DEI at DC memorials ripe for purging

The statue of Thomas Jefferson in his Washington memorial. Built during World War II, the memorial highlights diversity, equality and the need to always oppose tyranny

     WASHINGTON — The statue in the Jefferson Memorial is 19 feet tall, but it's the words carved in stone around the bronze figure that are truly monumental.
      Such as these, from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence:
      "WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL."
     "Again with the equality," I thought, forcing back a smile. And the diversity — "all men"? Really?
      Can't have that. Not in 2025 America, where the same government that went to the expense and bother of erecting this palace to DEI is now scrubbing references to unfavored groups from official websites and giving certain people the bum's rush — out of the military, out of the country.
     How long will this offense be tolerated now that intolerance is the latest dance craze? Envision a trio of Three Stooges administration lackeys. The same crew who took down the Department of Defense page mentioning the Enola Gay — the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — because, ewww, "gay."
      Imagine them showing up at the Jefferson Memorial in a blare of calliope music, a jumble of ladders and drop cloths and eye pokes, splattering plaster as they efface that forbidden "EQUAL" and slap on a more acceptable sentiment along the lines of "ALL MEN ARE CREATED ... MANLY."
     "Nyuk nyuk nyuk, Moe, we soitenly are!"
      Their next stop would have to be the Lincoln Memorial, where the Gettysburg Address covers one wall and goes straight into the DEI weeds: "FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO" (let's revert to lower case. These memorial caps look fine in marble but scream in print) "our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
      "Alllllll men"? Yikes! Even immigrants who came here seeking refuge? Can't they be unceremoniously bundled in a van by masked police and shipped to East Africa?
      Or men who identify as women? Of course they can be cashiered from the armed forces because ... well ... I'm not sure what the excuse is. They make our leader uncomfortable, perhaps.
      Meanwhile, my friends on the left will drill down on "men," pointing out that women weren't included in all this hoo-ha about freedom. Flash: There was no electricity, either.
      Are these really our choices? History as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. "Father, I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet." Or history as Thomas Jefferson, rapist and enslaver, who also did some other stuff?
      Does it have to be celebration or revulsion? Can't we have the full spectrum? Glory and shame?
      When I wasn't minding (though not jiggling or kissing) my new granddaughter in her new home, I strolled over to memorials. Not just the Jefferson and the Lincoln, but Martin Luther King Jr., who of course was caught speaking publicly about "dignity, equality and freedom." (I imagine the MAGA stooges will plaster that over with transcripts from J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance tapes.)
      The underappreciated and thoughtful Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial — contrast it with the explosion of wreaths, stars and eagles that is the insipid World War II Memorial — seems practically ripped from the headlines.

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Uber is for the weak

Young people aboard the LaGuardia Link.

  

      "We're the oldest people on this bus by 30 years," I said, then gave a second look around and revised. "Maybe by 40 years."

     It was true. Everyone else on the LaGuardia Link Q70 seemed in their mid-20s. A time when money tends to be tight.
     Money isn't tight for me; at least we can afford ride shares and taxis. But I can also do math. And spending $111 on an Uber from LaGuardia to Jersey City, a trip that would take about an hour with traffic, didn't make sense. Not when you can make the same trip for $7.75 — the free shuttle from the airport to 75th Street, the $2.50 subway down to the World Trade Center, and then five bucks or so — I didn't even take notice if the exact price — for the PATH train under the Hudson to Exchange Place.
      Sure, it took closer to two hours, with the pause at the Oculus Starbucks so my wife could grab a revivifying cappuccino. But we weren't in a rush.
      I've enjoy taking public transportation. Great way to become familiar with a place. I spent weeks in cities from Tokyo to Paris and never gotten in a cab or, more recently, called an Uber. (Not that I'm condemning the practice; I take Uber too, when necessary. The headline is a glib brag, not a blanket condemnation you need to get agitated about). 

      Sometimes public transportation is a challenge —  last year I was offended that there was no direct public transportation route from Boston to Boxborough, so cobbled a complex public transit odyssey together. It was almost an adventure. Even when publications are paying. I don't have many rules when traveling, but I seldom take a cab when a bus works, or a plane when there's a train going the same place. 

     I remember going to cover the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. I checked into my motel — nothing fancy here at the old Sun-Times — and then got in the queue for the bus, smiling quietly to myself, thinking about a colleague who ran up nearly a grand in taxi bills, supposedly, in London and almost lost his job over it. 

     "You'll just have to find another reason to fire me," I thought, paying my fare. Plus there was a captive audience of talkative Clevelanders waiting for me there.

    When there is no public transportation, there is always walking. We had a magnificent lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington. When we finished, we considered calling an Uber. It was hot, and a half hour walk back to where we were staying. We walked.

Nothing distracts like a new baby

     My wife asked if I wanted to cover the mirrors. A Jewish tradition in a house of mourning. At first I said no. Many pressing practical concerns had been raised by my mother suddenly dying that morning, but her soul becoming trapped in a mirror wasn't among them.
      Then I immediately changed my mind and agreed. Rituals comfort. The tradition had been retrofitted for modern times, in that nimble, adaptive way religion employs, scrambling to stay both timeless and relevant. Now covering mirrors is supposed to discourage vanity among the bereaved. I'm all for that. We could all use less vanity. Imagine where our once-proud nation would today be if fewer people were consumed by unchecked self-regard.
      "Suddenly" is the wrong word. My mother had actually been steadily dying for years — ailment upon indignity upon deterioration. Every time I'd visit, I'd make sure to kiss her goodbye and tell her I love her because I really wasn't sure if I'd see her again. The last time, a week earlier,, I'd gone to show her a photo of her newborn great-granddaughter.
      My mother, increasingly indifferent for the past few months, perked up, and even phoned her sisters, whom she'd uncharacteristically ignored, to share the happy news. We agreed that this was the most beautiful and perfect baby in the history of babies, and as soon as the tot could travel — probably at Thanksgiving — she would be personally presented for approval. Though I had my doubts of that ever happening, and stood in the doorway a long moment, just gazing at my mother, until I realized she was glaring back at me with a "what-are-you-looking-at-bub?" expression, and turned away.
      The next time I saw her she was dead, in bay 48 of the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital. Not a moment I'd prepared for. I don't believe I actually turned to my wife and implored, "Do something!" But I certainly thought it. My mother sang as a young girl — on the radio, on television — and sang to us all our lives. Last month was the first time she didn't call on my birthday and sing "Happy Birthday to You," In those last few moments together, I sang a couple brief lullabies she'd sung to us: "Rock-a-Bye" and "My Bonnie," an odd Scottish dirge she's somehow turned into a bedtime song, speaking of retrofitting. But apt in its sense of loss and longing. "Bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me."
      We went directly from the hospital to Golden Haven in Addison, where our parents lived. I told my father that his wife of 69 years had died. "How old was she?" he replied. I said 88, He nodded and observed that 88 is a good age, then let the matter drop. If he brings up the subject again, I plan to say that she went to the hospital, which is true, and leave off the rest. Who wants to re-discover, even vaguely, that his wife has died, over and over, every day, if not every hour?
      Jews get our own into the ground fast. My mother died on a Saturday, and was buried the following Wednesday. I'm not sure how we picked Shalom Memorial Park -- that was my brother -- but I admired how smoothly the whole process was handled. My mother had a keen eye for the mistakes of others, a trait I've inherited in full. But the only wrong aspect to the process in my view was there are no headstones jutting out of the ground — the Arlington Heights cemetery is a memorial garden, all bronze plaques, flush with the grass. When we drove through the place, I was uncomfortable with that absence, and considered insisting we find somewhere else, where she could have a granite tombstone.. But I decided to go with the flow, speaking of suppressing vanity, and not insist upon my own preference. Maybe covering those mirrors had an effect after all.

      The paper told me to take as much time off as I liked, and most of a week was consumed with planning the funeral and then holding it, removing her effects out of her apartment and donating them to charity.
     But in one of those examples of lucky timing that would look trite in fiction but life doesn't blush to serve up, 48 hours after we buried my mother, my wife and I flew to New York City to meet my new granddaughter, and help her parents pack up their apartment and move to a different city. Because merely having a baby isn't difficult enough.

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Can you pick the near Vermeer?

 

So is this the close-but-no-cigar Vermeer?

    Odd. I'm a certified art museum buff. We're members of the great Art Institute of Chicago and visit regularly, seldom missing a new exhibit. I love nudging Chicagoans toward Pilsen's National Museum of Mexican Art — few seem to go otherwise. I've even been to the quirky little Intuit Art Museum , with its tableau of the apartment of the deeply strange outsider artist Henry Darger. Though not since they expanded into Howard Tullman's old apartment. Going back to check out the new arrangement is high on my agenda.

     When visiting just about any city, hitting the local art museum is always a top priority, though after touring the museums in most smaller cities my main takeaway is near pity. The Art Institute they're not. 

     Still, most museums have at least one work worth seeing — Dallas's Amon Carter Museum of American Art, for instance, has Grant Wood's ever-more-significant "Parson Weems Fable." 

     Sometimes I fall down on the job. It hurt me to be in New York City recently and not hurry to the Met to see the John Singer Sargent show. But time was limited, and duty called.
    Generally, I collect museums the way other guys collect major league ballparks. The Prado. The Louvre. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, plus the Van Gogh Museum. The British Museum. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I'm proud to have gone to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before its famous 1990 art heist. 
     But the National Gallery of Art in Washington just wasn't on my radar. Maybe, given a spare few hours in the nation's capital, I always rush to the National Portrait Gallery, with its hall of presidents, or the American History Museum. Even the little round Hirshhorn. 

Or maybe this one? 

     

     On the 4th of July, I was headed to the Air & Space Museum— haven't seen that for years — but it was all sold out (tickets are free, but you need one). So we wandered over to the National Gallery, which turns out to have an enormous, deep collection — the only Leonardo da Vinci in the Western hemisphere (her room packed with tourists taking selfies of themselves, in some daft after echo of the mobs around the Mona Lisa). 
     An astounding trove of French impressionists, including Monet after Monet. My wife confessed to not being a fan of his near homophone, Manet, but by the time we were done she was won over by works such as "The Dead Toreador." 
     Rare paintings and studies by Georges Seurat, who created the Art Institute's masterpiece "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (rare because he died at 31) 

Or this one?

     The museum has an excellent Dutch collection, with a number of fine Rembrandts. It also has three of the world's 34 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer. As a fan of his quiet scenes of Dutch domestic life, I headed over to see them. 

     The National Gallery used to have four Vermeers. But in 2022 the museum took advantage of being closed due to COVID to put its Vermeers under sophisticated scanners, and decided one of them wasn't done by the master himself — the brushstrokes are wrong, apparently — but by someone in his studio.
     Knowing this, it seemed clearly inferior. But that opinion might have been skewed by knowing it wasn't from the master's hand. Which inspires me to quiz EGD readers. Take a look at these four paintings. Can you tell which three are real, supposedly, and which four is not quite up to Vermeer standards? The New York Times spills the beans here.

     I'm only touching upon the glories of the National Gallery of Art. In three hours we saw maybe half of it.

    I've been to the Rodin museums in Paris and Philadelphia, but was still impressed by their collection of his busts and sculptures (this time I managed to resist pointing out. yet again, that German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was Rodin's secretary. Typically my resolve fails me — as it did when I found myself mentioning, for the umpteeth time, that Rodin's Thinker is supposed to be an incredibly buff Dante, conjuring up his Inferno). 

    If you go before Nov. 2, check out the ground floor exhibit "Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World," a fascinating deep dive into 16th and 17th century depictions of insects and other small creatures. 

    Oh, and in addition to being a museum fan, I'm also a foodie, and lunch at the National Gallery was first rate — a chicken and orange salad for me for $18, a curry chicken salad for my wife. It's tiring work slogging through gallery after gallery, and nothing braces you for the effort than a plate of high grade chow. 

High-level training

 

     My attention was drawn to three jets of water shooting out high atop a building being constructed on Hudson Street in Jersey City. At first I thought the water had to be due to some kind of construction mishap. A burst pipe maybe. That might account for one jet. But three? 

     "They must be testing the standpipes," I said to my wife, referring to the vertical water pipes installed in all buildings taller than four stories, designed to be used by firefighters. 

     But I'm not a big fan of guesswork, not when an explanation can be found. We strolled in that direction, figuring enlightenment might be found there, and it was, in the form of a firefighter looking up at jetting water.
     I addressed my question to him, and he said that firefighters do not often get the chance to train 50 floors up in a high rise. They were being permitted to use the raw space to practice their hose work. That made sense. Firefighters sometimes make use of high rises that are about to be torn down, or have special training towers to simulate the layout of skyscrapers. Such simulations are important -- high rise fires are particularly dangerous, with the usual hazards of fighting a fire magnified by  additional mechanical and electrical systems, not to forget the difficulty of hauling gear up a few dozen flights of stairs. 
      We moved on down the street -- the water was shooting out so high up, maybe 500 feet above the pavement -- that by the time it reached street level, it was no more than a fine mist, quite pleasant on such a hot day. 

He's baaaaaaaack!

                            

    John James Audubon's Washington Sea Eagle is a magnificent bird. But there is a problem with it.
    It might not be real.
    While America's master of depicting birds is not known for just making them up, the fact is that this glorious specimen has never been found in nature. So either it went extinct after Audubon captured its golden glory, or he just got the bird wrong -- it isn't as if he could take reference photographs. 
     Making the Washington Sea Eagle the bird of the moment. As a stand in for our beleaguered nation. Glorious yes. But is it real? Or just a pretty picture? Did our land of freedom and liberty ever really exist? Or is it just a flattering story we've convinced ourselves is true?

     Glory seems in short supply, as congressmen cave and the thin veneer of values that many at least gave lip service to is utterly abandoned. Economic responsibility? Gone. Concern for the struggling? Gone. Half the nation watches in horror through latticed fingers as Donald Trump codifies and strengthens his hold on power and entrenches his administration policy of cruelty and abuse. While the other half either cheers or yawns,  cycling through Instagram, bored with it all.
     I'm ... what? Tired. Distracted. A little bored, to be honest, because the story lately never changes. The bad guys win. Still keeping track, sort of, despite a personal life that has suddenly become very, very busy. 
     Honestly, I've enjoyed the break. I could get used to this. In fact, I have a fine obituary ready to go for Old Obit Week #5.
     But ... well ... am I the only one who thinks Old Obit Week is feeling a little ... old? Stale. I like to give you your money's worth (which is a joke, ha ha, because you don't pay anything. Get it?)

     While I'm still officially on vacation, from the paper, helping my son relocate his new family, extending my week off to bury my mother to a second week off to welcome my granddaughter — talk about a shift in tone — an email from a reader served as a firebell in the night, a call to duty, such as it is.
     "Hi Neil," JS begins.

      "I am of German heritage. I have friends that are German immigrants. I have always struggled with how the German citizens of the 1930-40 era could capitulate to the horror of the Holocaust. Today, after the passing of the big bad bill, I understand how good people will look away. It's very sad and i need you to write about it. Help me make this ok or help me make it better.Please write something to help me. Help all of your readers.Thx. Your readers love you."

     And I love you guys, too. Truly. I'd feel stupid writing this for nobody. 

     My first thought was that I could never make this okay and wouldn't want to try. How could it be okay? This confederation of cowards kneecapping the poor while lavishing resources on our aborning police states. This is the exact opposite of okay. It's horrible. My general optimism sags under the weight of events. With far worse certain to come.
     One thing that made taking time off easier is there is nothing useful to say that I haven't been saying for years. This is a process, turning our flawed republic into a totalitarian state and then, maybe, turning away from that doom. We punched the ticket, we need to take the trip, to go through it, unfortunately. This is the part where we endure. It isn't pleasant. Bad things are supposed to feel bad. If you think this is terrible, wait. It gets worse.

     There is good news: this epoch will end someday. But until it does, all that decent Americans can do is pay attention and manifest ourselves in whatever small ways we can. I can't pretend this blog post or my Sun-Times column have any influence whatsoever. But they can buck up readers like JS, and that is not without value.
     I wrote her back, saying, essentially, now is a time for courage and forbearance, which are free, and no one can deny you. I am a fan of an organization that puts much stock in the concept of hitting rock bottom — that you have to reach some unacceptable nadir before improvement is possible. For a while, I hoped the insurrection of Jan. 6,2021, had to be that bottom. But I was wrong. Obviously we have further to slide. The future of America includes concentration camps.
Shit, the present of America includes concentration camps.
     If being in a state of constant anxiety would shorten the Trump's era by 15 minutes, I would do that. But the entire collection of voices thundering against him have done exactly diddly squat. He's stronger than ever. Yet I remain strangely optimistic. Maybe it's some kind of psychotic disconnect and denial. Maybe I'm relieved I'm not in a camp, yet. But I do retain a bedrock faith in this country that cannot be shaken . The good guys win, eventually. This country defeated King George III, the Confederacy, Imperial Japan, the Nazis and the Soviet Union. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor cannot prevail forever. We will defeat this monster. Just not anytime soon.

Old obit week #4: Bill Sennet, 70, `bright star in the neighborhood'

     Not everybody I wrote an obit about was famous. Some of my favorites were about exceptional-though-unheralded — I almost said "ordinary" — people who make life worth living. I wondered if it was too much of a burden to impose old obituaries on the EGD audience, but "He understood the joy of every day" makes the entire endeavor worthwhile, to me if no one else.

     Bill Sennet was a great neighbor.
     "He was Chicago all the way: Lane High School, Korean War, worked with his hands," said Paul McCloskey, whose yard abutted Mr. Sennet's in their Lakewood; Balmoral neighborhood. "His hardware shop in his basement was better than Ace. If you needed a tool, you didn't go to the store. You went to Bill. He not only had it, he said, `Here's how you use it.' You broke out a can of beer and sat there while he did it, then said, `Gee, thanks Bill,' and he said, `Let me know if you need any more help.' "
     Mr. Sennet, 70, died Dec. 19 at home.
     Born in Chicago — his dad worked in the Post Office — Mr. Sennet worked for 40 years in the insurance industry, as a safety engineer. But he had heart trouble_he had two bypasses_and retired about 1990.
     His friends remember him as one of those rare, wonderful people who brings a community together.
     "He was like the glue that bound everyone — the young and old and middle-aged — on the block," said another neighbor, Roger Flaherty, an assistant metro editor at the Sun-Times. "He loved to talk with other neighbors — new ones and old — about politics, neighborhood issues, how to fix things around the house, the best way to get rid of weeds and rodents, how to make a catapult. He was endlessly curious about the world around him."
     Mr. Sennet attended Wright College for two years, and was in the Army in the Korean War.
     He served on the local school council at Peirce Elementary, and volunteered, particularly with the art program.
     "He was really the most cordial, giving and warm person, always willing to support the school and very interested in art," said Peirce principal Janice M. Rosales. "Most recently, he was working with the artist-in-residence; he was working on a mosaic project just last week."
     "He understood the joy of every day," said Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th). "Where some people don't seem to understand the miracles that surround us all, he understood those miracles and he was able to communicate the meaning, to children in particular. I worked with him for many years on children's art events. It wasn't the doing of art; it was discovering and believing you could try and achieve something. I miss him so much."
     "He had a lot of interests," said McCloskey. "He loved a good martini, good music, loved to go to the Art Institute, loved working with his hands, loved doing financial things, loved working on his house."
     Mr. Sennet periodically adopted dogs from the city shelter. The latest, Zoe, was prowling his house a day after his death, searching for his missing friend. It was a feeling shared by everyone who knew him.
     "It is such a loss, not just for the family, but for the school and the whole community," said Rosales. "One of the neighbors mentioned to me: `He was a bright star in the neighborhood and well liked.' Everyone will miss him."
     Survivors include his wife, Josephine, daughter Karen and son Erik and a sister, Doris Potter.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 2000

Old obit week #3: TV sportscaster Tim Weigel dies

     The approach for this obit came about because Tim Weigel was my friend too -- we bonded over our mutual love of cigars, smoked together at the Billy Goat, back when men could do that sort of thing. I remember arriving for dinner at Tim's house in Evanston for the first time, his address written on a piece of paper. I gazed stupidly at a baronial mansion on the lakefront and thought, "That can't be the home of the guy in the loud jackets reading sports on TV." Then showed the address to a neighbor. It was. For some reason I neglected to mention that he was Gene Siskel's roommate at Yale and they both succumbed to the same rare brain illness. Maybe I didn't know at the time. 

     Tim Weigel was your friend.
     Even those who only knew him from their TV sets, from his candy-colored jackets and his upbeat, affable, "Hey-it's-just-sports" delivery, felt a special bond with Mr. Weigel that made him among the most popular television personalities in the Chicago area.
     He died Sunday at home in Evanston, almost one year since vision problems sent him to a doctor and an MRI revealed a tumor on his brain.
     Mr. Weigel, 56, was sports director of WBBM-Channel 2 for the last six years before illness forced him to step back, though not before bravely facing the cameras in a toupee he was the first to make light of.

      Previously, he was at WLS-Channel 7, where he spent the bulk of his career — from 1977 to 1994. He was so popular that, for several years in the early 1980s, he moved out of sports and anchored the 10 o'clock news.
     A fluid, graceful writer, Mr. Weigel also crafted a sports column for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1994 to 1996.
     Born on a Gurnee farm, Mr. Weigel attended Lake Forest High School and Yale University, where he studied history, played keyboard for a rock band, Cleopatra and the Seizures, and was a member of the football team.
     He received his bachelor's degree in history in 1968, taught third grade for two years and earned his master's degree in film from Northwestern University.
     A promised newspaper job in Connecticut failed to materialize, and he became a waiter. His big break into journalism came when he served a meal to Yale President Kingman Brewster, who felt waiting tables "was an embarrassment to Yale," Mr. Weigel said. Brewster got Mr. Weigel an interview with the New Haven Register, which turned into his first newspaper job.
     Mr. Weigel began covering college football in 1971 for the Chicago Daily News, winning awards and quickly moving up to cover the Bulls and the Bears.
     "I've never been around anyone whose sense of humor was so infectious," said the man who hired him, Daily News sports editor Ray Sons.
     Mr. Weigel's work was grounded in solid knowledge and fueled by a competitive streak, yet colleagues said he remained a fun-loving, loyal friend.
     "It was impossible not to like Tim, even when we were on opposite sides of a story," said former Bears coach Mike Ditka.
     Mr. Weigel "was one of the toughest competitors I've ever known, and he had the tenderest heart — he loved opera," said Channel 2 news anchor Mary Ann Childers. "Woe be it to the news manager who had to call Tim and tell him there was a breaking sports story on the night he had his opera tickets."
     He entered broadcasting when WMAQ radio hired him for sports commentary. He moved to television after hearing about an opening at WMAQ-Channel 5.
     Mr. Weigel was given the job on a trial basis. Soon after, he was given the No. 1 sports anchor job.
     "It was a total fluke. I can't imagine that would happen today," he said. ". . . In a cool medium, I was fairly hot — different. It jolted people for a while."
     "He was one of the first journalists to approach sports in a way that was both passionate yet professional," said his daughter Jenniffer Weigel.
     Mr. Weigel was fired when the station was taken over by a management team from New York City. Channel 7 quickly hired him, where he created a name for himself with his "Weigel Wieners," a much-copied segment of sports gaffes and oddities.
     He sported a backward beret when he lost his hair because of chemotherapy, which led to some disapproval from viewers who apparently didn't know he was ill, said his wife, Vicki Truax. They asked, " `Who did he think he was, going on the air looking like a gang member?' " she said.
     Despite his ordeal, Mr. Weigel patiently wrote to the viewers that "he had lost the hair on the back of his head and needed to cover it," his wife said.
     Family and friends recalled his hearty laugh. When he attended the opening of Broadway-bound "The Producers" in Chicago, Mr. Weigel laughed so hard that actress Sarah Jessica Parker — wife of the musical's star, Matthew Broderick — "kept turning around, and at the end she said, `I'm so glad you liked it,' " said Jenniffer Weigel.
     Toward the end of his life he could no longer play piano, read or drive, yet he remained positive. When his daughter expressed her sadness, Mr. Weigel told her, " `No, it's OK_because I'm still able to love.' "
     He was married three times, first in 1966 to Kathy Worthington, and to Carol Bishop in 1979. In 1992, he wed Vicki Truax.
     In addition to his wife and daughter, Jenniffer, survivors include his son, Rafer; daughter, Teddi; father, John; brother, Tony, and sister, Deni.
       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 18, 2001

Old obit week #2: "Hello Americans" — Paul Harvey dies at 90

   

     Fame fleets, and as big a radio broadcaster as Paul Harvey certainly was, his name has faded considerably. I remember him because I've been to his studio and met the man, and because he once quoted one of my books on the radio and my father heard it in Colorado. I didn't do much that impressed him, but Paul Harvey mentioning me did, and I'm grateful for that. I shared a byline with Chris Fusco on this obit.

     The headlines may have gone to more flamboyant radio personalities, the Howard Sterns and Rush Limbaughs of the world. But in raw popularity, Chicago's Paul Harvey topped them all.
     He was the most-listened-to broadcaster in America, whose shows originating from studios at Michigan and Wacker were heard by 25 million people every day at the peak of his career.
     Mr. Harvey, 90, died Saturday at a hospital in Phoenix, where he had a winter home, less than a year after his wife, Lynne "Angel" Harvey, had passed away.
     "He was devastated by her loss. It took him a great deal of time to get back on the air," said Mr. Harvey's close friend, nationally syndicated radio talk show host Bruce DuMont.
     When Mr. Harvey returned, he shared his grief with his listeners.
     "He was never the same Paul Harvey," said DuMont, president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. "She was the spark, he was the talent. That relationship is now gone forever. It's tragic."
     "My father and mother created from thin air what one day became radio and television news," said the couple's only child, Paul Harvey Jr., who like his parents is in the Radio Hall of Fame. "So in the past year, an industry has lost its godparents, and today millions have lost a friend."
     Heard locally on WGN-AM (720), Mr. Harvey would commute from his River Forest home to his Chicago office, arriving by 4:30 every morning. He wrote his news shows and his staunchly conservative commentary, "Paul Harvey News."
     Paul Harvey Jr. wrote "The Rest of the Story" — a program his father would broadcast.
     "Hello, Americans," Mr. Harvey would say when delivering the show his son wrote. "You know what the news is. In a minute, you're going to hear the rest of the story."
     In 2000, at age 82, Mr. Harvey signed a 10-year pact worth a reported $100 million, "the biggest deal ever cut with a radio personality," according to the president of ABC Radio.
     Born in Oklahoma in 1918, Mr. Harvey was based in Chicago since the end of World War II. A stretch of Wacker Drive has been given the honorary name "Paul Harvey Drive," as his studios are nearby.
     His programs were carried by 1,200 radio stations, plus an additional 400 stations of American Forces Radio. His syndicated newspaper column was at one time carried in 300 newspapers.
     With an audience like that, words that Harvey coined — such as "Reaganomics" and "guesstimate" — have entered into American English. His TV program, "Paul Harvey Comments," ran from 1968 to 1988 and was syndicated to 100 stations.
     Mr. Harvey was never reluctant to go out on a limb. He sent out his "Eisenhower Wins" column two weeks ahead of the election.
     Not that he was always right: He predicted that Elvis Presley wouldn't last a year.
     That was a typical call for Mr. Harvey, who made a career of praising Midwestern virtues at the expense of pop culture and the coasts, particularly New York. Appearing before a congressional subcommittee on offensive radio and TV broadcasts in 1952, Mr. Harvey condemned comedians "steeped in the nightlife of bawdy Manhattan" and claimed that their "girdle gags" had forced him "to turn off the radio to keep from blushing in front of my wife."
     He once described his listeners as a "vast, decent, middle-income, middle-IQ audience," and Mr. Harvey's politics reflected the right-wing slant of mainstream America.
     When Sen. Joseph McCarthy came to Chicago in 1954, he was a guest at Mr. Harvey's home.
     He was born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa, Okla., the descendent of five generations of Baptist ministers. He got his first job at age 15 on KVOO in Tulsa.
     Mr. Harvey attended Tulsa University while continuing to work at KVOO. After graduating, he moved through a variety of stations, ending up at KXOK in St. Louis, where he met his future wife, Lynne Cooper, in 1939. Mr. Harvey proposed to her the day they met, and they married several months later.
     Mr. Harvey went to Hawaii to broadcast for the Navy in 1940. He was on a ship, two days out of Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. Back in the States, Mr. Harvey was named director of news and information for the Office of War Information for Michigan and Indiana.
     He enlisted in the Air Force and moved to Chicago after receiving a medical discharge in 1944, joining Chicago's WENR-ABC newsroom.
      After President Franklin Roosevelt died, he delivered a famous obituary beginning, "A great tree has fallen. . . ."
     In 1955, Mr. Harvey began a syndicated newspaper column, "Paul Harvey News." He also wrote three popular books in the 1950s: Remember These Things (1952), Autumn of Liberty (1954) and The Rest of the Story (1956).
     While generally the voice of Middle America, something of a Reader's Digest of the air, Mr. Harvey was not unwaveringly so. He voiced opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as early as 1966.
     During his career, Mr. Harvey withstood pressure to dump radio for TV and move to New York or Washington, D.C., DuMont said.
      "He wanted to be in Chicago to maintain his connection to Midwestern values," DuMont said. "He never did a broadcast without a tie and white shirt."
     "The fact that he remained rooted in the Midwest gave him a unique sensibility. But his appeal crossed lines from rural to urban to suburban," said former Chicago Sun-Times TV and radio columnist Robert Feder.
     "The other thing is, he was personally a man of incredible graciousness who never failed to acknowledge a kind word from peers, young journalists and others."
     And, of course, there was that trademark radio voice.
     "You'd better be right," comedian Danny Thomas once told Mr. Harvey, "because you sound like God."
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 1, 2009

Old Obit Week #1 — Bob Hope, "Master of the one-liner, icon of show biz"

     A writer thinks about structure, and tends to group material thematically. After posting the obituaries of Sun-Times celebrity columnist Irv Kupcinet and his wife, Essee, I thought I'd keep going by adding Kup's reminiscence about comic Bob Hope, which I wrote for him.

    In looking for that, I noticed Hope's obit, which I also hadn't published. I was poised to post it, then another value besides structure kicked in: the need to avoid overkill. As inviting as it would be, for me, to slap another big honking obituary up and call it a day, I detected the tang of mothballs, and thought better to set this aside. But now I'm taking a second week off — for reasons unrelated to bereavement — and thought it might have some value.

     Bob Hope, the top gag man of the 20th century, an immensely popular comedian who knew how to make America laugh and entertained U.S. troops overseas from World War II to the eve of the Gulf War, died Sunday two months after his 100th birthday.
     He succumbed to pneumonia at his home in Toluca Lake, Calif., with his wife of nearly 70 years, Dolores, and his family at his side. A priest celebrated mass in his bedroom. Hope's daughter, Linda, described the scene as "beautiful" and "serene."
     "I think all the good vibes he put out during his lifetime came back to take him up. He really left us with a smile on his face and no last words. . . . He gave us each a kiss and that was it," she told reporters.
     Known for his ski-slope nose and his rapid-fire delivery of an endless supply of one-liners, Mr. Hope, who got an important early professional break in Chicago and adopted children here, was one of the few funnymen able to nimbly jump from one entertainment medium to another: He was a big star on Broadway, on radio, in movies — in fact, he was among the top box office stars of the 1940s and 1950s — and on television.
     He starred in the popular "Road" series of movies with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, beginning in 1940 with "The Road to Singapore." He wrote 10 popular books between 1941 and 1990.
     More than a mere celebrity, Mr. Hope became a cultural icon, the country's mainstream court jester, master of ceremonies to the establishment, golf partner of the powerful. He was welcomed at the White House by 11 presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. He was entertainment's most decorated and honored man, according to the Guinness Book of Records, with more than 1,500 awards. 

     All the while, Mr. Hope made sure to give back to his audience — he made 22 overseas Christmas tours and starred in 1,000 USO shows, even after his popularity declined among the young and he found himself criticized for his right-wing beliefs.
     Too sedate to be considered a first-tier comic genius such as Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx, Mr. Hope was the embodiment of ordinary America. Time magazine once summarized his appeal as "vibrant averageness." New York Times critic Vincent Canby dubbed his style "Inoffensive Contemporary."
     Still, his energy attracted praise from unexpected quarters. "The man drives himself and is driven," Nobel laureate John Steinbeck once wrote of Mr. Hope. "It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard and be so effective. There's a man. There is really a man."
     Mr. Hope was a consummate businessman, parlaying his decades of star salary into an immense fortune. Forbes magazine wrote in 1983 that he was worth $200 million. After further research, Forbes revised its figure to $115 million. Later, Hope was asked for a figure of his own. "I'm fine until June," he said with a deadpan look.
     He bought hundreds of acres of prime San Fernando Valley real estate when it was farmland, and sold it for sometimes 100 times what he had paid for it. At times he owned parts of the Cleveland Indians and the Los Angeles Rams.
     His awards are numerous: four special Academy Awards, an Emmy, a Peabody, an Order of the British Empire, the French Legion of Honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, given by John F. Kennedy, and the Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson. He received 54 honorary degrees. The Chicago Horticultural Society named a fern in his honor, and the Navy named a ship for him.
     In 1997, Congress granted Mr. Hope a unique tribute: It designated him a U.S. armed forces veteran, an honor extended to no other non-military person in our nation's history.
     On Monday, President Bush ordered flags to be flown at half-staff on all federal buildings and U.S. posts around the world. "America mourns the loss of one of its great treasures," Bush said.
     Mr. Hope hosted the Academy Awards 18 times between 1940 and 1978.
     He was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, England, the fifth of seven sons of William Hope, a stonemason, and Avis Townes, a singer. When he was 4, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio.
     Mr. Hope worked as a delivery boy, dance instructor, soda fountain clerk and shoe salesman. He was an amateur boxer under the name Packy East. Leslie was changed, first to Lester, and then to Bob.
     His professional stage debut was in vaudeville, in a dancing act with Lloyd Durbin in a Fatty Arbuckle Revue in 1924. Mr. Hope began his move upward in New Castle, Ind., when he was asked to announce the schedule in a vaudeville house. Mr. Hope joked around while making the announcement and impressed Chicago agent Charles Hogan, who offered him a gig at Chicago's Stratford Theater, at 65th and Halsted on the South Side.
     Mr. Hope said he struggled through hard times in Chicago. "I was in debt," he once recalled. "I had holes in my shoes."
     He ran into an old friend in Chicago. "I was just about to give it up and go back to Cleveland when this friend of mine passed by," Mr. Hope said. "He said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'I'm dying.' " The friend bought Mr. Hope a meal.
     "I had forgotten whether to cut a steak with a knife or drink it out of a spoon," Mr. Hope quipped.
     The job at the Stratford, which was supposed to last a week, lasted six months. "When I came out of there, I had everything," he said.
     He debuted on Broadway in "Sidewalks of New York" in 1927. His first big Broadway role was in "Ballyhoo" in 1932. Stardom came a year later in "Roberta."
     While performing in "Roberta," Mr. Hope met his future wife, a nightclub singer named Dolores Reade. Mr. Hope invited her to see his show, the story goes, and she went, thinking he was in the chorus, only to discover he was the star.
     The couple married on Feb. 19, 1934, and adopted four children — Linda, Tony, Kelly and Nora — from the Cradle adoption agency in Evanston. The marriage endured, despite Mr. Hope's notorious womanizing. "He's a rover by nature. . . . There were times I wanted to pack it in," she once told an interviewer.
     Mr. Hope debuted on radio on the "Capital Family Hour" in 1932. He bombed. His first few radio outings in the early 1930s were bad enough to earn him the nickname "Bob Hopeless."
     Pepsodent Toothpaste saved him, however, allowing him to build his own show in 1938. Tuesday nights quickly became "Bob Hope Night" in America, as the country laughed at Mr. Hope's antics with bandleader and singer Skinny Ennis and comedian Jerry Colonna. Pepsodent sales jumped from sixth place to first.
     The same year, Mr. Hope debuted in movies. His signature song, "Thanks for the Memory," was from his first major film, Paramount's "The Big Broadcast of 1938." He starred in 54 feature films, the last starring role being "Cancel My Reservation" in 1972. He made two later cameos, in "The Muppet Movie" and "Spies Like Us."
     Mr. Hope began entertaining troops, grudgingly, on May 6, 1941, in California. But he soon took to the practice, and his status as a beloved star was cemented in World War II. He performed in as many as seven shows a day, eating with the troops, taking time to talk and sing with them. He continued entertaining soldiers after the war, beginning a tradition of going overseas at Christmastime when he performed for troops running the Berlin airlift in 1948.
     He hosted his first network television special on Easter Sunday, 1950. (By no means his first appearance on television, however. He debuted on the CBS experimental station, W2XAB, in 1932.) In all, he starred in more than 300 specials for NBC.
     Popular throughout the 1950s, Mr. Hope's star set a little in the 1960s as the public began to embrace comedians who wrote their own material, such as Woody Allen, or who told stories instead of jokes, such as Bill Cosby, or were not afraid of risque material, such as George Carlin.
     Mr. Hope always relied on a stable of writers, many of whom had been with him for decades. He rarely spoke from his own actual experience, and never at length. And he avoided all but the mildest winking references to drugs or sex.
     He also began speaking out, politically, opposing the political protest surrounding the Vietnam War, and coming to the defense of the military and his Republican friends such as Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.
     The man loved by America was shocked to find himself the object of scorn.
     "The funny thing about Bob Hope is that he's not very funny," Look magazine wrote in 1968. "Practically every funny thing he says — in performance and private conversation — comes from seven well-oiled, well-paid writers who supply him enough gags to fill the file cabinets both in his office and in his mind."
     Even the military, which Mr. Hope had selflessly supported for years, turned on him as the war in Vietnam dragged on. Mr. Hope, who had received a two-minute standing ovation from 12,000 Marines in Da Nang in 1969, found himself being booed in 1970, his patriotic speeches met with stony silence. The Pentagon's chief of European entertainment services noted that Mr. Hope "fails to bring laughs and applause from soldiers turned on to pot smoking and rock music."
     Mr. Hope stuck to his views and kept entertaining troops. He was so taken with the plight of U.S. prisoners of war that, at one point, he made overtures to the North Vietnamese government, attempting to buy back our POWs with his considerable fortune. He was rebuffed.
     As the difficulties of the Vietnam era passed, Mr. Hope settled into a comfortable position as the elder statesman of the World War II generation, beloved by those who grew up with him and appreciated by those who valued his wartime work and his charitable efforts, which were many.
     Mr. Hope endowed the Eisenhower Medical Center. He donated the land — 80 acres near Palm Springs, Calif. — for the center to be built, and supported it through his Bob Hope Desert Golf Classic.
     Mr. Hope was a 12-handicap golfer who once scored a hole-in-one on the 220-yard fifth hole at Butler National Golf Course in Oak Brook.
     Mr. Hope lived in California, and had three grandchildren.
     A memorial service is scheduled for Aug. 27. His burial, tentatively set for Wednesday, will be private and for immediate family only. His daughter said that when Mr. Hope was asked in his waning hours where he wanted to be buried, he replied with a joke: "Surprise me!"

        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 29, 2003 

Flashback 2008: Are we willing to ship out immigrant children en masse?

     If I were writing a column this week, I might be unable to resist commenting on Trump's ferocious war on immigrants -- setting American civil rights on fire in order to scorch newcomers. Though the victimization of the very population that makes America great is nothing new. Remember, Trump is not a cause but a symptom, the avatar of a bias that is very old. It isn't even his main concern — he just uses xenophobia as a sparkly distraction to mesmerize his dupes while he picks America's pockets.
     Irene Rosenfeld retired in 2017.
     This is from when the column filled a page, and I've left in the headings and the closing joke.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     It is a very cold morning, and the children shepherded into Erie Neighborhood House, 1701 W. Superior, are bundled under coats, hats, scarves and, in one instance, a Batman mask.
     Ages 3 and 4, they are here for childhood development with Irene Marquez. Almost all are Hispanic — the latest wave of immigration to wash over Erie House, now often called La Escuela Erie. Go back in time to 1870, when Erie House was founded, and there would still be children needing breakfast, though those children were largely Dutch.
     Since then, Erie has helped waves of immigrants — Irish, Italians, Poles — adjust to a city that didn't particularly want them. A city whose longtime residents trod the wooden sidewalks secure in the knowledge that they had been resourceful enough to be born to parents who had arrived in an earlier migration, smug as they eyed those bundled children of newcomers, made jokes about garlic, and worried that the Chicago of 1910 was filled to capacity.
     I followed los ninos inside, where they hung up their lilac-colored coats, heard a story about a teddy bear, ate French toast cut up into triangles, then brushed their teeth using toothbrushes with their names on the handles.
     This must be the belly of the beast, I realized. This must be the outrage my angry readers have in mind when they talk about how immigrants are soaking up vital social services. These are exactly the people the Mike Huckabees of the world would force, with their parents, at bayonet-point into sealed cattle cars heading south. (Because, honestly, when you talk about deporting 12 million people, how else could you possibly do it?)
     Would it matter if they could stand here with me, watching the kids' eager faces as they listen to Teddy's Snowy Day? Would it soften their hearts to learn that this one is Cesar and that one is Antonio? That Brianna is outgoing and Ariana is shy?
     Or would they snap shut the book, roughly return their lilac jackets, their little mittens, and send them back out into the very cold Friday morning, as punishment for some misdemeanor their parents may or may not have committed years ago? Would they? Would you?

CEO, CHAIRMAN, LUNCH LADY

     Inspired by Lake Michigan filling their windows, La Rabida Children's Hospital designed its ward to look like a ship, with life-preservers on the walls and red-trimmed portholes peeking in on rooms that are called "cabins."  

   The effect is so well done, it's possible to imagine the hand rails lining the corridors — safety features found in any hospital — are here to grab onto in rough waters.
     In Cabin 19, Christian Barber, 9, decked out in tiger pajamas, relaxes in bed, watching "Scooby Doo" on television. He barely glances over as a trim, buoyant woman enters his room bearing a tray.
     "I brought you some lunch!" she exclaims, brightly. "Let's see what we've got here. Oh, chicken! Do you like chicken?"
     But Christian, who has sickle cell anemia, an exhausting chronic genetic condition, isn't interested in food at the moment, or company. And one of the most influential women on Earth immediately understands and withdraws, just as cheerily as she entered.
      She is Irene Rosenfeld, chairman and CEO of Kraft Foods, the $34 billion food behemoth based in suburban Northfield. Last year, Forbes Magazine ranked Rosenfeld ninth on its list of the world's "100 Most Powerful Women" — a full dozen places ahead of Oprah Winfrey, with Queen Elizabeth II and Sen. Hillary Clinton trailing even further.
     She is taking part in "Kraft Cares Day," where some 1,800 Kraft employees nationwide —  1,400 around Chicago — skip work and go out into the world, helping.
     "I'm happy to be here today," says Rosenfeld, who earlier read at Erie House before visiting La Rabida. "It beats most of the things I'd be doing otherwise."
     As much as I try to be cynical — a Kraft photographer must have snapped 300 photos, and Rosenfeld feeding little Hayley Edwards with her pink bows will look great in the company's annual report — it's hard to be. The truth is that Kraft not only gives away $83 million a year, but does so in a smart fashion. Rather than following the herd with a pro forma Christmastime effort to prod employees into donating to the trouble-wracked United Way, Kraft gives its employees a voice in deciding where their money should go. They picked Erie House, which has received $215,000 from Kraft since 2000.
     And Rosenfeld is impressive — her focus, the way she takes command of 17 preschoolers at Erie House, learning their names, even the shy girl at the back, and reading a story while peppering them with questions and listening to their sometimes protracted replies, all without a flicker of inattention.
     "You've done this before," I say later, and she admits to having been, once upon a time, a counselor at Tyler Hill Camp in the Poconos.
     Rosenfeld also has learned the secret of those who actually volunteer — that doing so helps them more than it does their supposed beneficiaries.
     "I can't make a dent today, but we can better understand who we're serving," Rosenfeld says. "Coming out to places like this motivates employees. It reminds us of some of the challenges out there, and puts things in perspective. It reinforces our mission: We have an obligation to give back."
     She doesn't check a BlackBerry in the three hours I'm with her. What if there were a crisis?
     "I have a very, very talented group of employees," Rosenfeld says. "There are still a few more to spare back at the ranch."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is so revered today that we usually forget he was also, to quote Andrew Young, "just a regular guy who laughed and joked a lot." He made this quip in 1964, after a private audience with Pope John VI:
      Things have really changed a lot when the pope will agree to see a fellow by the name of Martin Luther.

— Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 21, 2008

Flashback 2007: 'A terrifying, pitch-black cloud'

From "Ashen Sky," illustrated by Barry Moser

     I'm continually surprised what I can slip into the paper. Such as a review of letters from Pliny the Younger, which I think about whenever someone says a version of "fortune favors the bold," and I have to bite back my retort: "You do realize ... or more likely, don't ... that the guy who said that was rewarded for his daring by being buried in ash?"

     Fortune often favors the brave. Not always. I leapt to grab Ashen Sky, the new illustrated volume of Pliny the Younger's pair of all-too-brief letters describing the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii.

    

     The book is beautifully illustrated by Barry Moser's stark black and white woodcuts, and Virgil's famous edict on the usefulness of courage is spoken by Pliny the Younger's uncle, Pliny the Elder, a revered statesman and writer at the time of the catastrophe.
     Old Pliny has taken his family aboard a ship, seeking safety from the spouting volcano.
     "Suddenly the water became shallow and the shore was blocked by the collapse of the mountain," Pliny the Younger writes. His uncle "hesitated a bit, wondering whether to turn back," but then turns to the helmsman who urged him to do so and said, " 'Fortune favors the brave,' "
     In this case, boldness was fatal — Pliny the Elder was killed at his destination, on Aug. 25, 79 A.D.
     Since you probably won't rush out to get the book — I merely bumbled across it — I'll tell you what struck me as the most poignant detail. Pliny the Younger notes the people fleeing around him in fear as burning pumice stones rained down from the sky.
     "To protect themselves against falling objects, they tied pillows on their heads," he writes.
     You can't make that kind of thing up, a reminder of the frequent pitifulness of human effort in the face of nature's fury.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 17, 2007

Flashback 2010: Silhouette artist presents profile of a gentler time

The silhouette in the foreground is from May 26, 1946, when my mother
was 9. The sculpture of an alien head is by Allen Littlefield.

     My mother's effects included several silhouettes — quite the thing back then. And I recalled that I had my own silhouette cut for a column once.  Sally Newcomb passed away just last year, at age 96.

     "Shall I do your silhouette?" asks Sally Newcomb, gesturing me into a chair in her elegant, book-filled apartment in Glenview. "Here is where the victim sits."
      I face the window, while Newcomb, a spry lady with a ready laugh and a refined manner of speaking — think Aunt May in the "SpiderMan" movies — quickly sketches my outline. I ask about her parents, Richard Southern Shreve and Mary Grey Andrews.
     "My mother was from Salt Lake City and my dad was from Virginia, and his family used to feed Mosby at the back door."
     "Mosby?"
     "Rebel raider. Once the whole family got hauled into the courthouse because they were definitely Rebel sympathizers."
     Newcomb grew up in Washington, D.C.
     "I went to a girl's junior college in Virginia where my cousin Mary Frances had gone" — she slips into a deep drawl for "Meh Frances" — "with the idea that I was going to be a Southern belle. Well, it didn't work. But I had a very good time."

Nose not to scale.

     And here she unleashes that laugh.
     "My mom had silhouettes all over the house -- she fancied them, she collected them -- so I knew what they were."
     Newcomb began cutting silhouettes out of black paper in 1956.
     "I was in the Bound Brook, New Jersey, Junior Women's Club, and they were going to have something they called the Easter Bunny Fair, and someone said, 'You take the silhouette booth.' "
     The phone rings. She steps across the room, adorned with many, many silhouettes — family members, children, both when girls were portrayed with big ribbons in their hair to girls wearing karate outfits or pulling wheeled backpacks.
     "I am being interviewed by the press," Newcomb says into the receiver. "I'm terribly sorry. I'm thrilled that you called."
     She returns, and takes up her work.
     The tool she uses is seven-inch Singer sewing shears. Not something smaller?
     "You try working with little tinies all day long, and you have nothing left of your hands. It's like a Western saddle. You use a cute little saddle for jumping and showing off. If you are going to be there all day, you want something big and comfy."
     How did she pick up the skill?
     "There was a kit that you could send for that was in the back of the New York Times magazine, and it was supposed to make everything possible, so I sent for the kit, and it was a stinker to work with, so finally I thrust it from me and just winged it. They were pretty bad, but there was no competition. So that worked out well. Now, I've got to make a delicate cut here, so I'm going to shut up for a minute . . . "
     More like five seconds. She turns the portrait so I can see.
     "What do you think of you?"
     The speed is surprising — two minutes total, maybe three. I study my profile, notice she included my new beard, and observe that she has been kind to my profile.
     "I gave up kind a long time ago," she says. "People don't want kind. They want true."
     In my experience, I point out, people want truth regarding others but kindness for themselves. Either way, I will accept her version of my nose as a form of higher truth.
     Does she ever botch one, lop the head off?
     "Sometimes, I'm not quite pleased with it, but people are."
     She gives me a tour of her apartment — or, more accurately, the silhouettes in it.
     "This was done at Greenfield Village," she says of a proud rooster. "This was local. . . . This was something I've not seen done in silhouette before. It's a mommy who was very happily throwing her infant in the air."
     Did the mom have to throw the baby a lot for her to get that? "A couple of times."
     Pets are better behaved than children
     She shows me some of her greatest hits -- five figures, characters from Mark Twain, one with a paintbrush; another, a slingshot.
     "This was one of the first ones I did for the junior women's club -- they were having a play of Tom Sawyer.
     "This is when I was visiting a family in England and did all of their livestock, including their kids," she says, showing off a tableau of animals and people, including a goat and a pony. She names the rest.
     "Gifty the dog, Porridge the cat and Petrochelli the rooster."
     Are pets a challenge?
     "They're better behaved than the kids."
     She shows me her schedule from 1989. About two-thirds of the month was filled. She has gone to England, Scotland, Denmark.
      "I worked in Copenhagen and in Fields, Dillards in St. Louis and Florida and hopped all over the place. Rochester, New York. The Museum at Stonybrook. Mystic Seaport. I pretty much peppered New England."
     Now, alas, despite the popularity of classic Americana and parents' endless desire to memorialize their children, Newcomb says this charming artform is on the wane.
     "I rode the crest of the wave when it had a revival, now it's really disappearing," she laughs.    

     "Silhouettes are at a nadir."
     But not quite gone.
     "I'm 82, and I'm tapering down," she says. "I'm going to be in Winnetka at the Harkness Outreach Center. Nov. 20" -- that's Saturday. "I'll be in Lake Forest at the Gorton Community Center Dec. 3 and 4."
     "Silhouettes have been very good to me," she says. "They've taken me all over this country, I've met some fascinating people and had a great time."

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 19, 2010

Flashback 2000: Hunting a lost talisman

The odd thing is, I knew exactly where this guy was stashed after 25 years.

     Am I the only one surprised to realize that I've been using eBay for 25 years? For some reason, online technology still seems "new" even though of course it isn't. When I made my first purchase, over a quarter century ago, I used the power of the internet to retrieve something I'd lost and wanted back. This is from when the column appeared in the Features section, and was 50 percent shorter than it is today. 

     The box came. A blue, white and red Priority Mail carton, with a lovely maroon oval "INSURED" hand stamp. I checked the return address: Las Vegas, Nev. This was it!
     I have never anticipated a package the way I had this one. I hurried into the apartment. The boys called happily from upstairs. "In a minute," I said, and went into my office. Shut the door.
     "Thirty years," I muttered to myself, fumbling with the box. Of course thinking of the Sidney Greenstreet character in "The Maltese Falcon" clawing at the wrappings around the black bird.
     Two weeks earlier, late one weary afternoon, I had put aside work and plopped online, looking for distraction. I plugged into eBay, that vast network of sellers and buyers. What in the world did I want?
     When I was a child, I had Rat Finks. They were little charms, an inch high. A mouse with beady eyes and an addled grin — the mascot for a hot rod. They came in gumball machines and cost a dime. I have no idea why I loved them, but I did.
      I carried a Rat Fink for years, as a talisman, as a friend. If my mother stopped and gossiped in the supermarket I would pull out my Rat Fink and gaze at it, rapt.
      The last Rat Fink was orange. I remember it clearly. The ears had melted into stumps by trips through the dryer. The tail of course was gone. I was in the May Co. department store in Cleveland, playing on the escalator. I gave the Rat Fink a ski ride down the trough next to the moving handrail, planning to retrieve it at the bottom. But at the bottom it was gone.
     That was 30 years ago. Since then, I had kept my eye on gumball machines, toy stores. Once, I wrote to a Rat Fink collector who was advertising in a toy magazine. But he didn't reply.
     That first minute on eBay, I wondered whether anybody possibly would be selling Rat Finks. It seemed a long shot. I typed the words into the search engine.
     There were 151 Rat Fink items for sale. Model kits, posters and dozens upon dozens of the gumball finks I was looking for, some in their original packages.
     I browsed. They were getting money for the things — $45 for one sealed in its bag, with the Rat Fink oath.
     No need for that. I found one in less-than-pristine condition. The tail was gone, but the tails of mine were always gone. Opening bid: $6.99.
     The eBay software is amazingly simple. It leads you by the hand through registering.
     No one bid against me. The sale ended, and I was directed to dispatch a check to a Michael Devinney of Las Vegas. Writing out the check — $9.50 with shipping and insurance — I was still uncertain about the whole thing. Las Vegas: Isn't that where all the crooks are? Still, what was the risk? If I could learn that eBay was a rip-off for under 10 bucks, that would be a lesson worth the tuition.
     The dingus was so well-wrapped, I finally had to use a scissors. Out tumbled the Rat Fink. It was the same. Beady eyes. Big leering grin. I smiled broadly, as if imitating the lump of red plastic in my hand.
     A colleague at the newspaper had warned me about seeking out beloved childhood objects on eBay  — "They aren't the same ones you owned," he said. "They're somebody else's." But he was wrong. This wasn't somebody else's Rat Fink — it was mine, now. I slipped it into my jacket pocket, and together we went upstairs.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 21, 2000

Flashback 2011: Comic duck canned for being human

 

    I mentioned a column about tragedy and humor in yesterday's post, and wondered what it might say. The column also fits this very unusual week. I've pulled together some remarks for my mother's funeral, and while there are no jokes, per se, there is a moment early on where I expect people will laugh. At least I hope they do.

     Gilbert Gottfried was never my cup of tea. I prefer the cool paradoxes of Steven Wright, say, to Gottfried’s squinty, barking dog comic routine, though he was funny in the delightfully filthy documentary “The Aristocrats.”
     His squawk made him perfect for the voice of the Aflac duck, mascot for the insurance giant, which promptly canned Gottfried on Monday over tweets he sent cracking crude jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
     “Japan is really advanced,” he wrote in one of the more printable efforts. “They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.”
     When firing Gottfried, Aflac placed the jokes squarely beyond the pale of humanity.
     “There is no place for anything but compassion and concern during these difficult times,” said Michael Zuna, a senior VP and chief marketing officer for Aflac.
     Really? No place? No place at all? Because my understanding is that every tragedy in the history of the world quickly becomes the butt of jokes, and humor is especially important to those trying to survive the most extreme and awful circumstances.
     Slaves in chains joked about their masters. Jews in Auschwitz put on vaudeville shows.
     “Wit produced on the precipice of hell was not frivolity, but psychological necessity,” Steve Lipman writes in Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust. “ ‘We kept our morale through humor,’ says Emil Fachenheim, an Auschwitz survivor.”
     In public, the right to joke is reserved for those most affected: Gottfried did not lose his children to a tsunami and thus can’t make jokes. To live as a slave or in a concentration camp and joke about your condition is not the same as us making jokes about either today.
     And yet. Are we all not also affected by this, to a far milder but still real degree, as fellow humans? It’s been nearly a week since the Japan earthquake and tsunami hit. The world has been processing a continuously unfolding horror — uncounted thousands dead, far more homeless, plus crippled reactors on the brink of full-blown catastrophe. I’m not so sure that cracking a joke at some point isn’t a natural human response, as opposed to maintaining an unwavering expression of generic anguish and continual pro forma concern.
     People joke — part of the issue here is how technology has blurred the line between public and private. I’m sure Gottfried didn’t realize he was quitting his Aflac gig when he made those tweets; his timing was off and, as a comic should know, timing is everything.
     Private laughter is inevitable, especially during tragedies. I laughed over the situation in Japan, and I’ll tell you exactly when: It was when news broke about the volcano. It just seemed to be cruel fate turning the knife one twist too many. An earthquake. A tsunami. Pending nuclear disaster. And now an erupting volcano. You have to laugh, don’t you?
     “Jeez,” I said out loud to myself, with an amazed, sardonic chuckle, “Poor Japan. What’s next — a hail of burning frogs?”
     Does that make me a bad person? Indifferent to the plight of the Japanese? Should the paper fire me, too, for printing that just now?
     I would suggest that, while you’re always safe with nodding solemnity, laughter is what people who are themselves under the lash of fate find true comfort in.
     The French editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a brain stem stroke in 1995 that left him completely paralyzed. All he could do was flutter his left eyelid, which he used to dictate the bittersweet, haunting memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
     In it, he is parked every day in front of a glass case at a hospital on the Norman Coast, facing a marble bust of the Empress Eugenie.
     Eventually he notices his own reflection:
     “An unknown face interposed itself between us. Reflected in the glass I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled. . . .
     “Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter — when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke. My jovial cackling at first disconcerted Eugenie, until she herself was infected by my mirth. We laughed until we cried.”
     That is sometimes all you can do in a world where horror and humor blur into one.
     “Our house is gone,” said Kyoko Nambu, 49, as she gazed at Soma, her ruined hometown, “and now they are telling us to stay indoors.”

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 16, 2011