when it has to be right - Meeting Professionals International Chicago ...

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Joyce Paschall, CAE, CMP
Joyce Paschall, CAE, CMP
The Center for
Association Growth
From the President
Sweet Home Chicago
August 1969.
The Eve of Woodstock.
(Cue the just-released song Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival).
A seven-year-old girl and her mother, a high school home economics teacher in their
very small town, take an Amtrak train three hours north to Chicago. Union Station.
The noise, the constant flow of people, the street traffic, all amaze her. They hail a
taxi--the girl’s first cab ride and she sits in the jump seat!--to the Palmer House hotel.
There she sees her first doorman, takes her first escalator ride up to the lobby and
WOW. This is surely the fanciest place in the whole world. And she hasn’t even eaten
at Trader Vic’s yet.
Up the elevator they ride to a floor higher than she knew buildings could go. A woman
getting on with them, for whom they hold the door, says “gracias” instead of “thank
you,” and she has for the first time heard a word spoken by someone whose native
language is not English. After the woman exits on another floor, her mother’s colleague
says knowingly, “She must be French.”
The girl sees yellow and black signs posted in small corridors off the main hallway
and learns that they say “fallout shelter.” She wonders what that means. She realizes
it would be quite a fall from this tall, tall building, but how can you provide shelter for
someone who is falling out?
Over the next few days they find time to see Buckingham Fountain, the tiny Chapel in
the Sky atop the First United Methodist church, the breathtaking view from the newly-completed
John Hancock Center, and Chinatown. Who knew that cookies came
with messages inside? The menu from Pizzeria Uno, complete with sauce smudges
and filed away with other cherished childhood memorabilia, lists a large cheese pizza
for $3.75. In this city the sights, sounds and tastes are exotic beyond anything she
could have imagined. Now her small, rural hometown will never be enough.
But what equally captivates her is the meeting her mother has come to attend, the
Illinois home economics teachers’ annual convention.
On the first morning there is something called “continental breakfast.” It sounds
so grown-up, so sophisticated, so fancy. The general session is in the Red Lacquer
Room, surely the largest number of people she’s ever seen before in one place; the
size and depth of texture in the red drapes, the vastness of the room, and oh, those
chandeliers. People who must be very brave with important things to say take turns
speaking from the stage that seems so far away. The amazing buzz in the movement
of the crowd from room to room, session to session. And the exhibit hall, a loud, lively,
wonderful place where people hand you small treasures for no reason at all!
She is hooked. On meetings and on Chicago.
And I still am. Aren’t we all?
4 news & views | may-june 2008 www.mpicac.org