Friday, November 1, 2019

Flashback 1986: Cross-country train rider won't let life pass by



      Not everything is online. This story was published 33 years ago, and came to mind—thanks to a wetware retrieval algorithm—when a friend introduced me to the local Amtrak spokesman. I wanted to show him this, one of my favorite stories, found while taking Amtrak to Alderson, West Virginia, to interview anti-nuclear activist Jean Gump in prison. I was sitting in bar car at midnight, chatting with a conductor, and he said, "If you want a story, that guy lives on the train." "On here a lot?" I replied. "No," he said. "He LIVES on the TRAIN." So I went over and talked with the man. If this story seems long—it's three times the length of a regular column today—that's how we rolled in those days. I was pleased with how it begins almost like a camp fire story.


     If you find yourself traveling on an Amtrak train, say the Empire Builder to Seattle, or the Cardinal to Washington, D.C., or the Crescent down to New Orleans, visit the club car.
     While there, look for a man with an eye patch and shaved head, an old man, but powerfully built. If you see someone fitting that description, go up and talk to him. For this is your chance to meet a real-life legend, Loren Chester "Beetle" Bailey.
     Beetle Bailey rides the rails. At almost any minute of almost every day, he is on an Amtrak train. His days are spent looking out the window of the club car, chatting with conductors, sipping tea or a beer, thinking his thoughts. The 73-year-old Bailey makes his home on Amtrak trains, and has for most of the last nine years.
     This is a man almost constantly in motion. On Christmas Eve he left Montreal, arriving in New York City on Christmas morning. That afternoon he departed New York, reaching Chicago the next day at 8:08 a.m.
     On that visit, he stopped in Chicago for nine hours—a long time, considering that in five earlier visits to Chicago this month, he spent a combined total of only 14 hours and 22 minutes here. At 5:15 p.m. he left Chicago for Los Angeles, arriving there three days later. Two hours and 20 minutes after pulling into Los Angeles, he was headed north toward Seattle.
     "Mr. Bailey is one of the most colorful characters I've met on the rails," said Mario Patti, an Amtrak supervisor and 12-year veteran of train work. "I haven't come across anyone like Mr. Bailey. He always has a story or a song or a little harmonica playing."
     Bailey—who Amtrak personnel refer to not by his nickname, but as "Mr. Bailey"—is the sort of person who's easy to notice. Besides the patch covering his left eye, he has a three-inch heel on his right boot, both reminders of an active life fraught with injuries. He sports a bit of a pot belly now, the downside of sitting on the trains. Yet his forearms remain muscular and developed from years of manual labor. He wears a watch on each wrist, the right one set to Pacific Time, the left to Eastern Standard Time. A third timepiece, a pocket watch, rests in the breast pocket of his denim vest.
     "When you're had three grips stolen, you keep your valuables with you," Bailey says in a voice so soft a stranger might have to lean forward to hear above the clanking of the train wheels. But listening to him is well worth the effort. Within minutes of striking up a conversation—with Bailey talking amiably, asking questions, gesturing with his hands, laughing—the man with the eye patch is a stranger no more.
     "I've tried my hand at everything," he says. "A friend of mine once said: `Bailey, to have had all the jobs that you've had, you'd have to be 2,000 years old.' "
     Asked his age, Bailey pulls out a dog-eared passport. "Best ID you can get, young man." Born in 1913 in Minneapolis, Bailey began delivering newspapers on three different routes when he was 8.
     As far back as he can remember, he always has loved trains. His first paycheck was spent on model trains.
     His childhood remembrances are razor sharp, whether in describing how to make a crystal radio set out of an oatmeal box, or explaining "shinny," a form of field hockey played in Minnesota 60 years ago.
     "We used a condensed milk can for a puck," he says. "They called it 'shinny' because you were always getting whacked in the shins. Of course, sometimes a kid would get carried away and hit somebody in the nose."
     Bailey dropped out of school in ninth grade to go to work as a blacksmith's helper. Then he became a welder. Bailey's love of trains led him to work as a roundhouse helper, preparing the giant steam locomotives to make their runs. More than 50 years later, Bailey recalls the routine exactly.
     "We'd clean out the ash, start fires in the engines, throw in greasy waste, then throw coal in," he says. "When the cast iron heated up, it started expanding. The ground would be shuddering a mile around, the whole roundhouse shaking."
     In 1933 Bailey was in a motorcycle accident that shattered his hip and leg and put him in a body cast for a year. It was the first of many injuries that would dog Bailey and twist his body, but not keep him from a life of physical work or dampen his spirits.
     While working as an engineer mechanic at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, he learned to fly, taking newly repaired planes on shake-down flights with test pilots, even after another accident almost cost him his left eye.
     Bailey's love of planes and aviation joined his passion for trains. But in 1968, Bailey injured his back, and could no longer work. He retired on an Air Force disability pension, and was in and out of hospitals, for his back, his feet, his hip.
     In 1977 he got out of the hospital after a particular lengthy stay, and on an impulse he got aboard an Amtrak train, and except for another lengthy hospital stay in 1981 he has been riding ever since.
     Bailey travels light, with a small suitcase or "grip" tucked under his seat. Inside are a change of underclothes, a shirt, a razor and little else. He carries his medicines with him, to prevent theft, and keeps a trunk in the baggage compartment.
     When he set out on the rails, he discarded a lifetime's worth of possessions, except for two footlockers now in storage. He doesn't miss any of it—"I never used it; they were just memories," he says—though he does wish he had a particular photograph.
      "At Williams Field they wanted to take a picture of a P-80, and I was nearby, and they said: `Bailey, get in the picture.' So I posed in front of the plane. But I never asked for a copy of the picture."
     Using only an excursion pass, Bailey rides Amtrak nonstop. When asked about Bailey, an Amtrak official at first smugly explained that what Bailey was doing was impossible—the $250, 45-day excursion fare requires passengers to stop at no more than three destinations and cover no stretch of track twice in the same direction. Asked to check the computer, the official returned and said: "My jaw is hanging open. I've never seen anything like this before. This is incredible."
     Bailey circumvents the limits of the pass by planning his wanderings so he covers almost every route in the country, and being sure that whenever he arrives at a station, he leaves on the first train out, so it does not count as a "destination." After all this time on the rails, Bailey often knows the train schedules better than some Amtrak employees.
      Providing he always is on the next train out, Bailey can travel as long as he wants. He even has developed a game, where he tries to beat his own record of most miles in a 30-day period.
     "He's traveled 34,407 miles in 30 days," said Amtrak supervisor Patti, adding that most of that was done out West, where trains can average 90 miles an hour. With unlimited funds it would be easier, but he finds a way to do it for $250, which also is a feat. For him, this country's too small."
      Bailey thoroughly enjoys train travel—not only scenery, but also the people. Asked for his favorite memory, looking back over nine years of almost constant travel, he thinks of a time many people would have considered an inconvenience.
      "On the Sunset Limited to L.A.," he says. "We were halfway to El Rio when a freight was derailed in front of us. We got stuck behind it. We were supposed to get into L.A. at 4:30 in the morning. Now it was eight hours later. It was a train crowded with students. I played the harmonica, we played cards, we set out blankets on the shady side of the train and had a picnic. Sometimes a crowded train is a good train. At 4 in the afternoon, nine Greyhound buses were brought up to take us to L.A. Only 40 people went on the buses. I asked when (the train) would be able to go on, and they said about 7:30. I said I was staying on the train, and about 20 people got off the buses. They had to take eight buses back, empty. It turned out to be one the nicest trains I ever rode on because people got very well acquainted. It shows that sometimes under adverse circumstances, people's best sides come out."
      The same could be said about Bailey. While some might find his constant traveling sad, this is the solution to what could have been a painful, isolated retirement. Asked if he is ever tempted to get off and visit the cities he passes through, Bailey says, "Yeah, sure I do. But when you are on crutches, with a torn-up back, you just go to a hotel room and watch TV. I can't drive. I can't ride the bus. This I can enjoy."
     Bailey has a steady routine on the trains. He wakes early, sometimes takes a sponge bath in a restroom (not frequently enough for some passengers, according to conductors, who add that this is the only complaint ever heard about him). He spends most of the day in the club car, looking out the window, reading and talking to people. He'll be discussing President Reagan's most recent actions one minute, entertaining a small child, who asks if he's a pirate, another.
     At night, he has a few beers to help him sleep, then he goes back to his seat, reclines it all the way back and hooks his toes under the seat in front of him, making it "just like a traction bed."
     But perhaps the most amazing thing about Bailey is that, given his nomadic lifestyle, he is neither lonely nor sad. He has many friends among train employees and frequent train travelers, and keeps up with his three children and eight grandchildren. However, he and his wife split up in 1977 when he went on the rails.
      "He's a rather complex man," said his sister Fern Reeves, 65, who lives in Paso Robles, Calif. "Although he plays the harmonica for the children on the train, he's well versed in classical music and he was studying to become a concert pianist at one time.
      "I suppose (he gets lonely). Everyone who travels by himself must be lonely at one time or another, but he likes it and he knows all the train men. He gets letters - I get them here for him - and his friends will say: `Gee, Chet, we haven't heard from you in couple of years, are you still out there?'
      "I'm sure he was in a great deal of pain throughout his life. He comes from a family—we're all kind of stoic; Chet and I talk about this. My mother was kind of stoic. My father said only babies cry. We've learned to endure pain, and Chet certainly did. Sometimes people who encounter him have no idea the kind of pain he is in most of the time. He's a remarkable man.
      "He'd be perfectly happy if he dies there on the road. He is well-liked, helpful and keeps the children entertained, which always makes train men happy," said Reeves, a retired schoolteacher planning to join him for a stint before she begins traveling the rails in Europe.
      For Bailey, he looks back on his life with satisfaction.
     "I had a chance to go to Vienna, to Paris. I blew it all," he says. "That's life. I still like that music—Chopin, Mussorgsky - I used to have a Walkman and some tapes, but they were stolen in my last grip. I never made a lot of money; I just had a lot of fun."
      But despite Bailey's carefree attitude, or perhaps because of it, he often has a deep impact on the people he meets. Amtrak's Patti, whenever he has a moment or two free, likes to sit and chat with Bailey.
      "He reads the latest books. He has knowledge in all sorts of directions—music, literature, mechanics, gold panning," said Patti. "He seems to be a happy guy. He's happy doing this. It's not sad for him. I've always respected him, and never had any problems. He's always been very courteous—someone who deserves respect.
      "The thing is, in a few years, these kind of people will not be around anymore. He is one of the last of his generation. He's just that type of a person, who knows a lot because he has experienced a lot. I'm definitely glad I met him, and I'm glad that I probably will meet him again."
                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 31, 1986

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Facebook bans commercial fraud but welcome political lies


                             The Fairy Queen Takes an Airy Drive by Richard Doyle (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 


    If I decide to sell faeries, and buy ads on Facebook, describing the delightful woodland nymphs that could be yours for only $19.99, plus shipping and handling, customers would complain after they received their empty jars, and Facebook will then take down my faerie ads and refuse my money in the future.
    Commercial fraud they understand.
    But when the Republican takes out deceptive ads, filled with distortions and outright lies, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is becoming second only to Rupert Murdoch as a media enabler of the GOP plot against America, has deemed this sort of chicanery to be free speech, and will not turn it away.
    That's wrong, and to show how wrong, another big social media company, Twitter, announced Wednesday that it will refuse all political ads leading up to the 2020 election, rather than try to sort through what is fact and what is fiction. You know you're in trouble when you don't have the high standards exhibited by Twitter.  If they kept to their own rules about hate speech, they'd deactivate the president's account tomorrow.
    As if to underline the ethical correctness of the move, Donald Trump immediately condemned it as "very bad." For him. Very bad for him. Trump knows anything that Twitter's action limits the ability of the Russians to spread deception on his behalf. That isn't good for his re-election chances, which, like his 2016 election, is based on falsehood passing for truth among those who no longer care about the distinction. 
    And in case you're confused, remember the First Amendment relates to the government suppressing speech. Businesses are free to conduct business as they like. When a TV station refuses a political ad because it is morally offensive, or deceptive, that is not a violation of free speech. And as with Twitter, when television has higher ethical standards than you do, you know something is wrong.
    Strange that Facebook would wink at political deception while policing the commercial version, because the former is far, far worse than the latter.
    Really, what is the harm of the faery scam? A bunch of gullible people are out $20, plus shipping and handling. They get an attractive jar, with holes punched in it so the supposed faeries can breath. They learn a lesson, maybe. The country is not harmed.
    Compare that to political fraud, which helps allow the once respected United States of American to be led by a reality TV show host and confirmed fraud. It gives a free hand to the Russians and any nation that cares to to meddle in our elections. Why should politicians be permitted to broadcast literally any lie on Facebook, if they have the bucks to meet the bill? It isn't right.

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Loved or hated, candy corn is as Chicago as deep dish pizza

  
     This column was so much fun, I had trouble stopping—the first draft was twice as long as could fit into the paper. And still two essential aspects were left out: I had hoped to consider candy corn as an iconic design, an instantly recognizable image. And I wanted to point out that the hidden subtext of all the hate about candy corn online illustrates the frictionless, consequence-free toxicity of the internet. Next time.

     At least candy at Valentine’s Day makes sense. Love is sweet; you woo the object of your affection with a big heart-shaped box of chocolate.
     But what’s with Halloween? The ocean of candy ladled out Thursday to an army of children. Bribes? An echo of when Tom and Huck would soap your windows if you didn’t satisfy them after they rang your doorbell? Rewards? You did such a good job putting on that Spiderman mask that I’m giving you a Snickers?
     Controversies linger because they have depth, layers beneath the surface that sustain them over the years. For instance, I believe the whole you’re-not-a-Chicagoan-if-you-put-ketchup-on-your-hot-dog nonsense is not really about the mix of condiments atop a frank, but an unconscious parody of the get-off-my-block bigotry that Chicagoans used to casually exhibit. Can’t do that anymore but there are always hot dogs.
     Ditto for candy corn, the white, orange and yellow triangular treats that proliferate in October.
     For years the Internet has echoed with derision of candy corn. And not mild criticism. Full-throated condemnation.
     BuzzFeed’s 2013 list of “19 Things That Taste Better Than Candy Corn,” included chalk, urinal cakes and earwax.
     “Deodorant-flavored earwax nuggets,” Deadspin raged in 2014. “Wee little warhead-shaped misery pellets.”


To continue reading, click here.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

There are a lot of sane ones too


    Most people aren't nuts. Most people are sane enough. And smart. So it occurred to me Sunday, sharing yet another Alan P. Leonard letter—the sixth—that I was perhaps doing my readers a disservice by being a valve where only the toxically vindictive can pass through to join the cyber wordstorm.
     Actually, it didn't occur then. But later, cleaning off my desk. Sometimes the thing devolves to a mass of business cards, electronic cords, receipts, clippings, rubber bands and discarded Post-It Notes, and I have to just dive in and start filing and flinging into the garbage can.
     There, I usually find a letter or three, so interesting and well-reasoned that I set it aside to contemplate at my leisure and then answer in some witty, measured way, but invariably never do.
    Such as this, from David Stein, who has been writing to me for years. He offers some worthwhile advice—"QUIT FACEBOOK"—supporting it in a strong and articulate fashion. "Really, what would happen if you opted out?"
     I don't know, I'd ... ah ... disappear. Actually, the image he offers, "the Untouchable of Northbrook," with his begging bowl and the neighbors averting their eyes, sounds about right. This business is all about clicks, right now, and Facebook is the biggest pond where we fish for them. Anyway, there's some good lines in this, a bit of Orwell, and I felt guilty just pitching it after it sat on my desk for ... ulp ... two years, judging by his mention of naked women, which I think is a reference to this column about Howard Tullman's art collection, which got banned from Facebook for violating community standards by reproducing a photo of the risque artworks I was talking about. Anyway, it's a good read. Thanks to Dave, and to all the readers who take the time to write in, and deserve a response, even though I don't always have the time to send one.


Monday, October 28, 2019

Trump doesn’t know Chicago, but Chicago knows Trump





     Alice Qiu works in a law firm. Yaraneli Otero is a sixth grader at Thorp Elementary. Roger Green is homeless on the West Side. Desmond Sullivan is a plant operation engineer at the University of Illinois . . .
     Four of the 2.7 million people living in Chicago, the third-largest city in the United States. A complicated metropolis that President Donald Trump tries to reduce to a caricature, a buzz phrase for, take your pick: epidemic crime, failed Democratic leadership, unwise immigration, ineffective gun control or some toxic combination of all of the above.
     “The city of Chicago,” he once said, whipping up a rally in Florida. “What the hell is going on in Chicago?”
     Trump doesn’t wait for an answer. He doesn’t want an answer, batting away any reality in conflict with the comic-book Midwest Gotham City of his imagination.
     But with the president set to visit the actual Chicago, our Chicago, on Monday for the first time since being elected — to talk to a police chiefs’ convention and squeeze money from deep-pocketed backers — this seems a good moment to welcome him with a healthy portion of the one thing his administration is most starved for — the truth, served up by those in the best position to tell it: the people of Chicago.
     “Chicago is beautiful. I like Chicago,” said Qiu, who came here from China a year ago and hopes to remain. “That’s why I stay here. It’s hard for Chinese people to come here and stay here, now, because of Trump.”
     Otero is an 11-year-old girl but knows how Trump could be a better leader.
     “He needs to accept people,” she says, marching in a CTU protest with her mother. “It doesn’t matter the race. To learn to accept everybody. People have emotions and they have feelings. He needs to know that.”
     Good manners keep Green from revealing what he would tell the president.
     “You don’t want to know,” he said with a laugh, wishing Trump understood this is a city of “people living, struggling.”
     Sullivan, 58, of East Ukrainian Village, has only a few words for Trump, but they’re choice.
     “Be a man,” he says. “Men don’t lie. Men tell the truth.”


To continue reading, click here.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

The Era of Contempt VI

    How long can genius maintain its spark? Can any person, being mortal, be expected to top all previous effort, time and time again? Is it even fair of us to even hope it might be possible? No, of course not. A miracle cannot be demanded with regularity.
    But people are greedy, and it was with a thrill of expectation that I lifted an envelope from the mail and recognized the Tinley Park peel-and-stick return address label of Alan P. Leonard, and held my breath at the thought of what wonders must wait within. 
     Regular readers of course remember his introduction to these pages, his March 10, 2018 defense of "our wonderful president." A star was born. "A masterpiece of unintentional humor," one critic raved.  Not to forget his four subsequent installments, a body of work I labeled "The Era of Contempt." You can—indeed, you must—catch up with them here and here  and here—his classic attack on Michelle Obama, a racist excrescence one can hardly believe exists in the real world—and here, his most recent symphony in words, inspired by a passion for Trump, now elevated from "wonderful" to "glorious." What's next? Gloria in excelsis Trump.
     In light of those marvels, well, what can I say of his latest opus? Even noble Homer dozed. And while Mr. Leonard does reprise a few of his trademark flourishes: the misspelled name, the grammatical flub in the midst of calling for editorial rigor—"Does anyone review your articles and verify there accuracy?" You can see why I can't help but cherish the man—the seething contempt, the whole somehow never comes together.  It's so ... unspecific. he doesn't take time to articulate the supposed errors and departures from fact—so precious to a man of his caliber—that have moved him to once again take pen and floral stationery in hand. 
    Still, credit where due. He has produced another letter for our times, which the Republicans have has made into being far more about abuse than argument or correction. His points are at best allusions. Nothing like his previous installment's demand: "What do all of 'God's mistakes' have to be proud of?" The subtext of course being that he, Alan P. Leonard, is the self-appointed editor of God, and can confidently red pencil His errors. 
     But enough preface. Perhaps, spoiled by past masterworks, I have become overly-critical. You can judge for yourself. Has the craftsman entered into a decline that is the inevitable fate of a prodigy? We can only hope that he is merely tired. Sapped by his labors. That is certainly the prerogative of genius. And remember, he has disappointed before; his third letter also prompted me to wonder, "Is this up to his high standards for nitwittery?" Perhaps this is merely another dip, a fallow period, a retrenchment, the natural variance that even the artist at peak talent is liable to experience. A rest, a lacuna before he comes surging back, full strength, blooming anew, as he did after that third letter, once again the Alan P. Leonard that we have come to know and love. I'm sure you, as I, will be able to greet this latest missive not with disappointment, but with the proper sense of gratitude of those who have already been given so much. We must be thankful for this latest message, limited though it may be, and not demand too much of the man.






Saturday, October 26, 2019

We're going to need a bigger tent.



     Just when you get comfortable with something, it changes. That's life. I had wrapped my mind and my tongue around LGBTQ—for "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (or Questioning)"—when along comes this new designation: LGBTQIA, the last two letters standing for Intersex and Asexual, which I actually knew, perhaps thanks to osmosis, though not with enough confidence to do away with a quick check online. Plus I was challenged to parse one from the other. 
     "Intersex" is a more physical term.
    "Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male," says the Intersex Society of North America, which should know. "For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside."      
     There's quite a bit more, and if you want the details, you can find them here.
     "Asexual" is lack o
f sexual attraction to others. I might volunteer that this seems a sad way to go through life, but then that is exactly the kind of judgment that spurs churches to put out signs behind little red picket fences. Though I leap to point out that I'm not at all against including them in whatever I was doing: beach parties, book clubs, bowling leagues, whatever. (Dances, well, they'd kind of just sit there, right?) I think people get confused when it comes to differing between inclusion and acceptance. I'll never accept anti-vaxxers, but they can ride the bus if they've got $2.50. Were I a baker working in a public establishment, I would feel obligated to bake a cake commemorating the 25th anniversary of an asexual couple not being drawn to each other. Tolerance doesn't mean you have to like everything; I hate egg salad, but I'm not trying to stop anybody from eating it, so long as I don't have to join in. Ditto for asexuality.

    Maybe I'm showing my age, but my primary concern regarding this topic is fear of having to adjust to an-ever growing acronym of acceptance. Before you know it, we'll be adding handicapped persons and immigrants and those who go to furry conventions—LBGTQIAHPITWGTFC—and the term will start to look like the name of a village in Wales.
     Yes, this is serious stuff, with the U.S. Supreme Court at this moment deciding if you can fire anybody in the quintogrammaton (bad pun, a play on one of my favorite obscure words, tetragrammaton, or YHWH, the unutterable Hebrew name of God). It's too easy to be light-hearted when the topic is the rights of others. Maybe because those who drape themselves in the mantle of religious piety, using their faith as a club to beat down others they've never met, I just can't align my mouth into the same grim set as theirs in the name of humanity's glorious spectrum of possibility. 
     A little irreverence might even help this brave new world go down a little more easily with the general population, which can be good at heart and well intentioned and still sometimes feel like a high hurdler going over a never-ending string of hurdles.
     Maybe we could find a general term. Repurpose "weird" the way a spectrum of homosexuality rescued "queer" from being a slur. "We welcome the weird" is a sign I'd put on my front lawn, though my neighbors might mutter with a significant look in our home's direction that they've been doing that for years.
     Good for them. Including people is broadening. Being asexual has its advantages, I suppose. None of those sticky situations which we attracted-to-folks types stumble into during the course of our lives. No need to hurriedly gather your clothing and fling yourself naked out the window when the hubby unexpectedly arrives home from his business trip.  Not that I've ever found myself in a situation like that, mind you, though I'm sure if I put my mind to it I could recall a moment or two better left sealed in the vault of memory. I hope you accept that, because you kinda have to.