Good day in the city

     This space skews toward the negative — concerns about the national health, complaints about this or that, criticism of various and sundry, the constant airing of problems and worrisome situations.
     Even with occasional joyful forays into birds, food and etymology, happiness gets the short shrift.
     Though I am not — not not not — a complaining, querulous person. I hope. Rather I am, I believe, a generally happy person. Though you wouldn't know it, reading this blog.
     Why? Perhaps because happiness is so fleeting, or banal, or private. It feels uninteresting and gets overlooked, making me seem gloomier than I actually am, a suspicion that hit me suddenly standing on the Washington bridge Wednesday afternoon.
     Granted, I had just enjoyed an unusually restful, social day. Taking the 7:43 train downtown with my wife. Making phone calls in the Great Hall of Union Station, where I noticed a man photographing a stuffed toy frog. I ran over and interviewed him — that'll be in the paper eventually. I walked away buoyant, his life story tucked in my pocket like a $20 bill snagged from the sidewalk. Do I have a great job or what?

      Then to Lou Mitchell's — and how well does that perk up a day? A spinach and mozzarella omelet, well done. Thick toast. With a historian participating in the big conclave of the Organization of American Historians in Chicago this weekend. I'm going there Thursday afternoon.

      That lasted a couple hours. Just as we stepped out of Lou's into the rain, a cab pulled up and dropped someone off. So we cabbed over to River North, where I hung out at a Starbucks, then walked over to Gene & Georgetti to meet a pair of former colleagues, both retired. We spent another couple hours happily jawboning away, until we finally got up, with hugs and handshakes and promises to meet together soon.

     There was nothing to do but go home. Firing up a primo Rocky Patel Vintage 1990 brought along for just such a purpose, I walked it down Wacker Drive, the rain finally ended, the sun out, the afternoon waning.

     Crossing the Washington bridge, I glanced north, and saw the yellow Water Taxi steaming toward me. I love the water taxi. It's just a beautiful boat. And a sweet ride. Back when it cost $2, it was an astounding bargain, and now that it costs $5 it still is. I try to catch it whenever I can from the foot of Madison Street to the Wrigley Building. It's like taking a little vacation.

      Pulling out my phone, I took three shots, and then lowered the camera just in time to catch the eye of the water taxi operator, a bearded fellow. I raised my thumb and smiled. He raised his thumb in reply and smiled back.

     Bingo. That was it, happiness. And I realized happiness can be caused by many things, but connection to other people is key — whether talking for hours in a restaurant, or flashing a quick thumbs up to a guy you've never seen before and will never see again, but for a single second, shared a moment of optimism. Isn't everything great? Yes, everything is great. Right now, right here. 

     I paused at the Daily News Plaza, took up my usual position just north of the Madison Bridge, puffing away, looking at the river and the Civic Opera Building. I checked my email. There was a phone message from a reader, 88, who was unhappy. She has been a subscriber for as long as I had been alive, enjoyed my column mightily until recently. Because I had taken the Lord's name in vain — a trio of interjections of "Jesus!" — and she is a Christian. So she's scrapping her subscription, renouncing the folly of my column.

     I phoned her back — I told myself I shouldn't, but that doing so would spoil my mood. These calls never go well. But it was that very good mood that prodded me onward. Her daughter put her on the phone. She explained how she enjoys my writing about my boys, and loved watching them grow up in the newspaper, but she can't cotton having her Lord's name tossed about as an exclamation. I took a deep breath, then told her that I'm sorry; being Jewish, sometimes I miss the significance of such things, and that I apologize, renounce the sin, and hope that, being Christian, she could find it in her heart to forgive me.

     "It'll never happen again," I said, and she seemed satisfied, and I ended the call confident that I kept one reader from defecting from the fold. Sometimes that's all a person needs, to have their concerns heard and be treated with respect. We all need to be seen by each other, every now and then. It makes us happy.

     

Jim Johnson, who bridged the divide between hard news and ribald humor, dies

Jim Johnson

     Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 promising to "build a bridge to the 21st century." But when newsman Jim Johnson went to read that memorable phrase on the radio, it came out as "build a bridge to the 21st secretary," a malapropism echoing the president's famous roving eye.

     "Jim Johnson was a professional news gatherer and on-air reporter with amazing punchlines lurking in the weeds," said radio icon Steve Dahl.
     Mr. Johnson, who managed to straddle the divide between serious news and ribald humor, died Friday near Kansas City, Missouri, where he had gone to live near his family. He was 80.
    In an industry where talent generally survives by hopping from station to station, Mr. Johnson spent his entire career, almost half a century, at WLS-AM (890).
    "He was very adaptable," remembered WLS co-host Catherine Johns, "when instead of doing straight news — a 25-second report from City Hall — they asked him to become a co-anchor, part of a morning show. He adapted to that. When the format changed to talk, he adapted to that. He worked well with all of us, with Fred Winston and Steve Dahl and Garry Meier and Roe Conn."
     "I spent 50 years behind the microphone," Winston said. "Jimmy was the fastest, funniest cat I ever worked with. He was a multitalent, a personality, aside from being a top-shelf, excellent investigative journalist. He was funny, and he was warm, and he was irreverent, and he was loved by everybody."
     "One of the nicest and genuinely funny people I have ever worked with," Dahl agreed.
     "He's dyslexic and would type up his stuff, then hand write over it," said Conn, who worked with Mr. Johnson for 20 years. "He rarely used a computer screen to do the news. He liked to read it off the paper and would get lost in his own handwriting. He had these amazing 'Jim-isms.'"
    "Fighting AIDS" turned into "fighting eggs." "Vice President Biden" morphed into "Vice President Bin Laden." Then there were the "nine men who were killed to death."
     "He had this reel of these things we could constantly play," Conn said. "It was drop-dead, laugh-out-loud funny."
     And if you think Mr. Johnson's gaffes don't belong in his obituary, think again.
     "He would be so offended if you didn't have fun with this," said his daughter, Kansas City newscaster Alexis Del Cid. "The greatest way to honor my dad was humor."

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Mr. Johnson was born in Chicago. His parents were May and Charley Johnson, a reporter at City News in the 1930s and later with the Chicago Sun.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

      I subscribe to the Washington Post. Because it is an excellent newspaper. So much so that, for years, when Amazon would come under fire for some lapse — employees collapsing in sweltering warehouses, or forced to wear adult diapers because they weren't permitted bathroom breaks — I'd dilute my contempt for the company by thinking, "Well, at least Jeff Bezos funds the Washington Post."
    Not complete forgiveness. But partial mitigation.
    Yes, when Bezos refused to endorse Kamala Harris, and showed up at Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump's ring, I was alarmed, and considered cancelling my subscription. But the Post is still an important news source. Once the snowball of rationalization starts rolling downhill, it grows and grows.

     Then at the end of February Bezos announced that the newspaper's editorials would now be exclusively "in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Which is akin to the paper announcing in 1938 that its editorials would emphasize two main values: the need for people in the Sudetenland to be reunited with their German brethren, and the importance of Japan having access to Southeast Asian oil. In essence, the paper would now climb on a chair, bang two garbage can lids together and shout "Hurrah for Trump!" on its editorial pages.

     Honestly, I was taken aback. But still kept my subscription. Out of habit at this point.

     Bezos was joined by others — Tim Cook, from Apple. And of course Elon Musk, who stepped away from running X, nee Twitter, and SpaceX, and being the richest man in the world, to become Trump's right hand man.  Wielding a chainsaw — literally and figuratively — carving apart the government that we who are not billionaires so often rely upon to keep our lives from going down the toilet. I know that I soon will be leaning heavily upon the Social Security system that I have paid my hard-earned money into since I was 16 years old and scooping ice cream at Barnhill's in Berea. How will I live after the cash I expect from Social Security is diverted into the already bulging pockets of billionaires?
    Nor am I alone. You don't need me to tell you what a confusing, frightening time this has been, with entire offices of government shorn away while Trump tries to trash one Constitutional right after another by executive order. Here birthright citizenship, there 20 million Americans cut from the voting rolls by ginning up artificial barriers for them to clear on their way to the ballot box. The First Amendment will be next.
    Friends ask me how to resist. What small, ridiculous symbolic act they can perform to ... what? Register their displeasure in the great cosmic record keeper in the sky? Utter a bleat of unease as we all are stampeded over a cliff by our mad shepherds? Raising our voices. If only the czar knew. "I've got the solution, Natasha — we will inform him of our displeasure, through the sincerity of our protest!"

    In your dreams.
    Then clarity came to me. Of course. If you can't beat Trump, join him. Everyone else has. Bezos. Cook, Musk. Better men than I. More successful men. They obviously know something I don't. I may never be privy to their secret, successful thoughts. But I can emulate their actions. Indeed, I must.  

     So wear the red hat, if that will please him. And if you can, mouth the slogans too. Isn't that how Winston Smith ends up at the end of "1984." He loves Big Brother. Love Donald Trump. It's possible, right? It must be. Look how many people do it. Half the country, almost. Half the Congress, by a whisker.
     I mean, the man has done good things, right? Fast-tracking the COVID vaccine. You have to give him that. Saved millions of lives. And moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. That showed those Palestinians! His whole feint to cleanse them from Gaza and turn the territory into some kind of opulent resort. Is that really madness? Or genius? It'll be genius if it works, and as for the Palestinians, well, better off relocated to Jordan than slaughtered by the Israelis. 
    I could go on. Getting rid of the penny — that was a frustration of mine for years.  Trump axed it in a stroke.  Annex Greenland — why not? All the cool superpowers are doing it. China snarls like a junkyard dog, straining to sink its teeth into Taiwan, Russia gobbles up Ukraine. Greenland has all the earmarks of the ideal victim — nearby, defenseless, already cringing, waiting to be kicked.
    Yes, certain actions of Trump's are ... problematic. Shit-canning science by throttling the National Institutes of Health, for instance, and yanking back federal funding for universities that permitted overly-enthusiastic pro-Palestinian protests. But doesn't science typically thrive under some kind of oppression? I mean, look at Galileo. The Inquisition of the Catholic Church was in full swing in 1633, and still Galileo still used his telescope to gather evidence supporting the Copernican heresy of the earth revolving around the sun. What a great moment in the history of science, when the instruments of torture set out before the great astronomer. "E pur si muove," Galileo said. "And yet it moves."
     Okay, okay. That probably never really happened. But isn't that yet another gift that Donald Trump gives us? The gift of wonderment, of being able to embellish a world which, let's be honest, is often just too pedestrian and bland for our purposes? To be freed from the chains of fact, from the constant concern of did this happen or did that happen or does this word mean this or that, or is this action legal under the Constitution? Sweep all that bother away and just trust him to know what's best for us.
     It feels good, right? Freeing. After years of being in the losing opposition, that's a mighty appealing thought. To be on the winning side, for once. And don't Democrats seem to know it? Just by the way they sulk and scratch themselves, staring at their thumbs while the nation is terraforned into a dictatorship before their very, unblinking eyes? Who wants to be on their team anymore, mealy-mouthed little cowards without the courage of their own convictions. Story of their lives, losers who sat on their hands while their better qualified candidate lost an election — ooo, her laugh annoys us, we can't vote for her! — and are now sulking in a corner while the country is torn apart and rebuilt as a totalitarian state. 
     I for one am sick of it. So a change of course. There's no price of entry, no charges of hypocrisy. Half of Trump's cabinet are men who in 2016 were declaring him the greatest threat to the Republican Party since John Wilkes Booth. Nobody is so rude as to clap the Secretary of State on the shoulder and ask him what happened to all that "Little Marco" business. If anyone did, he would look them square in the eye and tell them that Donald Trump is a just and forgiving master, and once you bend the knee, the past is forgotten, at least until you cross him in any way or just aren't useful anymore.
     A decade's worth of columns, slandering Trump? I abjure them and apologize and — poof! — they are gone. Not really written by me. Mislabeled by balky software. Or if they were written by me — and who can be certain of anything anymore? — they are tissues of error created before I'd seen the light and fully understood the scope and majesty of the man. Now fluttered away on the wind, vanished. They never existed. We are living in the new world now. Times change, and we change. with them. 

    So all hail Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, gloria mundi in excelsis. I'm only sorry it took me this long. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I have seen the light. It's a beautiful thing. Come join me. Because those of us who dwell in truth — and truth is whatever Trump says it is, today — we hate to be alone. Or even questioned. Really. Our confidence is that great that any form of dissension burns like thermite. You see how easy it is to shed the past and face the future, boldly, to win through surrender. Join me. Right now, by clicking here. Or else.

Gay Chicago firefighters, on TV and in real life, focus on their jobs

   

Daniel Kyri

     Darren Ritter didn't know he was gay when he joined Firehouse 51 in 2018.
     "My character was only going to be around for a few episodes, so I don't think there was a lot of thought put into who guy was," said Daniel Kyri, the actor who plays Ritter on "Chicago Fire," now in its 13th season on NBC. "I just played the character as I saw him; I wasn't throwing out rainbows."
     Lt. Paul Clark certainly knew he was gay when he started as an actual Chicago firefighter at the Wells Street Station in 1997.
     "I was there about year and half, then I transferred to the West Side Douglass Park neighborhood and was there for nine years," said Clark. "That's where I cut my teeth on the job, a very busy firehouse, very poor neighborhood. I saw a little bit of everything."
     Like Ritter, Clark played it low-key.
     "I was never an in-your-face type of person," said Clark, 59. "I just, consciously or subconsciously, decided to let guys figure it out on their own and see how they react."
     When the producers of "Chicago Fire" invited me to interview Kyri, it seemed an opportunity to compare the experiences of a fictional gay Chicago firefighter with a real one.
     Firehouses are not known as monuments to tolerance; how did Clark's colleagues accept him?
     "As you can imagine, the fire department and firehouses are very gossipy," said Clark. "It doesn't take long for word to spread. I let it happen organically and almost made a game out of it. However they react is on them. Either way, I wasn't going to let it affect me."
     Kyri, 30, was born in Chicago and worked at the Goodman Theatre. As the show's writers got to know him, they decided to have his character come out. That intimidated Kyri.
     "Being a young actor, there is a hesitation with portraying a gay character," he said. "Am I only going to be known as portraying a gay character? I do not want to be limited in my career."
     This was no off-Loop black box theater, but a nationwide stage.
     "Knowing what this show is," Kyri said. "A Dick Wolf procedural about first responders. Middle America is watching. Not knowing how the reception is going to be. Coming out as a gay firefighter, the first one on the show. Is the audience going to accept that? Is this going to cost me my job?"

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You be the journalist

     While the best columns are often those written the quickest — I think Friday's well-received Maureen Dowd snarkfest took an hour to write — others can be pawed over for days, weeks, or even months.
     It was in December that I interviewed Daniel Kyri, a star in the "Chicago Fire" procedural drama (I keep wanting to call it a "soap opera" but that could have negative connotations). I'd never seen the show before, but he plays an openly gay firefighter, and I thought it might be worthwhile to compare and contrast what he had to say with the thoughts of an actual gay firefighter, if I could find one.
     That got the thing pushed into the slow lane. But — mirabile dictu — my old friend, Larry Langford, at the Chicago Fire Department did actually put me in touch with a real live 28 year veteran of the CFD, Lt. Paul Clark, who is indeed gay. I interviewed him in January.
     I knew that incorporating the two interviews would take some effort, and slow-walked that challenge until I finally decided that putting it off forever was not a success strategy. It was time to shit or cut bait, as we professionals say.
     So I began pulling the column together last week, and tried to get a draft Saturday, to lessen the Sunday morning strain. The column will run Monday.
     In doing so, I had to consider something Clark quotes one of his fellow firefighters saying about the gay pride pylons on Halsted Street: "'Can you believe the city put these up for these fucking fags?'"
     The question being, how much of that goes in the paper?
     Left to my down devices, as a believer in poet Robert Lowell's dictum, "Yet why not say what happened?" I would print the whole quote verbatim and let the complainers complain (the way some readers, already in my spam filter, took exception to the three interjections of "Jesus!" in Friday's column, never considering that the Galilee carpenter isn't my lord and I have no obligation to honor their theological view of the cosmos any more than they respect mine, aka, not much).
     But as I sometimes tell readers, I just work for the newspaper; I don't run the place. Nor do I set style. I follow it. So I knew what I called "the obscene gerund" in my apology regarding Dylan Thomas; a locution I borrowed from a Doonesbury cartoon about Frank Sinatra (from 40 years ago — Jesus!) wouldn't fly. It would end up as "f—-ing." (I found "obscene gerund" so funny in that context I used it in the blog version of the column, even though here, it isn't necessary, as swears are permitted by the boss, aka me).
     But what about "fags"? Such curse words have been dashed even more lately, the result of mission creep stemming from "the n-word," general societal cowardice, and a desire to thwart social media algorithms that will increasingly tag you as a hater and shutter your account if you use derogatory words under any context.

     The word also falls victim to an alarming tendency to whitewash the past. And here the left and the right have drifted so far from center, away from faith in the value of frank confrontation with reality — in my view — that they've begun to converge. Both the MAGA crowd and Blue State lefties posit the existence of timorous souls who will be crushed if exposed to the weight of the nation's true hateful past, and feel obligated to bowdlerize the historical record on their behalf. To lighten the load, as it were. Children and the profoundly sensitive are preemptively given the final say in vetting acceptability for supposed adults. I hate that.
     I tried out "f—-ing f-gs" but that reads to me as cursing out dried fruit. See, that's why I avoid euphemism. Very quickly readers have no idea what you're talking about. Then I considered "Can you believe the city put these up?" without the final clause at all. But that softens the insult so much you wonder why Clark remembers it a quarter century later.
     At this point I wanted to consult my editor, John O'Neill — oh right, he was let go last week.
     Seeking clarity, I went into the Sun-Times NewBank archive and found the word last appeared in a 2014 column about the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting protest buffer zones around abortion clinics:
     "A law aimed to prevent the Westboro Baptist Church from showing up at military funerals with their neon “GOD HATES FAGS” signs would end up stopping people from showing up at Bruce Rauner rallies with “RAUNER’S A FRAUD” signs, and we need more, not less, of those," the author wrote.
     If that writing sounds familiar, well, it was written by me. Seeing myself as the Welcome Wagon for obscenity — not a single colleague writing over the past 11 years felt the need to use the word — took the wind out of my sails. Or maybe someone wanted to use it and wasn't allowed.
     So take it out? Self-editing is the path not only to confusion, but tedium, and I decided to offload responsibility and let whoever draws the short straw Sunday morning and has to edit my column be the one to figure it out. (My editors opted for the nearly-indecipherable: "f—— f—-s.")

     And yes, I did pause, and worry, whether by using "obscene gerund" I was plagiarizing Garry Trudeau. And decided that credit was impossible — it would ruin the passage — and you can't really plagiarize a two-word phrase, any more than if I refer to "household words" I'm stealing from Shakespeare, who uses the term in "Henry V." 

     Of course you can get in trouble with this thinking. Years ago I ended a column "Isn't it pretty to think so?" and a reader sincerely accused me of plagiarizing the last line of "The Sun Also Rises." I had a reply, along the lines of, "I just assume everyone knows it — if I ended the column 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' would you accuse me of plagiarizing the Bible?" But it also reminded me to be careful about that kind of thing.  So if anyone is under the illusion that the life of a writer is carefree, let me assure you it is not. There is a lot to worry about.

The perfect baby gift

     People don't listen. And if they do, they tend to dismiss whatever doesn't jibe with what they already believe. 

     When dealing with my boys — and now their spouses — I try to break that pattern by actually attending to what they say, consider it, and weigh whether it might be true, even when I'm dubious.

     For instance. Almost as soon as our daughter-in-law informed us we'd be grandparents — in my memory, it was the next words out of her mouth — she instructed us that under no circumstances were we to kiss the baby, at least not on the head, at least not for the first six months. Because: germs. And bacteria. And disease. From us.

     Before these words had echoed away, I was online, checking the veracity of her claim. Because: really? Since when? Turns out to be true. I mentioned this last month. 

     It wasn't true when our boys were born in the mid-1990s.  Then, we were doing our parental duty if we didn't leave their carriers on top of the car and drive off. And I imagine it won't be true 30 years from now, when other concerns crowd to the forefront. Whether to implant the chip in their heads like everybody else, I imagine.

     Okay, fine, no worries. We'll withhold our kisses. Don't want to infect the baby. I didn't object beyond a crushed little, "But we can kiss a little socked foot, yes?"

     I tucked the information away, and forgot about it. We'll worry about it in June.

     But a few weeks back, I was looking for art to accompany something I'd written on the Suburban Cook County Tuberculosis Sanitarium District. Not many photos online. So I was glancing at old tuberculosis posters, and noticed a poster warning parents not to kiss their children.

    An idea bloomed. Perfect. I snapped into action.

    So I was ready when I attended my first baby shower last weekend, for the pending granddaughter. I'd never been to a baby shower before — they tend to be all-female affairs. 

     But my older son felt like being there — he's going to be a very hands on dad — and that opened the door to invite all the men in the family. We had a good time, nibbling beef tenderloin sandwiches and drinking mimosas.

     We didn't need to worry about a present — there's an online registry to choose from and, besides, we were going to the trouble and expense of the party, which is present aplenty.

     But I had still gotten a gift — one of those old TB posters I'd looked at, transferred to a onesie. There are businesses online that do that, and quickly too. 

     I would never be so bold as to claim that my gift was the hit of the shower, nor cast shade upon all the lovely little baby ensembles and complex bottle warmers and such the couple were given by others. But I will say that my present earned the biggest laugh of the afternoon. Score one for zayde. 

Noteworthy Chicagoans fete famous East Coast author

     So the wife and I went out to a party downtown Wednesday night. Which is unusual for me, because I normally don't go to parties, through an effective combination of a) not being invited and b) not wanting to go, as parties typically involve conveying myself somewhere and encountering unfamiliar people. I'd rather be home.
     But my close personal friend Christie Hefner invited me to a book signing at Carnivale, the big, fun Latin American restaurant on Fulton, and while that still wasn't enough to make me want to go (by "close personal friend" I mean I like Christie and we had lunch once at the Cliff Dwellers Club), it prompted me to ask my wife if she was interested (I recognize the burden of being married to me for — Jesus! — 34 years and try to enliven the torpor, when I can). To my surprise, she said, yes, in fact, she would like to go to the party.
     Which still might not have been enough to get us there. But Christie (now that I think of it, we've also had dinner, at the gorgeous, if narrow, Venetian palazzo on Michigan Avenue belonging to auctioneer Leslie Hindman) is nothing if not efficient, and her assistant prodded me until I finally RSVP'd that we were going.
     At Carnivale, we were met at the door by owner Billy Marovitz, who I've known since he was a sprite, having been a close personal friend of his uncle, Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz (and by close personal friend I mean we had lunch together at the old Standard Club, and he came to my apartment on Logan Boulevard to marry my brother, Sam Steinberg, to his wife of — Jesus! — 35 years, Yuri).
     The room was packed, and I noticed several well-known personages, including former Gov. Pat Quinn and former TV political reporter Mike Flannery, who I considered speaking to. But he didn't look in my direction, and the moment passed.
     I can't hope to read the books piled on the floor by my night table, not if I took three months off from work and did nothing else. So getting another book was not high on my list. But having had — Jesus! — nine book parties myself, albeit more sparsely attended than this, I have a moral code that can be described as "Buy the book!" I hurried up to beat the crowd to acquire the book being feted, "Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech," getting in line right next to beloved icon of Chicago journalism Carol Marin.
     Due to some quirk of personality, I introduced Carol to the author, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who, perhaps being in the middle of a long, exhausting book tour, looked up without exhibiting signs of interest or comprehension. She read my name off a Post-it note, wrote it with a Sharpie, then "Star power!" and signed her own name, "Maureen." No last name. Which, in many years of attending such events, I can't recall any author ever doing. Maybe she considers herself in the ranks of Cher and Madonna and similar mono-named cynosures. Or maybe she has arthritis or something. I probably shouldn't speculate.
     The talk involved Marovitz asking questions, and I would discover later when I began reading, Dowd repeating whole paragraphs from her book's introduction, almost word for word. While I wasn't in my reporter mode, I like to show that I'm sometimes out and about. She said, "Hollywood and Washington are twin capitals of illusion.” So I snapped a photo and sent that line to my 2,860 followers on Bluesky.

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