Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     In my 30 years of reporting for the Sun-Times, I've had cause to be there exactly twice, the second time last week. It is probably the most prominently-located yet completely-obscure place in Chicago—known to a select few, the masses not only kept out, but kept in ignorance of its existence. It wants no publicity. 
     Which is a shame, because the place has a wonderful back story, of why it's so improbably there, where it was no longer supposed to be.  I'll tell you the story of its endurance after somebody guesses where this is—this might be one of those that gets cracked early, by somebody who, like me, was invited in once or twice. Or maybe not— everyone I mention this to just gives me a blank look. Then again, maybe I just travel in lumpen circles. Maybe you go there all the time. Lucky you. Either way, hard or easy, today's question is: where are these lovely double swans? What IS this place? Since my stock of posters is dwindling, the winner will get ... a copy of my 2012 memoir, You Were Never in Chicago. Post your guesses below.  Good luck. 

POSTSCRIPT: Location cracked, but not at 12:05 a.m. this time, so I consider today's puzzle a success. Here's a shot I didn't want to print earlier, so as not to give away the game, to show you where today's location, revealed below, is located—that lovely oval dining room is secreted within this all black building, tucked behind the John Hancock's parking garage. 

The old and the young reaching out to each other, through the Internet

     On Monday, a colleague sent me a link to this touching video of senior citizens outside of Chicago helping Brazilian students learn to speak English. On Tuesday I was there, at Windsor Park retirement community in Carol Stream, watching the residents interact with students in Sao Paolo. The reality fell far short of the slick on-line presentation, and I had to mesh what I saw in front of me with what the seniors had already experienced. I didn't want to go too easy; this all might be a Brazilian advertising agency semi-scam whose sole purpose was to promote the school. I didn't want to go too hard; the seniors seemed to be having fun, and this kind of interaction could —emphasize "could"—have the potential to become something significant someday.

     ‘How do you live effectively, and not just wait?” asked Ruth Bamford, sitting in the lobby of Windsor Park, a senior home in Carol Stream, posing a key challenge of growing old, but not mentioning the thing being waited on.

     At this moment Bamford, 86, a former dean of student programs at Wheaton College, is waiting to help students in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with their English, part of a new program,  Speaking Exchange, that has caught the Internet’s fickle attention because of a touching video produced for CNA, a chain of 580 English schools in Brazil, that has racked up nearly a million hits on YouTube.

     “My nephew called me this morning and said, ‘Aunt Ruth, you’re famous!’ ” she said.

     The video was shot in April.

     “We were invited to be interviewed by this young man who was making a video for this CNA project,” Bamford said.

     Watching the video, viewers get the impression that this program has been going on for a while and the seniors developed a warm relationship with the students. Actually, the video was shot the first time the six Windsor Park residents and the Brazilian students had spoken. “We just have done it once, and it took us two full days,” Bamford said. “It was really quite a process.”

     Julia, her student, 14, was “quite shy” Bamford said, “so we related on that level. We were both having a new experience.”

     I visited Windsor Park, a luxurious senior facility of 600 residents with a $125,000 entry fee, to watch the second session.

     Two HP laptops were set up in a small social room, with tables and a spread of pastries and soda. Two more computers were across the lobby in a small dining room.
     Marion Carbonari, 85, waited in front of a laptop. Finally, a telephone bell rang and, with an assist from Windsor Park Executive Director Karen Larson, the connection was made. A man wearing a headset appeared.
     "Hi, who are you?" Carbonari said, with precision. "What is your name?"
     "Pedro," he replied.
     "Hi Pedro, I'm Marion. How old are you?"
     "I'm 31."
     "Thirty-one? You're a little bit old for the class." Turned out he was the technician. There was a lot of that. Trouble hearing, slight dismay that the well-scrubbed teens of the first session were gone, replaced by men in their mid-20s with five-o'clock shadows. No matter. The seniors plunged gamely on with questions about life in Brazil and information about themselves.
     "I live in a city called Chicago," Carbonari said, when her actual student, named Vincent, 20, appeared. "It's so good to have someone to talk to in a different country."
     Across the room, Ann Galezio, 75, was laughing, her face close to the screen.
     "Is there a girl in your life?" she asked.
     Seeing the process unfold in real life was reminder that, as with TV commercials, videos online can be deceptive. In the video, all is warmth and heart-tugging music. The process I saw was more hectic and disordered. Some of the media coverage referred to the seniors as "lonely."
     "I saw that," Bamford said. "We're not lonely here. I don't think this community would be described as lonely. I wouldn't ever say that. This is a vibrant community with lots going on every day."
     That said, the program is just beginning, and given what the Internet is mostly used for - buying books and shoes, trading snark, posting photos of your lunch - the idea that young people with something to learn could be paired with seniors with something to teach is vastly appealing.
     "Residents, like all of us, want to be part of something," said Larson, noting that 80 residents have signed up for the weekly program. "This gives them something to be part of, to contribute. The world now leaves this group behind. It's hard to plug them in, and this is an easy way to plug them in. Technology is making it possible; the way technology works now it's so simple."
     Bamford plans to keep being a part of it.
     "There's something so beautiful and exciting," she said. "Even as I watched it myself today, to see this young lady and this old lady speaking together, a thousand miles away from each other, effectively communicating. . . . This is a loving community, and I think it showed. A lot of old people are very loving and tender and kind. I think that emotion showed there. Talking to someone so far away, that you do not know at all, that you've never been introduced to. That's kind of a phenomenon, I think."

    

"Fagots Stay Out"

     Thirty years. More, thirty-two, almost. No family. No responsibilities beyond a job I loathed. Nothing to do after work but cruise down Santa Monica Boulevard in my 1963 Volvo P1800, maybe grab a few beers and a bowl of chili.
    A long time gone by, drop by drop. Yet it can can come surging back at the oddest times.
    For instance.
     Things were quiet on Wednesday, so rather than cab it back from lunch on North Michigan Avenue, I strolled the great boulevard. Kids were out in those jackets with the "=" equality sign on them—gay rights— raising money, or gathering signatures or whatever it is they do. I thought up a pithy line in case one came up to me—"You've already won, haven't you?"—but nobody approached me and I walked on, suddenly thinking of Barney's Beanery.
     If you lived in Los Angeles, as I did 32 years ago, you know the famous bar with the green and white striped awning, right where Santa Monica Boulevard veers southward, just before it intersects with La Cienega. Opened in 1927, Barney's was a dive with a past:  Charles Bukowski drank there. And Clark Gable. Erroll Flynn too. Clara Bow. Bob Dylan. Just about anybody who was anybody in LA. Janis Joplin ate her last meal here, supposedly. The Doors' Jim Morrison once urinated on the bar, and he and Joplin once got into a fist fight with each other here. 
     I knew of the place, vaguely, through a Tom Petty song, "Louisiana Rain," that has a line "Singing to the jukebox, in some all-night beanery." I'm not sure if Petty was referring to this specific all-night beanery (West Hollywood was not incorporated in 1982, so niceties like closing hours tended to be looser there).  But it was enough to get me inside, and I stayed for the chili and the late hours and the convenient pool tables. I liked to stand at the bar on a Friday, sip my beer, hope to meet somebody, maybe, toward that end, get some quarters and treat myself to a solitary game of pool. 
  So what's the connection between gay rights and this Los Angeles bar? When I frequented Barney's Beanery, in the early 1980s, their distinctive red matchbooks looked like this on the front—I didn't have to grab the image online, but just ducked down into the basement, where I have a big glass apothecary jar filled with dozens and dozens of the matches I once collected as little trophies of my travels and reminders of boisterous times. 
    Flip the matchbook over, however, and you find this.
    From the 1940s onward, Barney's had a sign reading "FAGOTS STAY OUT" in large letters behind the bar and, obviously, on their matches. The story was that in the 1940s there had been a police raid on homosexual acts in the bathrooms at Barney's, and the owner wanted to avoid that kind of thing. Times changed, and there had been protests, around 1970, but they didn't stick. We patrons didn't think much about it—I wasn't a faggot, so didn't mind, and what thought I gave to the matter was sort of a unspoken satisfaction, almost a pride. It was unusual, quirky. I remember thinking the slogan was part of the ambience, a sign that this was a genuine, authentic place, a tough dive that wasn't about to let itself be taken over by a bunch of pansies.
     I was 22. 
     Shortly after I moved back to Chicago, West Hollywood incorporated, and passed an anti-discrimination ordinance. Barney's Beanery took the sign down, and got new matches.     
     A sign of just how alien that idea is now, when I looked at the matches after all these years, I was struck more by the curious spelling—"fagots"—than the odiousness of the expression. It's a relic of times that are gone, thank God, and never coming back, nothing more. I think a lot of people are like that, still, today. Not so much they are haters as oblivious, which is why education like that being offered by the equality kids on Michigan Avenue is still important. Despite all our clear progress, we aren't as far away from "FAGOTS STAY OUT" as we like to think. You don't have to be a hater to be part of the problem, all you have to do is eat your chili and go with the flow.
     Before I returned the matchbook to its glass reliquary, I admired it and, for no particular reason, opened it up, and got a surprise. This: 

   So I must have met somebody there. Who was "Dina"? No idea. "312"—a Chicago number. Maybe I was still carrying the matches, trying to show off my worldliness, after I got back in Chicago. "Yup, just got back from LA." That sounds like my style. Maybe it was a Chicagoan I met one night in the bar at Barney's. Some things are too effaced by time to retrieve. It'll have to remain a mystery. Probably a good thing, too.

Cops not only answer to Chicago violence

     High school students volunteer more nowadays than when I was a kid.  No so much because they’re better than we were, though I think they are. Their schools not only make them do it, but colleges also expect it. Setting aside the conundrum of mandatory volunteerism, it is interesting to see the projects students come up with. Last weekend a pal of my older son’s threw a charity chess tournament. Another dug out buckthorn in a Cook County forest preserve.

     My high school senior wondered what he should do and I suggested The Night Ministry, the last line defense providing health care and food to Chicago’s impoverished and downtrodden. They have a mobile medical clinic on a bus that goes around the city. Volunteers—often from church groups—coordinate to be at each stop, waiting with food.

     Some of the stops require 200 meals, but Back-of-the-Yards is new on their circuit, so they suggested 20 suppers, which seemed more doable for an 18-year-old’s meal-making skills. He needed a helper to hand out the food, so I went along. It seemed prudent.

      Being a meticulous sort, I built in extra time for traffic. But 94 was fairly clear, so we got to the corner of 54th and Halsted at 8:15, a half hour early. Nothing to do but park and wait. The boy popped on his reading light and lost himself in his New Yorker. I watched the street scene, which was largely empty. Weedy lots, a bar of some kind directly ahead, people coming and going.

     The thing that really struck me were the police. Squad cars came by every minute or two. Up and down Halsted. Cruising in from side streets. One stopped for a long time in the alley across the lot to our right.

     Lots of cops. Still, most of the time, the cops weren’t there. Chicago is an enormous place. And it occurred to me, that the violence, which seems poised to explode this summer—Chicago had one weekend with 52 shootings in April—is presented as a police problem. If we get X amount of police to do Y, then this will get better. I’m not so sure that’s true. I think it’s more a case of police being one of the few things that can actually be controlled by the city. Focusing on police is an example of the adage, When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
     When people ask me my thoughts, I say "jobs." People with jobs are less inclined to go around shooting others randomly. I thought that was the smart, informed reply, but with a dozen shootings some nights, it also seems so hopelessly long-term as to be almost callous. Sure, good jobs would help. So would a pony. Guys won't be shooting so much if they're tending to their ponies.
     Part of me wants to say, "try everything." Curb the illegal guns flowing into the city, seize the ones already here, mobilize churches, prod fearful neighborhoods to take back their streets from gang-bangers and support their efforts with police.
     Another part wants to observe that this isn't something officialdom is going to sweep in and fix. Just as civil rights progress took countless individual acts of courage among people who sat down at lunch counters, in the front of buses, refused to be second-class citizens, so stemming violence is going to take individuals putting themselves at risk by standing up.   Kids shooting at each other are being failed by their families—heck, the fact that a 14-year-old was, allegedly, given the gun she used, supposedly, to kill her friend, should be a cause of echoing shock. Not shrugged off and forgotten. People in Englewood and Roseland need to realize this: The rest of the city doesn't care, not really, because it's not happening to them. Expressions of concern are mostly disingenuous attempts by people to wash their hands of the problem and feign compassion. Residents must be the ones who care. If family, friends and neighbors of a kid hanging with gangbangers won't stop him, what am I supposed to do?
     I'm not saying it's easy. But this problem needs a cultural shift. I've seen Chief Keef videos extolling guns and the thug life. I've never seen a comic mocking gangs, and how inhuman and idiotic they are. I don't think ridicule is going to end gang violence. But it is part of the "try everything" program.
     When I asked the boy what he took away from his Night Ministry experience, at first he just shrugged, as teens do. What about the people begging for an extra sandwich, I asked? The one instruction we were given about handing out meals was that people would ask for more than one, and we weren't to give in. As it was we were stripped of every scrap we brought and had to use the reserves on the bus. One man refused to budge. "Please," he said, staring hard at us, hand out. "Please. Please." We stood our ground; other people were in line. What about that part? I asked my son. Well, yeah, he said, there was that.

These bicycles are brought to you by....

     Here's a contradiction: I love brands but hate branding. 
     Certain products, packing, logos and labels simply have a beauty to them: Heinz ketchup in a glass bottle. The Tabasco sauce label. The Apple iMac. Ketchup in a plain glass bottle would seem generic, wrong.
     Liking the product itself can be secondary; I don't smoke but admire the Lucky Strikes pack.
     But it's somehow different when some non-product is slapped with a logo. A shiver goes down my back when  a heretofore unbranded space become branded. It seems bad, the seizing of public space by private enterprise.  I complained first and loudest that Chicago got nothing for its bike system while New York pried $42 million from CitiBank—hence "Citi Bikes." But now that Blue Cross/Blue Shield has stepped up, almost a year after the Divvy program commenced and is slapping its name on the bikes, well, I'm torn.
    Yes, the $12.5 million is helpful, for more bike stations and bike lanes. A tad more than a quarter of what New York got —we'll try not to think about that.
     But something about it...maybe because Blue Cross/Blue Shield has particularly ugly logos. A stick figure crucified on a crude blue cross, and the snake-on-a-stick caduceus. And what kind of company has two logos? You'd think they'd combine them into one decent logo.
     Maybe it's the year? We've bonded with Divvy, at least I have, and now it's changing. Maybe the change itself is unsettling. The United Center came into the world as the United Center, and therefore seems benign. If it had been the Bulls Center, first, that might have been different. It would be like the parents of a 1-year-old baby announcing that no, he isn't Charlie anymore, he's Ben. It would be weird.
     So maybe it's the retrofitting the brand onto the up-and-running sky blue image of the Divvys that's vexatious. Or it's a reminder that our government is broke and needs to raise cash, and this is how we like to do it. Taxes bad, branding good. So our communal space sells off parts of itself with a whiff of cowardice to boot. Hidden fees, fines, tickets, ads, anything that can't be called a "tax" by a political opponent.
      Maybe the worry is that someday our culture will resemble a NASCAR race car, festooned with sponsors. The bike system now, parks later. At least it's not school buses, not yet. Other places have tried that. Double unsettling, because kids are involved. "Attention class. This restroom break is sponsored by Gatorade..." I suppose we should be lucky it's not currency, not yet. The postal service has already sold off space on stamps to whoever wants it—and the joke is, few do.
     The logo started showing up on bikes last week, cluttered and unbeautiful and unwelcome.
     I suppose we'll get used to them. Or perhaps when the Blue Cross sponsorship is up in 2019, it will pass to other "blue" themed companies. Jet Blue, Blue Moon Brewing, IBM ("Big Blue," remember?).
     Maybe in time it'll even seem natural. The Wrigley Field name is so sacrosanct people forget it's hawking a brand of gum. But it is.

Saying goodbye to books

     Books are worth less.

     Not worthless, I rush to point out. Worth less. An important space between those two words. Still worth something, but not worth what they once were.

     That’s been obvious for some time. Being a bookish guy, I resisted admitting it. Struggled to believe that physical books — pages of paper, covers, possessing both mass and volume — have an intrinsic value that will conquer the destructive twins of time and technology. Books would survive the Web revolution for the same reason violins survive: they perform better than a facsimile.

     Now I’m not so sure.

     It started as a tickle. Standing in Half Price Books in Highland Park a few years back. So big, and the books were so cheap.

     Almost . . . too . . . cheap.

     This is a transitional phase, I began to realize. Half Price Books will occupy the margin between the books that customers tote in by the bagful to sell and the ones they buy and carry out, until the books start backing up, as more people want to sell, but fewer want to buy a hardback for $12, or $6, or $3 or $1.50. When a bunch of electrons can be had for nearly nothing, those readers are going to keep asking themselves “Why?” The margin will keep getting thinner. Eventually books will be used for insulation if not fuel.  

     Traditions change. Look at what employees carry their stuff in. A decade ago backpacks were for students. Now someone carrying a leather briefcase — heavy, expensive, limited — is practically indulging in an affectation. He might as well carry an ebony cane and wear a cape while he’s at it.

     To know where books are going, quite fast, all you have to do is look at the statistics. In 2008, 1 percent of book sales were e-books. In 2012, 23 percent of the revenue of the $7 billion book trade was from e-books. Nearly a quarter. Extend that graph out.
     Though it was only last week that I really felt the tremor underfoot.
     On the surface, it was good news, a win for the dusty volumes crowd. The New York Public Library announced it would not, as it had planned, offload its millions of books to New Jersey and turn the ornate Main Reading Room, two blocks long at its 42nd Street flagship, into a computer center. They had spent $9 million on plans for the change.
     So, relief. But I also felt that odd tickle.
     Last summer I was in New York, at the Main Reading Room, dragging my younger son (the way a normal man gathers ballparks, I wanted to add a third Gutenberg Bible to our trip, alongside the Morgan Library's and the Beinecke Library's at Yale. I hope that doesn't constitute child abuse).
     I enjoyed just seeing the place. And yet — and this is the earthquake — I think keeping it the way it is probably is a mistake. The books should rest in New Jersey.
     Why? Twenty years ago, I was researching a book on college pranks. Perhaps the best prank in the book occurred in 1902, when a drinking club at Yale, the Jolly Eight, tricked stern, ax-wielding saloon foe Carry Nation into thinking they were a temperance band, and she was their guest for a day on campus. At evening, they took a photo of her, supposedly toasting to temperance with a glass of water. They airbrushed a cigarette in her hand, as if she were partying with her Bulldog buddies. The Yale Record ran the photo with the caption, " 'I have always taken mine straight,' she said, laughing."
     A fun, satisfying prank. But there was one loose thread: Did Nation ever realize she'd been duped at Yale? Turns out she wrote an autobiography in 1908, "The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation." It is a rare book — you couldn't get it through interlibrary loan. But the New York Public Library had a copy. So I flew to New York to read it. At the Reading Room, you request books, and they bring them to you. I remember sitting at a table in that vast hall, being handed a pair of boards tied together with a blue ribbon. I tugged at the bow. There was the book. I turned to the table of contents, at Chapter XVII started to laugh, out loud, in the otherwise silent hall. Its title? "THE VICES OF COLLEGES, ESPECIALLY YALE." Guess she found out what happened.
     Last week, when I heard the news, I had a hunch and went over to Google Books.
     Sure enough. There it is, Carry Nation's autobiography. You can look at it yourself with a few taps. No plane trip necessary.
     That's far better. Scarcity creates value, but as much as I cherish the memory of that journey, I wouldn't impose it on others.
     Times change and we change with them. That thought was penned, using ink and a nib, by John Owen in 1622. It's as true written on parchment as it is set in type as it is painted upon the screen in electrons.

Fred Cohn: "He was the best. He was a star."

     For some reason obituaries have a bad reputation, as the lowest rung of the newsroom pecking order. I guess that's from the day when they were obligatory renditions of the good works of ladies in the sewing club. But obituaries are allowed to be interesting nowadays, and I love learning about the life of someone I either didn't know or was just vaguely familiar with. When I first looked into this, I had no idea who Fred Cohn was—my connection was I knew his son Yale. What I'm most proud of is that when I phoned Ed Genson, I didn't know that he knew Cohn—I just guessed he probably did, and was right. Ditto for Paul Biebel. This story was researched and written between 9 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. Friday, including two trips down to the clip file in the basement of the building, the second because I had the wrong key the first time. Let's see a computer aggregator do that.

     If Fred Cohn was defending you, you were in trouble.

Fred Cohn and his wife Mary on their wedding day.

     Not for any lack of skill on the part of the University of Chicago- trained criminal defense lawyer.

     “He was the best,” said Timothy Evans, chief judge of Cook County Circuit Court. “He was a star.”

     But Cohn represented some of the toughest cases, such as the 1969 robbery trial of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. If you were facing the death penalty, if you were caught with the shotgun smoking in your hands, if you had killed a cop — or been beaten by one — you wanted Fred Cohn on your side.

     “A singularly outstanding lawyer, an excellent appellate lawyer,” said Judge Paul Biebel, presiding judge of the Criminal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court. “He had a great knowledge of criminal law, and was one of the last of the old breed who would take cases simply because they felt this person needed to be defended.”

     Cohn, 75, died April 30 at Evanston Hospital after a long struggle with cancer.

     He was born in Brooklyn, came to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago and then graduated from its law school in 1962. He went to work for the Cook County public defender’s office, leaving in the mid-1960s to work for flamboyant criminal defense lawyer Julius “Lucky” Echeles.

     “He was Julius’ guy,” said Ed Genson, a top Chicago criminal defense lawyer, who called Cohn “a lawyer’s lawyer” and a wonderful man with a gift for friendship.

     “We were sort of brothers,” Genson said.
      A big, round, affable man, Cohn approached his work as a vocation, and often tried to rehabilitate and reform his clients, helping them get jobs and turn their lives around.
     "He was such a good man," Genson said. "He felt sorry for everybody he represented. Everybody charged was a victim, every person he wanted to protect."
     After the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964, Cohn went South and worked as a volunteer civil rights attorney for the summer.
     "He believed everyone had a right to vote," said his wife of 42 years, Mary Cohn. "He knew the situation in the South and felt he could contribute. He felt very strongly about civil rights his whole life."
     The two met in Evanston — Mary Derra was a nurse from Streater; he was running a legal aid office on the same floor as the visiting nurses association office where she worked. The nurses were always good for coffee and cigarettes, and Cohn would pop in for both, eventually taking his future wife to an open house at the Gateway Foundation rehab facility.
     "We knew zip about drug addicts," she said. Cohn was a fervent opponent of drug use who once threw a pair of drug dealers out of a party after he recognized them.
     Cohn was Hampton's attorney at the time he was killed, and represented other Black Panther Party members as well.
     He also taught criminal law and procedure at John Marshall Law School.
     "He was one of my instructors at John Marshall," Evans said. "He was committed to every avenue of justice you can imagine. He was a trial lawyer, primarily on the defense side, but was committed to fairness on all sides. He was my good friend for 40 years. He had a big heart. "
     Cohn lived in Edgewater and was involved in the community — he was chairman of the Edgewater-Uptown Building Task Force, trying to keep up housing standards. He was known to help neighbors with their legal problems for free, or in return for baked goods, home repair and stuffed peppers.
     Genson said that, during the unrest surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he witnessed Cohn trying to calm the participants.
     "At one end of Grant Park, the policemen were on one side, the demonstrators on the other, and there was Fred in the middle, screaming that they should all sit down and negotiate," said Genson. "And then they charged. For the life of me, I can't understand why he didn't get hurt. He was trying to negotiate. That was Fred. He didn't want anybody to hurt each other."
     "In lieu of flowers, do a mitzvah," said his son Yale, using the Yiddish word for "good deed." "Take someone you love to movies and ice cream. That's what he would do."
     Survivors beside his wife, Mary, and son, Yale, include daughter Kate. The memorial service is private.