Saul…my friend --- our friend. We loved you so, but never told you so. Snatched from us so quickly, we strain to hold you in our memory. Images come to mind. My lunch time companion at Elfman's on State St. Your beer is always drunk first, to get that extra "buzz." Talking union politics, college politics, city politics (oh, how you loved to talk politics) with flashing eyes, in your rich baritone, the elephantine memory, the rapier mind. And another image…my strike captain on the wind whipped picket line who turned me (and many others) from a middle class nervous Nelly into a defier of judges, in the days when teacher strikes were still illegal. And then I see the indefatigable precinct worker (who always worked his precinct) who taught a couch potato ideologue like me what real politics was all about -- never by preachment, only by example and leadership. And then I see Saul in his rumpled shirt, baggy pants, shaggy eyebrows and crazy hat, already in some pain from the yet undisclosed cancer, running around the hall outside the IVI endorsement sessions, just 2 months ago, selling spaghetti dinner tickets for his IVI chapter. As he has done every year without fail. Others at a much younger age retire to beach and golf course and say, "I have done my bit." Never Saul. Not the man who fought the law that forced him to retire at seventy.

And then I also have memories of a gentle and a nurturing colleague, who patiently and endlessly counseled colleagues and students, of colleagues who cried on his shoulders, literally, and were soothed by his steady, gentle baritone. Modest and unassuming, he never preened. And possessions seemed of little consequence to him. But blessed with formidable gifts of mind and memory and unquenchable energy, a brilliant speaker, trenchant stylist, and a master political tactician, the highest positions in state or society might have been his. But he seemed never to seek victory for himself alone, only for his cause. Always his cause came first.

Take the Mendelson-Chestang campaign of 1970. In that race he married his senatorial campaign to Leon Chestang's House race, in the days of the bullet vote. He confessed to me he saw no chance of winning for himself, but hoped to attract enough money through his national connections to give Leon, an African-American progressive, a chance to win. Saul worked that campaign as if his life depended upon it. He walked every precinct, attended every coffee… for the cause. That was vintage Saul. (And not incidentally that campaign was a harbinger of his not inconsiderable behind the scene role in bringing about the progressive black-white coalition that lead to the Harold Washington candidacy.)

Then I remember what was the last conversation I ever had with Saul, the last political conversation he may ever have had. It was exactly one week before his death. We were sitting in the hospital, waiting for the doctor to come and tell him about the next move. Within a half an hour I was to hear Saul say those fateful words: "I want to go." In a voice so weak I had to strain to listen, he talked to me anxiously and urgently about the perils of  Kosovo. That was truly Saul.

I don't think I will ever meet as good a man again. He was, I think, a kind of secular saint. As we leave here today, we can best preserve his memory by doing what he would have done after leaving here: work, organize, agitate.

Walter Falk

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