My top ten

 

The Sun-Times took this shot for some kind of promotional campaign that never happened. Yes, I
worried it was affected to take it at the Newberry Library. But one of my rules is: "Be who you are."

     I've written nine books. None of them is a collection of columns. A disappointment to me since, having assembled this list, such a volume would be fun (and easy) to put together. Heck, readers might even enjoy it. But whenever the subject is brought up (always by me) my agent, or whatever editor or publishing type I'm afflicting with my ideas, looks grim, shakes their head, and says the same thing: "Column collections don't sell." Particularly when they're never published. That was true when titans like Mike Royko and Steve Neal walked the earth. It's true now, I suppose. I don't know. I've never had one.

    Oh well, here online, we can do as we please. To mark my 30th anniversary (and yes, this has gone on — well, indulge me. There won't be a 40th) I've put together 10 of my all-time favorite columns over the years. It should really be 30 columns, given the 30th anniversary. But that would be a lot of work, and I can't imagine anyone actually looking at 30. Honestly, I can't imagine anyone looking at 20. Or 10. Or five. Or three. But I do hope you grab one and read it. Such as the one about Eugene O'Neill. My personal pipe dream, that prods me to perhaps work a little harder on these than the average newspaper fodder, is the hope that they might bear re-reading down the line. I like to think I'm right. Though I might be deluded. Like everybody else. Anyway, if you're new to the column, and want to see what pieces I'm most proud of, over the years, these stand out:

1. A great trumpet is 'a thing of beauty, an extension of you' — This is my favorite kind of story, where I pull a thread and see where it leads. In this case, I was visiting my son in Phoenix, and we went to the Museum of Musical Instruments. A fabulous place; think, the Louvre, but for instruments. I went back two more times, eventually noticing that a lot of brass instruments were made in Elkhart, Indiana. Home Conn Selmer. Only 90 miles away. It could have just been a factory visit, but I thought: this story should really begin with somebody playing a trumpet. And who should that person be, ideally? The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Esteban Batallan. Facts make a story, and the fact about a silver bridge from the mouth of previous lead CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth becoming a plate affixed to the bottom of his horn's bell, well, when he told me, I actually turned to look for the studio audience so I could gesture in his direction, raise my eyebrows, and say, "Can you believe that?"

2. ‘Code yellow: Trauma in the emergency room’ Even before I was a columnist, I was interested in medical stories. I remember seeing the photo of a little boy kicking a balloon at a picnic for transplant recipients and thinking, "How do they transplant those kidneys?" I would watch a kidney transplant, heart transplant, lung transplant. Watch autopsies at the morgue and faces being rebuilt. I'm still at it — right now I'm slated to watch brain surgery because, really, how often do you get the chance? Such stories were never dull. Like any other aspect of this job, contacts are important, and for this story, I had to force my way in. Mount Sinai's initial response when I approached was, in essence. "No. No. HIPAA. No. Again no." But I persisted. By the time I was done with them, their CEO was asking me to be her interlocutor at the City Club. And when COVID struck the next year, Ashlee and I could hit the ground running at Mount Sinai because the door had already been kicked open.

3. You can lead a girl to slaw, but you can't make her eat: The story you set out after isn't always the story you write, and it's important to be ready to turn on a dime, scrap your expectations, and go with something else.  Top chef Sarah Stegner, whom I'd been writing about since she headed the Ritz Carlton dining room, is one of the most socially-conscious people I know, and she views coleslaw as an entry drug for salad, and was going to go to my kid's junior high school and teach the cooks there how to make it properly.

      I went expecting a culture clash between the Polish lunch ladies and the James-Beard-award-winning chef. What I didn't realize was a) they'd worked together before and b) I'd meet Lily Jaeger and her friends, the sort of real life that seldom gets into the newspapers. I was so nervous, falling out of the sky to capture quite intimate moments, that I did something I never do — I called her mother, after the fact, to get her permission to run the column. I didn't want her feeling wronged, and wrecking the joy I felt writing it. She went along. My only regret is not assigning a photographer, though, if I had, I might have been fussing over a picture of some sorts, and missed the details caught in this column. 

4. "A wild roller coaster ride through a dark tunnel" — Asking a question, then acting on it are two key skills to being a columnist. Plus thinking of people other than yourself. Three qualities that went into this column, after I sealed up a Cologuard colon cancer detection kit, containing, well, you know, and then had this thought: "Who opens the jar?" Answering the question involved lots of calls and driving 300 miles to Madison and back. But everyone at the paper instantly got what I was doing, and they gave it great play. 

5. "Abandoning our kids, then and now" — Being on the night shift for seven years meant I was working when most of the staff was not, and I became expert at, for instance, rifling through the library and the morgue, where the old newspaper clippings were kept, a place most reporters seldom entered. This column came from a manilla envelope I glimpsed while flipping through the As, "ABANDONED BABIES, 1940s." How could you not look at that? And notice how it isn't just a deep dive into the past — what's the point? — but I bring it up to date, using the past to illuminate the present. Which is what it's for.

6. "Crawl across the floor to me." This column was one of those experiences that gets branded into memory, so to speak. From first hearing about this dominatrix at a family Thanksgiving dinner, and saying, "Now there's a profession you just don't see in the paper much," to standing in front of her dungeon door on Lake Street, hesitating before going in, wondering whether this would break my fragile bond of connection with readers. I decided that I wasn't doing anything I was ashamed of, and if I wrote it correctly, that would be conveyed. I later heard afterward that Lilith felt ill-used, somehow, and I'm sorry for that, as I felt I treated her openly and honestly. I did quiz her mother — an extra step I was proud to take. Maybe she was mad about that.

7. Non-Native-American Guide — Imagine having a skilled journalist and storyteller documenting your kids' lives, from birth. How great would that be? Another columnist would ignore his family completely — not newsworthy — but sharing news was never my goal. Telling a story was.  Though news had a way of creeping in. Notice how this column on my older son's participation in Indian Guide's also captures a moment when the YMCA scrapped the "Indian Guides" name. They're now called the "Adventure Guides."

8. Why restrict child porn but not guns? "The trouble with you Len," Paddy Bauler once said to Hyde Park do-gooder Leon Despres, "is that you think it's on the up-and-up." In a sense, that's my problem too — I think I'm crafting reasoned arguments for reasonable people, not throwing chunks of raw chum into a seething mass of piranha. Which is more or less what I'm doing. This was written as a calm argument about gun control based on the First and Second Amendments. The headline, which I wrote, blandly restates the premise of the piece. What I didn't realize was that a) putting the word "child porn" in your headline makes the algorithms go crazy. b) to people for whom it is impossible to even conceptualize any sort of rational restriction of guns, it's easy to invert that thought into an argument for legalizing child porn. It became one of my most ... I almost said, "read" but that overstates the case ... reacted to columns, by legions of people who never bothered to read it, or anything else, as far as I can tell. 

9. O'Neill's 'Palace of Pipe Dreams'  A newspaper column is a literary form, like Haiku, that demands certain qualities. An element of personality — I write a lot of obituaries, for instance, but they're not about me. My picture isn't generally on them Because they're not columns. A column also should be a certain length — say 500 to 1,000 words. Over the years I've managed to play with the form, now and then. I've written columns in the form of poems, or dialogues, or transcripts. This one I'm particularly proud of — it's an interview with actor Brian Dennehy, written in the form of a play that is also a parody of Eugene O'Neill. 

10. Girl X's mute testimony speaks to heart of agony: Here is another example of playing with the form — in this case, using assistant state's attorney Anita Alvarez reciting. the alphabet as a way to structure the column. If you read it, you'll notice I posted it for my anniversary joining the staff of the paper — anniversaries are big in the journalism world, a peg to hang information that otherwise might seem out-of-left field, and pointless. Which I hope this exercise in nostalgia doesn't seem. Tomorrow we got back to the daily grind of reacting to headlines, assuming they print the column I turned in. I know I've done my job when I worry they won't.