Maybe we need to pass a law conferring personhood onto women

   

"Women and Dog," by Marisol (Whitney Museum of Art)

     Women are human, right?
     I’m fairly certain they are. They’ve got all the telltale signs. Complex thought processes. Self-motivation — and by that, I mean they can move, physically, although the other meaning, doing things of their own volition, is also a factor.
     Now that I’m trying to define what being human means, I’m sorry for starting this way. It is fraught.
     Next I almost suggested “bilateral symmetry” — meaning if you draw a line down the middle, we’re the same on both sides — then thoughtlessly elaborated with “two arms, two legs” but realized, in the nick of time, I’d end up getting chewed out by amputees who are, of course, still human despise their losses. A big tent, people.
     Honestly, I feel like tossing the question to AI, after having looked askance at it last week. Contradictory, we humans ... oh heck, why not? Everybody else does. Hey AI. what does being human mean?
     “Being human means living as a blend of biological existence, conscious self-awareness and emotional connection to the world and others.”
     Sounds right to me. And I did I hit the first two, physical and consciousness, on my own. As far as emotional connection... well, I’m not so sure about that. Could be more AI fantasy. Emotional disconnection seems all the rage nowadays — in fact, tossing people over the side of the humanity boat might be a defining mark of humanity. Everybody’s doing it.
     Immigration papers not in order? You can be guiltlessly shipped to some hellhole in Texas or Uganda.
     On the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle? Why you and everyone like you can just... magically vanish. In fact, that’s the plan.

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Bad statuary continued

 

     As a rule, I'm proud of Illinois. An placid lake of humane, rights-affirming blue in a sea of frothing red, with Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest, to the east, Iowa, the scourge of trans citizens, to the west, and Confederate manques Missouri and Kentucky to the South. Gov. J.B. Pritzker gives back to Trump as good as he gets, and if he rode that river of sarcasm to the White House, it would be fine by me.
     But Illinois can't be on the ball all the time. Taxes are high, residents are fleeing, and we've really flubbed our chance to put on pride and joy on display at the Capitol. Twice.
     Saturday's post was about presidential statues, using some photos reader Tony Galati kindly sent. A reader asked if I knew what two Illinoisans are honored in the Capitol — each state gets two, thanks to a law signed by Lincoln. 
    I was tempted to go with Grant. But he wasn't the greatest president. I figured, go literary, and guessed Carl Sandburg, the pride of Galesburg, and, assuming a woman would have to be in the mix, Jane Addams, of Hull House fame.
    Wrong and wrong.
    The answer: deeply obscure 19th century politician James Shields, and Frances Willard.
    Who are they? 

   Shields is the only man to be a senator from three states — Illinois, Minnesota and Missouri. He also was a general, though his claim to fame seems to be that he challenged Abraham Lincoln to a duel in 1842 that was nearly fought until cooler heads prevailed.
     Frances Willard I actually knew — well, not personally. I knew her name, because her home is still standing in Evanston, where she founded the Women's Christian Temperance Union. There is a Willard Hall at Northwestern, and the NU Apartments used to have "We're behind the WCTU!" on their t-shirts, as the teetotalers' headquarters was next door.
    She was also active in pushing for the vote for women, and other laudable social issues.
    So they're not exactly anonymous mopes. But not the sort of historical figures the knowledge of whom cause you to swell with pride either. I'd say time to swap them out for someone more worthy — I nominate Ida B. Wells and Studs Terkel — but honestly, given our historic moment of peril, I would save mere symbolism for another day.

Who is this man?

 

   Take a look at the man above.
   Recognize him?
   I knew who he is supposed to be, because I read regular correspondent Tony Galati's email, sent in response to Thursday's post on the Dick Tracy statue. It's supposed to be Harry Truman. The statue is located at his presidential library and museum in Independence, Missouri. While there is, I suppose, a vague resemblance, and though Tony finds it "good," I would say more like "close but no cigar." There are photos to back me up.

     Maybe it has something to do with Truman himself. Another statue at the library, out in front, of Truman doffing his hat to visitors, which is fitting — the 33rd president worked in a men's clothing shop — is hardly better. 

     Maybe something about Truman's folksy charm resists monumental rendering — an enormous sculpture outside the Jackson County courthouse is also pretty bad. Although a fourth statue of Give 'Em Hell Harry, in the U.S. Capitol, is an improvement.

     Tony likes to visit presidential libraries — an enviable pastime for sure — and sent along snaps of several other presidential statues. He considers the George H.W. Bush statue at right "the best of the lot" and I agree. Maybe its something intrinsic to Bush's patrician looks — there is also a passable bronze of him outside the United States embassy in Berlin. Then again, Bush pere generally looks better and better as the years go on.
     Tony also likes the Gerald Ford statue, though deeming it "too thin." Sudden weight loss is a common flub when constructing statues — Roger Ebert's statue in front of the Virginia Theater in Champaign makes him so svelte as to be almost unrecognizable. 

     It's not like presidential statues can't be rendered effectively — Samuel Chester French's Abraham Lincoln comes to mind. (As opposed to the sitting Lincoln, who looks like he's waiting for a bus, sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, the man responsible for Mount Rushmore, whose all four faces, though substandard, at least have the excuse of being carved out of a mountainside. People treat Mount Rushmore like it's an American mecca. It's not. It's a tourist trap sprayed so thickly with the mist of unfocused patriotism that people can't see what it is).    
    As for Lyndon Johnson, Tony writes, "I don't know what they did to LBJ." That kind of modernist scuptural pointilism popular in the 1960s and 1970s. The statue of botanist Carl Linnaeus at the Chicago Botanic Garden suffers from the same stick-clumps-together-until-you-have-a-guy technique. 

    Anyway, Tony, thanks for the photos. Made me want to get on the road and visit some presidential libraries and museums. I've only been to two — the recently opened Obama Center, and the Kennedy Library over 20 years ago, when I was researching my hat book. I remember the staff being extremely helpful, and the museum being quite well done. I don't remember any statues of Kennedy. Probably just as well.

    

How are kids supposed to learn anything if AI does their work for them?

 

     "The technologies are now able to credibly complete most undergraduate assignments."
                                              — Washington Post

     I bumbled into the job. A colleague knew I had interviewed celebrities for a magazine, and asked if I could talk to his journalism class at Loyola about the challenges of writing profiles of the famous. So I leaned on the lectern for an hour and prattled about walking a golf course in Jamaica with Arnold Palmer and talking jazz over dinner with trumpet legend Dizzy Gillespie.
     "You're better at this than I am," my colleague said, afterward, suggesting I teach. So I ambled over to the dean's office and he gave me a class teaching feature writing.
     I started the students off with writing profiles, the most basic story. You've got your material — someone's life — already assembled. You've got the narrative arc — their career path — waiting to guide you. I signed up 20 real Chicago personalities — TV journalist Carol Marin, firebrand Rev. Michael Pfleger, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas — put their names on index cards, and handed them out to the class.
     We moved slowly. First the kids developed questions for their subjects, based on their life stories. I reviewed those. Then the interviews. Eventually, I had 20 finished profiles before me.
     Nineteen students understood the assignment. But reading one, on entrepreneur Leslie Hindman, suddenly the tone of the writing shifted dramatically. The profile was describing her business, a Chicago auction house, and it was like moving from gravel to asphalt.
     "This is boilerplate," I thought. "She took this off the internet." I plugged a paragraph into a search engine. Up it popped, on the auction house site. Word for word. It took 30 seconds to find.
     On the first day of class, I had made a little speech: "I know you can steal stuff from online. Don't do it. Because I'll find out and you'll fail."
     I didn't want to confront the student alone, so dragged the dean in with me, as backup. I expected the student to be in trouble, maybe expelled.
     That didn't happen. He explained to me that the dire consequences for plagiarism that Loyola warns about were more notional than real. The customer is always right. So together we gently tried to explain to the student who swiped copy why what she did was wrong. It was a struggle.
     I thought the student might be ashamed, at least apologetic. She wasn't. She was defiant. This was research! She was a single mother! She needed this class credit! She needed this degree!
     I pointed out that, yeah, you need the degree because it means something. If the only thing a Loyola degree represents is that you can deftly swipe other people's work, then it doesn't mean much, does it?
     The solution I generously offered — redo the profile without plagiarizing this time — was batted away as draconian. She dropped the course, and huffed off in search of a less rigorous instructor.
     Turns out, my student was years ahead of the curve. Now the great engines of technology align to help everyone farm out the creative process. Only suckers do the work.

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"Plain Clothes Tracy" wouldn't do.

      Statues must be hard. Because it's so easy to get them wrong. In June, I observed how significantly off the statues of Barack and Michelle Obama are at the new Obama Presidential Center. Not a lot. But enough, and what was extra surprising was that no one else remarked upon it, not that I heard anyway. Maybe it's considered impolite. Maybe pointless — the statue is cast in bronze and there. Not a lot anybody can do about it at this point.
     Because I am such a critic of statues — I tend to speak up when I find one lacking — I should take a moment to say how much I admired this statue of Dick Tracy, which I noticed earlier this summer strolling the hopping Riverwalk in Naperville after dinner with friends. Maybe cartoons are, counterintuitively, easier to render in three dimensions. Also notable is who the artist is — Dick Locher, the cartoonist who took over drawing Dick Tracy from Chester Gould,  creator of the strip. I actually spoke to Gould, once, asking him to draw the cover of a magazine I worked for. He agreed.
    Now that I think of it, I have a vignette about Gould developing the strip in my recent book, "Every Goddamn Day.' This might be an apt time to share it.

     Oct. 4, 1931: He was supposed to be a modern version of Sherlock Holmes. The deerstalker hat swapped for a snap brim fedora. But the same sharp nose for clues, the same determined jaw. The idea came the previous May to Chester Gould, an artist for the Chicago Daily News who draws other people's comics and illustrations of oriental rugs. All these headlines about gangsters murdering each other, only to go smirkingly free. Law-abiding citizens are fed up. Criminals ought to be caught. Somebody ought to catch them. Gould drew up some sample strips of what he called “Plain Clothes Tracy” and sent them off to the Tribune Syndicate — his 61st comic idea sent over the past decade. On Aug. 13, he received a telegram. “Your Plain Clothes Tracy has possibilities. Would like to see you when I go to Chicago next.” Two days later he was in Joseph Medill Patterson's office. “I think the name is too long,” Capt. Patterson said, promptly solving the problem himself. “John Tracy ... Fred Tracy ... Dick Tracy. Let's call this fellow 'Dick Tracy.' They call detectives 'Dicks.'” Patterson also suggested the backstory: the murder of his fiancé's father prompts Dick to join the force. That plot line runs today in the debut Sunday strip, kicking off a saga that will continue unbroken for 90 years, spawning radio spin-offs, movies, toys. The comic becomes famous for its rogues' gallery of villains whose appearance reflects their criminality: Pruneface, Flattop, Wormy. And of course that prescient two-way wrist radio. Gould will keep this first strip framed on his office wall for the rest of his life, along with the telegram delivering the good news.

Voting is being wrecked. Voting is being wrecked. Voting is ...

"One Vote Can Change the World" by Bisa Butler

     I try not to repeat myself.

     Let me say that again.
     I try not to repeat myself.
     Why? Well, for starters, it becomes dull. The second time never carries the punch of the first. You've read it before, maybe. The impact lessens.
     Even if I try to switch things around.
     Repeating myself is something I try not to do.
     But what if the same thing keeps happening? Something important. And any other topic, well, pales in comparison.
     On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court said to President Donald Trump, in essence: "Sure, go ahead and mess with the mail-in ballots, part of your general campaign to undermine and muddy elections, in case your side loses and you have to toss over the game board and cry 'Unfair!' your go-to move for years and years."
     In October 2016, when it looked liked the tide might be turning for Hillary Clinton, Trump fired off a series of tweets.
     "Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day."
     And ...
     "The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary — but also at many polling places — SAD."
     And ... speaking of repetition.
     "Election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign ..."
     Then he won, and ... poof ... suddenly the election was fine. Though Republican candidates, in parroting Trump's claims, would insist that elections that they themselves won were also rigged. Which would be funny if the situation weren't so terrifying.
     In the 2020 election, which Trump clearly and definitively lost to Joe Biden, the only dramatic attempts at election fraud were the president's, demanding that Georgia election officials "find" votes to put him over the top. Since then, he has machine-gunned lies about the election.
     Not to forget the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. After which the nation reelected him anyway, which tempts a person to give up, sit back and declare we deserve whatever we get.
     Maybe we do.

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Cats want to be naughty

Casper, in action.

      We have a pair of houseguests, Casper and Boo, taken in for a month. Our son's cats, now ours, temporarily. 
    The cats have been here before. We know the drill. Before they arrived, away went the Venetian glass atop my wife's dresser. Out came the napkin rings.
    Napkin rings?

Boo

     

     Any idea? That is the difference between you and me, and the genius of my wife. Cats can leap. Even onto the upper shelves of our hutch. And cats can knock things over. In fact, they seem to enjoy it. So rather than park all our stuff in a box for a month, my wife has taken to setting out golden napkin rings. For the cats to knock over — well, cat, singular. Boo is a sedentary cat, with no tail and a tiny head, the size of a ping pong ball, and hardly moves, never mind leaps anywhere. She's like a little feline cow. Occasionally she will pad over to my office, and hurl herself toward my lap, reaching it, with an assist from me. There I stroke her until I have a kitten of fur in my fingers. But that's it.
    Every morning, when I get up, I collect the napkin rings off the floor and return them to their places. Really, sometimes, I feel like we work for the cats. 
    But this is the genius part. If she catches him in the act, my wife scolds Casper. For knocking off the rings. That she placed there for him to knock over. Because she knows cats. And knows that cats want to be naughty. Want to piss you off. So she does a bit of play-acting. To keep the cat happy. 

White Sox might bring in popular Japanese mascot to pinch hit

 

Kumamon, at his birthday party in 2016

     Readers make suggestions. Some are anatomically impossible and best ignored. Some are for stories that deserve consideration. This idea immediately caught my attention, even though it is not only about sports — never my strong suit — but about the White Sox, specifically, their rookie first baseman.
     “I noticed that Munetaka Murakami was born and raised in — Kumamoto! Home of your favorite mascot,” Peter Erdelyi wrote in mid-July. “Kumamon is almost all black — a Sox logo would look great on him. Kumamon Night with free little Kumamons to the first 20,000 attendees, along with a mascot race with Kumamon, with the person behind it all with his brilliant suggestion to the Sox, Neil Steinberg, throwing out the first pitch.”
     Never heard of Kumamon? He is, to quote Tom Waits, “Big in Japan.” Kumamon is what the Japanese call a yuru-kyara — or “loose character.” That traditionally gets translated as “mascot,” though it doesn’t do the reality justice. They’re far more complicated. Kumamon is to Southpaw, the White Sox mascot, as Anna Karenina is to Raggedy Ann.
     Ten years ago, I traveled to Kumamoto, in southwestern Japan, to attended Kumamon’s birthday party, along with 50,000 other guests. It was nuts.
     As if reading my mind, the team held a bobblehead night for the slugger, bringing his parents over to throw out the first pitch. I thought that might moot my reader’s idea. But there’s always next year. I reached out to Brooks Boyer, in charge of marketing for the Sox, who I found in a good mood. The team is doing great this year, particularly compared to the three previous, especially-awful, 100-plus losing-game seasons.
     “I can expect us to be fighting for a division in late October,” Boyer said, “These guys are super likable and competing their butts off. So it’s been a lot of fun.”
     Fun is the operative word in baseball lately. As illustrated by the recent Banana Ball phenomenon, fun is very big at the old ballpark. As are Japanese players. In case you’re paying even less attention to sports than I am, the biggest star in baseball is the insanely skilled Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I told Boyer that keeping far-from-home Japanese players happy seems a challenge for teams.
     “You try to keep all of your players happy,” replied Boyer. “When we signed Murakami, we asked him if there are things from Japan that maybe we don’t have here that would create a more comfortable experience. We were thinking about rice cookers. But the very first thing he said was, ‘Could we get a washlet — a bidet — in the clubhouse?’”

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Days of beauty and tomatoes

     Sometimes simple is best. Like slices of homegrown tomatoes on a piece of fresh challah, spread with butter, eaten on the deck in your own back yard in summer.

     The tomatoes are the big news. After, well, too many years of having them just not come in — hard green spheres that never ripen — they are bountiful this year. The only thing I did differently this year was, early in the season, hit them with a few doses of Miracle Grow Tomato Plant Food. So maybe they deserve the credit, not me.

    I can't even describe how a tomato freshly picked from the garden tastes. Not like grass. Not like a store-bought tomato. It tastes like sun, and laughter, and summer. Not something to be expressed in mere words.

    The challah is from Kaufman's, in Skokie, so was fresh and superlative. Sent by a reader as part of a care package to make sure I wasn't starving while laid up. Thank you for that — thanks to all the good wishes from everybody. Very much appreciated. Had I thought about using this photo, I would have moved the ashtray out of the shot — readers zero in on a detail like that. Don't worry; the ashtray is from my hometown of Berea, Ohio, and hasn't been used in years — I usually smoke a cigar on the front porch, flicking the ashes into the hydrangeas. I noticed the ashtray in the basement a couple months ago and brought it up, but haven't used it yet, haven't smoked a cigar in months — tobacco and healing from surgery do not go hand in hand. Not even this week after a former colleague, doing a wellness check, brought by a trio of my favorite Rocky Patel Vintage 1990s from Iwan Ries. Though the day I light up one of those bad boys draws ever nearer. The surgeon said Thursday I can go without a sling, in the privacy of my own home, and I have been reveling in that, though eventually the arm becomes taxed and I sling up again.
     The weather was so nice, my wife suggested breakfast outside. Sitting on the deck for that hour, with the tomatoes and the challah, hot coffee plus a few — okay, four — Kaufman's cookies for dessert might have been the best hour of summer. Though, as I told Edie, it wasn't really four cookies. One was a rugelach.

 

Promise Willie

  

"Africa The Land of Hope and Promise For Negro People's of the World" (detail) by Bisa Butler

     Thursday was Google calendar scams — at least three, maybe four. The first alerted me that I was scheduled to answer a subpoena. I knew this was nonsense, and knew not to click on anything, so copied the law group supposedly involved and checked. A common phishing scam, designed to get you to react and serve up information. Deleted that, along with the subsequent notice of various illusionary depositions and hearings, bearing official-sounding gibberish: "Settlement Release Update — Review and Confirmation for Final Execution."
     Around 9 p.m. my attention was caught — how could it not? — by the title of one of my books. "You Were Never in Chicago." in the subject line. I got one sentence into it. "I almost didn't write this email" but by the second, "I wanted to approach you differently because authors receive enough messages from marketers who begin with praise and quickly move toward a package, payment link, or call" realized it was another AI book marketing come-on.
     I wrote about such ploys last March. Still, I quickly scrolled through it. Fourteen hundred words. If AI is going to become our overlords, they're going to have to learn the value of brevity. There was nothing I'd note here, until I got to the end:

     PPS – I'll leave this entirely with you. If it resonates, say the word. If not, no hard feelings. Either way, keep sharing your curious, insightful, and deeply human voice with your readers. We need more voices like yours.

Warmly,
Promise Willie
Book Marketing Strategist

     "Promise Willie"? Promise Willie! Is that a great name or what? Can't you see him? Waking up in his cinderblock home in Abuja or Manila. Catching a bright yellow danfo minibus or a colorful tuk-tuk to the sprawling call center he works in. Maybe grabbing a quick akara and pap from a street vendor for breakfast on the way in? Firing up his 30-year-old Dell and seeing who he can rip off today?
     Honestly, I considered responding "By God, yes, let's do it!" just to have further interaction with Promise Willie. He could be a character in a novel.
     But alas, that would probably be as unfulfilling as whatever sham marketing he was offering. I moved on, not even bothering to delete the email.

     Honestly, the junkier social media becomes — Facebook, Instagram, Gmail — the easier it is to ignore. They're doing us all a favor. 

Do legal challenges to hate speech protect Jews or threaten them?

Bess Myerson

     Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss America, was crowned on Sept. 8, 1945. In the hazy nostalgia that passes for historical understanding nowadays, people might assume her victory was due to the warm embrace that America gave all things Jewish after the horrors of World War II.
     It wasn’t.
     James Loeffler starts his new book, “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America,” with Myerson’s win, noting that old habits die hard. Sponsors who traditionally embraced Miss America got cold feet. The Catalina Swimwear Company, which provided bathing suits for the contestants, withdrew its promised contract and scholarship.
     “Several corporate sponsors refused to hire a Jewish spokesmodel,” he writes. “The Ford Motor Company reneged on its pledge of a gift of a new automobile.”
     Odd — you’d think that Henry Ford, who’d accepted a decoration from the Nazis, might be eager to put some distance between his company and his former pals. But no.
     Such expectations wilt as you read Loeffler’s book, which uses antisemitism to skillfully explore the difficulty of legally squelching haters in a nation whose First Amendment sanctifies free speech.
     A significant chunk of Americans sympathized with Hitler before, during and after World War II — 70 new American antisemitic organizations appeared within a year after Myerson’s win.
     The first two sections of the book focus on events in Chicago. We think of the city as a liberal bastion. Now, maybe. But not in 1946.
     “Chicago,” the American Mercury wrote, “the birthplace of the German American Bund and scene of the greatest wartime seditious activities” — a Lane Tech grad was landed by U-boat during the war with a raft of Nazi spies — was on its way to becoming “the hate center of the nation and the staff headquarters for incipient American fascism.”
     Thus in February 1946, notorious antisemite Father Arthur Terminiello, on a coast-to-coast speaking tour promoting Christian Nationalism, held a packed rally on the West Side. Protesters rioted outside and Terminiello was convicted under a Chicago ordinance against disturbing the peace.

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Maybe Brad Pitt will be the first. Maybe not.

     Did you see that Brad Pitt told Esquire how, after seven years sobriety, he has returned to drinking. At 62, he "got back off the wagon" and is now drinking "in a more restrained manner."
     Hmm....
     That was surprising. Even more surprising are approving reactions like that of the New York Times: "Brad Pitt’s Return to Drinking Is Not Unsafe, Experts Say, but It’s Not for Everyone."
     Double hmm... Maybe that's a sign of the high esteem he enjoys. The idea being, "If Brad Pitt is doing it, it must be okay."
     Like everyone else in America, I like Brad Pitt — a skilled, versatile actor. And wish him nothing but the best.    

     However ... I don't think that's how it works. And the mumbling experts the Times assembled basically said, "If you need to quit but can't, or don't, then drinking less is better than drinking more." 

     Which doesn't quite add up to "Not Unsafe."

     I would suggest his going back to drinking is not not unsafe. Indeed, it is very unsafe, somewhere between extremely risky and certain disaster.
     I am no expert, of course. The best course is to run your own sobriety, and let others run their sobriety, or lack of same. I do know that my own route has required not drinking anything for ... more than 20 years. But Pitt's announcement reminded me of the words of David Foster Wallace, in his masterpiece "Infinite Jest" which, if you haven't read it, is about semi-pro tennis set against a backdrop of addiction. Wallace writes:
     "That nobody who's ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance against has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever."
     So maybe Brad Pitt will be the first. But I know how drunks and addicts tend to jiggle the locks of their cages, and wonder. So my advice is, if you noticed this story and thought, even for a moment, "Hey ... look at that ... maybe ... reality has changed!" I hope you come to the immediate conclusion, "Nope. It has not. Same old reality. Just because this poor fellow is deluding himself doesn't mean I need to follow him over the cliff." 
    Or if you are determined to give it a go, my sympathy, and I would urge you to wait. Just a year or two. Then check back on Brad Pitt. See how well his plan works out for him.

Pumpkins, pensions, and the CTU's 'cooked' books

 

Just like the Illinois Policy Institute says: Illinois grows more pumpkins than any other state.

   Is criticism a crime?
     As fond as I am of teachers, generally, and despite being a good union man myself, I couldn’t help but shake my head in wonder at the Chicago Teachers Union, which I consider a fairly savvy organization, suing a pair of conservative watchdogs, the Illinois Policy Institute and the Liberty Justice Center, for sinking their teeth into CTU finances and accusing the union of using “cooked” books.
     First, way to turn a spotlight on their accusations. Believe it or not, I’m not checking the Illinois Policy Institute website every morning to see what’s in its crosshairs. Doing that, right now, I see their top story is on ... pumpkins.
     “The state produces enough pumpkins to make nearly 8 billion pumpkin spice lattes, the most pumpkins in the U.S.” At first I thought it must be a mistake — the colorful, pumpkin-centric page labeled “Illinois Policy” must be different from “Illinois Policy Institute.”
     Nope. Same folks.
     But is it true? According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the top producer of pumpkins in the country is ... Illinois, head and shoulders above the rest, responsible for 40% of all the big orange squashes grown nationwide.
     Did you know that? I did not. Score one for the Illinois Policy Institute.
     The second story “Chicago Teachers Union Undermines Yet Another Charter School” begins: “The Chicago Teachers Union’s relentless attacks on charter schools has claimed another victim. The Chicago High School for the Arts announced it will not renew its contract with Chicago Public Schools, citing financial struggles. It will stop operations at the end of the current 2025-2026 school year.”
     Is that true? The selective enrollment, privately managed school will stop operations. But the school itself will transition into a public school. You could also say ... as a Sun-Times story suggested last month ... that CPS stepped in and saved the school after its operators decided to abandon it, one of the many downsides of privatizing public education. As a rule, the Chicago Public Schools are not shutting down schools willy-nilly, at least not since Rahm Emanuel left office.

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The Tide goes out

 
      The internet is considered a constant distraction from the "real world" — the solid, fleshy, non-virtual realm of tangible existence.
     And I suppose that's mainly true.
     But online can also birddog you toward aspects of living existence that you might otherwise miss.
     Consider the bottle of Dreft, above.
     I was writing Monday morning, wanted to take a break, and thought I'd do some laundry, something I haven't done since my surgery. I filled a laundry basket, dragged it downstairs with my good arm, stuffed the clothing into the washing machine. But when I went to pour in some Tide, there just wasn't quite enough for a full load.
      I looked around the little laundry room for fresh bottle, went into the basement where my wife stores her supplies. Nothing, which is odd for her. She normally stocks up at Costco. But she's been real busy attending to my needs, so no criticism implied or overt.
     Looking down, I noticed the bottle of Dreft above, on the floor next to the dryer. Left over from when Grandkid #1 was staying with us. I figured, sure it's for babies, but it'll wash grown-up clothes, too, in a pinch. Right? I was about to add it to the Tide already poured when I looked closely at the label, wanting to confirm it was detergent and not, oh, lye or bleach or something else unsuitable in a detergent-like bottle. 
     Nothing. Which struck me as odd. So I took my phone and plugged in "What is Dreft?" and was informed that, yes, it is detergent, for baby clothes.
      But curiosity lingered. Why nothing on the label? I asked the Internet again, and was told that brand awareness is so strong they don't want to waste space stating the obvious. So that yes, the word "detergent" is there. But in very tiny type. I looked again, scanning every square inch of the label, and finally found it.  

    Can you? Probably not in the photo above. It's right above the numeral "64."  Then I looked at the Tide bottle. At first glance, it didn't seem to be there either. But careful study found it, in two languages, just left of the "CAUTION." 
     Odd, right? I began looking at packages for other kinds of products. Oreo gives up the game by boldly declaring "MILK'S FAVORITE COOKIE." Band-Aid practically is a noun itself, but maintains its trademark status by adding "Brand Adhesive Bandages" in small, but locatable letters. 
     Odd with detergents. Maybe the word doesn't test well. 

Government keeps close tabs on delis, on funeral parlors not so much

 

   Burying a loved one is much harder than buying a corned beef sandwich. More expensive, too.
     Trust me, I've done both.
     When my mother died last year, my brother and I were immediately faced with a series of difficult decisions. She had bought burial plots in Colorado. Bury her there? I pictured the two of us standing in some windy nowhere in Boulder County, at a funeral attended by nobody else. No. We'd bury her here and put mountains on her grave marker — you can get those, for an additional charge.
     Speaking of money. I floated an idea: donate the body to science? It would save, oh, $20,000 of our father's dwindling savings. That would pay for his care for, gee, almost three months.
     "A funeral is part of doing the right thing," my brother said, invoking our mantra for handling our parents' affairs. So we had a funeral.
     With a corned beef sandwich, there are also choices: Fatty or lean? Rye or a kaiser roll? Hot or cold? Don't forget condiments. But those are easier: fatty, rye, hot, yellow mustard. Far less expensive, too. At Kaufman's Bagel and Delicatessen in Skokie, it'll set you back $14.75.
     Given the two experiences — the heart-rending, hugely expensive funeral, and the pleasant, not-that-costly sandwich — why is it the state of Illinois so thoroughly inspects delis while so being so lax about monitoring funeral homes?
     "I have so many inspections I can't see straight," said Bette Dworkin, owner of Kaufman's. "The Skokie Health Department, three times a year, a thorough inspection, inside and out. Weights and measures comes in. A whole list of backflow devices need to be tested."
     Meanwhile, Illinois funeral directors are licensed but not the funeral homes that they operate, which are inspected when they open or change hands, and never inspected again, unless there is a complaint, and sometimes not even then. Which leads to periodic stomach-churning horrors, such as the 56 decomposing bodies found at a funeral home in South Deering, documented in the Sun-Times this past week.
     Across the border is a much different situation.
     "In the state of Wisconsin, there is licensing of the actual physical plant of the funeral home," said Michael D. Sharkey, a funeral director in Wisconsin for 30 years. "They do not do that in Illinois. When something goes wrong, nobody notices. That comes as a surprise to some people."
     Sharkey is uniquely situated to compare the two states, being the legal representative of both the Wisconsin Funeral Directors Association and the Illinois Funeral Directors Association, as well as the associations in South Dakota and Minnesota, where he lives.
     "The other big difference is that in Wisconsin, all regulatory actions are taken by the DSPS — the Department of Safety and Professional Services, all under one roof," he said. "In Illinois, the comptroller regulates crematories and the [Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation] regulates funeral directors, two separate agencies."
     Which leads to buck-passing.

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Flashback 1992: Dated books tell tale of schools' fiscal woes

From "The World is Round," by  Rose Wyler (Grosset & Dunlap: 1937)

 

    You need to keep your eyes open in this job. Because one story leads to another. When I reposted the 1988 investigation into the bad shape many students were in when they presented themselves to kindergarten at Chicago Public Schools, another memory stirred. Don Hayner and I had to go around to schools and collect — or drop off, I don't recall — questionnaires. Sometimes we had to wait, and we'd do our waiting in the school libraries. Naturally, I browsed the books, in those pre-Internet years. And perhaps unsurprisingly, was aghast at just how out-of-date and shabby they were. Four years later, I dropped this. This isn't a column — I wouldn't get one for almost another four years. What surprises me, reading it now, is how I downplayed the rather significant news — that schools were holding onto outdated books and loaning books to each other to fool federal regulators, and that companies were reluctant to deal with CPS because they were so slow to pay. To me, that wasn't as interesting as the musty information being forced on children. Say what you will about the Internet, at least the reading isn't generally 20 or 30 years out-of-date.

     Of course, this story could not be written today because there wouldn't be librarians to talk to. Over the past three decades, investment in libraries at CPS has cratered, and only about 15 percent of Chicago's public schools employ a librarian. Though now that I think of it, talking to the remnant might yield interesting results. One story leads to another.

"Meanwhile the savages — or Indians, as Columbus miscalled them — were gathering rapidly in the protective jungle; a thousand or more . . . the savages chattered like sea-fowl, offering to barter their cotton for any trinkets, however cheap; but the admiral would accept only gold."
      — From The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Armstrong Sperry (1950)

     You can actually see the high-water mark of Chicago education: the line where a surge of money and students pushed schools to their zenith, flushing them with resources and promise, before breaking and rolling back.
     Just step into any public school's library and look at the books.
     The collections are filled with volumes bought during those heady times: science books stockpiled in the post-Sputnik rush to embrace technology; sports books purchased with plentiful federal dollars in the 1960s.
     They are old now, worn and out-of-date. Those that deal with any sort of technical subject are woefully behind the times.
     "If you live in a large city, you have probably seen big buildings with computers in them," speculates a 1972 volume on the shelves of one elementary school.
     Those that deal with history, like the Columbus volume, often view it through an outmoded lens, blurry with bias: "The largest number of today's newcomers has been the blacks," muses Chicago and Its People, a 1972 volume that lumps together blacks, Appalachians and Latin American immigrants.
     Yet schools are forced to keep antiquated books on the shelves because there is no money to buy new ones.
     "If you start pulling all those (outdated) books off the shelf, you are not going to have anything," said Ann Tanner, a librarian at Lane Technical High School, 2501 W. Addison.
     "I'd love to get more books," said Caroline Whalen, librarian at Louisa May Alcott Elementary School, 2526 N. Orchard. She estimates she would need double her budget to replace books such as Baseball's Greatest Pitchers, whose "Heroes of Today" section lauds Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson and Denny McLain.
     "Kids love new books," said librarian Glenish W. Gillespie, of Michele Clark Middle School, 5101 W. Harrison. "Some of them won't look at an old book unless they are highly motivated."
     But at Michele Clark, the biography of Henry Aaron stops with the slugger hitting his 504th home run. A book titled Desert War refers not to the one in the Persian Gulf, but the one in North Africa against Rommel. The two copies of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm looked unused.
     It is no different at other schools. The volumes of the Best Plays series on the shelves at Amundsen High School, 5110 N. Damen, begin in 1899 and end, abruptly, in 1961.
     A look on the sports shelves at one school is a step into not only another era but another city: It's Good to be Alive, by Roy Campanella, Koufax, by Sandy Koufax, and a history of Walt Alston and his Dodgers crowd one shelf.
     Five different books about space can be pulled off the shelves at Lane Tech without finding one recent enough to include any of the Apollo moon landings.

   "But to go to the moon with a manned ship is something that cannot be done unless we have the space station first." 

     — From Rockets, Satellites and Space Flight, edited by Willy Ley (1958).

     Despite the problems they cause — librarians must routinely steer students toward newer reference books and caution them to always check copyright dates — outdated books are a valuable commodity.
     To keep certification, vital for its students applying to colleges, a school library needs a certain number of books per student.
     After Kelvyn Park High School "got rid of the junk" in its collection several years ago, the librarian had no new books to replace them. She found herself forced to put in a desperate call to nearby schools, begging them to quickly send over any obsolete books in storage to line Kelvyn's shelves before a certification inspection.
      Kelvyn got the books.
     The reason Kelvyn weeded out its surplus had less to do with keeping an up-to-date collection than with another common library problem.
     "Our library is totally inadequate in terms of space," said Patricia Hanlon, Kelvyn librarian. "It's so crowded that, every time we get a new book, we have to decide what we are going to throw out."
     At least one librarian keeps old books because they have a certain weight — literally. At one end of the Michele Clark library, scores of identical copies of beat-up textbooks are used to weigh down the freestanding metal shelves, which the librarian fears might otherwise topple over.

   "The company did not employ negroes in the factory. But they were hired to clean the streets, to work around the mill yard, and for other menial tasks." 

     — From The Way Our People Lived: An Intimate American History, by W. E. Woodward (1945)

     This isn't to say old books are necessarily bad. Librarians point out that most classic fiction does not go out of date, and some older biographies are superior to their newer counterparts.
     "Sometimes they're very good," said Frances Szymanski, librarian at Amundsen. "I have found many of the newer books are not well-written but are geared for a lower-level of reading. When you want an in-depth study of a person, what you want is an older book."
     Szymanski proudly points to recent additions — a beautiful 16-volume Spanish atlas, Gran Atlas Salvat; the Reference Library of Black America; the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. But they are not enough.
     "I would greatly increase the number of duplicates in fiction," she said, when asked how she would improve her library if given more funds.
     If anything, the problem will get worse before it gets better. The book budget is often the first thing to get axed — most high schools had their library budgets cut by a third this year.
     "Don't be taken in," said Tanner, gesturing around the three-story library at Lane Tech, with its wood carvings and murals of Native Americans. "Yes, it is a lovely room, very beautifully appointed. But for a school this size, the library is woefully small."
     Tanner said her library has so many pressing needs that new books aren't even the same priority as, for instance, improved security.
     "Maybe my focus isn't on new books because so many of our good books walk that it gets depressing," said Tanner.
     Even when schools have the appropriations to buy new books, they often are held up because of the school system's budgetary procedures, she said.
     "Companies do not want the business of the Chicago public schools because payment is so slow," said Tanner, adding that companies hold books back every year because of board debts. "I call them and they say, `Yes, Mrs. Tanner, we've got your order, but we're waiting for the board to pay its bills.' "
     Sometimes just finding time to order books is a challenge.
     "School librarians have virtually no time to prepare book orders," said Hanlon.
     And Szymanski added: "We would like to remove, perhaps, more old books, if we had the staff and if we had replacements. But we're just not getting the kinds of funds we need. So we just keep taping them."
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 1992

MY world is oh-so special....

     Lunch Saturday was at Dolce Arte, a bright and airy Italian restaurant at 3622 S. Morgan in Bridgeport, attached to an enormous art gallery space. My meatball sandwich was just so-so, but the pastries we shared were first rate. Afterward, we poked around, looking at the enormous photographs of David Yarrow — I liked his shots of animals; less so, the staged tableaus of Wild West models and wolves on LaSalle Street. The prints cost over $40,000 apiece, so somebody must covet them.
     Above one door was the sign at top. Not sure if it was an artwork or mere decoration. Moreover, I'm curious as to whether what stopped me, reading it, will also stop you. "My world is full of possibilities."
     What's your reaction to that? I instantly, well, not took offense, but found fault. It seemed needlessly reductive. I'd have gone with "The world is full of possibilities." There is a stench of ego to "My world is full of possibilities." My immediate reaction was along the lines of, "Fuck you, buddy, everybody's world is full of possibilities. Whether they act on them or not is another matter...."
     Am I wrong here? Maybe I was feeling unusually touchy. I'm still sleeping in a chair in the TV room. But it reminded me of the taint of ego, how it can poison an otherwise positive thought. Of course, there's a lot of that going around.

Maybe adults should follow students in setting down our phones

 

     My high school had a smoking lounge. But don't let the term "lounge" fool you. There were no comfy chairs, no billiard table, not even any walls. It was outside, behind the school, a weedy area where students would gather before, after, and I imagine, during class to get their nicotine fix.
     This was in the late ’70s. And if today it seems wildly inappropriate that a public school would facilitate smoking among teenagers, remember, back then smoking was considered nearly a human right, and there was a problem they were trying to address: smoke-filled restrooms. At least the lounge got smokers outside where they wouldn't impose their vice upon others.
     Memories of the smoking lounge wafted into mind while I was on medical leave, when Illinois joined 38 states allowing cellphones to be banned during school next year.
     When Illinois first contemplated the ban, I was against it. Phones are part of our lives now, like auxiliary limbs. Schools would do better teaching kids restraint regarding their phones since they will be constant companions after graduation. The focus should be on harm reduction.
     Then I thought about the situation some more, and through a superpower of mine called "changing my mind," decided that the ban is right. It helps that social media has degraded into an odious AI slop sink. Facebook imagines that my being Jewish means I want to view an endless loop of every antisemitic incident anywhere on earth, interspersed with agitprop about Israel, plus trite little tales about the Holocaust, which is being retrofitted into a feel-good story of heroism, resistance and survival.
     Spoiler alert: It wasn't.
     Meanwhile, Instagram served up so many snippets of "The West Wing" that I finally realized I could just watch "The West Wing" on Netflix and cut out the middleman. That's when I thought of smoking in school. We are biased toward the present, and it's hard to imagine things changing. But change they do, and today's necessity becomes tomorrow's puzzling affliction. Someday people gaping at their phones could be viewed with the same disapproval extended toward the miserable knot of co-workers puffing around the office entrance.
     Social media is so harmful to teens, so toxic, schools are right to teach youth there is life outside their screens. And the smoking lounge made me wonder whether high schools might not only be right regarding phones, but a vanguard, pointing society toward where we should all be going, as they were with cigarettes.
     In 1978, when I graduated from high school, the smoking rate among American adults was 36%. Today it is 10%, a triumph over damaging addiction, with countless years of life saved. (Though that might change now that the federal government is getting out of the "help people stay healthy" business.)
     Illinois banned smoking in high schools in 1990. Eighteen years passed before the state got around to banning smoking in restaurants. At the time, it was unimaginable — to not light up after a meal? Calamity. The restaurant industry would die. We journalists were dead set against it — what would a newsroom be if you couldn't grind out your cigarette on the tile floor? (The Sun-Times had its own smoking lounge, a truly repulsive little room that did have chairs, plus an enormous air purifier. I would go there sometimes to smoke a cigar and listen to Art Petacque reminisce about the mob.)

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Flashback 1988: How parents fail in preparing kids for kindergarten

 

     My three grandchildren marinate in adult attention. Love, books, toys. I've watch all four parents in action, up close and over time, and have nothing but admiration. They rock.

      The only problem, as I see it, is that all children aren't given such a leg up in life. 

      Not close. Most stories vanish, but this one has sat in mind for nearly 40 years, and I thought I would post it now, to mark the end of my surgical recovery period and prepare for my first column being published tomorrow. 

      This is a story was written as part of a team producing a series, "The Critical Years." We developed a questionnaire, working with the Board of Education, the Erikson Institute, and Chapin Hall Center for Children at U of C (we did things up right, back in the day) and sent hundreds to Chicago Public School kindergarten teachers, following up with focus group interviews with teachers and parents — I remember sitting in a room at the Robert Taylor Homes, conducting an interview with half a dozen parents, thinking, "We're not in Berea anymore...."  

     As shocking as this story is, in my memory, the reality was worse. Children would show up to kindergarten not knowing their names — they'd know a nickname, "I'm Little T!"  They wouldn't know the primary colors.

    Whenever critics of Chicago Public Schools are slamming CPS for their results, I remember this story and want to pipe up, "But consider where students start at. A lot of these kids are royally screwed from Day One — with the best conceivable education, many would never catch up."

      The news today is hardly better. One in four adults in Cook County is functionally illiterate. The ham-handed slashers of the Trump administration have gutted Headstart and other programs designed to throw a lifeline to such kids. I'd be a little reluctant to share such an old story with you, were I not completely confident we could write the same thing today. Maybe we should. That said, it's quite long — feel free to skim.

    This story ran on the front page, bylined, "By Don Hayner and Neil Steinberg."

     A 5-year-old boy came to kindergarten at Drake Elementary School last year not knowing common words like "doll" and "cat."
     He didn't know how to look at a picture book, or how to do things most children learn "from just being alive," said Judith Bowden, his teacher at Drake, 2722 S. King.
     The boy's mother is illiterate and could not read to him, which Bowden said was a major cause of his school problems.
     More than six of 10 children in city public school kindergartens are not read to by parents, according to teachers responding to a Chicago Sun-Times survey.
     By comparison, nine of 10 kindergartners in Wilmette public schools are read to by their parents, as are 87 percent of middle-and upper-income children attending Chicago public schools. Yet experts say reading aloud to children is crucial to their educational development.
     "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. This is especially so during the preschool years," according to the landmark 1984 report Becoming a Nation of Readers by the Commission on Reading.
     One ongoing study by Linda Meyer, a senior scientist at the nationally recognized Center for the Study of Reading in Champaign, goes even further. Meyer's study suggests that parents reading to their children is not enough. There must be quality reading that involves an exchange of questions and insights between parents and children.
     Teachers surveyed said six of 10 children have parents who do not know how to prepare them educationally for kindergarten. Teachers in Wilmette said only one of 10 children has such parents and slightly more than two of 10 middle- and upper-income Chicago children have parents who don't know how to prepare them.
     Typical survey responses from kindergarten teachers:
     "The children are left to take care of themselves." "Parents don't talk to children or ask them questions." "Nobody worked with these children. Television is their baby-sitter."
     Many Chicago children are far behind when they start school. And while the study indicates parents want to help, it also shows they don't know how.
     Educators, who for a long time looked within the school system for the key to academic improvement, are increasingly looking to parents.
     "It is unlikely that we will be able to make a major difference for the child unless we place equal priority on education and academic remediation for the parent," warned a 1988 Ford Foundation study, Toward a More Perfect Union: Basic Skills, Poor Families and Our Economic Future.
     Once a young child falls behind, he may never catch up, said Burton L. White, director of the Center for Parent Education in Newton, Mass., and author of The First Three Years. He added:
     "The child who is delayed at age 3 when he enters Head Start invariably, with virtually no exceptions, is behind on language. And if he's nine months or more behind on language, the chances are very good he'll never be an average student. Ever. The probability that any Head Start program is going to make him even an average student is very, very low."
     Teachers said some parents don't even talk to their children.
     "Many young parents don't know, for example, that even though a child is not verbal, the mother or father being verbal helps language develop," said Laura Devon, spokeswoman for Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project assisting children at risk.
Besides lacking basic parenting skills or information, parents have some ideas that are just plain wrong.
     "When you think you've heard the worst, something the next day always tops it," said Cheryl Stampley, a nurse working with new parents at the Robert Taylor Homes.
     Often, mothers feel that showing attention to newborns will "spoil" them. Some fathers feel that, until they are 6 months old, babies cannot see. Or hear. Or feel pain.
     A surprising number of parents will not put their children in a crib. They're afraid of crib death, although the crib itself, of course, has nothing to do with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
     A parent does not have to be poor to be overwhelmed with the responsibility of child rearing. Middle-class parents also frequently don't know what children need.
     "As bright as they are, they are totally unprepared (to be parents)," said Pat DeMar, director of a Family Focus drop-in center in Lincoln Park.
While poor parents may lack knowledge, said DeMar, affluent parents, ironically, sometimes have too much.
     "They read numerous books, on child bearing, on child rearing, but they reach a point where they're so well-read they lack security in their own instincts," DeMar said. "I worked at Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor, and I saw better parenting because they felt their instincts were OK."
Without adequate parental involvement, children can be so far behind when they enter school they have great difficulty catching up, even if the school does its job.
      At Terrell Elementary School, 5410 S. State, next to the Robert Taylor Homes, fourth-graders made a year's worth of progress in reading during 1987. Yet they still remained about 1 1/2 years behind the national norm.
     "We have to work twice as hard to get the children half as far," said Terrell Principal Reva Hairston.
     Parents often instill in their children a distaste for school that never goes away.
     One young mother, Kathy Jackson, sees her lack of participation as the cause of her son Robert, 11, having trouble in school.
     "He's not interested in school," said Jackson, "I didn't read to him, I didn't do anything with him. I believe that had a lot to do with it." She said she has begun to read to her younger son, Rodney, who is enrolled in the Dewey Child Parent Center, 638 W. 54th Pl., and that he seems to like school.
     It's futile telling some parents to read to their kids. "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Laura Devon of Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project aiding children at risk.
     Many parents are illiterate. One of every three to four adults in Chicago is functionally illiterate. From 650,000 to 1 million Chicagoans above the age of 16 read below the sixth-grade level. Only one-half of 1 percent of these adults are enrolled in literacy programs, according to the Chicago Literacy Coordinating Center.
Illiteracy itself, though, needn't prevent a parent from enriching a child's early years and helping to foster a desire for learning.
     "Even if you can't read yourself, you can contribute by telling your child anything from fairy tales to stories of your childhood. You create a social event in which the child gets the idea of gaining meaning," said James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development.
     Many parents are themselves children. In 1986, 9,959 children were born to teenage parents in Chicago. If these children were entering Chicago public schools today, they would represent one-third of all kindergartners. Studies show teenage parents are more hostile and punitive to their children. They also don't talk or listen to them as much as older parents do.
      "I was 15 when I had my little girl," said Estasia, a mother in the Beethoven Project, which assists parents in caring for their children. "I had to give up cheerleading. I loved that uniform. She was my responsibility, from the moment I got home from school."
     "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Devon of Ounce of Prevention.
     "Often young parenting increases the incidence of child abuse and neglect. We've seen that in news accounts of the last couple months, where a mom left her baby in a cold garage. Many young moms might think it is OK to leave an infant in that situation for a couple hours."
     More than 10 percent of the babies born in Chicago are also dangerously underweight, according to the Public Health Department. Low birth weight - anything below 5 1/2 pounds - is caused by a range of prenatal factors, from drug abuse to poor nutrition to depression.
     Low birth weight is a factor in 70 percent of Chicago's infant mortalities, and surviving low-weight infants have a greater chance of suffering physical and mental handicaps.
     Most poor parents want the best for their children, according to the Sun-Times study. They just don't know how to get it.
     The survey shows that 65 percent of parents come to school to discuss their children's progress more often than the two times required to pick up report cards.
     "You don't discuss your child's progress unless there is interest," said Ted Sanders, Illinois education superintendent, commenting on that figure.
     And nearly six of 10 try to help their child with homework, according to the study.
     "I've never met a parent who didn't want her child to succeed, but some of them don't know what to do," said Reva Hairston, principal at Terrell for the last 12 years.
     "So much depends on the home life and how much parents do with their children as far as listening and talking to the child," one teacher wrote, echoing a sentiment of many of those surveyed.
     Although a distinct minority, some parents seem to have almost no involvement with their children's education after they start school.
     About 14 percent of children have parents who have never come to school, not even to pick up their children's report cards.
     "Many children raised themselves, and come to school when they feel it's time," said Pam Stevens, director of the Dewey Child Parent Center. "I went to a house on a home visit, and the door was open, the babies walking around, and the parents nowhere to be found."
     Almost one of 10 children is regularly more than 15 minutes late for school, and 15 percent of all children miss more than five days of school a month, according to the Sun-Times study.
     Bowden of the Drake school said she has one child who was absent 51 days and another who was absent 40 days this school year."I think some parents are so overwhelmed with their own problem they can't see, so their priority is self preservation," she said.
     Teachers say many parents don't like to visit schools because it reminds them of their own academic failure.
     "When they come to school, it's because their children are destructive," said Dr. Grace Dawson, principal of Beethoven School. "They come to school for negative, not for positive, reasons."
      While parental involvement will improve a child's chances of school success, increasing that involvement is not easy.
     "It would be nice if we said to parents that involvement is in your child's best interest, and they would do it," said Dewey director Pam Stevens. "But we have to use all kinds of bribes and incentives. We have to persuade. We have to be evangelical. There's a big gap between where we are and where we are supposed to be."
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 29, 1988

The bagel lot

    Tuesday morning found me plunging backward, into the past, looking for the first use of the word "bagel" in the Chicago Record, a short-lived paper of the 1890s, and the Chicago Daily News. 
    The results were not what I expected.
    "Bagel" first shows up as a name, such as a certain Conrad Bagel, waylaid and robbed by five masked men in front of his State Street saloon in 1893. For 40 years it is only a name, plus misreadings of other names like Paget (the tendency of microfilm is for letters to puff up and degrade; optical scanners can have trouble reading them).
     The foodstuff shows up in the 1930s. In 1936, columnist Clark Rodenbach makes a colorful visit to Gold's, a restaurant at 810 W. Roosevelt since 1902. He notes that Sears executive Julius Rosenwald was a patron, Illinois' first Jewish governor, Henry Horner, "drops in when gubernatorial duties permit," as do Jewish celebrities such as Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Georgie Jessel and Groucho Marx.
    Being a journalist, Rodenbach must count as a near-celebrity, because he can't leave without a gift.
    "Before you go," says Moe Rafison, the third generation to run the place, "let me give you a bagel or two."
   Rodenbach feels obligated to explain what he's talking about. "They are roughly of donut form; and, like the rye bread, crispy on the outside and tender within. A great breakfast favorite with show-people after the last show."
     It was interesting to follow the bagel into more general acceptance — though even in the late 1950s, bagels were still being explained (including humorously, such as "a donut made of concrete") not only in a daily newspaper, but apparently among Jews themselves. 
    "Are Lox and Bagel (salmon and rolls) essential to Jewish Survival?" is the topic of a humorous debate held at the K.A.M. synagogue in Hyde Park in 1956, though I hold out hope that the explanation was inserted into the topic for the benefit of the general public.
     What really intrigued me was the use of "bagel" in the classified ads in the 1960s and 1970s.  

       "AUTO sales mgr. 100 cars a mo. If you can run a Bagel Lot." reads one, in 1966. "Floor plan & financing available."
     "SALESMAN BAGEL LOT," reads another, in 1972. "MUST BE EXPERIENCED."
     It didn't seem a term used with the customers themselves, but part of the private lingo of the car lot. "AUTO SALESMAN" a 1976 ad explained, "Need 2 experienced salesmen for high volume 'Bagel Lot'"
     My Wentworth and Flexner "Dictionary of American Slang" had nothing, as did AI. I formed a theory that it would turn out to be the deepest discount cars, pivoting off the "Jews are cheap" calumny. 
     I wasn't far off. In Paul Dickson's "Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms" I found, "bagel: a poorly maintained car, to a person looking at it for trade-in."
     As to why a bagel was a poorly maintained car, for now we'll leave that to the imagination.
      If you are like me, you are wondering what happened to Gold's. At the crossroads of the Jewish ghetto in the 1930s, it was steamrolled along with much of the neighborhood by the University of Illinois campus in the early 1960s. Although as a reminder that being Jewish is to never be too far from calumny, I noticed a brief, laudatory 1931 Daily News description of Gold's uses the word "clean" four times. A moment's reflection and you'll realize why.