two words that made no sense to me: 'unconditional love,' " he says. "I would roll that around in my head: 'love without conditions.' But the moment I saw my first child born, then I knew."
That first child, a daughter named Amy, was born when he was in the service. "I had met Maryellen Subock, a girl from Harvey, when I was home on leave. We met at Tony's Pizzeria, where a lot of us used to hang out. It was one of those boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant," he says.
They married. Amy arrived. He got out of the Navy, and quickly there were more kids, Tom and Jennifer.
"I went from job to job to try to support the family. I poured concrete for sidewalks and basements, 12, 14 hours a day, coming home sopping wet, falling asleep at the dinner table. But sometimes, a lot of times, I went out, trying I guess to catch the childhood I'd missed. I'd go out with the guys and hang out or, you know, whatever the street guys do, played basketball, 16-inch softball.
"But I always worked two jobs, usually construction and bartending, always bartending. I remember sitting in the bars and thinking, 'I'm not supposed to be here. I don't belong here, but where do I belong?' "
He would ask God, "What is you want me to do? There must be something other than this."
He was fearful of going the same dead-end drinking route as his father. But then older brother Glenn, back from the Navy and starting his own career, convinced him to sell life insurance policies and to join the Jaycees.
"That was when my life began to change. The Jaycees were gentlemen of action. I'd been hanging around bars where everybody moans and complains but does nothing about it. The Jaycees attitude was, if there is a problem in the community, let's solve it."
Dreesen created a drug-education program for grade- school students and began to speak in front of classes and assemblies. He was soon joined in these "shows" by another Jaycees member, Tim Reid, who had recently moved to the Chicago area from North Carolina and was working as a marketing representative.
They used humor to get through to the kids and eventually became funny enough that students and teachers started telling them, "You guys should have a comedy act."
And so in 1969 was born Tim & Tom, the first ("and sadly the last," says Dreesen) black-and-white comedy team.
