The Quiet Knight music room was carved out of poetic lines. Between 1969 and 1979, owner Richard Harding booked young acts like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley and Lou Reed on the second floor of the brick building at 953 West Belmont. The Quiet Knight was filled with discarded pews from a church near Cabrini-Green, where unconventional voices came together as a joyous choir. And the club’s spirit was defined by artist, poet, musician and activist Eddie Balchowsky.
Balchowsky was born in Frankfort, Illinois in 1916, and attended Joliet Township High School. He fought fascism as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, a sniper shot him in the right wrist while he was looking through binoculars. After the shooting his right hand and a good portion of his forearm were amputated.
Balchowsky lived beyond the limitations of mind and body. A couple of years before Balchowsky went to Spain, he had been a singing waiter at Kitty Davis’ Cocktail Lounge at the corner of Jackson and Wabash. When he returned to Chicago after the war, he played piano and painted with one arm. Harding hired him as a janitor at the Quiet Knight. Balchowsky liked the gig because he could play the club’s grand piano.
Lou Reed and Dion DiMucci wrote songs about Balchowsky. Jimmy Buffett was enamored with Balchowsky and wrote his ballad “He Went to Paris” about him.
Balchowsky died in late November 1989 when he either jumped or fell off an El track at the North and Clybourn station. He did much of his banking at a currency exchange right by the El stop.
Enduring lines find new directions.
Sixteen of Balchowsky’s rare drawings and monoprints are now on display at the Thorne Studio & Gallery in DeKalb. The gallery is owned by Charlie B. Thorne, the former Quiet Knight doorman, accomplished artist and a fast friend of Balchowsky’s. Between fifteen and twenty of Thorne’s pieces are also on display.
The affable six-foot-five Thorne worked at the Quiet Knight between 1971 and 1976. Now seventy-seven, he purchased about thirty pieces of art from Balchowsky. The pieces in his DeKalb gallery are neatly framed and matted in a beautiful first-floor room not far from where apple and peach trees bless his back door patio.
After Balchowsky’s death, Thorne took over the artist’s Wicker Park studio in the rear building at 1548 North Honore. Balchowsky’s landlord Rima was a Quiet Knight waitress. Balchowsky kept a cocktail spinet piano as the centerpiece of the modest ten-feet-by-eight feet studio.
“Eddie went into depression a number of times,” Thorne says during an extended conversation in his apartment on the second floor above the gallery. “He went into a bad funk at the end of his life. One time, we were at the Quiet Knight and he was in one of his moods. He threw out all his art. We were remodeling and there was a dumpster outside. He was just throwing it out the window. I said, ‘Eddie, would you be insulted if I climbed in there and got stuff out? That doesn’t mean other people don’t want it.’ He said, ‘It’s all garbage, I don’t care.’” So Thorne dumpster-dived and rescued the abandoned art.
An early autumn sun flickers through an upstairs window. The Del Monte Foods canned-corn water tower is visible in the distance. The plant closed in 1994.“Eddie should be known so much better than he is,” Thorne says.
Balchowsky has two pieces in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; 1951’s “In the Light of the Moon,” a twisted Salvador Dali-inspired black crayon drawing on white paper and the undated minimalist charcoal “Surrealist Landscape.” Musician Corky Siegel enlisted Balchowsky to do the cover sketch for the Siegel-Schwall Band’s 1973 album “953 West,” named for the Quiet Knight address.
Thorne and Balchowsky mentored each other through passionate discussions. “He would do a drawing and say, ‘The power lines hold any cityscape together’,” Thorne recalls. “Another one was, ‘Intensity, direction and speed is the formula for any line.’ I’d say, ‘Well, Eddie, in drawing, yeah, but in some art you can’t correlate that. You don’t put lines down.’ He’d argue back. Give us enough wine and we’d talk about anything.”
They would discuss the challenges of Balchowsky making art with one hand. “Partially why he did printing was because you could do it step by step,” Thorne says. “You can get things ready. Sometimes he had ad hoc students who would press and print stuff for him. He always figured it out.”
Thorne is also an accomplished carpenter and furniture maker. He built the fireplace in his upstairs living room. A life-sized toy rabbit sits near the fireplace. The rabbit is wearing a black eye patch. “I love pirates,” he says with a smile. Thorne remembers meeting Balchowsky when he sailed into the Quiet Knight. Balchowsky stood about five-foot nine, weighed 170 pounds and had the eyes of an alley cat. Balchowsky’s parents came from their native Poland to run a grocery store in Frankfort, which was then a predominately German village. The Balchowskys were the only Jewish family in the town, forty-five miles south of Chicago. The experience shaped Balchowsky’s underdog ethos.
“He was off-putting in certain ways to a lot of people,” Thorne says. “Big wild shock of hair. But he was intensely genuine. His eyes had a sparkle you couldn’t miss. There was a deep spirit in there. Hence, he’d get so involved with things. He got started with the drugs because of his wounds. He was strung out on morphine and it led to heroin. But he had the spirit, where at the end he kicked it all somewhere in the mid-1970s. He had demons but what was impressive is how well he reacted to them.“He was planning to be a concert pianist until he decided he had to go and fight Franco. Obviously it changed his life. He gave up piano [after the war]. He told me the story of how in the mid-1960s he was in a dive bar on West Madison Street, where the United Center is now. Old Skid Row. He went to the bathroom, maybe to shoot up. He looked down on the floor and there was sheet music. It was Bach’s Chaconne in D minor for the left hand alone. And he started playing the piano again.”
The gallery exhibit includes “Freedom,” a homemade Balchowsky cassette with vocals that was made in cooperation with the People’s Church of Chicago.
“Freedom” (Freiheit!) was Balchowsky’s signature song and he delivered it in a powerful baritone. “Freedom” was a popular Spanish Civil War song composed in 1936 by Bertolt Brecht collaborator Paul Dessau (1894-1979) and deployed in the Thalmann Column (which is also an alternate name for the song). German volunteers named their battalion after Ernst Thalmann, the leader of the German Communist party who spent ten years in a concentration camp before being executed in the camp in 1944. The battalion also included Austrians and Scandinavians. (Americans served alongside Balchowsky in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.) Ernest Hemingway was a devout fan of the Thalmann battalion. The chorus rings out:
“We’ll not yield a foot to Franco’s Fascists
Even though the bullets fall like hail
With us stand comrades, they are fearless
And for us there can be no retreat.”
“You talk about Vietnam guys coming back and not getting respect,” Thorne says. “He fought Hitler before it was popular. A lot of people don’t know this country was pretty far right at the time and heading toward Hitler. Eddie wasn’t considered as a veteran or anything. A premature anti-fascist was the term that was used. They fought too soon. They were doing it on their own, Eddie getting on the bus with Syd Harris [a boxer and Paul Robeson’s bodyguard] to go to New York to fly to Spain [in November 1937].” The singer-activist Robeson came to Spain in 1937 to entertain the troops. He needed a pianist. Balchowsky volunteered.
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade trained in Albacete in the province of La Mancha, Spain. They were fed a regular rotation of chickpeas, cooked in olive oil, lentil and mule meat. Balchowsky caught dysentery and his combat training was suspended. He was dispatched to the cultural committee where he played guitar on the radio and sang songs he had written. One of his favorites was “Manana.” The visionary battles of the brigade were soon forgotten. During the 1950s they were branded as communists. Their work has been swept away over time.
But Balchowsky could never forget his war injuries, of course. He later would clean up the Quiet Knight with one hand. “He was manic sometimes,” Thorne says. “It was all bentwood chairs and if he got upset you could hear the chairs flying around the room so he could sweep. Then he’d put them all back. I was doing the remodeling. I did the back bar. The legal capacity sign of the club was around 350. I’m sure for Springsteen we had more than that, but under 400 for sure. Sometimes I’d go to Ann Sather’s with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt. One of the waitresses lived nearby. [Jimmy] Buffett was on such a budget he had no place to stay. She had a spare bedroom so that’s where he stayed for the week he was performing there. The Quiet Knight closed relatively early. I had a van so we’d drive to the Earl [of Old Town] and watch another show. Or we’d go to Oxford’s Pub [in Lincoln Park].”
Buffett opened as a solo acoustic act for Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks and the Siegel-Schwall Band. He also met his future friend, collaborator and Cubs fan Steve Goodman at the Quiet Knight. “The Quiet Knight was full of characters,” Buffett told me in 2012 after Harding died of cancer at age eighty-two. “I’m getting goose bumps. Richard Harding had a great deal of satisfaction in helping me become who I was. He was the nicest club owner, although he still ran a tight ship. I will never forget him.”
Buffett’s 1973 ode to Balchowsky begins:
“He went to Paris looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so
He was impressive, young and aggressive
Saving the world on his own.”
Bob Dylan has cited “He Went To Paris” as one of his favorite songs.
The prolific Chicago blues harmonica player-pianist-classical musician Mark Paul “Corky” Siegel met Balchowsky in 1969 when his Siegel-Schwall Band began performing at the Quiet Knight on Belmont. “We were very close,” he told me in a conversation from his Chicago home. “I connected with Eddie because he interpreted everything in a deeper way than most people. You could call it spiritual, but I’m not thinking of spiritual as a religion as much as spiritual looking through a microscope at different things. The table looks solid but it really isn’t. There’s more to it when you look through a microscope and increase your vision. You can see that it is made up of space as well as particles. Eddie looked at the world that way, which I appreciated. When I talk about music with people they go screaming from the room.
“But with Eddie I could go deep.”
Balchowsky had three children: Raena, Liz and Kenny. Raena, eighty, was born in Chicago and settled in Northern California in 1970 where she lives today. She is a quadriplegic due to a motorcycle accident in the early 1970s. She has two children and a granddaughter. Liz, fifty-five, lives in Petaluma, California. She is also a motorcycle rider and blends essential oils on the side. Liz did not return calls for an interview. Balchowsky had a son Kenny, who is deceased.
“I have a universe in my head of this story,” Raena says in a conversation from her home in Northern California. “It is broad and deep and wide and meaningful.
“And full of little bits of amazing beauty and tragedy as well.”
Raena has many pieces of her father’s art and has cataloged dozens of his homemade cassettes. His mind was an endless loop. “He gives new meaning to manic depression and back then no one really knew what manic depression was,” she says. “His cycles were years long. Tom Waits told me one of his favorite stories about Eddie during one of his periods in Chicago when he and Tom were friends. Tom was in the top floor apartment of a mutual friend and Eddie came crashing through the skylight and landed straight up. That was his entrance.”
In May 1999 an excited Waits told the Dallas Observer about hearing Balchowsky play piano in Chicago. “He was excellent,” Waits said. “And the song he played over and over again was called [the 1929 Vincent Youmans composition, with lyrics later added by Billy Rose and Edward Elisc] ‘Without a Song.’ Bob Dylan quoted it one night at an awards ceremony: ‘Without a song. the road will never bend/Without a song.’ He would slam that hand down on the piano, and he’d do the low chords, and then he’d slam over and hit the octaves, then he’d get it in the middle there. It sounded huge. He sounded like Horowitz. He actually did have a nub on the end of his stump. It was like a little finger, so he could pick up a little bit with that. But it’s… hmmm. Where were we?”
Eddie Balchowsky moved to San Francisco in the 1967 Summer of Love. Of course. He resided in the attic of blues-rock musician Steve Miller. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer was born in Milwaukee and lived in Chicago in the mid-1960s where he played with Paul Butterfield, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. “When they were living in Chicago; musicians, friends and artists, Steve was trying to get his career off the ground,” Raena recalls. “Steve expressed the misfortune that he did not have proper equipment to make a demo. So Eddie and a couple of friends ‘found’ him some equipment. They said, ‘Now, there’s no excuse.’ And they became friends with Steve.”
Raena’s musical memories of her father are infinite and multidimensional. “A favorite is him playing our piano while I sat behind him leaning my head on his back and feeling the musical vibrations through his body,” she says. “Also my endless delight at seeing other people’s amazement at his one-handed musical soul gifts.”
She knows the words to “Without a Song” by heart. It was later popularized by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson (in 1983). In part she recites, “I’ll never know what makes the grass so tall/I’ll never know what makes the rain to fall/I only know there ain’t no love without a song.” She adds, “And of course hearing him sing it was a booming vibration of the soul. When he sang he penetrated.
“It’s reality.”
Raena moved to Northern California in 1970. Her father traveled back and forth between Northern California and Chicago throughout the decade. For a while he lived in a cabin in Guerneville, an old logging town south of the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve.
Her father was not mechanically oriented. “He never drove, except for a bicycle at the [1933] World’s Fair when he was delivering pie,” she says. “When he was living in Guerneville someone gave him a station wagon and he left it parked in front of the cabin and let people crash in it. He also had trouble with recording devices. He learned how to manipulate fast-forward, rewind and record. He made countless improvisations. There’s dozens of different versions of ‘Chaconne’ for the left hand. That’s a twenty-three-minute piece. Sometimes he would just talk and say things like, ‘Do not think about what you are not doing. Sometimes he would recite poetry.”
She recalls handing off her father’s music to Tom Waits as they both live in Sonoma County. After Balchowsky died she was going through his belongings and discovered a dusty homemade cassette titled “For Tom Waits.” She tracked down Waits, invited him over for coffee and delivered the tape. “Eddie made hundreds of cassette tapes and I made sure people got them,” she says. “Around 1992 there was a music store in downtown Sebastopol.”
Applying her father’s charming moxie, she strolled into the store and inquired if Waits was a customer. They said he was, so Raena asked if she could leave him a note. “A few weeks later I got a phone call,” she says. “It sounded like this. ‘Are you ready?’” In a gruff, raspy voice out of a dark alley she does her impression of the singer, “This is Tom Waits. I hear you got something for me, let’s get together.” Raena returned the call and Waits visited her. They told old stories about Balchowsky. “He was very happy to take the tape home,” she says. “It was a lovely visit, sociable. And it revolved around Eddie.”
Most of the 1970s were a complicated period for Raena and her father. “It might be too complicated to go toward,” she says. “In the late 1970s I found him a house around the corner from me [in Northern California]. He lived in that house in 1981, eighty-two. My son lived with him when he finished high school. He went back to Chicago for the remainder of his life in late 1983. Then his mind started acting out.”
Everyone in Balchowsky’s circle says he explored spirituality to calm the storms in his mind.
Richard Harding’s daughter Catherine, seventy, and son John, seventy-two, explored Shambhala, based on the myth of Shangri-La. It became a compass for Balchowsky. He was known to carry a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, which celebrated the Supreme Path.
“Eddie was spiritual and threw the ching almost every day,” Thorne says. One of the first things Balchowsky would bestow to visitors in his studio was the I Ching [the Book of Changes attempted to explain human existence and was one of the writings that created the canon of Confucianism]. To cast a question in I Ching, three identical pennies were tossed six times with each toss determining one of Balchowsky’s beloved lines of the hexagram from bottom to top.
“I was around him many times when he did that,” Thorne says. “We couldn’t do anything until he did the ching first. He’d toss the pennies, write it down and then he’d go through the formula to open the ching to tell him what passage to read. I think, maybe more than I do, that Eddie believed his relationship with spirit made a difference.”
In a piercing black-and-white Thorne gallery print, Balchowsky is sparring with a troublesome spirit in a Chicago alley. “The spirit of the alley was giving him a hard time,” Thorne says. “That’s why it’s all angular. He would go into an alley and feel there was something good in that alley. He’d find it. This was when I was working at the Quiet Knight in the 1970s. One time he found two prints by a well-known Spanish artist in a can in an alley.”
“Eddie introduced John to Padmasambhava, the [eighth century] Indian mystic who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet,” Catherine Harding recalled. In a recent lunch at the Golden Apple diner in Lakeview. “He wrote about the myth of Shangri-La, which you could say was enlightened society. John and Eddie did the ching a lot. Eddie was always working with his mind. He developed a thing he called ‘the Exercise of Choice.’ He did that in order to deal with heroin.”
Harding picks up a spoon from the table. “The Exercise of Choice goes like this,” she says. “I’m going to pick up this spoon. That satisfies you. You know you can pick up a spoon. You set the spoon down. Then, ‘Oh look, I made some drops. Okay, now I deal with those.’ He felt that if he could work with his mind enough he could control the desire for heroin along with the other things life threw at him.”
In an undated, twelve-page typewritten manuscript titled “The Spirit of the Law,” Balchowsky wrote:
“Some decades ago I maneuvered myself into an extremely exclusive lifestyle. Holed up with a friend, in a coach-house, a little south of the western edge of Old Town in Chicago, our routine excluded almost everything except:
1. Making enameled cuff-links and selling them. (I applied the powdered enamel and fired the pieces, balancing them on a bent wire coat-hanger, over our kitchen stove. My friend cleaned them and soldered on the findings.)
2. Visiting doctors and pharmacies to obtain and fill prescriptions for morphine sulfate.
3. Injecting large quantities of this drug into our veins.
4. Eating double lamb-chop dinners and drinking stingers.
Monotony and comfort merged. Life became a continuous dream of walking a tight-rope, balanced between my intense relationships with the external world and maintaining a position of noninvolvement. In this condition, I learned from newspaper reports that several of my close acquaintances had recently been removed from their abodes by the police: Drug busts. Each arrest moved closer to my position.”
Catherine made the choice to no longer study Shambhala, although her brother still practices. They both meditate.
John Harding credits Balchowsky and spiritual pursuits for helping navigate his stressful forty-year career as a Chicago Fire Department paramedic. Balchowsky was his phoenix.
“Most of the time I ran out of Engine 117 (4900 West Chicago) and Cicero on the West Side,” he says from his Winthrop Harbor home he shares with his wife. “Humboldt Park was part of my district and my dad was often living in different places in Wicker Park. Eddie’s influence was essential for me to be able to meditate and not get hateful. It is hard and many people would struggle with how to work with it. I stayed in the ghetto for a long time. All the young people would start on the busy ambulances in my district. That’s where you burn out. I told them to get their seniority and get out. But I didn’t get out.
“I feel like my meditation practices enabled me to stay without becoming a hater. I applied those techniques every day. Every time I arrived on a scene I touched into that energy of what we called ‘basic goodness.’ One time a bunch of gangbangers were running down the street shooting at each other. A grandma was holding her baby granddaughter on the front steps. The baby had been shot. There was a big crowd and the gang came back to see what happened. If somebody shot a baby, the cops are seriously going to come after those guys. At that moment you can view people as something very bad.”
John pauses for a long moment. He goes somewhere else, then continues, “I remember being able to have the space to have that thought and just let it go. Eddie started me with that. Because I’ve been doing it for fifty years. It’s interesting because I’m coming back to where Eddie started. There’s a book that’s a translation of Padmasambhava’s ‘Seeing of Reality.’ Eddie would study that book and look at different translations. He and I read that out loud to each other. And now, at the end of my life, really, all of a sudden I’m coming back to the Padmasambhava stuff that Eddie turned me on to years ago.”
Raena Balchowsky was born in 1945 on the north side of Chicago, to a woman named Norma. Raena, who grew up in Chatham, is about five-foot-two and carries her father’s diminutive-but-feisty quality. She was adopted in Chicago at the age of five, to a stepfather she declines to name. “I lived in the middle of Eddie Balchowsky by choice,” she says in one of several interviews. “I took my name back to Balchowsky. My son took it when we realized what was here and we embraced it fully.”
“My stepparents were comfortable middle-class people but they had attributes of the time of keeping up with the Joneses and being racist,” she says. “I grew up in that atmosphere. I lived in Tennessee with them for two years because my stepfather got transferred. I saw the fountains that said ‘Colored,’ I saw the back of the bus.”
Raena’s stepfather worked for a company that made asphalt coating for railroad cars. He became supervisor of a plant in Memphis. He got the plant rolling and the family returned to Chicago. By the time she was a teenager, Raena had a boyfriend who had a car. On weekends he drove all over Chicago in his Nash Rambler. “I told him what I knew about my past,” she says. “One weekend he goes to Old Town and comes back and says, ‘I heard about a guy they call Old Man Balchowsky. He’s kind of a legend.’ That was the first time I heard his name. I was about fifteen.”
Around the same time period, Raena was watching television with her stepparents in the South Ingleside Avenue home where she lived until she was seventeen. The station was airing a report about Paul Crump (1930-2002). The Chicagoan was convicted of murder at age twenty-two after a security guard was killed in an attempted robbery of a food plant in the Union Stockyards. Crump wrote the novel “Burn, Killer Burn” while on death row. Writer Nelson Algren had visited Crump in prison. William Friedkin directed the 1962 documentary “The People vs. Paul Crump,” which was his first notable credit.
Illinois Governor Otto Kerner saw the film and commuted Crump’s sentence to 199 years in prison without parole. Crump was paroled in 1993 but returned to prison for harassing a family member and violating an order of protection.
When talking about rehabilitation in the film, Crump cited his jail mate Eddie Balchowsky. He credited Balchowsky with teaching him how to type and sharing the beauty of poetry. “As I watched that, Eddie’s name reverberated through the walls,” Raena says.
Roger Ebert was enamored with Balchowsky as a scruffy bohemian character straight out of a movie. In April 1973, he wrote a Sun-Times profile of Balchowsky that was heavy on oral history. Ebert, then thirty-one years old, spent a few hours drinking wine with Balchowsky at the Quiet Knight.
Here’s Balchowsky telling Ebert of his nascent days in the Chicago art community:
“One day I’m walking along with a portfolio under my arm and I get an urge to play some piano. I headed over to 733 North Dearborn, which is where the WPA music project used to lie. Now it is the Institute of Design. I went into the auditorium to play my piano and put my portfolio down. A woman wandered in and looked at my stuff. She turned out to be the wife of Serge Chermayeff, the architect. He was the head of the Institute [president of the Institute of Design in Chicago, 1946-51]. They accepted me on the spot as a student and gave me a job in the print shop to pay my tuition. And in 1949, I had a one-man show at the Art Institute. It lasted six months. [Thorne has a Don Quixote monoprint from this show but it is not on display.]
“So, inevitably, I screw up. I get busted for pot. I was with Lila Leeds, the starlet who got busted with Robert Mitchum, curiously enough. She kept turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway that was four months in Cook County Jail and then I got out and got busted again and did two years in Stateville. I wrote a poem about that once, with the line ‘the shadows die where first they fall.’ Because the shadows don’t move in prison, you see. They turn on the lights and the shadows are there, and that’s it.”
Raena says the Ebert piece brought her birth mother back into her life. She saw the story, called the Quiet Knight and asked for Balchowsky. Raena still has a black-and-white photograph from their subsequent reunion. Eddie and Norma had not seen each other since 1948.
In 1963 Raena was attending Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. “What goes around comes around,” she says in reference to Thorne’s exhibition. “I ran away from home. A bohemian woman came to campus from San Francisco, but she had gone to Northern. She was barefoot with a drawing pad. She charmed me and we clicked temperamentally.”
The free spirits decided to hitchhike west together. Raena sold all her belongings and packed a suitcase. Her San Francisco friend didn’t show up. “So I bought a ticket to New York City on the Greyhound bus,” she says.
When life zigs, a Balchowsky zags.
“So in New York I’m living my own life which is quietly rebellious and I’m making up my own rules,” she says. “Of all the things I dismissed, the one thing I held onto from my upbringing was playing bridge. Yes. A card game.”
Raena was twenty-one years old in 1966 when she discovered the Le Figaro Café at Bleecker and MacDougal in Greenwich Village. Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce frequented the coffeehouse in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1966 the café was hosting Thursday night bridge games in the basement. “I didn’t even drink coffee,” she says. “I was just curious about the place. I was living a wild nightlife, but playing bridge on Thursday. I also had a son.”
One night she was waiting for a fourth bridge player. She says a man introduced himself as Byron Butterfield, who said he was a cousin of Paul Butterfield. “This is the dimension of Eddie’s karma,” she says. “Because this guy says to me, ‘I’m from Old Town.’ And the little back lights come on.”
Raena asked Butterfield if she knew an Old Town character named Eddie Balchowsky. Butterfield replied that he was one of his friends. Old Town was a community of Aces and Spaces. “And I say, ‘Well, he’s my father and I haven’t seen him since I was two years old’,” Raena recalls. “And he goes, ‘Would you like his number?’ This is truly how it happened. I called Eddie later that night. After I identified myself the first thing he said was, ‘What took you so long?’ Then I said, ‘Me? I’m a kid.’ He said, ‘I have a big handicap. I have no money. You’re a Balchowsky. I knew you’d find me.’ And on our first conversation we threw the I Ching over the phone.”
Not long after the phone call Raena flew to Chicago. Her father was living in an apartment with a woman named Judy Coleman who would become mother of Raena’s younger sister Elizabeth. Raena had her birth certificate to show to Balchowsky. “We knew,” she says. “My second night there he said my brother and his mother were coming over. I didn’t even know I had a brother until that moment. He’s gone now.”
Her brother Ken Balchowsky perished in a 1980s boating accident. Ken was a shrimp boater and champion net mender in the Gulf of Mexico. “Kenny was a sailor,” Raena says. “He and Eddie were very close. Kenny died in Baja on a drug-related high-speed chase with a friend. The drug was marijuana. They went off a cliff into the edge of the Sea of Cortez. They were being chased. He was born in 1950 and he died in his thirties.”
Balchowsky was married three times. “And I met all the wives,” Raena says. “I made it my business. The first one I met was Judy, who he had not married yet. Then I met Pat, my brother’s mother. Then I met Betty Dean who was from 1940 and he knew her on and off over the years. And there was my mother who he did not actually marry.”
Raena says the relationship with her father blossomed “systematically.” She returned to New York. “He discovered on the first conversation that he was a grandfather,” she says. “My son Scoutt is Indonesian. I told him that and he said, ‘Of course! Lately I’ve been feeling like a Chinese grandfather and keep finding wonderful old [Chinese] vases in the alleys. Some of them are even valuable.’ The idea of an Oriental grandson intrigued him immensely. They bonded.” Scoutt is now sixty years old and living with his wife on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.
Raena became a quadriplegic after a 1977 motorcycle accident in front of her house. She was planning to make a birthday cake for her partner’s thirty-sixth birthday. He was fixing his vintage Hodaka Ace 100 bike with Scoutt. They took a spin around the block. And then Raena asked if she could try it. “I had never been on a solo bike ride,” she says. “I had been a passenger. I got on the seat, opened the throttle and I left my body. My memory of the accident is silence with a brilliant light in front of me with a bright red bush. I wondered what was behind that bush. It was a guidewire from the telephone pole that had a metal covering on it. I ended up on the street dead. I was not breathing. And then I came back.”
Like her father, she lives life undaunted. She goes to a nearby farmer’s market in her electric scooter. She sent me a cheerful ten-second video signing off as “Grandma.”
Raena was following spiritual pursuits at the time of the accident. “I woke up on a gurney in the hospital and realized I couldn’t move,” she says. “I thought, ‘Well, it’s not like I haven’t walked.’ And my second thought was that this was my chance to see if I really know who I think I am.”
Raena was transported to a San Jose hospital for a lengthy recovery. Balchowsky stayed with a drummer friend in San Jose so he could make regular visits to see her. “He came every day,” she says. “He rubbed my back. He cooked brown rice and vegetables for me. He did this for several weeks. When he saw I was going to be stable he came back and stayed in this house for months while I was in the hospital with screws in my head.
“Eddie was diving down with manic depression. Everybody knows this. When I got out of the hospital four months after the accident the first thing I did was to try to find a way to get Eddie help. I got him into a psychiatric wing of the hospital in Santa Rosa. The person who looked out for Eddie in this clinic was named Ruth Belmont. She had known him in Chicago. They were in the early 1960s circle of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade people.”
And the Quiet Knight was on Belmont Avenue.
Balchowsky slowly marched out of his depression. Raena says, “He moved into a board and care here for six months. He had, shall we say, a lady friend he had seen off and on. She came to visit him at the board and care. She insisted on giving him a hot bath. She got in with him and broke the last stages of his emergence. He called me later that night and said, ‘I’m back!’ It’s tales of Eddie. There’s no end to the tales of Eddie. I know stuff that nobody else will ever know because I’m in the center of it with him.
“And it’s my honor to be that.”
Charlie Thorne and his wife Saren lived in Wicker Park until December 2020 when they decamped to DeKalb after they could not find affordable housing in Chicago. A musician friend led them to the house on the east end of DeKalb, not far from the Lincoln Highway. “My wife was also an artist so we needed at least a three bedroom so we would each have a studio,” he says. “My wife was already sick. She had pulmonary fibrosis but we had to find someplace to live. One of the realtors said for the amount you pay in rent you could probably do a mortgage here. I’ve never had a regular job. I stopped looking for work. I did a lot of rehabbing, I designed and built furniture. I made leather clothes.”
Thorne was married for twenty-seven years and he dated Saren seven years before they got hitched. She died on November 11, 2022. Catherine Harding wears a pair of earrings that Thorne gave to Saren. They are of gentle aquamarine color and each one is accented by a diamond chip.
Thorne takes long walks around the neighborhood that average around eight miles a day. He has time to think. And Thorne has found time to beautifully remodel his homestead. Saren, who he misses dearly, seems to be a muse.
The gallery is in the original building, circa 1900. A 1970s add-on morphed the house into a vinyl-sided split level with seven small rooms that had previously been rented out as housing for Northern Illinois University students.
The house now contains one large bedroom and his downstairs studio is a former bedroom. The 300-square-feet downstairs gallery covers two rooms. A vintage boom box sits on a kitchen table adjacent to the gallery. Thorne puts in the “Freedom” cassette. And there is Balchowsky in all his bawdy glory, deploying his joyful baritone. He sings “Los Cuatro Generales” (The Four Generals): “Madrid you wonderous city! /They wanted to take you but your courageous children/they did not disgrace you!” And then Balchowsky stops for spoken word:
“Before I went to Spain I was a pianist. I began studying when I was six years old in 1922. Before long Chopin became my favorite composer. I took great liberties with his music. All pianists take liberties with Chopin. I took perhaps more than others. But now playing with one hand I do not say I play Chopin. I play with Chopin. And here I will play two pieces using the theme of his first A major prelude and second of his E major etude.”
And off he goes.
While listening to the tape Thorne says, “He had the lungpower. When he yelled at you he wanted you to know who he was. It was like a sonic blast. Sometimes he’d use his stump [on the piano] but as he went along he did it less and less. Afternoons at the Quiet Knight we were supposed to be working and we’re all sitting in chairs listening to Eddie play.”
Chicago still tugs at Thorne’s heart. A pile of Chicago Sun-Times sit on his coffee table. He gets the paper delivered daily. Thorne talks about regular visits with Balchowsky to the Busy Bee diner in the heart of Wicker Park. “The waitresses there!,” Thorne says. “Ala Jaron, between myself and my wife we bought tons of her jewelry. She was a jeweler on the side. Even after the Busy Bee closed we kept supporting her. Last I heard she moved back to Poland. She worked hard. She bought a nice piece of property in Wicker Park. Then I heard she came back.”
Balchowsky’s wake was at his beloved Bee, the proletarian Wicker Park spot that attracted Harold Washington, Chicago cops and Hillary Clinton. The late Utah Phillips was a Quiet Knight act who sang his ballad “Eddie’s Song” at the event. Busy Bee owner Sophie Madej died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six. Richard Harding is gone. Buffett died on Labor Day weekend 2023. Thorne’s beloved wife is gone.
There is some debate about Balchowsky’s demise. Most in his inner circle say he committed suicide. Balchowsky was so laser-focused on the meaning of being, they say it was easy for him to decide when to leave the stage, his “exercise of choice.” Raena says he had only returned to Chicago for a day and a half from California and she believed he died and fell off the El platform. The December 5, 1989 Cook County Medical Examiner’s Certificate of Death states “suicide” as cause of death at 2:30pm, November 29, 1989.
Balchowsky was laid to rest near lefties such as Frank Lumpkin and Emma Goldman in the Anarchist’s Row in Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park.
The cemetery’s Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 1997. A black marble-and-granite bench invites visitors to “Sit and hear the voices for peace, justice and freedom.” The bench was dedicated in 2018 by Ted and Kathy Pearson. Ted Pearson earned a physics degree from the University of Chicago and his mother was a civil rights organizer in Louisville. He also worked for the Chicago Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression.
Balchowsky’s final resting place is as enchanting as his life. After a walk through the cemetery with a senior administrator and her gravesite map, we found Balchowsky’s ashes in an unmarked section in the cremation garden (Section M) by the cemetery chapel.
Yet a commemorative headstone is at Section N, Lot 464 on the other side of the chapel. It reads, “Artist, poet, raconteur, one-armed pianist. Veteran of the Spanish Civil War a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND FELLOW ‘PREMATURE ANTI-FASCISTS’ SALUTE YOU.”
This memorial, dedicated in 2002, was financed by Jeff Balch, a distant cousin of Balchowsky’s. Family members did not want Balchowsky’s ashes relocated. In a September 26 email, a cemetery official wrote, “At this time no one is interred in that [Lot 464] space, and our records do not indicate why his ashes were placed in one location while his memorialization was made in another.”
Raena says not-so-matter-of-factly, “He left us in 1989 but he’s still here. Don’t kid yourself.”
Richard Harding and Charlie Thorne had serious simpatico.
Harding was a trained electrician and Thorne was an accomplished carpenter. In his later years Harding always carried several pens and sharp pencils in his shirt-pocket protector. He was ready to make a move or cross a line. He was born in Chicago and graduated from Amundsen High School where he was a star linebacker. His mother Lula was a nurse who worked at Martha Washington Hospital on the Northwest Side. His father Clarence was an electrician.
Harding opened his second Quiet Knight in the former La Havana Madrid nightclub, a popular 1960s venue for Chicago’s Cuban, Colombian and Puerto Rican communities. Prior to the Belmont location Harding owned Poor Richard’s, 1363 North Sedgwick and the first Quiet Knight at 1311 North Wells. Andy Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” held a weeklong residency at Poor Richard’s with special guests The Velvet Underground (minus Lou Reed, who was in the hospital).
The Quiet Knight became Chicago’s answer to the Troubadour in West Hollywood, which is not far from the former Tropicana Motel location, where Tom Waits lived in the mid-1970s.
In a 2012 email to Catherine Harding, Waits wrote:
“Soooo long ago but still fresh in my mind. Belmont and Sheffield under the El train. Nowadays when do you ever get to stay two doors down from the club at the Wilmont Hotel where the night clerk was the original Marlboro Man?
“Richard [Harding] took good care of me. I traveled alone in those days with a suitcase and a guitar. Me and Richard would go to the old steam bath that was full of policemen and eat at that old homey cafe where he knew EVERYONE. Your dad was like a great old Inn Keeper showing me the ropes… he was like the mayor. I opened for Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and countless others. Chicago for me became inseparable from Richard and vice versa, better or worse.”
The first time Richard Harding saw Balchowsky was in 1962 at the Rising Moon, 1305 North Wells, which would become the Mother Blues nightclub, owned by Harding and Lorraine (Weller) Blue. “He was slicing ham to make sandwiches,” Harding told me in a 1990 conversation. “He’s doing it with one hand. Then when I opened the original Quiet Knight on Wells Street [in 1967] Eddie used to come by to see if I needed any help.” They became tight as old man Daley’s hatband. Their shared personalities defined the spontaneous ethos of the Quiet Knight, John Harding met Balchowsky at the Quiet Knight Belmont location. “Eddie was married, had a baby and was trying to stay clean,” he recalls. “My dad hired him to put together the new Quiet Knight, do some artwork. Eddie did the lettering on the outside canopy and from there he went on to clean the place every day.”
Thorne says, “I lived at the corner of Briar and Broadway when Broadway became known as New Town. There was a gay men’s store downstairs. At Christmas they had ‘Swish Kringle’ in the window. A little gay man with white hair would sit on a chair and guys would sit on his lap. That became a leather store called Fragile Sun Construction Co. I made a pair of leather pants for myself. I made designs for new purses. Richard would come in. To me, he was just a street guy from Broadway. One day I was just kvetching how I was doing all this work but didn’t sign up to be the store manager. Richard said, ‘Well, you can come and work for me.’ The Quiet Knight [on Belmont] was already open. He didn’t know anything about me.” Thorne designed Quiet Knight advertising posters. Balchowsky created the regal logo. Thorne also did early WXRT-FM logo ads. “Before they were corporate,” he says.
To enter The Quiet Knight, people walked upstairs past walls filled with concert posters. The second-floor room on the east side near the El tracks contained a pool table, upright piano, jukebox, full bar and kitchen. The concert space was across the hall on the west side where the only light was provided by candles on the circular tables.
In 1985 Richard Harding told me, “When I think about the acts I sold at the Quiet Knight for $2 and $3 cover charges… We had an opening act for Carly Simon that no one had ever heard of. His name was Jackson Browne. When Linda Ronstadt played the room no one had heard of her backing band, the Eagles. I remember when Springsteen was an opening act for five nights. He didn’t have the room at the Quiet Knight to do all his antics, but he and his band did most of the material off his first album.”
Jack Hafferkamp was the Chicago Daily News music critic from 1971 to 1977. “The Quiet Knight wasn’t particularly known as a jazz club, but it served up an all-star ‘A List’ of jazz legends: Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, Pharoah Sanders, Betty Carter, Mose Allison, Freddie Hubbard and Anita O’Day to name the biggies,” he says. “What Richard Harding did there on the second floor of the Greek market and the shoe repair/leather fetishist shop at Belmont and Sheffield was offer Chicago a musical organic garden, each week featuring a different varietal served with a two-drink minimum and a reasonable cover charge.”
Hideout co-owner Tim Tuten told me in a 2020 email about Harding visiting their tiny bar for the first time in the early 2000s. One day Tuten opened The Hideout around 4pm after teaching high school. He saw a disheveled older man sitting on the outside bench. Tuten asked the man if he needed some water and invited the man into his club. Tuten writes, “He said, ‘I’m Richard Harding, do you remember the Quiet Knight or Poor Richard’s?’ It was like meeting Dylan. I grew up reading and hearing about the Old Town scene. It was my dream to be there. And Richard just started telling me stories for the next four hours. He came by a couple more times after that. Like an angel, he would just appear. Tell stories and disappear. When I hugged him I felt I had a deep responsibility to live up to the profound culture and tradition of Chicago clubs. We yearn for our community.
“A community that connects with a long history of venues and characters and art and beauty.”
Harding was an urban scavenger. Like Balchowsky, he saw beauty in forsaken corners. The Quiet Knight back bar and church pews were delivered from churches that were razed when Carl Sandburg Village and Cabrini Green were being built. His reborn pews framed the exterior of the club. “He’d find a church that was being unconsecrated and he’d buy the paneling and stuff,” Thorne says. “He always had cigar ashes dropping on him. He was a big burly guy. He was strong.
“There was an island at the northern, narrow end of Lake Michigan that he wanted to buy. He said, ‘We could live there Charlie and have our island!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, and I’d be your house boy.’ We got along great. He had big dreams and he didn’t mind sharing them with almost everybody.”
Catherine Harding was attending Katella High School in Anaheim, California when she first met Balchowsky. Her mother Eleanor Lauderdale met her future husband Richard Harding at Amundsen. Lauderdale became a Chez Paree showgirl. They were married for ten years.
Catherine was nine years old when she moved with Lauderdale, her stepfather and brother to Anaheim. During summer break she would leave the magic of Disneyland to visit her father at the mystical Quiet Knight.
“Eddie was always irrepressible,” she says. “High energy. Larger than life. He was a bit of a con man. It was always one more of a certain thing, one more bottle of wine. I was able to say no to him which is why I think we got along.
Yet, there was tremendous generosity. In 1985, Balchowsky gifted Catherine Harding his 1984 oil-crayon painting “Wicker Park” off the wall of his Wicker Park studio. The bright blue and red abstract blends a pyramid, volcano and maybe even the original Double Door tavern with all its Elvis decanters. “He was making lamb stew,” she said. “He was good at chopping and seasoning. He had this giant skillet and then we smoked some weed. He’d play piano and I would sing. I saw this piece. It didn’t have a frame. He knew I liked it. I’m sure I never purchased a piece of art from Eddie Balchowsky.”
His generous Chicago spirit was similar to the late Tony Fitzpatrick. Not long after my mother died I was talking to Fitzpatrick in his Western Avenue studio. He pulled his “Quebec Bird” collage off the wall and gave it to me. Every bird has a halo. “Particularly in their maturity these good artists continue their generosity,” Harding says. “A big part of their meaning is to keep their stuff going.
“In Padmasambhava generosity is called a paramita, or one of their virtues. Generosity. Mindfulness. Patience. Taking action in the world counts. And one thing that really counts is generosity. And which one can we really know happens? Generosity. Dad was very generous whether he was getting a Bozo Podunavac guitar made for someone or having photographs taken and given.”
The Bohemian spirit of Balchowsky and the Quiet Knight shaped who Harding is today. When her father was living in the club they would share a bed. “Didn’t bother me, but I wasn’t exactly getting baths,” she said. “Eddie asked if I wanted a bath. So we went into the kitchen where there were big double sinks. He took a bunch of the bar towels, set them all out, started the water and made me a bath. So I could take a bath in the kitchen sink of the Quiet Knight. I was fourteen or fifteen. I tell people, ‘I slept in the same bed as my dad and there was an old guy hanging around that made me baths and they go ‘Yuck,’ but no, it was the best thing ever. He was so very different from anyone I had known.”
In 1972 Catherine Harding returned to Chicago to attend Lake Forest College. She quickly got a job working “The Teen Room” at the Quiet Knight.
John Harding attended Lakeview High School. Richard Harding was married to his second wife, Constance “Connie” Zipprodt Sorensen Harding Zonka, a public relations executive whose clients included the Chicago International Film Festival and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. She was married to Robert F. Zonka, the Chicago Sun-Times features editor from 1966 to 1977. Roger Ebert wrote Connie Zonka’s 2012 obituary for the Sun-Times. Catherine Harding says, “It was her press list that put Poor Richard’s on the map.”
John Harding recalls, “When my dad was married to Connie we lived in Crilly Court [Chicago’s oldest gated community in Old Town] and moved up to Melrose so I could go to Lakeview,” he says. “Because the school for Old Town was Waller, where nobody wanted to go. But then my dad and Connie’s marriage disintegrated.
“So he and I moved into the Quiet Knight.”
Father and son lived in the Quiet Knight for two years. Richard Harding later returned to his club as a solo act. “When I didn’t have any place, I would stay with him again in another room he made in the back,” his son says. “When we first moved there he and I just had beds in the storage rooms in the back. During my junior and senior years of high school I lived in the Quiet Knight. Eddie would often live with us because his wife would kick him out.”
Many of his friends at Lakeview knew that Harding was living in a nightclub but they did not realize the high quality of the live acts. “The people I went to high school with didn’t know about the Quiet Knight,” he says. “Except my girlfriend who lived across the alley from the Quiet Knight. I was never a huge music fan. I’d watch the acts because we didn’t have a television. We listened to whatever was on the radio.”
In Harding’s adolescent eyes, Balchowsky was not some larger-than-life character from the Chicago streets. “Actually it was very domestic,” he says. “We were all in the Quiet Knight in the daytime. Eddie was very outgoing to me. His way of dealing with his depression was to search for meaning which he found in I Ching, Lao Tzu and Padmasambhava and he talked to me about that. In many ways he was a mentor to me.”
On the event of John Harding’s twenty-first birthday, the family gathered at the Tango restaurant in the Belmont Hotel. “My dad thanked Eddie for helping raise me,” Harding says. “It was more of an uncle thing. He didn’t feel larger than life. He was like the rest of us, very much feet of clay. He struggled more than anybody.”
For the decade-long duration of the Quiet Knight, Richard Harding also had two guard dogs watch the place. Duke was a tough German Shepherd. Toro was a loyal Great Dane. “Duke was like Eddie’s protector,” Catherine Harding says. “He sat at Eddie’s feet while he played the piano.” In 1971 Duke was name-checked by Aliotta, Haynes and Jeremiah (of “Lake Shore Drive” fame) in their ballad “A Song for Eddie”:
“Duke, the white Shepherd who guarded the room
Never leavin’ the back of the bar
Would climb up on the stage and curl around his feet
As to guard him and his music from harm…”
Charlie B. Thorne had never operated a gallery until he arrived in DeKalb. Thorne was born and raised in a wood frame house in downtown Bensenville. His mother Alma worked at the workingman’s Thelma’s Grill in Bensenville and his father Ben worked in area warehouses for paper companies. Thorne’s middle initial is in honor of his father and it also distinguishes him from the best-selling books about twelve-year-old spy Charlie Thorne.
“When I was a little kid I knew art was going to be important in my life,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to be an artist. I liked doodling and stuff. We lived at Center Street and Green, it was almost like a farm house. The Center Theatre [opened 1925 and still open] was across the street. A blacksmith shop was two blocks away. Our basement was a little bodega. I was twelve years old and said, ‘I’m going to open a gallery!’ I painted the whole place and named it Center Street Gallery. Bensenville is very similar to DeKalb. Here we have the DeKalb airport with prop planes flying over my house. When I was growing up, there weren’t jets at O’Hare. There were prop planes. Boxcars flew in formation over our house.”
Thorne’s gallery includes his own work, most notably his “lipsticks.” Thorne has done 108 “lipsticks” from a genre he calls micro-miniatures. This work had been represented by the River North gallerist Charles Belloc-Lowndes, who died in 2016. “My career was in Chicago, I was doing stuff, but I wanted to get myself known elsewhere,” Thorne says. “This would have been in the mid-1990s. I always looked at the back of art magazines for upcoming shows. There was one in Seattle called a Petite Show. The maximum size was twelve [inches] by twelve [inches]. I had some small drawings that were eight by five but I wanted to do something new. I’ve had insomnia all my life. I was lying in bed thinking what I could do. All of a sudden I thought of the biggest thing I could think of to put in the smallest thing I could think of.
“It was Sears Tower in a lipstick tube!”
When his wife Saren woke up in the morning, Thorne asked if she had an old lipstick tube he could use. She did a double take. With a laugh Thorne says, “I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s an art thing.’ The Sears Tower was the first one I did. In a way she’s responsible for this. She would always get her cosmetics at Lord & Taylor on Michigan Avenue. So I went along with her.” Thorne micro-miniatured Coit Tower in San Francisco, the Empire State Building and Tribune Tower.
Thorne’s micro-miniatures also include botanicals with dead weeds and dead Bonsai trees. He uses fine brushes to paint the greenery with Polymar varnish. Sometimes he applies up to ten coats in the relentless spirit of preservation.
The Racine Art Museum (RAM) has six Thorne pieces in its collection. There are four miniatures of lipstick cases and two dioramas. “Charlie Thorne is one of those artists that turn mundane things into things magical,” says Lena Vigna, Director of Exhibitions and Collections. “Using a variety of media, he transforms the urban environment, a longtime favorite subject. Our pieces like the Chrysler Building are compelling, fun, unexpected, precious but not too precious. Thorne doesn’t have to use found materials to make these, but then again, he does as the presence of something recognizable that underscores their whimsical existence. With these gestures he shapes our perceptions and encourages new frameworks for understanding the world around us.”
Seven of Thorne’s pieces are in the futuristic 2001 film “Just Visiting,” set in Chicago and co-written by John Hughes. His upstairs living room features his painting “Relics” that pays tribute to an abandoned Woolworth’s on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park. The forty-inch-wide, thirty-two-inch-high oil pastel on black board was done in the 1980s in Balchowsky’s former studio. Woolworth’s is spelled out in red ghost letters. There are no people around. “I don’t like the frozen moment,” he says. “I leave out anything that should be moving. That’s kind of the mood I want anyway.”
Thorne designed the black-and-white Quiet Knight poster on display in the gallery. It was to promote a concert with headliner Corky Siegel to raise money for Balchowsky to return to Spain in 1986 for the fiftieth-anniversary reunion of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The Busy Bee comped the food. Thorne says “almost everyone” who visits his gallery has never heard of Balchowsky.
Siegel, eighty-two, was also close friends with Thorne. During the early 1990s Thorne’s future bride lived upstairs from the Siegels in their Rogers Park home. “Charlie built this beautiful cabinet in our kitchen with snakes running across the bottom, very Santa Fe-style,” he says. “He built some radiator cabinets. He is a wonderful artist. Richard [Harding] was going to take Saren to dinner at La Meme Chose [5819 West Dempster, where Catherine Harding was a server]. She wanted someone else to go with. So he got the door guy, Charlie Thorne. And Charlie and Saren fall in love.”
Thorne adds, “If it wasn’t for the Quiet Knight I wouldn’t have met my wife. Even though the Quiet Knight had closed it was a lynchpin for all of this.”
Siegel also helped nurture Balchowsky’s audience. The Siegel-Schwall “953 West” album not only features Balchowsky’s art on the cover, but the back side has a Balchowsky poem: “Standing in the doorway of 953 West/the afternoon sounds and the shadows/The reflections and the momentary silences/All press one into a motionless observer/no thoughts or feelings disturb the anesthetic of this reality.” The poem is accented with some of Balchowsky’s favorite quotes such as Engles’ “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” and Lao-Tzu’s “The best way to do is to be.”
Balchowsky was not commissioned to do the album artwork. The record was released on the Wooden Nickel imprint, co-founded in 1971 by future film producer and John Denver manager Jerry Weintraub. Wooden Nickel was distributed by RCA. Siegel sent the art to RCA and said it was the top choice for the cover. He even laid out the sparse image.
Siegel recalls, “Acy Lehman the art director [Stan Getz, Jimmy Smith, Sam the Sham, etc.] said, ‘This is horrible. I can do better with one arm tied behind my back. When Eddie greeted people he would take his stub and push it into your sternum, grab you behind the back with his other arm and rub the stub into your sternum. So when we had the record-release party at the Quiet Knight, Acy came with the other executives. I said, ‘Acy, remember the guy that did this artwork where you said you could do better than him with one arm behind your back? I’d like you to meet him.’” And Balchowsky went into his stub-sternum routine. Siegel says, “Eddie loved it. It was just a piece of art that he did. In the drawing there’s a picture of somebody at the El stop. We think it’s Eddie.”
Bits and pieces of Balchowsky art are scattered across America.
When Oprah Winfrey and Rich Melman opened The Eccentric at 159 West Erie in 1989, Balchowsky’s drawings were on the walls. Eccentric closed in 1995. “When we did Eccentric we had a lot of local artists,” says Kevin Brown, CEO of Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants. “On Tuesday and Wednesday nights we had painting classes in the bar. Eccentric opened in February of 1989 and Eddie passed away in November. There was some function or art night. He was invited and he came. I welcomed him and other people may have talked to him but I didn’t talk to him a lot. He was an interesting character. He had a black jacket on, he still had his beard.
“The art was usually on the walls. We put his art on the wall because he had some notoriety. Some of the other people we were using were art students. I’m not certain if it was one, two or three pieces of his on the walls. We rotated the covers of the menu regularly. We didn’t pick one piece of art and run with it.”
In 1992 Lettuce donated money in Eddie’s spirit to the Shambala Center in Chicago. Brown says, “It’s not unusual for us to donate to a cause, but we wouldn’t have necessarily paid someone directly.” During the late 1980s Catherine Harding was a server at Shaw’s Crab House, also a Lettuce enterprise.
Phillip Pinsof, president of Sipi Metals on North Elston, bought Balchowsky’s art when he would visit the plant looking for metals. Pinsof donated his collection to Brandeis University.
The playwright-publisher-Nelson Algren-friend Stuart McCarrell bought lots of art from Balchowsky. “He died [of a sudden heart attack in 2001] and I have no idea what happened to it,” Thorne says “He must have had a hundred pieces. I bought a lot from Eddie.” In Kenan Heise’s December 3, 1989 obituary of Balchowsky for the Chicago Tribune McCarrell said, “He had an immense ebullience and charm. He was our Chicago Falstaff.”
The Harding family has some Balchowsky pieces. Balchowsky’s daughters have their father’s art. Raena has catalogued a great deal of it but declines to place a number on how many pieces she inherited.
“I’m sitting here on a mountain of Eddie,” she says. “I spent a long time fishing out wonderful things. I made magnets out of his saying ‘Pay Attention and Improvise.’ I made postcards out of his saying, ‘At war with oneself—there can be no peace with others.’ It’s one of the greatest things anybody said.”
The message of this postcard sounds appropriate for the current president of the United States. It is compelling to consider how Balchowsky would react to today’s climate in America. Fascism is in the news again.
“People think different things when thinking about Eddie,” Raena says. “But one thing that doesn’t come up is that he was seriously nonviolent. We talk about Eddie as the guy who went to war. But he was the guy who went to Spain to try and help resist fascism. The only anti-anything I heard him say over and over was fascism. He was like an original Antifa,” she says with a chuckle. “Whatever that is. I made up a phrase, pragmatic fanatic, meaning that he was non-violent but he was a practical man that would address things as they came. He would avoid getting in trouble himself so he could be around to help. This was in his later years. In his earlier years, yes, he got into trouble because he was an outspoken character. But I cannot tell you the number of people he stood up for. For him, non-violence and non-judgement was the only way to get anything done. You’d think he’d be the guy to jump in to fight. But he was the guy trying to understand how he could help stop the fight.
“He had a deep sensitivity or he wouldn’t have been so productive and creative. His sensitivity had limitations. He kept that in the forefront of what he could and could not do. His sense of humor relegated the story of his limitations. Of Spain, he would say, ‘I lost my arm but I gained more than I lost’. The core of Eddie’s spiritual side was his art. He drove it and it drove him and it brought him to all kinds of great places.”
And for now, Balchowsky also has a home in DeKalb, the birthplace of supermodel Cindy Crawford and established in 1945 on the Lincoln Highway. Thorne turns his head to see a Balchowsky monoprint. “ I was there,” he says. “This is the block from the monoprint, so this is what he put the ink on to make a print. He pulled the print. We looked at each other and said, ‘The block is better than the print.’ I wanted it. We both said it was [Balchowsky’s daughter] Lizzie. She was in high school at that time. He had drawn it really quickly. I bought the block right away. I have the print too, but I haven’t framed it yet. He didn’t like it. He started messing with it and thought he overdid it.”
Balchowsky was enamored with a new brand of ink he was using. He immediately began working on the print. The result made for a darker print framed by a Lincoln-esque silhouette. “After he pulled it we both loved this piece,” Thorne recalls. “He had a stack of newspapers—the Sun-Times as always—to clean up, and grabbed this big fat brush and put ink on it. Then he put the shape on the top sheet of the newspaper. He ran it around in different colors. He loved the colors. He grabbed a spoon out of the dish tray and whoom, did that really quick. The last thing he did was the two eyes. It was like the eyes opened right in front of us. So he signed it and I bought it.” An undated self-portrait features a quizzical Balchowsky sitting in a dab of blue with red lines shooting in the background. Thorne looks at the portrait and says, “I think it’s pretty early because that would be his right hand and arm. (That he later had removed.)”
Thorne was given a 1960 piece after Balchowsky died. The brown-and-black abstract measures roughly eight inches by thirty inches. “The description isn’t certain, and of course I couldn’t ask him,” Thorne says. “I believe the black areas to be black mat board as opposed to an applied color. The brown areas, ink or acrylic paint, are brush applied. The lighter tones appear to be dribbled on and then manipulated with a pallet knife, or knowing Eddie, maybe a spoon.”
Thorne has a copy of a Balchowsky oil pastel of a shirtless man in a flophouse standing over a bare mattress while facing a royal blue wall. “This painting is a buddy of his shooting up for the last time,” Thorne says. “Then he OD’d. Eddie was one of the sources for Frankie Machine in [the 1949 Nelson Algren novel] ‘Man With the Golden Arm.’ Algren was doing an interview show and he was asked where that character came from. He said it was a bunch of street people from Chicago he knew and one of them was Eddie Balchowsky.” In the 1991 Nelson Algren Committee walking tour, Balchowsky’s studio is noted at 1548 North Honore and 1860 West Division was where Frankie and Sophie Machine’s apartment was situated in “The Man with the Golden Arm.”
Thorne has copies of Balchowsky’s sketch-maps of Chicago streets. These are detailed pen-on-paper sketches of specific spots on the North Side with a sentence or two explaining where he stood when he created the scene. In 1982 his mesh of telephone lines and roofs of two-flats are “In the alley, east of Lincoln looking south,” in his words. “He did a lot of street sketching but I don’t have a lot of it,” Thorne says. He looks at a black-and-white that pronounces “Join the Mayor’s Clean-Up Campaign. Keep the Lid on Litter.” Balchowsky appreciated an organized alley. This sketch was from an alley north of Armitage between Sheffield and Kenmore.
“That was when everybody had fifty-five-gallon drums and it was effective,” Thorne says. “Rats didn’t get in there. Eddie said it was the best thing the city did. Then the city said they couldn’t do those big heavy metal cans anymore. And now there’s rats everywhere.”
Thorne’s upstairs living room has a series of three light blue, red and multiple colored monoprints he commissioned from Balchowsky. “The black [section] is hand-done,” he says. “He would take his crayon and cut little notches in the edge. As he moved it around, the images automatically happened because he cut the pattern in the edge.”
A gallery visitor will wonder why Thorne devotes so much energy to Balchowsky’s legacy while often deflecting his own story. “He was that important of a figure in my life,” he says. “And somebody that was so genuine…”
His voice breaks like a branch from a tree in winter. Then he continues, “And he was vulnerable. I think about him as much as I do my mother. I remember doing so many things with him, him having the perfect thing to say. His eyes were like an eagle even when he was old. For a while he and [Chicago musician] Edison Blake did a show called ‘The Two Eddies’ where they’d play the piano and sing songs. They had a gig in a lodge in the woods in the far northern suburbs. We couldn’t find the place. We pulled into a gas station and Eddie goes, ‘It’s down the road!’ They had a light-up trailer sign by the side of the road. I could just see the rectangle of the sign. Eddie read the entire sign, the headliner and their names as the opening act.”
Siegel sees the flickering neon down the road. “As you get older the sentimentality becomes more like an understanding of how everyone you bond with becomes an essential undetachable part of who you are and what you do,” he says. “And Eddie will always be one of those to me.”
And 1,850 miles on a straight line from DeKalb, Raena continues making her handcrafted postcards celebrating the spirit of Eddie Balchowsky. Every word delivers a new day. In elegant cursive, one card reads, “Welcoming the future without relinquishing the past Is being truly in the present.”
“It’s his handwriting superimposed on a photo I took in the early 1990s. It’s in my backyard in Northern California,” she says. “I like to look at it in the fall with the leaves off and the bright sky. This is Eddie’s response after pondering the meaning of ‘Be Here Now’ [the 1971 Ram Dass spiritual book that inspired George Harrison and Steve Jobs]. He worked on what it meant from his perspective.
“The sky was a perfect place to put Eddie’s words.”
The Eddie Balchowsky exhibition runs through the end of January at the Charlie Thorne Gallery, 302 Maplewood, DeKalb. Open by appointment by emailing [email protected].
Published in the print edition of the December 2025 issue, with the headline “One Hand on the Sun: How the One-Armed Artist Eddie Balchowsky Came to Define the Spirit of the Legendary Music Club Called the Quiet Knight.”
