On the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of American icon Richard J. Daley, his family, including his son current Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, donated the late mayor's papers to UIC.

Approximately 250 people, including city, county, and state officials, joined university administrators as the Daleys presented the gift to UIC—whose creation the late mayor called his "greatest contribution to the life of the city."

"For my father, UIC was a shining star, a dream come true," said daughter Patricia Daley Martino. The current mayor noted that his father "fought long and hard to have this university located near downtown Chicago and close to public transportation. It was a very controversial project, but it was the right thing to do."

"Anyone who looks at this university today—and at all it has contributed to the people of Chicago—should be grateful that an earlier generation of leaders had the courage to see it through to completion," Daley added.

Richard J. Daley was born May 15, 1902, in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood and served as mayor from April 22, 1955, until his death on December 19, 1976. UIC's Halsted Street campus opened in 1965, replacing a two-year University of Illinois campus at Navy Pier.

"There would be no UIC were it not for Richard J. Daley," said UI President James Stukel. "From his days as a young legislator in Springfield, his dream was to have a University of Illinois campus in Chicago. He recognized the importance of higher education and of affording the opportunity for a first-rate public university education to the citizens of the Chicago area."

The late mayor's papers will be housed in Special Collections in UIC's Richard J. Daley Library, the largest public research library in the Chicago metropolitan area. Librarians will organize the materials in a secure, temperature- and humidity-controlled environment. The papers will be accessible to scholars, writers, advanced students, and researchers from UIC and other universities.

"The library is the storehouse of the knowledge that the university strives to pass along from one generation to the next," said UIC Chancellor Sylvia Manning. "It is the heart of the university."

"This is the right place for his papers—in a library that bears his name, and in a university that he helped create," Richard M. Daley said.

The UIC Richard J. Daley Library includes approximately 2.1 million volumes, 3.6 million microforms and 20,000 current serial titles.