As Trump returns, be a Martin Marty, not a Billy Graham

Martin Marty in 2017

     Faith gets good press. But its real value depends on what precisely you put your faith in, and how you use it. As I've said before: religion is a hammer. You can hit someone in the head with it. Or build them a house. Same hammer. Your choice.
     Take two of the most prominent Chicago theologians of the past half-century, Rev. Billy Graham and professor Martin E. Marty. Each used their similar faiths to take vastly different approaches to the crises of their turbulent era.
     Graham, a minister ordained in the Southern Baptist church, used his popularity as a ticket into the White House. There he curled up in the lap of power and became the personal pastor to 11 commanders in chief, starting with Harry Truman and running through every president up to Barack Obama. He baptized Dwight D. Eisenhower and spoke at the funeral of his golfing buddy, Richard Nixon.
     He cast himself as a kind of spiritual adviser. But was really just a hallelujah chorus, offering moral validation. Graham sidestepped civil rights. He sneered at Vietnam War protesters. “It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something," he reassured his pal, Lyndon Johnson.
     You don't need the perspective of years to see Graham ducking the great ethical challenges of his day. Martin Marty, a Lutheran religious scholar, saw exactly who Graham was.
     “A man in transit between epochs and value systems, he has chosen to disengage himself and distract us by shouting about the end of history,” he wrote in the Sun-Times in 1965.
     Marty's pulpit was far smaller than Graham's. But he used it vigorously to advocate for civil rights. When Martin Luther King personally invited him to Selma, he recruited colleagues and went. He not only opposed the war in Vietnam, but founded an organization, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, to do so.
     You can gauge the impact of each man by what he left behind. Graham left us with his son, Franklin, perhaps the coldest stone hater calling himself a man of God on the American scene today.
     Marty left us with the University of Chicago's Martin Marty Center, which works to encourage interfaith dialogue, viewing religion as something that should bring together people of different faiths, not drive them apart.
     Marty warned against acting as the "servant of a God of prey whose goal it is to annex and enslave."
     He reminds us:
     "Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive. To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it."
     I had lunch with Marty in 2017, when his book on Martin Luther's 95 Theses was published, and reached out to him to plumb his thoughts now. But he'll be 97 in a couple of weeks and avoids the public eye he used so well for so long. No matter, his voluminous writings — he is the author of more than 50 books — provide what we need.

To continue reading, click here.

Myths of Telephone History

      While waiting for the train downtown Friday, I noticed this bulletin from the Highland Park Historical Society, which is holding a commemoration of Elisha Gray Sunday night. I hadn't thought about Gray in years, and would certainly be there to honor him, but a prior commitment takes me to the city. Still, I spent a long time studying the man for my "Complete & Utter Failure" book, where he appears in the chapter on bad timing, "Myths of Telephone History."

     History is much more complex than the pap they feed you in school. Think of it as an onion. The outer, tough brown surface is the outline narrative we are all familiar with — what Voltaire called "the lie agreed upon."
     To get to the inner, fragrantly-human layers of the onion, where missteps and bungling and treachery and bad timing lie you sometimes have to peel. It takes time and thought, and most people don't bother — they have a hard enough time keeping the famous figures and buzzwords straight — but it is an exercise that, nevertheless, should be tried at least once.
     Consider the telephone.
     Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We learn this in grade school. He was a teacher of the deaf, with a big beard, and he invented the telephone. After he invented it, the first words spoken over the telephone were "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Everyone knows this.
     The date was March 10, 1876. The reason Bell needed Watson was because he had spilled sulfuric acid on his clothes. The acid was being used to alter an electric current in response to shifting sound waves, the central element in the telephone Bell was using, a telephone he did not invent, but which was described the month before in an application registered at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. by Chicago inventor Elisha Gray.
     And now we begin to peel.
     Gray, an electrician who founded the Western Electric Company, is one of those shadow figures of history, a person whose life comes into focus only when the light of failure is shone on the pages of the past. his telephone invention could have — perhaps should have — placed him among the pantheon of immortal American inventors: Fulton, Morse, Edison, Gray.
     Certainly Gray appeared to be the right man to invent the telephone. He had eleven patents to his name, all for improvements in the telegraph, and his Western Electric Company had the backing of the powerful Western Union, the biggest company in America. His people saw the telephone coming. In a New York Times article of July 10, 1874, detailing Gray's "musical telegraph," a device conveying tones over wires in the fashion of an electric organ, a Western Union official predicted that "in time the operators will transmit the sound of their own voice over the wires."
     They did, and quickly too. Within five years people would be paying to talk over a phone Gray had designed, but not over a phone that hadGray's name on it or put cash into Gray's pocket. Gray suffered a single slip, a stroke of bad timing on his march to glory, and it was enough to sidetrack hm into oblivion and ridicule. He is remembered today chiefly for his moment of lateness, a cameo appearance in what is, at first glance, one of the more astounding coincidences of history.
     On February 14, 1876, Gardiner Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell's silent business partner, visited the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., and filed a patent application for "Improvements in Telegraphy," Bell's modest term for a transmitter/receiver that could send a voice over electrical wires — a telephone.
     Approximately two hours later, an attorney named William D. Baldwin visited the same office and filed a caveat for Gray, describing a device for "transmitting vocal sounds or conversations telegraphically" (a caveat was an announcement of a pending patent application). The filing fee was $10.
     The Patent Office had a policy for handling two conflicting claims. On February 19, it issued what was called an interference, meaning that both applications were frozen for ninety days to give the examiners time to weigh the merits of the variou claims.
     The two devices were quite similar. Bell's used a membrane that when vibrated by sound waves, moved a strip of iron through the field of an electromagnet, converting the sounds into an undulating electric current. Gray's was a little more elegant. Vibration of the membrane changed the depth of immersion of rod in acidified water, varying the current (most people don't realize that it was not the element receiving or broadcasting the voice which was the radically new part of the telephone, but the smoothly varying electrical current, as opposed to the simple on/off of the telegraph circuit).

     Neither man had actually conveyed speech through his device. Gray hadn't built his. Bell had, but his assistant Thomas Watson had only been able to make out "tones" from it. But in keeping with the standard procedure of their time — and ours — each had bolted off to the Patent Office to try to secure the right to make great gobs of money off his invention a soon as the idea had been conceived.
     How did these two men — one in Boston, one in Chicago — end up inventing similar devices with identical purposes and presenting them to be patented on the same day?
     Remember, neither Gray nor Bel was a solitary genius wrenching his brilliant creation from his unique intellect. It didn't work like that. The telephone was a by-product, gradually extracted from the telegraph. Neither Bell nor Gray had set out to bring the art of disembodied conversation to an eagerly waiting world. Party lines, call-forwarding, telemarketing and Rock Hudson/Doris Day moves were well beyond imagining. In fact, there was no perceivable public desire to speak to people who were far away. The public was still pinching itself in wonder over the miracle of the telegraph, invented just thirty-two years earlier.
     That was the problem with the telegraph — it was too popular. people wanted to send too many messages over the fragile web of wires crisscrossing the country, since a line could handle only one message at a time. Message requests were routinely backing up. There were delays....
     When more information is considered, the coincidence of Bell's and Gray's devices colliding at the U.S. Patent Office seems less and less startling, more like two runners crossing the finish line at the same time than a bizarre twist of fate.
     As soon as the interference was announced by the Patent Office, Bell hotfooted it to Washington to try to smooth things over in person. Gray stayed in Chicago — perhaps a fatal error.
     Bell found himself in a conference with Zenas F. Wilber, the patent examiner. And this is the core of the onion — what passed between Bell and Wilber has been the subject of great speculation and debate. Bell later admitted that he asked Wilber about the nature of the conflict, and Wilber pointed to a line in Bell's patent application suggesting the possible use of liquid to vary the current. Even this is suspect, as the line is handwritten in the margin of the original application. Bell claims that he forgot to include it in the text. But suspicion lingers — perhaps unjustly — since Wilber was a deaf-mute,well acquainted with Bell and, just maybe sympathetic to his cause. They could have added the line on the spot, conjuring up the truism "Behind every great fortune is a great crime." Wilber later admitted that he also mistakenly showed Gray's application to Bell, which, if not a great crime, was certainly a breach of ethics.
     By the time patent No. 174465 was granted to Bell, on March 7, he had constructed a working phone — based not on the iron-bar model described and pictured in his newly issued patent, but on Gray's liquid model, at best only alluded to in Bell's application in the handwritten addendum. This was the telephone Bell used in calling Watson, the telephone he displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that summer to an awestruck audience, including Elisha Gray, who, not realizing that Bell was using his device, slunk off in defeat.

The Chicago Cultural Center

 

    "I've never been in there," said my friend, as we walked past the Chicago Cultural Center Friday after breakfast at Taco Lulu on Adams Street.
     "Let's fix that," I said, steering us inside. "Biggest Tiffany dome in the world."
     A completely understandable lapse. Originally the main branch of the Chicago Public Library, the Cultural Center, at Randolph and Michigan, has always struggled to find a purpose — generally home to sincere temporary displays of artwork by young persons, it comes off as a gorgeous box with nothing inside. Maybe because nothing on display is anywhere near as finely wrought as the building itself. Currently it has puppets related to the International Puppetry Festival, going on now. Some quite nice. But still lumps of paper mache set next to to shimmering glass and tile. 

     Of course I told her the story of Richard J. Daley's wife, Sis, saving the building in 1972, saying, in essence, "The hell you will," after her husband had announced it would be torn down.

     I routinely pass through only because I walk around the Loop a lot, the Cultural Center is a full city block, north to south, and you can cut through and keep warm on cold days.     
     If breakfast at a taco place seems odd, the plan had been to meet at Lou Mitchell's on Jackson. But the restaurant is closed for vacation until Jan. 22 — their right, of course, but they don't mention it on the web site. I love Lou Mitchell's — it's 100 years old, great food, thick raisin toast — but c'mon. It's also closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and I tend to forget that odd Tuesday closing. I think I've been turned away from Lou Mitchell's more than I've managed to eat there. 

The circle with a Y inside it is called "The Municipal Device" and represented the city — the Y 
representing the branching river. The CPL is for Chicago Public Library.

The legacy of Martin Luther King in Chicago: "to fight on, against all odds''

 

Shermann Dilla Thomas

     Martin Luther King Jr. was a Chicagoan. He lived at 1550 S. Hamlin with his wife and their four children. Coretta Scott King remembered the apartment building as "dingy ... no lights in the hall, one dim bulb at the head of the stairs," with a hallway reeking of urine.

      They moved in Jan. 26, 1966, and lived there, off and on, for about a year. Long enough to count — though I suppose that depends on who's doing the counting and how expert that person is at the advanced Chicago art of welcoming in the people they think belong, and keeping out those who, in their estimation, don't.
     With King's time here in mind and his holiday uncomfortably sharing Monday with the second inauguration of Donald Trump, I visited his old stomping ground by hitching a ride on a King-focused private bus tour that TikTok historian Shermann Dilla Thomas conducted for United Way of Metro Chicago.
     If there's one thing that sets Thomas's tours apart — alongside his deep knowledge and warm personality — is that the past never stays past. Right off the bat, he drew a line from King's time to our own.
     "Today we're here to talk about Dr. King's time in Chicago," Thomas began. "The thing that brings him to Chicago is housing. It's crazy to think that almost 60 years later we're still dealing with housing issues related to segregation, inadequate housing for the poor, lack of public housing, absentee landlords, people who hold onto vacant lots and dilapidated properties and don't do anything about them."
     The tour stopped at the Stone Temple Baptist Church, a former Romanian synagogue on West Douglas Boulevard.
     "This is where King did a ton of time doing his Chicago Freedom campaign," said Thomas. "Every year the folks connected with Skokie's Holocaust Museum build sukkahs in North Lawndale to continue the tradition. That's how you build community."
     The best and worst of the city freely mix — Thomas pointed out the beelove cafe, a sparkling facility featuring local honey, directly across the street from the Chicago Police Department's notorious "Black Site."
     "Thousands of Black and brown kids have been taken in that building without due process and held for days being tortured," Thomas said.
     Next stop, the old Sears Homan Square campus.

     "This was an anchoring space," Thomas said. "What makes them leave? King's assassination. ... Dr. King was the powderkeg. King gets assassinated, there were riots here, and Sears decides too take this expansive campus and put it all in one building, the Sears Tower

To continue reading, click here.







."

"Soup is too important"

The photo I need is the finished soup, hot and ready and in the bowl, heaped with chicken 
and carrots. But every time that was before me, I forget myself and began spooning it into my maw.

   
     Can you be offended by a grocery list? I can, though immediately realized that the ability to do so is not a good thing. But rather, a bad thing, an occasion for self-improvement. So let's begin, and own the sin.
     Last weekend, my wife was slammed by whatever virus is going around — not COVID, she took the test. But enough to confine her to bed, wiped out. I busied myself making tea and urging toast, unsuccessfully. She came down with whatever it was on Friday, slept all day Saturday.  But by Sunday had recovered enough to start issuing instructions. I had to go to the store to get essentials and "food for the week." She texted me a list. Kleenex, since she was burning through the last box. Skim milk. And then the item that raised my dandor: "Chicken noodle soup (low salt if possible)."
     Chicken noodle soup? Canned chicken noodle soup? What kind of person does she think I am? Is that what we're reduced to? Are we animals?
     The first thing she had done when she took ill was dig her homemade chicken soup out of the freezer. I boiled noodles — that she trusted me with — and saw that she spooned it into herself. But there was only one container and that was soon gone, in the first hours of her illness. Now we were to follow it up, drive the sickness off with ... what? Progresso? Out of a can? A canned soup?
     "I'll make you soup," I announced.
     Suddenly the haze of suffering lifted and she looked at me, clear-eyed and lucid. Her hard expression was like a blurry image snapping into focus. No words were spoken, but it was as if she said: "Soup? You? You'll make me soup? Is that what you're saying? Really? What do you take me for, a fool?"

      That doubled my resolve. Soup. How hard could it be? You pour water in a big pot, right? You put in, ah, the soup ingredients. Chicken must be important here — can't make chicken soup without it, right? I know that. You boil it. The result is soup. 

     Off to Sunset Foods. I got baby carrots and onions and celery — I forgot the parsnip, but those turn out to be dispensable. Back home I dug some of the vast supplies of chicken out of the freezer in the basement.
     Suddenly, she was downstairs, in the kitchen. The virus held at bay. She helped the selection of a pot — you can't just use any pot, apparently. The right pot selected, she vetted the chicken pieces to go into the pot. Not that you can just put them in — which I was about to do. No, you rinse the frozen chicken first to defrost it a bit. Separate the pieces. I almost said, "Won't they separate when you start boiling the water?" But something told me not to question the master. Nobody interrupts a master cello class with, "Mr. Casals, don't you just pull the bow back and forth over the strings?"
     What I said was:
     "I can make soup."
     "No you can't," she shot back. "Soup is too important."
     I peeled the onion; she checked that I had indeed thoroughly removed the outer brown layer and hadn't half-assed it. Into the pot. She handed me a bag of baby carrots and I poured them in. Mistake.
     "Wait a second," she said, as the carrots tumbled into the pot. Were these not the baby carrots already in the fridge? No, the new ones I just bought. I'd left them sitting on the counter. To put into the soup. She scowled — we should have used the old carrots first. I looked into the pot, wondering if I should begin plucking the carrots out, one by one. She read my mind — 34 years of marriage — and said no, they had to remain now, as they had touched the raw chicken.
     "I thought they looked too bright," she muttered, unhappily. I made a mental note to eat the half bag of baby carrots in the fridge, with hummus. They were now somehow my responsibility.

     I was allowed to cut the celery, but as I did, I felt her eyes upon me, as if she was wondering, "Can he do this right?" The pieces passed muster. And I could put the pot under the tap and turn on the water.
     She hadn't instructed me to get fresh garlic, so the shameful strategum of powdered garlic would have to do. Then there was the matter of salt. She grabbed a big blue box of rough Kosher salt and poured some into an open palm, then dumped that into the pot.
     "How much salt?" I asked, trying to keep myself involved in the process. 

     "You saw, right?" she replied. "Not too much. Not too little. Just enough."
     For the record, late in the soup making, she would allow me to taste the soup I was supposedly making, and I would add more salt. My wife couldn't taste anything.
     The soup cooked. There were more steps. The flame was adjusted. I boiled a pot of extra wide Manischewitz egg noodles — they are kept apart from the soup, added before serving, to keep them intact and to cool the soup for eating.
      We ate the soup for supper. It wasn't quite her soup — not as rich. Maybe that missing parsnip. But it wasn't bad either — and we consumed bowl after bowl. Dinner plans for Monday night were scrapped because we realized we still had soup left, and two bowls are a meal. The rest we froze as insurance against future illness.
      Only after did I realize that my making the soup had not been the welcome act of a concerned husband trying to nurse his ill wife back to health, but a species of rudeness, prodding a sick woman to get up and make us soup. I would rush to reassure her that, of course it goes without saying that my soup wasn't 100 percent — it needed dark meat — but what she generously deemed, "perfectly fine soup." Honestly, I don't believe we'll ever speak of it  again. The soup, for want of a better term, that I attempted to make is in the freezer, and this near-soup will be consumed at some point, probably to ward off the cold of February. But soon after that I expect to find the freezer magically jammed with plastic containers of actual, properly-prepared soup, deep yellow broth, so we are never again caught short in a time of sickness and forced to take desperate measures.

Ed Kelly at 100: Living among old friends

 

     "This is what I'm going to be buried in, right here." says Ed Kelly, of the Marine Corps blanket on the sofa behind him. Kelly was a gunner on a Navy Helldiver during World War II.

     Ed Kelly answers the door of his home in Lincolnwood.
     "Let me show you a few things. Muhammad gave me this here," he says, pointing to a clenched bronze hand. "This is his fist. He gave me that years ago. I was like a father to him. The twins are my nieces. We were close. I've got pictures of him in the basement."
     That he does. Many pictures. Being close to Ali, the greatest athlete of the 20th century, is the sort of thing a man can take pride in. As are photographs with the powerful and famous. Kelly, 100, former Democratic Party slate-maker and czar of the Chicago Park District, in that order, has much to be proud of.
     Readers might recall we chatted for Kelly's 90th birthday, when he rewarded my interest by firmly planting a harpoon into the side of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
     "Rahm's not a Chicago guy," Kelly said then. "He'll never be a Chicago guy."
     Troublemaker that I am, my fondest hope for this visit is a reprise. I baited hooks with the two mayors since. Nary a nibble.
     Kelly's centennial was in August — he waved off media inquiries, then. But longtime press agent Bernie DiMeo persuaded him to open up.
     "This is Richard J., fishing with me." Kelly says, of a photo with the first Mayor Daley. "He called me. He said, 'Get a boat; let's go fishing.'"
     Not that the past is all hanging with mayors — tragedy will find even the most connected insider.
     "This is my grandson, killed in Texas," he said. "Three Niles motorcycle police officers were trying to raise money. This is my Joey."
     Sgt. Joseph Lazo, 39. His photo is everywhere — in frames, on pillows.
     "A drunk driver ..." Kelly says. "He was like a son to me. We raised him. I've been going to the grave for four and a half years, for Joey and my wife. I go every Monday."
     Marilyn Kelly, 94; 76 years of marriage.
     "I lose Joey, then two years later I lose my wife," he says.
     What's it like to be 100?
     "Hard to believe I've reached 100," Kelly says. "Everywhere I go, I have doctors and nurses asking, 'What did you do?' I can't say I've lived different. I'm not a food guy. I've never been a drinker. Never smoked."
     We go into the basement. The bar seats six. One hundred photos are framed on the wall if there is one, and we pause before many.
     "Here's Papa and with Janie," he says, pointing to a photo of Bears founder George Halas and Jane Byrne. "Here's Stevie Zucker. Here's Gale Sayers. Jesse White — I've known Jesse since he was 15 years old."
     I point out an impossibly young Paul Simon, the former senator.

To continue reading, click here.

Fox trot

 

     In the nearly 25 years I've lived in Northbrook, my yard has been visited by coyote and deer, hawks and owls, even a pair of puddle-paddling ducks, who took up residence in wet weather.
     But never a fox. I heard one once — rather, heard the screams of the rabbits I assumed were being slaughtered by a fox. And seen a few down the block over the years. But Sunday one showed up in the backyard, in broad daylight. Alas, none of the photos I snapped were as clear as the image he, or she, presented, strolling along First Avenue. Trees kept getting in the way.
     "Maybe he'll polish off some squirrels before he leaves," I said to the wife. We have been plagued by squirrels this winter, pushing the birds aside and shimmying into the feeder. The old defenses don't work. I think the things are learning.

     Back to foxes, which I had never really considered before. For a moment, I couldn't quite place where in the animal kingdom foxes belong. Are they relatives of dogs? Or maybe cats — they do have a certain, sleek, feline quality. 

     No, not with that snout. They must be doggish, a hunch the Encyclopedia Britannica quickly confirms in its "Dogs" entry: "All dogs belong to the family Canidae, along with their relatives — wolves, jackals, and foxes." Even then, they don't quite belong to that trio, do they? Foxes have a quality wolves and jackals lack — a sympathy, their famous cunning maybe. Wolves are hungry, coyotes mangy, foxes sly. Though physically, the Britannica sets foxes apart this way: "Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the fox family, as compared with wolves and coyotes, is the eyes. They are yellow with elliptical pupils. all other canids, including dogs, have round pupils." 

     Didn't get close enough to look into the fox's eyes, which is probably a good thing.

     Foxes are solitary creatures — they do not travel in packs, and are monogamous. The OED ends its definition with this curious line, "Preserved in England and elsewhere as a beast of the chase" as if being hunted were somehow elemental to the species. More likely it's elemental to a dwindling crumb of the British upper crust.

     Here is where I would normally plunge into the etymology of "fox." There certainly are enough slang usages, related to cleverness, of course, to drunkenness, to swords. The foxtrot dance is not named after the animal, but vaudevillian Harry Fox. 

     Though the only definition that really caught my interest, as a book lover, is "foxing" — the brown spots on the pages of old books. There is an unusual related definition in the OED: "slang. An artificial sore" citing an 1862 sentence: "Daring youths were constantly in the habit of making 'foxes' (artificial sores)." Which raises the question, "Why?" Plague envy? Though it's safe to blame fashion, with a fox being a variety of fake beauty mark. 

     Back in the 1970s, "foxy" was a term of appreciation for feminine beauty. Even though it was endorsed by as revered an arbitrator of cool as Jimi Hendrix, with his song "Foxy Lady," I seem to recall being of the opinion that actually using the word, sincerely, reflected poorly upon the speaker, tarring him as being out of it, maybe even ridiculous.. Or maybe it was just one of those things I could never imagine myself saying under any circumstance. In the "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketch that Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd played on "Saturday Night Live," the hilariously enthusiastic and clueless Festrunk Brothers have a particular affection for the word. "That fox bar was really something tonight!"  

    The fox poked around, then quickly vanished, a dynamic I will emulate today.