Flashback 1999: Just enough space here to squeeze in Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin's footprint on the moon (NASA)

     Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and I'll share here the story that ran last Sunday in the paper on what Chicago was like on July 20, 1969. Until then, I realized that one of those Apollo 11 astronauts who walked on the moon, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, called me on the phone once, or make that twice, responding to an article I had written about the moon missions.

     Buzz Aldrin called this week. Twice. Which was not the amazing part. The amazing part was that I tried to duck the calls, telling his handler that I had just, the day before, talked with the Apollo 8 astronauts, so unfortunately my column's quota for 1960s space nostalgia was used up for the time being.
     Even as I was doing it, as politely as possible, I was watching myself, stunned at how fast the incredible becomes mundane. In a flash.
     If Plato showed up at your door this morning, you would of course be thrilled -- excited that he came in, sat down and talked about the ideal city all morning. Splendid. You serve him coffee on the good china.
     Even more incredible, he shows up again the next day. A life changing experience. Four hours on reality. You videotape it.
     The following day, again with the Plato. He talks about education. You phone up a few friends and tell them to hurry over.
     But by the fourth day—I guarantee it— you'd find yourself waking up and thinking, "I sure hope that Plato guy doesn't show up today. I've got a lot of errands to run."
     That's how people are. Not that I wasn't interested in talking to the second man to step on the moon. But I figured, he's busy, I'm busy, why waste both our time if the conversation isn't going to end up in the newspaper?
     But I took the calls from Aldrin anyway. You sort of have to. That's why those space guys do so well in business. When a fellow who has been to the moon calls, you talk to him, even if he's only promoting his plan to put tourists into space.
     Thank goodness Aldrin wasn't selling vacuum cleaners. We already have six at home -- seriously, six vacuum cleaners, of varying configurations and power, if you count Dustbusters. Don't ask me why, ask the wife. Still, if Aldrin were selling vacuums, we'd have seven.
     Instead, he has a program called ShareSpace. He wants to get the space shuttles privatized, build hotels in space, and start flying "citizen explorers" up to those hotels. There aren't enough rich people who'll pay huge ticket prices for a quick trip to space, so some seats will be apportioned by a kind of lottery; you pay $10 or $20, you get a shot at getting on a flight.
     He talked about it at great length, the way that semi-retired guys who are in the grip of passions will. There would be side benefits.
     "By bringing down the cost of access to space, we open up exploration to much more affordable means," he said. "Once you have spacecraft in orbit, it is relatively easy with low-thrust engines to journey to the moon and to Mars. Recycling reusable spaceships is the key to reducing the cost barrier."
     OK so far -- I wouldn't bet my money on it happening, but then I thought cell phones were a fad. His main purpose seemed to be to get those "citizens" into space for their own good. The science was secondary. Aldrin, who has visited the North Pole and the wreck of the Titanic, sees putting people in space as the next logical development in the adventure travel business.
     I have trouble with that, just as I had trouble with the Apollo 8 astronauts calling the moon landing a political gambit first and a scientific quest a distant second. Did he, I wanted to know, agree with that? That we school kids had been duped into believing humanity was learning something by all this? What good was going to the moon?
     "The value, as I've been trying to tell people, of the space program, of Apollo anyway, was not the rocks that were brought back, but that people were excited about it," he said. "There was a sense of involvement, something that touched them, affected their lives. People remember where they were when there was the landing on the moon. That's an enrichment of people's lives."
     So the whole thing was entertainment? A really, really expensive pageant to get Americans to feel good about themselves and forget for a while the nasty old Soviet Union and that terrible war in Vietnam.
     "I wouldn't want to call it 'entertainment,' " he said. "I would call it participation in historic activities, in events of significance. If you witnessed the Hindenburg airship explode, if you listened to the radio when Pearl Harbor was attacked, these were catastrophic events, major events in history. So many times the news is about adverse events happening, but occasionally there were achievements of great success."
     We went into space to generate good news. Lovely. And now, one of the space pioneers wants to see that every stock trader with $ 50,000 to burn can get an 8-by-10 glossy of himself in a jumpsuit, giving the thumbs up, floating around his hotel lobby, grinning like an idiot.
     Just like that pesky dead philosopher always showing up at your door, there can be too much of a good thing. I think that space travel will lose value once people flock to it as a lark, the same way that mountaineering has lost a lot of its cachet
     And now we're talking about going to Mars. Why bother?
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 6, 1998

Buzz Aldrin on the moon with the American flag (NASA)

Yasso bars: addictive, in a good way

Drew Harrington, left, and Amanda Klane met in kindergarten in Easton, Mass.
and went on to found the Yasso brand of frozen Greek yogurt treats.

     Most columns get written then slapped immediately into the paper. This one lingered. I first wrote it, oh, in early June, but kept bumping it for other things. With the country falling apart in big chunks, the time never seemed right to stop and deliver a panegyric to a frozen novelty product. Every time I read it, I thought, "I can do better than that." That happened half a dozen times.

     Then I went into the hospital, a week ago yesterday, and so unleashed my seven-part "The Joys of Summer" to keep the EGD faithful entertained while I went under the knife, a process which, rest assured, I will describe to you when I'm good and ready. So I turned this in, instructing my boss that he was to decide if it were worth printing. He decided it is, apparently, and I was rewarded with a number of readers expressing gratitude, several running out immediately and trying Yasso bars themselves and giving enthusiastic reports. Except of course for those who hate everything I write and let me know after every column under the charmed notion that their opinion carries value beyond the comedic (I've taken to playing Robert Glomb's voicemails for my wife and son, to our general delight at a sneer so intense we sometimes worry the poor man will strangle. Or maybe that should be "hope.")

      Anyway, this ran in the paper Monday, and will be my last column for a while. There's a tug-of-war between my wife, who wants me out the full six weeks the doctor recommends, lying on the sofa, eating Yasso bars and watching old movies, and me, who would return tomorrow,  though I sincerely believe that my wife would crack my spine back open with her bare hands, if I actually try that. So let's assume, in the spirit of compromise that makes healthy long-term marriages, we'll end up splitting the different and  I'll be back in the saddle by August.  In the meantime, well, I'll come up with SOMETHING here. I always do.

     Most diets fail. Know why? Because you can only suffer so long, shunning carbohydrates and nibbling celery. The world drains of color, life loses savor, and you slip back into your bad old ways.
     Not that I am suggesting that anybody diet, or try to be thin, or that being thin is better than being fat. Oh, no no no no. I’m not falling into that trap. Nowadays nothing is better than anything else, at least on the superficial level bruited about in newspaper columns, and this one does not engage in fat shaming or any other kind of shaming. It’s a free country, or was. Do what you want.
     I want to be healthy. I lost weight a decade ago after being diagnosed with sleep apnea and unable to breathe at night without a mask, which I hated. The doctor, exasperated, finally let slip that if I lost 30 pounds, it might go away. I did, and it did.
      My diet worked in part because I realized that I had to reward myself, to place daily metaphorical carrots to keep me eating real ones.
    Credit two products:
     One is Fresca. I drink one almost every day. It’s like a gin and tonic, only no gin. Or tonic. Or calories.
     And the other?
     Yasso bars.
     Now reading the above, you have one of two reactions. Either, “God, I LOVE Yasso bars! I think I’ll have one right now.” Or “Heck, Neil, what’s a Yasso bar?”
     Let me tell you.

To continue reading, click here. 

The Joys of Summer #7: Baseball

 

    Being America's pastime does not mean that baseball is our nation's most popular sport. Oh no no no. That would be football, by a wide margin—so wide that if you added college football as a separate category, that would beat baseball too.
     No matter.  Baseball is religion and ritual, summer and sunshine and lazy afternoons at the ballpark.  It is tradition and history, our country as it was and, so long as there is baseball, always will be. "Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game," as George Carlin explains in his essential comedic bit "Baseball v. Football." 
      Baseball is summer as in "The Boys of Summer," Roger Kahn's great book about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. And yes, I read it when it came out in 1972, revering Gil Hodges, pitying catcher Roy Campanella, paralyzed in a car accident, no doubt the first time that tragic concept ever entered my young mind. At the time my taste in baseball literature ran to lighter stuff like "Strange But True Baseball Stories" by Furman Bisher, tales of Eddie Gaedel, the midget Bill Veeck sent in to bat and similar fare, a book I notice three feet from where I'm sitting now. I was 12, and at the height of my baseball fandom, which was tough to do when you lived in the western suburbs of Cleveland, your team is the hapless Indians, laboring year after year under the curse of Rocky Colavito,  and your father was a nuclear physicist.   
      Baseball cards were important. Buying and collecting and trading them. I had a whole team of Jewish players, otherwise divided the cards by years, thick chunks wrapped in rubber bands, the edges gently rounded. I think my favorite card was Harvey Haddix, the Pirate who pitched 12 perfect innings and still lost. He seemed like Christ on the Cross, or St. Harvey.
      My father had his own baseball memories. He was a Giants fan; his favorite player was the Big Cat, Johnny Mize. But that's about it. No miracle at Coogan's Bluff, no heartbreak move to San Francisco. As he explained it, the Giants hired loathed Yankees manager Leo Durocher to run their team in 1948, and that was it. My father never recovered from the betrayal, the cognitive dissonance, with Satan suddenly in charge of your ballclub. That seemed the end of baseball for him. He never took me to a game, or played catch, that I remember. I'm sorry that never happened, I would have liked that
     My mother filled the void, a little. She was an Indians fan when that meant something. World champions in 1948, when she was 12. A classic series against the Giants in 1954, including Willie Mays classic behind the back running catch.   
      Her father Irv was an Indians fan too, and once, sometime in the mid-1960s it was arranged for my grandfather and I to attend a game, though the only fact about that game that lived in family lore was that I ate two hot dogs, and thus removed from the opportunity of ever going to a game again. It was my fault.
      I loved those 1950s players—Bob Feller, Larry Doby, and of course Al Rosen, the sluggin' third baseman who was Jewish. Like many Jewish kids, I had an affinity for Jewish stars, a thumb in the eye of the common stereotype that I embodied, as Jews as bespectacled and unathletic. I think my Little League career lasted a week, but I still have my Sears glove hanging on the door, a simple, five finger model, the glove Charlie Brown wears. Every half decade or so I go over it with neatsfoot oil, to keep it limber.
      Most people aren't that good at baseball, which is why, when we talk about the sport, we don't mean the slipshod pick-up games we play but the far more polished pro games we watch. Far too polished, now, it seems, the game given over to agents and metrics, drained of that pastoral quality that once clung to it. 
      Though not much of a fan, I had my moments. One fine summer afternoon in 1973, my father generously consented to drop me off at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, the biggest venue in baseball, where I met my friend from summer camp Alan Lictschien, or something similar to that, and we took in a double-header against the Boston Red Sox. Afterward, we lurked in the parking lot outside the stadium—you could do that then—and got the player's autographs, intercepting them as they headed for their Corvettes and Porsches. I got both my hero, Gaylord Perry. I read his memoir, "Me and the Spitter," and Carl Yastremski, who I liked, I believe, for his distinctive batting stance, bat held utterly vertical. I also liked Boog Powell, a heavy has-been, cast-off from the Orioles, but a star by Indians standards, and catcher Ray Fosse who, like so many Indians players, showed great promise until he didn't.  I seem to recall being a member of the Buddy Bell Fan Club one season. I also saw Henry Aaron hit his 704th home run against Montreal in 1974, a moment that shows up in my book on Failure for reasons I won't go into. That must count for something. 
     There's more, but you get the idea. I went to a game in Japan, the Nippon Ham Fighters versus the Sebu Lions at the Tokyo Dome (baseball teams are named for companies instead of teams in Japan). I was deeply jet lagged that day, but remember how the crowd stood in block section, like students at college football games, chanting percussive cheers. "Ni-pon Ham! Ta-Ta-Kai!" 
     Add 10 million more little facts like that and you can be a baseball fan. It proved too time-consuming for me, and while I can admire and envy the devotion to the sport of a guy like my pal, literature professor, baseball expert and Cubs season ticket holder Bill Savage—we literally met and became friends because of "Casey at the Bat"—it is the kind of envy I extend toward someone who speaks German. I wish I could do that. It would be wonderful to read Rilke in the original But my envy is not so much as to actually learn German. Every few years I'll go to a game, usually when a pal gives me a pair of tickets. It was easier when I lived in the city. I would go on my own. I used to work the night shift, and I remember one afternoon I took in an afternoon game, then arrived to start my evening fresh from Wrigley, unshaven, in a Hawaiian shirt and no doubt with a few beers under my belt. 
     I can still see our city editor at the time, the gentle, courtly Southern gentleman, Steve Huntley, stand up, and take the long, slow walk to my desk, and utter a few sorrowful words which I have thankfully forgotten but certainly amounted to, "Don't do that again."
     I think I've made my point. I could share with you the tale of taking my oldest son to his first game, but it's a set piece of my Chicago book and, frankly, I'm not up to retyping the thing. Besides, if you haven't read the book, well, hell, get with the program.  You can order it here, $6.32 used and free shipping. I think I'll pick up a few myself, to hand out to strangers. It has two really good baseball stories about both my boys. The youngest has his photo on the mound at Wrigley Field on the wall in Harry Caray's, and if you want to know how it got there, read the book.  
     In parting, I'll share you a more recent father-son baseball tale. Father's Day occurs shortly before summer, but it's close enough for baseball, as the saying goes. My wife flew my older boy in from New York City as my Father's Day present, and after our family brunch I prevailed upon both boys to go into the front yard for a game of catch. We hadn't done that in, oh, maybe 10 years. The older boy didn't have a glove, but he's a southpaw, so I gave him the first baseman's mitt I bought to play catch with the younger when he was in a park district league. I raced up to my office and grabbed my Charlie Brown mitt from where it has hanging, at the ready, from one doorknob or another, for the past 50 years. We tossed the ball around for maybe 30 minutes. Quite well, in my estimation. The throw and the solid "thwack!" At a respectable distance, catching it most of the time. I thought of taking a photo, or asking someone to take a photo, but that sometimes sets them off and besides, no photo could ever capture how it felt, the golden glow of love and connection that I felt talking and throwing and catching, the arc of the ball, the grab, stretch back, and release. I can't say what it meant to them—indulging the old man, no doubt, exchanging eye-rolling glances. But it meant a lot to me, as does baseball, which you can love though not being a fan, the way you can stray far from your faith and still belong. Baseball is a practice greater than the sum of its parts, the players and managers and ballparks, the bats and balls and gloves, the fans and games and scores and inning and outs and walks and runs. A thing like nature itself, like summer, green and alive, current yet ancient, complex beyond any individual comprehending, but available to the youngest child. And no matter how long you're gone, how far you stray, it's always ready to welcome you home on any given summer day.





     

The Joys of Summer #6: Picnics

    Of course it has to be French, picque-nique—the word practically can't be pronounced without a Gallic flourish—and originally the word referred exclusively to something one did in France.
    "We stayed here till 17th," Miss Cornelia Knight wrote in her autobiography, "and on the previous day went to a pique-nique at a little country house not far from the town." 
     The town being Toulon, and the year being 1777.
    It's clear from the context—the winds were high, they danced afterward—that Miss Knight's picnic was indoors. Prior to 1800, what made something a picnic was the various participants bringing items on the menu; what we call today a "pot luck." After 1800, the essential aspect of picnics being outside crept into use.
     I probably reveal too much about myself to say that the idea, "Hey, let's take our lunch, drag it outside and eat it lying down on the grass," is not one that I frequently, or ever, suggest. Half the time when my wife proposes that we go out on our back deck and eat I have to struggle not to say, "But that takes effort. And the food is right here!"
    But to Ravinia, or the Blues Fest, well why not? Food helps pass the time.
    For families, a picnic is practical on several levels. It's cheaper than a restaurant and invariably better too—most of our family picnics were committed during automobile journeys, where we'd find a well-situated picnic table and break out the cooler. Behavior is also less of an issue. If the kids want to run around after eating, if dad wants to shut his eyes, it isn't the same as in a restaurant. No one is watching. 
     Which also, for the young, is what makes picnics associated with romance. I'm not sure exactly what is going on in Edouard Manet's infamous 1863 painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, "Picnic on the Grass"—nobody is, though the situation is sketchy enough that the work was rejected as too scandalous by the Salon that year. Let's just say that no one in the painting seems too concerned that the food has tumbled out of the basket. 
    In literature, picnics are even more louche, to trot out another term the French like. In D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, the pretense of eating is done away with entirely—Paul and Clara set out on their picnic along the River Trent without bothering with the formality of securing food or a blanket and, honestly, neither are missed. Picnics are not meals at home, so flexibility is important and accommodations must be made. A picnic in Nabokov's Ada is where Ada and Van Veen get it on, never mind that she's 12 and they're brother and sister.
     I would have sworn that one of Anny's "perfect moments" in Jean-Paul Sartre's surprisingly readable only novel, "La Nausee" involve a picnic, but I'll be damned if I can find it. Maybe you'll have better luck, and if you do, please let me know. 
     I never went to church, but of course know of church picnics, primarily through "Porgy and Bess," George Gershwin's great American opera. Much of the second act involved Catfish Row preparing for a church picnic on Kittiwah Island. It allows the evil Crown to drag off Bess, but not before the one-two punch of a joyous ode to clean living "I Ain't Got No Shame" followed by a companion paean to sin, "It Ain't Necessarily So." ("The things you are liable, to read in the Bible, it ain't necessarily so.") 
     Finished? I've barely started. Picnics are a classic cartoon trope, along with desert islands and dungeons, though they are less funny now that beer comes in pull top cans—a lot of amusement seemed to be wrapped up in forgotten church key can openers, though the humor of that eludes me now. 
     Still, I think we've plunged enough for a summer day. Lying on the grass is beyond me at the moment, but I did sit on the front porch briefly Monday, which felt like triumph. A nice roast beef sandwich consumed under a clear blue sky in a sylvan spot sounds pretty good about now. 

The Joys of Summer #5: Hiking

 

     Normally, when I go to write these things, I pause for a second, muse momentarily, then nod briskly once and dive into what I have to say. The path is clear.
    But here, oddly, I sat a moment, pursing my lips, gazing into the middle distance. How to explain hiking? The immediate response seemed to be to invoke the line I sometimes fire at readers who ask insincere rhetorical questions, Louis Armstrong's supposed quip to some weisenheimer who demanded he define jazz: "If you have to ask, you'll never know."
     What is there to say? You go to a place and walk. The place should be beautiful, yes, but it doesn't have to be. I can't recall every going on a hike that wasn't. Are there trees? Fields? Clouds? Vistas? Flowers? Then it's beautiful.  The hike makes it beautiful.
     Why? Because it is a rare moment in your life when you are not getting or spending, not doing routine tasks, neither idling nor exercising, or some combination of all these things. It doesn't matter where you go, or when. You can hike in fall, when the colors are turning, or spring, when life stirs anew, or even winter. But summer is best, the warm weather, the free time. The above is Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia, where we went last summer after setting our youngest up at Virginia Law.
     I supposed it helps to be prepared. I have an excellent pair of hiking boots—Keen's—that make me happy to lace on, happy to walk in, happy every time my eye caresses their perfect lines. They want to walk, and lucky is the person who happens to have their feet inside them.
    A water bottle. A bag of trail mix. A day pack with a jacket. You go into nature prepared, and maybe that is part of hiking's appeal. You don't need a coffee grinder, or a snow blower, or a gallon of Tide, or all the thousand possessions and supplies and accoutrements you clutter your life with. You've got a pocket knife and a lighter, so are prepared to face  whatever life might throw at you that day.
    Hiking makes everything precious. Think about it. At home you've got an infinity of water a tap turn away. And you value it .... not at all. On a hike, you heft your water bottle, feel there is a good eight ounces left, enough to get you down the mountain to the parking lot. You feel blessed, lucky, prudent for not guzzling it all on the way up. 

The Joys of Summer #4: Family vacation

     One irony of this column is the boy who yawned at Times Square now lives in Greenwich Village.

     WISCONSIN DELLS, Wis.—When we took the boys to New York City earlier this year, they were not impressed. "Big deal!" the 6-year-old snorted, standing amidst Times Square's strobing, Blade Runner advertisements and crush of humanity.
     "I want to stay in the hotel room!" the 4-year-old later whined, sprawled in front of the TV.
     The city didn't make much of a mark on the boys. At home, they never mentioned New York and seemed not to recall they'd even been there.
     Now, the Dells, that's another matter. Our past visits were sources of constant fond reminiscence, coupled with urgent pleas to return.
     So here we found ourselves, once again, in the parking lot of Tommy Bartlett's Robot World. The boys surge forward, like bloodhounds nosing a fox.
     "I love Robot World!" the older one exuded.
     "Robot World is the coolest place!" shouted the younger.
     I shambled after, smiling sheepishly at my wife. Once, we vacationed in Paris, in New Orleans, in Martinique. Now, we're at the Wisconsin Dells, staying at the Wilderness, "America's Premier Waterpark Resort," an enormous hive of water slides and game rooms.
     What amazes me most is that I like it. I'm happy here. The bone-deep cheesiness of the place does not depress me, as it once would have. Maybe it's maturity, or resignation, I'm not sure which.
     This is our third trip to the Dells, and the ironic pose needed to shield myself for the first two trips is no longer necessary. I am genuinely excited to breakfast at Mr. Pancake. And the reason I am excited to eat at Mr. Pancake—you might not see it coming—is they have really, really good pancakes. Big and fluffy and homemade. The kind that take the sting out of a 186-mile drive.
     Sure, Robot World is a hodge-podge of optical illusions culled from a defunct science museum, salted with a smattering of low-rent robots of the lightbulb-and-garbage-can variety. But you know what? The boys liked it better than the Statue of Liberty.
     The Dells are an unfolding of hidden delights. Perhaps the biggest concentration of 1950s motels in the world—squat structures straight out of Nabokov, with names like Twi-Lite and Flamingo, heralded by achingly cute neon signs ("FREE TELEVISION"), ringing pools whose curving slides are a question mark as to how these places can still exist in the shadow of all those new mega-water parks such as the Wilderness. (They survive, I eventually realized, because the water-park hotels are so expensive that they've priced themselves out of the market for families that need to pay $50 or so for a room if they want to have anything left over for go-kart racing and roller-coasters and bungie jumping and rides on the Ducks.)
     We even glimpsed a bit of the natural beauty that got the Dells going as a tourist attraction in the first place, 100 years ago. Like most tourists, we didn't bother seeking nature out, but it found us in the most unexpected place: the entrance walk to Tommy Bartlett's Water Thrill Show, which turns out to be a cathedral of enormous pines, hushed and cool and not at all what you would expect to usher you into the inner sanctum of Wisconsin kitsch.
     I had never seen the Thrill Show before, perhaps because it struck me as the Seventh Seal of Midwestern, middle-class bourgeois Hell. I'd see the show, and before I knew it I'd be eating bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches and collecting Hummel figurines. Besides, I thought the kids would be bored by water skiing.
     They weren't. They loved it, at least the first half. The show is an oddly self-referential affair, a celebration of the history of water skiing and of its own history--the various forgotten world's fairs the show participated in (Seattle 1962!) and, of course, Tommy Bartlett, the radio announcer who swiped the idea of a water show from Cypress Gardens in Winter Haven, Fla., and brought it back to the land of clear spring waters.
     The boys liked the speedboats and clownery, and I savored the show as a pure form. One doesn't get much chance to see a chorus line of gals doing the can-can on water skis, never mind a flag-waving pyramid streaking by to "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
     We even experienced "A Wisconsin Moment." My wife wanted to take the boys to a fancy restaurant, so we got dressed up and went to the swank eatery attached to the resort--"Field's of the Wilderness," they call it. It had the trappings of sophisticated dining--the handblown wineglasses, the tuxedoed staff, the three forks. But instead of the forks being different sizes--dinner, salad and appetizer--they were a trio of hefty, heavy dinner forks, identical in size. Maybe that isn't enchanting to you. But, for me, it really was the highlight of the trip. Three big honking silver forks, one after another, triplets, next to the plate.
     It's the kind of thing that melts in with the other memories--like the boys joyously tubing down fake rapids, or pitting themselves, feverishly, against the arcade games--to form the image of a summer vacation. Ancient Greece is gone, but the civilization that is Wisconsin is still there, waiting for anyone bold enough to explore.

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 12, 2002

The Joys of Summer #3: The Beach

  

  

New Jersey Beach, by William Trost Richards (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
     This is an odd artifact, nearly 30 years old. And while it's a fairly flaccid piece of writing, it is interesting for its circumstance. 
     I hope.
     The summer of 1990 the Sun-Times was launching Sizzle, a magazine designed to appeal to young people. I was in my late 20s, so counted as a young person, or at least youngish, if you squinted, and so either volunteered or was asked to write something about the beach. I wrote the below despite that fact that a) I hate going to the beach and b) I almost never go. It's more of a fantasy than anything else, perhaps based on one hour of one afternoon with my pals shortly before graduating Northwestern. Of course the paper didn't publish it. To be honest, I feel a little squeamish posting it now; but then "squeamish" is a condition of life lately. I must have cared about it enough to print out a dot matrix version that has slept in a folder all this while. Vanity. But given the situation on the EGD medical front—I might get out of the hospital today, unless I don't—it's this or nothing. I hope I made the right choice.

    Ideally, you would never go to the beach. The beach would be there, outside your door, and you would wander onto it whenever the mood struck you, to think fine thoughts and watch the herons twirling over the shimmering sand.
     Having to go to the beach is more problematic. There is nothing intrinsically comfortable about a stretch of hot sand, never mind the usually long and difficult trek to get there.
     Comfort must be brought along, and comfort is chairs and coolers and towels and novels and umbrellas. Ice, bottles, food, utensils, sun block, shades and musical devices. Comfort is heavy.
    Which leads to the first and only each rule: Go with people. The thought of going alone might be enticing—you, silhouetted against the blue waters, a beacon of attractiveness and mystery.
    At the beach, alone, magnificent.
    But that isn't ever the case. Alone at the beach, you soon start to feel like something the waves washed up. A dead jellyfish. An old can. Nothing.
     A crowd makes you feel significant and, besides, you need people to help tote all the stuff. People to tell you that your shoulders are turning maroon. people to play Frisbee with and to hand you a cold beer when you don't feel like making the effort of reaching your hand all the way into the cooler.
   And that is the state you wish to attain on a beach. The laziest, sleepiest, most somnolent sort of near-coma you can possibly achieve.  Because you have spent so much energy lugging this stuff from the car, then setting up, and swimming and tossing the Frisbee and capering in the surf (another reason to go with a group. Have you ever seen somebody caper in the surf alone? They look like an idiot) you can then flop on the beach like an exhausted runner and rack up quality beach time.
    That is why we go to beaches in the first place.
     Where else can you wake up, all sleepy and disoriented, like a 4-year-old arising from nap time? You dig your watch out of .a sneaker. It's 4 p.m. You look around. Your friend are all scattered around like a pile of sleeping cats, their sand-crusted sides rising and falling in slumber.
    You fish in the melted ice and grab one of the remaining cold bottles. At the sound of the sloshing water, your friends start to stir and murmur. The sun is getting low. You think: evening. Dinner. Going out. First, a nice, cool , invigorating shower—maybe the best shower you ever had in your life, maybe with all your friends. Then dinner. Perhaps the best dinner you've ever eaten. The whole bunch of you, fresh and clean and wearing crisp new summer clothes, laughing together at your collective wit and mutual intelligence, heading into a wonderful restaurant after a day at the beach ,brown as beans and ready to party.
    That's what beaches do. they jumpstart your life. otherwise, why would people bother?

The Joys of Summer #2: Hot Dogs

     I love hot dogs—who doesn't?—and have written about the humble frank on a number of times over the years, whether attending Hot Dog University, or dipping into the ketchup controversy, alluded to yet again below. I somehow never shared this visit to the mothership itself, the Vienna Beef factory. Gold Coast is gone, alas, except for a tiny outpost tucked into a remote corner of Union Station. And Vienna Beef moved its factory to Bridgeport in 2016. No hot dogs, or solid foods of any type, for me at the moment—but I'll be looking forward to my next one, some time in August. Or September at the very latest.

     Another Fourth of July come and gone, and have you reflected on your deep personal debt to the humble hot dog? I thought not.
     Despite this being peak wienie season—nearly half of all hot dogs are consumed between Memorial Day and Labor Day—and despite Chicago being a world center for hot dogs, somehow the mild little sausages don't get proper credit, their significance ignored in their home town, drowned out in the choruses of praise for other Chicago standards, such as pizza.
     To add insult to injury, the only references I noticed to hot dogs over the holiday weekend were several reports on a hot dog eating contest—on New York's Coney Island, of all places, sponsored by Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs, whose franchise on Rush Street quickly withered and died in the face of superior local fare.
      "Chicago is a hot dog town," said Tom McGlade, a senior vice president at Vienna Beef, the largest of several frankmakers in the city. "We have 1,800 hot dog stands—more than the number of McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's combined."
     That gets overlooked, since none of those hot dog stands have the advertising clout of the burger giants. Most of Vienna's marketing goes into hot dog stand umbrellas and those eye-catching posters of giant hot dogs.
     There are many noteworthy stands, such as Gold Coast Hot Dogs on State Street, known for the tendency of visiting Hollywood stars to send their underlings to Gold Coast to fetch bags of chardogs back to their luxury suites.
     And Murphy's Red Hots on Belmont Avenue, whose owner, Bill Murphy, found himself tapped as the Col. Sanders of the Japanese hot dog after he stepped out from behind the counter to greet a group of Japanese customers at his stand. They turned out to be a team of food executives scouting the American hot dog scene before introducing the fare to the frankfurter-starved Japanese millions, and Murphy's friendliness earned him a goodwill trip to Japan.
     Despite the famous quote about how people who like legislation or sausages should never see either being made, I couldn't resist inviting myself over to Vienna's North Damen plant, where more than 100 million hot dogs a year are sent forth to gladden the hearts of a weary world.
     "Before I came to work here, I always thought hot dog makers were sweeping bugs off the floor, tossing in cow's noses and pig's toes," said McGlade, standing in front of a vat of 2,500 pounds of ground beef. "You can see how clean our beef is."
     Indeed. The meat looked as attractive as a ton and a quarter of ground meat could. Surround it with a hundred loaves' worth of toast points and a few dozen pounds of chopped egg, pop open a few jeroboams of champagne, and you could have the largest steak tartare party in the world.
     The beef arrives in big hunks from Vienna's own slaughterhouse in Harvard, Ill. I was taken aback when I saw a worker with a metal hook at the end of his arm use it to pull a chunk of meat toward him so he could trim off the fat with a big curved knife. The perils of industry, I thought.
     Then I noticed that all the other workers had hooks, too, and I quickly realized the hooks were held, not attached.
     A computer monitors the mixture to make sure it is 80 percent beef, 20 percent "sweet brisket trimmings"—a fancy way of saying "fat."
     Garlic, spices and salt are added and the mixture is pulverized until it ends up an unappetizing beige gel, which is then packed into casings.
     After the dogs are cooked, they turn the rich, enticing mahogany color people associate with beef franks.
     "No dyes," McGlade said. "It's a miracle." McGlade demonstrated that they are pre-cooked and don't need heating by plucking one off the line, snapping it in half, and taking a bite.
     Vienna takes credit for the invention of the famous Chicago Style Hot Dog, a frank buried under a mound of yellow mustard, neon green relish, chopped onion, tomato wedges, a pickle slice, hot peppers and a dash of celery salt.
     "It's a nice combination of sweet and crunchy and hot," said McGlade, who personally likes his dog with jardiniere and Grey Poupon mustard.
     You think that's odd? I like mine with mustard and ketchup, and eat them that way even though every person I've ever mentioned this to recoils in utter visceral disgust.
     I've come to accept ketchup on hot dogs as a perversion unique to myself, and will continue the practice until they pass a constitutional amendment banning it, and probably beyond.
     Then there is the entire question of charred vs. boiled.
     But that's an entirely different column. Hot dogs, thank God, are one area where consensus is not needed. You can enjoy your hot dog with whipped cream and a splash of Tabasco and it won't disturb me a bit. It's summertime. We should all relax.

                —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 9, 1997

The Joys of Summer #1: Ice cream

This is not the Jumbo Atomic Hot Fudge Sundae—that has three scoops—but the more modest Atomic Hot Fudge Sundae.

     Summer is a time of relaxation and the enjoyment of life's simple pleasures. To set aside quotidian concerns—our troubling political situation, the endless demands of work, complicated medical conditions that require surgery—and just have fun. 
    So for today, and the unforeseeable future, the blog, if not necessarily its author, will concern itself with the pleasures of summertime. For those who like to comment, it might be a number of days before I can sit up, read, vet and post them, and your patience as always is appreciated. I did think about just leaving the comments section open, but that's like handing my blog over to lunatics, and I'm not doing it.
     When I wrote the following, I had been home on paternity leave for seven months. This originally ran under the headline "Life, Treat Sweet at Margie's." For many years the Wicker Park institution kept a stack of photocopies next to the cash register, which pleased me greatly. It's still there, if you want to go, approaching its 100th year in business.

     I do not believe in angelic voices, interceding in our daily lives. Nevertheless, a voice did speak to me last week. It said, clearly, unmistakably, "Go to Margie's and get a sundae."
     To be honest, I had been feeling a little down. The routine had become very, well, routine. "Go to Margie's," the voice said. "And get a sundae."
    So I went. Driving down Western Avenue, I tried to remember how long it had been. At least six years. Maybe eight, since I last tasted that gorgeous bittersweet hot fudge sauce. And Margie, a tiny, ancient woman, sitting beside the cash register. Would she still be alive? Would the place even be open?
     Six years! Maybe eight. The Republicans are right. Our values ARE skewed. What could I have been doing all this time that was so important I couldn't go get a sundae? Shameful.
     From the outside, the place at 1960 N. Western is the same. Same 1940s sign. Same silk flowers and china dolls in the windows. The menu still offers 50 different ice cream sundaes, with names like the Zombie and the Astronaut and the Coco-Loco.
     The choice was easy. I ordered the Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae. Just placing the order was a joy: "I'll have the Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae, please," I said.
     Say it out loud once and you'll see what I mean.
     The Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae was exactly as it should be -- a white clamshell filled with three scoops of ice cream, covered by a lattice of hard chocolate dribbled over the top. (The lattice is what makes the sundae "atomic"). Whipped cream and chopped nuts on top of that. Plus a cherry. Plus two sugar cookies.
     Alongside, a stainless steel urn, filled with hot fudge sauce. Just as perfect as before—hot, rich, deep, dark, bittersweet.
     There was one difference, however. Margie Poulos was gone. She passed away just last year, at age 80. But Peter George Poulos, her son, was there, and he slipped into the booth and told me the Margie's story.
     His grandfather, also named Peter George Poulos, came to Chicago from Greece and, 75 years ago this year, opened an ice cream parlor at the exact spot where it stands today.
     The grandfather's son, George Peter Poulos—the current owner's father—met a girl named Margie Michaels.
     "They got engaged in that booth over there," says Poulos, pointing to a spot a few feet away. "We call it Lover's Lane."
     That was in 1933. Countless other couples have used the booth to pop the question. "You should be here on Valentine's Day—the joint is up for grabs," says Poulos.
     "People come back here to get engaged because their parents were engaged here."
     Poulos was born in 1936, and grew up, literally, in the store. "My father made up a cradle in the back of the candy case," he says.
     From the beginning, Margie's candy, the ice cream, the fudge sauce, was homemade, and nobody ever saw a reason to change it. "My mother was offered a fortune for the fudge recipe," he says.
     Fame has brushed against the little ice cream shop. Al Capone was a customer. The Beatles came by, after their Comiskey Park concert. Poulos, who is a podiatrist, was at a hospital doing his residency when his mother called.
     "She said, 'Hey, some English guys are here from Sox park,' " remembers Poulos. "I said, 'Ma, there's no English baseball team.' And she said, 'No, dummy. It's the Beatles.' "
     When Margie died, Poulos took over, moving his podiatry practice across the street, so he could better run the place. Lunchtime finds him there, along with his wife and their newborn son, named George Peter Poulos, after his granddad.
     "He loves the taste of ice cream," says Poulos, who gave the infant a fingerful of Margie's 18 percent butterfat frozen treasure when he was a week old.
     Might there be a chance that baby George will be running Margie's 75 years from now? Following in the footsteps of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents?
     "The little guy?" Poulos says, as if he never considered the question before. "I don't want him to be a foot doctor. I hope he will grow up here, like I did."
     Poulos thinks he has something good to pass along.
     "There are so few businesses that children want, because they see their parents work so hard, killing themselves," he says. "This is fun. You make people happy. It's not a tough life. You can walk around to your customers and say 'Hi' and be proud of what you're doing."
     I finished scraping the white clamshell clean with my spoon and made sure that not another iota of fudge could be dredged up out of the steel urn. Then I licked the spoon.
     I paid my bill -- the Jumbo Atomic Fudge Sundae cost $4; less than some places charge for a bottle of beer.
     I can't tell you how happy I felt leaving Margie's. Maybe it was enzymes from the fudge, working on my brain. Maybe it was the infectious cheer of Peter Poulos. Maybe it was the thought of baby George being groomed to make the secret fudge sauce for me when I am old and gray and will need it more than ever.
                 —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 5, 1996

Cleanslate preps workers for real world

 

     “Let’s get to work,” declares Tommy Wells, to no one in particular, loading empty garbage cans into a white pickup. “Make it a great day! Ladies and gentlemen. And it’s raining.”
     It sure is, a few minutes before 6 a.m., coming down hard. Some 60 men and women in identical baseball caps and gray vests trimmed with neon green gather in a large garage on South Ashland, waiting, snatches of conversation reflecting areas of the city that tourists never visit.
     “They wasted that boy — shot him in the face three times,”
     “This world just going crazy. It doesn’t matter where you go. In Chicago? It don’t matter where you go. Crime is everywhere.”     
     But not here. Here crime and homelessness, drug addiction and despondency are held at bay, thanks to the organization whose name is on those vests and hats: “Cleanslate” — operated by Cara, a social service program that since its founding in 1991 has paired more than 10,000 jobs with what it tactfully calls “individuals with high barriers to employment” — felons, recovering drug addicts, all manner of people taking their first tentative steps away from the street.
     The work is not elegant.
     “Mainly cleaning up sidewalks and curbs, some landscaping,” says Enise, 33. She’s worked a year for Cleanslate, which asks that workers’ last names not be used, so this first rung doesn’t hold them back higher up the ladder.

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Boffing bunnies

     It's summer, and I'm about to take a little time off. It seems my brain got a jump on things, so if you're looking for a significant topic deftly handled, well, check back tomorrow. Maybe you'll have better luck.
     Otherwise, when I was growing up, there was a shop in my hometown of Berea, Ohio called, aptly enough, "The Shoppe." It started off as what we called a "head shop," a small store where you could buy pot pipes and rolling papers and records and such. But soon it grew, and began offering clothes, and hip housewares. It's where, about 1979 I bought this pair of mugs to prepare the Quaker Apples and Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal I lived on as an undergraduate.
     This was the '70s, people were less tightly-wound about such things, and if you notice, not only is the bull anatomically correct, but the rabbits in the background are, well, doing what rabbits are famous for doing. A leporine Kama Sutra. I can't recall if I noticed this before or after buying the mugs. My guess is after. I came to think of it as the "boffing bunnies" mug, and appreciated both for the wide expanse of cobalt blue making up each creature, and particularly for the large size mugs. Perfect for tea.
       I looked closely at the steer mug and saw it's signed "1978 Win Ng-Taylor." In 1965, Spaulding Taylor and Win Ng formed a company called "Environmental Ceramics" in San Francisco, and came to be a quite popular purveyor of chic kitchen supplies, mugs and aprons, pot holders and dishtowels, in the 1970s and 1980s under the name Taylor & Ng. The company had a generally asian aesthetic, and also sold woks, if I recall, an exotic item at the time.
     The Shoppe is still in Berea and—why does this surprise me?—Taylor & Ng still operates online, where you can buy the exact same mugs, at the company's web site here, for $9.75.
      Of course you can. Though my mugs were made in Japan,and my guess is the new ones come from China. Still, they sell 'em. We live in a time where nothing, absolutely nothing, goes away. Whether that is a good or bad thing, well, you can discuss. So maybe a little significance after all, despite ourselves.

Girls too can be trustworthy, loyal, helpful ...

Felicia Pace, center, of Troop 64, marches in Northbrook’s Fourth of July parade. At left is Drew Sheedy.

     Victor Hugo never wrote, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
     What the author of “Les Miserables” and “Hunchback of Notre Dame” actually wrote, in French, was, “On résiste a l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas a l’invasion des idées.”
     Or, translated into English: “One can resist the invasion of armies but not the invasion of ideas.”
     Which not only doesn’t sound as good; it isn’t even true. One can resist ideas whose time has come. And millions do, for years, as they are dragged screaming and tweeting into the modern world.
     In fact, that might be handy shorthand for grasping what is going on today around the globe: some embrace ideas whose time has come. And some resist with all their might.
     Until change occurs, as change must, and most people ... shrug and move on.
     My wife and I took our folding chairs to Northbrook’s Fourth of July Parade last Thursday. A low-key affair. Cops on bikes. Fire trucks. Veterans marching as the crowd stood and clapped. The high school band. A division of the Shannon Rovers and the Jesse White Tumblers. Youth sports teams.
     And the Boy Scouts, whoops, Scouts BSA, which this year began permitting girls to make lanyards, learn how to pass axes safely and march in small town parades.

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If I call this a "blogburger," will I go to jail in Mississippi?

  

     Open your refrigerator. Take out the margarine. Look at the stick, or open the tub. What color is it? Yellow? Good, that means you're living in the year 2019.
     Because if you were living in 1919, your margarine might be white. By law. The powerful dairy industry having made it a crime to dye margarine yellow, under the strained notion that doing so perpetrated a fraud upon the American public who, perhaps unable to read the word "butter," might be confused by a product that looks like butter yet calls itself margarine. 

Confusing in Mississippi

     Margarine, a spread derived from beef fat and vegetable oil, is white—its name is from the Greek, margarite, for "pearl" ("Butter," a product dating to the start of history, also traces back to ancient Greek, from bous and turos, or "cow cheese.")
     Trying to get around the law, margarine was sometimes sold with a yellow dye. The consumer, the true victim here, was invited to mix them together. To avoid that, states passed laws requiring margarine be dyed pink. Or brown. Or black.
     This near-century long charade came to mind this week, as Mississippi tries claw the words "burger" and "hot dog" back from the grip of vegetarians, who would dupe easily-confused Mississippians with their veggie burgers and vegan hot dogs and such. Thus new laws, piling fines and jail time upon the soy fiends trying to pass their unwholesome discs of ordure off as "burgers." 
     Margarine was invented in France at the end of the 1860s and by the 1870s had come to the United States. Frightened dairy farmers did what fiercely proud capitalists often do when facing the challenge of a new, category-creating product—they went howling to law to forbid this unnatural spawn of the "ingenuity of depraved human genius." In 1886, Congress passed the Margarine Act, placing ruinous taxes and licensing fees on margarine. That was not enough for cow-happy Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania—their state legislatures banned margarine completely.  For the protection of the consumer.
     It didn't matter that butter was also dyed yellow. "This practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak" according to the National Geographic, whose informative article on "The Butter Wars," is the source of many of the facts trotted out here.
     A total of 32 states passed laws banning yellow-dyed margarine. These lingered for decades; the last state to repeal theirs, Wisconsin of course, did not give up the fight until 1967.
     Lawmakers in Mississippi are no doubt ignorant of this history, as were those in Missouri, which passed a similar law, now thrashing through the courts. Nor do they realize that "burger" has no more traditionally been wed to "beef" than "pole" can only be used to describe a device used in fishing. 
     The non-meat meaning of "burger" goes back at least 80 years. Arnold Williams writes in American Speech, in April, 1939:

     To the proprietors and clientele of thousands of roadside inns, diners and eat-and-run lunch-counters, -burger has come to mean almost any meat or meat-substitute ground or chopped and, fried or grilled, made into sandwiches.

    He goes on to list chickenburger, clamburger, rabbitburger and nutburger among others. H.L Mencken's Supplement One of The American Language preserves pickleburger, tomatoburger and fishburger.
      My Wentworth and Flexner Dictionary of American Slang was published in 1975 contains such heresy as "shrimpburger," and "catfishburger." It says that the "-burger" suffix "means any hot sandwich served on a bun, often toasted, with many condiments." 

     It doesn't mention vegetarian burgers, but then such products were not as hot in the 1970s as they are now, which is why cattle farmers are trying to pass laws to undercut their sales. But Wentworth and Flexner leave the door open for their inclusion:

      "Special ingredients will affect the choice of a root word (Chineseburger, containing rice; Mexicanburger, containing chile)."

     Except where prohibited by law. 

The Saturday Snapshot: Marquette, Michigan

Photo by Tom Peters

     Today's Saturday Snapshot is from our old friend, Tom Peters, who took this at sunset on Lake Superior in Marquette, Michigan, about 100 miles east of my regular UP spot, Ontonagon. The home of Northern Michigan University, Marquette is an area rich in iron, and one iron ore mine still operates, the Tilden Mine, in a nearby town aptly named National Mine.
     The area's mining legacy is also reflected in the name of its daily newspaper, The Mining Journal, a handsome publication whose managing editor is Bud Sargent. I phoned him up and we talked about Marquette.
     "The greater Marquette area is known as a superior location," he said. "We've got the best beaches, the best hunting, the best fishing, the best waterfalls, the best downtown area, the best shopping district."
     I considered asking whether "superior location" was a pun, a wink at the lake—I don't think it was—but thought better of it and didn't. Instead conversation shifted into winter. Sargent did concede that they "get more than our share of snow"—250 inches this past winter. Though that wasn't a record, and some places have it worse: 400 inches or more.     
      We talked about the possibility that the Empire Mine, shuttered two years ago, might reopen. 
     "That would be good news for the area—some several hundred jobs," he said. "Real jobs, not party store jobs."
     Good jobs that pay well, jobs with benefits, I said, to make sure I understood the meaning of "party store jobs."  That's what he meant.
     Not that Marquette is pinning its hopes on mining. The university, started as a teachers' college, the Northern Michigan Normal School, has diversified, and in 2017 announced it would be offering a degree in medicinal plant chemistry.
     "NMU’s program offers an entrepreneurial track with accounting, finance and marketing courses to prepare students for a business related to medicinal plants," the school explained, pointing out that everything they do would comply with all federal and state laws. "The alternative bio-analytical track provides advanced scientific understanding beyond the core courses in chemistry and plant biology. There is also a cohort component designed to strengthen connections among freshmen and facilitate mentoring by advanced students"
     The program, considered the first in the country, has drawn 300 students from 48 staes, who endure jokes about getting a "degree in weed" for a chance to get in on the ground floor. 
     “We’re providing a fast track to get into the industry,” said Brandon Canfield, a chemistry professor who proposed the major after hearing experts talk about the need for analytical chemists at a conference. 
     That's enough for a Saturday. Thanks to Tom for inspiring our visit, and to Bud Sargent for talking to me about an area he loves.
   "We think this is the absolute place to be," he said. "We can't imagine being anyplace else."

Farewell Mad, thanks for the skepticism

     The world was my father and mother, big sister and little brother. The single-level ranch house on Carteret Court, and a few blocks beyond. A mile away, Fairwood School, a couple dozen white suburban kids, led by the teacher—in 6th grade Miss Benson, who lived with school secretary Miss Palmer, an arrangement we kids never thought twice about, but whose significance would strike me about 25 years later in one of those “Ohhh...” moments. 

     Order reigned, and while life in all its messiness certainly roiled places far from Berea, Ohio—wars, protests, moon launches—even those were rational, understandable, delivered

in sensible reports each morning in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and at 5:30 by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. The little black and white TV was perched next to the dining room table, and we’d all watch, my father mandating silence.
     The first whisper of chaos, the bugle call that the cavalry was on its way to save me, was Mad magazine. The adult world wasn’t the temple of reason and dignity it pretended to be. It was a madhouse, a crazy anthill, seething with idiocy and hypocrisy. Not only could you laugh at it, you had to.
     I remember the first issue of Mad magazine that found its way into my hands. The June 1970 parody of “Easy Rider.” I can see that cover as if it were on the newsstand at Rexall Drug. Mort Drucker’s caricature of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper—I didn’t know how spot-on it was because, of course, I hadn’t seen the movie; alongside, the magazine’s dimwit mascot, Alfred E. Newman, pedaling his bicycle.

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Flashback 1995: Having a Blast on Fourth of July Should Mean Fun, Not Injuries

      

     Not even 10 p.m., the night before Independence Day, and the leafy suburban paradise sounds like the Battle of the Marne—low percussive booms and staccato pops, cascades of crackles and distance roars. I'm not a fireworks fan, obviously—not only are they dangerous, but they frighten my dog, who is cowering at my feet as I type this, looking up at me accusingly, wondering why I don't make the ruckus stop. If only I could, Kitty. The best I can do is try to remind those who feel compelled to set them off at least remember to stop at a decent hour and try to be as safe as possible until they do. The service piece below isn't the most gruesome fireworks safety piece I've ever written—that would be this—but it serves its purpose. Have a safe and sane 4th. 

     Spread your fingers out in front of you and count them. If you've got all 10 and would like it to stay that way after July 4, then take a moment to think about fireworks safety.
     In the week before and after last year's Fourth of July holiday, 121 Chicagoans went to hospital emergency rooms with injuries from fireworks, according to the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council. Most of the injuries were minor burns. A quarter were eye injuries, many resulting in some blindness. Seven people lost fingers or toes.
     "National data tells us that between 8,000 and 12,000 people are injured every year by fireworks," said Dr. Elizabeth Powell, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children's Memorial Hospital. "About half of those are kids. The eyes are most commonly injured, followed by hands and fingers. Not all of them are major injuries, of course, but if we can prevent them, why not do so?"
     Even those who aren't planning to go near fireworks need to think about safety—bystanders suffer 40 percent of fireworks injuries. In 1992, a 37-year-old Chicago woman had her right hand blown off while trying to bat away an illegal firework tossed in her direction. Investigators later determined that the "firecracker" had the power of a half-stick of dynamite.

      In 1993, a 4-year-old Chicago girl watching fireworks being set off died after a rocket struck her in the eye and lodged in her brain.
     Two years before that, a malfunctioning mortar killed a 30-year-old Burnham man. He looked into the tube of the device, trying to determine what was wrong with it, and it ignited, nearly decapitating him.
     The thousands of injuries nationwide, and occasional deaths, are not surprising, considering that most of the $ 300 million in fireworks sold in the United States are ignited by people who are not trained in handling them.
     Most consumer fireworks—mortars, roman candles, bottle rockets and the like—are illegal in Illinois. But the state's proximity to Indiana and Wisconsin, two states where giant fireworks stores line the highways, guarantees an ample fireworks supply to Independence Day revelers.
     In addition to fireworks being legal to sell in neighboring states, there are plenty of illicit fireworks in any state—M-80s, cherry bombs, M-100s and the like, not to mention homemade fireworks that can explode if you drop them.
     Even the devices legal in Illinois—snakes, poppers, smoke bombs and sparklers—can cause injury if not used properly. Sparklers are particularly dangerous, because their tips can reach 1,200 degrees and they are often liberally handed out to children, even young children, who invariably wave them.
     "These are not toys," said Dr. Tom Esposito, a trauma surgeon at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood.
     Fireworks can cause injury even with minor mishandling.
     "I took care of a 6-year-old child who had a package of firecrackers explode in his pocket and give him second- and third-degree burns," said Powell. "It seemed such a senseless way to be injured. You wouldn't give your 6-year-old a pan of boiling water to carry, but nevertheless he was allowed to stick these things in his pocket."
     Some feel that fireworks are so dangerous the only safe way to use them is to watch professionals present a display.
     Four years ago, the National Society to Prevent Blindness, now called Prevent Blindness America, changed its stance from cautioning people to use fireworks safely to urging them not to use them at all.
     "Most agencies like ours would say, 'They're dangerous, you shouldn't be using them and, oh, by the way, if you've got them here's how to use them safely,' " said Tod Turriff, director of programs for Prevent Blindness America. "Looking at the statistics, people obviously can't use them safely. There's no safe way so why propose one?"
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 1, 1995

On July 4, recall disaster along with the glory

 

      Happy Fourth of July, in advance. On Thursday you’ll be picnicking, parade-watching, ooohing at fireworks, maybe setting off a few, carefully. If I’m going to get a word in, best do it now, so we can all kick back, relax and celebrate our beloved country’s glorious past and bright future.
     Her troubled present, maybe not so much. Independence Day, the third in the Trump administration. The twist this year is the president is hijacking the celebration in our nation’s capital and turning it into — what else? — a glorification of himself.
     And adding his own personal flourish: tanks.
     American tanks, one hopes. The participation of tanks in patriotic spectaculars is really more of a Russian thing — those May Day parades with perfect ranks of goose-stepping troops, plus tanks and missile carriers rumbling past the generals on the reviewing stand.
     Oh, Trump has ordered up generals, too, and commanded them to stand beside him. Maybe next year he’ll include gymnasts twirling ribbons on sticks.
     Grim stuff. But maybe we can find reason for hope instead of despair. But how? I could point out that there might only be one July 4 left n the Trump administration.
     Or five.
     Hard to say.
     It’s a holiday, almost. Let’s be optimistic. One, then. I’ll put out the flag, as a patriotic American. It is still a great country, despite all those determined to make the country “great again” by betraying its every value.
     Remember: We’ve had grimmer Fourths; four when our nation was divided by Civil War. It’s odd, to take comfort in low points of our history, but the present is so very, well, present, it tends to warp our perspective.

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