The new president and chief librarian of the Newberry Library began work on Dec. 1 and on a warm afternoon a couple of months later, she was sitting in her book-lined office saying, with what one can sense is a genuine enthusiasm, “There will be a bar bill from Lenny Bruce.”
Astrida Orle Tantillo was talking about one of the items that will be part of the first major exhibition of her tenure, “A Night at Mister Kelly’s,” which opens March 21.
“I was never there but this exhibit will bring through our doors many people who were there, but perhaps have never been here at the Newberry,” she says. “I want to change that, to let all people come through our doors.”
Tantillo is a native of Portland, where her parents, both from Latvia, met and married in the early 1950s. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon Clark Honors College and then came here to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago. As rewarding as those years were academically — she would earn her doctorate from the university’s Committee on Social Thought — they were also personally beneficial. For a time, she worked as a research assistant for the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, who was a U of C professor for 30 years. “He was so courteous and elegant,” she says. “I would run errands occasionally but my main duty was to help with his correspondence, an amazing stream of letters.”
The campus was also where, inside the Harper Memorial Library, she met a law student named Stephen Tantillo. They would marry and he would go on to become and remain — through Mayors Daley, Emanuel, Lightfoot and now Johnson — the chief assistant corporation counsel for the city’s Department of Law.
She would embark on an academic career that would take her to the University of Illinois Chicago, where she was a professor of Germanic studies and history and also served as dean of UIC’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2012 to 2022. She wears her scholarship lightly, even though she has written three books on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, that towering German writer.
The Tantillos have long lived in Hyde Park, where they are “amateur birders” and have a Thai restaurant “on speed dial.” They attend concerts, the opera and he, a Chicago native, loves reading about Chicago history.
“And I take public transportation to work every day,” she says. “I can’t tell you how much joy and excitement that brings me. During the last months there has not been a day when I haven’t seen some other extraordinary item in our collection or learned something new about the pride our (100-some) people who work here feel about our ‘home’.”
She first visited the Newberry while a student and many times through the decades. One and a half years ago, she was asked to become a trustee by then president Daniel Greene. When Greene in left in April 2023 after four years, Gail Kern Paster served as interim president until a search committee came calling on the 60-year-old Tantillo.
“I could not be more excited and honored,” she said, and that’s a feeling shared by some of those who have long worked at the Newberry, where Tantillo becomes the 10th president and first female to hold the title.
The Newberry is — if you don’t know, and Tantillo is determined to make you aware — that imposing brick building that sits at 60 W. Walton St., across from the oldest park in the city.
It is known formally as Washington Square Park and more commonly referred to as Bughouse Square. “Bughouse” is a slang term for a mental health facility, which is what the park resembled from the 1880s to the 1930s when all manner of people stood on soap boxes and spouted their passion and philosophies.
The Newberry is a wonder, “a hidden gem that I want to make shine to the whole city, to the world,” Tantillo says.
I am fond of the way my former colleague Jeff Lyon once described it in a Tribune magazine article long ago: “an intellectual delicatessen … which attracts some 10,000 people a year to spend 32,000 hours reading 85,000 volumes, is nearly without equal in the United States. Its steam tables tempt the brain’s palate with more than 21 miles of holdings, ranging from books, maps, sheet music to historical whatnot.”
It has only grown since that observation, with more public programming and events, further outreach and renovations. On a personal level, my fondness rests on the library’s massive holdings of papers and personal effects from more than 50 other famous and near-famous Chicago journalists. The papers of Ben Hecht are there, along with the first 1927-28 Academy Award Oscar for best original story he won for “Underworld.” Also, the papers of Victor Lawson, founding editor and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, foreign correspondent Robert Gruenberg, political cartoonist John Fischetti and my father Herman Kogan.
Also there, and to be part of an upcoming exhibition, “Chicago Style: Mike Royko and Windy City Journalism” scheduled for June 20 to Sept. 28, are some of the thousands of Royko’s personal effects, papers, correspondence and other items donated by Mike’s widow Judy.
Of course, Tantillo is excited about that.
“My aim is to grow and diversify our audiences,” she says. “And I can remember reading Royko in the Portland paper and know how important he was to Chicago. I’m so eager to see this come together and to see who comes to see it.”
Shortly before her formal arrival, there was some Newberry news that caused controversy and complaint, when its annual book fair was cancelled.
Tantillo was now happy to tell me, “There is a misconception that we are no longer accepting book donations. We still welcome donations and are now selling some used books in our book store.
She hopes that the time and energies that were devoted to the book sale can now be used in other ways. “The book fair really took over the library for six weeks and we will see if that time and space might be used for new programming, summer events in the park.”
That park was born in 1842, the Newberry rose in 1887. Now, as Tantillo’s says, “I have ambitious dreams,” and it’s time for the next chapter.
“A Night at Mister Kelly’s” runs March 21 to July 20 at Newberry Library; 60 W. Walton St.; free, 312-943-9090 and newberry.org
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
