What’s New

The Chicago Blackhawks are having a terrible season so far. That is kind of part of the plan as the team is trying to rebuild for the future. There are going to be some high draft picks and development of prospects coming over the next couple of years.

The days of Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews playing for the Hawks are coming to an end. They are going to be moved out and the new wave of young players is going to be moved in. It will be sad at first but incredibly exciting in a few years.

We are going to get a decent visual of the future at the 2022-23 World Junior Championships. This is an event that is going to take place in Canada (Halifax and Moncton).

Every NHL team is hoping to see their guys go out there and dominate. The Blackhawks are amongst the teams with the most interest.

The host country of Canada released its rosters on Monday and there is plenty of Chicago Blackhawks flavor on it.

The Chicago Blackhawks have a lot of players playing in the World Juniors.

Defenseman Kevin Korchinski leads the way in terms of hype for the Hawks. They drafted him with the seventh overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft. He should end up being a very good NHL player one day with all the tools he possesses.

Another Blackhawks first-round pick, Nolan Allan, made the tournament as well. Chicago selected him with the 32nd overall pick of the 2021 NHL Draft. With his skating ability, he should be a really good asset to Team Canada’s defense.

A good portion of Canada’s defense is going to be made up of Chicago Blackhawks players as Ethan Del Mastro made it as well. He was a fourth-round pick in the 2021 NHL Draft.

Finally, Colton Dach is the only forward that the Hawks are sending. He is the younger brother of Montreal Canadiens forward (and former Blackhawk) Kirby Dach. The Hawks made him a second-round pick in 2021.

There is also going to be a big-time Chicago Blackhawks interest in both Connor Bedard and Adam Fantilli who both made Team Canada. Bedard is going to be the first overall pick and Fantilli is going to go second. The Hawks will have a chance at both of those selections.

Playing in this tournament guarantees you nothing but most of the best NHL players played in it at least once. With the way the Blackhawks are rebuilding right now, this might be the most exciting part of the season for them. We can only hope that their guys shine bright.

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Alderperson Ed Burke in November 2009 at the Greater Chicago Food Depository Credit: Kate Gardiner, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

As my mother used to tell me, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Wonderful words of wisdom that she herself rarely practiced, though often preached.

So I was tempted not to write a word about 14th Ward alderperson Ed Burke, who decided not to run for reelection after over 50 god-awful corrupt and racist years in office.

But then I read a newsletter by Shia Kapos for Politico in which she recounted how a line of well-wishers recently waited to shake Burke’s hand at the Irish Fellowship Club’s Christmas luncheon.

And I was like . . .

C’mon, Chicago, looks like you need yet another history lesson.

Not that you will pay attention. Chicago’s great at ignoring its past, which is why we’re even better at repeating our mistakes time after time.

The thing you need to know about Ed Burke above all else is that he just may be the worst alderperson in the history of bad alderpeople. I can’t think of one good thing he’s accomplished for the city as a whole since he took over for his father, who died in office, in 1969.

Far from listing Burke’s achievements, you have to go in the other direction and enumerate the bad things he did. Sort of like his Mount Rushmore of awfulness, starting with . . . 

Chair of the council’s finance committee under Mayor Daley. 

Soon after Daley was elected in 1989, he selected Burke to chair finance. Burke remained in that position for all 22 years of Daley’s tenure.

That means Burke oversaw the flow of billions and billions of public dollars in contracts, TIF deals, and budgets, as they raced their way from mayoral proposal to council approval.

This was a tenure marred by malfeasance of epic proportions including Madoffian TIF scams, and various asset sell-offs, culminating in the parking meter sale, in which the city sold an asset worth an estimated $10 billion for little more than $1 billion.

If Chicago were a meritocracy (in which we’re judged by our performance), Burke would have been bounced from the finance chair sometime in the 1990s.

But Chicago is more like a kleptocracy in which we publicly worship our leaders. And so Burke not only remained in his finance position, but was hailed as a fiduciary wizard for whom we should be eternally grateful.

In reality, being finance committee chair under Daley is not a particularly taxing job—which explains why Burke was able to continue his bustling tax-appeal law practice at the same time. More on that in a bit.

It’s not like Burke had to astutely bend and shape the budget to win the council votes needed for passage. No, under Daley, the alderpeople lined up to vote however the mayor commanded.

I submit to you that pretty much any alderperson could have chaired finance under Daley. In fact, Alderperson Scott Waguespack has handled the job just fine since Mayor Lightfoot took office.

And yet no one in the mainstream Chicago press feels compelled to hail Waguespack as a wizard of budgets. 

Burke also chaired finance under Mayor Rahm, even though candidate Rahm promised to clean up the financial mishaps of the Daley years.

Burke didn’t even endorse candidate Rahm when he first ran for mayor in 2011.

But he was one “enemy” that Rahm rewarded. I suspect that’s largely because Emanuel knew that Burke would be a loyal factotum who would usher through a proposal, no matter how misguided, that popped out of the mayoral brain.

In exchange, all Mayor Rahm had to do was look the other way at whatever chicanery Burke was up to—which he did until the feds raided Burke’s offices in 2019, forcing Rahm to replace him as finance chair.

As Emanuel’s finance chair, Burke championed Mayor Rahm’s first budget in which, among other crimes against humanity, they closed mental health clinics in low-income, high-crime communities.

Under Daley and Emanuel, Burke played the role of what my old colleague Mick Dumke calls “the closer.” After the never-in-doubt majority of aldermanic votes was rounded up, Burke would stand before the council and bloviate an oration of hot air, filled with quotes lifted from Bartlett’s. I think he was trying to assure us the alderpeople were public servants doing the public good—as opposed to a bunch of pirates robbing from the poor to feed the rich.

For this he was known as the council historian. 

And all the while Burke operated the aforementioned property tax appeal law practice that eventually led to his downfall. The federal indictment accuses him of shaking down business from developers or property owners, who then secured his support for whatever they needed from the city.

One of his tax-appeal clients was Donald Trump, on whose behalf Burke won over $1 million worth of property tax cuts over the years. Thank you, Tim Novak, for doing the deep dive on the Burke/Trump connection.

By lowering Donald Trump’s property tax bill, Burke, of course, raised yours. As I prepare to pay another outrageously high property tax bill, I’d say his work on behalf of Trump, and countless other downtown property owners, would qualify as his greatest offense, except . . .

Back in the 1980s, Burke and Alderperson Edward Vrdolyak tag teamed to organize most of the council’s white alderpeople into a bloc that opposed anything Mayor Washington tried to do.

The point was to sabotage the city’s government so that the electorate would vote Mayor Washington out of office. 

They just couldn’t stand the fact that a powerful and independent-minded Black man was calling the shots. It doesn’t get much more racist than that.

I urge everyone, especially millennials and Zs who didn’t live through those days, to watch Joe Winston’s documentary, Punch 9 for Harold Washington. It tells the Council Wars story in a compelling fashion.

Just in case anyone still wants to rewrite Chicago history or pretend it never happened.

The Latest from the Ben Joravsky Show

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Alderperson Ed Burke in November 2009 at the Greater Chicago Food Depository Credit: Kate Gardiner, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

As my mother used to tell me, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Wonderful words of wisdom that she herself rarely practiced, though often preached.

So I was tempted not to write a word about 14th Ward alderperson Ed Burke, who decided not to run for reelection after over 50 god-awful corrupt and racist years in office.

But then I read a newsletter by Shia Kapos for Politico in which she recounted how a line of well-wishers recently waited to shake Burke’s hand at the Irish Fellowship Club’s Christmas luncheon.

And I was like . . .

C’mon, Chicago, looks like you need yet another history lesson.

Not that you will pay attention. Chicago’s great at ignoring its past, which is why we’re even better at repeating our mistakes time after time.

The thing you need to know about Ed Burke above all else is that he just may be the worst alderperson in the history of bad alderpeople. I can’t think of one good thing he’s accomplished for the city as a whole since he took over for his father, who died in office, in 1969.

Far from listing Burke’s achievements, you have to go in the other direction and enumerate the bad things he did. Sort of like his Mount Rushmore of awfulness, starting with . . . 

Chair of the council’s finance committee under Mayor Daley. 

Soon after Daley was elected in 1989, he selected Burke to chair finance. Burke remained in that position for all 22 years of Daley’s tenure.

That means Burke oversaw the flow of billions and billions of public dollars in contracts, TIF deals, and budgets, as they raced their way from mayoral proposal to council approval.

This was a tenure marred by malfeasance of epic proportions including Madoffian TIF scams, and various asset sell-offs, culminating in the parking meter sale, in which the city sold an asset worth an estimated $10 billion for little more than $1 billion.

If Chicago were a meritocracy (in which we’re judged by our performance), Burke would have been bounced from the finance chair sometime in the 1990s.

But Chicago is more like a kleptocracy in which we publicly worship our leaders. And so Burke not only remained in his finance position, but was hailed as a fiduciary wizard for whom we should be eternally grateful.

In reality, being finance committee chair under Daley is not a particularly taxing job—which explains why Burke was able to continue his bustling tax-appeal law practice at the same time. More on that in a bit.

It’s not like Burke had to astutely bend and shape the budget to win the council votes needed for passage. No, under Daley, the alderpeople lined up to vote however the mayor commanded.

I submit to you that pretty much any alderperson could have chaired finance under Daley. In fact, Alderperson Scott Waguespack has handled the job just fine since Mayor Lightfoot took office.

And yet no one in the mainstream Chicago press feels compelled to hail Waguespack as a wizard of budgets. 

Burke also chaired finance under Mayor Rahm, even though candidate Rahm promised to clean up the financial mishaps of the Daley years.

Burke didn’t even endorse candidate Rahm when he first ran for mayor in 2011.

But he was one “enemy” that Rahm rewarded. I suspect that’s largely because Emanuel knew that Burke would be a loyal factotum who would usher through a proposal, no matter how misguided, that popped out of the mayoral brain.

In exchange, all Mayor Rahm had to do was look the other way at whatever chicanery Burke was up to—which he did until the feds raided Burke’s offices in 2019, forcing Rahm to replace him as finance chair.

As Emanuel’s finance chair, Burke championed Mayor Rahm’s first budget in which, among other crimes against humanity, they closed mental health clinics in low-income, high-crime communities.

Under Daley and Emanuel, Burke played the role of what my old colleague Mick Dumke calls “the closer.” After the never-in-doubt majority of aldermanic votes was rounded up, Burke would stand before the council and bloviate an oration of hot air, filled with quotes lifted from Bartlett’s. I think he was trying to assure us the alderpeople were public servants doing the public good—as opposed to a bunch of pirates robbing from the poor to feed the rich.

For this he was known as the council historian. 

And all the while Burke operated the aforementioned property tax appeal law practice that eventually led to his downfall. The federal indictment accuses him of shaking down business from developers or property owners, who then secured his support for whatever they needed from the city.

One of his tax-appeal clients was Donald Trump, on whose behalf Burke won over $1 million worth of property tax cuts over the years. Thank you, Tim Novak, for doing the deep dive on the Burke/Trump connection.

By lowering Donald Trump’s property tax bill, Burke, of course, raised yours. As I prepare to pay another outrageously high property tax bill, I’d say his work on behalf of Trump, and countless other downtown property owners, would qualify as his greatest offense, except . . .

Back in the 1980s, Burke and Alderperson Edward Vrdolyak tag teamed to organize most of the council’s white alderpeople into a bloc that opposed anything Mayor Washington tried to do.

The point was to sabotage the city’s government so that the electorate would vote Mayor Washington out of office. 

They just couldn’t stand the fact that a powerful and independent-minded Black man was calling the shots. It doesn’t get much more racist than that.

I urge everyone, especially millennials and Zs who didn’t live through those days, to watch Joe Winston’s documentary, Punch 9 for Harold Washington. It tells the Council Wars story in a compelling fashion.

Just in case anyone still wants to rewrite Chicago history or pretend it never happened.

The Latest from the Ben Joravsky Show

Read More

Monday Night Foodball returns tonight with a special menu from chef Won Kim of Bridgeport’s Korean-Polish restaurant Kimski, who is back in town and in the kitchen after a well-deserved five-month sabbatical. Read Reader senior writer Mike Sula’s preview here and join in the delicious fun at Kedzie Inn (4100 N. Kedzie); walk-in orders start tonight at 5 PM. (SCJ)

Tonight the Kehrein Center for the Arts (5628 W. Washington) offers a Family Holiday Community Musical featuring skits, songs, and videos created by community members (youth and adults alike), along with special guest performances by Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center and the Hiplet Ballerinas. Doors open at 6 PM, dinner is at 6:15 PM, and the performances will run 7-8:30 PM. Tickets are free, but reservations suggested at kehreincenter.com. (KR)

Free Mondays at the Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western) are always a treat, but tonight’s lineup is especially good: Beastii, Miniskirt, and Clickbait. Okay, if I’m being honest, I can’t speak much to Beastii and Miniskirt (sorry!), but wow, Clickbait is incredible live. Their energy is relentlessly fun, and their singer commands the crowd with vicious vocals, a sly strut, and enormous cymbals. When I saw Clickbait open for Automatic, they easily upstaged the band. They took the audience so high that everything afterward felt like an intense come down, and while I’ve only seen them a few times, I have never been disappointed. If you are 21 or older, do not miss the chance to see them for free! The show starts at 8:30 PM. (MC)

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Monday Night Foodball returns tonight with a special menu from chef Won Kim of Bridgeport’s Korean-Polish restaurant Kimski, who is back in town and in the kitchen after a well-deserved five-month sabbatical. Read Reader senior writer Mike Sula’s preview here and join in the delicious fun at Kedzie Inn (4100 N. Kedzie); walk-in orders start tonight at 5 PM. (SCJ)

Tonight the Kehrein Center for the Arts (5628 W. Washington) offers a Family Holiday Community Musical featuring skits, songs, and videos created by community members (youth and adults alike), along with special guest performances by Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center and the Hiplet Ballerinas. Doors open at 6 PM, dinner is at 6:15 PM, and the performances will run 7-8:30 PM. Tickets are free, but reservations suggested at kehreincenter.com. (KR)

Free Mondays at the Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western) are always a treat, but tonight’s lineup is especially good: Beastii, Miniskirt, and Clickbait. Okay, if I’m being honest, I can’t speak much to Beastii and Miniskirt (sorry!), but wow, Clickbait is incredible live. Their energy is relentlessly fun, and their singer commands the crowd with vicious vocals, a sly strut, and enormous cymbals. When I saw Clickbait open for Automatic, they easily upstaged the band. They took the audience so high that everything afterward felt like an intense come down, and while I’ve only seen them a few times, I have never been disappointed. If you are 21 or older, do not miss the chance to see them for free! The show starts at 8:30 PM. (MC)

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When news broke over a week ago that Danny Goldring had died at 76, there was (as is often the case these days) an immediate outpouring of tributes on social media. I learned the news from Chicago actor Gary Houston; I sometimes met Goldring and his wife, actor Diane Dorsey, over the years at parties hosted by Houston and his wife, artist Hedda Lubin. 

I never knew Goldring beyond nodding acquaintance, but it’s nearly impossible not to recognize his face. During his long career, he appeared in several movies, including shot-in-Chicago features such as The Fugitive, The Dark Knight, and Chain Reaction,and television series such as Six Feet Under and three Star Trek franchises (Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise). He had a memorable turn in the two-season Starz series Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer as a terminally ill Chicago mayor desperately hanging onto power. Goldring played Ryan Kavanaugh, a retired cop-turned-barkeep and an old friend and sounding board to Grammer’s Tom Kane. In a 2012 Tribune profile of Goldring by Rick Kogan, the actor said, “The character is almost a perfect fit. I know this guy.” 

Making us feel like we knew the guys he played was one of the great gifts Goldring brought to roles large and small. In addition to his handsome craggy face and (for most of his life) red hair, he had a memorably gruff voice that could seem at odds with what Dorsey describes as a man with boundless curiosity about—and kindness toward—other living creatures.

“He had a heart bigger than I realized,” she says. “He looked out for the Streetwise guys. He wanted to help the lost dogs find where their homes were. He’d walk out of our house with a cigarette behind his ear and he’d pull out another pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth, light it, take a puff, go down the stairs, walk to the bus to start auditioning, to start looking for work. That was his ritual for leaving home. And on that bus ride downtown? He talked to the bus drivers, he looked at the people on the buses. He made friends where you just don’t think about making friends.”

Dorsey and Goldring met while working together on a commercial shoot. Goldring had just returned to Chicago after several years in New York, where he appeared in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow until his character was killed off. 

Dorsey recalls the moment she met Goldring after the day’s shooting was done. “There were like maybe 20 of us at a bar on Halsted Street, and there was this guy I had never seen. I was ready to fall in love. I had already put a list [of what I wanted in a relationship] on the refrigerator according to Shakti Gawain’s creative visualization. I put five things on it, and a month later this gentleman happens to appear that I don’t know who he is.”

But she soon discovered Goldring checked all the boxes on her refrigerator wish list: He was over six feet tall; ruggedly handsome; had a great sense of humor (“I didn’t know it was going to be puns for 30 years, though,” Dorsey says with a laugh); respected the arts; and was financially responsible. Dorsey says she went over to introduce herself to Goldring, and when they shook hands, “I felt a zap go right through my arm.”

For a brief time, the two lived in LA, but they bought a house in Lakeview, and Chicago was home for most of their marriage. That house is where Goldring died on Friday, December 2. Dorsey says that, though he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2015, kidney failure is what caused his death. With a catch in her throat, Dorsey says, “This is his house that he bought with an actor’s money. This is the cute little house that we’ve lived in for 30 years, 32 years. I wanted him to be in his home when he passed.”

Working steadily as a character actor (a problematic phrase, insofar as all actors are playing characters) did provide a decent living for Goldring, if not star status. Dorsey says, “He viewed himself as wanting to try everything. And it wasn’t about lead roles, it was about unique roles, well-written scripts. He really didn’t like a couple of things he did because he felt it was poorly written, poorly produced, or poorly directed, mishandled by somebody. But that was very seldom. He just respected the work, he respected the people he worked with.”

That respect was very much returned. Edward Blatchford, who directed Goldring in American Blues Theater՚s 2015 revival of N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker (one of the last times Goldring appeared onstage), says, “To direct him was fabulous. Because he was the pro, he was totally responsible and showed up prepared without any of the drama. It wasn’t about the gossip. It wasn’t about all the drama surrounding relationships that were happening offstage. He was all about the work, and it shows in his work.”

Goldring was born in Woodstock, Illinois, the son of a U.S. Navy officer, and his family lived in many places while he was growing up, including (as Kogan noted) Japan, Hawaii, and Maryland. He attended Trinity University in San Antonio for a year, did a stint in the U.S. Army in the Signal Corps branch in Vietnam, and then returned to Maryland to work construction. He made his stage debut there in a production of The Thurber Carnival, then took a job touring with the Cole Marionettes, a Chicago-based outfit that eventually brought him back to Chicago, where he studied at what was then the Goodman School of Drama (now the Theatre School at DePaul). 

He performed in several small theaters around the city and suburbs in the 1970s and got his local break with the long-running comedy Lunching by Alan Gross at the Drury Lane Theater in Water Tower Place (now the Broadway Playhouse). As he told the late Tribune theater critic Richard Christiansen in 1978, “If I hadn’t gotten the part, I was going to quit forever, maybe go back to construction work or become a carpet salesman, I don’t know.”

Playwright Brett Neveu got to know Goldring when the actor played the title role in Neveu’s late-night show The Earl at A Red Orchid Theatre in 2006, which ran for six months. In Neveu’s play, an aging Hollywood action star, Lawrence Stevens (aka The Earl) joins a trio of brothers in their vicious backyard beatdown games. It was scheduled for the Saturday Reading Series at Chicago Dramatists, and the late Dramatists artistic director Russ Tutterow suggested that Goldring would be perfect for the part of the Earl. 

Danny Goldring (third from left) and the cast of The Earl at A Red Orchid Theatre in 2006. Courtesy A Red Orchid Theatre

In an email, Neveu tells me, “Danny played the role with the perfect amount of silver-screen bravado, unequaled cowboy strength, and viciously focused calm that would whip up jam-packed audiences into a frenzy . . . I’d watch Danny enter the stage with a careful whisper and leave with a blood-soaked grin, turning his performance into one now permanently logged into the annals of Chicago theater lore. Danny was hilarious, amazing, kind, smart, cool, and full of the kind of stories you want to listen to all night long. Being around Danny was like being bathed in the light of a God, and that’s not exactly hyperbole. He had that kind of power. His hair, his eyes, and that goddamn voice.”

Kirsten Fitzgerald, artistic director of A Red Orchid, also wrote in an email, “Whenever Danny called and left a message, or purchased tickets at A Red Orchid, he did so using the name Lawrence Stevens (or The Earl). It made my day to pick up the phone to his rich, deeply kind, and somehow mischievous voice, or to run into his big hug, sly grin, and razor-sharp sense of humor in our agent’s office or on the softball field with Diane and Brett.” She adds, “I think of Danny this way: as an icon of sorts, at times endearingly corny, holding all he loved sacred, and kicking serious ass.”

Dorsey also saw the introspective side of her husband. “Danny wouldn’t walk through the door and say, ‘Let me tell you what I did today.’ That’s something I would do,” she says with a laugh. “Danny would come in and walk back and sit on the deck and have a cigarette and look at the bird feeders. And I would say, ‘Well, what happened today?’ He’d say, ‘Well, the guy driving the bus wished everybody a merry Christmas. And it just cheered everybody up.’ He was that way. He had his stories inside, but he didn’t have a need to tell them except as an artist. And he fulfilled that beautifully.”

She adds, “Danny, he always wanted to know where the hole in the fence was. He told me that as a kid growing up, he was almost like an only child because his siblings were much older and he grew up in the Navy. So they moved around a lot and he would sneak out of the house, and he would sneak into [base] quarters where there were pool tables. But it was dark at night, and he would click the pool balls against each other and listen to the sounds. He wanted to be able to get in and out of places easily. He wanted to know where the hole in the fence was, symbolically.” 

Dorsey says that there will be a public gathering to honor Goldring sometime later in 2023. “We wouldn’t do anything formal because he wasn’t that kind of guy. In the spring, we’re going to have a get-together in a public place so that as many people that want to come can come, order a drink, order food, tell their stories on a mike if they want to share how they knew Danny.” 

Based on the longevity of his career and the huge number of tributes posted on social media, it may need to be a big bar. Meantime, Dorsey suggests showing kindness to random strangers, making a donation to PAWS Chicago, or perhaps making and sharing the starter for Amish friendship bread (something he loved and gifted to friends over the years, as Hedda Lubin told me last week) would be a good way to remember a one-of-a-kind Chicago actor.

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When news broke over a week ago that Danny Goldring had died at 76, there was (as is often the case these days) an immediate outpouring of tributes on social media. I learned the news from Chicago actor Gary Houston; I sometimes met Goldring and his wife, actor Diane Dorsey, over the years at parties hosted by Houston and his wife, artist Hedda Lubin. 

I never knew Goldring beyond nodding acquaintance, but it’s nearly impossible not to recognize his face. During his long career, he appeared in several movies, including shot-in-Chicago features such as The Fugitive, The Dark Knight, and Chain Reaction,and television series such as Six Feet Under and three Star Trek franchises (Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise). He had a memorable turn in the two-season Starz series Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer as a terminally ill Chicago mayor desperately hanging onto power. Goldring played Ryan Kavanaugh, a retired cop-turned-barkeep and an old friend and sounding board to Grammer’s Tom Kane. In a 2012 Tribune profile of Goldring by Rick Kogan, the actor said, “The character is almost a perfect fit. I know this guy.” 

Making us feel like we knew the guys he played was one of the great gifts Goldring brought to roles large and small. In addition to his handsome craggy face and (for most of his life) red hair, he had a memorably gruff voice that could seem at odds with what Dorsey describes as a man with boundless curiosity about—and kindness toward—other living creatures.

“He had a heart bigger than I realized,” she says. “He looked out for the Streetwise guys. He wanted to help the lost dogs find where their homes were. He’d walk out of our house with a cigarette behind his ear and he’d pull out another pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth, light it, take a puff, go down the stairs, walk to the bus to start auditioning, to start looking for work. That was his ritual for leaving home. And on that bus ride downtown? He talked to the bus drivers, he looked at the people on the buses. He made friends where you just don’t think about making friends.”

Dorsey and Goldring met while working together on a commercial shoot. Goldring had just returned to Chicago after several years in New York, where he appeared in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow until his character was killed off. 

Dorsey recalls the moment she met Goldring after the day’s shooting was done. “There were like maybe 20 of us at a bar on Halsted Street, and there was this guy I had never seen. I was ready to fall in love. I had already put a list [of what I wanted in a relationship] on the refrigerator according to Shakti Gawain’s creative visualization. I put five things on it, and a month later this gentleman happens to appear that I don’t know who he is.”

But she soon discovered Goldring checked all the boxes on her refrigerator wish list: He was over six feet tall; ruggedly handsome; had a great sense of humor (“I didn’t know it was going to be puns for 30 years, though,” Dorsey says with a laugh); respected the arts; and was financially responsible. Dorsey says she went over to introduce herself to Goldring, and when they shook hands, “I felt a zap go right through my arm.”

For a brief time, the two lived in LA, but they bought a house in Lakeview, and Chicago was home for most of their marriage. That house is where Goldring died on Friday, December 2. Dorsey says that, though he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2015, kidney failure is what caused his death. With a catch in her throat, Dorsey says, “This is his house that he bought with an actor’s money. This is the cute little house that we’ve lived in for 30 years, 32 years. I wanted him to be in his home when he passed.”

Working steadily as a character actor (a problematic phrase, insofar as all actors are playing characters) did provide a decent living for Goldring, if not star status. Dorsey says, “He viewed himself as wanting to try everything. And it wasn’t about lead roles, it was about unique roles, well-written scripts. He really didn’t like a couple of things he did because he felt it was poorly written, poorly produced, or poorly directed, mishandled by somebody. But that was very seldom. He just respected the work, he respected the people he worked with.”

That respect was very much returned. Edward Blatchford, who directed Goldring in American Blues Theater՚s 2015 revival of N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker (one of the last times Goldring appeared onstage), says, “To direct him was fabulous. Because he was the pro, he was totally responsible and showed up prepared without any of the drama. It wasn’t about the gossip. It wasn’t about all the drama surrounding relationships that were happening offstage. He was all about the work, and it shows in his work.”

Goldring was born in Woodstock, Illinois, the son of a U.S. Navy officer, and his family lived in many places while he was growing up, including (as Kogan noted) Japan, Hawaii, and Maryland. He attended Trinity University in San Antonio for a year, did a stint in the U.S. Army in the Signal Corps branch in Vietnam, and then returned to Maryland to work construction. He made his stage debut there in a production of The Thurber Carnival, then took a job touring with the Cole Marionettes, a Chicago-based outfit that eventually brought him back to Chicago, where he studied at what was then the Goodman School of Drama (now the Theatre School at DePaul). 

He performed in several small theaters around the city and suburbs in the 1970s and got his local break with the long-running comedy Lunching by Alan Gross at the Drury Lane Theater in Water Tower Place (now the Broadway Playhouse). As he told the late Tribune theater critic Richard Christiansen in 1978, “If I hadn’t gotten the part, I was going to quit forever, maybe go back to construction work or become a carpet salesman, I don’t know.”

Playwright Brett Neveu got to know Goldring when the actor played the title role in Neveu’s late-night show The Earl at A Red Orchid Theatre in 2006, which ran for six months. In Neveu’s play, an aging Hollywood action star, Lawrence Stevens (aka The Earl) joins a trio of brothers in their vicious backyard beatdown games. It was scheduled for the Saturday Reading Series at Chicago Dramatists, and the late Dramatists artistic director Russ Tutterow suggested that Goldring would be perfect for the part of the Earl. 

Danny Goldring (third from left) and the cast of The Earl at A Red Orchid Theatre in 2006. Courtesy A Red Orchid Theatre

In an email, Neveu tells me, “Danny played the role with the perfect amount of silver-screen bravado, unequaled cowboy strength, and viciously focused calm that would whip up jam-packed audiences into a frenzy . . . I’d watch Danny enter the stage with a careful whisper and leave with a blood-soaked grin, turning his performance into one now permanently logged into the annals of Chicago theater lore. Danny was hilarious, amazing, kind, smart, cool, and full of the kind of stories you want to listen to all night long. Being around Danny was like being bathed in the light of a God, and that’s not exactly hyperbole. He had that kind of power. His hair, his eyes, and that goddamn voice.”

Kirsten Fitzgerald, artistic director of A Red Orchid, also wrote in an email, “Whenever Danny called and left a message, or purchased tickets at A Red Orchid, he did so using the name Lawrence Stevens (or The Earl). It made my day to pick up the phone to his rich, deeply kind, and somehow mischievous voice, or to run into his big hug, sly grin, and razor-sharp sense of humor in our agent’s office or on the softball field with Diane and Brett.” She adds, “I think of Danny this way: as an icon of sorts, at times endearingly corny, holding all he loved sacred, and kicking serious ass.”

Dorsey also saw the introspective side of her husband. “Danny wouldn’t walk through the door and say, ‘Let me tell you what I did today.’ That’s something I would do,” she says with a laugh. “Danny would come in and walk back and sit on the deck and have a cigarette and look at the bird feeders. And I would say, ‘Well, what happened today?’ He’d say, ‘Well, the guy driving the bus wished everybody a merry Christmas. And it just cheered everybody up.’ He was that way. He had his stories inside, but he didn’t have a need to tell them except as an artist. And he fulfilled that beautifully.”

She adds, “Danny, he always wanted to know where the hole in the fence was. He told me that as a kid growing up, he was almost like an only child because his siblings were much older and he grew up in the Navy. So they moved around a lot and he would sneak out of the house, and he would sneak into [base] quarters where there were pool tables. But it was dark at night, and he would click the pool balls against each other and listen to the sounds. He wanted to be able to get in and out of places easily. He wanted to know where the hole in the fence was, symbolically.” 

Dorsey says that there will be a public gathering to honor Goldring sometime later in 2023. “We wouldn’t do anything formal because he wasn’t that kind of guy. In the spring, we’re going to have a get-together in a public place so that as many people that want to come can come, order a drink, order food, tell their stories on a mike if they want to share how they knew Danny.” 

Based on the longevity of his career and the huge number of tributes posted on social media, it may need to be a big bar. Meantime, Dorsey suggests showing kindness to random strangers, making a donation to PAWS Chicago, or perhaps making and sharing the starter for Amish friendship bread (something he loved and gifted to friends over the years, as Hedda Lubin told me last week) would be a good way to remember a one-of-a-kind Chicago actor.

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When news broke over a week ago that Danny Goldring had died at 76, there was (as is often the case these days) an immediate outpouring of tributes on social media. I learned the news from Chicago actor Gary Houston; I sometimes met Goldring and his wife, actor Diane Dorsey, over the years at parties hosted by Houston and his wife, artist Hedda Lubin. 

I never knew Goldring beyond nodding acquaintance, but it’s nearly impossible not to recognize his face. During his long career, he appeared in several movies, including shot-in-Chicago features such as The Fugitive, The Dark Knight, and Chain Reaction,and television series such as Six Feet Under and three Star Trek franchises (Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise). He had a memorable turn in the two-season Starz series Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer as a terminally ill Chicago mayor desperately hanging onto power. Goldring played Ryan Kavanaugh, a retired cop-turned-barkeep and an old friend and sounding board to Grammer’s Tom Kane. In a 2012 Tribune profile of Goldring by Rick Kogan, the actor said, “The character is almost a perfect fit. I know this guy.” 

Making us feel like we knew the guys he played was one of the great gifts Goldring brought to roles large and small. In addition to his handsome craggy face and (for most of his life) red hair, he had a memorably gruff voice that could seem at odds with what Dorsey describes as a man with boundless curiosity about—and kindness toward—other living creatures.

“He had a heart bigger than I realized,” she says. “He looked out for the Streetwise guys. He wanted to help the lost dogs find where their homes were. He’d walk out of our house with a cigarette behind his ear and he’d pull out another pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth, light it, take a puff, go down the stairs, walk to the bus to start auditioning, to start looking for work. That was his ritual for leaving home. And on that bus ride downtown? He talked to the bus drivers, he looked at the people on the buses. He made friends where you just don’t think about making friends.”

Dorsey and Goldring met while working together on a commercial shoot. Goldring had just returned to Chicago after several years in New York, where he appeared in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow until his character was killed off. 

Dorsey recalls the moment she met Goldring after the day’s shooting was done. “There were like maybe 20 of us at a bar on Halsted Street, and there was this guy I had never seen. I was ready to fall in love. I had already put a list [of what I wanted in a relationship] on the refrigerator according to Shakti Gawain’s creative visualization. I put five things on it, and a month later this gentleman happens to appear that I don’t know who he is.”

But she soon discovered Goldring checked all the boxes on her refrigerator wish list: He was over six feet tall; ruggedly handsome; had a great sense of humor (“I didn’t know it was going to be puns for 30 years, though,” Dorsey says with a laugh); respected the arts; and was financially responsible. Dorsey says she went over to introduce herself to Goldring, and when they shook hands, “I felt a zap go right through my arm.”

For a brief time, the two lived in LA, but they bought a house in Lakeview, and Chicago was home for most of their marriage. That house is where Goldring died on Friday, December 2. Dorsey says that, though he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2015, kidney failure is what caused his death. With a catch in her throat, Dorsey says, “This is his house that he bought with an actor’s money. This is the cute little house that we’ve lived in for 30 years, 32 years. I wanted him to be in his home when he passed.”

Working steadily as a character actor (a problematic phrase, insofar as all actors are playing characters) did provide a decent living for Goldring, if not star status. Dorsey says, “He viewed himself as wanting to try everything. And it wasn’t about lead roles, it was about unique roles, well-written scripts. He really didn’t like a couple of things he did because he felt it was poorly written, poorly produced, or poorly directed, mishandled by somebody. But that was very seldom. He just respected the work, he respected the people he worked with.”

That respect was very much returned. Edward Blatchford, who directed Goldring in American Blues Theater՚s 2015 revival of N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker (one of the last times Goldring appeared onstage), says, “To direct him was fabulous. Because he was the pro, he was totally responsible and showed up prepared without any of the drama. It wasn’t about the gossip. It wasn’t about all the drama surrounding relationships that were happening offstage. He was all about the work, and it shows in his work.”

Goldring was born in Woodstock, Illinois, the son of a U.S. Navy officer, and his family lived in many places while he was growing up, including (as Kogan noted) Japan, Hawaii, and Maryland. He attended Trinity University in San Antonio for a year, did a stint in the U.S. Army in the Signal Corps branch in Vietnam, and then returned to Maryland to work construction. He made his stage debut there in a production of The Thurber Carnival, then took a job touring with the Cole Marionettes, a Chicago-based outfit that eventually brought him back to Chicago, where he studied at what was then the Goodman School of Drama (now the Theatre School at DePaul). 

He performed in several small theaters around the city and suburbs in the 1970s and got his local break with the long-running comedy Lunching by Alan Gross at the Drury Lane Theater in Water Tower Place (now the Broadway Playhouse). As he told the late Tribune theater critic Richard Christiansen in 1978, “If I hadn’t gotten the part, I was going to quit forever, maybe go back to construction work or become a carpet salesman, I don’t know.”

Playwright Brett Neveu got to know Goldring when the actor played the title role in Neveu’s late-night show The Earl at A Red Orchid Theatre in 2006, which ran for six months. In Neveu’s play, an aging Hollywood action star, Lawrence Stevens (aka The Earl) joins a trio of brothers in their vicious backyard beatdown games. It was scheduled for the Saturday Reading Series at Chicago Dramatists, and the late Dramatists artistic director Russ Tutterow suggested that Goldring would be perfect for the part of the Earl. 

Danny Goldring (third from left) and the cast of The Earl at A Red Orchid Theatre in 2006. Courtesy A Red Orchid Theatre

In an email, Neveu tells me, “Danny played the role with the perfect amount of silver-screen bravado, unequaled cowboy strength, and viciously focused calm that would whip up jam-packed audiences into a frenzy . . . I’d watch Danny enter the stage with a careful whisper and leave with a blood-soaked grin, turning his performance into one now permanently logged into the annals of Chicago theater lore. Danny was hilarious, amazing, kind, smart, cool, and full of the kind of stories you want to listen to all night long. Being around Danny was like being bathed in the light of a God, and that’s not exactly hyperbole. He had that kind of power. His hair, his eyes, and that goddamn voice.”

Kirsten Fitzgerald, artistic director of A Red Orchid, also wrote in an email, “Whenever Danny called and left a message, or purchased tickets at A Red Orchid, he did so using the name Lawrence Stevens (or The Earl). It made my day to pick up the phone to his rich, deeply kind, and somehow mischievous voice, or to run into his big hug, sly grin, and razor-sharp sense of humor in our agent’s office or on the softball field with Diane and Brett.” She adds, “I think of Danny this way: as an icon of sorts, at times endearingly corny, holding all he loved sacred, and kicking serious ass.”

Dorsey also saw the introspective side of her husband. “Danny wouldn’t walk through the door and say, ‘Let me tell you what I did today.’ That’s something I would do,” she says with a laugh. “Danny would come in and walk back and sit on the deck and have a cigarette and look at the bird feeders. And I would say, ‘Well, what happened today?’ He’d say, ‘Well, the guy driving the bus wished everybody a merry Christmas. And it just cheered everybody up.’ He was that way. He had his stories inside, but he didn’t have a need to tell them except as an artist. And he fulfilled that beautifully.”

She adds, “Danny, he always wanted to know where the hole in the fence was. He told me that as a kid growing up, he was almost like an only child because his siblings were much older and he grew up in the Navy. So they moved around a lot and he would sneak out of the house, and he would sneak into [base] quarters where there were pool tables. But it was dark at night, and he would click the pool balls against each other and listen to the sounds. He wanted to be able to get in and out of places easily. He wanted to know where the hole in the fence was, symbolically.” 

Dorsey says that there will be a public gathering to honor Goldring sometime later in 2023. “We wouldn’t do anything formal because he wasn’t that kind of guy. In the spring, we’re going to have a get-together in a public place so that as many people that want to come can come, order a drink, order food, tell their stories on a mike if they want to share how they knew Danny.” 

Based on the longevity of his career and the huge number of tributes posted on social media, it may need to be a big bar. Meantime, Dorsey suggests showing kindness to random strangers, making a donation to PAWS Chicago, or perhaps making and sharing the starter for Amish friendship bread (something he loved and gifted to friends over the years, as Hedda Lubin told me last week) would be a good way to remember a one-of-a-kind Chicago actor.

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Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

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