Jan. 27, 1986: Chicago Bears return home to a ticker-tape parade after Super Bowl XX win

This story originally ran in the Chicago Tribune on Jan. 28, 1986.

A thank-you note written on 10 tons of ticker tape was hand-delivered to the Bears, who returned to sweet home Chicago Monday packing pride and a silver souvenir from New Orleans.

Five hundred thousand fans, hoarse from days of revelry, shouted hosannas as a caravan of cars and buses carried Bears players and management through the streets of the city’s financial district. Gratitude rained down in the form of shredded canceled checks, Yellow Pages, tissue paper and computer printouts.

“Today, in this country, everyone is a Bears fan,” screamed team president Michael McCaskey as he hefted the gleaming Vince Lombardi Super Bowl trophy from the podium at Daley Plaza. “We are the Super Bowl champs ... Woof, woof, woof, woof!”

The fans returned the now famous trademark of the Bears defense.

Along the parade route, which began at Jackson Boulevard and LaSalle Street and ended at the plaza, temporarily named Bears Plaza, businessmen with briefcases, construction workers with hard hats, lawyers in fur coats, students with backpacks and mothers with strollers withstood a windchill of 25 below zero to serve as hosts in the city's welcome-home party.

"I may have to have my toes amputated but I've got to see this parade," said Wendy Rosiak, who traveled to the Loop Monday from the Far Southeast Side Hegewisch neighborhood. "I've been a Bear fan since the day I was born."

Some diehard fans faced the frost and then asked for more.

"Papa, Papa please let it snow!" said Tom Webb, 44, as he looked heavenward for a sign of Papa Bear George Halas. "We want Bears weather!"

Webb, a truck driver for the city, said he phoned his bosses Monday morning to tell them he wouldn't be in, explaining that the parade was more important than his paycheck.

"My biggest wish is that Mayor Daley were here to see this," Webb said. "Wouldn't he be a happy man? Oooooo!"

But celebration turned to some consternation when fans, many of whom had been waiting outdoors to see the players since early Monday morning, realized many of the Bears had gone into hibernation.

Eight of the Bears biggest stars — Jim McMahon, Mike Singletary, Jimbo Covert, Otis Wilson, Dan Hampton, Richard Dent, Dave Duerson and Jay Hilgenberg — had caught an early-morning flight from New Orleans to Honolulu for Sunday’s Pro Bowl. Walter Payton had flown to Chicago earlier on a private jet and left for Hawaii, where Pro Bowl players were obligated to report Monday even if their team had won the Super Bowl.

But even those Bears who returned to Chicago were difficult to see.

Though convertible cars were lined up near the start of the parade route waiting to transport players past the crowds and over to Daley Plaza, the team was shuttled through in buses with tinted windows too dark to allow the fans any visibility. The exception was Coach Mike Ditka, who rode through in an open limousine that at one point in the parade drove over the toes of Deputy Police Chief Carl Dobrich. Dobrich was not hurt.

"They play football in weather like this," said a disappointed Dave Pomar, 24, a trade checker for the Mercentile Exchange. "You would think they could ride in an open automobile."

But according to Capt. Patrick McDonaugh of the Chicago police traffic division, the crowd, not the weather, was the culprit. "The crowd is too big and too excited," McDonaugh said. "They would have swamped the players. We had to send them through in the buses."

As the buses waded through the crowds and confetti in an effort to reach the plaza, fans mounted the vehicles and formed roof-top cheering squads. Others had pulled open the doors to the baggage compartments and climbed inside. Police barricades that had been set up to allow the players a clean path to the plaza podium were reduced by the city's celebrants to a pile of broken lumber.

In the end, only five of the players made it through the throngs and up to the podium.

"We had no idea the crowd would be that huge," said Ken Valdiserri, the Bears' director of public relations. "There were so many people, there was no way to get everyone on the stage."

Before Mayor Harold Washington told the fans, "The rest of the players can't get off the bus; you all get home safely," Willie Gault, Emery Moorehead, Steve McMichael, Tom Thayer and Kevin Butler, the place kicker who set a National Football League record this season for most points scored by a rookie, took the microphone.

"Isn't this sweet?" asked Butler. "Just make your plans for Pasadena (the California site of the 1987 Super Bowl) because we'll be stopping there next year."

Gault, who wore white, said simply, "Thank you, Chicago."

By the end of the bacchanal, 20 revelers had been arrested for disorderly conduct. According to a fire department spokesman, paramedics treated 29 people at the Daley Center and another 11 were taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Most were treated for frostbite and released. One fan bit a paramedic on the face.

Fans climbed to rooftops, tree tops, light poles, canopies and the top of the Picasso statue to better their glimpse of the ticker-tape parade, a rowdy and romantic celebration which Chicagoans have bestowed on Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Roosevelt, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, V-J Day and the Apollo 11 astronauts.

“One of my fondest memories is from 1945 when my mother brought me to a ticker-tape parade at State and Madison for V-J Day,” said George Tolbert, 52, the manager of a Hinsdale securities firm, who sat on a LaSalle Street curb. “There was dancing in the streets, and the crowd was huge, but I’ve got to tell you that this is a bigger shoot-up.”

Tolbert was accompanied by his wife and a friend, Tyke Ramm, 56, who told the employees of his La Grange brick company that he would be out making business calls Monday. “And just to be on the safe side I turned off my beeper,” Ramm said.

All along LaSalle Street, office workers formed human window displays, many of them sipping champagne and beer in an understandable suspension of workplace rules against alcohol consumption. Those whose windows were not painted or locked shut in a tribute to modern heating and cooling systems threw out once-important office documents in a steady hail.

"There's absolutely no work being done," said Chris Clancy of Milton Black & Associates on the 24th floor of 33 N. LaSalle St. where office workers had spent much of the day shredding phone books to throw.

One worker on the balcony of the City Hall-County Building attempted to read the shredded papers and joked, “Look, it says something about Clarence McClain.”

Chicago police tactical officer Jerry Masterson looked up, blinking, to see the stream of papers flying from office windows and observed, "As long as they don't start throwing their typewriters, we're in good shape."

But, alas, not everyone on the streets Monday had come to celebrate.

"Excuse me. Can I get to work please?" pleaded Daniel Murray, a stock broker who had been trying for 10 minutes to make his way from the Chicago Board of Trade building to his office across the street. "Can I please get to work?"

The answer was a resounding no.