Friday, January 31, 2025

Is it the shoes?

 

Those wouldn't be size 14s by any chance?

   Postage stamps. Crystal. Office chairs.
   To Chicagoans of a certain vintage, the above miscellany should conjure up Dan Rostenkowski as clearly as if I had posted his photograph. The minor grafts that ruined him, the pebbles upon which the great chairman of the Ways and Mean Committee scuttled his career and sent himself to prison.
    Not to single Rosty out. Corruption is always over petty shit, compared to the damage done. Ed Burke, off to jail for ... anybody? ... corruptly holding back a driveway cut-out exemption for a Burger King until his law firm got some business thrown its way.  Mike Madigan mumbling the wrong phrase into a federal wiretap. George Ryan crumpling an envelope holding a thousand dollars in cash and jamming it in his pocket. Rod Blagojevich tossed to the wolves by his father-in-law, Dick Mell, over the governor shutting down a landfill owned by Patti's cousin. It would look ludicrous in fiction.
    Okay, not always petty shit. Ed Vrdolyak went away for a significant chunk of cash — a $1.5 million kickback scheme. Although, compared  to the billions the Vrdolyak Law Group rakes in on personal injury lawsuits, still chump change. As always, the crime is what's legal.
     Into this pantheon leaps Mayor Unforced Error, Brandon Johnson, according to the Sun-Times, with his pathetic take of luxury goods — Hugo Boss cufflinks, a Montblanc Pen, handbags by Kate Spade and Givenchy. The usual baubles.
    Not to suggest anything untoward. Perhaps everything is on the up-and-up, as the mayor insists with his trademark huff. Maybe his wife isn't carrying that Kate Spade purse. Maybe his failure to account for the gifts is just him being too busy doing important work, driving the city deeper into ruin. His blocking the inspector general from looking into the matter is due entirely to distraction. No time to follow standard ethical policy. Yeah, that's the ticket. Though the guilty flee where none pursueth, and were the mayor handling gifts properly, why did he do everything he could to keep prying eyes off the supposed trove? Why wax so indignant? (The answer to that could be, "Because he always does." Truly, the man bristles at a touch).
     At this moment, what journalists are no doubt pawing over photos of the mayor, looking for him wearing a pair of Carucci shoes, whatever those may be. Careers have foundered over less.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Ronald Reagan's dream come true

Vent Haven Museum, Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky

     The Reagan epiphany was a simple one. With overt racism fallen from favor, in some quarters, you could no longer directly afflict the people you are keen to scorn— the minorities, the immigrants, the poor, gays, not to forget women, who are actually the majority but historically vulnerable because of their sex. 
      But you could assail the government that helps them. Starve it by slashing taxes, for the rich. Smother programs. Jettison goals. Scrap supportive laws and pass restrictive ones.
    Public education, once the bedrock of American society, could be abandoned once Black people found their way into white classrooms. School choice could be boosted, and here "choice" means "using tax money to pay for private schools for parents who couldn't bear to let their kids rub elbows with their lessers." 
     People bought it.
    That many of your own kind are hurt — most people in poverty are white — didn't matter. Bigotry is both a kind of ignorance and a form of self-immolation. Southern towns would fill in their swimming pools in the 1960s after the courts ordered them integrated. If your own children sweltered, well, there are always private clubs, and another reason to hate the people you hate already. 
    And there's always someone to hate, to fear, if that is what you are looking for. 
    The task never ends, and when would-be demagogue Donald Trump took office, he arrived with a flurry of spite and vindictiveness, sprayed in all directions, against groups and individuals who dared stand up to him in the past, a practice, already rare, sure to become rarer. 
      Trans soldiers were ejected from the army, based on nothing more than malice and general distaste. The same calumnies directed at Black military personnel until Truman integrated the Army in 1948 could be retrofitted. Any port in a storm. The first thing the new secretary of defense did was strip former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley of his security detail and security clearance, and take steps to bust him in rank in retirement. The first thing.
     Whatever pressing matters the country faces are pushed aside. The need for a functioning military is overlooked. 
     So, open season on vulnerable Americans and the government that serves them. The whole system torn down, as if by a child. That the government does so much, from building roads to testing the purity of food and drugs, that it helps so many, is simply ignored. Racism is both a form of ignorance and a powerful addiction that must be fed .... with somebody. Anyone will do. Democrats, liberals, will serve too, eventually. Does it seem the bond that should hold Americans together in unified purpose is easily dismissed? Apparently so. 
    Today's post is late — my apologies — and I know feels ... what? ... muted, wooden, subdued. That's an accurate rendition of my mood. There must be a lot of that going around.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Lady Liberty gets a makeover — the statue remains, the concept behind her is sold for scrap


     Look on the bright side. The Statue of Liberty is still there, at the mouth of New York Harbor. Facing southeast, to welcome immigrants arriving aboard ships. Lifting her lamp to light the golden door.
     "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ..." is still emblazoned on a plaque at the feet of the Mother of Exiles. "Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me."
     There is no plan — no public plan anyway — to take her down and sell the copper for scrap. Or jackhammer away Emma Lazarus' famous poem praising "a mighty woman." Or remove the torch and refashion her uplifted right hand to display an extended middle finger.
     Not to give anyone ideas. Defacing national monuments is already in the air — talk has resumed of adding Donald Trump's face to Mount Rushmore.
     The statue remains, for now. Only the concept behind her is being scuttled, the American welcome mat yanked away, again. The golden door slammed shut.
     U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — was busy in Chicago and across the country Monday. Hundreds of immigrants were arrested here, thousands nationwide, and while those arrested were portrayed as murderers and rapists, facts were scarce.
     I have a feeling that when the facts are known — and we can't assume the truth will ever be known, this being 2025 America — the bulk of deportees will end up having committed parking offenses, and of course, the unforgivable crime of being here in the first place. Which is what this is all about, and why Donald Trump is president — so we can throw out the foreigners along with their crime and disease and strange languages and get back to this country as we imagined it to be in the 1950s.
     A certain brand of foreigners, of course. From Mexico and South America, primarily. They haven't rounded up the Norwegians, yet. I contacted the French consulate in Chicago to see if their people here are on edge. Let's just say, they're not. The elimination of diversity efforts in government and anti-discrimination laws give further proof, as if more were needed, of what this is really about.
     The effort focused on Chicago. Here is where border czar Tom Homan was striding around, joined by — in that note of surreal horror that all true nightmares require — TV's Dr. Phil,  offering the ripping apart of families as entertainment, edging toward the strafed lifeboat full of refugees in George Orwell's "1984." Red meat for red state audiences.
     Remember why Chicago is being singled out. What is our crime again? Oh yes, we are a "sanctuary city," welcoming immigrants, who have so overrun the place that Chicago's population has been flat for 30 years. Chicago had more people in 1925 than it has today. We're being punished for seeing a situation clearly — we need residents — and acting upon it. Expect more of that.

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Tuesday, January 28, 2025

A visit from Lee Goodman

 

     "Aren't you jumping the gun?" I asked Sunday, as neighbor Lee Goodman took off his raincoat to reveal a striped concentration camp uniform, with the inverted blue triangle, representing immigrants. I invited him to have a seat in the living room.
      He said he was going downtown Monday to protest the ICE arrests in Chicago, and wanted me to know, I suppose, in case he disappeared into Donald Trump's growing security apparatus. He asked for my phone number and I gave it to him. I considered going along, to observe, but had other work to do Monday and, besides, dramatic symbolic acts are not my strong suit. I prefer spinning reasoned argument to dash uselessly against the reinforced armor of unreason.
 I don't know which is more futile; I suppose it boils down to personal preference.
     I asked where he had gotten the uniform — what with Party City out of business and all. That's me, always curious about practical matters.  Those new red MAGA hats with the Death's Head insignia, who thought of that?
     Lee said he had made it himself, using a painter's outfit dyed grey, then masked out with tape and painted with black fabric paint. That's Lee, the guy who put up a sign tallying the COVID dead in 2020 at the corner of Shermer and Walters, prompting that to become a focal point for several pro-Trump rallies. He's the spoon that stirs the pot. I've admired his commitment to social action, even as I question its efficacy. As I question my own. 
     We talked about whether the Holocaust had so faded from public memory that younger people might not even know what it represented. 
    "They might see it and think, 'Beetlejuice,'" I suggested.
    Bingo. 
     "I was surprised by how little reaction my uniform got throughout the day," Lee later wrote, on his Facebook page report about how his trip downtown played out. "I was even more surprised that among the several people who did react, only one recognized the uniform. Everyone else thought I was dressed up as the movie character Beetlejuice. Only after I corrected them did their expressions change from amused to somber."
    Lee went to the Daley Center, City Hall, the County Building. He didn't get far trying to visit ICE headquarters and his senator's office.
   "Things didn't go as I expected," he wrote.
    They seldom do. 
    I'm torn. Part of me resented Lee for going straight to the Holocaust. Shouldn't we save that for when thousands of arrested immigrants are languishing in camps on the outskirts of town? Isn't the present moment alarming enough without exaggeration? I both admire Lee for doing something and look askance at what he's actually doing and a little at why he's doing it. Who does this help?
    "If I didn't do anything, it would eat me up," he said, and I nodded. I sometimes view protest as an elaborate washing of the hands — an orchestrated cry onto deaf ears done more for the benefit of the criers who can now tell themselves they've done something.
     The concentration camp imagery is powerful. The paper won't even let me call whatever facilities they're building to corral immigrants — and no doubt, eventually, citizens —  "concentration camps." Too judgy. I think we settled on "detainment camps." As if that mattered.
      Maybe that's the danger — thinking none of this matters, that resistance is futile. Resistance didn't topple the Nazis — America did. We saved Europe. But now, who will save us? Lee Goodman is on the case, and God bless him. But it's going to take more than that.


Monday, January 27, 2025

We need to support the people Trump is stepping on


     This fall will mark the 50th anniversary of the release of the "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." A comic romp sending up 1930s science fiction movies, it featured Tim Curry as Dr. Frank 'N' Furter, a cross-dressing mad scientist, Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon as the naive young engaged couple who ... —  The movie was so popular, it feels almost strange to describe it, like explaining the plot of "Hamlet" — "See there's this guy, he's a prince, and his father is murdered ..." Everybody knew "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."
     But times change.
     You did not attend the movie once but many times, bringing along props — squirt guns for the opening rainstorm, toast to throw. I was 15 when I first went with a group of friends.
     My parents neither noticed nor cared about me viewing this randy cross-dressing romp. We did not live in constant dread of trans people, nor worry about encountering them in bathrooms, nor fret about their influence on high school sports. There was no moral panic.
     Yes, trans people were played for humor. But then groups scorned by mainstream society traditionally tiptoe toward acceptability through comedy. It is a foot in the door, just as white households who'd never invited a Black guest to their table howled at "Amos and Andy" in the 1930s, and Jews who couldn't stay at a restricted resort in the 1950s could still tell jokes in its ballroom.
     There's nothing I can do here to stem the current fear-mongering, except point out where attention is being misdirected, like a magic trick. Card-carrying liberals darken at the topic, suddenly concerned about bathroom assaults and unfair swim meets.
     Democrats took to reflexively blaming the outcome of the last election on their previous — the "wreckless" is unspoken — acceptance of trans folk, as if addressing toilet etiquette by undoing democracy makes even momentary sense. "Look at those drapes! We must burn the house down."
     I try to make my friends step back and see how the issue is being framed for them and usually fail. They aren't considering the vast number of Americans who have this orientation and struggle to live but the margins, the nagging issues — do not male bodies pose unfair advantage in the 100-meter dash?
     It's like any other prejudice, only not as noticeable. If every time someone mentioned the word "Muslim" I began ranting about terrorists, or every time the word "immigrant" came up I cited some ghastly crime against a 12-year-old girl, you'd peg me as a hater. Terror and crime are real problems; the hate is in pretending these problems represent the entirety.
 
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Sunday, January 26, 2025

Flashback 1995: Bob Watch debuts

Illustration by Jeff Heller

     Journalism is disposable. Reporters who don't get that are fooling themselves. A fraction of the population ever sees our work, fewer still read it, and that handful forgets what they read the next day, if not the next minute.
     That said, scraps of my oeuvre linger. Every few years someone will dredge up my 2004 book "Hatless Jack" and, oblivious of what it's about, seek out my opinion on how Kennedy killed hats. 
     And Bob Watch, the monthly ad hominem vivisection of Tribune columnist Bob Greene that debuted in the Chicago Reader 30 years ago Monday, Jan. 27, 1995, under the slogan, "We read him so you don't have to."
     I'm not sure why, of all my stuff, Bob Watch should persist. Perhaps it has a sharp-edge that people like. A crystalline meanness. The great Gene Weingarten recently cited Bob Watch after dredging up a Bob Greene column on Bob Evans, which he identifies as the worst column ever written, a prize that Greene seemed to vigorously vie for. I felt honored that the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner remembered me.
     I should tell the story. Spy magazine had come out and I decided: "These are my people." I flew to New York and spent some time with founding editors Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson. While I was there, I pitched stories, including Bob Greene — but he was already in works, and I ended up writing the sidebars to Magda Krance's gleeful keelhauling of Bob. (My favorite was "How a Press Release Becomes a Bob Greene Column," where I selected columns of his that obviously had come from corporate ballyhoo, then contacting the companies to get ahold of the relevant releases that sparked Bob's muse. I'll have to dredge that up and share it someday. The similarities alone should have cost Greene his job, had anyone in authority at the Tribune been paying attention. Spoiler alert: they weren't).
     The Spy pieces caught the fancy my friend of Cate Plys, then an editor at the Reader, who suggested I take a whack at Bob every month. This was my first entry. I'm surprised at how brief it is: a mere 428 words But I manage to pack a lot of scorn in a small space. It's poignant to be sharing it now, as the Reader is laying off its staff and seems destined to crumble and be swept into the dustbin that awaits us all.
 I hope they can survive — the Reader has always provided an important outlet for perspectives that would never otherwise be shared in the mainstream media. Like Bob Watch, which ran for two years, and began this way:

     Those who sincerely admire and respect Bob Greene – who read his columns aloud to entertain their dozens of cats, perhaps – should leave the room now. We don’t want to upset them.
     That leaves those of us who can rationalize his existence only by inverting the normal expectations of readership – instead of excoriating his faults, savoring them. We pick up his column with a tingle of anticipation – how awful will it be? Will he content himself with another effortless sputtering of baby talk, lavished over one of his pitiful handful of themes and interests? Or will he reach some new benchmark of idiocy?
     Bob loves imperiled kids, and himself holds a key role in the chain of abuse. Parents torture their kids, DCFS ignores them, the schools and the courts bungle the situation, and, finally, the tiny emaciated survivors are led into a room where Uncle Bob awaits, cooing sympathetically while he boosts them onto his knee for the Final Abuse, the flopping out of his revolting pity.           
This week he sallied day after day, again and again, to the defense of “a little boy in deep, terrible trouble,” an unfortunate he called, “with typical folksiness, “Joe.” Last week it was a class of handicapped students who had lost the services of a speech therapist. The last sentence of this column, where Bob appeals to Mayor Daley to personally intercede, is a joy. You can see the mayor of Bob’s fantasy world – porkpie hat, big cigar, sitting in the bathtub – crushing the paper in his little fists and squeaking “Why, why, this is an outrage!”
     The next day, Bob rewrote the New York Times obit of Victor Riesel, the columnist blinded in 1957 when acid was thrown in his face by union thugs. Bob begins the tale by conjuring up his beloved idyll of 1950s Columbus, Ohio, where little Bobby Greene learned about the courageous newspaperman who wouldn’t back down. Though Bob gets almost halfway through the column before he remembers to mention Riesel’s name, he implies that the “kid reading the paper [who] wondered about the man behind the glasses” was inspired by Riesel’s example. We are left marveling how a blind man’s bravery helped embolden one special little boy to someday become Bob Greene, nostalgist of courage, boldly speaking his truths and letting the chips fall where they may, whether he is daring to openly worship Michael Jordan or mourning the passing of toaster covers.
     Bob doesn’t quite come out and say it but, from his vantage point, Riesel’s sight must seem a small price to pay.


Saturday, January 25, 2025

Flashback 2008: "Sympathy for the Daley"

Managing all that stuff isn't easy. A room at the Northwestern University Archives in 2023.

     January is a cold month, and it should come as no surprise that death has been busy. Wednesday, the day the obituary for my esteemed colleague Rich Hein ran in the paper, a classmate asked me if I had heard that Pat Quinn died. I had not.
     Quinn was the archivist at Northwestern University, and given my affection for research, of course I knew him, and benefited over the decades from his enthusiasm and expertise. He was especially helpful when I was writing my pranks book, though whenever I visited Deering Library — a vast improvement over the tri-towered mess of poured concrete that is the university's main library — I would pop in and visit.
     When Pat retired in 2008, I noted it in the column, which I reprint here in full since it is — he said modestly — a hoot. Plus its general tone explains why my invitation to speak at Northwestern's commencement has been slow in coming. The original online headline was, "Sympathy for Daley — So he's not George Clooney — Chicago's scrappy mayor can teach Northwestern's pampered graduating class a thing or two."
     This was from when the column ran a thousand words and filed the page, and I've kept in the original headings.

OPENING SHOT ...

     What a bunch of babies.
     Even considering the constant embarrassment that Northwestern University has been inflicting upon its shuddering alumni lately, this is a new low, as NU's pampered undergraduates send up a chorus of complaint because their commencement speaker is Mayor Richard M. Daley.
     A "slap in the face to graduating seniors" one whined.
     Well . . .
     I've been writing about Daley since he took office, and I can't remember ever feeling as much sympathy for him as I do now. It's hard to write a commencement address and a pain in the ass to deliver one, never mind to a gang of 21-year-olds from Scottsdale and Connecticut who have their dander up because you aren't the Dalai Lama or George Clooney or somebody they can brag about to their chums at Stanford (Oprah Winfrey!) or Harvard (J.K. Rowling!).
     Say what you will about Daley, but being the son of the former mayor didn't guarantee him his job — not the way many spurning him will have their careers handed to them on a platter by Dad. Daley had his perks, but the long knives were also out for him after the old man died. Daley's path was uncertain, and he learned a thing or two that might help an ambitious graduate.
     Last year, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was the commencement speaker. Nobody howled about the TV star, but the embattled city mayor gets catcalls.
     This is what they call "a teaching moment." For years, Northwestern liked to festoon its official materials with the best advice a graduate can get, spoken by Adlai E. Stevenson:
     "Your days are short here," he said. "This is the last of your springs. . . . And don't forget, when you leave, why you came."
     Is that really why the Northwestern Class of '08 went to college? To bask in the reflected status of some rock-star commencement speaker?

SPRING 2008

     "Free Sun-Times!?" a bright young man in mod eyeglasses half exclaimed, half asked, poking a folded paper in my direction as I cleared the steps at Union Station and broke into the fresh air and sunlight of Madison Street.
     I subscribe, of course. But that copy stays at home with my wife, so I buy the paper at the Northbrook station. There's another copy waiting on my desk. So I'm covered, Sun-Times-wise. But I was so glad to see somebody waving the flag, that after weighing the merits of wasting a promotional paper vs. supporting the boys in the trenches, I smiled, thanked him and took it.
     The exchange slowed me down a couple of seconds, enough that, a few steps later, when I glanced down at the green water of the Chicago River as I passed the center of the Madison Street Bridge, I saw the front edge of something massive moving out from underneath.
     It was the Robert F. Deegan, out of Thorofare, N.J., a huge barge, its width spanning a third of the river.
     I settled against the rail to watch the enormous vessel pass under my feet, all gray metal walkways and red rust stains. Pushing it was a tugboat, the Donald C. Hannah — nearly 90 feet long, with a 2400 horsepower engine — out of Lemont.
     It took a minute for them to move a block south toward St. Louis. I watched the boats recede, joined by a solitary gull circling around. The barge and the tug cleared the Monroe Street bridge, and the gull peeled off.
     Taking its cue, I headed toward work, stepping into Harry's Hot Dogs at Randolph and Franklin to quietly set the folded newspaper on the orange linoleum counter, where somebody could find it.

MY WAR AGAINST BUCKTHORN

     Call it "buckthorn suppression," the stroll around my property, with its narrow stretch of woods on the east side, eyes on the ground, pausing to bend over and pull up the small buckthorn sprouts that grow everywhere no matter what I do. You need to catch them early, when they are 2 or 3 inches long, because very quickly they're 6 inches tall with roots so deep you have to dig them out.
     Having had to saw down several 15-foot tall versions of the gnarly, bethorned tree, I know the danger of neglect, but still am surprised by my zeal. It is against the law — the Illinois Exotic Weed Act, to be specific, as amended in 2004 — to "buy, sell, offer for sale, distribute or plant" buckthorns without a permit, and they will only be issued to those experimenting with new ways to kill it.
     As is common with zealotry, my animosity against this plant, with its deeply veined, oval leaves, is catching. When we went to the Brookfield Zoo last Sunday, it was my wife who kept pointing out that much of its 216 acres are choked with buckthorn.
     Deeply ironic that a facility dedicated to preserving creatures from natural habitats around the world would play host to this destroyer of Illinois vegetation — invasive plants crowd out and kill native species. In its defense, Brookfield Zoo is aware of the problem.
     "We don't have enough staff to keep up with it," said Nicole DiVito, a spokeswoman. "We're doing as much as we can. Occasionally, we're getting volunteers, and slowly getting rid of it."
     I asked her to let me know next time Brookfield has its Let's Kill the Buckthorn Day. I'll help. Because, really, what's the point of highlighting the biological diversity of the earth, if every plant is going to be the vegetable cousin of the cockroach?

PERSONAL NOTE

     Patrick M. Quinn, the archivist at NU for 34 years, is retiring today. As luck would have it, I called him to check the Stevenson quote, and he pointed out — in characteristic fashion — that Stevenson did not say it at NU, but at a senior dinner at Princeton in 1954, and that Northwestern, also in characteristic fashion, alas, seized it as its own, for years, until he stopped them. Thanks for all the help, Pat. Good luck and God bless.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 2008

Friday, January 24, 2025

Is this column antisemitic? Gosh, I hope not

 

     I'm no semiotician — an expert in the study of symbols — but I am Jewish and know antisemitism when I see it. An octopus with a hook nose straddling the globe, its waving tentacles holding missiles and moneybags? Definitely. Particularly if it is marked with a Jewish star. That's a giveaway.
     Swastika spray-painted on a synagogue door? Absolutely. Elon Musk extending his arm straight out in a Nazi-like salute — well, he's an odd duck, given to weird jigs and twitches. And since he's gone on record supporting neo-Nazis in Germany, I'd say debating the meaning of a gesture is beside the point.
     Bottom line: Just as I cherish my right to speak freely, so I do not lunge toward offense, nor leap to stifle others. When I was passing through the Chicago Cultural Center last week, showing it off to a Chicagoan who had never been inside, we passed by the "U.S.-Israel War Machine" that this week is causing a fuss. I paused. My underwear remained unknotted. I took a photograph, thinking it could be used when addressing a certain kind of hysterical anti-Americanism. We moved on to look at the gorgeous Tiffany dome.
     A valuable skill, moving on. I was surprised, and disappointed, Thursday to open the Sun-Times and read a story about the puppet, and a nearby one of Benjamin Netanyahu, being labeled antisemitic by 50th Ward Ald. Debra Silverstein, the City Council's lone Jew (I was the only Jew in my elementary school. That's rough. I hope Silverstein isn't constantly being called on to stand up and explain what Hanukkah is about. Embarrassing).
     She asked the city to take the display down.
     Sigh.
     Debra, Debra, Debra. Did the creator of "U.S.-Israel War Machine" pay you for this bit of press agentry? Because you took a crude papier-mache caricature sitting unnoticed in a seldom-visited corner of the Cultural Center — remember my friend, who lives blocks away, had never set foot inside — and slapped it into the pages of the Sun-Times. Nice work. Maybe next you can organize a book launch for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
     I love Israel, I'm a Zionist, and I hope that a thousand years from now there is still a Jewish State of Israel. I also think Benjamin Netanyahu is the devil, that he left the door open for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and my big puppet of him would have longer fangs and more blood dripping off his fingers.
     Does that make me an antisemite? I suppose in some eyes. The same way my thinking that Donald Trump is a criminal who should be in prison instead of the White House makes me a traitor to many. I think it makes me patriotic.
     Sympathizing with yourself is common as dirt. If we look at the problems in our world, 99% of them are from people so enthralled with their own precious selves that they are unable to grasp the humanity of anybody who is not exactly like them. I don't understand why it's so difficult to accept that a lot of people with connections to the Palestinian territories, either through family or culture or inclination, are upset over the situation. I certainly am. And some of those people might want to express their outrage. With a pair of big puppets. At the Cultural Center.


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Thursday, January 23, 2025

Ending birthright citizenship will create a permanent, rightless underclass

 


     This column ran in the paper yesterday. 

     The cruelty of slavery was so extreme that every aspect of the shameful institution does not get proper consideration. Once you get past loss of personal autonomy, enforced labor without compensation, brutal punishment, separation of families, obliteration of culture ... there's more, but that will do ... there isn't much emotional space left to consider slavery's multigenerational aspect, though that certainly was one of the more horrific features.
     You were a slave because your parents had been slaves. Your children, even if fathered by the man who owned you, a common occurrence, would also be slaves. As would be their children. And their children. Onward into eternity.
     Take a moment and try to imagine how grotesque this is. As a parent, I take comfort that my boys are better than me in almost every regard, leading lives that are smarter, less troubled, an all-around improvement. I can't conceive of the agony of being certain your children would be doomed to a fate exactly like yours, to toil in a field. Or worse.
     If you're wondering why this bit of American history bobbed to the surface now — it's isn't even Black History Month yet! — that's because among the flurry of executive orders President Donald Trump issued after his inauguration Monday was one aimed at ending birthright citizenship.
     Enshrined in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment has been law since the Civil War. It begins, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
     In a nutshell, if you're born here, you're a citizen.
     Since even the president cannot change the Constitution — you need a two-thirds majority in Congress and approval of three-quarters of the states — the Trump administration is arguing that the 14th Amendment has "never been interpreted" to grant universal citizenship to those born here. Another untruth to add to the tally.
     The legal crack that the Trump administration is trying to squeeze through is the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" part. If your parents aren't citizens, the argument goes, then you are not subject to the oversight of the United States but an unwelcome interloper whose only relationship to the law is being sent back to wherever you, or your parents, came from.
     The American Civil Liberties Union has already filed a lawsuit against the order, calling it "an attack on a fundamental constitutional protection, and one that is central to equality and inclusion." The 14th Amendment, the ACLU said, "is the cornerstone of civil rights in the United States," and "every attack on birthright citizenship, from the 19th century until now, has been grounded in racism."

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Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Rich Hein: Sun-Times photo editor whose theatrical work was art

"The Iceman Cometh," directed by Bob Falls, at the Goodman Theatre, 2012 (Photo by Rich Hein)

     Rich Hein looked through the lens of his camera into the hearts of people. He shot the city for nearly half a century, taking thousands of images that captured the human condition, first for suburban newspapers, then for 40 years on staff at of the Chicago Sun-Times, rising to become its photo editor.
     "Rich was a tough but fair boss," said Alex Wroblewski, pausing from shooting the inauguration of President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday for Agence France-Presse. "I wouldn't be where I am today without him. He opened the door for me. A sweet and gracious man."
     Mr. Hein, 70, died Sunday in Naperville. He had felt chest pains, drove himself to Edward Edwards Hospital, waved off a wheelchair, and walked into the ER, where he collapsed and could not be revived.
     "He was an all-around photographer, he could do anything," remembered John H. White, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Sun-Times. "He could do any kind of news. I always called him 'The Professor' because he was a teacher; he'd explain things. He took the time to teach me many things. He was a great photographer, a great educator."
     "Rich was always so calm, just always chill and cool, easy to talk to, easy to be around," said Robert A. Davis, a Sun-Times staffer for 14 years before going on to become a top international photographer. "He never got too excited. Slow and steady."
     That steadiness was put to the test in 2013, when the Sun-Times abruptly fired nearly its entire photo staff — except for Mr. Hein.
     "He felt very guilty about it," said former colleague Rich Cahan. "He's sitting there, and everyone else is gone."
     Mr. Hein was left the photo editor — a term he hated — supervising one young videographer, and whatever freelancers he could rope in.
     "He didn't want to be the only guy left," said Ashlee Rezin, the Sun-Times' current photo editor. "His running joke was that, on his tombstone it would read, 'He complied.' Because he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. But he did so much more than comply. He was the quiet, calming, level-headed backbone of the photo department."
     But it allowed him to do something he excelled at: nurture a staff of young, energetic photojournalists.
     "I think he really loved giving opportunities to young photographers," said Rezin. "He loved when somebody wanted to work, and wanted to do well and wanted to learn from him. He enjoyed that mentorship role. I used to ask him for a critique: 'How did I do?' Whenever I didn't do the greatest, he would look at me over the top of his glasses and say, 'Do you really want to know?'"
     In addition to his Sun-Times work, Mr. Hein was a fixture on the Chicago theater scene, shooting publicity stills for stage productions.
     "His photos for the theater community were artworks themselves; they were gorgeous, " said Bill Ruminski, a news editor at the Sun-Times.
     "He was a wonderful, wonderful guy, beloved in our community," said Robert Falls, the former artistic director of the Goodman Theatre.

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Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Wait long enough, and deer turn into whales

Ancient whale skulls (The Field Museum)

     Honestly? I was busy Monday morning. A colleague died suddenly Sunday, and I set to work writing his obituary. I hate to be coy, but don't want to scoop the paper. You'll find out Wednesday. So until about 3 p.m., I was talking to colleagues and bereaved loved ones, checking archives, writing.
     When I was finished ... well, I just didn't have the bandwidth to listen to even five seconds of the speech. Doesn't matter anyway. Who cares what a chronic liar says or doesn't say? He freed all the Jan. 6 rioters. So much for law and order. Signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as "the Gulf of America." An incredible self-own, like signing an affidavit to his own smallness, pettiness and triviality. What could I add to that
     Not that I don't have anything to add. I do: whales are descended from land animals. I learned this Sunday at the Field Museum. Actually, I misunderstood the plaque, and thought the take-away was "Whales descended from horses." Which would be truly marvelous, and had me wondering, almost indignantly, "Why has this information been kept from me?"
      But that isn't the case. The ancestor is a deer-like, hooved creature — the hooves threw me off, making me think "horses." They can tell by the ankles, apparently. 
      Somehow, small deer-like creatures aren't quite as delightful, though I don't see why that should be.  Maybe the "Ken Effect." Still, it shouldn't detract from focusing on what occurred. Food grew scarce, the deer-like beastie nudged itself toward the water to grab at fish, or plants, or whatever, and over a mere 10 million years ended up spouting plumes and being chased by Ahab. Dolphins did the same, evolving from a dog-like predator called a Mesonyx. The closest relatives of whales and dolphins now are hippos and cows. 
     Funny, I already knew whales were mammals. Rising to the surface to breathe, periodically. Live birth. And yet, somehow, never followed that through to its logical conclusion: how did mammals get into the sea? They were hungry, apparently.
     There is a message there that applies to our current fraught political situation, and I hope you won't mind if I spell it out. Life is a long, long time. Things change. A small deer can, in time, become a gigantic whale. If you wait long enough.

Monday, January 20, 2025

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

Martin Marty in 2017

     Faith gets good press. But its real value depends on what precisely you put your faith in, and how you use it. As I've said before: religion is a hammer. You can hit someone in the head with it. Or build them a house. Same hammer. Your choice.
     Take two of the most prominent Chicago theologians of the past half-century, Rev. Billy Graham and professor Martin E. Marty. Each used their similar faiths to take vastly different approaches to the crises of their turbulent era.
     Graham, a minister ordained in the Southern Baptist church, used his popularity as a ticket into the White House. There he curled up in the lap of power and became the personal pastor to 11 commanders in chief, starting with Harry Truman and running through every president up to Barack Obama. He baptized Dwight D. Eisenhower and spoke at the funeral of his golfing buddy, Richard Nixon.
     He cast himself as a kind of spiritual adviser. But was really just a hallelujah chorus, offering moral validation. Graham sidestepped civil rights. He sneered at Vietnam War protesters. “It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something," he reassured his pal, Lyndon Johnson.
     You don't need the perspective of years to see Graham ducking the great ethical challenges of his day. Martin Marty, a Lutheran religious scholar, saw exactly who Graham was.
     “A man in transit between epochs and value systems, he has chosen to disengage himself and distract us by shouting about the end of history,” he wrote in the Sun-Times in 1965.
     Marty's pulpit was far smaller than Graham's. But he used it vigorously to advocate for civil rights. When Martin Luther King personally invited him to Selma, he recruited colleagues and went. He not only opposed the war in Vietnam, but founded an organization, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, to do so.
     You can gauge the impact of each man by what he left behind. Graham left us with his son, Franklin, perhaps the coldest stone hater calling himself a man of God on the American scene today.
     Marty left us with the University of Chicago's Martin Marty Center, which works to encourage interfaith dialogue, viewing religion as something that should bring together people of different faiths, not drive them apart.
     Marty warned against acting as the "servant of a God of prey whose goal it is to annex and enslave."
     He reminds us:
     "Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive. To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it."

     I had lunch with Marty in 2017, when his book on Martin Luther's 95 Theses was published, and reached out to him to plumb his thoughts now. But he'll be 97 in a couple of weeks and avoids the public eye he used so well for so long. No matter, his voluminous writings — he is the author of more than 50 books — provide what we need.

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Sunday, January 19, 2025

Myths of Telephone History


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

     History is much more complex than the pap they feed you in school. Think of it as an onion. The outer, tough brown surface is the outline narrative we are all familiar with — what Voltaire called "the lie agreed upon."
     To get to the inner, fragrantly-human layers of the onion, where missteps and bungling and treachery and bad timing lie you sometimes have to peel. It takes time and thought, and most people don't bother — they have a hard enough time keeping the famous figures and buzzwords straight — but it is an exercise that, nevertheless, should be tried at least once.
     Consider the telephone.
     Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We learn this in grade school. He was a teacher of the deaf, with a big beard, and he invented the telephone. After he invented it, the first words spoken over the telephone were "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Everyone knows this.
     The date was March 10, 1876. The reason Bell needed Watson was because he had spilled sulfuric acid on his clothes. The acid was being used to alter an electric current in response to shifting sound waves, the central element in the telephone Bell was using, a telephone he did not invent, but which was described the month before in an application registered at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. by Chicago inventor Elisha Gray.
     And now we begin to peel.
     Gray, an electrician who founded the Western Electric Company, is one of those shadow figures of history, a person whose life comes into focus only when the light of failure is shone on the pages of the past. his telephone invention could have — perhaps should have — placed him among the pantheon of immortal American inventors: Fulton, Morse, Edison, Gray.
     Certainly Gray appeared to be the right man to invent the telephone. He had eleven patents to his name, all for improvements in the telegraph, and his Western Electric Company had the backing of the powerful Western Union, the biggest company in America. His people saw the telephone coming. In a New York Times article of July 10, 1874, detailing Gray's "musical telegraph," a device conveying tones over wires in the fashion of an electric organ, a Western Union official predicted that "in time the operators will transmit the sound of their own voice over the wires."
     They did, and quickly too. Within five years people would be paying to talk over a phone Gray had designed, but not over a phone that hadGray's name on it or put cash into Gray's pocket. Gray suffered a single slip, a stroke of bad timing on his march to glory, and it was enough to sidetrack hm into oblivion and ridicule. He is remembered today chiefly for his moment of lateness, a cameo appearance in what is, at first glance, one of the more astounding coincidences of history.
     On February 14, 1876, Gardiner Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell's silent business partner, visited the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., and filed a patent application for "Improvements in Telegraphy," Bell's modest term for a transmitter/receiver that could send a voice over electrical wires — a telephone.
     Approximately two hours later, an attorney named William D. Baldwin visited the same office and filed a caveat for Gray, describing a device for "transmitting vocal sounds or conversations telegraphically" (a caveat was an announcement of a pending patent application). The filing fee was $10.
     The Patent Office had a policy for handling two conflicting claims. On February 19, it issued what was called an interference, meaning that both applications were frozen for ninety days to give the examiners time to weigh the merits of the variou claims.
     The two devices
 were quite similar. Bell's used a membrane that when vibrated by sound waves, moved a strip of iron through the field of an electromagnet, converting the sounds into an undulating electric current. Gray's was a little more elegant. Vibration of the membrane changed the depth of immersion of rod in acidified water, varying the current (most people don't realize that it was not the element receiving or broadcasting the voice which was the radically new part of the telephone, but the smoothly varying electrical current, as opposed to the simple on/off of the telegraph circuit).
     Neither man had actually conveyed speech through his device. Gray hadn't built his. Bell had, but his assistant Thomas Watson had only been able to make out "tones" from it. But in keeping with the standard procedure of their time — and ours — each had bolted off to the Patent Office to try to secure the right to make great gobs of money off his invention a soon as the idea had been conceived.
     How did these two men — one in Boston, one in Chicago — end up inventing similar devices with identical purposes and presenting them to be patented on the same day?
     Remember, neither Gray nor Bel was a solitary genius wrenching his brilliant creation from his unique intellect. It didn't work like that. The telephone was a by-product, gradually extracted from the telegraph. Neither Bell nor Gray had set out to bring the art of disembodied conversation to an eagerly waiting world. Party lines, call-forwarding, telemarketing and Rock Hudson/Doris Day moves were well beyond imagining. In fact, there was no perceivable public desire to speak to people who were far away. The public was still pinching itself in wonder over the miracle of the telegraph, invented just thirty-two years earlier.
     That was the problem with the telegraph — it was too popular. people wanted to send too many messages over the fragile web of wires crisscrossing the country, since a line could handle only one message at a time. Message requests were routinely backing up. There were delays....
     When more information is considered, the coincidence of Bell's and Gray's devices colliding at the U.S. Patent Office seems less and less startling, more like two runners crossing the finish line at the same time than a bizarre twist of fate.
     As soon as the interference was announced by the Patent Office, Bell hotfooted it to Washington to try to smooth things over in person. Gray stayed in Chicago — perhaps a fatal error.
     Bell found himself in a conference with Zenas F. Wilber, the patent examiner. And this is the core of the onion — what passed between Bell and Wilber has been the subject of great speculation and debate. Bell later admitted that he asked Wilber about the nature of the conflict, and Wilber pointed to a line in Bell's patent application suggesting the possible use of liquid to vary the current. Even this is suspect, as the line is handwritten in the margin of the original application. Bell claims that he forgot to include it in the text. But suspicion lingers — perhaps unjustly — since Wilber was a deaf-mute,well acquainted with Bell and, just maybe sympathetic to his cause. They could have added the line on the spot, conjuring up the truism "Behind every great fortune is a great crime." Wilber later admitted that he also mistakenly showed Gray's application to Bell, which, if not a great crime, was certainly a breach of ethics.
     By the time patent No. 174465 was granted to Bell, on March 7, he had constructed a working phone — based not on the iron-bar model described and pictured in his newly issued patent, but on Gray's liquid model, at best only alluded to in Bell's application in the handwritten addendum. This was the telephone Bell used in calling Watson, the telephone he displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that summer to an awestruck audience, including Elisha Gray, who, not realizing that Bell was using his device, slunk off in defeat.

Saturday, January 18, 2025

The Chicago Cultural Center

 

    "I've never been in there," said my friend, as we walked past the Chicago Cultural Center Friday after breakfast at Taco Lulu on Adams Street.
     "Let's fix that," I said, steering us inside. "Biggest Tiffany dome in the world."
     A completely understandable lapse. Originally the main branch of the Chicago Public Library, the Cultural Center, at Randolph and Michigan, has always struggled to find a purpose — generally home to sincere temporary displays of artwork by young persons, it comes off as a gorgeous box with nothing inside. Maybe because nothing on display is anywhere near as finely wrought as the building itself. Currently it has puppets related to the International Puppetry Festival, going on now. Some quite nice. But still lumps of paper mache set next to to shimmering glass and tile. 
     Of course I told her the story of Richard J. Daley's wife, Sis, saving the building in 1972, saying, in essence, "The hell you will," after her husband had announced it would be torn down.
     I routinely pass through only because I walk around the Loop a lot, the Cultural Center is a full city block, north to south, and you can cut through and keep warm on cold days.     
     If breakfast at a taco place seems odd, the plan had been to meet at Lou Mitchell's on Jackson. But the restaurant is closed for vacation until Jan. 22 — their right, of course, but they don't mention it on the web site. I love Lou Mitchell's — it's 100 years old, great food, thick raisin toast — but c'mon. It's also closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and I tend to forget that odd Tuesday closing. I think I've been turned away from Lou Mitchell's more than I've managed to eat there. 

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



Friday, January 17, 2025

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

 

Shermann Dilla Thomas

     Martin Luther King Jr. was a Chicagoan. He lived at 1550 S. Hamlin with his wife and their four children. Coretta Scott King remembered the apartment building as "dingy ... no lights in the hall, one dim bulb at the head of the stairs," with a hallway reeking of urine.
      They moved in Jan. 26, 1966, and lived there, off and on, for about a year. Long enough to count — though I suppose that depends on who's doing the counting and how expert that person is at the advanced Chicago art of welcoming in the people they think belong, and keeping out those who, in their estimation, don't.
     With King's time here in mind and his holiday uncomfortably sharing Monday with the second inauguration of Donald Trump, I visited his old stomping ground by hitching a ride on a King-focused private bus tour that TikTok historian Shermann Dilla Thomas conducted for United Way of Metro Chicago.
     If there's one thing that sets Thomas's tours apart — alongside his deep knowledge and warm personality — is that the past never stays past. Right off the bat, he drew a line from King's time to our own.
     "Today we're here to talk about Dr. King's time in Chicago," Thomas began. "The thing that brings him to Chicago is housing. It's crazy to think that almost 60 years later we're still dealing with housing issues related to segregation, inadequate housing for the poor, lack of public housing, absentee landlords, people who hold onto vacant lots and dilapidated properties and don't do anything about them."
     The tour stopped at the Stone Temple Baptist Church, a former Romanian synagogue on West Douglas Boulevard.
     "This is where King did a ton of time doing his Chicago Freedom campaign," said Thomas. "Every year the folks connected with Skokie's Holocaust Museum build sukkahs in North Lawndale to continue the tradition. That's how you build community."
     The best and worst of the city freely mix — Thomas pointed out the beelove cafe, a sparkling facility featuring local honey, directly across the street from the Chicago Police Department's notorious "Black Site."
     "Thousands of Black and brown kids have been taken in that building without due process and held for days being tortured," Thomas said.
     Next stop, the old Sears Homan Square campus.
     "This was an anchoring space," Thomas said. "What makes them leave? King's assassination. ... Dr. King was the powderkeg. King gets assassinated, there were riots here, and Sears decides too take this expansive campus and put it all in one building, the Sears Tower

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Thursday, January 16, 2025

"Soup is too important"

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


   
     Can you be offended by a grocery list? I can, though immediately realized that the ability to do so is not a good thing. But rather, a bad thing, an occasion for self-improvement. So let's begin, and own the sin.
     Last weekend, my wife was slammed by whatever virus is going around — not COVID, she took the test. But enough to confine her to bed, wiped out. I busied myself making tea and urging toast, unsuccessfully. She came down with whatever it was on Friday, slept all day Saturday.  But by Sunday had recovered enough to start issuing instructions. I had to go to the store to get essentials and "food for the week." She texted me a list. Kleenex, since she was burning through the last box. Skim milk. And then the item that raised my dandor: "Chicken noodle soup (low salt if possible)."
     Chicken noodle soup? Canned chicken noodle soup? What kind of person does she think I am? Is that what we're reduced to? Are we animals?
     The first thing she had done when she took ill was dig her homemade chicken soup out of the freezer. I boiled noodles — that she trusted me with — and saw that she spooned it into herself. But there was only one container and that was soon gone, in the first hours of her illness. Now we were to follow it up, drive the sickness off with ... what? Progresso? Out of a can? A canned soup?
     "I'll make you soup," I announced.
     Suddenly the haze of suffering lifted and she looked at me, clear-eyed and lucid. Her hard expression was like a blurry image snapping into focus. No words were spoken, but it was as if she said: "Soup? You? You'll make me soup? Is that what you're saying? Really? What do you take me for, a fool?"
      That doubled my resolve. Soup. How hard could it be? You pour water in a big pot, right? You put in, ah, the soup ingredients. Chicken must be important here — can't make chicken soup without it, right? I know that. You boil it. The result is soup. 
     Off to Sunset Foods. I got baby carrots and onions and celery — I forgot the parsnip, but those turn out to be dispensable. Back home I dug some of the vast supplies of chicken out of the freezer in the basement.
     Suddenly, she was downstairs, in the kitchen. The virus held at bay. She helped the selection of a pot — you can't just use any pot, apparently. The right pot selected, she vetted the chicken pieces to go into the pot. Not that you can just put them in — which I was about to do. No, you rinse the frozen chicken first to defrost it a bit. Separate the pieces. I almost said, "Won't they separate when you start boiling the water?" But something told me not to question the master. Nobody interrupts a master cello class with, "Mr. Casals, don't you just pull the bow back and forth over the strings?"
     What I said was:
     "I can make soup."
     "No you can't," she shot back. "Soup is too important."
     I peeled the onion; she checked that I had indeed thoroughly removed the outer brown layer and hadn't half-assed it. Into the pot. She handed me a bag of baby carrots and I poured them in. Mistake.
     "Wait a second," she said, as the carrots tumbled into the pot. Were these not the baby carrots already in the fridge? No, the new ones I just bought. I'd left them sitting on the counter. To put into the soup. She scowled — we should have used the old carrots first. I looked into the pot, wondering if I should begin plucking the carrots out, one by one. She read my mind — 34 years of marriage — and said no, they had to remain now, as they had touched the raw chicken.
     "I thought they looked too bright," she muttered, unhappily. I made a mental note to eat the half bag of baby carrots in the fridge, with hummus. They were now somehow my responsibility.
     I was allowed to cut the celery, but as I did, I felt her eyes upon me, as if she was wondering, "Can he do this right?" The pieces passed muster. And I could put the pot under the tap and turn on the water.
     She hadn't instructed me to get fresh garlic, so the shameful strategum of powdered garlic would have to do. Then there was the matter of salt. She grabbed a big blue box of rough Kosher salt and poured some into an open palm, then dumped that into the pot.
     "How much salt?" I asked, trying to keep myself involved in the process. 
     "You saw, right?" she replied. "Not too much. Not too little. Just enough."
     For the record, late in the soup making, she would allow me to taste the soup I was supposedly making, and I would add more salt. My wife couldn't taste anything.
     The soup cooked. There were more steps. The flame was adjusted. I boiled a pot of extra wide Manischewitz egg noodles — they are kept apart from the soup, added before serving, to keep them intact and to cool the soup for eating.
      We ate the soup for supper. It wasn't quite her soup — not as rich. Maybe that missing parsnip. But it wasn't bad either — and we consumed bowl after bowl. Dinner plans for Monday night were scrapped because we realized we still had soup left, and two bowls are a meal. The rest we froze as insurance against future illness.
      Only after did I realize that my making the soup had not been the welcome act of a concerned husband trying to nurse his ill wife back to health, but a species of rudeness, prodding a sick woman to get up and make us soup. I would rush to reassure her that, of course it goes without saying that my soup wasn't 100 percent — it needed dark meat — but what she generously deemed, "perfectly fine soup." Honestly, I don't believe we'll ever speak of it  again. The soup, for want of a better term, that I attempted to make is in the freezer, and this near-soup will be consumed at some point, probably to ward off the cold of February. But soon after that I expect to find the freezer magically jammed with plastic containers of actual, properly-prepared soup, deep yellow broth, so we are never again caught short in a time of sickness and forced to take desperate measures.

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Ed Kelly at 100: Living among old friends

 

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


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

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Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Fox trot

 


     In the nearly 25 years I've lived in Northbrook, my yard has been visited by coyote and deer, hawks and owls, even a pair of puddle-paddling ducks, who took up residence in wet weather.
     But never a fox. I heard one once — rather, heard the screams of the rabbits I assumed were being slaughtered by a fox. And seen a few down the block over the years. But Sunday one showed up in the backyard, in broad daylight. Alas, none of the photos I snapped were as clear as the image he, or she, presented, strolling along First Avenue. Trees kept getting in the way.
     "Maybe he'll polish off some squirrels before he leaves," I said to the wife. We have been plagued by squirrels this winter, pushing the birds aside and shimmying into the feeder. The old defenses don't work. I think the things are learning.
     Back to foxes, which I had never really considered before. For a moment, I couldn't quite place where in the animal kingdom foxes belong. Are they relatives of dogs? Or maybe cats — they do have a certain, sleek, feline quality. 
     No, not with that snout. They must be doggish, a hunch the Encyclopedia Britannica quickly confirms in its "Dogs" entry: "All dogs belong to the family Canidae, along with their relatives — wolves, jackals, and foxes." Even then, they don't quite belong to that trio, do they? Foxes have a quality wolves and jackals lack — a sympathy, their famous cunning maybe. Wolves are hungry, coyotes mangy, foxes sly. Though physically, the Britannica sets foxes apart this way: "Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the fox family, as compared with wolves and coyotes, is the eyes. They are yellow with elliptical pupils. all other canids, including dogs, have round pupils." 
     Didn't get close enough to look into the fox's eyes, which is probably a good thing.
     Foxes are solitary creatures — they do not travel in packs, and are monogamous. The OED ends its definition with this curious line, "Preserved in England and elsewhere as a beast of the chase" as if being hunted were somehow elemental to the species. More likely it's elemental to a dwindling crumb of the British upper crust.
     Here is where I would normally plunge into the etymology of "fox." There certainly are enough slang usages, related to cleverness, of course, to drunkenness, to swords. The foxtrot dance is not named after the animal, but vaudevillian Harry Fox. 
     Though the only definition that really caught my interest, as a book lover, is "foxing" — the brown spots on the pages of old books. There is an unusual related definition in the OED: "slang. An artificial sore" citing an 1862 sentence: "Daring youths were constantly in the habit of making 'foxes' (artificial sores)." Which raises the question, "Why?" Plague envy? Though it's safe to blame fashion, with a fox being a variety of fake beauty mark. 
     Back in the 1970s, "foxy" was a term of appreciation for feminine beauty. Even though it was endorsed by as revered an arbitrator of cool as Jimi Hendrix, with his song "Foxy Lady," I seem to recall being of the opinion that actually using the word, sincerely, reflected poorly upon the speaker, tarring him as being out of it, maybe even ridiculous.. Or maybe it was just one of those things I could never imagine myself saying under any circumstance. In the "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketch that Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd played on "Saturday Night Live," the hilariously enthusiastic and clueless Festrunk Brothers have a particular affection for the word. "That fox bar was really something tonight!"  
    The fox poked around, then quickly vanished, a dynamic I will emulate today.