This week in history: Frank Sinatra, honorary Chicagoan

As reported in the Chicago Sun-Times and its sister publication, the Chicago Daily News:

New York may have been the city Frank Sinatra wanted to wake up in, but Chicago would always be his kind of town.

And in 1975, it became his town officially. Mayor Richard Daley made Ol’ Blue Eyes, who was born Dec. 12, an honorary Chicago citizen on Sept. 24, 1975, bestowing upon him a gold medallion and a framed proclamation naming him an “ambassador of goodwill for our city” for popularizing the Second City with “My Kind of Town.”

The next day’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News provided a recap of not only Sinatra’s award ceremony, but also his concert at Chicago Stadium, where listeners “indicated that he’s always been their kind of guy.”

Sinatra’s appearance outside the fifth-floor mayor’s office at City Hall caused an “enormous commotion,” the Sun-Times reported. About 150 people — including “the most clout-heavy departmental city secretaries” and a number of plainclothes police officers and bodyguards — crowded the room.

A Daily News reporter noted Daley introduced Sinatra to several of his colleagues, including city consumer sales commissioner Jane Byrne, who would go on to serve as Chicago’s mayor herself. She said she thought the singer “looked pretty good.”

“Hello Jane, how are the markets?” Sinatra asked her upon their introduction.

If anyone felt nervous that day, it was likely Daley. On his way to hand Sinatra the medal, Daley dropped it at the rostrum but “quickly recovered it,” the Sun-Times reported.

The “genial, gracious crooner” told reporters, “I’m delighted. This is a marvelous moment. I have been coming to your city for many years now... and have always had a good time — I don’t mean in the sense of rah-rah good time — but in the sense of being accepted warmly by everybody in the audience and having lots of friends privately and in the sense of being accepted as a human being.”

Later, Sinatra showed he “still has what it takes to turn on an audience” when he performed that night, along with Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald, the Sun-Times said. One woman nearly fell over a balcony trying to touch him while others handed him flowers on stage.