1-Feb-13 – After three decades as an NBC news correspondent, Michael Leonard (left) announced his retirement in December. The 65-year-old Glencoe native can reflect on a career telling, as Matt Lauer, host of The Today Show, put it, “countless stories of everyday people who often get overlooked.” Before the television career, before he worked in construction, before he graduated from college, in the summer of 1966, an 18-year-old Mike Leonard, freshly graduated from high school, found work at Marina City, itself in its youth.

He and another man his age, John Davis, were the youngest on a crew of janitors. They cleaned apartments when people moved out, did maintenance and other chores – but working for Robert Butler, the building superintendent, they found themselves assigned to tasks both unpleasant and dangerous.

On each of Marina City’s 80 residential floors, garbage is placed into chutes located in the circular hallways, inside small vestibules. Falling from at least the 21st floor and as high as the 60th floor, the garbage lands on the marina level. In the east tower, it comes to rest in a large metal trash compactor about five feet high and filling most of a small room inside Marina City’s concrete core. In 2008, the process was modernized, enabling trash to drop more directly into the compactor, but in 1966, in a spot where the chute bent at a 45-degree angle, occasionally the refuse of several hundred residents would get stuck. For the janitorial staff, that is when a spry 18-year-old came in handy. (Left) The last stop for garbage in Marina City’s east tower. The compactor at lower right is about five feet high. A photoelectric switch detects trash falling down the chute and switches on the compactor. (Click on image to view larger version.)

“They would send me up there a lot, and they had a football helmet,” recalls Leonard. “It was a red football helmet with stars painted on the front of it. No facemask. And it was a James Bond kind of thing because you had to go in the tube and it was wide enough that you could have traction with your feet and your hands as you went up and it would angle just enough that you could do it but it was basically coated with garbage.” The garbage, says Leonard, included “everything known to man and beast.” Glass bottles, human waste, and the occasional cardboard box that got stuck. (Right) Closer view of the very end of a 60-story trash chute at Marina City. (Click on image to view larger version.)

“And you’d brace yourself with your legs and you’d yank on this carton to free it and then…you’d come flying down with the garbage.”

When they were not wrangling stuck garbage, Leonard and Davis would have to stand in what was then the bed of a semi-trailer truck and with a paddle, while being pelted with it, evenly distribute the garbage.

Working with garbage in the other tower was not much easier. Leonard says he would have to climb down into the trash compactor to free anything that was caught. “You lived in fear because there was a red button that someone could push and it would trash compact.”

Jobs at Marina City only got scarier

“Butler came down one day and said, ‘who wants to work outside?’ And of course, standing neck deep in garbage, who wouldn’t? I said, ‘I do.’ So he took me to the top, 61st floor, and he had some buckets and some kind of material like caulking, some trowels, and what I had to do was go climb over [the] fence of the observation deck and then go out onto those little leafs out there and then patch up the gutter kind of thing on the edges. We had no belts or anything. And he just said, ‘ok, it will take you probably a couple weeks to do it. See you later.’”

(Above) As it looked in June 2010, this was Mike Leonard’s office for about two weeks in 1966. This is the west edge of Marina City’s west tower observation deck, overlooking the Loop and the Chicago River.

When one semi-circle was done, Leonard would grab a bucket with one hand and the fence with the other and step over a narrow but very deep gap. One slip would be fatal, and it was like that every day for two weeks.

“I could drop the bucket, I could fall. It was just a different time. Back in the sixties, that’s what you did. When I think back on it, I could never go out there now, as an adult. It was scary. Someone said to me once, what did your parents think? I never told them. I didn’t even think of worrying them.”

After Marina City, the path to network journalism

Leonard worked two summers at Marina City and then attended Providence College in Rhode Island, playing on the school’s hockey team. His flair for home movies got him into television news in Phoenix. Then he was hired by NBC. But the job at Marina City was important to Leonard, his first job in the city.

“It was interesting to work with adults who had to do necessary work that was often very dirty. It was a dangerous job at some times. But it was somewhat exhilarating to be on the top of my world at that point and to look down – and problems seemed a lot smaller than they seemed at ground level.”

When his contract with NBC was up for renewal, Leonard says he “wanted to leave when I still liked it and when they still liked me.” He is part of a family-run video production company, Picture Show Films, and says he has some ideas for a public television project.

(Left) Leonard on The Today Show on December 13, 2012, filing his last report after 32 years.

If he was doing a story about Marina City, Leonard says it would be about the Chicago icon’s pie-shaped homes.

“We don’t normally live in pies,” he observes. “When you’re living in a pie…the lines are different. I don’t know anything about feng shui, I just wonder if that type of thing appeals to certain people, if they ever think of it. Or if at some point it makes them feel different.”