The expression that has come to symbolize Chicago’s once-insular machine politics dates back to 1948, when an idealistic University of Chicago law student named Abner Mikva decided to get involved in his community. Mikva walked into his neighborhood ward office to volunteer for the campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, who was running for governor, and Paul Douglas, a candidate for senator.

“Who sent you?” asked the committeeman, Timothy O’Sullivan, removing the cigar from his mouth.

“Nobody,” Mikva replied.

“We don’t want nobody nobody sent,” the committeeman said. Then he added, “We ain’t got no jobs.”

“I don’t want a job,” Mikva said.

“We don’t want nobody that don’t want a job. Where are you from, anyway?”

“University of Chicago.”

“We don’t want nobody from the University of Chicago.”

Mikva eventually became a somebody in Chicago, serving as a congressman, a federal judge, the White House counsel to Bill Clinton, and a mentor to a young Barack Obama. He told the story of his first attempt to break into the Chicago political scene so often that Milton L. Rakove used the phrase for the title of his oral history of the Richard J. Daley years.

Send your questions about the Chicago area to emcclelland@chicagomag.com.