From garbage into the stuff of history, a trove is donated to the Newberry from Illinois poet

Marc Kelly Smith, left, and Alison Hinderliter at the Newberry Library.

     Marc Kelly Smith has bronchitis. Yet the 76-year-old poet still drove three hours this morning from his home in Savanna, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, to the Newberry Library on the Near North Side, to deliver piles of paper that could be easily mistaken for garbage, even by their owner.
     “I would have the tendency to throw it all out,” said Smith.
     Flyers, clippings, letters, photos, doodles, VCR tapes, sheet music, address books, all decades old, in a banker’s box and a paper shopping bag.
     “There’s some good stuff in here,” says Smith, to Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry’s manuscripts and archives librarian.
     The box is labeled “SLAM MEMORABILIA,” reflecting Smith’s legacy to Chicago and the world: the Uptown Poetry Slam, started by him in 1986, then spread around the globe as poetry — the art form that Emily Dickinson sewed into little packets and silently tucked into a drawer — took center stage as performance art to be screamed, whispered, howled and wept in places such as the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.
     As the ephemera rolled on a library cart, it moved from detritus intended to be stapled to a telephone pole then melt in the rain, into the stuff of history, carefully preserved by curators in white cotton gloves, to be — perhaps — joyously discovered someday by future scholars.

     “I’m always glad to hear about people donating their papers,” said Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2024. “I think of these people as pirates burying treasure chests — in really easy-to-find places, with reliable maps. They don’t know who’s going to come along and what those future treasure seekers are going to discover and which objects they’ll find most valuable. Archives mean everything to someone in my line of work. Archives offer proof that the past is never past — it’s there to be rediscovered, redefined and retold. Some people think of these things as musty old boxes, but those people are wrong.”

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Flashback 2007: "Wives think their husbands are stupid"

     

     Before I decided to run a pair of series, metaphors and food, while I was on vacation, I pulled a few chestnuts from the archive, thinking they would serve. Though unneeded, this one is too fun not to share.  I would hesitate to say whether I'm considered more or less stupid now than in 2007. Let's just say, I'm smart enough not to ask.

     Wives think their husbands are stupid. They have to. It's the modern way. If you're a married woman, just try saying to a female friend: "You know my husband, he's so smart. I think he's a genius."Just try. You can't, can you? Not with a straight face. Probably not at all. Your mouth won't form the words — it's as if I asked you to fire off some twisting bit of Gaelic: Is e do bhaile do chaislean.*
     My wife certainly thinks I'm an idiot. Of course, she'll deny it — I can hear her, reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, denying it to the cats, "I do not!" But you do, honey. Remember the light fixtures?
     The light fixtures in our boys' bedrooms? They were plastic — milky white inverted ziggurats from Menard's. Not elegant, but they withstood years of onslaught by flung balls and hacked light sabers and thrown stuffed animals.
     Until they didn't, until they cracked, eventually, then broke apart, beyond repair, in both rooms. I'd like to say that the boys endured the uncovered light bulbs for a year, a not-at-all-pleasant bus-station-at-3-a.m. effect. But it might have been two years. Tempus fugit.
     Eventually we bought new light fixtures — glass, vaguely breastlike affairs with an air of the 1890s — something that fits in with our ancient house. The boxes sat in the guest room for — I don't know — three months. Maybe six. Nine, tops. Waiting for my wife to call an electrician to put them up. I can do things around the house, but draw the line at electricity because Electricity Can Kill You.
     Eventually the sight of the boys in their rooms, squinting at their books under the harsh interrogation blaze of unshielded lights, overwhelmed my caution. I waited until my wife was out, then went about my task.
     Installing a light fixture is not as difficult as I imagined — you unscrew the old one, disconnect the wires, hook up the new one, then screw it in. They looked quite nice, blazing away.
     I could barely wait to show off my handiwork. My wife returned, and I ushered her upstairs. She regarded the new lights.
     "WELL, I HOPE YOU TURNED OFF THE ELECTRICITY!!!!" she cried, with alarm and a hint of rebuke. I was taken aback.
     "If I didn't turn off the electricity," I answered, through gritted teeth, "I'd already be dead."
     Yes, I suppose there are people each year who buy the ranch by working on wiring without first cutting the power. And no, I am not mocking the loss of your uncle, or father, or husband, nor suggesting he is a moron. Tragedies happen.
     But I am right now looking at the instruction sheet for the fixtures. The very first words are: "WARNING: BE SURE THE ELECTRICITY TO THE WIRES YOU ARE WORKING ON ARE SHUT OFF. . . ."
     So not shutting the power off must be an issue . . . there must be people, men, supposedly, husbands, one assumes, who go at copper wires with metal implements while the wires are still hot.
     Maybe the low opinion that wives have of their husbands is not without justification. But jeez, honey. I went to college. I know to cut the power. Give me just a little credit.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 18, 2007

* "Your home is your castle." I can't believe I printed that, untranslated. Maybe I AM stupid.

Neither arches nor ballrooms do greatness make

 Rua Augusta Arch in Lisbon, about 40 percent shorter than the arch planned for Washington.

     It was good to take a couple weeks off. But it's also good to be back — thank you for your forbearance. 

     Column writing is a kind of gearbox. It isn't always engaged. But when my mind shifts into column-writing mode, I can almost hear the process grind to life. As it did, almost unbidden, while touring the Pena Palace in Sintra — which doesn't actually appear in this column. Nor do I address the initial question that first came to mind: when people come from all over the world, at great bother and expense, to wander these opulent halls, what is it they're trying to touch? The concept of royalty did remain, which I used to consider our present circumstance.

     PORTO, Portugal — What do you think of when you think of Portugal?
     When my wife first suggested visiting here, I drew a complete blank. No associations whatsoever. Not a single destination — just the opposite. I knew Lisbon was destroyed by a huge earthquake in 1755, but only because the catastrophe darkens Dr. Pangloss's sunny mood in Voltaire's "Candide."
     Otherwise, my gut told me Portugal is a kind of low rent Spain. Still, I agreed to go because, as I've said before, if I didn't take my wife's lead, I'd still be a single guy living in a one-bedroom apartment in Oak Park.
     I went expecting nothing. Certainly not the jaw-dropping procession of palaces, castles and mansions we've just finished touring, each an endless warren of elaborate rooms crammed with crystal chandeliers and gilded opulence, oil paintings of royals dripping in ermine robes and bejeweled bling. Look up, and the ceilings were crammed with cherubim and angels and Greek gods smiling down.
     As I listened to tour guides gravely explain which royal posterior graced which dynastic throne, who begot whom and which king built what architectural folly, I couldn't help but consider that I was seeing the other side of the tunnel my own country is currently plunging into, as the United States slides into monarchy.
     Do I exaggerate? Has our leader not declared himself God's chosen vessel? ("I am the Chosen One" were his exact words). Have the customary checks and balances — Congress, the courts, the rule of law — been subdued? Is not voting, the traditional method that American citizens use to show they hold power over their leaders and not the other way round, being undercut?
     Is our leader not furiously impressing his image on nearly every flat surface he can find? From passports to National Parks passes, and soon to be grimacing from coinage, a flex going back to Nero.
     Think of all the effort expended on that White House ballroom. Half a dozen ballrooms in Portugal dwarf the one occupying far more time than a man trying to manage a war that refuses to cooperate with his pronouncements ought to spend. Not to forget the planned Triumphal Arch, to be 50% taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
     They've got a big arch in Lisbon, too, the Rua Augusta Arch. Still, a mere slip of a structure — 100 feet tall — compared to the 250-foot behemoth some are already calling the Arch of Trump. The Rua Augusta Arch offers a warning, if anyone is in the learn-from-history business anymore.
     The arch was begun after the aforementioned earthquake of 1755, intended to celebrate the rebirth of the city. But they were celebrating something that hadn't happened yet; the arch wasn't finished until 1873. At a similar rate, Trump's arch will top out in 2144. If you're sick of hearing about that ballroom now, imagine how you'll feel midway through his third term. Or his son's first term. These kings, they like to keep power in the family.

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                Not even royal: the Commercial Association of Porto's Palácio da Bolsa.

Mother's Day, 2026

     This is the first Mother's Day since my mother passed away. In the last few years before she died, I spent a long time talking to her about her life, and began to write about it for an unpublished project.

     "I was a beautiful child," my mother recalled. "My mother entered me in Shirley Temple contests."    

     That she did. A suspiciously large quantity of 8 x 10 studio portraits exist of my mother as a baby and toddler, her blonde hair in fat ringlets. More than even the proudest parent would commission, too large to ship safely to Poland; snapshots tucked into letters are cheaper and more practical. On the back of one, the remnants of a label from a "Beautiful Baby Contest," half scraped off 

     A reminder. We consider the current subhell of influencers, all those 11-year-old girls solemnly unboxing packages of eyebrow sparkle for their budding YouTube channels, as a particularly modern deformation of the once-innocent childhood experience. It's not. In the 1930s, ambitious parents wanted their children to be movie stars. Not just Shirley Temple, the apex, but Deanne Durbin and Mickey Rooney, not to forget Jackie Cooper, Dickie Moore, Darla Hood, and other "Our Gang" stars. Plus countless lesser lights, including local radio personalities in every major city. Feeding this dream were acting classes, dance studios, singing lessons, piano teachers. They even managed to monetize being smart; the "Quiz Kids" radio show began in 1940 and ran for 16 years.  

     My grandmother was a member of the Jewish Singing Society, and my mother took a cue from her.

     "I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree," she sang, at 10 years old, the Joyce Kilmer poem set to music, her debut performance, at a Sunday school run by the Jewish Bureau of Education. 

     "I loved to be in front of audience and my passion was to perform," she wrote, years later. She joined the Cain Park Theater and began, by age 13, to enter radio singing contests. Grandpa Irv paid $10 to have a 78 rpm record cut of her competing on a radio competition. "Big Broadcast" written on the label in a careful hand. "March 17, 1950." St. Patrick's Day. 

     Nowadays we record everything and drown in unexamined documentation. But this 78 seems a precious few minutes improbably preserved from the deep past, captured, rescued, scooped out of the torrent of events and set aside in a china teacup outside of time. 

      A blaze of static, then: 

      "Act No. 6. A charming young lady. How old are you? 

      "Thirteen," she says, in a piping baby doll voice. 

      "Thirteen! A great big girl now," the host exudes. "A blonde. She has a brilliant flame red dress on. Her name is June Bramson. Where do you live June? " 

      "3161 East Derbyshire Road." 

      "June is going to sing. Have you ever taken any lessons?" 

      "No," she says, almost pouting. Listening to it, hearing her childish voice, it strikes me: at 13, she'll meet my father in less than five years; marry him in a little more than six, and I'll be born, 10 years and three months after this broadcast.

     "Those are cute gloves," the host says.  "What do you do with those? Make music with them?" 

      There's something almost forward in that question, "What do you do with those?" She doesn't answer. The host pushes on.

      "June, what do you want to sing for us tonight?" 

      "'There's No Tomorrow.'" 

      "That used to be 'O Sole Mio.'" 

      "An Italian song," my future mother agrees. 

     The studio piano plinks to life. "Love is a flowwwwwwer, that blooms so tennnnnnder…" she begins, a throb in her voice, occasionally going a bit flat on "tomorrow." The thick one-sided record was carefully shelved for nearly 75 years, salvaged by me, safely tucked in a record album of Al Jolson 78s — back when albums had pages of sleeves, like a photo album. In 2025, I have it digitized at the library next door and play it for my mother in her assisted living facility in Addison. 

     She sits in her wheelchair, head cocked, listening carefully. The song ends. The studio audience not only claps, but cheers. My mother doesn't share their enthusiasm. 

     "I never won," she says, flatly. "I didn't win. I should have picked a better song. 'Goody Goody' would have been better. Something with more pep." 

     "I never won." That seems very telling. My kind wants so badly to win, it makes not winning burn, and we remember the bad part. The good part — I sang on the radio, I wore a flame red dress, my father paid $10 to record my voice at a time when a quart of milk cost a quarter — doesn't register. Then again, I just pointed out that my 13-year-old mother sang flat. So I'm reporting on a tendency while simultaneously suffering from it. If indeed that is a liability. I like to think of it as candor. When putting the shiniest gloss you can on yourself and everything you do is practically an American folk ailment, pointing out the flaws in life becomes a patriotic duty.

D'oh, nuts!

    Fate has a way of upbraiding you.
    If you remember EGD's most recent guest post, a week ago Sunday, a friend related a terrible experience with Dunkin'' Donuts at Midway Airport — service so bad that at least one reader doubted it could be true. It was.

     In my little introductory paragraph, I really laid into Dunkin' Donuts. "Never eat at a Dunkin' Donuts for any reason whatsoever," I urged.

     Though I felt guilty about it. My condemnation was based purely on thinking their donuts are not worth putting in your mouth. I wouldn't do it, and I'd eat a Circus Peanut. Even as I applied the lash, I remembered those many long ago mornings in my early 20s when I'd look forward to breakfast consisting of a pair of Dunkin' muffins in a waxy paper bag and a cup of coffee as I made the drive from Oak Park to my job at the Wheaton Daily Journal.  A bran muffin for the main meal and a chocolate chip muffin for dessert. They were good company in my dead grandmother's dinky blue Chevy Citation. Peeling off chunks of the muffin top, the shiny, dense, best part, life seemed to hold promise.

     Maybe they were sweet and awful and I just didn't know any better. But I still liked them.

     The day that post ran — garnering twice the readership of anything I wrote the previous week (heck might as well say it — earning better stats than anything I wrote all month) — I found myself at O'Hare with my wife, heading out on the trip that we are now returning from (apologies to readers whose comments I didn't post. "AHA! You're on VACATION! You're OUT OF TOWN, not CURRENTLY RESIDING IN YOUR HOUSE IN NORTHBROOK. Which is now EMPTY..." My wife doesn't like me to post that on the blog. People are crazy. Things happen).

     My wife isn't crazy. She is sensible, and eats good food. Sitting there by the gate, she wanted something not in our store of foodstuffs. She wanted a banana. Knowing I was at an airport where prices are insane, I asked, before setting out in search, what the most I should spend on her banana. 

    "It could be five dollars," I warned.

     "Two dollars," she said, sensible. In a supermarket, a banana costs about 19 cents.
     I dutifully toddled over to a nearby market sort of place, with sandwiches and cheese sticks and such. Insane prices. $12 for a modest bag of candy. And no bananas. Nearby was a Dunkin' which had — and you see this coming, right? — a bowl of big, yellow, unblemished, perfectly ripe, bananas.  Price — $1.10 apiece.
    So Dunkin', which I had keelhauled that very day, was offering the cheapest, best foodstuff for sale at O'Hare, not that I did a survey. Having advised others to never patronize the place, I was patronizing it myself. Touché, fate.

     Walking back to the gate, I couldn't resist tucking the banana into my fleece pocket, so that one end poked out.
     I walked up to my wife.
     "Say it," I instructed.
     She smiled, instantly understanding.
     "Is that a banana in your pocket," she said "Or are you just happy to see me?"
     "Both," I said.
     She took the banana.
      "I was going to say it even before you asked," she said.

     My friend, by the way, said that Dunkin' Donuts did apologize to her for their abysmal service, without so much as offering her a gift certificate, not that shed' patronize them again. I would. But only for bananas.
     

Foods I love #5: Bolo de cenoura

      Carrots and I go way back. To the days when my mother would serve frozen peas and carrots and I would instinctively go for the orange cubes. Who wouldn't? The peas were mushy and green and gross and I hated them. But the carrots — bright, sweet, and encouraging.
      Later they were crinkle cut and, even better, roasted. Glazed with brown sugar at Thanksgiving.

     Carrots are root vegetables, meaning they grow underground. But compare them with their cousin, the potato. Tubers are big brown lumps of mundanity that must be enlivened by ketchup or sour cream or cheese. Carrots are slimmer, sexier, yet harder to find, as if the great mass food manufacturers can't be bothered coping with their complexities. Carrots are more colorful, more exciting, yet it is potatoes that McDonald's fries in enormous quantities, some nine million tons a day, worldwide. Mickey D's only sells carrot sticks in a few niche markets, like Ireland. 

     To be honest, I am not a fan of carrots in their raw form. I will eat them, and even enjoy them if you heap enough humus on one end. But a carrot stick is work, crunchy in a bad way, grainy in the mouth.

     But what wonders can be done with them with the application of heat, ingenuity and fat.
     When my wife and I got married in 1990, my sole contribution to the wedding dinner menu was to suggest we start with cream of carrot soup with ginger. I've ordered many a main course simply because it came with carrots.  One River North eatery served a carrot salad, with pine nuts that drew me in regularly. Then it was gone. I complained, and after the waiter explained that carrots were not in season, I objected. "They sit in cellars for months," I believe were my exact words, and didn't go back for years. A head of lettuce will last three weeks in the fridge; a fresh carrot will be good for three months.

     I can't say I am always on the look-out for carrots — that would lead to too much disappointment. They're that rare. But carrots have a way of finding me.
     Earlier this week, at the excellent Padaria Ribeiro bakery in Porto, Portugal, my attention was drawn to dense orange triangles, covered with chocolate sprinkles. 
     "What are those, sweet potato?" I asked, tapping on the glass case.
     "No, carrot," the clerk said. That focused my attention like a star flare. The magic word. I ordered one, with coffee Americain, and took a seat at one of the little tables outside, watching the university students, in their colorful top hats and canes, parade by.
     English is prevalent in Portugal. But when I went back into the bakery, after we consumed the orange slice in a delirium of pleasure, and asked what it was we had eaten, she said, "bolo de cenoura."  Simply Portuguese for "carrot cake," but this was not like the traditional American carrot cake with cream cheese frosting you'd find at Gibson's. It didn't have pieces of carrots. This was almost more like a pudding. The carrots are pureed. 

      What histories I could find said that the dessert was created in Brazil, Portugal's former colony, in the 1960s, based on American carrot cake, then filtered back to the mother country. 

      To my delight, my wife enjoyed it as much as I did, and immediately found a promising New York Times recipe. Which we will have a chance to whip up now that we are home — today, if all goes well — after our near fortnight in Portugal. I appreciate your patience, with last week's metaphor series and this week's favorite food series. They were fare I could whip up ahead of time and leave sit until it was time for them to be consumed — well, except for this one, pounded out in a guest house room in Porto Tuesday night, with memories of a superlative slice of bolo de cenoura still very fresh in mind. 
      

Food I love #4: Fresh challah

Fresh challah at Masa Madre, a Mexican Jewish bakery in East Garfield Park, now, sadly, defunct.

      True story.
      Once I stopped by Tel Aviv Bakery on Devon Avenue for some ... I don't know what. Hamantaschen maybe. And while I was buying whatever I was there to buy. Could be bagels, though those should really be gotten at New York Bagel on Touhy, I detected a smell, a tantalizing aroma: warm challah, fresh from the oven.
      So I bought one. How could you not? Dense, rich, ever so slightly sweet bread, the crust shiny with egg white. 

     At the car, I put whatever I bought — does it matter? — and began to drive. Proud of myself, thinking of how surprised, and pleased my wife would be with the fresh warm challah that I was thoughtfully bringing home to her.  
     But it's a long drive — say 25 minutes — from Tel Aviv Bakery to our house. And it was late afternoon. A loaf of challah, it's big. A lot for two people. What harm would there be from a pick-me-up, just a hunk of challah, from the end? Yes, it would detract from the complete braided purity of the loaf. But it was just a taste. Surely, she would not begrudge me that.  

     God it was fantastic. If you haven't eaten a chunk of warm challah — and that's the ideal way to eat it. Not sliced; cutting it with a knife commits violence against the bread. Challah is braided, by talking three fat strands of dough and weaving them together, and so pulls apart, naturally, along those original fault lines (and really, how many foodstuffs are braided? A sign this is something special).

      At Sabbath, when the Hamotzi — the prayer over the bread  — is said, the challah is passed around and everybody breaks off a hunk. It might even be a commandment somewhere. I'll have to check.

    So I'm driving, and eating this warm, really superlative challah. Time passes. I'm basically in a fugue state, lost in reverie, communing with the challah, as retrospective as a mollusk. I'm glad I didn't drive into the back of a truck.

     And now I'm home, and I gather up whatever it was I bought — it could have been cookies, I really have no idea. And I pick up the white paper bag with the challah in it. And the bag is weirdly light. Like there isn't an entire loaf in there at all. I look inside. A pathetic heel. That's it. Something had happened to the warm loaf of challah. All that was left was ... a scrap, a remnant I was embarrassed to share with my wife. Though I must have. Frankly, my mind is blank of how that went over. Nature can be kind sometimes. I'd ask her, but I'm too afraid of what she might recall. 
      I'd eaten most of the loaf in the car — I shouldn't feel the need to point that out, but this is also read by people slow on the uptake, and I don't want people writing in say, "So what happened to the bread?" Nor do I need to be told that eating 1,500 calories worth of challah is not a smart move.
      You'll notice that today's subject is not "challah" but "fresh challah." That's because they are really two very different types of food. Challah, regular, not fresh challah, the kind usually sold in grocery stores, can still be good — you can make a sandwich out of it. But fresh challah, no more than a few hours, less than a day at most, from birth is entirely different. Because over time a dryness, a stiffness, a subtle change that is both slight and enormous. 
     The thing to do with un-fresh challah is to make stuffing — I've written about that. Or French toast. Add cinnamon and a cap of vanilla to the egg batter — the vanilla is the secret. I was known for making absolutely nothing in the years my boys were growing up, but challah stuffing and challah French toast.

     I feel almost guilty writing about fresh challah as a favorite food, because I really don't get it enough to qualify. I really should stop by Tel Aviv Bakery more often.