IT WAS THE LATE SPRING OF 1979, AND I’D RECENTLY LEFT MY JOB selling high-line cars at Loeber Motors on Clark Street, a couple of blocks from Rush Street’s corridor of nightclubs. The dealership was still sponsoring my Alfa Romeo racecar (we were winning quite a few races that year, which made George Loeber happy), and I’d drop by regularly to pick up parts or just to see how things were going.
It was on such a visit that I noticed these two guys in George’s office. One wore a high-mileage three-piece suit, and the other was in shirtsleeves and dungarees and sported unruly hair, an extravagant mustache, and large, copper-tinted sunglasses. It turned out the suit was from Mayor Jane Byrne’s film office and the other guy was some sort of advance-organizer wheel from Hollywood. Their shared mission was to help facilitate the upcoming Chicago shoot of John Landis’s The Blues Brothers.
The two were asking George where they might find reliable, trustworthy drivers who could handle an automobile “at speed” and, moreover, would work for cheap and show up at 5 a.m. as needed. That’s when George noticed me wandering through the showroom and beckoned me into his office. “You might ask this guy,” he told them as he fiddled with his pipe. “He races cars.”
The two guys eyed me. “Izzat right?” the City Hall guy said. I gave him one of those half-nod, half-shrug things and tried
