Japan is a strange place

Samuri armor, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

     About 2 a.m. Sunday, Chicago time, I'll be stepping off a plane at Narita airport in Tokyo, if all goes as planned. I decided, since I dredged up old columns on LA for my trip to Los Angeles last month, I shouldn't almost immediately subject you to a week of that regarding Japan, and would try to provide some fresh reporting in real time. But travel and jet lag being what they are, I thought, until I can get myself situated and both experience something noteworthy and find the opportunity to tell you about it, not to mention a Wi-Fi connection, that I'd set the scene with some thoughts from my last visit to Japan, a quarter century ago.

     The army of reporters swarming over Nagano, dazzled by the Olympic glare, seems to have lost sight of one noteworthy aspect of Japan: It is a tremendously strange place.
     Not to the Japanese, I'm sure. They grew up there. They're used to it.
     But to Western eyes — all right, to this Westerner's eyes at least — spending even a brief time in Japan, a few years back, was enough to fix it in my mind forever as somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Shangri-La.
     For instance: umbrella condoms. That's certainly not what they are called there, but that's what I called them. You go into a department store and there are huge rolls of long plastic sheaths designed to slip over your wet umbrella so as not to cause inconvenience while you shop.
     In the places without umbrella condoms, there was something even odder: big umbrella racks. People would leave their umbrellas at the front of the store, with a reasonable assurance that the umbrellas would be there when they returned. Strange, right? Like believing in the tooth fairy. They did the same thing with their shoes at the entrances to temples and certain restaurants. In my country, that practice would result in a lot of barefoot, angry people.
     Frankly, I got the impression that in Japan they could have numbered cubbyholes at the entrances of stores for people to place their wallets in — so the store could rub oil into the leather, or polish the credit cards — and not only would people do it, but the wallets would be there when they got back.
     Some of the weirdness was close to genius. I have deep, sincere admiration for Japanese bathrooms. Many are modular units — the entire room molded out of a single piece of fiberglass. Some toilets have the sink built into the toilet tank. When you flush, a spout of water automatically fills the sink, which drains into the tank. It's very clever; no dirty faucet handles to touch, and the water used washing your hands is then used to flush the toilet later.
     The system seems even more sophisticated when you realize that nearly every other toilet in Asia is a hole in the floor between two footpads.
     Not in Japan. In Japan, taxicabs have a mechanical device that allows the white-gloved driver to fling the rear door open for you, so you don't have to undergo the agony of touching something as dubious as a public vehicle's door handle. Not that I could afford to take a taxi in Japan, but the concept is still admirable, nevertheless.
     There is also something called Tokyo Tower, a giant television tower about the same configuration as the Eiffel Tower, but several times larger and painted orange (again, strange). Go to the top of Tokyo Tower, and you can see the entire city, though God knows why you'd want to, because Tokyo is a cluttered agglomeration of charmless architecture that looks like 100 downtown Dallases assembled together in a 10-by-10 grid.
     In Japan, they have graveyards for fetuses. I happened upon one next to Tokyo Tower. Each grave had a tiny stone statue of a baby. The mothers would knit little caps and bibs for the stone babies, and stick toy pinwheels next to them. Poignant. When the wind picked up, all these pinwheels started going. It was eerie, particularly when I got a translation of some of the messages that had been left at the graves. For example, people who were feeling guilty about an abortion wrote something like "Dear Baby — we're awfully sorry about this. Forgive us . . ." Supposedly the buddhist monks who run the place make a fortune.
     Service is big in Japan. That's one of its best features. Whenever I buy something in a store in Chicago and observe the listless clerk deigning to ring up the sale and fling my purchase in my general direction, I think about how they do things in Japan. I once saw a Japanese clerk run — run — to get an item for me. I stayed at a resort where dinner was brought by a woman in a kimono who crawled into the room on her knees, carrying the food on a lacquered tray. Try finding that at a Sheraton.
     I was in Japan to visit my brother, who worked at a firm there. And the oddest thing of all was something my brother's boss did. He arranged to take me out for a drink. It struck me as unusual, but I was game and went along. (Japan is a drinker's paradise. They sell bottles of scotch from vending machines on train station platforms).
     We sat in a hotel lobby, he, smoking away (everybody smokes there), me, perched on the edge of my seat, wondering what this all was about.
     As it turned out, he just wanted to get to know me. See what kind of family his employee came from. Determine whether I was on a mission to bring my brother home. Just a concerned, friendly employer looking out for the best interests of his company and his people.
     Weird, right?

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 8, 1998

Busy

     So, I said to my wife, sitting at a casual lunch at Roti on Randolph Street in Chicago one day last week: the trouble is, between fact-checking the galleys and writing the columns and the blog posts and getting ready for my trip, I just can't get a week's worth of posts ready ahead of time for Every goddamn day while I'm away.
    "So leave it blank," she said, in the tone someone would say, "Today is Tuesday."
    But, I continued, there's the promise implicit in "Every goddam day..."
    "'Every goddamn day' is a metaphor!" she almost shouted. "For life! The relentlessness of life. Not that you have to write every goddamn day..."
     Easy for her to say. She's not the one who has to watch the online trolls dancing in a joyous conga line around you, laughing and pointing. Or, worse, realizing that no one notices or cares. So my plan is to write from the road, or the airport, or train station, to keep you posted on my travels.
    Assuming it's possible. Japan is far away. Maybe their Wi-Fi won't like my laptop.
    Anyway, another busy day yesterday, between working on an advance column for the paper, proofing my galleys and getting ready for the trip, and today was the first day in two and a half years where I woke up and realized I had entirely forgotten about the blog. But I didn't want to leave you completely high and dry. I do have a promise to keep.  So here you go. I'll check in from Japan tomorrow, if I can. 
   

Flying into fear

     Paris. London. Rome. Jerusalem. 
     Sure, I'm an international traveler. Flitting about the globe like a luna moth—I'm off to Tokyo on Saturday—wearing a bespoke suit, crisply folding my International Herald Tribune in airports from Copenhagen to Hong Kong to Vilnius, stifling a yawn as I notice that my flight takes off in 20 minutes and I had better finish my espresso and amble over to the departure gate, wherever it may be ... 
     No, that's a lie. I'm a stressed out traveler, dressed in my sensible walking shoes,  one hand clutching the lump of my wallet through my clothes, the other my boarding pass, printed out at home 23 hours and 59 minutes before the flight's scheduled departure, using an elbow to nervously guiding my rollie bag, expecting Homeland Security to wrestle me to the floor at any moment, on general principles. 
    But I can aspire, can't I? Why should Donald Trump be the only one with carte blanche to shout down reality and substitute a more flattering image? If a crude, mendacious, gold-plated, blustering P.T. Barnum of a fraud like Trump can insist he's serious presidential timber, then I can pretend I'm Daniel Craig, picking a piece of lint off my lapel and nipping a martini as the hanger in Qatar explodes behind me. 
    I saunter into the airport with the ease of a duke, taking the morning air at his estate...
  
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Blood on the tracks

    

    When I first moved to the suburbs, in 2000, I was fascinated by Metra, and did a number of columns on the rail system, such as this one, where I rode in with the engineer and talked about the toll pedestrian deaths take on Metra employees. There have been two this week on the northern lines, which seem like a lot. I also sat down with a Metra honcho to talk about odd questions I had about the rail service. Fans of irony will note that the official fielding my questions was no other than Phil Pagano, who nine years later would step in front of a Metra train himself, ending the complex hash he had made of his life. It was not only tragic and senseless, but an unfathomable insult to everyone who worked at Metra, because Pagano, of all people, must have known the impact such deaths have.

     'We're late," said John Appel, the engineer driving a 3200-horsepower Metra engine toward the city at 70 miles per hour.
      That we were. But just seven minutes late. Only railroads care about being seven minutes late. That's on time everywhere else. Heck, seven minutes late at O'Hare Airport is early.
     I was riding with Appel, in the control car of the 8:17 a.m. Milwaukee line from Northbrook. The engine was in the back, and we were in a little cab area tucked into the top of the foremost passenger car.
     My ride was something of a fluke. Ever since I began the commute in the city, I've been noticing what I called "Metra Mysteries," odd aspects of commuting that I couldn't quite explain. What are those piles of sand doing on the tracks? Why do the switches burn bright blue in winter? I had guesses but didn't really know for certain.
     I approached Metra, and they sat me down with Phil Pagano, the executive director. Pagano answered my questions -- we'll get to them in a minute -- then, in discussing the various ways frantic commuters risk death to avoid being late for work, said I should really ride with an engineer to see the Auto Thrill Show for myself. He wasn't kidding.
     "Right around the gates!" said Appel, pointing to a woman zipping her car across the tracks, maybe five seconds ahead of the train. He said he's had commuters cling to the outside of the train as it pulls out. One unfortunate woman attempted to get from one side of the train to the other by crawling under. The train pulled away, maiming her.
     "It's unbelievable what they'll do," said Appel. "So many horror stories. We all have foolish moments, but here it can cost you your life."
     Appel doesn't want to talk about the suicides, the people who walk to meet the oncoming trains. Metra gives you three days off, mandatory, when that happens, and offers the services of a counselor.
     "It's terrible," said Appel, who called his job "12 hours of boredom interspersed with three or four 10-second intervals of sheer terror."
      He would, however, talk about the time a semi-trailer carrying beer decided to back onto the tracks just as the train was racing toward it at 70 miles an hour. It was, needless to say, memorable.
     "The 18-wheeler wrapped itself around the engine," said Appel. "You never forget that sort of thing."
     Appel was suitably businesslike in discussing his profession. There is a pleasing sense of dignity, of seriousness of purpose and respect for the customer that has lingered in railroad employees while fading nearly everywhere else. I loved that, despite the fact that I was riding with the engineer, the conductor nevertheless insisted on punching my ticket. Otherwise, it would be stealing from the railroad.
     Before we run out of space, on to the Metra Mysteries.
     Q. Just before the train departs, the lights go out for a minute or so -- I think of it as powering up the atomic core. What's happening?
     A. "They're unplugging the train from standby electrical power," said Pagano. They have to do this before they power up the diesel; otherwise the 500 kilowatts produced by the engine's generator -- enough to power a block of suburban homes -- would "fry the system."
     Q. So what's with the piles of sand on the tracks? There can't be that many ill passengers wretching from the platform.
     A. "A traditional braking mechanism," said Pagano. Basically, the engines have reservoirs of sand which, if thetracks are slick or they're going a bit too fast, is dumped over the wheels to give them traction.
     Q. What about the burning switches out in the yard in winter, obviously to keep them from freezing; isn't that kind of low-tech?
      A. "These are techniques people learn through experience," said Pagano. "For a while, the industry went to hot air blowers, steam machines. Nothing worked like the gas switch heaters."
     Q. Anything that can be done about the cell phones? Can't users be forced to ride in special cars, isolated from the non-obnoxious riders?
      A. "We've come up with some creative posters," he said. "The biggest abusers of cell phones are lawyers. The things they talk about in public -- business and clients -- it's phenomenal." He said that experiments of confining them to special cell phone cars, where they can bother each other, have not worked. "They tried that on the East Coast, and the New Yorkers found the conductors have a lot more important things to do than monitor people's cell phone use."
      Q. I've noticed that a good number of my fellow riders start lining up to get off the train at Western Avenue. Are these the same people who bolt out of the Lyric Opera during the last aria? What's their rush?
      A. "It happens all over," said Pagano. "Every train, a small group of people want to beat the crowd. All you're doing is going to work."
      Q. I always notice all the coffee cups, ticket stubs and newspapers left behind by my fellow passengers. Don't they realize somebody has to clean up after them? Didn't their parents teach them anything?
      A. "The majority of people are conscientious," Pagano said. "There's no doubt probably a pretty significant group -- 30 or 40 percent -- who are, I wouldn't say slobs, but who leave their papers and soda cans behind."
      So now you know.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 20, 2001

Vote early if not often

      Tuesday, March 15, is the presidential primary in Illinois, and for the first time in my adult life I won't go to the polls on Election Day.
     Not only won't I be voting, I can't.
     It's against the law.
     I'm tempted to let you chew on that a bit, like the old riddle that stumped people in slightly more sexist times, where the man and his son are in a car wreck, the boy is rushed into surgery, and the doctor there says: "I can't operate on that boy, he's my son!"
     Any idea? (About the voting. The doctor is his mom; you knew that, right?)
     The reason I can't vote March 15 — and good for you who got it — is that I've already voted, on Monday, Feb. 29, at the start of early voting. First time. I'm a creature of habit. I like dutifully marching off to the polls on Election Day. But I'm going to Japan in a few days, and while I'm supposed to get back March 14, I don't want to be stuck on a plane diverted to Guam, gnashing my teeth at the delay, tortured by the thought I'm missing my chance to toss a pebble on the scales for ....
  
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Unstoppable

    I've heard from anxious readers, wanting reassurance. 
    Tell us, they say. Is Donald Trump unstoppable?
    The question is echoed in headlines. "Is Trump unstoppable?" asks a headline on The Hill, and dozens of other publications.
    Unstoppable? God no, Donald Trump is not unstoppable. 
    Stopping him is so easy that I'm certain it's going to happen. I try not to traffic in predicting the future, but you can take that to the bank.
    When panicked Republicans talk about Trump being unstoppable, they mean by other Republicans. And in that they are correct. Marco Rubio is punching too far above his weight to have any chance. And Ted Cruz is too universally-despised: with good reason, by the way. Given the choice between the two, I'd take Trump without hesitation. Better an erratic egomaniac than a laser-focused monster. One reason the GOP is so terrified of Trump is because his conservative beliefs are so recent and lightly held. He could get into office and go back to being a Democrat.
     But he won't get into office. Because Hillary Clinton is going to stop him. Not that Hillary is so great a candidate, mind you. Lots of baggage—the negative word for "experience"—and a personal style that is as careful and measured as Trump's is reckless and improvised on the spot.
     But as long as 51 percent of Americans haven't gone batshit crazy, to use the term that Sen. Lindsay Graham used last week to describe the Republican Party, then it's going to be Hillary.
     And I'll tell you when the moment is going to come. Trump's trademark activity is lashing out at people's personal characteristics, in a low, mean fashion. And Clinton's, remember, is restraint. So they'll be having a debate, and he'll lay into her for some physical trait, make some gross, leering comment, and Hillary Clinton will just look at him, her face frozen in cold loathing, and say something about how that's not the way Americans want their president to be. And then it'll be all over but the voting. 
     At least that is what I hope. 

And you think YOUR school feels like a jail...

     At the end of September, I let out this cry of frustration over not being allowed back into the Chicago public high school inside Cook County Jail, which I visited in 1987. That led to me finally being allowed in, in early January. The tour seemed fairly ordinary, but then I started hearing from former teachers, criticizing the school, and I realized why they hadn't wanted me in; not mere bureaucratic inertia, but concern over how they'd come off. I tried to thread the needle and both do the feature I had in mind, and include the concerns of the former teachers. This story isn't fish nor fowl, but at least it got into the paper. 
    
     "Welcome to Mr. Maloney's Science Class" reads a slide projected on the wall of Room 1306. Posters describe the circulatory system, the skeleton.
     "Today we're going to cool out a little bit and not worry about all our assignments," says John Maloney, projecting a laid-back teacher vibe, welcoming his new class at Consuella B. York Alternative High School. He outlines the grading system he'll use, stresses the importance of tidy folders, and says something that indicates we are not in just any of the 176 public high schools in Chicago.
     "I want to get your court dates," he says to his class of 10 students, who are all wearing identical school uniforms: beige scrubs with "DOC" — Department of Corrections — stenciled on them.
     York High School is the CPS high school within the Cook County Jail at 2700 S. California. The school has roughly 235 students — enrollment fluctuates day by day as students are incarcerated and released — ranging in age from 17 to 22. Only two 17-year-olds are left in the jail after most were transferred to juvenile custody last year. It has 56 teachers and administrative staff.
     Some aspects of York are like any high school: it has a mascot, a tiger. Come summer, there is a graduation with caps and gowns and proud parents.
     "It's a big to-do," says Marlena Jentz, director of alternative programs and education at the Cook County Department of Corrections. "Lots of crying and Kleenex."
     Some aspects are very different. The school is scattered among various divisions of the jail —male, female, drug treatment, protective custody, maximum security. Students in different wings don't encounter one another in class.
     "It's almost like having five or six different high schools that you have to run and manage" says Jentz.
     The students don't go to school because the law requires it but for a variety of other reasons.
     "Some are actually in school prior to incarceration, some do it because it passes the time," says Sharnette Sims, York's principal. "It gives them something to do while they're here. Some do it to impress the judge."
     Whatever school brings to the students, education behind bars is good for society: a recent RAND study found that inmates who participate in any kind of educational program are 43 percent less likely to return to jail.
     The first stop on our tour is the art room; art is mandatory at York. The art teacher is April Clark, 24. She has worked at the jail for four years since graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She finds her students in jail "just regular people."
     "I don't notice a difference at all," says Clark, comparing the York students to students at John F. Kennedy High School, where she was a student teacher. "A regular place with regular people who've made mistakes. They have the same issues, they go through similar things. The difference is they have a different environment. At JFK, they can go home, they can roam the hallways. In this case, a totally different atmosphere."
     In some ways, she said, it's a better atmosphere in jail, where classes are an hour and 40 minutes long.
     "It's more intimate and I have more time to teach, to expand their minds," she says. "They get a whole 100 minutes to work. As with other classes, there is much personal development, discussions of goals and attitudes. Clark's students do "body biographies," addressing "where their heart is, what their hands do."
     "They need to know they're capable of doing much more than people make them out to be," Clark says. "Art is all about self-learning"
     As difficult as it is to teach high school, period, in jail there is the added element of uncertainty. And even that can be spun into a positive.
     "I don't know I'm ever going to see them again," she says. "So we have to make the time matter. ... Every single minute I have with them, we make sure the time we have is not in vain."
     This being a Chicago Public School, however, it is not without controversy. In 2011, it was reported that as few as 20 students a year actually graduate from York, each costing some $300,000 in state money. A new block system, where semesters are 38 days long, was instituted, and graduation rates soared 60 percent. After I toured the jail, I began to hear from teachers who recently quit York, claiming the principal pressured them to give inmates credit for classes they never finished.
     "I left Jan. 8 after 18 years because the harassment is incredible," says Jackie Burger. "There have been three of us in the last two months who have done that."
     "They want a graduation rate so it looks better for the administration," says former teacher Scott Anderson. "I worked there for 10 years, I loved the school, loved the students, was nominated for the teachers award twice. Then last year some of the things that went on got so bad, I just quit. The culture was really toxic, a lot of unethical things with the credits. I did not feel I was teaching students the way they should be taught. The teachers were literally told they would be fired if they didn't give students a credit."
     "You can't have kids who can sit still that long for 100 minutes in a classroom," Burger says. "How do you issue credits in 38 days? Then teachers are forced to issue credits in 38 days. I had a student six days [and they are credited]. When my names on that, I'm responsible."
     Jail officials referred the issue to CPS which, characteristically, did not respond. It took me three months of pushing to get inside the school - at the time I wondered why, but the "toxic atmosphere" might be the explanation. Though the students themselves don't reflect that in the brief time I observed their classes and spoke with them.
     "It's alright, like a real school, a safe environment," says P.W., 19, who has been in jail for two years. (I agreed to not use their names.) He is sketching in an American literature class and says he wanted to be an architect. "Just because you're in jail, doesn't mean you can't make the best of it."
     Why go to school in jail?
     "Help me understand, open my eyes," says Little Drew, also 19, who hopes to be an electrician. "I'm seeing education is important."

Truth in advertising

    Browsing happily over my recovered photographs Saturday, I came across this photo snapped last October in Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, one of those hopping urban gustatory wonderlands, like Los Angeles' Grand Central Market, which are fun to visit and eat in, provided you try not to reflect  too ruefully on why Chicago's own French Market by Union Station is so dead in comparison.  Some academic should do a study and figure it out, so that we can fix the French Market. A great idea. But it just doesn't seem to be working, though it works in other places.
      I took this picture because I had just spit one of these Osso di Morta cookies into the garbage, and wanted to document what I eaten, or, rather, tried to eat. They looked so lovely, white and various shaped. But they tasted like clove-flavored brick, and only after looking at the photo and reading the sign did I notice the description—or I should say "warning"—"A hard, clove-flavored Cookie."
     It certainly was that. You can't accuse them of misrepresenting their product, though "A very hard, rock-like, cookie reeking of clove" would be more to the point. 
     Maybe the cookies are good dunked in coffee, or, better, grappa. Maybe those who grew up teething on them love them, and to those people, my mie scusi. Maybe they're an acquired taste, which isn't going to help me, because I plan to never eat another one as long as I live. 

Memento mori

     Death caressed my cheek, lightly, and in the oddest way.
     It was not precisely a caress, his cool fingers trailing across my skin, chilling me, and then gone.
     Not that. More like a sudden sting. Thursday night iPhoto ate my photos. All of them. Going back to 2009. Thousands of them. Gone.
     I don't know what happened. One moment I was working on my computer, getting my post for Friday ready, and I slid over to iPhoto to look at the pictures, and there were none.

     Just a grid of gray squares, empty as the eye sockets of skulls, jeering skulls, leering at me.
     Where are your precious memories now?!?
     I leapt online. There are forums for this—none sponsored by Apple itself, oddly. But a variety of ad hoc advice blogs run by would-be experts. It's as if Honda didn't print an Odyssey owner's manual, just left problems for drivers to form ragtag groups and puzzle over like Platonic dialogues, wordy and digressive.
     Nothing they suggested, once I figured out what they were suggesting that is, actually worked. I held down the "Option" and "Command" buttons while summoning up iPhoto, checked the "Reconstitute Thumbnails" button, and waiting in hope.
     But nothing. Shut down the computer and re-started it.
     Nothing.
     I wasn't upset so much as focused, determined. I figured the photos were somewhere. I would most miss the ones from the 2009 trip with the boys out West. But those would still be on the chip from the camera, which I saved.
    I explored.  I found a file with all of 2009 in it—1200 photos—and imported those back. The trip, ironically, the one thing I had backed up. But at least something, a scrap of the original bounty. Maybe a reason to hope.
    Then I saw something called "BROWSE BACKUP." And it brought me to what seemed like photos, on the teraflop G-Drive external hard drive I bought over the summer when my iMac's guts were dying. I hit "RESTORE" and got a little spinning candy cane and the hopeful message, "REBUILDING LIBRARY." It seemed to grow very slowly — a good sign. Something was happening. I went to bed.
     I snapped up at 3:30 a.m., rushed to check. The photos were all back. No, not all. It stopped in June, in the middle of Kent's prom. For some reason, the past seven months weren't there. Maybe I hadn't backed it up since then —I have a tendency to unplug the drive. There aren't enough ports for a drive and a printer and to charge the phone.  But I thought I had.
     I went to work musing on this, the loss of the past six months. What, exactly, was gone? I was almost afraid to think about it, to reaching into the void and feel the phantom prick of something important. What picture would I miss?
     It was then that I felt The Grim Reaper, the chill touch, the low chuckle as I walked through all those strangers in the Loop. The pictures for the past six months were gone, as all the pictures would be gone, as I too would be gone, the way your most cherished objects end up sold for a dollar at a garage sale, your favorite shirt a tuft of color on a bale of rags being shipped by the container to Africa. We assemble these careful worlds, our mementos under glass domes, our photos tagged and properly backed up, in albums trimmed with lace, then Fate draws in a big breath and blows and it all scatters away. Your memories molder in a landfill, or are gazed at by distant descendants who didn't know you and don't care.
    Embrace your losses, Seneca says. View them as practice. A few drops in advance of the storm that is going to wash you away. A reminder: someday you will lose everything.  Find a lesson. Keep that external hard drive plugged in.
      Patek Philippe is right. We never really own things, we just take care of them for the next generation, and while there's a chance they'd value your $100,000 wristwatch, most of us don't have one of those, and the threadbare assemblage we spend a lifetime gathering makes for a few melancholy days in front of a dumpster for our progeny. We only possess one thing that is truly ours: time, the minutes and days and hours of our lives.  And that we have in both scarcity and abundance. An endless, or so it seems while it is unspooling, string of moments that are really just one moment, now, blundering alongside us like an eager puppy into the next moment, some good, some bad, too many spoiled and wasted and tinctured with anxiety over something like the loss of some bundles of well-organized electrons.
     Back at my desk, I couldn't help it. I thought about the photos since June. There really was only one that came to mind as a Loss. Kent, on the day we dropped him off at Northwestern, running through the Weber Arch. My wife and I positioned ourselves further along the path, and I caught him as he flew past, young and happy and in motion, literally running toward his future. I'd miss that photo if I never saw it again.
    Although.... Did I not like it so much that I posted it as a cover on Facebook? Yes, I did. We sneer at these technologies, and blush at our use of them, but they do have their value. A click delivered it safe in a grey strongbox at the bottom of my Facebook page. So not everything lost. A little, sometimes the best, remains — maybe the best is what lingers. Or perhaps I'm just returning to the illusion. Lucky me was lucky again. The best photo is here, the rest will be found or, if not, forgotten, which is their eventual fate anyway. The Pale Rider brushes past me but keeps going, galloping toward a rendezvous with someone less fortunate. Leaving me with a souvenir, the briefest touch on the cheek, a cold kiss of fingertips that caught my attention, left me gazing at where he vanished, wondering whether I really saw him at all. That's a gift better than photos, to realize, there is stuff, and there is time. Don't waste the important one worrying over the unimportant one.  Thanks for the warning, Mr. Death, I'll try to take it more to heart between now and when we meet again.

    Postscript: After work Friday I took a longer look at that "Browse Backup" function, and recovered all the photos until Thanksgiving. We'll accept December and January's photos as the slightest of scars, nothing to even feel bad about. The headline, "memento mori," is Latin for "remember to die" meaning, "remember that you will die," and sometimes refers to actual objects, tangible reminders, like the small skull carved from a cow bone pictured above. 


   
   
   

'Plump Trump, chump!'

     Let's play newspaper editor. Here is your green celluloid eye shade, your shirt garters and the stump of a cheap cigar to jam between your lips.
     Close your eyes. Imagine: It's mid-June 2015. A variety of news stories are vying for your attention. A crisis in Yemen. The resignation of Rachel Dolezal, president of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, who, despite her vigorous posing, is not really black. The House delays a vote on aid to workers displaced by global trade agreements. Pope Francis calls for action on climate change.
     And Donald J. Trump descends the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce that he is running for president and will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created and, oh yes, Mexican immigrants are "bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
     Squeak back in your chair, Mr. or Ms. Editor, gaze at the yellowed newsroom ceiling and decide.
     Lead with the NAACP, right?
     That's what many news organizations did.

     To continue reading, click here. 

   

Silvio Trump

Naples

     I only spent one day in Naples. We arrived to Italy by ship, my father and I, in summer, 1999, sought dinner in town, explored a bit, and the next morning left for Rome.
     But it was beautiful, in a quiet, laid-back, decayed sort of way. Men stood at coffee bars with their suit coats draped over their shoulders, like capes. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry. The buildings were all 100 years old, largely empty and gone to seed.
     Whenever I contemplate the looming decline of the United States—insisting that our country is "great" or will again be "great" does not and will not be enough to magically make it so—I take comfort in thinking of Italy. 

Trump

Berlusconi

     Not so bad, really. The highway of history, which used to run right through our land, was rerouted, long ago and now we sit in the sun in cafes and read the paper about stuff happening somewhere else. Little coffees in little cups with hard biscotti.  Idle conversations about nothing. Wild local politics fighting over the scraps of empire.
     Americans could live like that; and maybe we're going to get the chance to find out.
     After Nevada, with Trump's massive 46 percent win, nearly twice the vote gotten by his nearest opponent, the pipsqueak Marco Rubio, I said to my wife, "He'll be our Silvio Berlusconi."
     Yes, I know. Don't feel bad. We're Americans, world politics eludes us. Silvio Berlusconi was an Italian billionaire who served as prime minister for nine years, despite being, to quote The Economist, "unfit to be in politics—let alone run Italy."
     I'm not the first to make the connection. Rooting around online, comparing the two, I noticed that last September—a century ago, it seems, in this primary season, the Washington Post published an article equating the two.  And why not? The comparisons are clear.
     "Berlusconi started out as a wealthy demagogue on the brink of bankruptcy, whose celebrity was — like Trump’s — rooted in both real estate and popular entertainment culture," wrote foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal. "Berlusconi presented himself as Italy’s strongman, speaking like a barman, selling demonstrably false promises of wealth and grandeur for all. He made the electorate laugh while stoking fears of communists and liberals stripping privileges and increasing taxes. Presaging Trump, the Italian media mogul cast himself as the only viable savior of a struggling nation: the political outsider promising to sweep in and clean up from the vanquished left and restore the country to its lost international stature."
      “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I sacrifice myself for everyone,” Berlusconi said. Now we find Trump promising “to make America great again,” pledging to become the “greatest jobs president […] ever created.”
     Spoiler alert. Berlusconi didn't do any of that. He mired himself in a number of corruption and sex scandals and got himself sentenced to prison while the country went to hell.  The economy didn't soar; it cratered. In Naples, they had trouble collecting the garbage.
     "Trump managed to tap into real anger and disillusionment with an American political class owned by billionaires like him. He's taken populism to  new depths, tacitly embracing a call to 'get rid of' all American Muslims," Jebreal writes. "Berlusconi appealed to their most base instincts and sanctified their prejudices, rendering them unwilling to overlook the obvious hypocrisy and fallacy of his promises."
    That does sound familiar.
     "As prime minister, he repeatedly put his own interests before the country’s," The Economist opined in 2013. "He exacerbated popular cynicism about public life." 

     Familiar indeed. I would have thought it was impossible for Americans to be more bitter, divided and hopeless. But I'd bet Donald Trump is up for the task.  It is uncertain whether he'll actually grab the Republican nomination and then beat Hillary Clinton. But if he does win, it is an utter certainty that, like Berlusconi, he'll leave our nation in far worse shape than he found it, sadder if no wiser.

Madison honors prankster

Leon Varjian

     I've only been to a couple of Chicago City Council meetings in my journalistic career. I distinctly remember just one, a debate over whether elephants should be barred within city limits.
     Which gives you an idea of why I seldom go.
     There were also endless motions to honor various individuals, police officers and Boy Scout leaders and such. Official resolutions are not generally news. Which is why it's so extraordinary that the moment I heard the Madison Common Council is honoring Leon Varjian, I had to tell you.
    Not for the honor, per se — Wednesday, Feb. 23, is Leon Varjian Day in Madison — but because I suspect you don't know who Varjian is, and I do. I'd like to dust off a chair in the back of your mind and invite him in.
     With a warning: Once he's there, comfortable, Leon Varjian has a tendency to never leave.

     He was from New Jersey, with all the brashness and bravado associated with that state. In the 1970s he studied mathematics at Montclair State before earning a master’s at Indiana University. Varjian tried to join the working world like everybody else, taking a job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. He lasted 18 months.
     “It was awful,” he later recalled. “I couldn’t stand it. You get up every morning, get on a bus and go to work with a bunch of pasty-faced commuters, sit behind a desk all day, doing nothing and come home at night. I just couldn’t stand it.”
     Most live our lives that way. But Varjian was one to push back at the dull routines. He quit, fleeing to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Enrolling in just one class, he occupied himself cooking up a variety of stunts, such as asking students to sign a petition to change the name of UW-Madison to “University of New Jersey,” so “students could go to a fancy East Coast school without moving.”
     If I ever write a movie, it will be about Varjian, and begin with him, at a booth in the school quad, long-haired, droopy mustached, collecting signatures.
     In the spring of 1978, Varjian formed the Pail and Shovel Party and campaigned for vice president (“that’s where the power is”) for the Student Government Association. He and his running mate, Jim Mallon, dressed as clowns. They promised, if elected, to change the name of Madison to “Cheesetopia.” They promised to bring the Statue of Liberty to Madison.
     “Honesty, integrity, responsibility,” a campaign flier began. “Pail and Shovel doesn’t believe in any of them.”
     They won.

   

     To continue reading, click here. 

Guns and baby shoes

   People are incredibly plastic vessels, in that we stretch to cover an enormous range of thought, capacity and action. From mute to loquacious, sharp-eyed to blind, artistic to actuarial. 
     Incredible, really. 
     I was walking the dog by Village Hall in the old leafy suburban paradise a while back, and in a single glance saw the entire 180 degree spectrum of human behavior.
      You've got the sign, warning passersby against going into Village Hall with handguns, those hard metal mechanisms of instant death. And no doubt there are people carrying guns who need the warning, even in Northbrook. A reminder that, for every individual who carries a gun for legitimate purpose, cops and bank guards and such, there are 100 who use them as totems, as lethal blankies, to calm their fears within and protect themselves from enemies without, real and imagined. 
     Mostly imagined.  Especially in Northbrook.
   And the baby's shoe. Take a good close look at it. Gorgeous, really. A beautiful shoe. Two-tone real leather—or what looks like real leather.  Artistic stitching. Comfortable, user friendly Velcro straps. The toddler wearing that shoe chose his parents well. 
     A shoe that somebody designed, and somebody made, and somebody bought, and a fourth person found in the street—babies, as anyone who has ever raised one knows, have a genius for kicking away their footwear undetected, and the more expensive the shoe, the more prone a little fat foot is to fling it away, unseen. 
     So some big-hearted good Samaritan found the shoe, and placed in this obvious spot, where mom or dad would be more likely to find it. A pleasing marriage of concern and cleverness. Oh look at that, poor kid, poor mom! I'll just jam the shoe above this sign, where it'll be seen. The sign warding away those who might be carrying handguns around the mean streets of Northbrook because, gosh darn it, they just don't feel secure without one, and if somebody, perhaps driven insane by how badly Northbrook has botched its commercial development, goes bursting into the Village Hall and starts shooting up a zoning board meeting, they'll be ready, maybe. 
     In the meantime, their gun is posing a hazard, of some degree, to themselves and their loved ones, 24 hours a day. 
    Quite the range of possibilities. People. Including myself, walking the dog, seeing the shoe and sign and trying to synthesize it all. I try to focus on the shoe makers, wearers and returners. But those gun makers and buyers and users, they have a way of spoiling the fun, don't they? 
     

Trump joke isn't funny any more

General John "Black Jack" Pershing

     Conventional wisdom says that Donald Trump is going away.
     Any minute now.
     Cooler heads, supposedly still in charge of the Republican Party, are convinced that once a few of the crowded GOP field drop out, his popularity will plunge and he'll be relegated to the dustbin of extremist zealots who excited the fringes early in primary season then faded away.
     Those 7.8 percent of South Carolina voters who cast a ballot for Jeb Bush in South Carolina Saturday will, now that he's given up, embrace Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or any of the remaining non-Trump candidates.
     I sure hope so.
     Because while I, like many Americans, at first smiled in a kind of rapt, fascinated horror at Trump walking, unscathed, through a succession of lion's dens that would have shredded other candidates, his victory in South Carolina, and the vile hate-mongering he committed leading up to it, have to make any patriotic American reason recoil in disgust, and finally realize: this isn't funny anymore.
     South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. To this day, South Carolina nurtures its bigotry more openly than most places in 21st century America. It was only last year that its state government offices finally took down the Confederate battle flag, 150 years after Appomattox.  Demonizing black people, at least publicly, has fallen from acceptability, even in South Carolina, so those who try to comprehend a confusing world by hating others have turned their attention to Muslims, susceptible because some terrorists claim to be acting in the name of Islam.
     On Friday in Charleston, Trump trotted out a story about General Black Jack Pershing in the Philippines.
     “Early last century, General Pershing — rough guy — they had a terrorism problem,” Trump began. He never explicitly says Pershing was dealing with Muslims, but in the half-sly way that bigots have, sets it up this way: “They have a whole thing with swine, and animals, and pigs. You know the story."
     "He caught 50 terrorists who caused tremendous damage and killed many people. … He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pig's blood. And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person he said "You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.' And for 25 years there wasn't a problem, OK?"
     After the applause died down, Trump added, ”We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant and we better start using our heads or we're not going to have a country."
     Trump told his audience they could read about it in their history books, though “not a lot of history books because they don’t like teaching this.”
     Actually, not in any history books, because it isn’t true. The story is a lie.
     But set aside its untruth — Ronald Reagan confused what happened in the movies with what happened in real life. Look at Trump’s intent in telling the untrue story. To direct hatred at Muslims and, in doing so, draw votes to himself.
     Think about that.
     I don’t understand how a candidate does that on Friday and on Saturday wins a statewide primary, even in South Carolina. Muslims are frightened and aghast, of course, but to anyone who belongs to any persecuted group, or simply cares about people, it should be a firebell in the night. For Jews, it is the blood libel, given a slight twist. For blacks, it is the state that enslaved them, looking for a new victim to abuse. For Catholics, women, gays — anybody really, who belongs to a group that can be ostracized and maligned — to hear Trump say it, to see his opponents, maybe hoping for a VP spot, not call Trump out on it, it should grab our attention like a house ablaze next door.
     “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant and we better start using our heads or we’re not going to have a country.”
     Because a country with Muslims in it isn’t America, I guess.
     They said the same thing about Jews. They said the same thing about blacks. We didn’t belong either.
     How can we let Trump do this?
     Maybe Trump is a joke, maybe he’ll go away and just be a bad memory. Some blame the media for paying attention.
     “Neil, I can’t believe you would give this asshole a minute of your time!” reader Glenn Hoffman wrote.
     Here’s the deal, Glenn. I’ll stop listening to Donald Trump when Republicans stop voting for him. If he’s a joke, he’s a bad joke. If he’s a joke, it isn’t funny. If he’s a joke, too many people are laughing along. If he’s a joke, he’s a joke that has gone on far too long.

Pope bested by a higher power

     I wrote this Friday morning, but it already feels like some antique commentary on Free Silver. Since then Donald Trump has won the South Carolina Republican primary, after a truly despicable play on anti-Muslim hysteria, recycling some century-old canard about Islamic soldiers being shot by bullets dipped in pig's blood. By comparison jousting with the pope seems quaint, the relic of an era when the most monstrous demagogues did not prance on the public stage, never mind gain mainstream support from the Party of Lincoln.  

     Score: Trump 1, Pope Francis 0.
     In the latest jaw-dropping moment of Donald Trump's jaw-dropping march to the White House . . . whoops, make that his protracted flash across the American political heavens, the New York real estate billionaire tussled with the wildly popular leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics on Thursday and came out the clear winner.
     Back before presidential politics became a stumble through a hall of funhouse mirrors, the idea of a candidate talking trash at the pope would be impossible. But, if nothing else, the 2016 elections will go down in history as an epic expansion of the realm of the possible.
     What made this episode unique was that it did not stem from a preemptive Trump attack. From his tarring Mexican immigrants as rapists to whack-a-moling war hero John McCain, then POWs in general, then Fox host Megyn Kelly, then mocking a handicapped reporter and suggesting that all Muslims should be barred at the border because, well, they're Muslims, Trump likes to fire first.
     Instead, this time it was the pope who, during his trip to Mexico and asked about Trump, unleashed this:
     “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”

To continue reading, click here.

The pavement in hell.

     Email hasn't quite fallen into the realm of nostalgia along with semaphore flags, smoke signals and handwritten notes sealed with red wax. 
      But the truth is, with text messages and tweets and Facebook posts and comments, you just don't see a lot of emails anymore. They're not yet down there with telephone calls. But let's put it this way. I had a column Friday in the Sun-Times on a timely topic—the FBI demanding that Apple create a "back door" to hack its own iPhones so that they can peer into the locked phone belonging to the couple who murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California Dec. 2. The column ran on page seven, took 2/3 of a page, with photograph, and was promoted on the front page, with a picture of me and everything.
     Four emails. 
     But that wasn't the sad part. The Internet has created a typhoon of communication and any given peep is apt to be lost in the general howl. I get that. The sad part was what the four emails said. They ... well, no need to summarize. 
    The first one read:

You disappoint me. I thought you were better than this. You actually think that your life is so interesting that the feds would bother to take notice of what's in your precious little I phone? I actually think they (the feds) have a lot more to do trying to identify terrorist cells within our country than concern themselves with your playlist. If opening that iPhone means acquiring credible information to protect us with, what do I care about Apples proprietary software. If they are that concerned, just have their techs do it in the Apple lab and hand it back to the feds open. What's the big deal?

     The second one read:

During its existence, every civilization, or every nation, is forced by circumstances to make choices--how to manage their land, which alliances to make and what form of government to embrace. I would seem that in order to protect its citizens from external (or for that matter, internal) danger, the government is most efficient when it has the most information regarding those who would do its citizens harm. Further, turning over the I-phone in question to Apple for the express and not repeatable purpose of unlocking its contents is certainly reasonable given that the phone's user (and not its owner) gunned down 14 innocent people. It would be good not to have a repeat of that episode; remember that privacy is a privilege; freedom from harm is a right.

     The third one read:

    Neil I read as much of ur article as I cld until I had to run outside and hug a tree and look for a whale. Why did Apple open up 7 other phones when requested by the FBI previously? Did they do it because their stock price was on all time highs but now because it's about to make a new 52 week low, it provides a hypocritical opportunity to pander to the uninformed in an attempt to polish up their reputation? Haha! U really believe there is privacy? That is 7 separate back doors developed. Ur co just sold my email address for 7 cents. If u had my home phone it's a quarter. That's what Apple considers ur privacy worth

     And the fourth one... oh heck, you get the idea. 
     A uniform chorus, saying, in essence, let's swoon in the arms of the government, let them paw through our sock drawer, and maybe no one will hurt us.
     "Government is most efficient when it has the most information regarding those who would do its citizens harm." And that is...everybody and anybody? And notice the second writer, who conjures up "not repeatable purpose" when the whole issue as laid out by Apple is once they create this way into their phones, it will exist and get out and anyone can use it, not only the government, but criminals and terrorists themselves. He missed the entire point, the nut of the issue, blinded by...
     Fear. The Republican Party is the Fear Party. They're afraid of immigrants. They're afraid of minorities. 
    And they're afraid of terror. They're terrified, literally. Which is both natural and exactly what the terrorists intend. They lunge at anything they think will take the edge off their fear, no matter how counter-productive. They stock up on guns, ignoring that each gun endangers the owner far, far more than it provides any kind of guarantee against all that they're afraid of. They'd bar the immigrants who make our country strong, whose arrival is what stands between the United States and the demographic death spiral ruining places like Italy and Japan. They hate every embodiment of the government and then turn to it with a cry to run their lives and protect them from shadows.

     "Freedom is not free." That's the buzz line false patriots use when paying lip service to the military. But what does it mean? It means that there is a cost to freedom, a risk. Part of that risk is not letting the FBI rip open our lives and root around whenever they please, all in the name of security. "Hell is paved with good intentions," the great Samuel Johnson once said. How can they not see it?
     Four emails. I don't want to leave you with the impression that's an average day. Usually it's more like 40. Maybe everybody was outside, enjoy the warm, windy weather. Maybe their courage was blown away in the breeze. I hope they find it again when the winds stop, maybe flapping in the tree like an errant plastic bag. 

Apple bites back at the FBI

     My hiking boots are falling apart. So I went to REI. But their selection of Keens is spotty, so I jumped on the company website.
     Far more sizes and styles. But there is a downside. Now whenever I log on to Facebook, I'm nagged.
     "Shop KEEN footwear Now," Facebook demands, with a photo of the very boots I'd like to buy, though in my own good time, thank you very much, and not because I'm being browbeaten by an algorithm.
     My way of saying that privacy was not exactly enjoying a golden age before a judge ordered Apple to create software to thwart the anti-snooping program in its iPhones that wipes clean their memory after 10 abortive tries, so the FBI can crack a phone belonging to the terrorists who murdered 14 people in California last December.
     Apple's reply, in essence, is "in your dreams," though more eloquently, in an open letter from CEO Tim Cook.
     "The U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create," Cook writes. "They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone."
     Apple's point is that if the genie is conjured up and handed over to the FBI, it will exist, and the online world being what it is, once it's out of the bottle, no one knows where it'll go. Edward Snowden proved if you want something secret distributed broadly, put it in the care of the federal government.
     "The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals," Cook writes. "The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe."
     Cook called for discussion; what he got is society lining up along the standard fault lines. Republicans, who make a show of scorning government when the sky's clear, did their usual rainy day reversal, suddenly rolling at the feds' feet like frightened puppies.
     “Who do they think they are? They have to open it up,” Donald Trump said Wednesday, as if the iPhone were a tin of tuna. "We have to use common sense.”
     Ben Carson, using his common sense, and perhaps confusing this situation with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, said the country might have to wait until Obama leaves office to resolve the FBI/Apple stand-off.
     Ted Cruz, meanwhile, took a break from being the most frightening Republican candidate to observe “Apple has a serious argument” before he reverted to form and added that refusing the FBI's request is like defying a search warrant.
     And Marco Rubio, also true to form, punted.
     "There has to be a way to deal with this issue," Rubio said. "I don't have a magic solution for it today . . . but I do know this: It will take a partnership between the technology industry and the government to solve this."
     The Democrats did no better. If Rubio kicked the can down the road, Hillary Clinton booted a towering, end-over-end punt, calling for a "Manhattan-like project" to find a way for law enforcement to snoop on the phones of the terrorists in our future without undermining security for everybody else. Bernie Sanders was, perhaps wisely, mum on the issue, as far as I can tell.
     When I got my first iPod, having all my music somehow crammed into this sleek, small, aluminum lozenge made me proud to be a human being, to be part of the same species that created such a thing. I have an Apple laptop, plus four iMacs — even though they cost more, because I decided in this one aspect, if nowhere else, I'd have the best. And an iPhone, one I do not want the government sticking its big bazoo into, if it can be avoided.
     And as proud as I am of these devices, I'm prouder that Apple is making a stand for privacy, what little privacy remains. Because as public as our lives are now, with our friends ballyhooing their lunch daily on Facebook, there are hells below this one. At least our public confessions are voluntary. As bad as it is to be hounded by a boot company, it would be worse for the FBI to pop up on Facebook pointing out that they've noticed I have "Isis" by Bob Dylan on my iTunes playlist, and would I mind stopping by their office for a little chat?

Chicago loses Oscar business

Sun-Times file photo

     I'm not sure how much civic pride Chicago residents ever actually took in the Oscar statuettes being produced locally, but that fact sure was embraced by the media.  Here was a bona fide local angle to one of the biggest stories of the year, the Academy Awards. We might not produce many of the actors and actresses joyfully leaping onto the stage to get their moment in the spotlight, but we sure as hell could make the hunk of metal they were handed when they did win. 

    That changed, the Sun-Times reported Wednesday, because the Academy wants them made of bronze, which our R.S. Owens doesn't do. So now New York media will be traipsing to a factory there, the way I did years ago when I drew Oscar duty, and filed this report:

     Wrap your hands around the most famous product that Chicago's R.S. Owens & Co. manufactures and odds are that, after you register its heft and weight for a moment, you will gaze out at an imaginary audience and begin a speech.
     "They thank their mothers, they thank the academy," said Scott Siegel, president of the company that makes the Oscar statuettes to be given out, amid maximum pageantry, tonight in Los Angeles.
     While the Owens company typically gets a burst of publicity at Academy Award time, the Oscars are only a tiny part of their business.
     As expensive as the 50 24-karat gold over silver over nickel over copper trophies might be (the company doesn't reveal what they cost, or how much precious metal is in them) it wouldn't be enough to keep the 60-year-old manufacturer's 180 employees busy all year in Owens' 82,000-square-foot plant at 5535 N. Lynch.
     That is done by all the other prestigious awards that Owens makes -- the Clios, the Emmys, the MTV Video Music Awards and hundreds of other cast-metal trophies.
     Each trophy has its own particular challenges. The Oscars are multiple-plated, requiring dips in baths of chemicals and washes in sulfuric acid. The Emmys are even more complex, with a sphere of copper rings that must be individually cut and welded together. The MTV Video Music Award -- a lunar astronaut saluting an American flag — has to be cast in four pieces and assembled.
     Owens makes two types of trophies. The first, such as the Oscars or Emmys, are licensed — what the company calls "captive molds." That means Owens can only make as many as the licensing group desires, and no more. It can't start selling Oscars on the side, though there is one in the company showroom, along with a bronze hot dog in a tux and crown, a metal Super Mario and several hundred other statuettes, orbs, pyramids, animals and figurines, some of them famous -- the copies of the Super Bowl Trophy given to team players, for instance -- most of them obscure.
     The rest of the trophies are "stock" — two-handled loving cups and stars of excellence and such. Anyone can call up and order one or 100 or 1,000.
     "Thirty years ago, our business was 95 percent stock, and five percent licensed," Siegel said. "Now it's the other way around. Most stock trophies are plastic and very low end."
     Owens & Company doesn't make the plastic kind. Siegel explained that while business people know the value of receiving a quality trophy, the bulk of stock awards -- school awards, Little League trophies -- are given to kids, by adults who tend to want to cheap out on the prizes.
     "Corporate people still want quality," he said. "Kids want quality, too, but the adults are in charge of expenditure."
     Making a metal trophy from scratch is a lengthy, expensive process. Say a widget company wants to give its salesman of the year a bronze widget on a wooden pedestal. Owens will hand the prototype widget to its master craftsman, Manny Steffan, who will look over the widget and see how difficult it will be to cast in metal.
     "Certain jobs cannot be done," he said. "Sometimes you have to simplify." He might suggest that a stylized widget be used, to cut down on production costs.
     While a simple piece — say a globe — can be cast in a two-piece mold, complex figures need multiple-piece molds that fit together like a puzzle. Steffan once did a bronze ice castle whose mold came apart in 34 sections. (The 13-inch-high, 8-pound Oscar is made from a single mold).
     The company is careful about its estimates, because if it underestimates the amount of work needed, it will lose money on the job. Siegel points to a lovely turn-of-the-century trophy topped by an ear of corn, given by a cereal company to its most productive farmer. The company brought it to Owens to be reproduced, and it didn't realize just how tough the job would be."It took us a year and a half," Siegel said. "We lost our shirts on it."
     Once a price is set, Steffan goes to work. It can take two to four weeks to sculpt a model, and up to three months before the molds are done and the first trophy is made. Molds must fit together with small tolerance for error to keep down the amount of flashing -- spilled metal around the seams that must be laboriously ground off and polished. The Owens plant is filled with workers at grinding wheels or wielding hand files, doing away with flashing.
     Siegel's grandfather was in the pigeon supply business, selling food and accessories to people who kept pigeons as pets. His father worked for him as a teenager.
     "In 1938, my father went downtown to get two trophies for a customer's store," Siegel said. "The trophy company thought he was a dealer, and gave it to him wholesale. He made $ 8 on the transaction, as much as he made in two weeks. So he decided to go into the trophy business."
     Like many children of successful businessmen, Siegel resisted following his father's footsteps. He taught high school for seven years.
     "I didn't want to have the rest of my life scripted for me," Siegel said. But the lure of business proved too great, and upon getting his master's degree at Northwestern he joined Owens.
     Few companies can point to a product that will be as happily received and carefully cherished as a trophy. Siegel walks by rack after rack of John Phillip Sousa medallions -- to be given to high school band members -- Boy Scout emblems and spiked globes to be given out by a cable TV network in India. But Siegel said he doesn't really think about his products being dispersed worldwide.
     "To tell you the truth, I think more about how to produce a good product and how to be efficient," he said.

                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 23, 1998

Taste test

     Harry Caray stopped drinking in July 1994 after a fall in Miami landed him in the hospital.
     "Hey doc, when can I have another drink?" his widow, Dutchie Caray, remembers him asking. The doctor replied: "When the Cubs win the World Series."
     So from then on, until his death in February 1998, the great Cubs broadcaster had a bottle of Budweiser placed in front of him but would really be sipping Anheuser-Busch's nonalcoholic beer, O'Doul's.
     Harry didn't have a lot of choice. Many bars don't stock NA beer at all, and those that do tend to have a choice of one, so people who drink nonalcoholic beer, for whatever reason, are left hanging.
   
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