HAROLD WASHINGTON LIBRARY — Smiling benevolently above the stacks on the fourth floor of the Harold Washington Library, Guy Vermillion III, Esq, immortalized in an oil portrait, was probably a really good dude. City attorney general from 1899-1963, Vermillion was a familiar face at fundraising events across the city, rubbing shoulders with Chicago’s best and nicest citizens for nearly a century.
When asked about the Vermillion portrait, library assistant Kate Glaze, 25, gave a good-natured shrug of recognition. “I don’t know a whole lot about the guy, to be honest,” she said, shelving a 350-page hardcover on beetles in the “bug-adjacent” aisle. “But if his portrait is hanging here, I think it’d be safe to assume that he was a pretty good person.” Vermillion, who donated nearly 1/200th of his estate to the Chicago library system, was a known patron of the arts. In his prime, he was often seen meeting with innovative and popular artists of the era, chatting with them just about their artistic process and nothing else. Other library employees, when pressed, offered statements like “He looks friendly” and “He would probably let me borrow his phone if I dropped mine down a sewer and needed to call the sewer cops to get it back.”
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Not all were so pro-Vermillion, however. A black-clad book-shelver lurking in periodicals shed light on the anti-Vermillion coup fermenting in the library’s underground networks. “Not all of us think this Guy was such a choir boy, okay?” the book-shelver muttered, picking the nail polish off a thumb well-textured with loose cuticle skin. “I’ve been spending some time in the archives, and found something the higher-ups at Harold didn’t want me to find. Want to know where Guy got his money? Meet me at 9 PM in the southernmost elevator shaft.”
Upon meeting at the rendez-vous point, the shelver was nowhere to be found. In his place, a note. “Had to pick up some things from a friend’s apartment :-)” the note read, “but I was just going to reiterate how much this library loves and appreciates the Vermillion family and all they’ve given to our fair city. Hope this helps!”
Head librarian Pat Vermillion-Griffin, 57, reiterated the merits of Guy in an email. “Guy Vermillion was a benevolent philanthropist, shrewd businessman, and creative lover. We here at Chicago’s flagship library are proud to hang his portrait year-round. Through the library’s devotion to providing resources such as science textbooks from the ‘70s and microfiche of William B. Ogden’s nudes, his legacy lives on.”
