For what it is worth, I really enjoy tales like this.  Each time I see old photographs of handfuls of older actors back in their younger years during downtimes on movie sets, I think of the tales these people could tell and get to tell when in environments like that and imagine what it would be like to be fly on the wall.

Just like this story.

Back in the early 80s, a group of hard-living Polish Chicago police officers found their way to the area I grew up in because of the duck hunting. Duck hunting, well about all hunting and fishing is big in my area and was even bigger in years past. The coppers ended up becoming friendly with the locals, especially this one man who would put them up when they were down. He would have what was called Wild Game Feasts (which was just another term meant for eating, drinking, getting drunk and bullshitting). One time, as a very late teen at one of these things, as I stood before a large warmer filled with shredded beaver meat, in front of all these older, masculine men, I made the mistake of uttering how I had never eaten beaver before - so imagine the retorts to that admission in a room full of hyper-masculine hunters and boozer types).

Anyway, this group of "Chicago coppers" were hilarious and outspoken and part of this time was during the era of Harold Washington becoming the first black mayor of Chicago and they were not kind to him at all in their lampooning.  This went on for a number of years and right up until shortly after Washington's death.

But it was interesting to watch the locals and how they were enraptured with this brazenly unknown and almost foreign culture of Chicago as it was injected into small-town rural America.  One aspect of their humor was of the attention they gave to their own local politicians.  They would make toasts to Jane Byrne,  wishing for her political demise, and then, when Washington was elected, one can imagine there were even more extreme toasts and then, I recall their toasts of "RIP" upon his death.  (One or more of them were marine cops and one even took my uncle, his son,  a friend of his son's, and me out on Lake Michigan to fish - I can't recall if it was on a police boat or not, but do remember we did leave from the lakeside located police station).

And, with the passing of people, these things slowly ease into not existing any longer, and half the time, we wonder if they really existed in the first place.