June Steinberg, 1936-2025

   

     My mother died yesterday. In her honor, I'm taking the day off. 

'She saw our kids as people, not as disabilities'

Sister Rosemary Connelly (photo by Heidi Zeigler)

   

      I feel blessed to have known Sister Rosemary for over 30 years, and to have worked with her on many stories. She's the only person who ever caused me hesitation over this blog's name. We were having lunch at the Greenhouse Inn, maybe a decade ago, and I mentioned something about the blog. 

     "And what is this blog of yours called?" she asked. I looked into the wide blue eyes of this good nun, bright with curiosity, and my mouth dropped open. I just couldn't say it.

     Catholic women who became pregnant out of wedlock in Chicago 100 years ago would quietly disappear into the Misericordia Maternity Hospital and Home for Infants on 47th Street, to bear their illegitimate babies under the care of the Sisters of Mercy, joined by indigent married women and those "of foreign birth or parentage."
     They often emerged without their infants. Most healthy children left behind would eventually be adopted. But those with disabilities became charges of the Archdiocese of Chicago, which warehoused them "out of sight, out of mind" until they turned 6, and could be delivered to the state of Illinois and its notoriously nightmarish mental institutions, where residents were tied to beds and worse.
     By 1954, the Home for Infants housed about 50 children with developmental challenges like Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. In 1969, the task of keeping them alive until the state could take over fell to a 38-year-old nun with the Sisters of Mercy, Sister Rosemary Connelly, who knew little of Misericordia, but immediately realized she had found her calling.
     "I felt God's presence on my very first day at Misericordia," she said. "I could tell that all the children were loved."
     Loved, but not busy. They were well-dressed, but stayed in bed all day. They ate there. Sister Rosemary decided that these were not inert objects that could just be allowed to languish, but God's children, precious souls, each with the spark of humanity, no matter how buried. That flame had to be nourished, physically and spiritually.
     She would provide them with the rich and rewarding lives they deserved, and since programming for such children didn't exist, she created it. In the process, becoming the dynamic, irresistible force building Misericordia into the pre-eminent home in Chicago for children and adults with developmental challenges.
     Beloved for the energy, skill, devotion and unwavering faith she brought to Misericordia for more than half a century, Sister Rosemary Connelly died June 19 at Misericordia. She was 94.
     "Sister Rosemary was the heart and soul of Misericordia for more than 50 years," said Fr. Jack Clair, president and executive director, of Misericordia. "Her love and guidance helped build a community where hundreds of people with developmental disabilities enjoy living the highest quality of life. Sister’s life was a life of faith dedicated to God’s promise of eternal life.
     "There are few people in the City of Chicago who have done so much for so many as Sister Rosemary," said Richard M. Daley, then mayor, at her 40th anniversary as head of Misericordia in 2009. "Her extraordinary devotion to those in need and their families make her a role model for us all."
     "When you think of the number of lives she touched — thousands," said David Axelrod, the former senior adviser for Barack Obama. "Not just the folks who lived in Misericordia, but their families. It changed my daughter's life and it changed my whole family's life for the better. This whole place exists because of the force of her will."
      Rosemary Connelly was born in Feb. 23, 1931 on Chicago's West Side, the third child of a pair of immigrants from County Mayo, Ireland, pub owner Peter V. Connelly and Bridget Moran. She joined the Sisters of Mercy at age 18, served as a psychiatric social worker in Aurora, and a school teacher in Chicago before drawing the Misericordia assignment.
     Why her? Nobody ever explained.
     “I don’t know,” Sister Rosemary said on her 90th birthday in 2021. “That’s been a mystery. They always had a nurse in charge. And I had a master’s degree in social work and one in sociology. Maybe that’s why.’”
     She graduated with a degree in social science from St. Xavier University in 1959, received her masters in sociology from St. Louis University in 1966, and a masters in social work from Loyola in 1969.
     One of her inspirations was a nephew who had disabilities. Her first order of business after being put in charge of Misericordia was to go to Sears for tricycles and wading pools. Then she opened a dining room, so children could eat together, as a community.

     Misericordia — the word means "mercy" or "compassion" in Latin —stopped sending children to the state.

     "I decided we'd keep them," she said.
     That meant the population grew, and by 1976, the Misericordia Home for Special Children, was too small.

     Meanwhile, the largest Catholic children's home in the city, the Angel Guardian Orphanage at Devon and Ridge, had closed for lack of state funding and the rise of foster homes. Sister Rosemary saw its possibilities, and talked Catholic Charities into putting the 31-acre campus under her control.

     On March 29, 1976, 39 children boarded a yellow school bus for the trip from 47th Street to the North Side. This being a Sister Rosemary Connelly operation, on the way the bus stopped at the Lincoln Park Zoo, so the children could visit the animals.

     "To put these children in a nursing home is unfair," she said. "We want to help them become caring people. We're trying to break this whole condescending world in which retarded people live."

     Sister Rosemary inherited an aged campus of cottages in need of repair, and exercised two strengths she showed a positive genius for: mobilizing volunteers and raising money.

     "She was the best politician in town," said Axelrod, who was also founding director of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. "She knew everybody. You didn't want to disappoint her."

     Axelrod said she called Joe Biden "My brother Joe," and once, when she was visiting the White House, Biden walked her into the Oval office to meet Barack Obama, introducing her with, "Mr. President, this is why I'm a Catholic."

     "She looked like a sweet white haired nun until you realized she was made of structural steel," said Carol Marin, the former newscaster and co-director of the DePaul Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence.

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Sumer is icumen in

 

     Summer starts today — if you are reading this on Friday, June 20. Actually, summer starts at 9:42 p.m. tonight, that being the moment of the solstice, when the axis of the earth is most inclined toward the sun.
    I'm almost reluctant to mention anything astronomical — it smacks of magic, witchcraft and the occult, and the solstice is regularly a time when rumors fly, when small Midwestern towns drum up satanism panics, convincing themselves that newly turned gardens are fresh graves. 
     My summertide concerns are more mundane. At this point, the top of the first hill in the roller coaster, summer is mostly a challenge. What  to do with this longest day? And with the three months and two days to come? Ninety-five days until the calendar head-butts into autumn — a season I prefer, honestly, for crisp weather, snug jackets, colorful fall leaves. Summer swelters, it's uncomfortable. And we're supposed to have a particularly hot one this year, beginning ... Saturday, the first of three days in a row in the mid-90s. Thank you, global warming.
     Summer requires special attention — if you're not careful, September arrives and, well, where was the fun that summer promised us? Or, rather, we promised ourselves? The picnics? The lazy afternoons? Lost to more work. Dissipated in the time sink of routine.
    A reminder that, for adults, summer is mostly nostalgic. You can't beat those summers of the past. The kickball games. the streetlights coming on, the new romance. "The air vibrated," as Julie Cadwallader-Staub writes, "with the sound of cicadas/on those hot Missouri nights after sundown/when the grown-ups gathered on the wide back lawn."
     Hard to top that. Hard to top the sense of liberation when school let out. I suspect that when I finally walk away from the word trade, there won't be the same sense of freedom. Just loss and lassitude.

     It shouldn't be that way. Why? Leisure is leisure, right, whether you're 7 or 70? It should even be better. An adult with time on his hands and cash in the bank has options a 7-year-old dragging his G.I. Joes through the mud could never dream of.
    But it isn't. Maybe you know too much at this point. Maybe you can't just show up at the carnival and thrill to the chance to toss balls at that pyramid of lead milk bottles, already picking out which garish bear will be yours. Maybe you've played this game too many times, and know in your heart, with sorrow, how it always ends. This game is harder than it looks.
     My schedule today is pretty free — an eye appointment in the afternoon. Nothing dire, just a routine check to make sure diabetes isn't ravaging my vision. It can do that. 
     Otherwise, there are flowers to water, weeds to pull, a book project to prod forward like a balky pack animal, and Monday's column to think about. All those things are fun for me — drinking coffee, listening to music, maybe smoking a cigar. 

     In a strange inversion, the typical fun things — lolling on a beach, going to a ballgame — seem burdens, obligations, dull when what I really want to do is stay home and read and garden, garden and read, with breaks for exercise. Is that finally knowing oneself? Or just sad? Or both?
    Not that the summer will be without highlights. A new granddaughter to meet soon.  The old standbys of the Trail through Time and the Chicago Botanic Garden, where we went Thursday, getting a jump on summer — a big Juneteenth turnout.  

     Once upon a time I looked down on columnists who wrote about the weather. It seemed a failure of imagination. And I can report, on good authority, that is indeed exactly that. I shuddered to imagine where this war in Iran is going, or what lies ahead for our poor star-crossed country, having turned itself over to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor. And in truth: I have no fucking idea. Nobody does. Though no shortage of those pretending to be Nostradamus.

     Better to think about those enormous summer cumulonimbus clouds — they were spectacular Thursday.  Better to think about low sugar lemonade and a Rocky Patel on the front porch. Dozing on the sofa on the back deck, watching the big green sugar maple leaves vibrate in the zephyr breeze. Bring summer on. We will do the best we can.

The headline of today's post means "Summer has arrived" in Middle English and is taken from the 13th century "Cuckoo Song," the oldest known. round:

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.

Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

Sumer is icumen in—

Lhude sing, cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweth med

And springth the wude nu.

Sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,

Lhouth after calve cu,

Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth—

Murie sing, cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu,

Wel singes thu, cuccu.

Ne swik thu naver nu!

Or in modern English:

          Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
          Seeds grow and meadows bloom
          And the forest springs anew,
          Sing, Cuckoo!
          The ewe bleats after the lamb,
          The cow lows after the calf.
          The bullock jumps, the stag cavorts,
          Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
          Cuckoo, cuckoo,

          Well you sing, cuckoo;
          Nor will you ever stop now.

Flashback 2002: Taipei rabbi helps Jews connect far from home

     I went looking for this column Wednesday and was surprised to find it wasn't posted here. Can't have that. My sabbath in Taipei is etched on my mind for a variety of reasons — most of which are outlined in the column. But also afterward, one of those technical turning points in life. 

     At the time, our sister newspaper was the Jerusalem Post. After this ran in the Sun-Times, the Post wanted to reprint it, and asked me if I had a photo of Rabbi Einhorn.
     "No," I said. "But I have his card."
     So I shot an email to the rabbi, whose secretary forwarded me a photo, which I sent along to Jerusalem. I remember looking up from my computer, amazed, thinking, "What just happened here?" A request Jerusalem to Chicago to Taipei, a photo from Taipei to Chicago to Jerusalem. Imagine the time that would take, the mail delay, in the pre-Internet age. It would never happen.
     I am glad, still, to be old enough to find a whiff of wonder in that.

     Born in Vienna in 1918, Rabbi Einhorn died in 2021 at the age of 103. 

     TAIPEI, Taiwan — Dr. Ephraim F. Einhorn digs four business cards out of his pockets and hands them over, one after the other. They reflect his capacities as senior vice president of the World Trade Center, Warsaw; honorary representative of the Polish Chamber of Commerce for Asia and the Pacific region; president of the World Patent Trading Co. Ltd. and--most significantly at the moment--rabbi of the only synagogue in the Republic of China, which holds its services in Room 419 in the Ritz Landis Hotel on Min Chuan East Road.
     It is a cramped, narrow hotel room — two dozen or so banquet chairs, facing a modest table with candlesticks, a lectern set between two elegant lamps, a small ark. Books are piled everywhere. In the bathroom, cases of kosher wine are stacked in the bathtub.
     I must admit that running to Sabbath services would not normally be my first impulse on a Friday night in a foreign country. But my Taiwanese hosts, ever gracious, thought I might enjoy it and added it to my schedule, and I, for reasons of — in descending order of importance — politeness, curiosity and residual religious faith, did not decline. 

Rabbi Ephraim Einhorn

      

     As soon as I walk in the door, I am propelled up to meet the rabbi--look, a new person! Rabbi Einhorn produces his four business cards. He might have more; he seems to be fishing in his pockets for a fifth when he realizes that the newcomer had not yet seen his books.
     "What will interest you is that I maintain in the hotel one of the largest collections of historical Jewish books in Asia," he says, plucking up a large volume bound in soft brown leather.
     "Look at the year," he exalts, in a precise, refined tone that reminds me of a 1930s radio announcer. "1727." He reaches for another book. "Here, I will show you a fine example. This one, Vienna, 1810."
      More books, with elaborate title page engravings, old dates, references to obscure kings and princes. Rabbi Einhorn shows the books off with an unmistakable pride. Handing over the reprint of an academic paper, he says, "You'll see my name on every page. Interesting, eh?"
     Rabbi Einhorn has been conducting services in Taipei for 26 years, 15 in this very room. "Before that in the Presidential Hotel," he says. "Before that in the U.S. Military Chapel." That, of course, was before the United States de-recognized Taiwan in 1979. "Jimmy Carter isn't very popular around here," the rabbi says.
     The congregation, about 100 people total, is made up of embassy personnel, business executives posted in Taipei, plus their families and the occasional stray such as myself. There are children. Last Saturday, he says with pride, they had a bar mitzvah. We talk of the challenges of performing circumcisions in Asia--there is a mohel in Tokyo, he says, who swings through town to do the job when needed.
     This night, about a dozen people crowd the room. Mostly men, plus a few wives, children, and a baby. This is not just a religious service, but also a support group--Jews Far From Home Anonymous. We settle in, and Rabbi Einhorn goes around the room, asking us our names, our places of origin. Everyone is from somewhere else--Israel, South Africa, the United States. Every location draws a few lines of commentary from Rabbi Einhorn. A visitor from Padua, Italy, elicits memories of his days as a student at what sounds to me like "Instituto Superiora del Torah. "I had a relationship with the chief rabbi in Italy," he says.
      Never before in my life have I yearned for a tape recorder the way I yearn for one while Rabbi Einhorn is speaking. A tumbling cascade of erudition, bravado and pure verbiage that I despair to capture in my notebook. He mentions a certain noble lady--a marchesa--and conducts a brief exposition on the titles of nobility. A marchesa, he begins, is the wife of a marquis, but then he spirals upward, through dukes and duchesses, counts and viscounts, all the way up to the king and queen, a virtuoso performance, a jazz riff of obscure titles that I vainly try to capture with a mere pen.
      We then zip through the service, the familiar prayers. Rabbi Einhorn calls on various congregants for help. "Doctor, do you know how to light the candles?" he asks, then, in an aside to me, "Here, it is not the ladies who light the candles."
      Rabbi Einhorn offers commentary. "If you can bear it, there's so much to say, so much I want to tell you," he says, taking out a speech. "I worked on this for 48 hours."
      He reads a fervent, pro-Israel tract. "The whole world is wrong, and Israel is right," he concludes.
     The service ends in socializing. Regulars catch up and each in turn greets me. Several want to know if I'll be back. Even after I say I'm going home in a few days, they still want to know: Will I return? Will I bring my children to the services? "My kids are in the United States," I tell someone. "That's OK," he says. "Bring them anyway."
      When it comes time to go, I stand in the entranceway of the little room, for a long time, reluctant to leave, looking at the people milling around. So unbearably sad and sweet, a desperate need to connect, born of distance, longing and loss. I feel, at the same time, the service is something both already fading and permanently etched in my heart.
       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 19, 2002

Earl Moses would have written a better headline

 

Earl Moses

     A reporter is supposed to cover the story. Not be the story. And one local newspaper typically doesn't report on the entry-level staff hires of another.
     But Earl Moses Jr. getting a job was news.
     "News Breaks Ice, Employs Negro Reporter," a headline proclaimed in the Indianapolis Recorder, a Black weekly, on Jan. 26, 1956.     
     The article begins, breathlessly:
"The Indianapolis News has employed a young Negro as a full-time member of its reportorial staff giving him the distinction of being the first Negro full fledged reporter to hold such a position on an Indianapolis daily newspaper." 

      The nimble and rigorous city editor that Moses became at the Chicago Sun-Times would have leaped to red pencil that sentence, purging unnecessary verbiage, fixing that passive voice and adding a time element, ending up with: "The Indianapolis News hired the first full time Negro reporter on an Indianapolis daily newspaper earlier this month." All the news in half the words.
     Moses, a respected Chicago newspaperman, died May 24 at his home in Torrance, California. He was 94.
     He was deeply proud of those who struggled before him, writing a brief family history in 2021.
     "In conjunction with Juneteenth," he began. "June 19, 1865, when word of the Confederate defeat finally reached Texas, this seems like a propitious time to revisit the origin of the Moses family roots."His great-grandfather on his mother's side was Henry Sheppard, born in 1838 on the Sheppard Plantation in Georgia — given his last name because he was plantation property. But when he was released from bondage after the Civil War, his great-grandfather chose a name worthy of a free man.
     "He decided to shed his slave name and pick a name that bespoke of honor, strength and dignity," Earl Moses wrote. "He chose Moses."
     Moses was born in Chicago. His, father, Earl Richard Moses Sr., was a college professor. His mother, Marjorie Banks, a teacher. 
     The family moved to Baltimore. Moses graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
     He joined the Army in 1953, serving as a radio operator and posted in Alaska. He went to Indiana University for law school at night, while working for the Indianapolis News.
     "His father insisted: 'You always have a backup plan,'" said Matthew Moses, his only child, who himself wanted to be a writer but became a librarian.
Moses joined the Sun-Times in 1962, rising from reporter to night city editor, then city editor, assistant managing editor, assistant to the personnel director and assistant to the editor before taking early retirement in 1988 after suffering a stroke.

     "My dad was a true newsman. The Sun-Times was his life," said Matthew Moses, who remembers his father interacting with colleagues. "Roger Flaherty, Leon Pitt, I remember their confidence. They saw through all the bs going on in the city. It was fun watching them hang out, hearing them swap stories. That made him a superhero in my eyes."

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The Louvre is closed.

     Workers at the Louvre went on strike Monday. Which caused me to send out supportive thoughts of solidarity to any teenagers being dragged through Europe by their parents, sullen and silent, figuring, "At least I'll be able to tell the gang back home that I saw that famous woman, Mona Whatever."
     I was that kid. Summer of 1977. My father spent a couple months at the Palais de Nations, taking his family along to cool their heels in Geneva.  Not what I would call a hopping town. I spent a lot of time in the American Library, reading "Dune." I pined for Cleveland or, more specifically, my girlfriend in Cleveland. That's what you do at 17.

     Though I did stretch my wings, taking the train to Zurich, and the boat two Chillon, twice, to visit Byron's Castle. I had a great fondness for Byron at the time. "I have not loved the world/Nor the world me/Have not flattered its rank breath/Nor bowed a patient knee,"    
     For the last two weeks of the trip we hit Paris and London. The highlight was to be the Louvre. But the Louvre .. was closed ...for renovations.

     I didn't believe my mother when she told me — can there be a more 17-year-old reaction than that? I thought she was lying to me, that she just didn't want to go to the Louvre. To spite me. In my defense, that sort of thing was certainly within her capacity. 
     I insisted on striding up to the museum doors and pulling. Locked. Turns out ... the Louvre ... was closed. For renovations. The week we were in Paris.

     I ended up ditching my family and wandering the book stalls along the Seine. In one, there was a pile of art reproductions on canvas, mounted on wood. A life-size copy of Petrus Christus's "Portait of a Young Lady" caught my eye and I bought it. 

     She's been staring from my bedroom wall for ... ngggg, doing the math ... 48 years now. I eventually put a big ass gilt frame around it. And when the actual picture, housed in Berlin, came to the Met, I made a point to go see it, sitting gazing at it for maybe half an hour. The original is much finer — art reproduction wasn't at its height in the mid-1970s.

      The funny thing is, the Louvre being closed turned out to be one of the more memorable aspects of the Paris trip. I didn't get back for 15 years, until I returned with my wife. The Louvre was open that time. Closed makes for a better story. I'm sure that will be cold comfort for all those tourists milling around in front of the locked Louvre doors in stunned incomprehension.

WBEZ, longtime Chicago voice for 'respect and joy,' needs help

     WBEZ and I go way back. In the mid-1980s, when I was freshly fired from the Wheaton Daily Journal and looking for any kind of work, Ken Davis gave a whistle and I started filing live reports on his Studio A program.

     I didn't get paid, of course — taking advantage of the ambitious young is a venerable media tradition. But it was reporting on the radio.
     I broadcast from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, watching attendants slide big numbers into place. From a live poultry store, watching a chicken, its throat cut, upside down in a metal funnel, blood running out the bottoms, talons scratching uselessly against the galvanized metal.
     Awkward situations made good radio. I broadcast naked from a sensory deprivation tank — quite the thing in the mid-1980s — on Lincoln Avenue.
     After floating peacefully on heavily salted water in total darkness for nearly an hour, imagining myself an amoeba on an ancient sea, the door was ripped open and phone receiver into my hands. Ken asked what I was thinking about at the moment he called. "How much I have to pee," I replied, blinking.
     As the years passed, I'd circle back to WBEZ, first in the creepy old Bankers Building at Clark and Adams, with the radio tower on the roof, and then at their new digs at Navy Pier. For several years, the Tribune's ace columnist Eric Zorn and I would meet on Michigan Avenue every Friday and walk over to the pier to do a run-down of the week's news.
     Or I'd be a guest on particular programs — Scott Simon's "Weekend Edition" or "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" or Jim Nayder's "Magnificent Obsession" — a quirky early morning show on addiction and recovery. It was periodically rebroadcast, and now and then I'd hear from someone who caught my segment and was braced in their struggle.
     And that's just being on the station. I haven't even touched upon my experience as a listener. WBEZ reflected life in Chicago. Jazz at night in the city that practically invented jazz. Live feeds of important historical events — hearings, trials.
     Plus lots of fun — Garrison Keillor's folksy "A Prairie Home Companion," a mix of humor and music. "Car Talk" with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers — and if listeners today have a hard time imagining WBEZ running a show dedicated to car repair, well, let's say that station didn't take itself quite so seriously.
     Then again, these are more serious times.
     Last week, the U.S. House chainsawed $1.1 billion intended for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR's parent. The good news is WBEZ only gets 6% of its budget from the feds.
     It's much worse nationwide. In swaths of the rural countryside, the NPR station is the only game in town, a key source of important local and emergency news. More than 120 stations get more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government.

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