A river (of concrete) runs through it

     I got so wrapped up in recounting our college trip that I neglected to post this column that ran in the newspaper last Sunday. The story has an interesting genesis. It began because I noticed all the Prairie Materials concrete trucks coming and going at the new skyscraper being built at Wolf Point. "Hmmm, concrete," I thought. "There's a substance you don't read about much." So I phoned Prairie Materials, and went to visit them in Bridgeview. We had a very nice lunch, and they were forthcoming enough, though really didn't show me much of their operation. That was supposed to come next. Before it could happen though, I bumped into some Ozinga workmen at a job site on Franklin Street after mistaking their work gloves for lilies. Once I got in touch with Tim Ozinga, the Praire Materials aspect sort of faded into the background, which is something of a shame. To me, this story could have been twice as long; as it was, many fascinating details of the substance were left on the cutting room floor, such as the fact that concrete continues to set, for decades, not getting weaker, but gathering strength as the years pass. An example for us all. 

     Pick the most perishable substance: a) whole milk b) bakery bread c) newly mixed concrete.

     If you answered, “c,” fresh concrete, then you probably already know a little about the rivers of beige-gray flowing around Chicago this summer.

     Milk is good for about a week. Bakery bread, a day. But you have 90 minutes from when cement, aggregate and water are mixed into a batch of concrete before it starts to harden like, well, cement.

     So if the hundreds of concrete mixers plying Chicago’s roads seem in a hurry, they are.   Not only is the concrete in their drums setting, heating up as it does, but construction in Chicago is heating up too: After a long, harsh winter that was hard on the construction trade, the summer saw a jump.

     “Business is definitely headed in the right direction,” said Tim Ozinga, a member of the fourth generation running Ozinga Bros., the city’s largest concrete company. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand in the marketplace. This year is very promising.”

     From the reconstruction of the Ontario Street Bridge on the Kennedy to the Navy Pier Flyover to the expansion of the Chicago Riverwalk to the first of three towers at the billion-dollar Wolf Point project, concrete projects big and small are taking place all over the city.

     Hiring is up in construction generally in Chicago — up 5.1 percent in the 1st quarter of 2014, according to Moody’s, compared to the same period in 2012, and the national cement market is rising 10 percent a year.

     A note about those two terms, cement and concrete, since they’re often confused: Cement is a binding agent, made of powdered limestone and gypsum, that goes into making concrete, which is what you get when you add everything from gravel to fiber optics for translucent concrete, which is possible but pricey. Cement is to concrete as flour is to bread, or would be if bread were 10 percent to 18 percent flour.

     Chicago is known for its concrete buildings, not only Marina Towers, but Lake Point Tower and Water Tower Place.

      “Concrete has long been a major player in Chicago,” said Bill Baker, chief structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
     The Chicago region is peppered with concrete plants: Ozinga has 50 around Illinois, Indiana and southern Michigan; Prairie Materials has 22. The reason is so concrete can be mixed as close to the work site as possible; for really big jobs, mobile mixing plants are set up at the construction site.
     "It's a perishable product," Ozinga said. "You can only go so far with it and maintain the quality and integrity."
      A generation ago, concrete was thought of as a single substance; contractors would call up and order a truck full of "mud." But now, just as bread comes in hundreds of varieties and flavors, thousands of concrete mixture are used for all sorts of purposes - for setting underwater, weather resistance in roads, high strength in skyscrapers. There are ductile concretes that bend and porous concretes that allow water to flow easily through.
     "We really should give it a new name," Baker said. "We call it 'concrete,' but it's the stuff you see on the sidewalk and the stuff you get delivered to the site - they're both gray, but that's about it."
     The surge in tall buildings and advances in concrete technology are directly related. Trump International Hotel and Towers and Dubai's 2,722-foot-tall Burj Khalifa - both Skidmore, Owings and Merrill buildings - are concrete.
     "Today's concretes are not your father's concrete," said Lawrence Novak, director of structural engineering at the Portland Cement Association in Skokie. "Our ability to produce stronger and stronger concrete has really fueled the ability for us to go taller and taller with the high-rise buildings. If your concrete strength is low, you need bigger and bigger columns for support, and you wind up with a building that's all column on the first floor. We can make columns smaller and buildings taller and lighter."
     Illinois is something of a center of concrete materials research, not only with Portland, which was once hired by NASA to make moon dust into cement, but the University of Illinois, renown for its concrete studies.
     "Chicago for a long time has been a major leader in concrete technology," Baker said. "Chicago got used to very, very high-quality concrete."
      "People are always drawn to use concrete in very flexible and creative ways," said David Lange, a professor of civil engineering at U. of I., who explained how advances in concrete lead to design breakthroughs in architecture. "Another interesting trend is the emergence of self-consolidating concrete."
     Concrete has to flow into a form, and any kind of design or detail requires concrete to be packed or vibrated to fit into the crevice and avoid the formation of voids. That's why concrete surfaces are typically, up to now, flat and smooth. Self-consolidating concrete "flows easily into formwork without vibration, which makes possible a lot of very complex shapes," Lange said. "We seeing that come into the U.S. market."
     Chicago's most notable recent buildings, like the Trump tower and Jeanne Gang's undulating Aqua Tower, have been concrete, and more such buildings are on the way.
     "There are about 18 high-rise residences planned for Chicago, all made out of concrete because concrete gives you the ability to form it in any shape, when hardened a unique combination of high strength and fire resistance," Novak said.
     Baker said changes in technology will allow more "fluid" designs to concrete buildings. "We're looking at origami."
     The composition of the concrete isn't the only way technology affects concrete building. Trump's tower required some of the most powerful pumps ever developed for concrete construction to move a stream of it up 60 floors.
     Usually, concrete is moved in fleets of trucks (a new McNeilus standard mixer costs $185,000). Ozinga has 500 trucks, 100 of them running on natural gas, though not so much because it's cleaner but because it's quieter, a consideration in the city. Also key is size; Ozinga is developing a smaller concrete truck to better navigate tight urban spaces.
     Concrete heats up as it hardens, so much that venting the heat has to sometimes be figured into construction design, embedding water pipes that were later caulked in. Heat also sometimes required trucks to have ice poured into their hoppers to keep the contents cool. New chemical mix-ins help reduce that need.
    At Ozinga's main headquarters on the near Southwest Side along the Chicago River, trucks are filled with various mixtures of concrete for specific jobs. Getting the mix right is crucial, because there's no point hauling concrete designed for highway pours to roadways to a high-rise.
     The process is itself a mixture of high and low tech. Work orders come in through pneumatic tubes but are tallied on computer screens. An electronic gauge measures the resistance on the truck drum motors to determine each mix's "slump" - the term used to measure the consistency of concrete. In the field, workers perform the slump test (Concrete InFocus magazine called it "a sacred rite") by filling a foot-high cone with concrete, waiting, then removing the cone and measuring how many inches the pile of wet concrete slumps down.
     What happens to those trucks that don't get to work sites in time? Or find that workers aren't ready? You can "kill" the load - sugar works in a pinch to render concrete unsettable. If there's time, truck drivers hurry back to base where the concrete is poured into huge blocks, usually with a metal cable embedded in them to be moved by crane, and the blocks are used for ballast and various projects.
     And yes, sometimes the concrete hardens in the drum.
     What then? Somebody has to go in with a hammer and chisel to chip it out.

Selfie in a concrete mixer: with Tim Ozinga

Saturday fun activity—Where IS this?

    Talk about serendipity.
    I've been fighting a cold this week; even stayed home to rest on Wednesday, which is something I hardly ever do, and set my wife speculating when the last time it happened.
     "Years?" she wondered. 
    "Probably," I replied. "No idea." I soon was on the mend, but on Friday I thought I had better undergird my recovery with a big bowl of hot soup. My brother, whom I meet about every week for lunch, said he knew just the place ... well, I better not go into details, lest I give it away. Very good soup. I'll tell you all about it after somebody cracks this.
     Or doesn't.
      After lunch, rather than exiting the restaurant into the street, my brother head into an intriguing side lobby entrance of this building, with me following like a pull-toy duck. I'm rewarded with this ornate cut lead screen. Fantastic, isn't it? You don't really see it from the sidewalk, you have to step inside. All because I had a cold. Lucky me. 
      So where is this lovely lattice? Somewhere in the Loop is the only hint I'll give. Maybe everybody knows this thing, but I had never seen it before bumbling upon it on Friday. Have you? The winner gets ... something good, I'm tired of giving away books, makes them seem common ... this lovely maroon t-shirt from the Sonya Shankman Orthogenic School, whatever that is. It's never been worn, to my knowledge, 100 percent cotton, no size on the tag but it seems large. I have no idea how I got it, but it has sat in a drawer in my office for some span of years. It's been freshly laundered, so it's ready to wear, and all yours if you can guess today's puzzle. Good luck. Remember to post your answers below.  

Postscript:  

Well, at least it wasn't cracked by 12:03 a.m., the way it sometimes is, but this one was guessed correctly — 182 W. Lake — at about 11 a.m. The 1930 building has been redone into condos and the grille work, I discovered, is by a little-known Chicago master named Edgar Miller. Step inside and take a look some time. The restaurant, opened less than a year, is Ajida Japanese Grill & Ramen. The miso oodon was supurb for $13 and, unsurprisingly, by the next day my cold was completely gone.  That's worth a visit too. The wait staff was extraordinarily friendly and helpful, too.

University of Illinois needs to do more than lower tuition

     So the University of Illinois is worried because more potential freshmen get admitted but decide to go elsewhere.

     A valid concern. It won’t be much of a University of Illinois if the school is all exchange students from Ghana and Qatar.

     In 2006, 58 percent of students admitted from Illinois ended up attending; last year, it was 45 percent. At this rate, soon the only thing “Illinois” about it will be the name.

     How to get more homegrown kids to go to our big land-grant college? Maybe, Illinois leaders wonder, they should lower tuition. That way, kids won’t be so quick to grab attractive college deals from other states.

     That’s a start. Going to Illinois used to be bargain, but relentless cost-cutting has eroded quality and boosted costs at our still-great-despite-everything university system.

     But money is only one factor in the swirling confusion of college. As the father of a boy who just snubbed U of I to fly way the heck off to college in California, and another who is a high school senior in the midst of visiting schools — nine since spring, including Illinois — I feel well-positioned to give the Illini powers that be some friendly advice as to how they can make their university more attractive to hard-to-please locals.

     Numbers to keep in mind are 63 and 41.

     Sixty-three is the acceptance rate at Illinois. The acceptance rate at University of Michigan is half that. Illinois could let in fewer students, hoping those it did admit might get the sense they had achieved something truly significant by being admitted and actually go.
     Yes, a lot of kids work like demons to get in, and are deliriously happy if they do, U of I representing the attainment of their dreams. I don’t want to minimize that.
     But many others apply to U of I and don’t attend because they consider it a worst-case scenario “safety school” — the fire ax behind glass if they don’t get their top picks.
     You can cut the cost. A tougher trick is making U of I a place where more students really want to go or, rather, publicizing that it offers more than size and a campus farm.
     Which leads us to the second figure: 41. The ranking on the U.S. News & World Report list of “Best Colleges.” Rankings have become an end unto themselves as overachieving students and anxious parents fixate on the lists and ratings.
     “There’s this insidious effect,” agreed Chris Kennedy, president of the board of trustees, pointing out how University of Illinois-Chicago leapt ahead of Champaign in the rankings by making it easier to apply. “Does that make it a better school?”
     They also need to work on intangibles. I was shocked, when I started to think about the school seriously, to realize how little I knew. My impression for 20 years was this: Urbana-Champaign is a place where kids get raped in the woods. Why? Because in 1995 a serial rapist prowled campus.
     Is that fair? Of course not. But balance is a rare quality in the college hunt, and I’ll give another example: Name one Illinois professor. How many came up with “Bill Ayers,” the unrepentant ’60s radical? He taught at U of I-Chicago, and isn’t even there anymore. Add the murderer, also gone, and the latest hate tweeter, never hired, and Illinois risks becoming the place where kooks teach.
     When I visited campus in March — for the first time; I never had reasons to go before — I was surprised to find it … attractive. Pleasant, not the seedy sinkhole of downstate grimness I expected, but bristling with programs and libraries and quirky collegiate peculiarities, like a squirrel watchers club.
     After taking the tour and attending orientation, I could see my boys going there, even though they continued fixating on stats.
     Kennedy said the board has pledged to keep the number of Illinois students “no fewer than in the past” though the student population might be fattened with more foreign students paying full freight.
     He is concerned Illinois will try to win over applicants by offering less need-based aid and more merit scholarships, which sound good, though schools give them to well-off families whose students are high achievers, including his own daughter, offered a sports scholarship. “Why are they giving the Kennedys a scholarship?” he said.
     Kennedy added that while the image of Illinois indeed is “big,” that “is only the start.”
     “I don’t think it’s the size that should blow you away,” he said. “It’s the quality of programs, the engineering, accounting, massive talent in liberal arts and sciences. That’s what makes the institution great.”
     But try to tell the kids of today that.

Divvy Diary: Take my bike, please!

    Ka-thunk!

     Of all the satisfying physical aspects of riding a Divvy bike in downtown Chicago — standing on the pedals to pick up speed and make it through that yellow light, dragging the pad of your thumb across the serrated wheel that rrrrings the bell — returning the blue bomber to its station port after a jaunt and slamming the thing home is one of the more satisfying.

      Ka-thunk!

     You’ve made it, alive. You guide the handlebar with one hand, while the other lifts the seat slightly as you ram the front wheel vigorously into the docking mechanism.

     Ka- thunk!

     You are rewarded with a sound halfway between a Cadillac door slamming and a shell being jacked into a pump shotgun

      Ka-thunk!

      The little light goes from yellow to green — bike received, thankyouverymuch. You give the handlebars a hearty tug to make sure the bike is secure. And you can walk off, confident that you aren’t on the hook for the $1,200 a bike costs if you don’t return it.

      That’s how it works.

       In theory.

       In reality, mechanical systems break down. There are glitches. Only in Indiana Jones movies will a mechanism in a cave since pre-Columbian times perform flawlessly when you step on the wrong stone.

     One day a few weeks back I was heading to lunch at a favorite spot — Star of Siam: beef and broccoli to die for. I went to park, as always, at a nearby station, Kinzie and Wabash, at the foot of what once was the IBM building and now is ... oh, why must things change? ... the 330 N. Wabash building. Slam the bike home.

     Ka-thunk!

     But no little green light. No closing clamp. The bike rolls freely back. Broken, I assume. Some of these locking mechanisms are always broken. There were are five more open ports. They can’t ALL not work, right? That would be an utter impossibility. This is the city that works.

So I roll the bike back, drag it a foot to the left, and jam it into the next port.

     Ka-thunk! Six strikes, you’re out.
     No go. There were six empty docks because none could accept a bike.
     There is a station three blocks north, I learned last time this was full. Not far away.
     Pedal three blocks north, wait for a break in traffic, cross Grand, notice that four more docks are open. Whew! These can’t all be inoperative, too, right? Maybe seven is the charm, come on, Lucky Seven!
     Ka-thunk. Nothing.
     Three empty ports left, and I utter a small prayer to the God of Divvy Return.
     Ka-thunk. No.
     Two left. I imagine myself heading back to the Sun-Times, parking there, and walking back over in shame. Some convenience. My devotion to Divvy, revealed as a lie.
     Ka-thunk!
     The little green light winks, the bike is as solidly docked as a fireplug is attached to the ground. Mitigated joy! I toddle to lunch.
     Later, I run this past the Divvy folks.
     “It’s not broken docks, per se,” said Elliot Greenberger, Divvy spokesman, explaining that sometimes it takes a moment for the locking mechanism to close, but instead of waiting, impatient riders will roll their bikes back, during which time the dock locks, and then roll them forward and the station thinks it already has their bike secure.
     “If you’re making this a teaching moment,” Greenberger said, “push your bike in firmly, and wait [for a] green light.” Will do.
     What Divvy is selling is time. You can walk to a certain place in X minutes, or Divvy it in X/3 minutes. The question becomes is the cost, helmet hassle and risk of death worth the time gained? The uncertainty of dropping off a bike adds to the calculus. If I’m meeting someone for lunch, I can’t plan on gliding from Point A to Point B and then parking the bike and hurrying on. Time must be built in to find a working dock.
     To me, it’s still worth it. I try to take Divvys whenever I can. Sept. 3 is my first anniversary as a Divvy member. I’ve signed up again for a second year; $75 is a true bargain — even a better deal for college students, as Divvy is about to announce a $55 annual membership for them.
     According to Divvy, in the past year I’ve taken 153 trips — tossing out the trips that are 3 seconds long, shifting from a dock that seems broken to one that gives the green light. Let’s say 140 trips. About 55 cents a trip. Just to put your butt in a cab costs six times that. And Divvying often is faster and certainly better for you. Divvy makes the city more fun. Usually.

Steinbergs in the Southland: The college march to the sea

The University of Virginia

     Who knows what motivates people? They often don't know themselves, and even if they do, or think they do, opinions change.

     My oldest son Ross, for instance, at the outset of his search for a college, announced that he was not interested in schools in California. "Too far away," he said. I pouted—no Stanford!—but also viewed it a compliment. The boy doesn't want to be too far from the familial nest. So we did not consider West Coast schools. Our tour last summer was of eight colleges exclusively on the East Coast. Places you could drive to in a long day. 

    He is at college now, almost needless to say, at Pomona. In California. I've never seen it.

    Our second son, hot on his heels, now a high school senior, wants to go into business. Thus we have visited strong business-oriented colleges nearby like Northwestern and Marquette and Notre Dame and, in the first half of August, took a swing through the South to look at six southern colleges: Vanderbilt, Davidson, Wake Forest, College of William and Mary, University of Richmond, Washington and Lee University, and three in passing, Duke and University of Virginia and the Virginia Military Institute, which I slipped away to explore myself, briefly.
     Why the South? I have put that question to him in several different ways, and piecing the answers together and squinting, I get: most bang for your buck. Which makes sense. Not everybody can go to Harvard or should. They have good schools down there, but not everybody in the United States even considers them, well, because they're down there. One essential in business is finding value where others overlook it, and if my kid could do that right out of the box, well, I'm not going to stand in his way. And the food's great.

     Still. While last year I had been eager to finally set my eyes on such stories schools as Princeton and Yale, I had almost no mental image of any of these southern schools. Vanderbilt I had glimpsed, a few years back, when the family spent two happy weeks traveling around Tennessee. A gate of some kind. The rest, I knew almost nothing about, a few crumbs. Wake Forest is big in sports. University of Virginia was founded by Jefferson and is the subject of a cutting Karl Shapiro poem that my father liked to quote.

     And that's about it. College of William and Mary? It's old, right? But as a father I am nothing if not equitable when it comes to my boys, and if the first one got a two-week, 2,500 mile trek through the colleges of his choosing, by God so would the second. I tried not to think about the fact that he did not end up attending any of those colleges. It was not a waste, because we had fun, and if my younger boy didn't go to any of these, well, so be it.

Orientation at Vanderbilt

    "How many of you all are first time visitors to Vanderbilt?" asked admissions counselor, Ben Gutierrez, in a grey suit and salmon tie. Hands shot up. "A lot of you all."
     I savored those "you all's" — there's a joy in finding the epitome cliche right where you expect it, like hearing someone in Boston say they'll go "pahk the cah."   
     He asked an ice breaking question that no college session had yet asked: who thinks they have the weirdest high school mascot? A few prospects were tossed out, but the prize was retired, obviously, by Atoka High School Wampus Cats, from Atoka, Oklahoma (a folkore version of the cougar, a glance at Wikipedia reveals that four other high schools also have a wampus cat).
       Gutierrez lauded what he called "southern comfort experiences"—people smiling, holding the door for you, and of course, the food.  We had eaten the night before at the Loveless Cafe, whose claim to making the best biscuit in the world might be disputed, but not by me. Of course, not everyone might be looking for that. When he asked who in the audience liked country music, hands stayed folded in laps. "Wow, very few," he marveled. I was lucky in that a magazine once asked me to interview Loretta Lynn, so I boned up on her oeuvre and developed a healthy appreciation for country music, a true American art form, like jazz.

Vanderbilt University

      Teens are another matter. Gutierrez soldiered on, Vanderbilt is right in the heart of Nashville, he said, "a growing city of 1.7 million." That figure gave me pause, since Chicago has 2.7 million. Turns out, Nashville has 600,000 people, which means our host exaggerated the size by a million plus. (He probably meant the Nashville metropolitan region, which does have 1.6 million people, but covers 13 counties, including other cities such as Murfreesboro.  On that scale, Chicago has 10 million people. Though perhaps he merely misspoke).
      The stat that leaped out of his presentation, put two fingers in its mouth, and whistled was on an otherwise dull chart of where Vanderbilt students come from: most from Tennessee, naturally enough, but the second most prevalent source of students is Illinois—526, more than even New York or California.
    Suddenly I saw the sense of the Southern Gambit.
    Our guides were  pair of students, Jevaugn from Washington, D.C. and Rani from Beirut, Lebanon, who regaled us with tales of his mother, who worried about her son leaving the security of Beirut ("Are you safe?" she asked him) and who bristled when he referred to his dorm as "home" -- "Are you so quick to forget about us?" Based on his mother and his looks, I assumed he was Jewish, a misconception I only gradually let go of after I asked him if there were much of a Jewish community in Beruit and he said, "No, none."
    They showed us the commons. "We kind of based it on Harry Potter," a phrase used at so many schools to often to describe anything ornately clubby that it should be retired at this point. Which I suppose it will as the series, a cultural obsession five years ago, recedes.

Proudly walking backwards: Tour of Davidson

     Next stop, Davidson College, in Davidson, North Carolina, which Forbes had just named the No. 1 Best College in the South. Hopefully they use a more rigorous formula to evaluate the school than I did, because based on the answers to "Why did you come today?" the handful of prospective freshmen at the orientation session managed strangle my opinion of the place, aborning in the bassinet.
    "It's close to home," said one.
    "My mom made me come," said another, and a third said something very similar about her mom forcing her here. A big percentage of the college experience is added by the people you go to school with, and the image of prospective freshman being so clueless as to announce that to a room of strangers staggered me. I'd have clapped my hand over my kid's mouth had he said that. It also surprised me to learn that 26 percent of the incoming students are varsity athletes, which made the school seem like an athletic program with classes attached. Though other schools were to cite a similar figures.
     My son, needless to say, liked it very much, and the more "Really, you like this?" vibe I radiated, the more enthusiastically he seemed to like it. I struggled manfully to shut up.
    "You absolutely do not have to be a Presbyterian to go to Davidson," our guide, Jennie, told us, which somehow was not comforting. She was one of those guides who took great pride in walking backward, and was the first to stride in reverse full speed into a post, though no damage seemed done. She also pointed out "boxy wooden desk things" in the commons.

Wake Forest

     When I first stepped onto Wake Forest's campus, suddenly the second word in their name flashed as if in green neon. "Ah, Wake Forest." The place is practically in the deep woods—it relocated from the town in the 1950s, and all the buildings seemed as if they were built at the same time. I missed the orientation, taking the Honda in to the dealer in Winston-Salem to check it out after encountering a stray truck tire tread on the highway. But I showed up in time for the tour, held in the rain. Rain is supposed to dampen (sorry) your ardor for a school, but Wake Forest is just the sort of place you could happily wander around for four years. The fact they offer classes is icing on the cake.
    Our guide, Dan, a pre-med, presented his coming to Wake Forest as a kind of personal epiphany. He knew, just knew, the moment he stepped on campus that this was the place for him. I snuck glances over at my own boy. I didn't expect that kind of certainty. Maybe that's a good thing, a sign of flexibility. My friend who is a college admissions adviser said Rule No. 1 in applying to colleges is: Do not set your heart on a particular school. That's a recipe for finding yourself at a wonderful school yet unhappy, since it isn't the one you wanted most.  
      The College of William and Mary is one of the oldest in country, set next to colonial Williamsburg. The buildings were charming and old, and we paused in front of a statue of Jefferson.

College of William and Mary

     "This is old TJ, as I like to call him," our guide said. Greek life was treated the way fraternities and sororities are always treated in these tours—handled with tongs. "I really like it, and it adds to my experience," our guide said, "but I wouldn't like it if it detracted from others," he said. 
     My older boy, who gamely tagged along even though he was weeks from starting his own college, sent his buddy Matthew, who would be attending College of William and Mary, text updates—mildly taunting him, no doubt, based on everything I know about the boys (and because, at Vanderbilt, he had been taking pictures of slavery-related objects at a library display and sending them to another friend who would be going there, along with tweaks, no doubt along the line of: "See the sort of place you're going to.") Occasionally a guide would notice his Pomona t-shirt and expound on what a great school it was, which also pleased my lad to no end.

University of Richmond

      The University of Richmond is the school that stood out, for me. The administrators greeted us with a sincere zeal that was a full twist stronger any of the nearly two dozen schools I've visited.  They just seemed to want us more—handing out coupons that waved our application fee, as a reward for coming out. 
     "We want to put you in the shoes of a spider," said Austin Kelso, the administrator who greeted us—Richmond has the best mascot, the spiders, and a shirt so cool I thought of buying one, "Fear the Spiders." As fine a school as Pomona is, its mascot is still Cecil the Sagehen. 
     More significantly, Richmond's Robin School of Business will take $300,000 from the school's endowment and allow juniors and seniors to invest the sum for them. They also have their own electronic trading floor. I tried to catch my kids eye and do a little Isn't-that-cool? eyebrow dance, but he wasn't willing to look at me.
     The campus, set around a lake, is lush and lovely, the buildings new yet refined. It helped that we had the best guide, well, that I've had in nearly 20 college tours, a budding journalist, Andrew Jones of Houston, Texas, who wasn't affected, wasn't preening, just commenting directly about school life. He wrote his class schedule, which had no classes Monday, Wednesday or Friday, on a white board in a classroom.
    "Who thinks this is a good idea?" he asked. "Who thinks this is a bad idea?"
     Bad college guides, I've learned, obsess over themselves, sharing more than you care to know, or recite some canned nasal speech. Jones was a person, talking as people do.
     During the tour of a dining hall, we saw these fabulous desserts laid out, rainbow cakes and special pies. I was ogling rows of homemade cookies, thinking "A savvy school would give us a cookie."
     "If you want a cookie, take one," Jones said, reading my mind. You don't attend a particular college because someone there gives you a cookie. But it doesn't hurt.
     Washington and Lee University, to my surprise, is directly associated with both men, perhaps the two most heroic figures in American history. George Washington gave stock to get the college going, and Robert E. Lee assumed its presidency after the Civil War to help the battered school get up off its knees. He's buried there, and so is his horse, Traveller.  Of all the schools we visited, Washington and Lee really radiated Southernness, with its row of red brick buildings and square columns.

     We toured first. On one hand, 75 to 80 percent of students are in the Greek system—the sorority houses are lined in a row, and we viewed them from a far distance, as if that is as close as men could get. 
    On  the other, if Richmond was impressive for giving 300 grand to finance students, Washington and Lee dumped $5 million of its endowment into the laps of its investment club. That had to be an educational experience.
     Our guide talked about the honor system—many of these Southern schools have them. You can take your final home to do, and leave your computer on a tree stump, since all students sign a pledge to be scrupulously honest. By this time, I had heard it enough to ask, carefully, how many students were brought up on honor charges? It seemed almost an elaborate system for inflating grades by allowing everyone to openly cheat under the cover of honor. But I was reassured this is not the case. If it works at colleges, we should all take honor pledges: society would be improved.
     The Washington and Lee information session, however, was held in a long, thin room where, out the windows to the left, men worked with howling leaf blowers while, out the windows to the right, they worked cutting bricks with a shrieking masonry saw, and it was distracting enough that I wondered: if the woman in front of us were as dynamic as the school supposedly made her, why she couldn't either get them to stop, or march us all to a different, quieter room, rather than compete against these distractions. 

Virginia Military Institute dorm rooms

     Kent and I had to duck out, to get him to his interview. While he in shirt and tie talked with an administrator, I strolled over to the Virginia Military Institute, which is directly next door. I was impressed with its crenelated silhouette, though when you walk through the gates you are confronted with a sight that resembles nothing more than a prison. I ducked into the chapel, and was surprised to find the area where normally you would find, oh, pictures of Jesus and such, was a painting of the rebel charge at the Battle of New Market during the Civil War. Yes, it was VMI cadets doing the charging, but still, in a church? Remember, the person who said, "The past isn't dead, it isn't even past," was a Southerner, William Faulkner.
     The University of Virginia we didn't tour properly—too big for consideration. But I wanted to see  the famous campus, and we clomped around looking at the Thomas-Jefferson-designed building, the central dome, alas, being under heavy reconstruction. We happened upon room 13, where Edgar Allen Poe lived, restored to how it might have been during his residency. An English grad student was moving next door -- the rest of the rooms are in use -- and we chatted with her pleasantly. We walked the breadth of the place, I can't say I regretted Kent's idea not to apply, and then on tiptoe left.
     That night at dinner, I called up the Karl Shapiro poem about the University of Virginia on my smart phone:

University of Virginia

               

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew

Is the curriculum. In mid-September

The entering boys, identified by hats,

Wander in a maze of mannered brick

      Where boxwood and magnolia brood

      And columns with imperious stance

      Like rows of ante-bellum girls

         Eye them, outlanders.

In whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace,

Under the arch, and lofty banister,

Equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass;

The exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet”

      And visitors on tiptoe leave

      For the raw North, the unfinished West,

      As the young, detecting an advantage,

         Practice a face.

  

Duke Gardens

   The college glimpsed least was Duke. To be honest, we only toured the botanic garden in the center of campus. It was quite beautiful. As for the rest of the school, well, I hear they have a good basketball team. 
     As we headed northward and westward home, I was glad I had come—these were fine places all, and he'd do well in any he got in. He seemed leaning most strongly toward Vanderbilt or Washington and Lee, but these things change, and I'll be quietly drumming for Richmond. It really was an excellent cookie.

Virginia Military Institute

Steinbergs in the Southland: Working people

     The sign said, "Peaches—1/2 mile" or words to that effect. Fair warning, which struck me as a smart business practice. So much is sprung on you nowadays, and you don't have time to consider it until the opportunity has passed. "Do you want peaches?" I asked my wife, and she admitted that she did.
      We were driving across Virginia, heading to Virginia Beach to put our toes in the ocean. But it was lunchtime, and since no particular restaurant had presented itself, we were nibbling our way across the state. 
       I pulled off the road for Whitby's Orchard & Produce, 34 Piney Pond Road, in Brodnax, Virginia. 
     My wife went over to admire the big oblong baskets of peaches. 
     "Do you divide these up?" she asked Emily Blair, granddaughter of the store's founder.
 

Emily Blair and her sister Randy at Whitby's

   "I can't sell you half a peach," said Emily, adding that otherwise we were free to buy as many individual peaches as we liked. Just in case we were on the fence, she went into the back room and emerged with a plate covered in a paper towel, and chunks of freshly cut peach. That sealed the deal. We sampled them, and my wife started to fill a bag with half a dozen.
      Were we interested, Emily wanted to know, in homemade jelly? They make it right here. Or smoked bacon? They smoke it themselves. No need to refrigerate. Four dollars a pound. She went into the back and returned with strips of smoked bacon. We added a pack. Along with a bag of fried peanuts, $1.79 for what felt like a pound. And some Squirrel Nut Zipper candies.

       We left but we didn't get far. The fried peanuts were good, but my wife wanted to try boiled peanuts—did you know they grow peanuts in Virginia? They do. We stopped at place. A man in green rubber boots that identified him as a peanut farmer stood chatting with the clerk, but they allowed us to buy some boiled peanuts, and burlap sacks of regular roasted peanuts to give to friends. Boiled peanuts are cold and mushy and intensely salty, and though they did not grow on us, now we know what they're like.
     When you're growing the peaches or the peanuts, smoking the bacon or making the jelly, you sell it differently. You aren't an indifferent clerk slumped at a 7/Eleven, but trying to move the product. I was intrigued at the kind of service we bumped into. Heading into Winston-Salem I drove the van over a piece of truck tread in the middle of the road and the plastic guard beneath the bumper sagged down. So I detoured the next morning to the dealer there — Flow Honda of Winston-Salem. They tossed the van on the lifts while I went for a walk, chatting with folk sitting on their porches. When I got back, the mechanic told me they had pushed the frontwork back into place. Cost: zero. 

Dimitiri

       I seemed to meet a lot of people on this trip. Even in Virginia Beach, which is basically a tourist trap, on the last night, Edie wanted pancakes for dinner—tired of oysters and fish and such. We explored and found the Honey Bee, the one place that offered them, and fell into the hands of Dimitiri, a 22-year-old Bulgarian who served us while, in essence, putting on a one-man show. He showered us with indulgences--if we wanted, he confided in us, we could sneak over to the salad bar and have some fruit before the pancakes came. He had bought this job, in essence, from a broker in Bulgaria, and shared the whole complicated story. I might have thought he was angling for tips, but he wasn't—he was just being personable and answering our questions. The covert salad bar invitation impressed me—make your customers feel like they're getting something special, even if its the fruit that has sat out all day and will go into the dumpster in a couple hours. Anyway, if he becomes a titan of industry someday, I predicted it first.
     At Monticello, I paused to watch a workman putting a brick floor into a log cabin on the grounds. I took a photo of him talking about the construction and told him I was with the Sun-Times in Chicago and asked his name.
      "I'm not supposed to talk to the media," he said, "and I'm not supposed to tell them that I'm not supposed to talk to them." 
     That's the old Jeffersonian spirit! Though I didn't blame him, or Jefferson, so much as the foundation that runs Monticello. How many organizations trust their employees so little they muzzle them, even though it undermines the good relations they're supposedly trying to foster? Though his last part gave away the game, revealing what he thought of being silenced by the organization. It put in relief for me why I was enjoying the Southland, because I was meeting individuals generally freed from the idiocies of institutions. They were independent characters, growing, canning, selling, pouring concrete as best they could. I don't want to pull out a banjo and go all weepy. Part of this is they're poor and struggling to make ends meet. But living in a well-off Northern city, you can become detached from the make-do independence of those scraping by. Poor people in Chicago have pride that is often unfounded. Here they both have pride and something to be proud about.

Steinbergs in the Southland:

 

View from the porch, River Dance bed & breakfast, Marshall, North Carolina.

      Today is Labor Day, and while I considered looking at the bad news about labor, the truth is I did that last year and, alas, the bad news has not changed.
      Besides, there's our two week trip to the South in early August to recount. 

     "Do we have the truffle mousse?" asked Ross, from the backseat, as we departed Northbrook and headed on our two-week summer vacation, a tour of the Southland. 
     My wife said we did. And the onion jam. We've gone on enough road trips that we've learned: pack lunch. I haven't eaten at one of those godawful highway burger stops in years.

     We had packed up the car the night before, brewed coffee that morning, filled the CD player with tunes and set off. The ritual swing up to Deerfield Bakery had been executed. My cinnamon cake donut and almond horn awaited in a crisp white bag. Vacation had officially begun. 

     His remark was made during a discussion of aspic, the jelled substance used in elegant cooking. My boy considers himself refined. I wondered if the South was ready for us and we for them. If we do not seem the sort who would cross the Mason-Dixon line, well, thank my wife. Six years ago she suggested we go hiking in Tennessee. I thought it was a terrible idea. Like many Northerners, I viewed the South with an ignorance-soaked condescension bordering on contempt, my image fixed in 1954, formed by history books and Neil Young songs. It helped that, excluding New Orleans and Florida, which don't quite count, I had never been anywhere South.    
     But I am trained to do as she says, so went on the trip. 

     Tennessee was great. Beautiful and friendly, with good food and lovely mountains to hike. We visited Andrew Jackson's home, the Hermitage, and slept at the LeConte Lodge, inaccessible except for a six-mile hike. They bring the food in on pack llamas.

     Thus when our incoming high school senior, Kent, decided he wanted to visit Southern colleges, starting with Vanderbilt in Nashville, I did not resist or complain. We had gone to the colleges his older brother wanted to visit last summer; we would now kick the tires on his choices. His life, his call.
     "Still, shame he isn't interested in the University of Hawaii," I muttered.
      So we would be hitting Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky. Not the Deep South. Not Mississippi. But close. My requests were two: since we'd be in Virginia, I wanted to visit Monticello, Jefferson's home. I'm a history geek. And I wanted to spend a day lolling on the beach. I work too much and loll too little, the ocean is a kind of enforced idlement, since not planting yourself on the sand and gazing at its majesty seems a rude gesture to nature. Compulsory lolling.

      We visited seven schools, which I will describe in detail Wednesday.

      Not much time in Nashville—just enough for me to do a morning jog through Centennial Park with Kitty, and remind myself that yes, they really did build an exact replica of the Parthenon out of beige concrete. At the beginning of our run, I posted a picture of the place to Facebook, and a friend scoffed -- she insisted I was lying, the photo a fraud -- so vehemently that I took a few selfies with Kitty before the structure, to prove the thing is really there. It wasn't open so early, so I couldn't see the statue of Pallas Athena, but I savored the irony anew that the heart of the Bible belt had erected a pagan temple with a 42-foot-tall, gilded goddess inside. 

Marshall, North Carolina

      After that it was three days in Marshall, North Carolina, at River Dance, a bed and breakfast up a remote mountain road that my wife had found. It was everything a bed and breakfast should be -- capacious, friendly hosts, a comfortable chair with a staggering view (see above). We hiked the first day, Kent and I spent a morning white-water rafting on the French Broad River the second. The third we ventured into the town of Marshall itself, population 872, which no doubt is a few derivations above the truly desolate small towns, but shocked my boys nevertheless, particularly after we popped into a hardware store to ask about charcoal, and the clerk answered in an unintelligible deep-in-the-hollows slurry. We didn't quite back out slowly, but we didn't press the issue.

     "The educational opportunities here must be very limited," Ross said gravely. I thought about going back and shooting a video of the clerk speaking, for anthropological purposes, but decided that would be a Bad Idea. Back at the bed and breakfast, our hosts  explained he was a beloved local personality, known for his chicken dancing at local musical events, and probably would have welcomed the attention. 

     Driving away from Marshall, the boys in the back had this exchange.

    "There is a certain existential sadness to this town," Ross said. 

     "There is an existential sadness to any town," retorted Kent who, newly 17, has been challenging his brother more frequently.

     "I miss my well-off suburban enclave," Ross said, sincerely, regarding Marshall's deserted but not too ramshackle streets. "It reeks of entropy."

      I would be more embarrassed to recount this little exchange of privilege, but  youth is the time of certainty and they'll need a full tank of self-regard to dig through the mountainous half decade or so of education between them and where they want to go.
     It is true that we didn't feel we were on the cutting edge of American society, but that's why we were there. If we wanted dynamic bustle we could have stayed at home. And the South was not without its excellences. People were more polite, particularly in Virginia, and we enjoyed the process of buying things in stores and ordering meals in restaurants more than in the eat-and-get-out North. People really did say hello more, pedestrians in the street whom you didn't expect would.  If you made eye contact they greeted you, and sometimes even if you didn't. My wife and I found ourselves lingering before the windows of realtors, seeing just how much bang for your buck you get down here. And they have grape soda everywhere.
      With lunch in Marshall, I ordered a Nehi Grape. My wife was surprised. I never drank soda that wasn't Fresca, or at least diet soda. Wither Nehi Grape? "We're in the South," I explained. "You're supposed to drink grape soda here."

Tuesday: Would you like some smoked bacon with that peach?