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High praise, indeed: Mitt Romney banner hung on Willis Tower
Mitt Romney got the city’s highest endorsement recently on President Barack Obama’s home turf.
It was a 110-stories-high sanction atop the Willis (Sears) Tower, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.
John Rukavina, 74, a Local 1 ironworker — who claims to have put up “every antenna and tower in Chicago since Marina Towers in 1974” — affixed a Romney banner as well as an American flag on the ABC antenna on Willis Tower minutes after it was completed Sept. 30.
“The flag is a symbol — an old ironworker’s custom — which is hung if the job went well,” said Rukavina, who said he worked on the Sears Tower antenna in 1978. He’s also worked on the John Hancock Center and New York’s World Trade Center.
“I promised my sister, Anna, a year ago I would use the burial flag of her husband, a World War II Navy veteran, when we topped off the antenna,” he told Sneed.
“But I didn’t tell anyone I was going to put up the Romney poster. I did that on my own and it was hard going. The wind was blowing like crazy that day,” he said. “But I wanted to make that gesture the last thing I did.





MADJACK
October 16th, 2012
AWESOME!
Hey Obowme, if ya don’t like it send up Mooshell to take it down. Her fatass needs the exercise.
Birdie Num Num
October 16th, 2012
There was a show on the National Geographic Channel a few years ago about the guys that install, repair and maintain those skyscraping antenna towers.
Them boys is crazy!!!
yourfavoriteunkle
October 16th, 2012
Buy that man a beer!
Death_By_Farts
October 16th, 2012
That guy has some serious balls…
Not only climbing an antenna on top the Sears Tower,
But hanging a Pro-Romney banner in Obama-Town itself is really saying something.
Wonder what Rahmbo has to say about it?
Death_By_Farts
October 16th, 2012
The guy is 74 years old and for twenty minutes he was affixed to the antenna of one of the tallest buildings in the world…I’m speechless.
Mary Jane Anklestraps
October 16th, 2012
I’ve seen videos of people changing bulbs. [It was even on Dirty Jobs] I’m telling you, it’s an ass-clencher!
PearlClutcher
October 16th, 2012
This man is awesome, unlike the ancient bitch who told a kid he should have been aborted. This man deserves to retire, as for the bus driver (she too is in her 70′s) hope she has to work till her dying day in honor of all the unborn babies death she condones.
Efficacy
October 16th, 2012
This union ironworker ia an all-American hero!
I assume he doesn’t think highly of AFL-CIO’s godfather Richard Trumka, SEIU’s former thug leader Andy Stern, nor Teamster boss Hoffa Jr.!
Lowell
October 16th, 2012
Boys and girls, I’ve worked on antennas and towers.
300 feet and less. It truly gets weird up there. Even on those short ones. Not sure I could do what that boy did.
Quit doing it when I got too old for the exertion of the climb. And I’ve always been afraid of heights. Which I found out, ain’t that uncommon with tower climbers. We shared something, a knuckle headed stubbornness that an irrational fear wasn’t going to win.
My hat is off to all the ones today that still climb. It’s a small club.
deli doug
October 16th, 2012
bet lhyacan’t see it from kenwood – the neighborhood where bombthrowing billie ayers lives – just down the street from where the bombthrowing (okay, just the lyingest POS ever to disgrace the White House) pReezy used to live
Unruly Refugee
October 17th, 2012
That’s the thing about liberal infested cities like Chicago — if you don’t want your conservative campaign signs vandalized you have to put them up pretty fucking high.