The one spot where Roland Burris can truly be at peace
The controversy, anger, racial debate and general mess swirling around embattled Junior Sen. Roland Burris might follow him until the day he dies. But when Burris finally does shake off these mortal coils to blaze a trail into the afterlife, he'll be moving into one of the greatest, most diverse, most serene, most accepting neighborhoods in Chicago.
The Burris mausoleum - the crypt that ego built, where the much-maligned senator has his resume carved in stone under the heading "Trail Blazer" - sits on a magnificently conspicuous plot of prime real estate at the intersection of three paths in the Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago's South Side. His closest neighbor in the graveyard will be a man who put the blaze into trail blazer.
While not nearly as impressive or massive as the Burris post-life abode, the gravestone a few feet away honors Jesse Owens - the 1936 Olympic hero who rendered the Aryan supremacy kaput and made the Fuhrer furious.
"His faith in America inspired countless others to do their best for themselves and their country," reads the monument in front of the small gravestones for Owens, his wife, Ruth, and their son-in-law Donald Prather.
The cemetery is filled with trail blazers - from governors and senators to athletes and musicians.
"I'm really amazed that some of the most famous people have some of the most modest markings," says Pamela Shine, family service counselor for Oak Woods Cemetery, a 183-acre, walled paradise at 1035 E. 67th St.
The unremarkable gravestone for the man who first harnessed the nuclear power needed for the bomb that hastened the end of World War II, and who has the government laboratory in Batavia named in his honor, is the size of a microwave oven. It reads simply, "Enrico Fermi, physicist."
William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago and Bradley University, has a college in Palatine named after him, and a monument smaller than Burris'.
The old Italian gangster Giacamo "Big Jim" Colosimo, who brought a kid named Alphonse Capone to Chicago, has a crypt not nearly as tall or flashy as the monument for the family of Chicago Mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson.
The murderer Richard Loeb, of the infamous Leopold and Loeb thrill murder, was cremated at Oak Woods, but he has no grave. Neither does his lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who was cremated at Oak Woods, and had his ashes scattered in nearby Jackson Park.
"There's lots of good stuff there," Liz Garibay, public program manager for the Chicago History Museum, says of Oak Woods. Many of the monuments are architecturally significant works of art, but the occupants tell the story.
"There's a lot of major, and minor, figures there. It's reflective of the city as a whole," Garibay says. "It's really a great tool, a visual tool, to learn about the evolution of the city."
Near a statue of Abraham Lincoln, a mass grave holds the remains of 4,275 (maybe as many as 6,000) Confederate soldiers. The men, from Ezekiel Able of Texas to J.L. Zollicoffer of Mississippi, died in northern prisoner camps after being captured during the Civil War.
A plot just across Memorial Drive holds the body of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor. The Republican who ran against Washington - Bernie Epton - is buried in the new Jewish section of Oak Woods. The old Jewish section features gravestones, many written in Hebrew, crowded behind a fence. There is no Muslim section, but many Muslims are buried here, too, with their graves facing east.
"There's a little bit of everything, and the cool thing is it is integrated," says Garibay, noting that the Chicago History Museum, www.chicagohistory.org, will begin selling tickets next month ($15 or $10 for members) for its June 14 tour of Oak Woods.
Cap Anson -- baseball's first star with the team now known as the Chicago Cubs -- was an avowed racist. But he's buried here. So is Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's first commissioner and the man who banned "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and seven other players of the 1919 White Sox.
"Blues Man to the World" Junior Wells is buried not far from Opera star Jessie Bartlett Davis, who is buried close to Thomas "Father of Gospel" Dorsey.
Prices for a single plot with no headstone start at $5,300. So far 189,072 people - from the poorest orphans to the rich and famous - have been buried at Oak Woods.
Of course, if you prefer your history in the living form, you can travel 16 blocks straight north of the cemetery and try to catch a glimpse of President Barack's Chicago home.