Flashback: 2009: Woodstock ruined my life

     Those hoping to throw a 50th anniversary Woodstock concert hit another snag this week, losing their upstate New York venue. Added to their loss of financial backing and of their production company, you'd almost think fate was trying to give them a hint: move on.

     No such luck. The Baby Boom has been clinging to and venerating their great moments of youth for decades and are carrying that practice into their senescence, a habit I decried at the concert's 40th anniversary. 

     Screw Woodstock

     Really, I mean it. If you're my age—I was 9 when the three-day concert took place—you noted the 40th anniversary of the key event of our culture's endless 1960s nostalgia by thinking, "Gee, have I really been listening to these goofs celebrate themselves for only 40 years? Because it feels like 400."
     Doesn't the self-regard and self-significance make you want to vomit? OK, 400,000 people gathered for a rock concert and didn't kill each other—big flippin' deal. Ten years later, in 1979, 1.2 million people showed up in Grant Park for a mass with Pope John Paul II, and you never hear them claiming it was a rend in the time-space continuum. Even more people are flocking to the lakefront for the Air & Water Show this weekend, and we don't act like it's some giant epochal moment—just another summer weekend in Chicago.
     Woodstock ruined my life, sort of. Imagine growing up, an impressionable child, watching all those supposedly pivotal 1960s event—Woodstock, the riots at the Democratic National Convention, the moon landing—on your parents' black-and-white Zenith TV in the living room of your suburban tract house in Berea, Ohio.
     It quickly gave the impression that we lived in Noplace, that life, the important stuff in life, was always going on Somewhere Else. That, by 1974, every significant thing that might conceivably happen had already occurred. I had missed the feast but was free to pick over the scraps, had missed the party and arrived for the cleanup, the dismal denouement of the 1970s, a miserable void of disco and leisure suits and meaninglessness, at least by the judgment of the people who had so much freaky fun at Woodstock while we were busy learning cursive.
     Doesn't it ever go away? How long must we gaze raptly at the enormous waddling rump of the Early Baby Boom? Forever? Not that we want our turn, no way—hard experience has made us better than that. Should anyone announce that, for instance, the 1977 World Series of Rock at Cleveland Municipal Stadium was an earth-shattering moment of bottomless significance, at least I'd have the honesty to say, "Hey, buddy, I was THERE, and it was just 90,000 teens guzzling wine out of botas and listening to Peter Frampton."
     How come nobody who was at Woodstock has the guts to say that? Nobody says, "You know, standing in a downpour, cold and hungry and listening to Alvin Lee wasn't really all that magnificent an experience. In fact, it was miserable, and it didn't mean a damn thing."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 16, 2009

Take cabs while you can or soon there won’t be cabs to take

Uber Eats delivery driver in Santiago, Chile this April. 

     Our flight to Chicago was delayed. So my brother and I retired to a wine bar next to the gate at the Denver airport and ordered the cheese plate. Conversation shifted to arrival home.
     ”Are you cabbing it or Ubering it?” he asked.
     ”Neither,” I said, delighted at the spontaneous riddle I had handed him.
     My brother chewed on this koan.
     ”Ohhh,” he said, realization dawning. I don’t believe he actually said, “Lucky man!” and socked me admiringly on the shoulder, but rather made some kind of appreciative sound I interpreted that way.
     My wife was picking me up. In this frenetic era of Snapchat and Lyft, we still cling to the tradition that you personally collect loved ones arriving at an airport. To not do so is a snub. If my wife were flying home and I told her to take a taxi I might as well make up my bed in the garage.
     This is habit, not law. As the flight delay stretched into evening and the weather soured, she messaged me, asking: do you mind getting home yourself? I did not, understanding her reluctance to be an after-effect of when I came home from South America. She had braved a mid-April blizzard to pick me up at Midway, an experience so harrowing we skipped the ritual glomming of a dozen donuts at Huck Finn’s and simply bolted home.

To continue reading, click here.

'Complaining is part of the fun'

   


     I wrote this last November but never posted it. I'm not sure why; maybe I didn't think it was up to snuff. Maybe it was simply overlooked. It's somewhat appropriate now, since the older boy is coming home this weekend, for Father's Day, after an absence of ... gee ... five months. Can't wait.

     "Let's play a game!" said my younger son.
     Something of a surprise. I had just finished making a big pan of stuffing.
     "Great idea!" I replied.
     The kitchen island was cleared. His older brother, who arrived about 1:30 a.m., was enlisted in the cause. The game we play, "Settlers of Catan," involves building roads, settlement, trading resources. A lot more fun than it sounds.
     We took turns, each rolling a pair of dice to determine which resources are handed out. We were playing at a kitchen island, and though we rolled carefully, occasionally a die would skitter off onto the floor.
      I rolled, and one die went over the side. On the table the die showed two—two "pips," actually. The black circles on dice are called "pips." The younger boy leapt up and read the die that had tumbled onto the floor.
     "Seven," he said.
     "Okay, nine," I replied, checking the board to see whether that rolled earned me any resources.
     "No," said my son. "The one on the floor is a five. The total is seven."
     "Of course," I said, smiling slightly.
     "There is no 7 with one die," my older son explained.
     I knew that. I know that a die has six sides, one through six. A piece of technology unchanged since Roman times. Amazing, really. But I expected him to read the dice, not add it to the two on the table, so when he said "Seven" I did the addition myself.
     Is there a lesson there? Maybe that expectations can trump our knowledge? Or maybe it's Thanksgiving, and I should just enjoy the game—which I did, and not just because I won, though that helps. I never win—and not think so much.
     There was a moment earlier in the day that I will always treasure. I was making the stuffing. The boys and their mom had been talking in the living room, but I lured them into the kitchen, by taking some of the challah I was cutting into croutons for the stuffing and making it into french toast instead. The family moved into the kitchen to enjoy some french toast.
     The topic was restaurants, with this or that establishment coming under close scrutiny. I wasn't really listening, and then a sentence cut through the kitchen clatter.
     "Complaining is part of the fun," my older boy said. I stopped what I was doing, dried my hands on my apron, and walked carefully around the island.
     "That's my son," I said, kissing him on the head.

Take up the straight man's burden....

     I thought it was a joke.
     A meme, some online wit.
     That’s how news often enters our awareness. As flashes on the horizon, something crouching at the corner of our field of vision. A hoax from the Onion perhaps?
     On the fourth or fifth glimpse: fine, a “Straight Pride Parade,” ha-ha, let’s take a look.
     Oh.
     It’s real.
     Sorta.
     Just a permit. Not quite the Parade of Roses, yet. But the internet is nothing if not a hothouse for every cracked notion that manages to poke out of the earth, warmed by concentrated attention and nourished by the scattered like-minded.A group in Boston has applied for a permit to hold a Straight Pride parade on Aug. 31. To push back against Pride parades and Pride Month, which seems a bigger deal this year, perhaps because of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
     Why a Straight Pride Parade? A slap at Gay Pride, at all the underlings and those who support them by suggesting oppressed groups still exist.
     “For them, everything is based upon identity and whether or not one is categorized as a victim or an oppressor,” Straight Pride organizer Mark Sahady wrote on Facebook. “If you get victim status, then you are entitled to celebrate yourself and expect those with oppressor status to defer to your feelings.”
     There is a fragment of truth here — Democrats are big on identity politics, and that is a two-edged sword. We can celebrate uniqueness so much we forget the need to come together about anything.
     The solution is to find commonalities that include everybody. Someone who sincerely felt the unifying impulse parodied by Straight Priders would put their energies into stopping Donald Trump from commandeering our nation’s Fourth of July celebration and turning it into a celebration of himself. The 4th of July is, or was, exactly the kind of event that most Americans could get behind.

To continue reading, click here.

‘Soulless’ sets out R. Kelly’s abuse of girls

       

     No kindness goes unpunished.
     The Sunday editor asked if I would read the new book on R. Kelly and, accommodating fellow that I am, I said I would. I wrote this after finishing my column Thursday, so if it strikes you as a little wooden, I agree. Not much gas in the tank when I set to the task, nor much time to polish the result.
    The above is known as self-awareness, and self-critique, with perhaps a bit of humility mixed in. A thing can be flawed even though I myself did it. 
    This blend of qualities I would heartily recommend to the author of "Soulless" who complained, several times and without charm, about the review below, because I suggest the book is not perfect. Spoiler alert: it isn't. 
    

    R. Kelly is a hometown hero in Chicago, an R&B superstar who grabbed the brass ring of fame and riches. His smooth, sexy songs are loved by millions, the soundtrack of countless weddings and barbecues.
     Or, at least, he was.
     R. Kelly can’t read. He’s a “crude man” who sometimes smells, from not bathing, and trolls suburban malls picking up teenage girls, whom he sexually molests, sometimes on video.
     Or, at least, he did.
     Both descriptions of Kelly are true, though the first image is finally fading in the glare of the second. The serpentine process, 20 years in the making, is laid out in “Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly” (Abrams, $26), a captivating if sometimes disjointed journalism procedural by Jim DeRogatis, former music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.
     The book starts with an anonymous fax sent to DeRogatis just before Thanksgiving 2000. “I’m sending this to you because I don’t know where else to go,” it begins. “Robert’s problem — and it’s a thing that goes back many years — is young girls.”
     DeRogatis tosses the fax on a pile. But he returns to pull the thread, and the tale slowly unravels, taking on weight and momentum.

To continue reading, click here.

What's the hurry to get to St. Louis?

Typical St. Louis residents commuting to work in 2019

     Today is "But St. Louis IS Boring Day" at one of my favorite neighborhood watering holes, Wrigleyville's Nisei Lounge. At least it was, back in the day. I haven't been there in many years, but still recall the simple pleasure of passing a Friday afternoon in its dim, modest interior with a cue in my hand, sucking back beer and trading observations of the world as pool balls clacked and the juke box played.

     After the below was published a St. Louis radio station phoned me, on air, and invited me to visit the city and see its wonders. Trying to avoid the trip, for reasons clear below, I said that I couldn't imagine going without my family. So they flew us ALL down, put us up in the presidential suite of the Adams Mark Hotel. We got the full treatment—to a Rams game and that Buster Brown kids museum. As we were ferried across the St. Louis Zoo in a golf cart for our VIP tour, my wife leaned into me, eyes glittering wickedly, and whispered, "Piss off Montreal next...."

     Amtrak wants to send 16 trains a day hurtling at up to 125 miles an hour from Chicago to St. Louis. Which begs the question: Are there 16 trainloads of Chicagoans who want to go to St. Louis every day?
     I doubt it.
     Don't get me wrong. If you somehow find yourself in St. Louis, as I have on six or a dozen occasions, there are things to do. Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. That train station mall. The Arch. The Budweiser Brewery Tour.
     I've done the beer tour a few times. Which underscores a vital truth about St. Louis: If London takes a lifetime to master, then St. Louis takes about three days, and after that you find yourself back at Budweiser again. It gets old.
     All told, that doesn't bode well for the idea of high-speed bullet trains flashing between the two cities. I mean, think about St. Louis. What adjectives come to mind? "Sleepy" is one. "Warm" is another. "Muggy," a third.
     St. Louis, by definition, is not a place one rushes to. Whether you get there in an hour or three hours or five hours or a day is pretty immaterial. The very fact that you are going to St. Louis at all shows you have time on your hands. Frankly, I think people would be more inclined to increase the time it takes to get there, not decrease it. They would rather take a flatboat down to St. Louis, twanging on a mouth harp while Huck poles the raft along the meandering Mississippi, than take a high-speed train. I would.  

A shot, beer and this lovely, spot-on t-shirt all for $12.

     High-speed trains work in the East because they connect New York City to places like Boston and Washington, D.C. Each city is filled with people who need to travel in a hurry.
     Running a high-speed line down to St. Louis would be like filling an inflatable kiddie pool with a fire hose—you can do it, but there's a tremendous sense of overkill.
      Frankly, the whole scheme smacks of those suburban mayors who, from time to time, announce that the solution for suburban commuting problems is the creation of a $ 5 billion Disneylandlike monorail system between, say, Oak Lawn and Carpentersville.
     Look at foreign cities connected by high-speed trains. Tokyo and Osaka. Paris and the French Riviera. There is no need to imagine why people in Cannes would want to zip up to Paris, just as there is no mystery as to why Parisians might want to speed down to Monte Carlo.
     But St. Louis? Sure, I can see people there wanting to come here, their Model-A Fords piled high with chicken coops and butter churns and sofas as they snake their dusty way up Interstate 55 to look for a piece of land where they can be farmers.
      That's a one-way trip, unless they give up, overwhelmed at the tall buildings and the fact that their cheerful "Howdy!" is met with puzzled stares. They can lope home to Grandma's kitchen on Greyhound. No need for a high-speed train for that.
     Beyond Missourians who can't cut it here, who else might use that train? A few Wash U alumni heading for nostalgic weekends. Half a bleacher's worth of Cubs fans on game days. Put them together and how many Chicagoans go to St. Louis on an average day? Five? Twenty? A hundred? Tops.
     The entire question is probably moot anyway, since the line would be run by Amtrak, and they have a hard time getting their regular old pokey trains from point A to point B. I can't imagine Amtrak trains reaching 125 miles an hour, unless they're derailing over a gorge.
     Back in the days when Eva Marie Saint ran into Cary Grant on a train in "North by Northwest," there was a purpose and a romance to cross-country trains. Now, sadly, they exist mostly for penny-pinching retirees and acrophobics. The towns along the route where Amtrak says it will be blasting its high speed Chicago-to-St. Louis Cannonball Express are concerned about the increased traffic. They needn't be.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 27, 2000

     

Ricketts not first owner to go to bat for Republicans

     So baseball fans are grumbling because Todd Ricketts, Cubs co-owner and finance chair of the Trump Victory Committee, is dandling GOP fundraisers at a party Saturday night in a little property of his called Wrigley Field.
     Reaction was swift and predictable. ”BOYCOTT THE CUBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Jim McDonald demanded on Facebook. “Anyone who goes to Cubs games and spends money is actually supporting Trump. Who do you love more The Cubs or the future of the USA?”
     Oh please.   

     First off, the Ricketts family assumed controlling interest in the Cubs (it was too complicated a financial shell game to call it a “purchase”) in 2009. So the hefty profit off all those $10 beers have been funneling to right-wing causes for a decade. Odd that some notice only now, even claiming to shift their allegiance to the Sox, as if such a thing were possible.
     And remember from whom the Ricketts bought the Cubs: The Tribune Company. Not exactly Ben & Jerry’s. More like Fox News before the American Pravda was a gleam in Rupert Murdoch’s eye. Whether sneering at immigrants or urging isolation, the Trib was a foghorn of right-wing nuttery for decades, stretching back to the days when its owner, Col. Robert McCormick, began each morning licking the boots of Hitler.
     Yet fans still cheered Ryne Sandberg.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2011: Would so many still storm the beach today?

     On July 9, 1944, Corporal H. W. Crayton paused "somewhere in France" to write a letter to the parents of Raymond Hoback.
     "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hoback," he began. "While walking along the beach D-Day plus 1, I came upon this Bible and as most any person would do I picked it up from the sand to keep it from being destroyed. I knew that most all Bibles have names and addresses within the cover so I made it my business to thumb through the pages until I came upon the name above. Knowing that you no doubt would want the book returned I am sending it knowing that most Bibles are a book to be cherished. I would have sent it sooner but I have been quite busy . . ."
     Knowing he had found a book but not its owner, Corp. Crayton put the best spin he could on the situation.
     "You have by now received a letter from your son saying he is well. I sincerely hope so. I imagine what has happened is that your son dropped the book without any notice. Most everybody who landed on the beach D-Day lost something. I for one as others did lost most of my personal belongings, so you see how easy it was to have dropped the book and not known about it. Everything was in such a turmoil . . ."
     His hope was in vain—by the time the Bible arrived, the Hobacks had been informed that both Raymond Hoback and his brother Bedford were killed at Omaha Beach, one of 33 pairs of brothers to die, along with more than 2,500 other Allied soldiers, on D-Day, June 6, 1944, 67 years ago today.
     The standard reason given to remember such sacrifice is to "honor" those soldiers, but given that they are beyond the touch of what we can do or say, I think it's more important that we remember the devotion to country and willingness to sacrifice they manifested, a sacrifice that, thankfully, has not been demanded of most Americans for a very long time—so long that it is a valid concern whether we'd be able to respond in a similar fashion if called upon to do so again. I like to think we would, but wonder if people could ever be as selfless as they were then.
     Bedford Hoback was named for the town he grew up in, Bedford, Va., and 17 of the 30 Bedford men in Company A, 116th Infantry, 29th Division also died that day. It wasn't an accident that they were in harm's way.
     "You know, us Bedford boys, we competed to be in the first wave," said Ray Nance, one of the few to return. "We wanted to be there. We wanted to be the first on the beach."
     Maybe we're smarter now. Maybe we see the futility of war, particularly the wars we're fighting today in Afghanistan, in Iraq, wars that are not so clear cut. They certainly won't end cleanly. There will be no fall of Berlin, no signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri to cease hostilities. We'll just at some point stop and bring the troops home, blundering blindly forward until then.
     Well, that isn't entirely true. As always, we have our history to guide us, a history that shows Americans have always been willing to sacrifice, to rise to the occasion, to defeat evil, to pay a high price, when called upon. We did not choose to enter World War II, the war came to us. I can't say the same about the present wars—the cause might be debatable, the heroism of the soldiers isn't.
     But sacrifice is supposed to be spread out. One of the many awful aspects of the current wars is that the full burden falls on such a small segment of the American population: the volunteer military and their families. The rest of us too easily ignore what's happening. Many people know that June 6, 1944 was D-Day. Can you cite one significant date in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars off the top of your head? I certainly can't.
     The sacrifice wasn't always spread out in the past either. Bedford suffered a greater rate of D-Day casualties than any other town in America. That is why Congress chose to locate the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, dedicated 10 years ago today. The monument depicts bronze figures storming a beach, with one representing Raymond Hoback—whose body was never found—face down in the sand, his Bible spilling out of his backpack.
     Cpl. Crayton ends his letter. "Time goes by so quickly as it has today. I must close hoping to hear that you received the Bible in good shape."
     His parents did. The Hoback brothers' sister, Lucille Boggess, still lives in Bedford, Va., and still cherishes Raymond's Bible.
     "You still think about them and miss them and just wonder," she told a local reporter a few days ago. "What would their life have been like if they had lived?''

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 2011

City population grows by one

Frank Robert Schneider Sennett

     Congratulations to proud parents Denise Schneider and Frank Sennett, who welcomed baby boy Frank Robert Schneider Sennett on Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 3:54 a.m. Frankie weighed 6 pounds, 7 oz., and measured 20 inches long. All are doing well.
     And if you’re wondering what they’re doing at the top of the column, well, I originally intended to tag the happy news discreetly at the bottom. Why? Blame nostalgia. Not so long ago the paper boasted all sorts of bold-faced columns: Irv Kupcinet and Bill Zwecker, and of course Mike Sneed, who still runs on Sundays.
     There was a vigorous cosmopolitan swirl to those bold-faced columns. We weren’t a city of anonymous nobodies, hog-butchering and clock-watching unheralded and alone, but a glittering array of celebrities and quasi-celebrities and the connected powerful. Folks who counted. 

      Those days are gone, replaced by ... whatever the heck it is we have now. The top Chicago “influencer” is .... a 26-year-old make-up artist named Alexys Fleming, with 2.6 million followers on YouTube and 700,000 on Instagram. Not to take anything away from her. She seems good at what she does, and if the public is far, far, far more interested in learning how to transform into the Night King from Game of Thrones than in reading semi-witty critiques, the fault is not hers. (There’s actually more to Fleming than that; a diabetic, her ”Dumb Things People Say to Diabetics” video is funny and should be required viewing for anyone grappling with the ailment).
     But I digress. To tuck the news of little Frankie’s arrival at the bottom and let it sit there, to be honest, looked strange. And demanded explanation. And the more I explained, the longer it got and I realized that ... one of my favorite expressions when it comes to writing is a line from Napoleon: If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna. No half-measures, no shilly-shallying.
     So if we’re going to have a birth announcement, let’s do it up...

To continue reading, click here.

Don't count those chickens quite yet.

      Boulder, Colorado is a liberal enclave if ever there were one, between the head-for-the-mountains University of Colorado, the swami spiritual Naropa Institute, and the geological layers of hikers and hippies-turned-techies and flush craft beer and herbal tea companies.. 
      The Boulder Book Store is perhaps the emotional epicenter of the town—not a single Ann Coulter best-seller in sight—and there I noticed this big display of oval stickers and rectangular magnets marking 01/20/21, "Trump's Last Day—Not soon enough!" 
       Pretty to think so.
       Maybe it is. 
       And maybe it isn't.
       My people have a term, a kina hora, which translates roughly as "evil eye." Not in the sense of placing a curse so much as knocking on wood. The idea roughly behind, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."
     Or, for those slow on the uptake: Trump might get re-elected. Then his last day would be 01/20/25. Not soon at all. That could happen. It's not only possible; it's probable—the president has an advantage, historically, and, say what you will, that asshole is president, and his herd of credulous dupe followers shows no sign of disillusionment.
     Recognizing the fact, that the deck is stacked against our country being delivered from the hands of its shame any time soon, is key to the Democrats' chances. Over-confidence was part of the galaxy of errors that led to Hillary Clinton's defeat. We should try not to reproduce her blunders, though this sticker, like so much going on right now, is not a cause for hope.
     I didn't buy one, but I got in line to buy some Belize chocolate. 
     "How long have you been selling those?" I asked the clerk, gesturing toward the display.
     "Since the beginning," she said, somewhat cryptically. 
     "I hope the date's correct," I observed. She didn't take the bait, but only looked at me, uncomprehendingly. 
    Trouble. 

Police forced to show courage legislators lack

     Virginia Beach is, to be honest, kind of a dump.
     “A tourist trap” is how I’ve described this unlovely coastal jumble of blockish ocean-facing hotels and pool-heavy motels, neon T-shirt and bicycle surrey rental stands, joints selling fried oysters and fish chowder, cramped stores hawking novelty shot glasses and Virginia is for Lovers beer cozies.
     We only visited because we were looking at southern colleges for the younger boy, and the grumpy dad doing all the driving insisted that he’d be damned if he was going to travel all the way from Chicago to the University of Richmond — lovely campus, great business school, they trust their kids with chunks of the endowment to invest, and the best mascot ever, the Spiders — without pushing 100 more miles and sticking his toes in the ocean for a few days.
     All things being equal, better to swim at Michigan City and save yourself a drive.
     There is, however, on the crowded and over-developed Virginia Beach boardwalk, a curious statue showing three figures, obscured up to their hips by a marble base, each with one hand interlocked, the other reaching down, as if offering passersby below a helping hand.
     It is the Virginia Beach Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Dedicated in 2012, it’s inscribed with 14 names of local officers who died in the line of duty. The bronze larger-than-life figures represent the police, the sheriff’s office and federal agencies.
     I thought of the statue after what Virginia Beach police chief Jim Cervera called a “horrific event of unbelievable proportion” occurred Friday afternoon: a dozen people murdered at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. Shot dead for ... well, whatever unknowable blend of petty grievance and flaring psychosis (and, never forget, easy access to automatic weaponry) causes a person to do such a thing.

To continue reading, click here.

In new book, John Paul Stevens relates a lifetime of legal reasoning

John Paul Stevens in 2015

     I was engrossed when I heard former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speak to the Chicago Bar Association four years ago. Reading his new book was less captivating, for reasons I try to summarize in the Sunday paper today. 

     Chicago doesn’t cherish local boy John Paul Stevens as much as it should. Maybe next year, when the former Supreme Court justice turns 100, he’ll get his due.
     Though now is not too early to kick off the celebration by reading his new book “The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years” (Little Brown, $35).
     An unfortunate subtitle — apparently the book was five years in the making, though you’d think in that time somebody at his publisher would have noticed that Stevens places the presidential election of Jimmy Carter in 1978, as opposed to 1976, the year that event took place in temporal reality.
     Not to start with a gaffe in a book that is, generally, an engaging if, by necessity, legalistic account of the key issues that frame our national conversation.
     Stevens is so long-lived, perhaps it can be forgiven if the years blur.
     He remembers going to the 1929 World Series at Wrigley Field and seeing Babe Ruth make his called shot in 1932. His father and grandfather built the Stevens Hotel — now the Hilton Chicago — and, as a boy, Stevens met Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. His first job was as a wandering raisin tart salesman at the 1933 Century of Progress Fair, the fourth star in the flag of Chicago.
     Stevens was invited to become a Navy cryptographer, spending World War II deciphering Japanese communications, then returned to Chicago to get his law degree at Northwestern.

To continue reading, click here.

The Saturday Snapshot: Missouri justice

     Miscarriage of justice is nothing new in Missouri.
     After the state last week became the latest to enact an abortion ban—for all intents and purposes—denying half of American citizens the basic human right of enjoying sovereignty over their own bodies, faithful reader Tony Galati offered this timely contribution to the blog, these stunning photographs of the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, where the infamous Dred Scott case was first heard in 1847 and 1850 on its way for its infamous date with the United States Supreme Court.
     Scott was a slave, born in Virginia about 1799, taken to Missouri in 1830 with his owners, the Peter Blow family. He was sold to an army surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, who took him to the Illinois and Wisconsin territories, which were designated free by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
      Upon his return in 1842 to slave-owning Missouri, abolitionist friends encouraged Scott, who was illiterate, to petition the court, arguing that his time as a free man in the territories made him free permanently. 
     Scott's case was filed in the then-unfinished St. Louis courthouse on April 6, 1846. He lost the first trial on a technicality, but was allowed to petition again. The Missouri courts, in a bit of ominous foreshadowing for proponents of the latest law depriving Americans of liberty, sided with the notion of "once free, always free," and Scott won his freedom in this building in 1850. 
     But the case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court by the widow of the surgeon.
     The U.S. Supreme Court, to its undying shame, decided in 1857 that no black person could be a citizen of the United States, a ruling whose wrongness is echoed today in the notion that no woman can decide when she wants to have a baby. It took the Civil War to correct the court's error; who knows what national fissure will be required to put this question to rest? Future generations will no doubt view the current machinations—the dying gasp of compulsory religion in this country—with the same sense of sorrowful bafflement that Americans today view the Dred Scott case.
     Unless they don't. The side of justice always assumes it will win in the end but, if we look around at the world today, we can see that just isn't so. 
    

Musician keeps memory of Tiananmen Square alive

Fengshi Yang conducts the East Meets West Music Arts chamber orchestra in a previous memorial concert. 

     Music is not going to topple the Chinese Communist dictatorship.   
     More and more, it seems nothing will.   
     But music is all that Fengshi Yang has.   
     “China is not getting better,” said the Columbia College music teacher. “It’s getting worse.”
     She feels obligated to do what she can: present another commemorative concert in her hometown of Naperville, performed this Sunday by the East Meets West Music Arts chamber orchestra to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, in which Chinese students demanding democracy were slaughtered by their government.
     China does what it can to suppress the memory of the massacre, using its complete control of the Chinese online media. There, you can get in trouble for even mentioning “June 4” or “6/4.”
     In 2012, when the Shanghai stock market fell 64.89 points at the time of the anniversary, Chinese censors began blocking searches for “index” and “Shanghai stock market.”
     China can’t suppress American free speech, yet, but its chilling influence is felt right here in America’s heartland. It has increasingly tried to impose its uncritical nationalism, casting honest history as mere bigotry. Chinese exchange students sometimes push to import the propaganda they grew up on at home to American campuses. I interviewed a neighbor, born in China, who 30 years ago was a student protesting at Tiananmen Square. An American citizen now, he asked me to not only refrain from using his last name, but also his first.

To continue reading, click here.

Don't pick the flowers!

     The Chicago Botanic Garden is the biggest bargain in the history of ever. For $99 a year, you can stroll the grounds—rose gardens and walled English gardens, fruit trees and prairie, lakes and waterfalls, a formal Japanese garden and a woodland. Desert hothouses and profusions of tropical orchids. 
     And much more.
     My wife and I go there all the time, as often as we can. Just to stroll, talk, take the place in. We even go in winter, in February. The Botanic Garden is constantly changing. We always have a good time. It's like being in heaven, only you're not dead. 
      True, we do bring the personalities  we labor under when not in the garden. Which is not an issue for my wife, temperate as a spring day. And, honestly, not much of an issue for me, lulled into a calm, reflective, appreciative Chicago Botanic Garden state of mind.
    Usually. There are times when I revert to form, the flowers be damned. Times when, well, to paraphrase Boss Tweed, I see my opportunities and I take 'em.
    Such as this lovely orange flower, which we noticed in the middle of the path. A crowded path, right in front of the entrance. I quickly stooped to pick it up and hand it to my wife. 
     "Here," I said. "It would look good in your hair." 
     "The wind must have blown it down," she said, taking the flower, gazing at it appreciatively. I took a step back.
    "Hey!" I chided, in a loud, bold voice, waving my arms. "You're not supposed to pick the flowers!" 
     I can't honestly say everyone turned to look; I was focused on her. But she certainly squirmed as if they had. Joke accomplished, she tucked the flower behind her ear and we moved toward our car. A fun place, the garden.  

Buckner’s blame is also our own

     He had more hits — 2,715 — than either Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams.
     But Bill Buckner also blew one important play, and was smart enough to know what that meant.
     “The headline on my obituary will say I missed a ground ball in Game 6,” Buckner once said. “A little note at the end will say, ‘He was a pretty good player.’”
     He got that right, the first part anyway. The obituaries for Buckner, who died on Monday, did try not to let his 22 stand-out seasons be eclipsed by one bobbled ball.
     “A MIXED LEGACY,” read the headline in Tuesday’s Sun-Times. “’80 NL batting champ with Cubs committed big error in ’86 Series.’’
     “2,715 Hits, Eclipsed by One Miss” is how the New York Times put it.
     They tried, but they failed. Because Bill Buckner was a goat, the biggest goat in baseball for the past three decades. If the term doesn’t pluck a heartstring, then you’ve forgotten your “Peanuts.”
     “If I catch it, we’ll win the championship, and I’ll be the hero,” Charlie Brown says to himself, looking up, glove at the ready, as the baseball flies in his direction. “If I miss it, I’ll be the goat!”
     Spoiler alert: Charlie Brown misses it.

To continue reading, click here.

"Some of the last mystery in the world will pass"

    Twenty-five years ago, when I was writing a book on failure, I wanted to focus on an achievement which many people tried to accomplish and failed before it was finally done, and settled on the conquest of Mount Everest. 
     The chapter, called "Were the Mountain Smaller," examined all the expeditions that didn't make it up Mount Everest, named "Chomolungma," by  the locals, before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay managed the feat in 1953 (one analysis of a British failure in the 1930s determined that success would certainly have been theirs "were the mountain smaller.")
     My research gave me a lifelong skepticism, if not contempt, for attempts to scale Everest, an attitude that tends to flare each May, when conditions are right, or as right as they get at least, for summiting. This year's was particularly deadly and ludicrous, which prompted me to re-read the chapter, and remember that while the situation gets worse and worse, none of this is new, alas. The chapter ends this way:

     Some six hundred people have climbed Everest and the number is constantly growing—sixty-one people reached the summit in 1993 alone, forty of them on a single day, May 10 (climbers savoring their moment of personal triumph at the summit, heard shouts from below to hurry up, that others were waiting).
     As many as one hundred people making the attempt have died, thirty-four in the past five years—in falls, from exposure, from hypothermia and, in attempts to duplicate Messner and Habeler's 1978 climb, from causes related to oxygen depletion, such as cerebral edema.
     For a while, mirroring the atomization of society, climbers attempting Everest sought to be an ever more specific first something atop the mountain—first American, first woman, first person over fifty, first American woman over fifty. Attention also shifted to which route was taken up Everest. Hillary and Tenzing, it turns out, not only cheated with oxygen but took the easy way up. So the more difficult routes had to be conquered.
     Stacy Allison, the first American woman up Everest, spent forty-five minutes at the summit photographing herself with the logos of her numerous corporate sponsors. Later, appearing on "The David Letterman Show," she took a stone from her pocket, explaining that it came from the top of Everest, and asked permission to heave it through Dave's famed studio window. "Of course," said Letterman, and she threw the stone, accompanied by the usual breaking-glass sound effect. 
    Today Everest is climbed so frequently that trash is a problem—the Nepalese government has had to require that expeditions carry out all their garbage, lest the slopes become an utter junkyard of discarded oxygen cylinder and mint cake wrappers.
     From a vantage point of forty years, comparing the end result of the dynamic, peakward-yearning philosophy of the British mountaineers to the austere, mountain-fearing mysticism of the Sherpas, one doesn't have to be a devotee of Eastern religion to wonder if perhaps the world might be a more appealing place had Everest been a little higher, the winds a little stronger, the cold more harsh and the highest mountain in the world remained forever beyond the grasp of the humans living below.
     "The mountain appears not to be intended for climbing," noted Mallory in his diary in 1921. He was speaking of the physical challenge, but oddly enough, at least some Western contemporaries also found philosophical obstacles. When the first expedition was being organized, a few London editorialists wondered about the wisdom of making the effort. "Some of the last mystery of the world will pass when the last secret place in it, the naked peak of Everest, shall be trodden by those trespassers," on prescient critic wrote.
     in early June 1953, on their way down the mountain toward fame, the British expedition stopped at the Thyangboche Monastery to pay their respects. John Hurt told the elderly abbot that they had just climbed to the summit of Everest. "He was plainly incredulous and nothing would shake his unbelief," wrote Hunt, oblivious that if you thought God was on top of a mountain, you couldn't every well imagine a bunch of haggard bearded foreigners tramping up to visit Him. "But his natural courtesy forbade him to give expression to this in so many words, and when we left he graciously congratulated us on 'nearly reaching the summit of Chomolungma.'" 

Memorial Day is to remember the fallen

Tom Dier in Vietnam in 1970

     The Jerry Corp Memorial Highway is not long. A section of U.S. Highway 160, it runs two and a half miles through Ozark County, Missouri, 250 miles southwest of St. Louis.
     A green highway sign flashes by, the name registers and some drivers may feel a passing curiosity: does anybody remember Jerry Corp?
     Tom Dier remembers him.
     ”We weren’t really close or anything like that,” said Dier, 70. “He wasn’t in my platoon.”
     A mortar platoon in Company C, First Battalion, 52nd Infantry. Corp was a radioman attached to the command post in Quang Ngai province Vietnam.
     ”We got to know each other that way,” said Dier, who grew up in Northbrook and has returned home to speak at the northwest suburb’s Memorial Day commemoration after the parade Monday. “You didn’t really get close to people too much.”
     In fact, Dier has exactly one memory of Corp, but it’s a good one.
     ”Someone on the perimeter called in for a routine fire mission, asking for illumination,” Dier plans to say in his speech. “I dropped a round down the 81-millimeter mortar tube. The shot went out, and we waited for the familiar pop and the subsequent intense light that the round would provide as it drifted slowly back to the ground for several hundred feet in the air.
     “The descending illumination revealed a nearby hillside covered in jungle. Jerry and I laughed as the flare drifted toward the hillside, watching a multitude of chirping birds who mistook the flare for a sunrise. The noise from the birds stopped suddenly—as if a switch had been flipped—when the flare burned out.”

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1998: Veteran entitled to help, but 'too proud' to see it

     Not every soldier who is lost falls on a distant battlefield. Some come home, alive and seemingly sound, only to later succumb, a casualty to hidden wounds. 
     With Memorial Day tomorrow, I thought of this pair of stories. Though more than 20 years have passed, I still remember clearly the day the first one was printed, because I did something that I'd never done before: I took my telephone, which would not stop ringing, and put it in my desk drawer and closed the drawer. I had already used it, for a difficult conversation with a bereaved mother, and needed to write the second column. 

     Pvt. McLynn Craig made it back from Vietnam, but the Chicago streets did him in. Now his body lies unclaimed, waiting for somebody to help him home to his final rest.
     Craig, 48, a former Marine, was found dead under a stairwell on the West Side in the middle of December. Cause of death: pneumonia.
     Since being recovered, Craig's body has been at the Cook County medical examiner's office.
     "He was very nice, an educated young man," said Reatha M. Holder, a social worker at the Veterans Affairs West Side Medical Center, who tried to encourage Craig to enter programs and get off the street.
     "But he was too proud to seek help," she said. "Others from the lounge tried to get him to seek help from the VA, because he was eligible."
     "The lounge" is Carol's Lounge, a tavern at 3858 W. Madison, where Craig used to work as a handyman.
     "We all knew him, but we didn't know much about him," said Quentin Black, the manager at the bar. "He came from the South—he has ties with people down there. He was in the Marines. He served two tours in Vietnam. He worked maintenance on a flight crew. He was a bright man, kind of worldly for his young life."
     Black said that Craig used to sleep in the bar for a while.
     "But he took to the streets. Everything he owned was on his back," said Black. "He was proud."
     Holder has tried to locate his family. His mother, Lena Mae Craig, is thought to live in Montgomery, Ala. He has children in Chicago—two sons and a daughter, who is blind. But nobody seems to know their names or where to find them.
     The medical examiner's office was going to release Craig's body to be buried in a pauper's grave at the potter's field in Homewood. But Holder intervened, hoping someone would come forward and claim him.
     "He was helpful to everybody," she said. "I just couldn't understand how he could let himself become a homeless veteran."
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 9, 1998

      As concerned strangers were making plans Friday to bury McLynn Craig—the ex-Marine who became homeless and died huddling under a West Side stairway in December—the sad news was being relayed to his mother in Alabama.
     "They were neighbors of ours here in West Chatham—a fine family, a wonderful young man," said Grethyal Gooch, 63, who read about Craig in Friday's Sun-Times. "I was stunned. I called his mother. She was very distraught. They'd never been able to find him."
     Lena Mae Craig said her son took to the streets for reasons she didn't understand.
     "That was just something he wanted to do," she said from her home in Gadsden, Ala. "He was evidently dealt a bad something. I don't know. He's been like this for three years, sleeping and staying in taverns and doing work for food."
     She said Craig, who was 48 and served two tours in the Marines and then one in the Navy, could have come home anytime to the people who loved him.
     "He has a blind son, 25 years old. I just told him (the news)," Craig said. "He loved his father to death. He has a sweet daughter, in Rock Falls. She's going down to ID his body at the morgue. He has two sweet children that love him and a mother and two sisters and a brother."
     Her only indication of what might have kept her son from seeking help was his bitterness toward the government.
     "He said the government was rotten and he didn't want anything to do with it," Craig said. "He didn't want any help, didn't want to go into the hospital."
     She said her son did not live in the streets because of any mental problems. "He was too smart in the head for that. He was in the Marines," she said. "The Marines are not dumb people."
     Nor do they neglect their own. Throughout the day Friday, Marines -- active, retired and reserve, as individuals and as representatives of groups such as VietNow -- called the newspaper offering burial help.
     But it seems that Craig will be shipped home for burial in Alabama.
     "I want him shipped here," his mother said. "I want him here."

                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 10, 1998

The Saturday Snapshot: "Philosophy will clip an angel's wings"

Photo by Nikki Dobrowolski

     Rainbows always catch our attention. They're rare enough to not bore, but common enough not to frighten. They're color on a grey day—all the colors of the, forgive me, rainbow in fact—after a storm, and have enough cultural baggage to make us feel good, as heralds of happiness, with an echo of tales of leprechauns and their hidden pots of gold.
      All good, but also a shame, because we usually stop there, and seldom reflect, oh, how both Rene Descartes and Isaac Newtown studied rainbows, the former in his 1637 treatise...
     Aw, the hell with it. Let us not pull rainbows down from heaven and pick over them with our microscopes. As much as I'm inclined to do just that, roll out the science, today ... well, not in the mood. Today, let's err on the side of romance. 
    So let's cut across the field, veering from technology to poetry, and take the advice of John Keats, who complains specifically about people who would study rainbows, in his poem "Lamia"—Lamia being a child of Poseidon, a child-devouring sea monster. He uses "philosophy" in its older sense, encompassing science, and "awful" in its meaning, not of a bad thing, but "inspiring awe."

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow...

     Thank you regular reader (and photo contributor) Nikki Dobrowolski, for sending the photo, taken in her back yard. That's some backyard.

Trump takes his hands off the wheel

 

Union Station is falling apart, sometimes on commuters' heads. 

     Infrastructure is not sexy.
     Roads and bridges, railroad tracks and tunnels. Nobody says, “You know what I love about Chicago? The electrical grid; it’s so robust!”
     Though I admit I find infrastructure — well, if not quite a turn-on, than at least interesting. I’ve watched roads built, cement poured, tunnels dug, bridges installed. It’s not boring.
     And it’s important. A nation’s infrastructure is like a body’s veins and arteries, bone and sinew. You might not take pride in your Achilles tendon, but if something goes wrong with it, you try to walk and instead pitch forward on your face.
     You probably noticed infrastructure in the news this week. The president stormed out of a meeting with Democrats Wednesday; they were supposed to talk about long-delayed infrastructure repairs. But Donald Trump vowed not to address this urgent, bipartisan problem while the Democrats are plumbing the depths of his administration’s corruption and criminality.
     On one hand, it is not the biggest setback. Just as the environmental standards being scrapped tend, upon closer examination, to have been implemented by Barack Obama in 2014, so nobody was rushing to fix our national infrastructure before Trump brought his circus to Washington. Obama’s 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act grew construction efforts by only 1 percent in 2009 and 2010. (I like to point out where Obama fell short, just to mess with Republicans’ heads, showing it is possible to view your own side critically. I sincerely believe Republicans don’t know it can be done, beyond occasionally muttering, “I wish he didn’t tweet so much” which is like pointing out Satan has a loose button on his coat).

To continue reading, click here.

It happens from time to time

Pregnant woman, by Edward Degas
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I always worry about repeating myself in the column. Probably unnecessarily. Nobody ruffles the paper indignantly and harrumphs, "I READ this same opinion 15 years ago!" But I have my professional pride, too much no doubt, and to me, once you start recycling old ideas, you're halfway to Bob Greene and his 100 columns about Baby Richard.
     So the horror of Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, the pregnant 19-year-old Pilsen woman who was strangled and  her baby cut out of her, evoked, after the normal human shock that such a crime would evoke, a kind of double deja vu. First, the realization that this crime, as staggeringly incomprehensible as it is, has happened before, repeatedly. And second, that I've pointed this out already. Thus I kept quiet.
     For today, I dug up up that column from 15 years ago. It's brief, since the column took a full page and had a variety of parts. under bold faced subheadings. 

    But it does the job.

    On the same day, I ran a vignette about my family life in 2004 that I couldn't drop back down the memory hole without sharing. I'll tag it afterward, as an apology for taking you  to such a grim place. The speaker at the time was 7.

Not the first time

     I shouldn't even bring up the subject of the hideous murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett—the Missouri woman who was strangled and her baby cut from her womb—since there's nothing funny about it.
     But one aspect of the crime should not escape notice. When we first heard of this kind of thing, in the similar 1995 Debra Evans case here in DuPage County, I thought it was so brutal and horrible it had to be a unique occurrence. It seemed a crime of such awfulness it might have happened only once, safely in historic times, the kind of thing that becomes a Greek tragedy, like Medea.
     But these cases are not unique. It's incredible, but true. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens—now in Missouri, in 1995 in DuPage, and also in cases in Ohio, in Alabama, in New Mexico, and probably more that I couldn't find.
     I don't know what conclusion to draw from this, other than as a reminder that there are some hugely disturbed people out there. And while such crimes are still rare, the killing of pregnant women is not—in fact, murder is the leading cause of death among pregnant women and new mothers, eclipsing things such as cancer or delivery complications.
     Researchers are trying to figure out why.

'I'm lying!'

     "Do you really have an earache, or are you faking it?" my wife, trying to shepherd the boys out the door, called after the youngest, who has lately been trying to goldbrick his way out of anything he finds remotely unpleasant.
     I set down the coffee cup, poised to point out the lack of utility of such a question, when his voice, bright with the innocent candor of youth, came chiming in from another section of the house:
     "Faking it!" he announced.
     I didn't know whether to be proud of his honesty or dismayed by his lack of craft.
                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 20, 2004

Picking up after your dog is just the start

     Social media gets talked about as if it were one thing. But “media” is plural, and each social medium has different customs and tone.
     Facebook is familial, for instance. You can show unruly guests the gate. On Facebook I mark personal occasions: my wife’s birthday, a son home from school, in a way I never would on Twitter. Twitter is far more public and contentious, a mad free-for-all, like that tomato festival in a small Italian town where everyone is covered in red goo, flinging fruit as fast as they can.
     Then there’s blogging. I maintain a blog whose name, alas, can’t be printed in the paper. Blogging seemed edgy when I began, six years ago, ignoring the unavoidable truth that, if I’m doing something, then it ain’t edgy.
     Now blogging seems a quaint and obscure time-wasting pastime, like embroidery. A place for smaller, more trivial thoughts that have no business gobbling up the scarce real estate of a printed newspaper. Two weeks ago, one blog post began this way:
     “Tuesday is garbage day in the old leafy suburban paradise. Which makes Tuesday a better day to walk the dog, because people roll their big sturdy green garbage cans to the curb, affording me a range of disposal options after Kitty has done her business. No need for carrying the blue New York Times bag with its load of doo, not for long, not on Tuesdays. Detour a few steps over to a can, a tad guiltily, lift the top and flip the bag inside.
     “I don’t know why I feel guilty—it isn’t as if the homeowner will mind, me using their can for such a purpose. Or maybe they would. Of course they would. We can be very jealous of our prerogatives, we suburbanites, and I can imagine some homemaker gazing worriedly out her window. ‘That disheveled man, the one with the limp who is always walking that ratty little dog. He just came by and used our garbage can!’”

To continue reading, click here.