Tom Dreesen, a pioneering actor and comedian and Chicago area native, died Wednesday.
Dreesen’s family announced on social media that he died early Wednesday morning. He was 86.
Dreesen was born Sept. 11, 1939, and grew up in Harvey, Illinois, a south Chicago suburb. As he told the Special Fathers Network, Dreesen was the third child in a poor family of eight, and began working at a young age selling and delivering newspapers, shining shoes in taverns, and setting up pins in bowling alleys…