Chicago resistance to ICE echoes opposition to Fugitive Slave Act 175 years ago

“A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves” by Eastman Johnson. “The absence of white figures in this liberation subject makes it virtually unique in art of the period — these African Americans are independent agents of their own freedom,” writes the Brooklyn Museum.

     Jim Gray arrived in chains.
     At the railroad station in Ottawa, Illinois, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago.
     Gray wore leg irons, his arms bound to his sides, and was led by a rope.
     It was Oct. 19, 1859.
     The month before he had escaped from slavery in New Madrid, Missouri. Caught by an Illinois sheriff "in sympathy with the slave owners," Gray was being returned to bondage. A crowd awaited him, including a local merchant named John Hossack, an immigrant from Scotland.
     "What crime has he committed?" Hossack shouted. "Has he done anything but want to be free?"
     A question that echoes through the years and across the country today. With federal immigration agents this past year prowling Democratic cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis — kidnapping Latino individuals and dragging them off to exile, and billions being pumped into immigration enforcement, gearing up to grab more people and confine them to enormous facilities now being constructed nationwide, it's impossible not to think of the Fugitive Slave Act, the 1850 law that also created a federal force tasked with snaring people for the crime of wanting to live in freedom.
     There was already a law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, empowering owners to retrieve their chattel from the North. But Southerners were upset that California was being admitted to the union as a free state. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a sop to them, meting out punishment to anyone helping Blacks escape slavery, and creating monetary incentives for agents bringing escapees back. The law gave bite to the slave drivers' bark.

John Hossack (Ottawa Museum)

     Then as now, local communities fiercely resisted this federal intrusion into their constitutional rights. Then as now, street clashes erupted as national law and human decency faced off against each other. This being February — Black History Month — and with the Trump administration waging war on Black History, scrubbing it from the Smithsonian, from college campuses and federal websites in an attempt to declare the civil rights struggle an unmentionable blot upon enforced patriotic zeal, it seemed important to explore the subject in depth, while we still enjoy the right to do so.
     "All historical analogies are the same," said Matthew Pinsker, a history professor and director of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College. "There's always some similarities and plenty of differences. This is a battle between the national administration and blue state governments. In the Fugitive Slave days, it was a battle between Washington and Northern states, which passed laws called 'personal liberty laws' that were like the sanctuary city laws that Trump is trying to overturn."
     Hundreds of Ottawa residents showed up for Gray's hearing the next day in the courtroom of Justice Dean Caton, who ruled that while Gray had broken no Illinois law, the Fugitive Slave Act demanded he go to Springfield to face charges.
     Gray never got there.
     As a marshal began to lead Gray from the courthouse, local men sprang into action. The officer was restrained, while Hossack grabbed Gray by the elbow.
     "If you want liberty, run!" Hossack urged, dragging Gray from the courthouse. They jumped a fence, climbed into a waiting carriage, and were sped out of town.
     Gray escaped north to Canada. But Hossack was arrested and sent to stand trial at the federal court in Chicago.

Chicago's resistance. Strong then, strong now

     Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act was particularly strong in Chicago, the city "a sinkhole of abolition" in the words of one downstate editor. A hub of actual railroads, it was also a center for the Underground Railroad, an informal confederation hurrying those escaping slavery north to Canada. When a slave catcher arrived at Chicago in October, 1850, he was informed that his safety could not be guaranteed, and the enslaved servant he had brought with him was helped to escape.
     The same month, the Chicago Common Council — predecessor of the City Council — passed a law condemning the Fugitive Slave Act as "cruel and unjust" and ordering the police force — nine men at the time — "not to render any assistance for the arrest of fugitive slaves."
     Uncannily similar to the challenge Mayor Brandon Johnson would face 175 years later: How much cooperation must local government give to federal authorities enforcing a despised and unjust law? The Council in 1850 minced no words, damning any free-state representatives supporting the bill as "fit only to be ranked with the traitors, Benedict Arnold, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed his Lord and master for 30 pieces of silver."
     Last October, the City Council passed a similar, if less florid, resolution, focused on trying to protect children from traumatic seizure by ICE agents and urging citizens to report the misconduct they witness.
     What was motivating Chicago to push back against the Fugitive Slave Act? While it's tempting to just superimpose Chicago's current sanctuary city liberalism onto the mid-19th century city, that wasn't the case. There were only 323 Black people living in Chicago in 1850 — about 1% of the population. Illinois had passed its own "Black Laws" in 1848, forbidding the immigration of free Blacks into the state and, as amended in 1853, forbidding Black visitors from spending more than 10 nights in the city.
     "These protectors of fugitive slaves raised no objection to the exclusion of Negro testimony against a white person in the courts of law," historian Bessie Louise Pierce noted in 1940. "They seemed to see no inconsistencies in providing a separate section in the theaters for Negroes, and in segregating the races in the common schools."
     To whites, this was more about protecting their own rights than the rights of Black Chicagoans.

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'A temporary insanity'

Fashion models, Paris

     Regular readers know that I have dictionaries — dozens of them, from the oft-cited Oxford English, Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster dictionaries. to much more obscure volumes: Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, the Continuum Dictionary of Religion, or Room's Dictionary of Distinguishables, which parses the difference between, oh, jam and marmalade (the former, made from the whole fruit that has been crushed or pulped, usually sweet and sugary, the latter, a jelly in which small pieces of fruit, often citrus, including the rind, are suspended, making it tend toward the sharp and tangy).
     Speaking of sharp and tangy, today being Valentine's Day, I thought I would gather my thoughts on romance and, having none, I sought inspiration in my copy of Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary," words filtered through the mordant wit of my fellow Ohioan, who served in the Civil War, and used that grim experience to write memorable stories such as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
     His literary bias was on full display in his definition of "romance" purely as a sub-genre of literature, beginning, "Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination — free, lawless, immune to bit and rein..."
     There's more, and I'm sure it was howlingly effective in 1906, when the book was published, but frankly it fell flat for me. Pressing on, I tried the entry for "love" and was rewarded by this classic definition that might ring a bell: "A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient."
     I almost left out the "civilized races" part, worried it has a tang of colonialism to it. I mean, how would he know? And I'm not entirely sure what that last part, about the physician and the patient, is supposed to mean. Maybe you can help. 

      Before I returned the book to its place, I checked on "Marriage," which had the shortest definition yet: "The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two."
     Hard to argue that one. Whatever condition you find yourself in this Feb. 14, I hope the day goes pleasantly for you. Bierce, as you might know, vanished mysteriously in 1913 after joining Pancho Villa's army in Mexico. Which offers up another definition of romantic.

Flashback 2009: It won't matter, until it does

     The good news is I wrote an interesting, unusual column Thursday, related to Black History Month — if you feel reading it half as much as I felt writing it, you'll get a lot out of it. 

      And long — three times the length of a usual column.

      The bad news is that, to find that much real estate in the paper, I had to push it to Sunday. Which left me both drained and with nothing to run today.

      Thank goodness, Saturday is Valentine's Day, and I have countless Valentine's Day columns slumbering in the archive. Such as this, the bulk of which is in the form of a poem — though I would remind my slower readers that Robert Pinsky isn't coming to the Art Institute — this ran in 2009. Seventeen years ago. You missed him.

      Ron Huberman lasted less than two years as head of the Chicago Public Schools, quitting to join a private equity firm when Rich Daley announced he wouldn't run for mayor in 2011.

      The column ran when it filled a page, and I've kept the original headings in.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Sometimes I'll be droning on to my wife about my day and I'll stop, suddenly realizing that I've overlooked the really interesting part.
     "Whoops," I'll say, "I buried the lede. . ." — "lede" being the opening paragraph and most important aspect of a story, which in news articles often are one and the same.
     More than a few readers, enjoying Fran Spielman's excellent profile Sunday of mayoral favorite Ron Huberman, no doubt had a similar moment when, at the end of paragraph 11, they learned that the new chief of the Chicago Public Schools is gay.
     Not so long ago, that bit of information would have been the lede, the headline and grounds for dismissal. Newspapers were forever feigning surprise that gay people not only lived among us, but held jobs — "He's a postman! And he's gay!"
     We have thankfully moved beyond that, though the implication in the story that Huberman's orientation will not matter at all isn't entirely correct either. It won't matter in the execution of his official duties. But it will matter, perhaps enormously, to some he had to deal with, particularly those who object to some action of Huberman's and are searching for what they consider a fault to bludgeon him with.
     Performance, not private life, should be the most important factor when it comes to educating our children. But it isn't always that way. I remember when local school councils were considered the solution to our perennial school crisis -- the notion that involved, engaged, vigorous parents would succeed where the bumbling bureaucrats of Pershing Road had failed.
     That was the theory. The reality was that parents can be just as misguided as paper pushers can be, and more than one outstanding principal got the bum's rush by his local school council because his racial background didn't match his student population's. Like the bureaucrats, the parents failed because they cared about the wrong thing.
     Huberman is nothing if not savvy, and his choosing this moment to go public with this open secret is no doubt part of some greater strategy ("Who accuses himself," Publilius Syrus wrote, "cannot be accused by someone else.") His opponents, trying to besmirch him, will certainly at some point invoke his sexual orientation, not realizing it is themselves they indict.

FLASH: POET TO SPEAK IN CITY!

     I could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

     Not incredulous, not curious
     As why I would miss the 5:12, the 5:25
     The 5:30, 5:50, 6:19, 6:55, and 7:35
     And pin my homeward hopes on the 8:35
     Submerge myself on the damned 8:35
     To face that train window face.
     Those green-gray faces, like moles, like drowned souls
     Nibbling on sacks of stinking fast-food fare
     Asking myself "What was the need?"
     A question from Pinsky's "Round."

     My boss, my friends, my wife, not one
     Bothered asking "Why bother?"
     It must seem a pointless task to ask
     Though I tried explaining anyway.
     You see, he translated Dante's "Inferno."
     Better than Longfellow, no mean poet
     But Henry's "renews the fear" can't touch
     "The old fear stirring."

     Plus, Valentine's Day two weeks away
     The guy behind "The Handbook of Heartbreak."
     (The title itself a poem) the man who wrote,
     "It was as if she had put me back together again
     So sweetly I was glad the hurt had torn me."
     About his mom

     So go, not to put on airs, since no one cares
     Go alone, to be there. "What was the need?"    

     Imagine yourself a painter of signs
     Big coffee cups splashed across bigger brick walls
     "DRINK PERK-U-UP COFFEE EVERY DAY."
     Scaffolds, ladders, turpentine
     Might you not admire a cup begot by Harnett
     His sable strand dipped in thimbles, not your broad brush
     So real you reach toward the cup, as if you could touch it
     As if, with your low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand
     You could ever grasp someone who reaches a heaven
     That's shut to you

     To paraphrase Robert Browning's poem
     About a mediocre painter justifying himself
     To a disinterested young thing with better places to go
     "How could it end in any other way?" and
     "This must suffice me here." Comforting himself
     Which I find comforting, I
     Who could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Publilius Syrus was an Assyrian writer of maxims who lived 2100 years ago. While a number of his sayings apply directly to Ron Huberman -- "You should not live one way in private, another in public" -- only one struck me as vaguely humorous:
     We are born princes, and the civilizing process makes us dogs.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 2009

Orchids hunger for your flesh

      If orchids vaguely frighten you — and I find them creepy — there's good reason. Orchids are saprophytic; that is, they obtain their food from decaying organic matter. Other plants, usually. But your rotting body would serve in a pinch.
    Orchids are also deceitful. The flowers of certain species mimic territorial enemies of bees. There's a great term for this, "pseudoantagonism," as opposed to the all-too-real-antagonism we humans experience. With the pseudo version, male bees strike at the insect-imitating petals, trying to drive the illusionary foe off, getting pollen on themselves in the process. Other orchids mimic the smell of nectar that isn't actually there, and hungry bees root around, looking for it, getting dusted with pollen in the process before flying off, disappointed.  

Slipper orchid

        

     Despite orchids' seedy reputation and behavior, my wife and I, being faithful, card-carrying members of the Chicago Botanic Garden, go every February to see the CBG light up the mid-winter darkness with their annual Orchid Show. This year's, "Feelin' Groovy," has a 1960s theme, and while perhaps not as natural a pairing as last year's marriage to subcontinental India, is not bad either. When was the last time you saw a yellow Volkswagen Beetle?
    Orchids are all about inclusivity — they're found all over the globe, including four species above the Arctic Circle. Some grow on bare rocks — several species grow on cacti. They're associated with the tropics, but several species thrive in deserts, and the environment you'd expect them in most, rain forests, are not really best for orchids. 
    They're luxurious plants, mostly good only for show or, in the disapproving words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the family is notably lacking in species from which products are derived." 
    With one big exception — vanilla, extracted from Vanilla planifolia. Found in Madagascar, Mexico, Indonesia, various Pacific Islands and ... wait for it ...  Puerto Rico, which I emphasize because, well, Puerto Rico is having its moment in the spotlight, are they not? Enjoying the same Bad Bunny Bounce that caused Democrats to hope that we aren't as royally fucked as we seemed to be last week. 

    Still, I think vanilla is a big enough deal to make the Britannica's "notably lacking" a little unfair. That's almost like saying wood is not good for any practical use beyond building houses ... and furniture. And paper. And cardboard. Okay, not quite like saying that at all.

    Not many orchids this year presented an appearance I consider "The Screaming Baby Face," which is good because ... 

    Oh hell. Okay, confession time. The only reason I'm writing these words is to have something to frame my photos of the Orchid Show, "Feelin' Groovy," which runs until March 22. That mission is accomplished. Tickets to the show are $16 if you are an adult living in Cook County, and $16 if you don't live in Cook County, which makes me wonder why the Botanic Garden makes the distinction at all. Plus $9 per person to get into the Botanic Garden itself. And $10 parking. 

     If that seems like a lot, remember: annual memberships start at $141 for an individual. It's worth it. We go dozens of times a year. The answer to the question, "Should we go to the Botanic Garden is alway, always, always, "Yes!" Even when there are orchids.

      
    

'None of us can do everything. But all of us can do something'

 

     Readers sometimes ask me what they can do.
     They don't need to explain exactly what it is they want to do something about. You either know already or never will.
     I take the question seriously. The news is both bad and good. On the bad side, there is not much any individual can do in a nation hurtling in a terrifying direction. We are all on the bus. None of us is driving. The cliff looms.
     On the positive side, there is always something, and taking action seems necessary, to some of us. If only to tell ourselves, "I did something. I didn't just sit by and watch it happen." Pointing and shouting "The cliff!" might not stop the bus. But it could help.
     Those protesting the presence of ICE proved that regular people turning up on ordinary days to witness and record extraordinary abuses have an effect. The bus did seem to veer, maybe even slow. For now, anyway.
     I tell people: Do what you can. You have skills; use those skills. I write stuff, much of which boils down to "The cliff!" It's my job. Others are prompted by some detail of the general national catastrophe.
     For retired Chicago TV newsman Phil Ponce, it was seeing that the two Border Patrol agents suspected of killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are, like himself, Hispanic.
     "I expected to see someone directly addressing the Latino ICE agents," said Ponce, 76, former host of "Chicago Tonight." He decided to be that someone.
     "I started thinking how Latino agents are interacting with their own community," he said. "What that might be like."
     He saw an opportunity.
     "I put in my mind the figure of somebody who believes in what he or she is doing as an ICE agent and thought, 'How could I meet them halfway, so I could have a conversation?'"
     Ponce spent days writing a script.
     "I agonized over it, trying to walk the line between being overly preachy and too sympathetic," he said. "I thought, 'How would I talk to my children if one of them were an ICE agent?' If I were talking to my own kid, I wouldn't yell at them. That'll not get you anywhere. That's not what a loving parent does. You have go respect someone, attempt to establish common ground."
     This led to "A Father's Message to Ice," a 2-minute and 41-second video shot last week. I saw it on Facebook and encourage you to take a look.
     He begins talking about himself:
     "My name is Phil Ponce. My parents were born in Mexico — I was born in South Texas, McAllen."

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Ashland v. Ashland or, don't let the grit blind you

Ashland 

      Chicago's gritty history can lead one astray.
      My friend Bill Savage certainly winces at the "gritty" epithet as "a thoughtless reflex" and urges his students not to use it, as a cliche left over from Chicago's coal-stoked days, similar to the Al Capone, rat-tat-tat gloss that obscures much more than it reveals.
     So it was ironic that the reputation, like a piece of grit, temporarily blinded me to our city's sylvan deep past after reading my WBEZ colleague Erin Allen's fine Sunday piece on why Ashland is sometimes an avenue, sometimes a boulevard, of course quoting Bill, a Northwestern professor and Chicago history expert who is assembling a book on Chicago's grid (and man, am I looking forward to that). 
     Finishing the article, I had one question Erin didn't address (in print; it was raised on the radio): why "Ashland"? An evocative name, and I immediately imagined some 19th century slag heap on the west side of the city.
     Sad.
     I lunged for my copy of "Streetwise Chicago" by Don Hayner and Tom McNamee and was reminded that the past is more than our little shoebox diorama perceptions.
     After observing the street was formerly named Reuben Street, it says "Ashland" was chosen "in honor of the Kentucky estate of Henry Clay, which was surrounded by ash trees."
     Oh right. Ash trees. Never thought of that. Which is doubly shameful, since I planted a beautiful cimmaron ash next to my house and enjoyed its shade for 20 years, until the goddamned emerald ash borer to it, despite my best efforts. 

    In my defense, there actually is a Chicago neighborhood named for sooty refuse. Any idea?

    Ashburn. Ashland is a reminder of the numerous Kentuckians who gave up trying to make it in the hardscrabble Bluegrass State and moved to the greener fields of Illinois (including, remember, a certain carpenter named Thomas Lincoln, whose son Abe would thrive here). 
    Ashland, the estate, is in Lexington, Kentucky and the 672-acre homestead (well, 17 acres of it, anyway) is on the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and boasts a blue ash over 400 years old. Seems well worth a visit. 

     Funny, I was reading about Henry Clay — important congressman who, leaving for Washington, ordered that no tree was to be cut in his absence, defeated for the presidency by Andrew Jackson, twice, in 1828 and 1832 — just yesterday, in Matthew Pinsker's excellent "Boss Lincoln" which I plan to write about for President's Day. Lincoln called Clay his "beau ideal of a statesmen" though declined to visit him at Ashland when he was in Lexington, for reasons mysterious. That's the thing about this job — you can head off in one direction, and end up back where you started.

Also Ashland

Hotel's brush with greatness

 

"Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" by Gerhard Richter

      Hotels are not famous for fine art. Just the opposite. Once showcases for generic mass-produced canvases ranging from kitsch to trash, lately they lean toward cutesy black-and-white photos echoing the visual cliche of the moment. Vintage cars. Soda signs. Cowboys.
     So you are forgiven for missing the fact that, for years, what would become the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist hung largely unnoticed in a Downtown Chicago hotel lobby.
     It was "Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" by Gerhard Richter, who is still alive. In fact, Monday, Feb. 9 is his 94th birthday. Richter is having a banner year, with a big show in Paris, and since my going is out of the question, the second best thing is to tell how one of his major works ended up next to the front desk at the Park Hyatt Chicago on Michigan Avenue, and why it is now gone.
     The Pritzker family — the clan of Illinois' courageous governor — runs the Hyatt chain of over 1,000 hotels. In 2000, wanting something to jazz up its new crown jewel, the Park Hyatt Chicago, a 70-story edifice at the corner of Michigan and Chicago, the Pritzkers decided to dig deep.

     “When we were building the hotel, my cousin, Nick, said, ‘Let’s go all in and get a great piece of art,'" Thomas Pritzker, then CEO and now executive chairman, of the Pritzker organization, told Sotheby's in 2014. “So he chose the Richter."
     Richter is an abstract German artist whose work is something of the love child of impressionism and photo realism. "Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" was commissioned in 1968 by the Siemens Corp., the German technology conglomerate, for its Milan headquarters and shows a blurry black-and-white image of the Cathedral Square there.
     Hyatt bought the painting in London for $3.6 million — not exactly cheap to begin with — and hung it in the Park Hyatt.
     I could pretend I know about the painting because my thumb is pressed on the pulse of all things cultural. Though the truth may be actually even cooler, in a lunch bucket vibe way. I've never stayed at the Park Hyatt. The only reason the hotel is on my radar is because it was erected during the late-1990s building boom. Tower cranes were everywhere and, curious guy that I am, I started wondering about the cranes — how do they get up there? — so I took a closer look.
     In 1999, crackerjack photographer Robert A. Davis and I visited the crane atop the nearly-completed Park Hyatt. That adventure bonded me to the place — being at the tip of the crane boom as it swung out 600 feet over Michigan Avenue will do that — and I made a point of circling back to see what it looked like when finished.
     The Richter caught my eye; it's hard to miss being 9 feet square. Guiding out-of-town guests through their Magnificent Mile window shopping, I'd detour into the hotel to check it out.
     The painting hung in the lobby for 15 years, except during 2002, when the hotel lent it to the Museum of Modern Art for a traveling retrospective of 40 years of Richter's work that included the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Puerto Rican Chicago history

     I usually watch the Super Bowl — for the commercials — but this year I think I'll pay a bit more attention to the on-field activities, since my wife and I began enjoying this football business watching the last two Bears playoff games.
    It'll certainly be exciting to see Bad Bunny perform. Not that I could name a song of his if you put a gun to my head. But the way MAGA swooned onto their fainting couch of faux victimization when he was named, and, laughably, created an alternate halftime show starring the Michigan excrescence, Kid Rock, well, one wants him to shine. He seems a nice person, based on his Carpool segment with James Corden, which you might want to take a look at. I really admired Corden's opening question: "When did you tell your family you were going to call yourself 'Bad Bunny' and not 'Benito'?"
     Bad Bunny is very proud of his Puerto Rican heritage. I learned something of Chicago Puerto Rican history when I wrote "Every goddamn day." Puerto Ricans are one of the city's most significant ethnic groups, and imagine many are swelling with pride seeing their guy in the spotlight

     The community exploded into Chicago's consciousness in 1966, after Puerto Rican teens clashed with the police:

June 20, 1966 

     Jose Cruz is not his real name. 

     Anonymity is in order when your life is splayed out in the newspaper in detail, from what you earn as a punch-press operator ($2.22 an hour) to the rent you pay for your second-floor West Side walk-up ($25 a week) to the fact that you purchased your refrigerator and television on the installment plan ($27.18 a month).

     “They belong to me,” Cruz tells the Daily News, jumping the gun. They will belong to him if he makes his payments, the kind of detail that can trip up an immigrant. 

      The story in today’s paper is notable for its ordinariness. Cruz is not a criminal or a victim; he has no complaints and the most modest of dreams: “I would like to move out someday to a larger place.” 

      But the profile does appear in an extraordinary context; a city suddenly waking to its Puerto Rican community. The week before, 100 police and 1,000 Puerto Ricans clashed on the Northwest Side. A police car was overturned and burned, firemen pelted with rocks, their trucks looted. The shock came not so much from the episode’s violence but because it happened at all. 

      In 1950, there were 255 Puerto Ricans living in Chicago. That number rose to 32,371 by 1960. Now it’s 65,000 and, during the riot, “to the police it seemed all of them were on W. Division St. between Damen and California.” 

      In the ensuing hand wringing, the Daily News runs a front-page editorial, in Spanish—“Puerto Ricans must not be strangers in our midst,” it says, translated. “Their culture—the oldest in the Western hemisphere—and their language—revered in world literature—must become part of the life in Chicago. This cannot be done by violence.” 

      Why the riot? Some blame is placed on a failure to communicate. Charles H. Percy, Republican candidate for US Senate, suggests teaching police Spanish. Then there is the difficulty of the scale of life in Chicago: 85 percent of Puerto Rican immigrants come from small rural towns. 

      “The Puerto Ricans come here with an inability to cope with the problems of the city,” Rev. Daniel Alvarez, head of La Casa Central, a social service agency, tells the Daily News. “They don’t find the proper services, they run out of money, they lack the ability to find employment, and they get trapped. . . . They borrow money, they risk everything they have for the $106 one-way ticket to Chicago.” 

      That ticket is significant. Puerto Ricans are “the first ethnic group to come to the United States predominantly by airplane.” The suddenness of the transition—no long voyage, no wait at the border—adds to the shock. Despite difficulties, Puerto Ricans are on their way to becoming the second-largest Latino group in the city. 

      “All these things bring problems, problems that did not exist at home,” says Alvarez. “We are trying to solve them. But it will take time—and understanding.”

Works in progress: Jack Clark

 

Sun-Times delivery truck, 1961 (Photo courtesy of John Chuckman)

     This was a bad week for newspaper fans, with the Washington Post cutting a third of its staff so Jeff Bezos can firehose more money at Donald Trump. Though honestly, the place is supposedly losing $100 million a year, which even for Bezos starts to add up. Today's offering is from our periodic correspondent Jack Clark. I've just begun reading his new memoir, "Honest Labor: Writing & Moving Furniture" — great title, right?

     I’m a newspaper junkie. Every morning I take a walk to my local Walgreens to pick up the Sun-Times and the New York Times. Six dollars. It’s a small price to pay for my daily fix.
     I read the Sun-Times with breakfast but I save the New York Times for late at night, usually just before bed. I got into this habit back in the days of old when you could pick up the early edition of both morning papers the night before.
     When I was a kid, my father would sometimes send me to the local newsstand around 10 p.m. to pick up one or both papers. So, like a lot of other addicts, I blame it all on my upbringing.
     Sometimes, the papers would be late, and a line would form, usually me and a bunch of old guys waiting for those speedy trucks to arrive. Remember those posters on the side promoting Royko or Ann Landers, or some other newspaper star. Neil must have got there a time or two.* The Tribune trucks were white, the Sun-Times blue. (I think the late, great, Daily News trucks were red, but I’m not certain anymore.)
     When I was a teenager, up to no good in the middle of the night, I used to love to watch the newspaper trucks as they came west down Madison Street, hopping from one side of the street to the other, paying no attention to traffic laws as they made their deliveries. They’d drive for blocks on the wrong side of the street if that’s how the stops worked out. The cops never bothered them, except to get a free paper or two to help while away those slow overnight hours.
     As years went on, the papers came out later and later, 11 o’clock, midnight, one in the morning, and then they stopped coming until dawn. I was not happy about this, but I had no one to blame but myself.
     One day the Tribune called. No. They didn’t want to hire me. They’d already explained that they didn’t hire guys like me anymore — guys without a college education. The days of Ben Hecht and Mike Royko were gone. Instead, they wanted to talk to me about subscribing.
      I’d been getting these calls regularly for decades. I was always polite when I declined their offer. If they pushed, I’d give them various reasons: I like to get a little exercise in the morning or I pick up the paper on the way home. I made it a point to tell them I read the Trib every day, and I did until the Zell years came along. (I had friends who’d read the New York Times but not the Chicago papers. I could never understand it. Didn’t they want to know who died?)
     But this one day, the Tribune would not take no for an answer. “Do you know how much money you could save with a subscription?” the guy asked. This was always their biggest selling point, that I was needlessly throwing my money away.
     I explained that I’d been needlessly throwing my money away my entire life. It was now well past the point where saving a couple of bucks a month on newspaper consumption was going to make any difference to my standard of living.
     “Okay, I’ll throw — in Sundays free for the first month,” he said.
     “Look, I’m out of town a lot. I don’t want the papers piling up on the porch.”
     “You just call. We’ll hold the deliveries until you get back.”
     “Yeah. But all I have to do is forget to call one time and every thief in the neighborhood will know nobody’s home.”
     “Look, what can I do to get you onboard here?”
     “Nothing.”
     “If I gave you the paper for free, you wouldn’t subscribe?”
     “That’s right.” And then I made my mistake. I decided to show him how smart I was and explain the real reason I would never subscribe. “Look, why would I want to read the home edition?” This was the one you got with your subscription. It was the very first printing. “It doesn’t come until six in the morning. I can pick up the late edition at one?”
     There was dead silence on the line for a while. I thought he’d actually given up. My genius had won the day.
     “Would you say that again?” he said very slowly, and I had a sudden feeling of nausea.
     I knew I was compounding my mistake but I couldn’t stop myself. I said it all over again.
     I’ve never admitted this publicly before. So before we go on, I’d like to apologize to all the old-timers who liked to read the paper before bed, to all the insomniacs waiting for the sun to come up so they can finally get a bit of sleep, to the newspaper truck drivers, to the cops and cab drivers, to the doormen and security guards, and late-night waitresses and short-order cooks, all those night owls trying to kill a little time before dawn. I’m truly sorry.
     I done it. I confess. I’m the guy.
     Within a week, the Tribune stopped sending the late edition out overnight.
     I was driving cabs at the time and hanging around a White Hen Pantry on Lincoln Avenue. It was a good stop for fresh coffee, a friendly place where they’d let you use the washroom. You could hang around and take a bit of a break and talk to the cops, fellow cabbies, and the newspaper-truck drivers who were all doing the same thing.
     “Where’s the Tribune?” Everybody wanted to know.
     The Sun-Times drivers didn’t know but they knew something was going on, and they looked worried.
     A couple of days later, a Sun-Times driver told me the Tribune was now waiting to deliver the late edition until after the home edition was out. The drivers were still starting at their regular time, but the Tribune was holding the trucks at the loading docks. Nobody knew why and I didn’t say a word. A week later, the Sun-Times trucks disappeared too.
     That persistent salesman probably got promoted to Vice President.
     In my defense, I’d like to say, shouldn’t they have known this without me telling them? How could they not know what time the various editions of their own newspaper went out? Well, that salesman probably didn’t read the paper, only the balance sheets.
     I’ve often wondered how many new subscriptions they got and how many readers they lost in the process. Was it really worth it?
     It was a bad couple of years for me. I finally solved the problem by buying both papers in the morning and saving one for night. That didn’t alleviate my guilt, of course. But with enough time you can get over almost anything.
     And then there was a wonderful period, which I obviously didn’t deserve, when I could pick up the next morning’s New York Times at my local 24-hour Walgreens as early as midnight. This was especially wonderful because it was printed at Freedom Center, the Tribune’s printing plant. This was so funny, that I could get a New York paper hours before any Chicago paper, that I thought of writing about it. I managed to stop myself. Too late I’d learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes you’re better off not showing people just how smart you think you are.
      Some of my favorite memories of my North Side neighborhood were walking out of the great Monday night jazz jam at the old Serbian Village and walking across to the Walgreen’s to get the New York Times on the way home.
     I got to be friendly with the driver. I’m pretty sure he worked for Chas. Levy Circulating Company. If he saw me crossing the street, sometimes he’d hand me a free paper and I wouldn’t even have to go into the store.
     Those days are long gone now, and my crime hardly matters with all the other crimes that have beaten the newspaper business into the ground.
     I haven’t seen a newspaper delivery truck in years. At the Walgreens, which is no longer 24 hours, the newspapers now arrive in ordinary cars.
     The other morning it was two degrees. I was bundled up in layers under a down jacket, with a hat and two hoods on my head. When I got to the Walgreens there was no New York Times. This happens now and then with both papers. Personal cars break down, delivery people get sick, or somebody steals the papers from where they were left in front of the closed store.
      It’s not a big deal. I don’t need my NYT fix until night. So I try to remember to pick one up in my travels that day. But at two degrees, I wasn’t planning to do any traveling, so I picked up the Tribune instead.
     This is something I almost never do. It’s not because I don’t like the Tribune. It’s a pretty decent newspaper again and I do have a dirt-cheap online subscription for when I’m out of town. It’s not even the price. Four-dollar is twice what the Sun-Times cost. It’s the same price as the New York Times.
     And there’s the rub. Later that night, when I turned to section two of the Tribune, there was a story about Trump’s deportations. Not only had I already read it the day before in the New York Times where it originated, I’d already paid four dollars to read it.
     The New York Times is worth four dollars even on their worst days. They have reporters all over the country and all over the world. They don’t rely on other newspapers or wire services to fill their pages, and that comes with a cost.
     And then, to top it off, when I got to the sports section, the Trib didn’t have any coverage of the Bear’s game the night before. You want four bucks and you can’t even stay up a little late for the most important Bear’s game in years? And I’m supposed to give you four dollars. Dream on.
     And the Sun-Times has had its own problems with pricing. I don’t usually buy the Sunday paper. The New York Times is six dollars that day, and that’s really about as much as this junkie wants to spend. I’ll take a quick look at the Sun-Times headline and if it’s something especially interesting, I might pick up a copy.
     The last time I did this, the Walgreens tried to charge me six dollars. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. There’s no arts section. No book section. The comics are a joke. Bring back Willy ‘n Ethel and I might give you a few extra dollars. The way the paper is now, it’s no different than a normal daily edition. It’s only a bit thicker because it’s stuffed full of advertising inserts. I wondered if those advertisers realized how many readers they were going to lose with the new price.
     I took a closer look at the front page and then pointed to the price on the cover. $5 Chicago. $6 elsewhere. “I think this is still Chicago,” I said to the clerk.
     “But that’s how it rings up,” the girl said, and she had this helpless look on her face. Here was another geezer talking in some incomprehensible language. I knew it was a hopeless battle and told her to keep the paper.
     I was going to complain to the Sun-Times about their new price but I knew I wouldn’t have to. Many other people would do the work for me, and the price has since gone back to the more reasonable three dollars.
     I could write on and on about my love affair with newspapers, but this is probably enough for now.
     I know I’m lucky to have the Walgreens so close. It’s only a block from home. And it’s more luck that they carry the New York Times. Some Days they only get one or two copies. I’m pretty sure I’m their steadiest customer at least some of the time. I’m out of town for months on end and I know that one of these days, I’ll come back and the New York Times won’t be there waiting for me.
     Of course, before long, it will all be gone. The age of the newspaper will be over. The only real question is, who dies first?

* Editor's note: Never. Who do you think I am? Jay Mariotti?
 

Epstein files circus hides sex abuse horror in plain sight

"Char Dolly" by Parsons & Charlesworth (Chicago Cultural Center)

      Sure I'm in the Epstein files. Big city columnist, jiggling the ice in my glass aboard the Hollinger corporate jet as it winged its way toward...

     Maybe I shouldn't even mention it. But Jon Stewart confessed his cameo in the scandalous files — a tossed-off suggestion that he narrate a documentary being contemplated — and as my lone appearance is similarly benign, perhaps I should.
     The risk is that doing so further perfumes this true horror with another spritz of triviality.
What the heck, we're on the topic already. I'm not a fan of trigger warnings. But this subject is so grim without the warm glow of celebrity and euphemism the media habitually slathers over it. I like to be direct. If that might upset you, many interesting articles await elsewhere in the paper.
     Jeffrey Epstein was a rich pedophile who raped children, secured for him by his pander, Ghislaine Maxwell, who went around seducing vulnerable girls with tales of money and power. They were debauched by Epstein and a revolving cast of famous pals who no doubt imagined that the girls were consenting. But children can't consent to their own molestation. It's still rape.
     Epstein initially got a tap on the wrist, until the Miami Herald ran a three-part series in 2018 that sent Epstein back to prison, where he killed himself, most likely.
     The Epstein files would not die, however, and became a hobbyhorse of the lunatic right, when they thought the case would besmirch Bill Clinton. When it turned out that their beloved hero was also involved, big time, their interest waned.
     My instinct was to pass on the tawdry mess. Who cares if Bill Gates supposedly cheated on his wife? Nothing in the Epstein files could lower my rock bottom opinion of Donald Trump. If you haven't figured him out long ago, you never will.
     Only two things are worth observing here, and since I haven't heard either said among the 24/7 media chicken ranch squawking on the subject, I will point them out.
     First, evil needs a framework. The ICE and Border Patrol agents who shot Renee Good in the face and put 10 bullets into Alex Pretti would not, I believe, have done so independently, had they strolled out into the street last summer and encountered these two on their own. The federal government first had to hire them, train them, supposedly, outfit them with weapons and, crucially, give them permission to suspend any sense of basic human decency.
Permission is key to hurting others. Bullies are cowards, and must be reassured it's okay. Think.      Why would any super rich guy need to visit Jeffrey Epstein? They have their own planes, their own willing assistants who could scour local roller rinks for underage victims. But they didn't do that. They needed Epstein to assure them that is allowed, on his plane or island. He created a setting where they could be as awful as they wanted to be.

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Flashback 1985: "Mom, do I have to go to school?"

 

Boy on the floor playing with a toy car, by Charles Ray (Art Institute of Chicago)

     Some stories stick with you. Almost 30 years later, I remember standing next to the first Cook County Medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, looking through large crime scene photographs of the bodies of children. Stark black and white shots that I won't describe, though I can see them clearly as if they were in front of me now.

     There were the days at the University of Illinois Craniofacial Center, talking to patients who were having facial prosthetics made. One man, who was having a silicon nose and upper lip to go over the big hole in the middle of his face. The nose was held on by four titanium posts.
     Or the first such jarring story, written back when I was the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal. A single mother wrote a letter to the paper. Her 4-year-old son had been raped by the school janitor. She phoned the police, expecting them to show up with lights flashing. Instead it began a legal crawl that ended up heading ... nowhere.

     Not quite nowhere. I wrote a series on child sex abuse that ran for a week on the front page of the Journal. I spoke to her, met her son. Assistant DuPage County State's Attorney Brian Telander was convinced the crime had happened, but the evidence just wasn't there. I looked at other aspects of abuse, interviewing a man in prison who'd started raping his daughter when she was 11. I asked him how he could do it, and he answered me. I also talked to a an older teen who'd been molested as a child, about the devastating damage it did to her.
    Now that I look over the stories, it's the sort of thing that doesn't run in newspapers much anymore. I'm not sure why. Journalism has fashions like everything else, I suppose.
     The stories themselves ... start quite slowly. I think because I was 25 and had never had to process this sort of thing before. The one about the pre-schooler begins this way:

     No one wants to say that four-year-olds are open game for sex abusers. Talk to almost any professional, and he will try to find ways around it.

     Laws are changing. Confessions are frequent.

     But after a while, they'll say it outright. It's open season. Afterward, they'll ask you not to print it. So as not to tip off the perverts, they say. But if you talk to them a little further, they will admit: the perverts already know. The people who don't know are the parents.

     Charlie's mother didn't know. A single mother, living in DuPage County, she sent her son Charlie to a school while she attended a professional school.

     It was late August, early September 1984, when she first noticed something was wrong with Charlie.

     Usually an energetic, confident four-year-old, he started not wanting to go to school.

     If I were writing it today, I might begin with the sentence above, and save the jarring opening paragraph for the end of the story. 

     "He was very outgoing, a very sociable child," she said, later. "That made it all the more incongruous."

     He asked me 20 times a day, 'Do I have to go to school today?' Even on the weekend, he would ask, 'Mom, do I have to go to school today, do I have to go to school?'"

     His mother was concerned, but no amount of coaxing would get Charlie to tell her what was bothering him about school.

     This went on for months. Charlie's mother was concentrating on getting her diploma, and began to automatically answer her son's complaints by assuring him that, as soon as she graduated, he would be able to stop going to school.

     "Be a good boy for a little longer," she pleaded. She comforted herself with the thought that Charlie's difficulty was due to "separation anxiety."

     It made sense. I could justify it — I was away from him now," she said.

     Charlie started to adopt mannerisms that struck his mother as uncharacteristically mature, such as drumming his fingers like an adult. He also had the annoying tendency to punch her father or brother in the crotch when they were around.

      When Charlie came home one day and told his mother that a teaching assistant, "Mr. Smith"...

     I made the janitor into a teaching assistant, one of several changes — mentioned at the top — to protect the identities of the subject. The man had not been charged, never mind convicted, of any crime.

...kicked him, his mother didn't pay much notice to it. She couldn't find any marks, and decided Charlie was probably making it up. He did that sometimes. She didn't report anything to the school.

     "I should have reported it," the mother said. ""I respected an adult more than my own child."

      The week before Thanksgiving, Charlie was caught in a closet touching a playmate sexually. His babysitting announced she would no longer watch Charlie because of his aggressive sexual behavior.

      Distraught, the mother told the psychologist at her dental school about her son's problems. The psychologist said Charlie was exhibiting the classic signs of sexual abuse, and recommended she call the Child Abuse Hotline.

     "When I look back, all these things fit in like puzzle pieces, but at the time ..." Her voice trails off.

     Cathy called the hotline on Nov. 30. On Dec. 4 an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services caseworker was sent out to interview Charlie, along with a detective from a municipal police department and Lori Chassee, an investigator for the state's attorney's office. He didn't tell them anything significant.

     Two weeks into December, Charlies mother suspected but did not definitely know that something had happened to her son. Despite her fears, she continued to send Charlie to the school. She had the pressure of examinations, and really didn't know what else she could do.

     On the night of her graduation, Dec. 15, Charlie said, "I don't have to go to school, right? You don't have to go to school, and I did my job , and don't have to go to school either." Cathy said yes, he did not have to go back to the center.

     Then it all came out.

     "He talked for three solid hours," said Cathy. "In gross detail. Everything hat happened in that school. I was in shock. I was shaking, thinking, 'It can't be true.' Everything caved in. I had no idea it was like this. I thought my kid had been fondled. I had no idea it was like this." 

     Charlie described being forced to commit oral sex, of having his mouth stuffed with Kleenex and taped shut and then being sodomized and other acts committed by Mr. Smith.

     Cathy called the police immediately, at 4 a.m. She expected the police to arrive with flashing lights. She expected Mr. Smith to be yanked out of bed and arrested.

     Charlie's mother did not know it at the time, but she was about to be plunged into another world, a world of policemen and lawyers, therapists and administrators. her days would be filled with phone calls, with meetings, with notes and documents and procedures. For the next eight months, she would doggedly purpose a single, elusive goal: justice for her son.

     The policeman who took her call was sympathetic, but told her to call back Monday morning and talk to a detective.

     That's enough, right? It's about the first third of the story. Another student was found to have been abused, and in that case, there was physical evidence. But his parents did not want him to testify. Without his evidence, the case went nowhere. Charlie was a terrible witness, adding all sorts of flights of fantasy, contradicting himself. The case went before a grand jury, which did not find enough evidence to press charges. Mr. Smith went off scot free. Cathy said she felt as if her son's personality was murdered. I follow the frustrating odyssey like a dim bloodhound tracking a false scent to nowhere.

     Charlie would be in his 40s now. I wonder what happened to him. And how many more victims Mr. Smith had before he was finally brought to justice, assuming he ever was. This is a very long way of explaining why I didn't join the media party dancing around the Epstein maypole. I thought they were missing the point, blinded by celebrity and spin, and ignoring the underlying crimes, again. A situation I hope to address in Friday's column, where I refer to this story. So I figure, put it up here, ahead of time.

For ICE protesters, high-tech punishment for standing up for what's right

     "Social credit" is a bland phrase in English. What does it even mean? The slight rise in status you experience after throwing a party?
     In China, however, the term — 社会信用体 shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì — while also vague, refers to a ranking system used by officialdom to reward or punish citizens based on their behavior. It is not a single score, but an ad hoc, varying assemblage of carrots and sticks the totalitarian government deploys to keep 1.4 billion citizens in line.
     In 2018, then Vice President Mike Pence warned about China’s social credit system.
     "China has built an unparalleled surveillance state, and it’s growing more expansive and intrusive," Pence said. "By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life — the so-called 'social credit score.' In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.'”
     Be a good party member, don't cause trouble, and your score rises. You can rent a bike without a deposit, or get higher placement in a dating app. However, if you complain to co-workers, post snarky comments online about official policies or, Mao forbid, attend a protest, your social mobility score will plummet. Suddenly, you have trouble boarding a train or airplane.
     That echoed ominously with one aspect of the ongoing ICE clashes in Minneapolis. One protester, Nicole Cleland, said in a declaration supporting a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, that ICE agents, whom she did not know, nevertheless called her by name, thanks to facial recognition programs they use. Three days later, she received an email from Homeland Security, saying her membership in Global Entry, designed to speed fliers through TSA airport checkpoints, had been suspended.
     "I travel frequently," wrote Cleland, a director at Target Co. "I am concerned that I may experience other complications while traveling stemming simply from the exercise of my rights." Cleland, 56, had not committed a crime and didn't pose a threat beyond showing up and exercising her Constitutionally protected right to protest a policy which she, and the majority of Americans, find cruel and destructive. President Donald Trump said he was going to go after murderers and rapists. He did not promise to send masked thugs rampaging through Home Depot parking lots, accosting American citizens trying to pick up a cordless drill.
     With cherished freedoms fluttering to earth like maple leaves in a November gale, it might seem odd to focus on this particular bit of oppression. But as horrifying as it is to be shot 10 times for recording something on your phone, most of the general public does not attend protests, so their risk of being murdered by ICE is still low. However, they might post something on Facebook. Or send a text to a colleague. With technology, the ability to oppress increases exponentially. China has an estimated 500 million public surveillance cameras, one for every three people. And while those were of limited use when government drudges had to monitor them, facial recognition software changes all that.

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Dante, love and cheesecake

     

     Valentine's Day looms — a week from Saturday. You've done nothing, of course. It helps to have a plan. For starters, what is Valentine's Day about, anyway?
     Love, right?
     Yes, clearly. All those hearts and flowers. Kind of a a giveaway.
     Of course, you could argue that everything is about love, in one way or another. Sports. War. Success. All mating rituals gone mad. I just finished Prue Shaw's excellent "Dante: The Essential Commedia" and it reminded me that, in Dante's cosmology, love is the essence of belief. Asked — by Saint Peter in heaven, no less — to explain his own personal faith, Dante replies:

     "...I believe in one God,
      sole and eternal, who, himself unmoved,
     moves all the heavens, with love and with desire."

     Love drives the clockwork of the universe, from the beating of our hearts to the whirring of the cosmos. The epic masterpiece has 14,233 lines of terza rima, and — spoiler alert — the last five are:

      "Here my lofty imagination failed
      but, like a wheel revolving evenly,
      already my desire and will were turned
      by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.'

    So saying Valentine's Day is about love doesn't mean much, since everything else is about love too. Maybe Valentine's Day is more about gratitude — thanking the people whom you love and, mirabile dictu, love you back, not only despite who you are, but because of it.

     In the 43 years my wife and I have been an item, I've been famous for nailing Valentine's Day. One year, when we were dating, and had separate apartments, I used my new key to slip in her place while she was away and clean it, top to bottom, as a present. I suppose some gals might be horrified at that, but, given our situation then, she knew it was the perfect present: something thoughtful, that demanded knowledge of the recipient and considerable planning and effort. Plus I was broke, so it was the most elaborate present I could afford.
     And, like all the best gifts, it was kind of a gift to myself, too, since the place clearly needed cleaning. She married me anyway.
     Speaking of love and gratitude, I've always been grateful for the love shown to this blog by Eli's Cheesecake. From the very beginning of Everygoddamnday.com, the classic Chicago dessert ran holiday advertisements here, from Thanksgiving through February.
     Gratitude being important, to me anyway, I felt I should thank them for their support. 
     Over the years, these pieces developed a certain tone of elaborate, almost theatrical appreciation I think of as Cheesecake Hysteria. Such as 2016's "Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake," (its suggestion that you " stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into" grows more on point as the years pass) or 2020's "We will eat the good cold cheesecake, browned by the sun and be men" and 2o19, perhaps the ultimate, "Have you done your duty, cheesecakewise?" with its pointed opening sentence, "Hey, parasite!"

     Maybe because I'm a journalist, and thus supposed to be impartial. Immune to such considerations. I wanted to make sure that the reader clearly understood what was happening — I am being paid and celebrating my benefactor. Sunlight is a disinfectant.

     That said, I still felt guilty. How was I different than any other bought-off hireling? Yes, the cheesecake is great. Yes, I'd eat it anyway. But still. Money changes hands. There is no free lunch.

     Fast forward to the present day. I'm reading "Dante: The Essential Commedia," a unique sort of book, where the author walks the reader through the Commedia's three books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, providing a running commentary, stopping the action to expound on what is going on. An excellent way to appreciate a book that otherwise can be puzzlingly dense and obscure. I plan to write my Sun-Times column about it Friday.

     At one point, Dante, Virgil — and I suppose we readers too — are heading up Purgatory's mountain, toward Heaven, where Dante will gaze upon the blinding white light glory of God. Angels are flitting about, too quick for Dante to process. A climbing soul introduces himself: 

      "My name was Currado Malaspina
      I'm not the old Currado, but a descendent of his
       the love I felt for my family is purified here."

     Shaw steps in to explain.
     "Dante pays the speaker an elaborate compliment: he has never been in those parts, he says, but the Malaspina family is famous throughout Europe for their courage and their liberality, the two quintessential feudal virtues."
      Dante outlines their renown.

      "The fame that honours our house
       celebrates its lords and celebrates its lands,
       so that even someone who hasn't yet been there knows of them."

     The soul makes a prediction.
     "The shade responds that, before seven years have passed, Dante will experience the family's generosity for himself," Shaw writes. "Dante was the guest of the Malaspina family in the Lunigiana in late 1306, one of the few securely documented sojourns in the early years of his exile. While there he represented the family in peace negotiations with the bishop of Luni. The document that names those involved survives in a local archive. In the time frame of the poem, these events lie in the future. here the poet repays the courtly hospitality of the Malaspina family with generous words, written long after the event."
     Ha. Double ha. So Dante Alighieri, master poet of all time, equal only, perhaps, to Shakespeare, pauses in his epic masterpiece to sing the praises of the house that put him up for a while after Pope Boniface VIII exiled him from Florence and sentenced him to death, should he ever return.

      In exchange for his room in the family estate, and — what? — a few months' worth of meals at the communal table, Dante celebrates the Malaspinas in a work that will circle the globe and remain fresh and current — and in print — for 700 years.
      So it's not just me. 
      I can't tell you how satisfying that is. 
      Between the world wars there was a skillful cartoonist named H.T. Webster who would draw various series of cartoons under a certain theme. "Life's Darkest Moments" and "The Timid Soul" (named Casper Milquetoast," a character that lingered in the culture for quite a while). One series was "The Thrill that Comes Once in a Lifetime" and showed a young man holding a newspaper whose headline reads, "JOE DI MAGGIO LIKES CHICKEN CHOW MEIN."

     "Gee!" he says, cheeks flushed. "I like chicken chow mein too!"

      The almost unnecessary caption, "THE BOY WHO FOUND HE HAD SOMETHING IN COMMON WITH HIS HERO."

      I don't claim to have much in common with Dante — pervasive disappointment, a sense of my own worth not at all in keeping with my current state — but I do know on which side my bread is buttered on. Just like him.

      Oh, I almost forgot. Valentine's Day. Here before you know it. Go online and order your beloved a box of "Be Mine" Baby Eli's cheesecakes, or a Valentine's Red Cherry Vanilla Bean cheesecake. Do it right now, right here, before you forget and it's Feb. 13 and you're jamming yourself into a 7-Eleven to pay $10 for a limp looking single rose. Your long-suffering loved one will be glad you did. You'll be really glad you did. I'll also be glad you did. And Dante, if only he were around, would be glad you did.

     Okay, maybe not. Not a lot made the dour Florentine glad. But one can still hope, another important quality when you find yourself stuck in hell and trying to get out.