James C. Petrillo’s moniker has been on the Grant Park bandshell since 1976, when Mayor Richard J. Daley put it there, and the Petrillo family has been lobbying to get it transferred to the Frank Gehry confection that’s slated to go up in Millennium Park. Two years ago Petrillo’s granddaughter Donna De Rosa told the Reader her grandfather had earned the honor as a Park District commissioner, the originator of the Grant Park concerts, and one of the nation’s most prominent labor leaders. But word is the new bandshell will probably be named after a donor. If city officials are looking for a reason to say no to De Rosa, they might pick up a copy of Symphonic Paradox: The Misadventures of a Wayward Musician, a slender memoir recently published by former Chicago Symphony Orchestra percussionist Sam Denov. The heart of Denov’s story of his 31 years with the CSO is the tale of how he and other musicians struggled to free themselves from the choke hold of the longtime union boss. “You wouldn’t name a park after Al Capone, would you?” says Denov. “So why name a bandshell after Petrillo?”
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Denov is a Chicago native. Like a fair number of his CSO contemporaries, he graduated from Lane Tech’s (long gone) four-year music program. He served in the navy during World War II and spent five years playing with the San Antonio and Pittsburgh symphonies before Chicago recruited him in 1954. The CSO music director was Fritz Reiner, and Petrillo was president of both the Chicago Federation of Musicians Local 10 and its parent organization, the American Federation of Musicians. In short order, Denov learned his dream job had a nasty underside. Reiner was a tyrant with an uncanny ear; he hired, fired, and terrorized at random, and gave raises, such as they were, mostly to his cronies. As for the union: “The entire contract,” Denov writes, “consisted of one typewritten page. We had nothing whatever to do with the contract’s negotiation, nor did we have the right to ratify whatever it was that the union had negotiated on our behalf.” To make matters worse, Petrillo was cozy with the chairman of the orchestra’s board of trustees, Dr. Eric Oldberg. “We all knew…that Oldberg actually dictated all the terms and conditions of our contract,” Denov says. The union held only one meeting a year, and no name but Petrillo’s appeared on its ballot for president. With a starting salary of $145 a week for 28 weeks each year, Denov took an off-season job as a car hiker for an auto dealer while his colleagues peddled pots and pans or Fuller brushes. Trapped between Reiner and Petrillo, they felt as powerless as indentured servants.
In 1969 Georg Solti took over as music director, unaware that he was the orchestra’s third choice, and in ’71 the CSO finally made its first, glorious tour of Europe. Still, it seemed to Denov that union-management relations were not what they should be. In 1985, discouraged by what he saw as signs that they were still in bed together, he retired and became a freelance labor relations consultant, doing occasional guest performances with other orchestras. Ten years ago he represented a pair of musicians in a case against the Los Angeles local. After all these years, after everything else, he suspects that that case landed him on a blacklist. “I have not been [asked] to perform a single professional engagement since.”
