Saturday fun activity: Now at dawn.

     Through some miracle, I remembered I promised to post the Saturday fun activity at 7 a.m. So go to bed, and it'll be waiting for you then. 'Night.

Eastland disaster warns us still

Bobbie Aanstad

     Bobbie Aanstad could do something most 13-year-old girls in 1915 could not: She could swim. Her sweetheart, Ernie Carlson, had taught her one summer in Michigan.
     She lived in Logan Square, then a Norwegian immigrant enclave, with her widowed mother and little sister. She had an uncle Olaaf who worked at the vast Western Electric works in Cicero, where 40,000 employees made every telephone in America. He invited them to come to the company excursion to Michigan City.

     The family took the trolley and arrived at the Chicago River about 6:45 a.m., July 24, 1915. Five ships awaited to take them to Michigan. The Eastland was scheduled to leave first, so they got on that, and found a spot on the crowded cabin deck to wait for the deadliest accident in Chicago history to unfold.
     The Eastland disaster is often said to be forgotten, but the truth is worse: It is ignored, a tragedy that has none of the glitz of the Titanic, which killed fewer passengers, nor the can-do spirit of the Great Chicago Fire. It was a mass watery death in full public view, within two dozen feet of shore, on a ship still tied to the wharf.
     What happened is plain enough. When the Eastland received its 2,500 passengers — the absolute limit — the gangways were closed and the ship's crew prepared to cast off.
     But the ship, notoriously unstable, could not right itself. For a few minutes it listed back and forth, starboard toward the pier, then port, toward the center of the river, and back. The captain tried to trim the ship, filling various ballast tanks. For the picnickers, the swaying was a lark; they whooped happily as the boat tilted this way, then that.
     Then the Eastland began to tip to port and kept going. A refrigerator toppled over, sending bottles of beer crashing. A piano crushed a boy. The laughter turned to screams as the boat turned on its side and settled in water that came exactly to its midpoint.
     In what instantly became a dark, watery cell, Bobbie Aanstad dog paddled for her life, then held onto a railing while others died around her. She cried for her mother. Outside, the surface of the Chicago River was a thrashing, clawing, screaming mass of humanity.
     "Most of them, it seemed, could not swim, or were dragged down by those that could not swim," deckhand Harry Miller said later."Men, women and children, all over that part of the river."
     Bystanders tossed chairs, ropes, chicken crates, anything they could find, into the river. The women were doubly doomed — not only had the vast majority never been taught to swim, but they were weighed down by long dresses, buttoned into clothes that could not be quickly shed in the water. If rescue didn't come in seconds it came too late.
     Another reason the Eastland does not loom large in civic memory is that it was not a moment of pride for Chicago. While bystanders who could swim did leap into the waters and saved lives, others picked the pockets of the horrified crowd — and even robbed the dead. A fire boat sat a block away, the captain delayed going to the rescue, worried about a boiler explosion. The police were later accused of holding back the crowd and would-be rescuers, instead of helping those in the water.
     That night, when a temporary morgue was opened, the curious far outnumbered family members attempting to identify lost loved ones. After the city erected barriers along the river to give privacy to the recovery of bodies, a janitor at a nearby building admitted the gawkers to the roof for a dime a head. When the names of the deceased were announced — including 22 entire families — some of their homes were robbed.
     Come Monday, hundreds began showing up at the Hawthorne works, hoping to fill the jobs of those who had not yet been buried.
     Though a century has passed, aspects of the tragedy are with us yet. The clock tower of the red brick Reid, Murdock Building, built in 1914, still broods over the scene. The chicken company whose crates were tossed into the water, Cougel Brothers, is now Cougel Commission, and still sells chicken.
     Bobbie Aanstad's two granddaughters, Barbara and Susan, live in Arlington Heights, and well remember their grandmother, who lived to be 90 and late in life married Ernie Carlson, the boy who taught her to swim.
     "My grandmother always told us, when we were little girls growing up, 'It's very important you girls know how to swim,'" said Barbara Decker Wachholz, whose Eastland Disaster Historical Society will hold a memorial at the river at 1 p.m. Friday and a candle lighting at dusk Saturday.
     Another thing that has not changed: Most people still can't swim, not well enough to save their lives.      
    According to the American Red Cross, while 80 percent say they can swim, the number who can stay alive in an emergency, who are able to swim 25 yards or tread water for a minute, is around 46 percent. The numbers for Latinos are far worse: 60 percent can't swim; African-Americans are worse still: 67 percent. Nationwide, 10 Americans drown every day. Or the equivalent of the Eastland's death toll of 844, drowning every three months, year in and year out.

One last ovation for Dave Feldman

     When Dave Feldman walked into the newsroom, the sports department would stand and applaud.
     A mixture of admiration and gentle mockery of the man everyone called “The King.” Feldman, the paper’s turf reporter, was a king with a bad back and a heart condition, the dean of horse racing in Chicago who would reply to the question, "How are you?" with a snarl of "I'm dyin'!"
     So let’s potch our hands together and maybe we can conjure up Feldman one last time in honor of 100 years since his birth, July 24, 1915. Clap, and squint, and maybe we can see him toddle in, looking like an unmade bed, perhaps slightly raising a regal hand to acknowledge his subjects, a short, paunchy, sad-eyed man, lurid shirt untucked, fly perhaps undone. A man who lived for horses, who not only wrote about them, but owned them, trained them, bet on them, and announced their races.
     "I could enter my horse in a race, handicap the event, call him home to the wire, and interview the winning owner and trainer—me," he wrote in his memoir, perfectly titled “Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda,” written with Frank Sugano. The book is an urn containing Feldman's enormous spirit; crack it open and he lives again.

Dave Feldman

     "Dumb, right?" Feldman writes, of buying his first horse. "Yeah, but as they say, when you get an itch, you've got to scratch it. The thought of owning a horse had spread in my mind like a rash. I probably picked it up in New Orleans, where I had spent the winter covering the races at the Fair Grounds … My partner and I got the horse cheap because we promised to pay the owner $1,000 when Oomph Girl won a race. Hah! The first three times we ran her she was beaten like a flyweight matched against Jack Dempsey.”
     Born on the West Side, Feldman began delivering the Herald-Examiner at 6. A neighbor took him to Arlington Park when he was 12, and he was hooked.
     "Other kids my age read comic books," he recalled. "I read the (Racing) Form."
     Feldman took bets from Damon Runyon. He was the mascot for the Chicago Blackhawks in 1929, the year, as a student at Lindblom High School, he began handicapping races and took a part time job at the Chicago Herald-Examiner. When it merged with the Evening American in 1939, Mr. Feldman became turf editor of the resultant Herald-American, later Chicago's American. He moved to the Daily News in 1969, and to the Sun-Times when the Daily News folded in 1978.
     He wrote as he spoke:
     "Girl jocks?" he mused, on the advent of female jockeys in 1969. "I'll be honest with you. I don't care for them. But they're here to stay. Follow?"
     "You know, horses are smarter than people. People bet on horses, but horses never bet on people."
     Feldman died at 85—of the heart condition he worried about for decades—in 2001. I wrote his obit, but left out one story I cherish about Dave.
     The Sun-Times had many larger than life characters, and another was the high school sports editor, Taylor Bell, at least in his estimation. Feldman had a way of spreading into Bell’s space, and Bell resented it. Words were exchanged.
     Feldman got back this way. He visited a high school with a tape recorder, and went up to students who looked like athletes. “Do you play football?” he’d ask until he found one who did. “Do you know Taylor Bell?" he’d continue. If the student did know Bell, he'd thank him, rewind the tape, and look for another. If he didn't, he'd push a bit. "Really? What position? Quarterback? And you've never heard of Taylor Bell? Really? No idea who he is!?"
     He ended with a string of student athletes, expressing bafflement over this mystery man, Taylor Bell. Then he played the tape for Taylor to the permanent delight of all present.
     Feldman was president of the Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association, the union that represents owners and trainers. He described the job this way:
     "I hate being president of the HBPA. It's tougher than being president of the United States. At least the president has a party tin back of him. I have nothing—no party, no friends, no flunkies, just a board of whiners and backstabbers. Then there are the horsemen, another bunch of stakes-grade squawkers. It's been that way since 1975 when I was first elected. So why didn't I quit after the first three-year term? Hell if I know. My whole life has been like this."
     Unlike most of what he wrote, that was not quite true. Feldman had many friends, from broke stable hands to millionaire horse breeders—Arlington International owner Dick Duchossois was one of his pall bearers.
     A horse race lasts a minute or two, a human life, a little longer. When it's gone, sometimes those you touched remember. I didn't know Dave well, and couldn't tell a thoroughbred from a mule. But I admired the way he manifested himself. On Dave Feldman's centennial, it seems fitting to saddle up his spirit, to let him flash around the track of our minds one more time before retiring out to pasture for keeps.

America deserves Donald Trump

     I was at the Lincoln Memorial earlier this month, and studied the face of Daniel Chester French's Lincoln. He looked pissed, and that right foot lifting slightly, as if he were about to leap up and stride out of that shrine and start kicking ass.
    And why not? The Union is in disarray, as always. Our cherished freedoms are held cheaply by the paranoiacs and psychopaths who dominate what passes for political discourse in this country. Relentless plutocrat and egomaniac Donald Trump is leading the polls in 2015 is something you'd expect in a bad nightmare dystopian movie from 1989. Yet there it is. Get in the game Abe. We need you. We need somebody. 

     America deserves Donald Trump.
     Don't we?
     Nearly a quarter of Republicans agree: They want him to be president. Twenty-four percent prefer Trump over actual politicians such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio.
     Yes, that Post-ABC poll was mostly taken before Trump's jaw-dropping slap at Sen. John McCain's war record. But Tuesday, when those poll numbers came out, the general feeling was not that Trump had destroyed himself and this was the final gasp of might-have-been before the real estate developer slumps offstage in shame. The usual, one-awkward-shout-and-Howard-Dean-is-history dynamic doesn't seem to apply to Trump, who refused to be embarrassed for slurring every American POW who ever lived, and instead busied himself slamming Lindsey Graham and giving out his cellphone number.
     Times change. Gary Hart's campaign was scuttled because of one weekend with Donna Rice; Donald Trump married Marla Maples and nobody even remembers.
     So Republicans think we deserve Trump because he represents their angry rejection of all things Washington: politicians, policy, Barack Obama. Trump, remember, was denying Obama was born in this country long after even zealots let the fantasy drop.
     Now Democrats, look into your hearts.

     We believe this country deserves Donald Trump too, don't we?
     Haven't we turned our political life into a theater of the absurd? Don't we acknowledge that shiny surface appearance trumps — no pun intended — inner merit? Hasn't money hijacked the electoral system, flowing easily around all feeble efforts to constrain it like a swollen river around a rock?
     Sure, some Democrats will embrace Trump cynically, as the quickest way to drive the GOP into a ditch, leaving a clear stretch of dry highway for Hillary Clinton to cruise into the White House.
     But we could also accept Trump as the punishment we know we deserve. For being lightweights, for never embracing what we believe with a fraction of the passion of the Fox News crowd.
     Remember, Clinton has also been running for president for the past few weeks. She might as well be campaigning on Pluto, a smudge photographed by the New Horizons spacecraft as it raced by. Trump straddles the American stage like a colossus.
     Maybe we're getting used to him. We've seen him on TV, read his books. We buy his wealth=quality logic.
     Trump doesn't need position papers. He doesn't need policy experts. He just has to be himself, pure ego, pure demagoguery. Maybe he'll blow up, maybe he'll call Taylor Swift a whore and the country will turn on him.
     Or maybe he won't. I keep thinking of Ronald Reagan, the guy we want to add to Mount Rushmore. The country forgets what a joke he was, at first, the Bedtime for Bonzo B-grade actor who paused from selling Borax to run the nuthouse of California and won GOP hearts by being more dynamic than Gerald Ford, which is not that hard to do.
     Sure, Trump might implode. But how is the GOP going to settle down with staid old Jeb Bush after Trump? It can't.
     Insulting McCain will pass; McCain's a stiff, the guy who lost to Barack Obama by 10 million votes. Not that we should hold the Trump inauguration quite yet. I'm of the opinion that Trump will self-destruct on live TV during the Aug. 6 debate. It will be his "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" moment with the whole country watching, aghast. But that might be my giddy, people-are-good-at-heart optimism.
     Right now, Trump is a win-win-win for America. Either he flames out — win — and makes the country grateful for a Jeb Bush candidacy, something I would not have previously thought possible.
     Or he takes the GOP field — win — and allows Hillary Clinton to waltz into the presidency in a cakewalk.
     Or Trumps prevails and becomes president, terrifying the world with the awful, limitless possibility that is America, raising the specter of a country lost in shallowness and worship of wealth finally getting the leader we so richly deserve.

Goodbye old tree.

    People never had trouble finding our house.
    "It's the one with the giant maple in front," I'd say, "the one with the tire swing."
    That was enough. They'd see the tree, massive, 60 feet tall and almost as wide, then behind is, hiding, our 1905 farmhouse.
    The tree was one of the oldest in Northbrook: easily 125 years old, and was perhaps the best feature about our place. A living link to the 19th century. 

    "I bought the tree," I'd tell visitors, "and the house came with it."
     In autumn, it was a mountain of orange and yellow. In winter, framed severely against the blue sky. It sprang to life every spring, and in summer was green and cool, interjecting itself between our house and the sun's fierce transit.
     The bark was thick, creased, more like armor plate, like something on a gnarled prehistoric beast.  How many hours did I sit on the front porch and just stare at it? It was age itself, serenity itself, the embodiment of permanence, of true beauty that endures forever.
     But trees, like people, do not actually live forever. And our tree was slowly dying. We noticed it years ago. We tried tending it, hired arborist after arborist to pump nutrients into it, wire together its sagging gigantic limbs—that enormous branch, pointing due south, seemed ready to crack the tree in half.  
    Every year there was more deadwood, and every year we'd cut the deadwood out and hope for a rally, or at least for the decline to stabilize, though no expert thought that possible.  It was slowly falling apart. On morning, maybe five years ago, a 10 foot section that must have weighed 200 pounds  was noticed dangling, about 20 feet up, right above the sidewalk, a sword of Damocles. I ran to the hardware store, bought sawhorses, blocked off the sidewalk and called a tree trimmer to get it out before it killed someone.
    One tree company, asked for an estimate to cull the deadwood, just turned in a proposal to remove the tree and grind out the stump. Our initial request had not made sense to him. Another guy just looked me directly in the eye and drew his finger across his throat. I felt like we were  giving CPR to a corpse.
     The arctic winter of 2013/2014 was particularly hard on it. We cleared the deadwood away, again, and hoped for  miracle. But this year it came back looking worse than ever.  The bark fell away in sheets. The ants moved in. The sap bled down the white, barkless trunk, as if the tree were weeping.
     Still, I was going to remove the deadwood again, give what was left another summer. But that one huge arm of the street shot out over the sidewalk. I wasn't just gambling with my own life, kneeling down to pick up the papers, always tossed directly underneath, I wondered if the last thing I'd hear would be a loud "crack" and I'd look up just in time to get a kisser full of tree.
     I was also gambling with the life of everybody who walked past. All the kids in the neighborhood.
     So we took it out Monday. I surprised my wife with how calmly I took it, avoiding the hoopla I might have felt compelled to indulge in. No ceremony, no ring of neighbors holding hands, encircling its enormous trunk—10 foot six inches in circumference. No poems, no tears. We did not, as we had considered, have the lumber treated and turned into furniture. That would have made it all somehow worse, by its paltriness, like erecting a sail to try to stop the world from turning. I paused at the top of the stairs Monday morning, took one last look, then headed off to work. I never even said, "Thank you." But then again, trees aren't doing what they do for the thanks. That's just how they are.
     My wife tried to put the best spin on it.
     "It's dying," she said. "Maybe it's in pain."
     Hard to tell. I don't think so. It's not as if you could ask it. Either way, it's not in pain any more.
     It helps that last year, I planted an identical sugar maple under our dying giant's dry branches. And I made a point of gathering a half a dozen seedlings that our fading Goliath had thrown off. I'll take these orphan saplings out into various spots and plant them, to give the old guy a new lease on life. That's the lesson nature teaches. Each of us dies, every tree dies too. But trees still go on. Life goes on. The new maple has a century to go, but it'll get there. I won't, but it will. Someone else will mourn its passing.

This is not my anemone

      "This is not my anemone," I said, with mock surprise. My wife looked down, at the flower bed in front of us at the Chicago Botanic Garden, read the sign I had just read, and sighed.
     A pun, and not a very good one. I pronounced it "enemy." But it's really "ane-mone."
     So worse than a pun, a mangled pun.
     Humor itself is a low form of writing—fragile, fleeting—and puns are a subchamber of that. "He who would pun would pick a pocket" Alexander Pope wrote, in the Duncyiad, perfectly capturing the sense of disrepute related to gimmicky wordplay.
     What's the appeal? I think it has something to do with connecting words. There's some kind of hardwired joy, for those unfortunates afflicted with a propensity to pun, with drawing a line from one word to another.
      Being funny is secondary. For instance, like many boys, I played with slot cars, and of course became familiar with their various little motor parts. The brushes, the armature. When I came to Chicago, seeing the street name "Armitage" conjured up "armature" in my mind. It wasn't in any way witty, so I didn't say it aloud, but I think that automatic connection, one word to another close to it, flipping meanings, is what drives the punster.    
     The link forms in mind and there's nothing to do but toss it out.  My wife, since she's usually the one around, in usually the victim.
     Or benefactor. Sometimes puns are funny. You might remember the Pope quote being spoken by Doctor Stephan Maturin in "Master and Commander," after Russell Crowe's Captain Jack Aubrey makes a pun. He points to a pair of weevils crawling on the table and asks the ship's surgeon to pick one. After some goading, Maturin picks the larger one. The captain is triumphant.
    "Don't you know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weavils?"
    That sets the table aroar, but there was a lot of drinking going on, which usually helps a pun.     
     Though sober puns can sometimes hit. My wife and I were working in the garden, it was hot, and we were thirsty. She mentioned that she had made some mint iced tea that was waiting inside.
     "I put some of this mint in it," she said, gesturing to our tub crowded with fresh mint, which has to be restrained so it doesn't take over the garden.
    "That's good, that'll make it extra-minty," I said, then paused, the the pun forming before my eyes. "As opposed to excrementy, which would be bad."
     I'm not sure whether that was funny, but she laughed, and  I laughed too. Maybe you had to be there.

Happy 90th birthday, Ed McElroy

Sharon Fountain, left, and John L. Smith, right talk with Ed McElroy at the Chicago Crusader. 

     Readers of "You Were Never in Chicago" will remember the chapter called "Driving With Ed McElroy." What they probably don't realize is that Ed is responsible for the book's existence: it was that chapter, originally an article in the Chicago issue of Granta, that prompted the University of Chicago Press to ask me to write a book about this fascinating city.
     And that is just one way that I'm in Ed's debt, for generally taking me under his wing and showing me the ropes in the city. I could not let Ed McElroy's birthday pass unheralded. He turns 90 Monday, and the big party at the Beverly Country Club is today. This is a longer version of a story that ran last Monday in the Sun-Times. 

     Ed McElroy is making his rounds.
     Natty in a pinstripe suit, the shirt and tied picked out for him by Rita Marie, his wife of 60 years, he parks his black Cadillac in a no-parking zone on Halsted Street and strides into the  office of the Bridgeport News, briefing me on the way: the editor's husband is a Chicago fireman, the owners and I share a religion.
     "The guy who owns the paper is one of yours," he tells me. "His father was a friend of mine. Really Jewish too."
     If that seems a slightly startlingly remark in this day and age, well Ed is not quite of this day and age. He's 90, or will be on July 20, a living, working slice of the Chicago way that somehow has magically escaped the claw of time, a shoe leather and handshake man in an impersonal electronic world.
     

Ed McElroy talks with Janice Racinowski at the Bridgeport New.

Ed McElroy visits the Bridgeport News
     "How many years you and I go back?" Ed asks editor Janice Racinowski, sitting in the otherwise empty office.
     "Well, let's see..." Racinowski replies. "I'm going to be 58 next year. I started when I was 15 going on 16. So, 43 years."
     There is a lot of that with Ed. He knows you, he knew your father, he sometimes knew your grandfather. I'm slightly surprised, almost incredulous, when I meet older Chicagoans who don't know Ed.
     I should admit up front that I am not writing about Ed the way I would write about any random Chicagoan. Ed's my friend, so whether hailing him on his birthday is self-indulgence or news, well, I'll let you decide. But favors to Ed have a way of rebounding well for all concerned. Last month I went down into the Thornton Quarry because Ed asked me to—I only vaguely knew the quarry was there. The story led the Sun-Times web site for most of the day, the public rapt to learn about the huge hole they've been driving by forever.
     So was I helping Ed, or was Ed helping me? Or a little of both, the truest definition of the Chicago way.
     Ed McElroy was a radio reporter for WJJD in the 1950s and 1960s, and as such has chatting up everyone from Martin Luther King to Jackie Kennedy. He has represented judicial candidates, police organizations. He visits dozens of small newspapers and brings them good news, literally.
     "We leave the bad news to the bigger papers," says Racinowski. "This is all just neighborhood news, meetings, stuff we feel people would be interested in, for their benefit."
     Some of that material comes from Ed, photographs of awards dinners, of the honor ceremonies. He drops them by, picking up stacks of paper to show his clients, always pausing to chat.
     "He's one of the nicest gentlemen you'll ever meet," says Racinowski. "Fantastic stories. I love listening to the older stories. "
     Like the story about his wedding.
     He married in 1955, two weeks after Richard J. Daley was elected. Ed had worked on Daley's unsuccessful 1948 campaign for mayor. But the outgoing mayor was his mother's friend, so some delicate negotiating was in order.
     "My mother came from 31st street, and so did Martin Kennelly," says Ed. "For eight years he was mayor, my mother knew him quite well. So Dad Daley gets elected, he's going to be an usher at my wedding. Then my mother said 'Edward, Mayor Kennelly has to be at your wedding.' I said, 'You know ma....' 'Edward, the mayor has to be at your wedding.' 'Okay mother, he'll be there.' So we worked it out. Kennelly came to the church and Dad Daley came to the reception.."
     By then he was announcing six-day bicycle races, female baseball leagues, and part of that was drumming up publicity.
     "I used to announce stock car races. An editor said, 'Ed, if you could get a picture I could run it.' People liked that I came around. then I got into more the public relations side."
     On the public relations side, Ed makes himself useful. He's driven several future presidents around Chicago.
     John F. Kennedy to name one.
     "In 1959 Dad Daley called me, said I want you to go out and pick up the senator from Massachusetts," remembers Ed. "I said what's his name? 'John Kennedy.' Don't mean a thing. What's he look like?" They ended up on Rush Street, for dinner and a few nightclubs.
      Barack Obama to name another.
     "This kid from Hyde Park gets elected state senator," says Ed. "Now I'm not in love with people from Hyde Park. That's where Despres comes from" — Leon Despres, 5th ward alderman and do-good reformer. Ed, being old Chicago, is no fan of do-good reform. "I'm not paying too much attention to Obama. [State senate president Emil] Jones says, 'Hey, be nicer to this guy.'"
     Ed told Jones, 'Well, he's one of yours, I don't like him."
     Still, Ed complied.
     "So I start being nice to him. I bump into Obama at this party, he's all alone. 'Where are you going?'' Home. 'I'll drive you home.' Drive him on a couple rounds of the district. Never a foul word. None of that cheap talk. As high class as could be. So I take him one day to Beverly Review."
 

Bob Olszweski Jr.

   "Barack Obama sat in this office right here," says Bob Olszewski Jr., the Beverly Review's editor-in-chief, in the cramped, shabby offices at 105th and Western. "Ed came by, wants us to meet this guy. 'Barry Obama!'' Yeah, whatever. Editors roll their eyes and cringe because you know, a lot of the stuff Ed sends out is PR. But there always somebody from the neighborhood or from the area, so I can justify it, and the help he has given us over at the paper ... whatever Ed McElroy wants around here, he pretty much gets."
     Ed also stops at the Crusader, at 6400 S. King Drive.
     "Ed knows everybody," says John L. Smith, the ad manager. "Ed is a great guy. Everybody in the neighborhood loves Ed. Been one of the few people who come and help every community. He does everything. He helps everybody. We have never, ever called him on anything and he did not respond. Ed has always been there. I don't remember when he wasn't."
     You don't have to ask Ed the secret to reaching 90. He has never had a drink or smoked a cigarette. Or drank a cup of coffee. Or gambled. Or chased skirts.
     "I played full court basketball three nights a week until I was 75 years old," Ed says.
     Still, at 90, there is a whiff of sadness.
     "Now almost all my friends are dead," says Ed.
     And the city has changed. Coming out of the Bridgeport News, he spies an orange parking ticket slapped on the windshield of his Cadillac.
     "A ticket on Halsted Street!" Ed marvels, as if he can't believe it.
     Still, despite the occasional indignity, Ed keeps scrambling, basically, because he always has.
     "Life is tough. My dad died when I was four years old. He died in 1930. There was my mother, with three boys, and what the hell does she do?"
     He makes both a living, and a lot of friends.
     "Ed McElroy is a fine American," says Olszweksi. "He knows life is about helping others and they'll help you....Ed came in and offered his help and he's done nothing but help us from the day we met him.... The old fashioned way. Go meet people. put the shoe leather in, get to know people, establish relationships... So there's a bunch of love out there for this man, I tell ya, a lot of people know him and love him. They don't make 'em like this anymore,"
     Olszweksi turns to me.
     "How did you meet him?" he asks.
     "I've always known Ed," I reply.