Made you look!

 

    Yes, we tuned into CNN Thursday night to see how Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did in their first interview after the Democratic National Convention. Because the interview had been ballyhooed into an Event of Significance. My wife and I wanted to see how they did. 
     What we got was CNN triviality interspersed with bald attempts to catch the pair in a contradiction. What did Harris think when Trump said she wasn't Black? Didn't Walz once say he had carried a weapon during wartime? What about that cool photo the New York Times took of one of Harris's nieces watching her speak? What about Gus Walz crying?
     All deflected away more or less deftly — more by Harris, the former prosecutor, less by Walz, the former football coach.  The next morning WBBM prominently aired the quote where Harris squelched the "changed race" gambit with "next question." Emotion over substance. So what was all that blustering about "policy" about? Isn't not being a traitor policy aplenty? We can hash out their position on the Law of the Sea later.

     The bottom line that keeps drifting out of sight for the major media is this: they're running against Donald Trump. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor. Convicted felon. Who led an insurrection against the country and will do so again, given the opportunity. Who cares what Harris said about fracking in 2020? Who could possibly care? CNN apparently. It's like the old joke where the flight attendant pushes the cart down the aisle and says, "For dinner, we have chicken, or shit mixed with broken glass" and the passenger replies, "How is the chicken prepared?" 

Don't hold your breath waiting for that new Illinois flag

The Illinois state flag, below. Just about anything would be an improvement.

     Social media gets a bad name. But there are wonders to be found. Brooklyn graphic artist Max Kolomatsky started noticing crude handmade signs in his neighborhood, then redesigned them and photographed the vast improvements next to their inferior inspirations, posting the shots on TikTok. Seeing the result is like taking a lungful of sweet air after being underwater too long.
     The joy of good design does not get the press it deserves. Thus Illinois, an island of cool blue sanity in a churning red sea of backward-straining discord, should be lauded for holding a contest to find a new state flag. Kudos to Gov. JB Pritzker, who last year created the Illinois Flag Commission, and to Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who followed through Wednesday, announcing a contest to find a replacement.
     To quote Phil Connors, the TV weatherman trapped in an eternal Feb. 2 in "Groundhog Day," "Anything different is good."
     OK, not strictly true — Elon Musk-owned X is different though not an improvement. Fear of making things worse pushes people to prefer errors of omission over errors of commission. We become frozen, nostalgic and change-averse.
     The penny was a great idea when the United States began minting the Fugio cent in 1787. Now, pennies are a waste and an embarrassment. Like you, I never use the copper slugs, but, should the United States finally scrap them, I'd leap up and start doing one of those ecstatic Greek dances. Because, if we can finally do that, maybe we can, oh, make the leap into universal health care. Small steps.
     Not that Illinois is exactly a pioneer, flagwise. Utah, Georgia and Mississippi are already updating their flags, and Minnesota adopted its new flag in May. Their old state banner looked like someone had set a white dinner plate on a blue carpet and then thrown up on it. An indecipherable mess, replaced by a clean, simple, beautiful standard with two shades of blue and a single star. Illinois should do so well.
     As this might be read by someone who saw the story in the Sun-Times Thursday and is already busy with their crayons, a word of advice: Put the work in.

     Chicago has a particularly beautiful municipal flag, adopted in 1917 after a contest, albeit one conducted the Chicago way. The winner was a writer named Wallace Rice, who, in classic we-don't-want-nobody-nobody-sent fashion, suggested the competition, wrote the rules, judged the entries and declared himself the winner. Sometimes the best candidate for a job really is the boss' cousin.

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Have you been to New York City?

 

Manhattan skyline from Jersey City

     Maybe we'll enjoy the post factual world. Think about it. Trump gets re-elected — a coin toss right now. Democracy goes down the toilet, sure. But we all then can live in fantasy worlds of our own construction. We don't have to trouble ourselves with what is true and what is not.
     Because facts can be difficult things. My column Wednesday was about New York City introducing rolling garbage cans, 40 years after Chicago did. It begins with this sentence, "Most Chicagoans have never been to New York City." Of course I considered whether that is actually true. I couldn't find anything as simple as a survey — nobody asking Chicagoans, "Have you ever visited New York?" So I thought about it. My analysis went like this: 11 percent of Americans never leave the state of their birth — there are surveys on that. Fifteen percent of Chicagoans are children, who usually haven't traveled many places, never mind a city 700 miles away. Seventeen percent of Chicagoans live below the federal poverty line — not much tourism there, and New York is a particularly expensive destination.

Most Americans never see her.

     The tourism industry offers some clues. A 2012 Hotwire survey found 62 percent of Americans have never been to the Statue of Liberty — true, you can visit New York and not go, but it's high up on the must-do list. A 2018 VOA News study found only 30 percent of 2,000 Americans had been to the Empire State Building. Yes, New York reports 60 million tourists a year, which would mean the entire population of the United States cycles through every six years or so. But many are from overseas, and many are repeat visitors — I've gone at least dozen times, if not two.
   The search can lead you down all sorts of rabbit holes — are Chicagoans more or less likely to travel than the average American?  I decided to go with "most." Most Americans don't have a passport either (not that you need one to visit New York, but possessing a passport is connected with a tendency to take significant trips — like visiting New York. A 2018 Victorinox survey said 13 percent of Americans don't own luggage — hard to go to NYC without it). 
    I wasn't the only person to wonder about the opening sentence's veracity. An editor changed it to "Many Chicagoans probably have not been to New York City." Which irked me, first because of that "probably" — no, I thought, "Many Chicagoans have abso-fucking-lutely not been to New York City." I knew why the editor did it — the truth being hard to find, smart to dial back the sentence. I have a writerly edict about that — "It's better to be vague than wrong."
     But I have another imperative: "If you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna." A line of Napoleon's. Meaning, don't be half assed.  If you want to say something, say it. Don't pussyfoot around. I talked to the editor and we changed it back to "most" and jettisoned that "probably." 
     The next morning — aka Wednesday — I had qualms. Doubt crept in, and and I  looked harder. Still nothing definitive, and Google now vomits up reams of Reddit pages of people speculating and chattering. I looked for a New York Tourism office in Chicago and came up empty. I fired a query to the New York City Tourism Office — the office is closed until Sept. 2. Maybe that's part of the problem. As social media and automatic systems grow, the availability of humans who can answer questions shrinks. I phoned, finally got someone. They're checking, but I bet they run into the same problems I did.
    Though I'm still working on the question. That's the beauty of this whole daily business. One may persist over time. I'm starting to fear this is a research failure on my part — the truth is out there, as they say, I'm just not finding it.  Maybe the hive can be of assistance. Is a correction in order? I'm still thinking Chicago consists of 51 percent homebodies, at least New York wise. That if 1.3 million Chicagoans have been to New York, 1.4 million haven't. Though I could be wrong.

Katz's Deli

New York boldly goes where Chicago went ... in 1984

     Most Chicagoans have never been to New York City. That's too bad. I know the local fashion is to despise the place, sight unseen. But I have been there, many times, for business and pleasure. New York is not without its allures. Manhattan has an energy that generally eludes Chicago. There is interesting architecture, a noteworthy theater scene and numerous good restaurants.
     True, the place is provincial as hell. I know that is the opposite of expectations — Chicago is supposed to be the Midwestern cow town, full of rustics who escaped Iowa and Kentucky and still have pig slop ground into the seams of our boots as we stand gawping at the tall buildings.      But New York is far more parochial. That Saul Steinberg drawing, compressing the nation between the Hudson and the Pacific into a bare brown rectangle? That's actually how they view the world.    

     Earlier this summer, Eric Adams, New York's mayor, announced a daring experiment. He said ... and I can barely get this out without laughing ... he said the city will now introduce rolling garbage cans with hinged lids, crowing that now, instead of piling their garbage bags in the street, a Gotham tradition as ingrained as hot dog carts, this new, Space Age technology will be embraced.
    "We're going to catch up with everyone else and get these plastic bags off our streets," Adams promised.
     Raising the question: How far ahead of New York is Chicago, rolling trash can-wise? How much catching up does New York have to do?
    Forty years. Forty years ago, next week, in fact. On Sept 5, 1984, in the 8th Ward, the first wheeled garbage cart in Chicago was tipped into the first garbage truck equipped with a lift. Four other wards also took part in the pilot program.
     At the time, Chicago's garbage record was nothing to brag about. For decades, garbage collection was a notorious mess of patronage, inefficiency and almost unfathomable squalor. Before World War II, apartment dwellers routinely threw garbage out the windows, as in medieval times. They had to be threatened with fines to do otherwise.

     In the 1940s, half of Chicago's alleys were “lined with open piles of filth.” Only about 15% of garbage found its way into a metal can with a lid. A third of the trash was heaped in “old washtubs, battered baskets and boxes.” A quarter was left in open piles, with the last quarter dumped into large concrete containers. Garbage collectors went at the piles with shovels.

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Flashback 2012: How far back will they roll the clock?

     We progress by the inch. No, by the millimeter. No, it can't be the millimeter — that's metric, and so stinks of the European socialism that we, as Americans naturally abjure.
      Maybe that's the bright spin. Maybe we progress, not incrementally, but not at all. Sometimes I look back on an old column and almost despair. Look at this from 2012. A dozen years ago. Republicans were trying to ban gay marriage and abortion in the Constitution. They're drumming on the same fixations now, having made astounding progress compelling the keyhole peering meanness that a solid majority of American oppose. A reminder that Trump didn't lead the Republicans to their sorry state — their sorry state conjured him up, like a demon. Not a cause, but a symptom. This column even includes a cameo from Ann Coulter, who popped up this week mocking Gus Walz, a teenager with social adjustment issues. I thought she was already sunk into obscurity in 2012. Again, I was being optimistic. This shit hasn't gone away. It's never going away.

     ‘This horror, this nightmare abomination!” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1852. “Can it be in my own country!”
     She was referring to the institution of slavery. And while it might be a tad strong to equate the sense of moral revulsion that slavery evoked in enlightened persons in antebellum America to the indignation sparked by aspects of the current U.S. political climate, there are without doubt correlations.
     Today people are not enslaved because of the color of their skin; chalk one up for progress. They merely have their human rights, such as to marry and form families, denied based on sexuality (in the case of gays) or the ability to conduct their reproductive health dictated by others (in the case of women).   

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Smithsonian)

     Rightly or wrongly, Stowe’s heartfelt cry echoed in my mind spontaneously this week, a cold clanking heard when I reluctantly focused my attention on the Republican Party as it prepares to hold its quadrennial political convention in Tampa on Monday, assuming a hurricane doesn’t wipe out the city first.
     It’s hard to believe, in 2012, that Americans can not only hold such backward, morally indefensible ideas but boldly urge they be written into the Constitution, the operating code of our country. The Republican platform would amend the Constitution to ban both gay marriage and abortion. Yes, it’s only a party platform, and yes, party platforms are generally chin music designed to motivate the fringes, who live in permanent hope that the modern world will somehow yet be dragged kicking and screaming back to the homespun Eden of their imaginings — we’ll drop-kick gays back into the closet, where they belong, women will be taught to marry young or else keep their knees together and, if they don’t, go off and birth their bastards in shame. It boggles me that anyone would want that, but clearly they do, though not of course in those terms.
     They prefer to invoke God, and at least they’re being honest, because being against gays or reproductive choice are purely religious scruples. People who are not in thrall to their own faiths and unable to imagine moral frameworks other than their own do not, as a matter of practice, try to dictate women’s gynecological business. They’ve so muddied the argument with talk of babies, few realize the key point is not when, but who. Who decides? They decide. They seize the right to make this decision, based on their own religious tenets, then would deny the same privilege, by law, to everybody else.
     Slavery is illuminating here for a variety of reasons. First, it answers the question: Is the United States capable of oppressing entire classes of people, despite its Founding Fathers’ hoo-ha about liberty and freedom? Answer: You bet, for nearly 100 years, officially, and then an unofficial extra century.
     Second, it asks: Did religion aid in this atrocity? Why yes. God Almighty smiled down upon slavery, and of course — to listen to the Southerners — the slaves themselves were worthy of their fate, for a variety of gross, imaginary traits and flaws, some of which are the same sexualized slurs imputed upon gays. (Aside to black readers: Yes, I know it is possible to be both black and a homophobe. Yes, I know that some African Americans resent the suggestion that the mindless bigotry they faced is comparable to the justified contempt that gays draw upon themselves by, ah, being who they are. Different situations entirely, you say: skin versus sin. I grasp your point, and disagree completely; sexuality is no more a choice than skin color. I couldn’t decide to be gay, could you? But your objection is noted.)
     National politics is often jarring, because morality tends to be local, built on family and community. We in cities tend to be liberal, tolerant Democrats who prefer addressing actual problems to cooking up imaginary ones. In Chicago, it’s easy to forget how immigrants are hated in the Southwest, or how tightly religion clutches the throat of education in places like Texas or Mississippi.
     Not that you have to leave Illinois to find glittery-eyed fanaticism. When I was in Springfield for the state fair, and picked up the local paper, the State Journal-Register, I was genuinely shocked to find its editorial page carries the column written by far right attack beast Ann Coulter — I would have bet cash money that she existed only in an electronic netherworld of online haters, occasionally ducking behind a bush to disgorge another monstrous book of twisted thought. And here she is, defending Joe McCarthy in the biggest newspaper in Springfield.
     It might be easier were all morality decided locally. Then Texas could teach creationism and the South could secede again, unchallenged this time to ostracize gays, ban abortion and, heck, re-establish slavery while they’re rolling back the clock. It had its supporters then, it would have supporters now.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 24, 2012

Flashback 2009: A retiring CPS teacher speaks her mind.

     Today is the first day of school for the Chicago Public Schools. A realm I don't write about much, because it is so broad and complicated, and the Sun-Times always has excellent education reporters who cover the topic like a damp shirt. But occasionally I do, such as this 2009 story about a CPS school for children with special needs. It actually was a significant visit, for me, because I wrote it up for what became "Driving with Ed McElroy" in Granta and led to the University of Chicago Press publishing my memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago."

    The second part — this was back when the column filled a page — is a reminder of the time when a certain British poster, now a visual cliche, was newly re-discovered.

     The Blair Early Childhood Center is one of those Chicago schools you've never heard about. Nobody was ever shot there. It has no football team. This marks the first time its name has appeared in this newspaper.
     Which is a shame, because Blair — which serves 103 public school students with severe medical and mental conditions such as Down syndrome and autism — is bright and clean, with small groups of students, aged 3 to 7, some in padded wheelchairs, gathered around teachers, who sing songs, read stories and present lessons.
     The school is at 6751 W. 63rd Place, far afield from my normal wanderings. But I was taken there by Ed McElroy, that grand gentleman of Chicago. While I'm reluctant to say that I go anywhere Ed asks me to go, the truth is I never turn him down and never feel sorry that I accompanied him somewhere. He knows the city block by block, almost inch by inch.
     Among the many teachers we met at Blair was Deanna Dalrymple, painting in Room 107 with a semicircle of first-graders decked out in smocks.
     It turned out that Dalrymple, 65, is retiring today. The graduate of Chicago Teachers College knew she wanted to be a teacher since age 4, but ended up in special ed the way so many of us end up places — by happenstance.
     "I started out 45 years ago at Christopher School," she said, of another CPS school for children with exceptional needs. "They were in desperate need of special-ed teachers. I had two months to wait for my assignment, and had taught blind children, so thought I would go to Christopher and teach for two months."
     That was in 1965. Two months became almost half a century. When Blair school opened, 25 years ago next October, she shifted there.
      The Chicago Public Schools are not without controversy. Most teachers, like any profession, are muted by self-interest. To speak their true views is to risk unemployment. But a person poised on the cusp of retirement has no such constraints. So? I asked, licking my chops. Any frank thoughts from 45 years of teaching she'd like to share?
     "I get so upset when someone talks about all the bad in the Chicago Public School system," she said. "But there's so much good. So much good being done for every child. What our children get is phenomenal. You see the care here. A child comes in, sometimes can't walk, can't talk, can't do anything, and they come out and these children walk and talk and feel good about themselves."
     OK then, in the spirit that I'd have reported it if she delivered a stinging indictment, and in honor of Deanna Dalrymple's 45 years of hard work with kids that you or I might have difficulty teaching for 45 minutes, I believe she has earned her say. Congratulations and good luck.

See you soon, Bob

     I'm not normally a 10 o'clock TV news kind of guy — I get up early, absorb news all day long from all seven of the distinct sources from whence news comes (can you name them? There are seven, at least).
     Give up?

     Newspapers, of course, then TV, radio, Internet, telephone and — these last two are toughies, particularly for the young folk — conversation with others and news that you yourself observe happening.
     By 10 p.m. I'm usually done with news and reading — the boy and I are 800 pages into War and Peace, slowly slogging onward, like Napoleon in midwinter.
     But I was in front of the tube Wednesday at 10 p.m. to see Bob Sirott do his final broadcast — at least for the near future — on the WMAQ-Channel 5 News.
     He was — as always — cool professionalism itself, and did not take my suggestion, made earlier in the day, that he mark his departure by mooning the audience, nor delivering a Howard-Beale-like tirade against NBC management, which failed to offer Sirott a satisfactory deal.
     Instead, what he said at the end of the program was:
     "Keep calm and carry on — thanks for being there and see you again soon."
     Mmm, that's rather oblique, I thought. The next morning I caught up with Bob. Why the low-key hail and farewell?
     "I thought, you know what, this isn't exactly Chet Huntley saying good night to David Brinkley for the last time," he said. "I'm not that important, I'm also not going anywhere. I'm taking a vacation now; when I get back right away I'm on WGN radio at noon. It would have been a little self-important and pompous, so I opted to go with something a little more subtle."
     "Keep calm and carry on"?
     "I stole that," he said. "If you Google it, it has become popular again, because of the economic strife."
     The quote sounded to me like Churchill, but there's an even more interesting history — British authorities, preparing for German invasion in 1939, printed the advice on a poster designed to brace the besieged populace. But the Germans never invaded Britain, so the poster was never used. It was rediscovered in recent years and resonated with grim economic times — times that make Sirott reluctant to present his abrupt unemployment as hardship.
     "For a lot of people, it's 'Adios, don't let the door hit you in the ass,'" he said. "I'm a really lucky guy. I got zero to complain about. I'll be back on TV, doing something."

Today's chuckle:

     Television: A medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.

           — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 12, 2009

DNC in Chicago offered energy, talent, hope: Here are 4 key takeaways

     I'm not a political reporter, in the same sense that I am not a sports reporter — I find my passion elsewhere. But just as sometimes I'm called to cover sports, so the Democratic National Convention was too big a story to miss. I spent a very long day Monday, hoovered up everything I needed, and couldn't see a reason to go back, watching the rest on television — which my friend Eric Zorn points out is the way the convention is supposed to be experienced. I ended up writing four columns: an opening day scene setter based on the 1932 convention, a focus on Mayor Brandon Johnson, a look at the protests, and this summary, an assignment running in the paper Sunday. I don't know about you, but I'm more than ready to move on.

     There were so many ways the Democratic National Convention could have gone wrong.
     Start with thousands of impassioned protesters in the streets of Chicago, butting up against a police department that has not always risen to the occasion.
     Add dozens of speakers, many stepping, blinking, onto the national stage for the first time, some of them children. Broadcast live.
     And yet, as they'd say at this summer's other big summer event, the Olympics, the Democrats stuck their landing. The protesters stayed in their lane, mostly. The cops did their job well, even though most of that job involved enduring 12-hour shifts, standing around, waiting.
     Remember where the party was just five weeks ago — a bag full of howling cats tied to the cinder block of President Joe Biden, whose deer-in-the-headlights debate disaster seemed to kill his chances of reelection. and maybe hope for a functioning democracy too.
     Then, Biden did what he should have done a year ago: withdrew.
     And Kamala Harris, his heretofore unexceptional, unnoticed and unloved vice president, locked down the nomination in 24 hours and went from virtual nonentity to adored superstar faster than anyone since Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris.
     Given that dramatic starting point, had the DNC offered four days of Chuck Schumer tossing cards into a hat, the party mood would still have been buoyant. Instead, it was a parade of talent that got labeled with the sports cliche "a deep bench."
     The only way to summarize the four-day party is with a four-item list, one highlight for each night. There isn't even room for Doug Emhoff, the first "second gentleman," who's so comfortable in his skin that he made being a divorced Jewish lawyer from New Jersey sound practically iconic, like being a lumberjack.
     On to the daily highlights:
     Monday: Biden, whose heroic denial of self-interest — or tardy acknowledgment of reality — allowed his party to soar, had his moment in the sun. Well, 47 minutes actually. But he delivered the goods: "We're in a battle for the very soul of America." If that Joe Biden had shown up to the debate, he'd still be the candidate.

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"A sad ending to a sad story"

     When I heard the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had gone and done it, I of course felt bad — for him, at least for the decent human being he had once been, long ago. And for his family. I'd gotten to know his brother, Chris, a little, when he was head of the Merchandise Mart, and found him a smart man, energetic, devoted to family and dedicated to social justice. I knew how proud he was of his father's legacy, and how fiercely he tried to protect it from those who'd tear down his memory. 

     But he was powerless to protect that reputation from the rolling besmirchment that is RFK Jr. As terrible as it must have been to see his brother descend in vaccine nuttiness and paranoid conspiracy theorizing, to see him now outdo himself by kissing the ring of Trump is, as Chris and his family wrote in a letter released Friday, "a sad ending to a sad story ... Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today are a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear." Speaking of their father in the present tense underscores just how real he is to them, still, 56 years after his death. 

         Robert Vickrey (Smithsonian)

     And it is a sad story. RFK Jr. lost his father when he was 14. He struggled with heroin addiction for decades, became a respected environmental lawyer, but then changed. I remember reading a story about RFK Jr. thundering against the windmills he once boosted when they were going to be put within sight of the family compound at Hyannisport. Maybe the good-for-you-but-not-for-me hypocrisy somehow tore his mind apart.

     I haven't talked to Chris since his ill-considered, poorly-executed run for the governorship in 2018. I'd pissed him off by writing a column saying, in essence, if he really cared about what he says he believes in, he'd drop out and support Dan Biss, because otherwise they'll both lose to J.B. Pritzker (which is indeed what happened). No Nostradamus, I saw Pritzker as a scion of wealth and nothing more, failing to sense what a magnificent governor he would turn out to be.
      Rather than consider my advice, Kennedy was angry and felt betrayed. Loyalty is very big among those who resent being judged by their words and actions. We never spoke again. That's okay. I get by, though I did enjoy our conversations, and what, despite our widely divergent stations in life, at some moments felt like actual friendship. (Even though, now that I think about it, at the time I quoted to him Aristotle's line about how between master and slave there is no friendship). When the news broke Friday, I rooted around for Chris's phone number, thinking to send him a supportive note during what has to be a difficult moment — save grudges for junior high. But I actually know several Chris Kennedys at this point, and didn't want to bother the wrong one. Probably just as well. I can't imagine him caring one way or the other. I'm surprised I do, but then, I'm slow to give up on people.

    As for RFK Jr., this really isn't the "sad ending" his siblings envision. If only it were. Alas, again, they are putting the bright spin on an erring family member. RFK Jr.'s story is not at its end, unfortunately, but now continues, to a fresh hell, the humiliation of being a Trump acolyte. Take a glance at a piece I wrote in 2016, "Chris Christie in rags" about the "stunned, miserable stare" on Christie's face when he found himself standing in Trump's rogue's gallery of supporters, just another supernumerary to the Great Chee-toh God, hoping to huff a contact high of ego and power. The former governor of New Jersey later tried to reinvent himself as a person with a functional conscience, and speak out against Trump. Too little, too late. Or as I sometimes will write a reader: a person who thinks that Donald Trump is a good idea for this country can't really expect anyone to care what he thinks about anything else. It's the same reason you don't ask homeless people for stock tips. I wonder as RFK slides deeper into the Trumpian netherworld whether it will ever occur to him that he had done this to himself. 

     I haven't written much about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because, honestly, I find him too repellent to contemplate. But I keep up with someone in the Kennedy circle, who met RFK Jr. a few times, and asked her what she thinks of him. "A shocking monster," she replied, without hesitation. And that was before he endorsed the greatest menace to American democracy since the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.  

    Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about John F. Kennedy's style — his brother Ted generously granted me an interview and sent me a kind letter after it was published — and like many Americans, harbor still a small wellspring of respect for a family that gave so much to the country. But the source of that spring went dry years and years in the past, and the ground around it has become dry and cracked. Just a fading, tattered memory among a dwindling band of people, a ruined dream that even some who carry the revered name and cursed blood  stopped caring about a long time ago. 

Sky's the limit.

     It isn't much of a photo. First, the shot makes the street look brighter than it was, at about 8:30, as I came back from walking Kitty around the point. It was pretty dark. The phone commanded me to hold still, and I did, while it sucked up what light there was from the streetlamp.
     But if you look closely, you'll see him. A young man on roller skates who had rolled past me on First Ave, holding a flashlight. He was doing a few circles at the intersection with Center, waiting for a car to pass. 
    That flashlight caught my eye because, as far as I recall, I've never seen anybody skate by at night using a flashlight to guide his way and, I assume, alert cars that he's there. Actually, I rarely see skaters at all. Or skateboarders, for that matter. I assume they're at home scrolling through Tik Tok. Maybe watching videos of skaters. 
     The caution of that flashlight made him relatable to me. I'm a cautious guy. I see kids on their bikes, in groups of three and four, tearing down the street at night, unilluminated, in their dark clothes, and think, "C'mon guys. Don't do that. Stuff happens." I remember having a light on my bike, a big chrome thing, streamlined like a jet liner engine nacelle. It tended to go out of whack, if I recall, the batteries leaking over time.
     But the overwhelming idea left me, in this illuminated skater's wake, was that I had never seen that before. Never. Not a guy skating with a flashlight. And there is something comforting in seeing a creative person do something new. Something hopeful. It's like that day at breakfast, probably 20 years ago, when a waitress asked my younger son how he wanted his two eggs, and he said he wanted one scrambled, one sunny-side up. I looked at him, amazed. In a lifetime of ordering eggs I'd never considered that I could split the order, and left to my own devices would have never imagining it possible. This kid, I thought, is unbound by dull convention. He could do anything. 

What does 'Free Palestine' mean?

     "From the river to the sea," the speaker's voice echoed across Union Park. "Palestine will be free."
     The sun was high and blazing Monday, the air electric with drums and chants and squawking bullhorns. Thousands of people milled around, holding signs, backpacks, bottles of water.
     The only way to cover such a sprawling chaos is to pick a person and dive in. I settled on a trio holding a banner 45 feet long featuring the thought of the day: "FREE PALESTINE." I approached the young man on the left and asked: Free Palestine ... of what? To me, the end of that phrase is obvious: "... of Jews."
     "Absolutely not," he said. "To me, it means the freedom in Palestine to live, to have food and water. To not be in an open-air prison. To not be exterminated."
     He said they were with Students for Justice in Palestine.
     "My personal goal, the reason why I'm here, is to call for a cease-fire and to call for peace," continued the man, 19, who did not want to be identified. "The situation is pretty complicated, to be honest. It would take a long time, but I do think a single-state solution could work."
     A future of peaceful coexistence was not exactly being floated from the stage.
     "Stop all aid to the racist, colonial, terrorist state of Israel!" the speaker shouted. "We will continue to march, until we ... achieve total and complete liberation of Palestine. From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free."
     At a New Students for a Democratic Society booth — echos of the 1960s SDS — I spoke with a young woman whose face was wrapped in a green keffiyeh.
     "Everybody has the right to exist, to live," she said. "We believe everybody should be liberated, but most importantly, the Palestinian people should be liberated."
     And the Jews?

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"Nice try, gramps."

     Nothing like free food to draw a crowd. I slid into some kind of Content Creators Corner at the Democratic National Convention not because I consider myself "a content creator" — though  did ask the doorkeeper, breezing by, "Do newspaper columnists count?" and was told we do — but because I saw they had free soft pretzels. 

      And my backyard, as you might know, has become a rolling orgy of little brown birds flapping and scrabbling around my constantly stocked bird feeder. Sometimes dozens at a time. Nor are they alone. They're are often several rabbits and two or three or four or five squirrels. I'm not happy about it but what can I do? They're hungry.

     I glanced out the kitchen window last Thursday morning and saw this bad boy. All alone. The brown bird shindig had mysteriously moved on. "About time you showed up," I muttered, admiring his fierce hunter's profile. He'd thin the herd.  

     Wrong. No sooner had I snapped this photo — not that good, through the window at a distance — when a development entered, stage left. A young squirrel who had obviously been asleep during the lesson about not being eaten, nudged into the frame and began poking around the seed husks under the feeder, looking for seeds that had fallen to the ground. Those brown birds, in their frenzy, are sloppy eaters. 

    "This'll be quick," I thought, anticipating what was to come. But it wasn't. To be honest, the hawk seemed to barely notice the squirrel. Then he did. It looked like this:

     If ever a hawk had easy pickings, this had to be it. But hawks are designed to dive bomb prey from a great height. This narrow gap didn't allow him to get up a head of steam. Plus there was the obstacle of the feeder, whose anti-squirrel defenses — a baffle and length of PVC pipe — you may now pause to admire 

    When the hawk made its move, it turned out that little squirrel was not so oblivious after all. He bolted under the protection of the fire pit, and some kindling stacked around it, while the hawk flopped and flapped after him, quite ineffectively.

     The amazing part was that the squirrel didn't even wait for the hawk to go away. After the encounter, he was back nosing the seed leavings as if to say, "Nice try gramps." The hawk flew off, no doubt disgusted with himself, in search of less nimble prey.

Brandon Johnson salutes his past while looking toward the future

     It's Monday morning. In a few hours, he will address thousands of Democrats gathered at the United Center and millions more tuning into the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
     But right now, Mayor Brandon Johnson is at Walter H. Dyett High School for the Arts, at 555 E. 51st St., about to speak to a few dozen people. He stands poised by the steps to a small platform.
     "They're coming for him!" Jitu Brown, national director of Journey for Justice, a coalition of grassroots educational organizations, tells the gathering. Brown, who led a 34-day hunger strike in 2015 to reopen Dyett, prowls the stage, invoking faceless forces set against the mayor.
     "Because they want him to privatize. They want him to privatize," Brown says. "They don't want him to love Black and Brown children. They were silent when they were closing over 160 schools in this city. ... They don't get to decide no more. Kwame Nkrumah said this: 'It is better to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else.'"
     With that two-edged maxim tossed out, the man trying to govern the sprawling city of Chicago as it welcomes one president, two candidates, thousands of delegates and protesters, not to forget all the other daily doings of a major city, takes the podium.
     "I'm grateful that we have come together to fortify our position as we push for sustainable community schools to be the model throughout our entire school district," says Johnson, who joined the 2015 Dyett hunger strike on its 24th day. "This model is not simply about teachers and teachers' assistants; it's also about the families who make up the community."
     Party politics might be about to push Johnson onto the world stage, but first Johnson takes the time to go to Bronzeville and give some love to a cause dear to his heart.
     "Sustainable community schools" is a major Chicago Teachers Union effort to remake the public schools so rather than compete for scarce magnet slots, students attend schools in their own neighborhoods with curriculum that will, in the CTU's words, "humanize education in a way that is antiracist and advances equity and justice."
     It's a message Johnson is eager to share with the world. Earlier, at the Chicago Hilton, 720 S. Michigan Ave., Johnson told a Michigan delegation breakfast that politicians need to put public money where their mouths are.

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Chicago convention history is hardly conventional

Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery

     I had two scene-setters in the Sunday paper. The first, posted Sunday, was on how the Democratic National Convention might affect the city's battered reputation. This is the second, a quickstep through Chicago's convention history.

     The nation was falling apart. The agricultural South, having forced the United States at its birth into a devil’s bargain, had no intention of abandoning the highly profitable ancient evil. They invoked God, the Bible, science and common sense when explaining why slavery had to continue forever.
     But the North could no longer accept Southern sheriffs infiltrating their cities, seizing free Blacks and dragging them back to bondage. The 1860 election was seen as a crossroads. Not in liberating the South — that wasn’t even on the table, initially — but determining the future of the unfinished West.
     Would the seven territories between Missouri and the Pacific allow slavery? Would the South get the respect they craved? The Democrats, meeting in Charleston, couldn’t even settle on a consensus candidate: the party ended up nominating two different candidates at two different conventions. Their confusion seemed an opportunity for the new Republican Party, formed out of the ashes of the Revolutionary War era Whigs.
     Where should Republicans hold their convention? Chicago had a burgeoning industrial city, with a population of 110,000 — making it the country’s ninth-largest, not half the size of Baltimore. No big shakes. So why here? And no, not because of Abraham Lincoln. He wasn’t even a consideration; had he been, the convention might have ended up elsewhere.
     Part of Chicago’s allure was that it wasn’t an Eastern city. Holding the convention on the coast would “run a big chance of losing the West.” Plus, then as now, Chicago was good at receiving guests.

Hotel rooms and railroads

     “Essentially Chicago had the infrastructure in 1860 in terms of railroads and hotel rooms,” said Ed Achorn, author of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.”
     “Illinois was also a vital swing state in the election, and the convention would help promote the party. But the site also appealed to the executive committee of the Republican National Committee because members believed it was neutral ground. No serious candidate in their view came from Illinois. William Seward, Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and Simon Cameron were deemed the big contenders. Lincoln was considered a veep possibility at best.”
     Chicago wasn’t really neutral ground. Lincoln’s homegrown forces knew the political terrain very well. While Seward’s New York supporters were parading a brass band around the Wigwam, the impressive log convention hall built where Lake and Wacker meet today, Lincoln’s team filled the balcony reserved for spectators.
     Chicago would host 24 more Democratic and Republican national conventions, including three years when both parties held their conventions here. Most — 22 — were in the century between 1860 and 1960, when the city held its last Republican Convention and nominated Richard M. Nixon for the first time. We’ve held only three since, counting the 2024 Democratic National Convention, commencing here Aug. 19.

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Looking back at a convention when conventions really meant something

Franklin D. Roosevelt heading toward the Democratic National Convention at the Chicago Stadium in 1932.

     The Democratic National Convention begins Monday. It's a big deal, supposedly, even though its central purpose is long gone. Starting in 1831, and for 125 years, votes were taken, alliances made, deadlocks broken.
     The last contested convention was the Republican Convention in 1964. In 1972, voters assumed the task, in primaries. Now conventions are publicity extravaganzas — four-day infomercials — promoting what has already been decided.

     What were they like previously? I just re-read "Happy Days Are Here Again: The 1932 Democratic Convention, the Emergence of FDR — and How America Was Changed Forever" by Steve Neal, a political columnist at the Sun-Times who died in 2004. He delighted in this stuff, had deep knowledge and wide connections. This was his last book, and it's a gripping read even if you know how it ends.
     In the summer of 1932, the nation was mired in the Great Depression. Chicago was paying its teachers in scrip. Still, politics then resembled politics now.
     "It's pretty hard to exaggerate the bitterness here," a columnist wrote. "Names are called, accusations made, treachery charged, and discreditable stories spread."
     Herbert Hoover was the aloof Republican president, refusing to aid his suffering nation. He seemed a sitting duck, and the chance to defeat him was up for grabs.
     Neal focuses on FDR, but there are a half dozen others who could have also become the nominee: cigar-chewing, derby-hatted Alfred E. Smith, the "Happy Warrior" who had lost in 1924 and 1928; Huey Long, the "Kingfish" who brazenly took 10% percent of the salaries of all public employees in Louisiana, because he could; John Nance Garner, aka "Cactus Jack;" Albert Ritchie, Maryland's four-term governor and former Secretary of War Newton Baker, seen as the man who would swoop in if FDR stumbled.
     And stumble Roosevelt did, especially in trying to eliminate the "two-third rule" that prevented him, with a simple majority of delegates, from cakewalking into the nomination on the first ballot.
     "If FDR is nominated, it will certainly prove there is no limit to the amount of fumbling one can do and still win a game," future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter wrote.
     Giants roamed the city. Comedian Will Rogers covered the convention, as did novelist John Dos Passos. H.L. Mencken and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. went into a Loop speakeasy where the Bard of Baltimore took objection to the crooner.
     "Finally, Mencken said to the young lady behind the bar, 'I'd like to shoot that son of a bitch,'" Lodge, a future diplomat and senator, recalled. "'The young lady did not bat an eye ... She reached under the counter, pulled out a Thompson submachine gun, laid it on the counter, and with a condescending fluttering of her eyelids said, indifferently, 'Go ahead.'"

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Earl B. Dickerson, a Black University of Chicago-trained lawyer, appeared before the all-white Resolutions Committee to press for a civil rights plank. "He asked his party to take a firm stand 'against discrimination by reason of race, creed or color as being outdated, barbarous and un-American,'" Neal wrote. It didn't work but reminds us how far we had to come to see a woman of color run for president.

"A wonder to a stranger"

     The paper asked me to write a scene-setter for Sunday's paper about how the convention might affect the image of the city. This is what I came up with.

     Welcome to Chicago!
     The crime-ridden, blood-soaked dystopian nightmare we call home. Stroll down Michigan Avenue, past the shuttered shops and the brazen thieves boldly pilfering luxury goods, confident the police won’t arrest them and the state’s attorney wouldn’t prosecute them if they did ...
     Whoops, that isn’t true.
     Chicago, glittering vacationland, home of the blues and deep-dish pizza, birthplace of the skyscraper. A center for art — the location of Picasso’s only monumental sculpture, plus our beloved Bean, the shiniest, beaniest, most instantly beloved artwork on earth. We rose from the ashes and held the greatest fair of all time, so certainly we can hold another Democratic National Convention, our 27th major party convention, if you count the Progressive Party in 1912.
     So which is it? When the balloons drop Aug. 22 — I almost said “when the smoke clears” — what will be left of Chicago’s reputation? Another boost for sweet home Chicago, celebrated in song, cynosure of American life? Or will it be more body blows for the punching bag of the Western world?

‘Chicago can handle a big event’
     Chicago boosters are confident the city will shine.
     “I believe Chicago is going to be a star,” said Guy Chipparoni, whose Res Publica Group promotes Lollapalooza and other big-ticket festivals. “Chicago can handle a big event.”
     That much is true. From a purely attendance perspective, Chicago holds numerous trade shows that are bigger deals than the DNC — the city expects 50,000 guests at the convention, but the National Restaurant Show last May drew 58,000, and the vast majority, like the millions of visitors who come here, aren’t mugged in any fashion worse than paying $13 for a can of Bud at Wrigley Field.
     Chicago has been wowing convention visitors since Lincoln’s debut.
     The city “is a wonder to a stranger,” wrote Simon P. Hanscom, editor of the Washington National Republican and a friend of Lincoln, noting “its broad avenues, magnificent buildings, splendid shops and fine private residences.”

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Saturday pinch hitter — Jack Clark: "Chicago 1968 and a few other DNCs"

     Former cabbie and current detective novelist Jack Clark has long been a friend of this blog. With the Democratic National Convention bearing down, he offers up memories of previous conventions. Jack is the author of Hack Writing & Other Stories, a a collection of 17 of his Reader pieces from 1975 to 2001.

     Years later--I’m not sure when this happened--I decided that my father had actually died in 1969. I probably had too many memories in the space reserved for 1968.
     The year starts for me at the very beginning of February with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. I had a hard time turning the page on a photograph of a very large pile of dead U.S. soldiers in the back of an open-bed truck. Many of them looked to be my age—the same age as my friend Phil who was there with the Marines. 2100 U.S. soldiers would die in the attacks, which were a turning point in the war. Before the year was out nearly 17,000 U.S. soldiers would die. It was the worst toll in that long war.
     At the end of March, President Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term. The war was tearing the country apart. From now on, we would have to do it without him. Maybe that would stop the chant: Hey, hey, LBJ how many kids did you kill today?
     Later that same week, my father and I watched Martin Luther King’s last speech. King told the striking sanitation workers in Memphis that he had been to the mountaintop. “I may not get there with you,” he said at the very end of the speech. “But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
     He was assassinated less than 24-hours later.
     I saw the beginning of the West Side riots the next day in front of Austin High School where I was a student. A police car was overturned in the intersection of Pine and West End Avenue, just south of the school. A police officer fired a shot into the air. Those were the final sparks.
     I was with a few hundred other white students at the north end of the block. We were soon fleeing west. Thousands of black students, who had come on a march from schools all over the West Side, headed east causing havoc as they went, and that night the West Side burned. And that was pretty much the end of the neighborhood I’d known my entire life. After the riots, the question changed from Are you moving or staying? to When are you moving?
     My father was already back in the hospital. We could see the West Side burning from his room.
     In June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
     My father’s 50th birthday was in August, ten days before the Democratic Convention came to town. His friends threw him a big party in one of their downtown offices. Looking back, I realize it was what we now call a living wake.
     My family, like many others, often talked politics around the dinner table. The war in Vietnam and Civil Rights were the big discussions that decade. By 1968, most of us were against the war. I’m pretty sure my father had been against it from the very beginning. My parents were Henry Wallace/Adlai Stevenson liberals. When the first black family moved in around the corner, my mother baked them a cake, carried it over, rang their bell, and introduced herself.
     On the front porch one day, my father told me something prophetic about race relations. “Black people are always going to have a hard time in this country,” he said. “A bigot might see a man walking down the street and think he looks Jewish. As much as he hates Jews, he has to be careful because he’s not really sure. But when he sees a black man, he doesn’t have to be careful about anything. He knows.”
     My father and his mother came to Chicago from New York when he was 10. He never met his own father. He lived all over Chicago, south, north, and west, and knew it well. He met my mother in night school at Austin High School, and then went all the way through college and law school at night while working full time. He took several years out for Army service during World War II. When he passed the bar in 1951, he already had four children. Three more were yet to come.
     It was his idea that I should volunteer to work at the 1968 convention. His mother had worked at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933, (No. Not as a fan dancer.) and he spent most of the summer he turned 15 there. He had good memories of being in the middle of such an historic affair. He thought being a page would be a good experience for me.
     My friend John and I had wanted to get to the convention center at the
     International Amphitheater but we didn’t have enough clout and got stuck at the Conrad Hilton. The other pages were all college kids. We were still in high school.
     The hippies and war protesters were across the street in Grant Park. The National Guard Troops were on Michigan Avenue and in jeeps covered with barbed wire frames. The Chicago police were everywhere. I was 18 years old. I had no idea what was going on, although I’m sure I could have done a pretty decent impersonation of someone who did. My favorite hippie chant was: Fuck you LBJ. Fuck you LBJ. It would go on and on. You could understand every word blocks away. I’d never heard anything like it—not out there for the entire world to hear. They didn’t like LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey either, the man who became the nominee that year. Dump the hump, was another chant and I agreed. I was working for the hump but I was rooting for Eugene McCarthy. He was staying across the street at the Blackstone Hotel.
     I remember leading a couple of delegates to their rooms. Other than that, I have no ideas what our duties were. I know John and I spent quite a bit of time a few floors down where Bobby Kennedy’s people were in mourning. We’d hide our Humphrey credentials and try to talk with any college girl we could find. I’m pretty sure we never told them we were in high school. When security got tighter, we were exposed as Humphrey workers and barred from the floor.
     But the Hilton turned out to be the action-filled assignment. We watched parts of the Battle of Michigan Avenue, between war protesters and the Chicago Police, first on live TV and then hanging out the 8th floor windows of the Hilton Hotel. The Walker Report would later characterize the battle as “a police riot.”
     After the last hippie had been beaten, tear-gassed, and dragged away by the police, John and I hurried down eight flights of stairs and went outside to view the battlefield. Michigan Avenue was littered with assorted pieces of clothing, shoes without partners, sleeves torn off shirts. The heavy scent of tear gas was still in the air, and that’s about as far as my memory goes. There must have been blood but, more than 50 years later, I can’t say I actually saw any of it. I know that when we tried to get back into the hotel, we couldn’t. I think they were afraid of a hippie counterattack. Our Humphrey credentials were no longer enough. Now we needed a room key.
     We ended up in a long line for the pay phone across the street in the parking lot of the Essex Hotel. It was mostly kids calling their parents collect to let them know that they’d survived. One of them said his father was the governor or maybe the lieutenant governor of Connecticut, something like that. When our turn came, we called upstairs and had someone come down with a key.
     Ramparts Magazine published a daily wall poster newspaper at the convention. I’d saved every issue. “Up Against the Wall,” it said on the top left, and that’s exactly where I intended to put them in my bedroom at home. When we were getting ready to leave on the last night, I opened the drawer where I’d stashed them, and every single issue was gone. Who would be that low down and dirty? I never figured it out.
     That was the end of August. My father died less than three weeks later. He’d been in and out of the hospital for more than a year.
     I don’t think we ever talked about the convention. By the time it was over, the relatives were coming in from out of town.
     I must have gone to the hospital once or twice in those final weeks. I hope I did. But the truth is, I went as little as possible. I told myself it was too painful to see him in that condition. I have long since realized it’s not your pain you should be worrying about when someone close is dying.
     I sometimes think 1968 must have been a particularly bad year to die. The country and Chicago were both in turmoil. It was a troublesome time. And he would never know how it all turned out, how the country and the city got through it, or if they ever did.
     On the other hand, he was spared the Nixon years.
     My father attended the 1952 and the 1956 Democratic conventions, which were also held at the International Amphitheater. Adlai Stevenson was nominated at each, and went on to lose to the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket both times.
     In 1956, my father Vincent Clark and his law school friend Patrick Nee were at the convention on the final night. They stayed to the very end and then grabbed one of the decorations on the way out the door. It was a sturdy five-point, canvas-covered star, about six feet by six feet, built with two by fours. They tied it on top of Pat’s old Packard and started for the West Side.
     The Congress Expressway (now the Eisenhower) wouldn’t open for years. But sections of it were already completed. Signs said: Drive At Your Own Risk. They probably thought this was the perfect route, a couple of young attorneys turned desperados, on the run with a pilfered star. That’s where they ran out of gas. Pat got the car off to the side. My father grabbed a gas can and went off in search of a station.
     He found a cop somewhere or, more than likely, the cop found him. He got gas and the cop gave him a ride back to the car. Along the way, my father talked the cop into giving Pat a hard time. The cop turned on his flashing lights, pulled behind the Packard and shined his spotlight in the window. He got out and began to interrogate Pat about what he was doing with a star on top of his car. Where’d you get the star, buddy?
     It was a great joke and anytime someone asked about the star, which moved around our house for years, my father got to tell it all over again. Pat was a good sport, a big guy with a twinkle in his eye. We kids all loved him. He died even younger than my father.
     So all this is a way to say, I’ve got Chicago conventions in my blood. But I’m going to have to miss this one. I’ll be in France visiting the lovely Hélène, the light of my life these last 14 years. I’m sure we’ll catch some of it on TV, especially if it’s anything like 1968. The French love that kind of stuff.
     Have fun without me. And if you happen to see a loose memento lying about don’t be afraid to grab it. But don’t steal someone else’s. Those Up Against the Wall Posters would have been in tatters long ago, if I’d managed to get them home. But I would have had a lot of fun with them through the years, moving them from one apartment to the next, from one wall to another. If people happened to ask about them, it would have given me a chance to tell some stories. Who knows? Maybe if I had, I would remember more today.
     There are those who say that when history is being made it’s best to be somewhere far away. On the other hand, if you manage to survive, you’ll always be able to look back and say, “I was there,” even after you’ve forgotten almost all of it.

 

Summer's not over (yet); a conversation with Germany's 'Dr. Beer'

Dr. Marc Rauschmann, with hops plants.

     The second half of August, already? Geez, that was fast. Summer, still, but also one of those moments when you find yourself teetering at the top of that first steep hill on the roller coaster. You can see the entire amusement park spread out around you. Take a good look, because it's a quick plunge, a few rises and falls, a few hard turns, until we come to a jarring stop at autumn.
     Did you have a good summer? I detailed the highlight of mine on Wednesday — my older son's wedding. Otherwise, mostly work, trips to the Botanic Garden and the YMCA. Gardening was a disaster, again. My tomatoes are little hard green balls of shame.
     At least there was the comfort of cherries. Great this year, if pricey. The Northwest Cherry Growers credit perfect weather.
     What else? I did indulge in light summertime reading, racing through the last few volumes in Robert Galbraith's C.B. Strike mystery series. My wife is a big mystery fan, and after years of touting the books, written by J.K. Rowling under a pen name, I dove in, warming immediately to one-legged shamus Cormoran Strike and his resourceful sidekick Robin Ellacott. The author of the Harry Potter books certainly can write, and these books are also a window into her psyche. Rowling spends her days decrying trans women on X, and they appear as some of the more loathsome characters in the Strike novels.
     Strike is a classic noir detective — hard-drinking, fast with his fists. But in the later books he goes on a diet and starts drinking NA beer, which has been booming in recent years. NA beer can be seen as reaching a new level of acceptability when fictional detectives start drinking it.
     Once, the choice was O'Doul's or nothing. Now there's half an aisle of NA beer at Binny's. When I was in Boston, my cousin's wife brought me a Woodland Farms Brewery Pointer Non-Alcoholic IPA that was so delicious I looked into having the stuff shipped. Though honestly Clausthaler is good enough for me.
     The Radeberger Gruppe, which launched Clausthaler in 1979 and claims it is the first NA beer (a distinction I'd give Prohibition era near beer), dangled their brewmaster at me. I bit.
     What does Clausthaler taste like?
     "It's full-bodied beer," said Dr. Marc Rauschmann, on a Zoom call from Germany. "A slight sweetness from the malt, from the sugar. We have a moderate bitterness, a good bitterness."
     I told him that a moderate, good bitterness is exactly what I strive for.
     "We have a higher bitterness, but because of the sweetness it's a very good balanced beer," he continued. "You don't taste a very aggressive bitterness. You taste the bitterness, but it's very pleasant."
     This is because it's brewed to be no alcohol, he said, while other NAs remove the alcohol later, leading to "empty tasting, low bodied" beers.
     Speaking of Heineken 0.0, that leads to what I know is the central puzzlement among regular beer drinkers regarding NA beer: If you don't get a buzz, why bother? Several reasons. To me, it tastes good, it's better than a glass of water and fewer calories than soda. It approximates the beer experience, and nobody ever regrets drinking NA beer.

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Cool facts about beautiful buildings

 

Artist/photographer Chris Hytha, right and writer Mark Houser by Hytha's model of the top of the 
Carbide and Carbon Building at the Chicago Architecture Foundation in July.

    Unlike you, I've been through the nickel skybridge connecting the two Wrigley buildings — yes, there are two, built at different times, with separate addresses, yet still generally considered one Wrigley Building. My wife and I also had our first breakfast as a married couple across the street on one of the stepback terraces of the old Medinah Temple — now the Intercontinental — having wed in a ballroom there the night before. I've sat in one of top floor offices of Tribune Tower, with a glorious half circle window, while admiring one of the three Pulitzer Prizes won by the late cartoonist Jeff MacNelly. And I once gave an architecture talk at the top of Mather Tower, pointing to the various landmarks within sight of the wonderful little round skydeck with a 360 view of the city. 
     What I'm trying to say is that I have a fairly granular understanding of the local subject matter of Chris Hytha's art: gorgeous high rez images of deco towers. And so went to the talk that he and writer Mark Houser held at the Chicago Architecture Center in late July. Not expecting to write anything — I focused on Hytha's stunning drone images (not Ansel Adams single photo frames, but computer-assembled composites) just two years ago.
    Even though the talk offered up a trove of delicious information.

    For all the times I walked past the Carbide and Carbon Building, the cover image on their new book "Highrises Art Deco: 100 Spectacular Skyscrapers from the Roaring '20s to the Great Depression," I didn't realize it is Union Carbide and Carbon the name refers to (I have a hard enough time keeping them in the right order — I keep wanting to make it the Carbon and Carbide Building, until I realized that the second vowels went in order, i before o).
    Nor did I realize the connection between The Chicago Tribune Building and the Chicago Temple, the gothic-topped home of the First United Methodist Church of Chicago (and yes, I've gone through the parsonage located at the top, one of the sweeter gigs in Christendom, and visited the Sky Chapel with its carved wooden bas relief of Jesus gesturing over the skyline of the city, circa 1955). 

    Exactly a century ago, in 1924, the Tribune had its famous contest for a design for its new home.

     "Col. McCormick had just finished an international contest, hundred of architects from around the world., trying to design the most beautiful skyscraper in the world to be the new home of the Chicago Tribune," Houser told the rapt Architecture Center crowd. "Every single one of those entrants had followed the rules that Chicago has a 400 foot tall height limit.  He picked his winner, based on a French cathedral. And that skyscraper is just under 400 feet tall."

    Then the Chicago Temple topped out, far taller than the proposed Trib Tower.

   "Now the City Council is going to allow the church to have a 568 foot tall skyscraper a couple months after he made this announcement," Houser said.

    Col. McCormick was not a happy man. And he had a newspaper to thunder through, though he tried to work with the development.
    " So immediately, there's the headline: 'The Methodists have found a way to break through the 400 foot crust that is stifling Chicago architecture!"' said Houser. "The city saw the error of its way and the Chicago Tribune tower added another four stories" after McCormick pressed the winning architect to make the thing bigger.

     There's much more, but you get the idea. I would have selfishly kept this to myself, but the duo are circling back to Chicago this weekend — alas, their talk Saturday at the Pendry Chicago, a boutique hotel within the Carbide and Carbon (checking those second vowels) Building, 230 N. Michigan, is already sold out. But they are selling (and signing) their magnificent book there 5 to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday evening and 10 to 12 Sunday morning.  And their show at the Chicago Architecture Center, 111 E. Wacker, runs until the 25th. Check it out if you can; it's stunning.

Chris Hytha with a slide showing how AI can be used to. generate architectural ideas. Over three years
he traveled to some 70 cities shooting deco towers.