Flashback 2003: Lumbering fears not all that bad

     For a guy who likes to loaf, I hate being sick. I suppose most people do. That drained, feverish feeling. Gobbling Tums to settle the stomach. Hours sprawled in bed, flipping through a book — P.G. Wodehouse, not as funny as I recall — or the random hodgepodge of Facebook videos. I looked at a table saw on the Home Depot yesterday, and today half the videos are woodworking porn. I can't figure out how to make it stop,
     At 4 p.m. I ventured into my office to figure out something for tomorrow. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson, the bard of being sick at home. "When I was sick and lay abed, I had two pillows at my head..."
     Nah, too much effort. Into the archive, looking for columns that take place in bed. I found this, too fun not to share. This was part of the "Hammered and Nailed" series of columns I wrote about repair in our home section. You might recall, I outlined the Fort last November.  Too soon for another installment, but I really feel as if someone hit me behind the ear with a sock of nickels, so this will have to do. If you decide to read it, strap in: it's twice as along as my usual column. Back in the day when we had time on our hands and newsprint to fill.

     Night. Bed. Sleep. A crash and then the tumble of lumber. Unmistakably. I was on my feet in an instant, moving fast toward the door, thinking, "The Fort has fallen over." I stopped, went back, got my pants, started to leave, then checked the clock: 3:19 a.m.
     Hurrying through the darkened house, I braced myself for the sight. Timbers lying in a shattered heap. All that work and money for nothing. My wife would laugh at me about it for the rest of my life. The Fort has fallen over.
     Still, somewhere deep down I was relieved. Cart the ruins away, I told myself. Be done with it. My own fault. My folly. I had haughtily rejected the premade forts as beneath my fever dreams of fatherhood, instead designing my own Taj Mahal Fort, 15 feet high with a 90-square-foot floor plan. The lumber alone cost $1,700.
     When I began work, on Father's Day, at 5:30 a.m., I was energetic, excited. I had marked with four little red flags on metal rods where the concrete supports would go. Concrete a yard deep. I would do it right. I had carefully dug around the 10-inch cardboard concrete form, removed the circle of sod, and then dug down. And down.
     If you've never dug a hole, it's hard work. Not so much the first foot, or even the second foot. But that third foot. Each hole took about 90 minutes to dig. Still, the process was very satisfying. It's hard to mess up a hole. Sometime that morning my wife and boys came out with a glass of lemonade and sang "Happy Father's Day," and that was nice.
     After digging the first two holes, I poured the concrete. Also a backbreaking-yet-satisfying experience. I mixed the concrete with a shovel in a big plastic trough, then spooned it into the holes. Before it set, I positioned the big metal brackets for the 6-by-6 beams. I carefully checked them with a level, ensuring a solid foundation.
     At the end of the day, I cleaned up, hosed out the trough, looked at these two little 10-inch circles of concrete, with their metal brackets sticking out. It seemed a lot of work for two holes.
     The second day I did it again, for the other two holes. The work seemed to go easier. There was one truly frightening moment — I thought I had put the brackets in too soon for the first holes, so I waited until I had filled the fourth hole with concrete before I tried to sink the bracket in the third. Big mistake. I went to shove the metal into the wet cement. It went down halfway and then stopped. Sick with fear, I contemplated having to dig up the entire mess of drying concrete and repour it.
     At that moment my wife wandered over. She can smell panic, and has a genius for happening by at the pinnacle of crisis. She stood smiling at me, her Mister Handy.
     Sweating like a pig, I fixed a false grin on my face and gave the metal bracket a mighty push. It went in, barely, but was skewed hard to the left.
     "You know honey," I grunted, through gritted teeth, trying to muscle the bracket upright, "this is not ... the best moment."
     That was a weekend's work. The next weekend, I bolted in the legs of the Fort — huge honking 6-by-6ers. I was a little concerned that the cut was not exactly flush, but went halfway across the broad end of the beam and then jumped up 1/16th of an inch. The lumber place must not have had a saw big enough to do it in a single cut. A few of the beams also had cracks in them.
     Not terrible cracks, I decided. Normal, probably. I couldn't imagine dragging those beams back to Craftwood. So I pressed on. Across the top of the upright 6-by-6 beams, two 4-by-4 horizontals then a series of 2-by-6 joists, to hold up the floor, nearly 6 feet in the air (this was before the deadly porch collapse; I'd use 2-by-12 joists now. Instead, I will just have to hope that genetic Steinberg unpopularity prevents my boys from having too many friends over).
     As I began contemplating putting the floor down atop the joists, I ran into a problem. The Fort is basically a little house sitting on a 9-by-10-foot platform, with a little railed porch in front. The little house is framed by 4-by-4 beams, and I knew that if I merely screwed the beams to the floor, they wouldn't be as sturdy as if I put them through the floor and bolted them to the joists. But doing that meant making complicated cuts in the flooring, cuts my fancy new DeWalt chop saw couldn't do.
     I pondered: easy and unstable or difficult and locked in? The thing was wiggly as it was. The beams seemed to sway on the concrete footings. I was standing there, trying to figure out how to proceed, my stomach in a knot, when wife happened by — "Howzit going?" she said breezily. I started trying to explain the dilemma.
     "Do I bolt the post to the floor or have it go through the floor and bolt it to the beam?" She just looked at me. I said it several more times, in several ways, and she still didn't understand, and then I did something that scared both of us: I slammed my head against the joist, deliberately, out of frustration, a quick dip to the side and then a thud. I've never done something like that before in my life. She remembered something she had to do in the house.
     Things actually got worse from there. Taking the tough road — always the tough road — I fished a jig saw out of the basement and made the cuts in the first floorboard to accommodate the Fort beams, a laborious process, but mismeasured, and put one cut in the wrong place, so that the beam couldn't pass through. I thought of taking the jigsaw to my throat but, collecting myself, grabbed a new $14 cedar board and measured again, more carefully this time, measured twice in fact. The new board was an even better job — the cuts neat and precise — and I joyfully went to put the board in place. I was on the ladder, moving it into position when my wife came by, smiling.
     "I don't believe it!" I said, aghast. "I've done it again."
     "Done what?" my wife asked.
     "Cut the board wrong. I screwed up the measurement again!" She had a bright idea, but I just didn't want to hear it.
     "Can I suggest ..." she began.
     "No!" I shouted. "No you can't suggest! Leave me alone. I can't believe it. I did it again."
     "Can I share an idea with you ..." she said quickly.
     "No!" I snapped angrily. "No ideas. This is a disaster. I can't understand it." I raved on in this vein for a bit, until my wife said,
     "Flip the board over."
     Flip. The. Board. Over. Hope dawned. I wasn't as stupid as I thought, not at least in this instance. I flipped the board over. It fit. I had measured correctly, but then turned the board around.
     At that point I had decided to call it a day. Now 12 hours had passed. It was 3:19 a.m. and I was at the back door, hurrying to see my collapsed Fort. I flipped on the floodlights. The Fort was there, intact. I couldn't understand it. I had heard a crash then a tumble of lumber. It was not a dream. I walked out into the cool night, walked all around the Fort in the darkness, looking for a shattered timber, something, touching it lightly with my hand as if I couldn't believe it was still there. But it seemed fine. Eventually I went to bed, mystified.
     Later that morning, when the sun was out, I went back to look at the Fort. I walked around the Fort once, twice, then I noticed something in the driveway. The garbage can, where I had piled some wood scraps, was knocked over, probably by hungry raccoons. The lumber scraps had tumbled out — that was the crash and tumble I had heard. Not the Fort. At that exact moment my wife walked over and I unwisely told her what had happened. It took her five minutes to stop laughing.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2003

Soldiers in our streets — as the city braces, remember: they're been here before

The National Guard patrols Madison Street during the riots following the assassination of 
Martin Luther King Jr. (Sun-Times archive)

 

     Chicago began with soldiers.
     Capt. John Whistler, to be precise, an Irishman who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War. After the peace, he joined the United States Army and was sent to the western frontier, which at the time was Indiana.
     There he helped build Fort Wayne. In the summer of 1803, he and his company of the 1st United States Infantry were dispatched to build a new fort at the mouth of the Chicago River, named after Thomas Jefferson's secretary of war, Henry Dearborn.
     A small settlement grew around the stockade. Then, on Aug. 15, 1812 the garrison's 66 soldiers tried to evacuate Fort Dearborn, joined by 15 friendly Miami, plus nine women and 18 children. They ran into an ambush of 500 Potawatomi warriors. Two-thirds were killed.
     That first military effort in Chicago — for years called the Fort Dearborn Massacre, but really a battle, a minor skirmish in the War of 1812 that went very badly for one side — was a mixed bag. The Army's presence planted the seeds of the city. They also got its residents killed by mishandling relations with the local Native Americans.

     The history of American soldiers in Chicago — about to get a significant new chapter with President Donald Trump planning to deploy the National Guard to the city — is also checkered.
     At times, soldiers provide a welcome, calming presence, such as during the 1919 race riots, when they created a buffer between Chicagoans bent on murdering each other because of the color of their skin. At times, they made matters worse, such as during the 1894 Pullman Strike, when their arrival — despite the governor's objections — sparked days of deadly rioting.
     Troops trampled American freedoms. One of the nation's worst cases of journalistic suppression happened in Chicago during the Civil War at the point of a bayonet. But soldiers also protected those rights, or tried to.
     In July 1951, Gov. Adlai Stevenson called out 300 members of the Illinois National Guard. Each was issued two rounds of ammunition, told not to shoot unless ordered and sent to Cicero, where a mob was rampaging around the home of Harvey E. Clark, a CTA bus driver whose family would have been the town's first Black residents.
     Except their potential neighbors rioted instead, trashing not only their apartment, but the building it was in. The Guard used tear gas; six Guard personnel were injured, four rioters were cut by bayonets. Young Guardsmen got a life lesson in hate, Chicago style.
     "I didn't think there were people like we saw last night," one admitted the next day.
     Military force isn't consistently effective. In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, which Trump has threatened to do. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the West Side, but were deployed too late, or in the wrong locations, to keep Madison Street from burning down.

Dispatching troops as a show of power

     Sending in troops as a vindictive show of power is nothing new. On June 3, 1863, two companies of the 65th Illinois Infantry marched out of Camp Douglas to the offices of the Chicago Times — no relation to the Sun-Times, thank goodness, as it was a Confederate-sympathizing scandal sheet run by an odious bigot, Wilbur Storey.
     Gen. Ambrose Burnside, chafing at recent Union defeats, decreed that "declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed" and closed down the Times, citing its "repeated expression of disloyalty and incendiary statements," though the paper referring to him as the "butcher of Fredericksburg" might have also been a factor.
     That night, thousands of Chicagoans gathered to protest this "spectre of military despotism." The next day, President Abraham Lincoln rescinded Burnside's order.

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'Why would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?'

The Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, a haven for ventriloquist dummies, is one of the countless subject that nobody gives a shit about, at least until I write about them. Then they tend to.

      As a rule, I try to let the commenters on my blog post comment, and not get involved in the discussion unless there is some question I'm in a position to answer. I've had my say; now the readers get theirs.
      But sometimes questions are raised that merit my involvement. Such as this, after Friday's post on museums, from Bill:

Question,

There's two different kinds of people which one are you?

When you go to a place That's open to the public say a restaurant or a museum for instance and there's almost nobody else there do you say to yourself I'm so lucky I'm so smart nobody else came here out of the 7 billion people on earth I'm the only one here lucky me or do you realize that no one else gives a s*** and that's why you're in there alone because it's of no interest to anyone else?

You are a very fine writer most of the time you write about things that a fair number of people care about why on earth would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?
Are you writing for you or are you writing for us?

I know that's more than one question but I figured you got to write about something

     In another mood, I might not have even posted that — the "I'm so lucky I'm so smart" is nearly an accusation — I'm an arrogant bastard — the standard MAGA mind trick of imagining something stupid and then projecting the thought into the mind of people they hate. "I'm lucky I'm so smart" is not a thought I have often, certainly not compared to, "I'm lucky I blundered here through blind fate, despite the fact that I didn't want to come here because I never want to go anywhere."
    But he said something complimentary. And that "Write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again" is fairly accurate. 
     I considered, and answered on the blog this way:

That's a valid question. The short answer is: I'm writing for me, absolutely, 100 percent. The fact that other people who aren't myself want to read it is a continuing marvel. As far as the nobody gives a shit aspect, I would reply with a question: 1) "Who appointed you their spokesman?" and then make an observation: "And yet you're here." But this seems a topic worthy of expansion, so I'll write tomorrow's blog post about it. Thanks for asking.

     The reader preference feedback loop is the bedrock of much social media — you click on a video of a turtle being cut out of a net by a diver, and suddenly your feed is inundated with aquatic animal rescue, Artificial Intelligence thinking, "More animal rescue!" 

      And we worry AI is going to take over the world.

      "Give the lady what she wants," was the slogan for Marshal Field's. Instead, I see myself as a sifter. I go to these very dull and ignored subjects that for some reason catch my attention, dig up handfuls of facts regarding them and toss them onto my fine-mesh sieve of a mind. Then begin to shake. Out drops the parts that not only aren't dull, but interesting. Those, I share.

    I'm the guy who, 30 years ago, wrote a chapter in my book on the National Spelling Bee. This was before all the novels and plays — in fact, I like to think I had a small hand in creating the literary bee genre. The spelling bee was an obscure and strange American institution that got grudgingly reported on and generally ridiculed at the end of May. I followed a girl through a year of the bee, beginning in her middle school, then proceeding to  state, and ending at the national bee in Washington, D.C.

     The chapter, called "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" is one of my favorite pieces. It gives every word my champion, Sruti Nadimpalli, received in a year of the bee, but is never dull, and others joined me in that estimation.  Granta, the esteemed London literary quarterly, republished it on their cover.

    Returning to Bill's question, my writing about things nobody cares about is not an accident. I set out to do that. Because the things people do care about — sports, celebrities, today's political crisis — are already covered like a damp shirt by a thousand other writers. Why join the scrum?    To me, the greatest accolade is to walk an untrodden path. And while people don't care about the topics before I address them, by the time I'm done, they care more than they did before. Sometimes a lot more.

     I loved visiting Neenah Foundry to watch manhole covers being made because it was a dream of mine, and took me about five years of badgering to get them to agree, and because what I found there was gold, well, okay, iron, but you get my point. Before the story ran, I took the time to check the Sun-Times, Tribune and Daily News files, and found that, in the 100 years Neenah has been making manhole covers for the city, nobody from the Chicago press had ever found a way to drive up there and write about the process. Not once. I was the first. That, to me, is something to be proud of, to be that guy, the guy who asked Cologuard, "Who opens the jar?" For many subjects, I'm the only one who wrote a particular story in the Chicago press over the past 40 years — the social lives of transvestites. A factory making table pads. What it's like to visit a dominatrix. The fact that nobody has written before, or since, and no reader was waiting for the answer, isn't a reason to pause. It's a reason to hurry forward. A plaudit. Icing on the cake.

    Does that help, Bill? Because if you don't find this stuff interesting, nobody is putting a gun to your heads. As I sometimes tell people who complain: But I don't write this for people who don't like it. There must be stuff you like. Go find that. Because I'm certainly not changing to suit the displeased.

 

New book illuminates Wrigley Building

 

Photo courtesy of the Chicago History Museum

     Resolved: the Wrigley Building is a beautiful, beloved jewel of Chicago, though not great architecture. Discuss.
     "Beautiful" is a value judgment, one I endorse fully. Glazed terra cotta in six shades of white, shifting toward creamy yellow as it nears the top. Festooned with dragons, griffins, cherubs, rams. That four-faced clock, 20 feet tall.
     "Beloved" is not open to debate — any survey of popular Chicago buildings includes the Wrigley Building.
     "It was made to be liked," said Robert Sharoff, whose new coffee table book, "The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon," (Rizzoli Electa) with photographs by William Zbaren and commentaries by Tim Samuelson, shines a spotlight on a structure that's been well-illuminated for over a century.
     "The more I shot it, the more joyous it became," said Zbaren. "It's so playful."
     The Wrigley Building is just fun. Perched at the confluence of Michigan Avenue and the north bank of the Chicago River, the historic heart of Chicago — the outlines of Fort Dearborn are in brass across the street — the tower has always been a font of fascination, to me anyway,
     Starting with it being in reality two buildings, built at different times, with different addresses, 400 and 410 N. Michigan, connected at the 14th floor by that metal skybridge, a rococo detail that seems pulled from those dreamlike early 1900s fantasies of the urban future, with plump zeppelins and streamlined elevated trains and mustachioed gentlemen in bowler hats pedaling through the air on penny-farthing bicycles with wings.
     "The Wrigley Building" bristles with glorious facts that even I didn't know, starting with the clock initially being hand-wound by someone turning an enormous crank, winching up weights that once drove the mechanism.
     The authors come down firmly in favor of "great architecture," not surprising in a book bankrolled by Wrigley Building owner Joe Mansueto. Though they insist the Morningstar billionaire gave them a free hand, which they use to massage the life of the architect, Charles Beersman, who does not have a deep portfolio — his other building of note is Cleveland's Terminal Tower. Both of his signature structures are riffs on the Giralda Tower in Spain, with notes of New York's Municipal Building stirred into Wrigley.
     To me, he had one idea, and it was someone else's. But in this book, Beersman might as well be Michelangelo — we're given nine of his 11 childhood addresses in San Francisco, in a note.
     What we get far less of are the critics who lined up over the years to give the Wrigley Building the backhand. Lewis Mumford referred to its "safe mediocrity." The Wrigley Building is "just what the name implies," sniffed Frank Lloyd Wright — admittedly not famous for kindness toward other architects — noting it “illustrates the principle that an ugly building by day, if illuminated, will be ugly by night as well.”

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Flashback 1999: Now's the time for him to chart his own course

    Today is the 38th anniversary of my joining the Sun-Times, a day I traditionally reach back into the files and highlight something from the archive. This column appealed to me because, to be honest, I write about myself so goddamn much, it's a relief to see me focusing on someone else for a change. 

     This column ran the summer I crossed the ocean with my dad for the book, "Don't Give Up the Ship." Our New Zealand press lord, Nigel Wade, would not give me time off — he was offended that I asked — so I had to file a column, three days a week, from the sea, using the molasses-dripping-off-a-stick-in-winter satellite modem in the radio room. Focusing on the ship's only Chicago cadet was a no-brainer. 

    The obvious question this column leaves us with is: what happened to Terry McCabe? My gut told me, as mentioned at the end, that the son, grandson and great-grandson of police officers has a strong chance of becoming a Chicago cop. But CPD, natch, did not respond to my inquiry, and a desultory online search came up empty. He'd be in his late 40s now. He seemed like a nice kid; I hope he's having a good life.

     ABOARD THE EMPIRE STATE — So how does a 21-year-old South Side Irish kid end up aboard a ship, 300 miles due north of Puerto Rico, steaming toward Barbados at a brisk clip of 17 knots?
     "I like water," offers Terry McCabe, the only Chicagoan attending the State of New York Maritime College, the oldest of the nation's six colleges teaching young people the honorable and endangered art of navigating the high seas. Every summer, 400 underclassmen and -women set sail for eight weeks aboard the Empire State — a 37-year-old cargo ship converted to carry trainees — cruising from the Bronx and heading, on this summer's voyage, to Charleston, Barbados, Naples and Wales.
     I suggest to the 1996 graduate of Mount Carmel High School that while many people like water, few sail the seas. He digs for a better explanation.
     "I was a lifeguard at Rainbow Beach, at 79th and Lake Street — also at Kennedy Park," he says. "This is what came to me, I guess."
     It is gratifying to see your city well-represented, and McCabe, as Maritime's lone Chicagoan, does just that. He was vice president of the student council, president of the 50-member Emerald Society, and wrestled at 171 pounds. The cadets have their nicknames embroidered on the pockets of their blue boiler suits, and McCabe's "Scrappy" is a remnant from his days on Maritime's now-defunct rugby team. Five-foot-eight "on a good day," he made up the difference between himself and the typical rugby behemoth with pure grit. Maritime prides itself on a certain quasi-military discipline, and so disbanded its rugby team after realizing that rugby placed its cadets in the general vicinity of other collegiate rugby teams, and thus such venerable rugby traditions as the Naked Beer Slide.*
     Probably just as well. While McCabe's older sister is a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, his blood is not navy but Chicago Police Department blue. His great-grandfather, Peter McCabe, was a Chicago cop, as was his grandfather, John McCabe, as was his father, also John McCabe, who just retired as a detective at Area 2 violent crimes after 30 years on the force. His brother, named — and you saw this coming — John McCabe Jr., is a fourth-generation Chicago cop, currently on leave.
     Despite that long tradition, McCabe — who took and passed the police exam last March — is in no rush to settle down at 11th and State, certainly not before seeing the world. And he has already seen much more than the typical 21-year-old from Mount Greenwood. This is his third cruise_the past two summers took him, among other places, to Spain, Portugal, Germany, Bermuda, England and his ancestral Ireland.
      He wasn't overly impressed. Asked his assessment of the countries he's seen, McCabe replies: "They're all the same." Pressed for something more profound, McCabe, who plays bagpipes in the Chicago Stockyards Kilty Band, admits "Ireland was actually pretty cool."
     McCabe has reasons to be nonplused. Not only is he from Chicago, but the Maritime College is not your run-of-the-mill state institution either. Tucked on the very northeast tip of New York City, where the East River flows into Long Island Sound, the college is built around Fort Schuyler, an 1830s pentagon of stone with formal parade grounds and slit gun ports and enough nautical memorabilia scattered about to quicken even a Midwesterner's dusty heart, such as a massive bronze five-bladed propeller salvaged off that greyhound of the seas, the SS United States, and displayed as if it were sculpture.
     "(The campus) is one of the things I like most about it," says McCabe. "It's hard to believe it's in the Bronx."
     It is, but we're not. Not anymore. The Bronx is 10 days and 1,300 miles behind us. Shipboard life for cadets falls into routine. "You're either on watch, or working or in class," says McCabe, a 1st class boatswain — sort of like a handyman on the ship. They need a handyman, given that the vessel is basically 12,000 tons of pumps, blowers, winches, watertight doors, condensers, conduits and wildcats that haul up 12,900-pound anchors on massive chains with links 14 inches long.
     "You don't usually use heavy machinery in college," McCabe notes.
     The news about the maritime industry typically sounds so grim — all those 400,000-ton Japanese supertankers with crews of a dozen or two — but McCabe, entering his senior year, doesn't think he has spent the last three years training for a dwindling profession.
     "I have more options than (I would at) any other college," he says. "I'll graduate with a degree in marine transportation and I'll also have my U.S. Coast Guard license for unlimited tonnage. So they gave me the best of both worlds here. You can ship out, you can work on land. And my degree is so inclusive, you can do anything and everything, from maritime law to maritime insurance."
     He doesn't add "to being a cop" but that's where I'd bet my money. The lure of the sea is mighty, but it drains away compared to 100 years of family tradition. And besides: How many police officers can figure out where they are with a sextant and a starry night sky? We could use one, someday. But Terry McCabe is in no rush. He has those supreme luxuries of youth: time and a world awaiting.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 1999

* Something I knew about because I had witnessed it first hand at a Big 10 rugby party held at Northwestern Apartments in 1979.

The Shed endures

 

     For the past 20 years or so, we've hosted Thanksgiving. Big boisterous events packed with food and family. But this year we had an offer we couldn't refuse — spend the holiday with our younger son's new in-laws in Cooperstown, New York. That's quite a drive, and we stopped the first night in my hometown of Berea, Ohio.
     I might not have gone out of my way to eyeball the old house. I saw it, what, 10 years ago? But our host suggested the nostalgia tour, and we swept over. The circle where we played kickball seemed so very small, and I stood at home plate a moment, waiting for a boy now older than I am to roll a ball that wasn't coming. 

      I remembered that when I recently wrote about The Fort I built the boys, a reader expressed interest in seeing The Shed that my father constructed — by himself, during the three weeks I was at summer camp, start to finish, which is about two years quicker than I took to build mine.
     So I gingerly stepped into the side yard and snapped the photo above, hurrying away before the homeowner might notice and jump to shoot me. "This is Ohio after all," I said. 
     In my day there was no decoration — and a tall rectangular window in front that has been painted over. Or boarded over — maybe the glass was shot out too many times.
     The new owner is obviously a golfer, judging by the bric a brac scattered everywhere. And why not? It's his house, and it's a free country — so far, though judging by the number of Trump flags I saw snapping in the buckeye breeze, that could change. My hometown friend urged me to knock on the door and present myself as the original occupant — my father would take his lunch here and watch construction proceed. I was reluctant but, joined by my wife so as not to present "some scary solitary man," I rang, waited a moment then, relieved, hurried away. 

The Fort

     In Wednesday's column about  woodworking, I might have given the impression that I've never touched tools before. That isn't true. This post was ready to go over the summer, then never ran. I'm not sure why.
     Maybe I wanted to keep The Fort private. I haven't mentioned it here before, to my recollection. A structure built in the backyard for the boys when they were small. Maybe it was somehow special, to me — the boys won't care one way or the other — and I didn't want to turn it into material. Not everything is for public consumption. You're allowed to keep some things for yourself. But that ship has sailed, hasn't it? Maybe I just didn't want to offer up to public scrutiny an amateur structure that I designed and built. That sounds right.

     This is from my unpublished travelogue, "The Quest for Pie," written about a five-week trip across the country I took with the boys in 2009 when they were 12 and 13. In this section, I am wondering whether to really go through with the trip, simply because I said that we would.

     Selfishness is a father’s friend, or can be. If you view everything you do for your kids as a sacrifice, every effort as putting yourself out over something you aren’t interested in and getting nothing in return for your trouble, then you’re going to end up not doing much with them. Where luck comes in is when a dad does what he wants to do, and it ends up being good for his children as well. 

     This trip thing, I realized, might work to my advantage. I had been beavering away at the newspaper business for years, for decades, scrambled to the top of this small hill at the very moment it was being washed away. Now I was king of the damp, dwindling mound. Why not take a break to travel, to reflect? What was I afraid of? 

     And I had a previous experience, a template for rashly committing myself to an endeavor that turned out to be both a ton of effort and worth it. We moved to the suburbs from the city nearly a decade earlier, when Ross was about to enter kindergarten. That wasn’t a coincidence. The Chicago public schools try hard but fall short — way short. Ross was a bright, mischievous, talkative little boy, and just the thought of sending him to a substandard city school felt like contemplating child abuse. The public schools weren’t good enough and we couldn’t afford private school. Hence the suburbs, our only option. Ross was as nostalgic and change-averse as any 5-year-old, and didn’t want to go. Hoping to soften the transition, I promised him that, after the big move, he would have a play fort in our ample backyard. What kid doesn’t want a play fort?

     A couple years later, we’re living in our old shambling ruin of a home, an aluminum-sided former farmhouse built in 1905, on its half-acre lot in Northbrook with The Forest running down one edge.

     “So…” I said, probing. “What do you want to do this summer?” 

     “Oh I don’t know…” Ross said, laying the trap. “I wouldn’t mind playing in my fort.” 

     He looked hard at me. Oh right the fort, I thought. I did promise you that, didn’t I? I should pause here to touch upon the idea of unfulfilled paternal promises. When I was growing up, my father often told me how, when he was a boy, his father Sam, a sign painter in the Bronx, tricked him into working every Saturday morning at his sign shop with the promise of a real Lionel train set, the Holy Grail toy for boys in the 1940s, which my grandfather claimed he had already acquired, and was on a certain high shelf in the sign shop, waiting to be earned. He pointed out the box to my father on his first day at work. 

     My father cleaned brushes and painted what he could that Saturday and on many Saturdays to come. Then one day, curious, he got on a chair to take a peek at this train set he would be getting, and it turned out the box supposedly filled with his reward was merely the transformer from a neon sign. There was no train set. There had never been a train set. 

     Something about that story lodged under my skin. Maybe it was the high shelf, or the bald lie of my grandfather’s. The haunting image of a train set that wasn’t there, compounded by the variety of half-plans that my father, despite his own disappointments, nevertheless had dangled in front of me. We would climb Mount Rainier together. The family would move to a series of cities, from London to Baltimore. He would buy a car for me when I turned 16. It never happened. Nothing ever seemed to happen. 

     Okay, that’s harsh. Good things did happen. They did. When I was a teenager, my father spent two summers working in Boulder, Colorado and took the family along. We hiked the Arapahoe Glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park. When business took him to Europe, we all went to Geneva for a month, then London and Paris for a week apiece. One summer, while I was away at camp, my father built in our backyard something we called “The Shed,” but was actually an attractive, well-built, two-story A-frame structure — cherry-stained, matching our home, with double doors that swung out to store the lawnmower and his tools on a tongue-in-groove floor below solid enough to drive a truck on, with a wooden ladder that led up through a trap door to a space above, a secret clubhouse just for me with a skylight window that opened. It was fantastic, and that I would initially overlook it and give the impression I was raised in a closet should tell you something important about myself. 

     Memories of that structure were foremost in mind while I was dismissing, out–of-hand, the play fort kits that suburbanites buy at garden centers and put outside their custom-built, million-dollar homes. The kind with the little strip of green fabric as a roof and the flimsy yellow slide. Those pre-fab forts struck me as an astounding lapse, a mystifying cheapness, similar to how some people stick stackable white plastic chairs out on the luxurious wrought iron balconies of their four-story townhouses. My father designed and built The Shed; I would design and build The Fort. For who wants to be a lesser man than his father? 

      I bought a big pad of blue-square graph paper, sharpened pencils and sat planning with a ruler at the dining room table. The Fort had to sleep four — two sons and two friends. It had to have a ladder and a slide and a cargo net. It must be made of cedar: there would be no need for stain or paint.

     Eventually the drawings were done — careful schematics, precise scale plans, thanks to a mechanical drawing class taken in 7th grade. A front view; a side view, a 3-D view. The Fort wasn’t in a tree, but stood on four five-foot-tall, 6 x 6 beams standing atop four concrete footings. To support the structure, the footings — I calculated — should be three feet deep. How much concrete would you need for four cylindrical footings, each 10 inches in diameter and a yard deep? Nearly a thousand pounds, dry. 

     A week passed. Two. I contemplated the drawings. Really, very nicely done, very skillful drawings. The fort had a porch and a flagpole. It looked like a lot of fun to play on, and a world of work to build. I’d never done anything like it. An incredible task, to actually construct this thing. What was I thinking, taking on this burden? Just because I’d promised my son I would? The most complex structure I had built up to that point was a compost bin behind the garage, a rectangular box lined with chicken wire. Building it took a day. 

     But if I balked, what would I do? Show the drawings to the boys someday, tell them: this was the fort I was going to build you, but I chickened out? That sounds familiar. My Lionel train set on the high shelf. 

     No. Impossible. I would build the Pyramids if doing so kept me from being a disappointment to my boys. I went to Home Depot, took one of those low rolling orange platform carts and piled it with nearly 1,000 pounds of concrete — a dozen 80-pound bags. The platform was very heavy, slow to get moving — you had to really lean into it — and tough to push. And at one point, between the concrete section at the far wall and the registers up front, I stopped and just stood there, thinking, “This is insane.” I hesitated for what seemed like a long time, in the middle of the vast warehouse of a Home Depot, frozen before a pallet of concrete, hands around the scuffed metal bar, my own life, stretching back in my head, and the life I hoped for my boys stretching forward. Hope for a life where they might be better off, better tended, better loved, just in general better than their father. I weighed the thought of returning to the concrete section, pictured sliding the bags back into their places. Looked at the thought, almost as if it were a small object nestled in my hand. Then I made a decision, firm and irrevocable, tightened my grip on the bar, bent forward and pushed that concrete until it started to roll toward the checkout counter. 

     The Fort took three summers to build, from the time I staked out the holes and began to dig, to when I nailed in the last cedar shingle in place and signed a hidden message to the boys high up on a beam facing the eaves. The three of us slept in it that night, the night I completed it, a jumble of pillows and sleeping bags, a rare warm November night. They never slept in it again. But they play in it sometimes, during Super Soaker battles and snowball fights. It looks swell, gentling aging in the seasons, the cedar slowly going to gray, like the guy who built it, and while I wish I had started a few summers sooner, I never regretted all the time and effort and money it took to build. I think some of the happiest moments of my life were standing out back in the summer sun, with the yellow DeWalt chop saw set up on the deck, a boombox blasting music, cutting the lumber for that structure, kneeling on the half-completed flooring to screw planks into place, standing up with a pencil behind my ear and a leather belt heavy with tools slung low on my hips. The big hexagonal-head stainless steel carriage bolts used for the ladder — stainless so they wouldn’t rust and streak the wood — were a joy to hold in the flat of my hand and contemplate; so well machined, they made me proud to be a human being. 

     The Fort was in mind when I considered the trip. I could ignore it, for a while, and did. But I could not abandon it. A promise is a promise.

"A sad ending to a sad story"

     When I heard the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had gone and done it, I of course felt bad — for him, at least for the decent human being he had once been, long ago. And for his family. I'd gotten to know his brother, Chris, a little, when he was head of the Merchandise Mart, and found him a smart man, energetic, devoted to family and dedicated to social justice. I knew how proud he was of his father's legacy, and how fiercely he tried to protect it from those who'd tear down his memory. 

     But he was powerless to protect that reputation from the rolling besmirchment that is RFK Jr. As terrible as it must have been to see his brother descend in vaccine nuttiness and paranoid conspiracy theorizing, to see him now outdo himself by kissing the ring of Trump is, as Chris and his family wrote in a letter released Friday, "a sad ending to a sad story ... Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today are a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear." Speaking of their father in the present tense underscores just how real he is to them, still, 56 years after his death. 

         Robert Vickrey (Smithsonian)

     And it is a sad story. RFK Jr. lost his father when he was 14. He struggled with heroin addiction for decades, became a respected environmental lawyer, but then changed. I remember reading a story about RFK Jr. thundering against the windmills he once boosted when they were going to be put within sight of the family compound at Hyannisport. Maybe the good-for-you-but-not-for-me hypocrisy somehow tore his mind apart.

     I haven't talked to Chris since his ill-considered, poorly-executed run for the governorship in 2018. I'd pissed him off by writing a column saying, in essence, if he really cared about what he says he believes in, he'd drop out and support Dan Biss, because otherwise they'll both lose to J.B. Pritzker (which is indeed what happened). No Nostradamus, I saw Pritzker as a scion of wealth and nothing more, failing to sense what a magnificent governor he would turn out to be.
      Rather than consider my advice, Kennedy was angry and felt betrayed. Loyalty is very big among those who resent being judged by their words and actions. We never spoke again. That's okay. I get by, though I did enjoy our conversations, and what, despite our widely divergent stations in life, at some moments felt like actual friendship. (Even though, now that I think about it, at the time I quoted to him Aristotle's line about how between master and slave there is no friendship). When the news broke Friday, I rooted around for Chris's phone number, thinking to send him a supportive note during what has to be a difficult moment — save grudges for junior high. But I actually know several Chris Kennedys at this point, and didn't want to bother the wrong one. Probably just as well. I can't imagine him caring one way or the other. I'm surprised I do, but then, I'm slow to give up on people.

    As for RFK Jr., this really isn't the "sad ending" his siblings envision. If only it were. Alas, again, they are putting the bright spin on an erring family member. RFK Jr.'s story is not at its end, unfortunately, but now continues, to a fresh hell, the humiliation of being a Trump acolyte. Take a glance at a piece I wrote in 2016, "Chris Christie in rags" about the "stunned, miserable stare" on Christie's face when he found himself standing in Trump's rogue's gallery of supporters, just another supernumerary to the Great Chee-toh God, hoping to huff a contact high of ego and power. The former governor of New Jersey later tried to reinvent himself as a person with a functional conscience, and speak out against Trump. Too little, too late. Or as I sometimes will write a reader: a person who thinks that Donald Trump is a good idea for this country can't really expect anyone to care what he thinks about anything else. It's the same reason you don't ask homeless people for stock tips. I wonder as RFK slides deeper into the Trumpian netherworld whether it will ever occur to him that he had done this to himself. 

     I haven't written much about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because, honestly, I find him too repellent to contemplate. But I keep up with someone in the Kennedy circle, who met RFK Jr. a few times, and asked her what she thinks of him. "A shocking monster," she replied, without hesitation. And that was before he endorsed the greatest menace to American democracy since the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.  

    Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about John F. Kennedy's style — his brother Ted generously granted me an interview and sent me a kind letter after it was published — and like many Americans, harbor still a small wellspring of respect for a family that gave so much to the country. But the source of that spring went dry years and years in the past, and the ground around it has become dry and cracked. Just a fading, tattered memory among a dwindling band of people, a ruined dream that even some who carry the revered name and cursed blood  stopped caring about a long time ago. 

Flashback 1991: Win Stracke dies — folk singer was a pioneer in kids' TV

Win Stracke

   I'm reading Mark Guarino's excellent "Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival" — more about that in my column Friday — and when he got to the founding of the Old Town School of Folk Music, and Win Stracke, I found myself thinking, "Wait a sec ... I think I wrote his obit." Thirty three years ago. As to why that would stick in mind, I'm not sure. His unusual name, maybe. Or the fact that I spoke with Studs Terkel about him. I would draw your attention to the name of the contributing writer at the end: Mary A. Johnson. That was the future Mary Mitchell. 

     Win Stracke, 83, troubadour  and co-founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music, died Saturday at his home in the North Shore Hotel in Evanston.

     For decades, Mr. Stracke, a big, deep-voiced, gentle-humored balladeer, was an important presence on the Chicago folk scene, performing his music on radio, television and the stage.
     Born in Lorraine, Kan., in 1908, he was the son of a German Baptist minister, Robert Stracke.
     The family moved to what became the 43rd Ward in 1909, and the elder Stracke served as minister at the church at Willow and Burling.
     Later, Mr. Stracke immortalized the ward in a ballad about its wild politics and colorful politicians.
     Win Stracke began singing at his father's church and soon became a soloist at other churches.
     During World War II, he served in an Army anti-aircraft battery in Europe, carrying his guitar through six overseas campaigns, playing his folk songs for troops.
     With the advent of television, he performed in what were known as Chicago School TV shows. He had a running role on the "Studs Place" show, the "Hawkins Falls" soap opera, "The Garroway Show," and his own children's shows, "Animal Playtime" and "Time for Uncle Win."
     Mr. Stracke's soft wit and gentle presence made him ideal for children's television.
     "Let's see," Mr. Stracke told his audience in an early "Animal Playtime" show, which made its debut in March, 1953. "Let's sing about animals that we like. What kind do you like?"
     Pausing for a second, he gazed directly at the camera and at his young viewers. Then he brightened. "Dogs? Why sure, we all like dogs, don't we? Now. . . ," and he began strumming a simple song about dogs, one of thousands of folk songs he composed.
     "He pushed other people into loving music," said Dawn Greening, who helped Mr. Stracke start the Old Town School of Folk Music. "He shared his love for the music with everybody, I just remember where I first heard him sing; one of the places was the Gate of Horn. I just thought he was really wonderful."
     When "Animal Playtime" was canceled in 1954, thousands of mothers — who appreciated Mr. Stracke's mixture of lively songs with lessons about animals — mounted an angry crusade that led to the show's reinstatement.
     "You can say Win was Chicago's Bard because of the songs he sang," said Studs Terkel, who called Mr. Stracke his "oldest friend."
     "Win was a friend of blues singers, folk singers, everybody. He sang in picket lines when the CIO was organized. He was there whenever there was difficulties at picket lines. He was a stalwart."
       Mr. Stracke "was the figure that brought together social action, the love of tradition and really good fun," said Stuart Rosenberg, a local musician, songwriter and WBEZ radio show host.
       "There is a whole generation of singers and songwriters who looked to Win for their first inspiration. He was a unique figure in that he related to everyone."
      In 1957, Mr. Stracke began the Old Town School of Folk Music with Greening, Frank Hamilton and Gertrude Soltker. Begun with one teacher and 20 students, the school helped make Chicago a center of folk singing.
     "The whole idea is to give people who love folk music a chance to participate rather than to just listen," Mr. Stracke said at the time. "This interest in folk music by city people betrays their search for the basic realities which they don't find expressed in commercial popular music."
     Mr. Stracke was a member of the Civil War Round Table and the Chicago Historical Society. He wrote the words to "Freedom Country," a 23-minute cantata celebrating the Illinois sesquicentennial in 1967.
     For the last 20 years he had been retired, living for seven years in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, then returning to the United States to live in Fort Collins, Colo., until three years ago, when he returned to Chicago.
     Survivors include two daughters, Jane Bradbury and Barbara Pavey, and two grandchildren.
     Services were pending.
     Contributing: Mary A. Johnson

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 30, 1991 

Hope in Grief

      Over a year ago, Rotary Magazine asked me to write something about suicide and handguns. I found a club member affected by this tragic plague, talked to relatives and friends of her lost loved one, and accompanied her on a suicide awareness march in Dallas. 

      The article is in the November issue, after passing through a lengthy editing process,and I encourage you to read it here. I also thought it might interest blog readers to see the article as originally written, which you'll find below:

     Jesse Cedillo was a soft-spoken young man who dreamed of becoming a police officer. But being heavy, and suffering from chronic back pain, he worried about the physical demands of the job. After high school, he regularly helped out around the Locust Fork Baptist Church, the center of life in a small rural Alabama town that is Jesse’s mother called “just a blink of the eye really” along the highway between Huntsville and Birmingham, a community located in Blount County, a hilly region dotted with long-established farms slowly losing their tug-o-war with new housing developments. 

     On April 18, 2015, Cedillo had a cheerful conversation with the church pastor, Rufus Harris, assisted an elderly parishioner down the front steps, made sure the lights were off and the doors locked, then went to his grandparents' house, next door to where he lived with his mother. There he stepped into the study, took one of his grandfather's guns and shot himself. 

     He was 20 years old. 

     "It was a complete surprise," said Cedillo's aunt, Lori Crider, through tears. "He was very quiet. He always seemed to be fairly happy." 

     "It shook up the whole community," said Harris. "Everybody was broken-hearted over this event and couldn't understand why something like that had taken place." 

     Why do people kill themselves? The question arises immediately after this surprisingly ordinary tragedy. More than 47,000 Americans commit suicide every year—128 a day— according to the Centers for Disease Control, making it the 10th most common cause of death. More victims than taken by car accidents or pneumonia. 

     Jesse Cedillo’s friends offered one explanation — he was bullied, maybe even the night he shot himself. 

     "People were probably mean to him," said his youth pastor at the time, Randy Cater. "High school can be that way." 

     Cherie Cedillo, his mother, said that any mockery was affectionate. 

     “He was overweight, he was teased,” she said. “But everybody loved JC. The way he took it was not how they intended. He was like an old soul. He was just different.” 

     There is another, even more significant reason hiding in plain sight. One that doesn't get talked about nearly enough: a gun was readily available. In some parts of the country, guns are so prevalent, they are hardly noticed, never mind viewed as perils. 

     “We’ve always been around guns,” said Cherie Cedillo, who won awards for shooting when she was in the 4H Club. “Daddy always kept the one that JC used, just for personal protection. It’s always been there. We had no idea.” 

     Suicide rates in states with the highest level of gun ownership are three times higher for men, almost eight times higher for women, than in states with low gun ownership. 

     Not because gun owners are more suicidal. Rather because when someone attempts to kill themselves with a gun, they usually succeed, 90 percent of the time. Intentionally overdosing on drugs instead, for instance, is fatal in only about 3 percent of cases. Since most who attempt to kill themselves and fail never try again, guns steal that second chance. They make suicide too easy. 

     What is not in any way easy is coping with the aftermath. Millions of Americans struggle to understand and accept the suicide of a friend or loved one. Crider, a member of Rotary since 2010, threw herself into helping others to cope with her own grief and to prevent suicides from happening. In 2021 she created the Suicide Prevention and Brain Health Rotary E-Club. 

     "As soon as I heard about cause-based clubs becoming a thing, we chartered the new club," said Crider, who lives in Dallas. "We're at about 50 members. It was really surprising to get that many. It's needed, and the Rotary provides a great resource in helping spread the word." 

     Crider's e-club was one of the sponsors of the Out of the Darkness Dallas/Fort Worth Metro Walk on the last Saturday in October, 2022. Since 2004, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has sponsored some 400 such walks all across the country. 

     "The walks raise awareness around the issue of suicide, reduce stigma, educate the public and allow those with a connection to the cause to come together," according to the AFSP. "They also raise funds to support research, advocacy, education and programs." 

     The morning of the Dallas walk dawned gray and rainy, with wintery clouds surging across the skies framing the roller coasters at Six Flag Over Texas, as participants gathered at nearby Choctaw Stadium, home to the Texas Rangers for a quarter century. 

     Shirley Weddle, charter president of the suicide prevention e-club, stood in the concourse, setting up a table with a bowl of wristbands and another of red-and-white mints, plus handouts and pens. She lost her only child, Matthew, to suicide when he was 21. 

     Weddle said that society encourages people to seek help, then punishes them if they do. 

   "Just a few years ago, if I renewed my license for radiology in the state of Texas, they would ask you questions about have you had depression, and they will try to monitor you," Weddle said. "There are physicians that will go across state lines and pay cash and use a different name to get help because they don't want to say they're getting assistance." 

     Even prestigious universities like Yale pressure suicidal students who seek help to drop out. Which speaks to an important aspect of the walk — to publicly demonstrate that suicide, whether committed by a loved one or simply contemplated, is not a taboo topic. You not only can talk about suicide; you must. 

     "There is still so much shame about it," said Pamela Greene, a licensed professional counselor participating in the walk. "So we're trying to dispel that. We are not alone. There's this many people, and I really believe it has changed their lives, being able to open up and talk about their experiences." "

     Awareness is a big piece of it, for me personally," said Stephanie Duck, chair of the Dallas walk, who lost her grandfather to suicide in 2018. "I think, the more we talk about mental health, the more we talk about suicide awareness and intervention, the more likely people are to feel comfortable reaching out, seeking help, not feeling alone. A big part of awareness is getting the facts out there." 

     Handouts and brochures were offered at tables ringing the concourse at Choctaw Stadium. Shielded from the rain, a thousand people or so milled around, greeting each other, hugging, taking literature and snacks. One table gave away strings of color-coded Mardi Gras beads: white for the loss of a child, red for a spouse or partner, gold for a parent. 

     Crider wore seven strands, in purple (loss of a relative) green (personal struggle) teal (supporting someone who has attempted suicide) and blue (general prevention).  

     "I've lost more than Jesse, unfortunately," she said. "I had an aunt in the '90s. Then a friend about mid-2000s. Then my cousin in West Virginia after Jesse. I wear a purple for each of them." 

     Certain factors increase the risk of suicide: men kill themselves more often than women. Whites more than Blacks and singles more than marrieds. The suicide rate in rural areas is double that of the city; experts blame isolation and the ready availability of guns. The more educated you are, the less likely you are to kill yourself. Though suicide is the second leading cause of death among U.S. teens, after car accidents and before murders, that’s because young people tend not to die otherwise; suicide risk actually rises with age, topping out at those older than 85. 

     Suicide is an epidemic in the military — since the 9/11 terror attacks, four times as many service members have taken their own lives than have fallen in battlefield operations. Military personnel tend to have many risk factors found in the general population — male, lower education level, access to firearms — and add others unique to service: post-traumatic stress, deployment abroad far from friends and family, sexual assault that is also epidemic. 

     The suicide rate for male veterans is 50 percent higher than that of the general public, 2.5 times higher for female vets. A dozen veterans commit suicide every day, according to Tony Dickensheets, manning the Soldiers' Angels table at the Dallas walk. He served in the Army, 101st Airborne, guarding the DMZ in South Korean. A Rotarian and member of Crider's e-club, he speaks to police and veterans groups all over Texas. 

     "I know what suicidal ideation is because I battle it weekly if not daily," he said. "I have a severe mental illness; I am bipolar, and battled it for 37 years." 

     How can he be so open about something that many are reluctant to admit, even to themselves? 

     "I'm a Christian,” he said. “I like to give back. I believe in giving back." 

     The benefit flows both ways. 

     "Whenever you help others you help yourself," he said. "Whether you have mental illness or not, whether you are a Christian or not." 

     His organization connects volunteers stateside with soldiers, sailors and airmen stationed abroad, suggesting they send a monthly letter or care package. Even just a postcard can be the kind of connection that keeps despair at bay for someone serving our country. 

     "There are different ways to serve," he said. "Adopting a soldier overseas is a way of serving the military." 

     Suicide by gun spiked to a 20 year high in 2020, thought to be partially due to negative effects of COVID lockdown. Rotaries have been active in encouraging the public to lock up their guns. For instance, in March, the Rotary Club of Avon, New York offered a presentation by Lock and Talk Livingston, a program handing out free gun locks to encourage safe storage. 

     At Choctaw Stadium, cable gun locks were also available for free to anyone who needed one. 

     "We talk about how important it is to lock up and secure firearms in the home or vehicle," said Donna Schmidt, standing at the BE SMART table. 

     "The word 'SMART' becomes an acronym to remember behaviors we have around guns," she said. "'S' for secure—securing your firearm, unload it, lock it. 'M' is modeling your behavior around guns. 'A' is 'ask.' A lot of people don't think about this when your kids or grandkids go to somebody else's house, ask them if their guns are locked up. 'R' is recognizing the risk of suicide is three times higher for a home with a firearm in it. For a depressed teen, it's 10 times higher. 'T' is for telling other people the idea about securing firearms. If you have one, then please be safe. The idea of storing a firearm securely is not anti-gun." 

     As a steady stream of walkers moved out into the rainy morning, a long, snaking line on the sidewalk was knotted with groups of friends and relatives, some holding large photo montages of lost loved ones, or wearing matching tribute t-shirts: “Team Jake” and “#ForJames” and “#TeamJulian,” honoring an 11-year-old. Their stories often involve the presence of a gun turning a passing impulse into a permanent loss. 

     Last July, Joshua Garcia and his girlfriend Courtney Barrett went out to Whataburger for dinner. Afterward, for reasons mysterious — maybe because he'd been drinking — he walked out into the garage and used the gun he carried on his hip for protection to kill himself. 

     "It was definitely spur of the moment," said Melissa Barrett, Courtney's mother. "She happened to walk out there and seen him put the gun to his head. She couldn't have stopped it, but at the same time, she told me she thought about going and grabbing the gun herself. She didn't know she'd be able to survive. I could have lost her that night as well." 

     The emotional damage that suicide inflicts on loved ones cannot be overstated. 

     "Our lives were completely destroyed for ..." began Kathy Thompson, whose son Luke, age 18, hung himself the week before Thanksgiving in 2018. 

     "...two years," added her husband, Tony, a pilot. 

     Luke’s mother said she was struck, reading his note, by how massively her son underestimated the toll his death would take on his parents. Suicidal teens can feel so insignificant; they don't understand their central place in the lives of others. 

     "I don't think they realize the impact," she said. "He did mention in his letter, he thought people might be sad for a few minutes. He thought, someone might cry for a couple days. We cried for years. We will cry for years." 

      Four years later, she can look back at the tortuous road they've been traveling. 

     "The first year you're in shock, a zombie," she continued. "Then the second and third years were so hard. You're really realizing that this is real. Just kinda going through the motions." 

     "We turned to God," her husband said. "We both have a very strong walk with the Lord right now. Got involved with the church that helped us through this. Now we lead the grief share at our church." 

     Faith can be a refuge to survivors, but it can also plague believers taught that suicides are condemned to hell. The families of those lost to suicide often reject that. 

     "I know where Jesse is," said his grandmother, Mary Ann Crider, who discovered his body. "It's a comfort. You hear people say things like, 'If somebody takes their life they go to hell.' I never found that in Scripture. Never. It says, 'Nothing can separate us from God's love.' Jesse was mentally sick, probably depressed, because he was picked on so much." 

     The walk was brief. Two kilometers, a little over a mile. Long enough to raise $227,532. But its non-monetary value is obvious to those who need to do something: gather, walk, talk, hug, cry. 

     Dawn Carson Bays had gallbladder surgery a week ago, and cut her recuperation short to show up and walk in memory of her husband David. 

     "We didn't have any guns in the house until we went through the [2020 George Floyd] riots," said Bays. "So I told him to go get guns from his dad. Then I told him to take them back, and he ... didn't. That's how he killed himself. He disappeared on a Monday and he killed himself on a Thursday." 

     That was two years ago. Of course she feels guilty for having been the motivation for that gun being there. 

     "The second year is harder," she said, because she was "in a haze" the first year. 

     Now she finds herself a refugee from her own life, lost in a dark, strange land. 

     "There are no words," she said. "I've given up. I was very successful in my career, and now I'm like, ‘It's not worth it anymore.’ Done. I've totally changed. Everything is different to me. I have to get up every morning and I don't want to." 

     Bays has a message to share. 

     "If you are contemplating suicide, you don't understand the impact on all the people you left behind," she said. "It's not a bad thing to say you're not okay. It's not a bad thing to say, 'I need help.' The effect on me, my family, my friends...." 

     How can you know if a loved one is contemplating suicide? Those close to Jesse Cedillo had no idea. 

     "His demeanor hadn't changed," said Randy Cater, who was with him "24/7" the week before a spring break church youth retreat. "I didn't pick up anything much different. Nothing was out of the ordinary; there didn't seem to be any triggers. I wish I would have known to ask. " 

     "It is pretty common that you hear that: 'We had no idea,' or that they just seemed so happy, and things like that," said Stephanie Duck, the walk chair. "Some of the key things to look for are changes in behavior, changes in mood, changes in appetite, things they are doing, things they're involved with. Are they getting rid of their possessions? Saying, 'Oh well that doesn't matter. I won't be needing them.' Watch out for that kind of language." 

Lori Crider

     “The signs were there, we just didn't read them,” said Rufus Harris. “I wish I had been more attentive. I wish I knew what to do." 

     Parents of children who commit suicide invariably wish they had pushed harder to find out what was going on. 

     "Don't be afraid to have conversations, even if it makes your child unsettled, or even makes them defensive," said Jerry Howe, who wore a photo on a lanyard around his neck of his daughter Megan, who killed herself in 2017, age 23, a month before graduating college. "Be blunt, and ask, 'Are you okay? If something's not right, you need to tell us about it. If there's something you're unsettled about, you have any kind of thoughts along those lines, any suicide ideation, you need to talk to us and you need to go to professional help or you need to talk to someone. You just can't keep it hidden away because that's the worst place to keep it. Inside, it's only going to build.’" 

     After Jesse Cedillo killed himself, some 200 Locust Fork residents came to the church for an impromptu memorial service. 

     "I wish he would have known he was loved by so many people," said Cater. 

     What should you do if you suspect someone is contemplating suicide? The National Institute of Mental Health offers "Five Action Steps for Helping Someone in Emotional Pain." 1) Ask them directly, "Are you thinking about killing yourself?" 2) Keep them safe by reducing their access to lethal items — not just guns, but pills, knives, ropes, etc. 3) Be there, listen uncritically to their feelings and acknowledge what they are saying. 4) Help them connect to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, 988 on any cell phone; 5) Stay connected, following up and keeping in touch after a crisis. 

     After a person commits suicide, it is too late to save their life. But it does not mean that lives cannot be saved. Kathy Thompson could barely speak at her son’s memorial. But now she and her husband talk about it to others, one-on-one, and have seen results. 

     "We shared our story with this gentleman, and he talked to his family about it,” said Tony Thompson. “His daughter went to school next day and said, 'I haven't been sleeping the past two days. I have this plan...' There was a huge intervention. The wife called me and said, 'I think you guys saved my daughter's life.' She was able to talk about it. She didn't want to worry her parents. So she was going to take her life. That's the thought process. They're not thinking clearly. Later, she was crying at her high school graduation party, saying, 'I wouldn't have been here.'" 

     Those tending to the needs of the suicidal, or living with the aftermath of suicide are encouraged to practice self-care: look out for their own mental well being, their own health. For Lori Crider, that means to always keep moving. She has hit her 10,000 steps every single day, missing only one because of a blizzard, over nearly the past three years. Even the rain on the Walk out of the Darkness can be seen as a blessing. 

     "We've been in such a drought," said Crider. "I'm really grateful we got the rain we did." 

     At Locust Fork Baptist Church, the Prime Timers, a group of older parishioners who get together on Mondays to play checkers and dominos, sometimes bring up the subject of Jesse, who loved games and would often join them. He was only quiet until he got to know you; then he opened up. 

     "It's been seven years since he passed away, and we still talk about him," said his grandmother, Mary Ann Crider. “It's always ‘Jesse would have said this,’ or ‘Jesse would have said that.’" 

     Her husband of 55 years, who died recently, got rid of the gun Jesse used to take his own life. 

     "We didn't want it," she said. As for the room where it happened. 

     "I thought afterward, every time I went in that room, that's what I would think of," she said. "But you know that's not true, I don't think of it every time I do go in that room." 

     What changed? "

      God has given me peace," said his grandmother. "It is something you never get over. But time does ease things a bit." 

     The pain eases, but does not go away. 

     “I think about him every day,” said his mother, Cherie Cedillo. “It’s just hard. I blame myself and it doesn’t matter what anybody tells me.” 

     She was busy at the Dollar Store at the time of her son’s death. 

     “I was working ridiculous hours,” she said. “There were a lot of time, I was working in the store, and I’d turn around and JC was there. He’d say, ‘I was heading up to church, and wanted to see if you wanted lunch.’ It was like 15 miles out of his way.” 

     She thought working so much would improve life for Jesse and his older sister. 

     “I was trying to make it better for them,” she said. “But now I think, had I been even working a 40-hour week job, would I have noticed something was wrong? I just wasn’t home to see it. It’s just hard. I don’t think I’ll ever not blame myself.”

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