"Music was his life, it was not his livelihood."

      While I don't want to become one of those guys who can't stop working, one challenge I have is the intersection between what I find fun and interesting and what I consider work. Wondering about "O Holy Night" on Wednesday got me thinking it might be a good Christmas Eve post, if only to share that Jennifer Nettles video, which everyone should listen to. But digging into why I like the song brought me to Harry Chapin and Martin Tubridy, the discovery of whom prompted me to polish up this blog post and offer it to the newspaper, where it's running as a front page column Saturday. I'm posting it here in longer version—I have to tuck in under 700 words at the paper—because I wrote it on my day off. While Tubridy was identified on a Harry Chapin fan site in 2004, and in Wikipedia, it hasn't, to my knowledge, been in any newspaper outside of Weston, Connecticut. Making it news, of a sort, in my eyes. Anyway, It seemed worth pulling together in time for Christmas.

     Saturday night is Christmas Eve, and while I don't usually write a column for Saturdays, this fell in my lap late in the week. It isn't quite a Christmas miracle, more of a Christmas wonder, as you'll see if you can bear with me to the end.
     On Wednesday, an acquaintance asked if I were doing anything for Christmas. Yes, I replied, as always, on Christmas Eve, I'll play R&B singer Tevin Campbell's version of "O Holy Night."
     "It isn't celebrating Christmas, like having a tree," I explained. "It's just a pretty song."
     If you like that, my acquaintance said, you should hear Jennifer Nettles sing it. He sent me a link.
     Wow. Tevin Campbell has been topped.

     As I listened, I wondered: there are lots of carols, many quite beautiful. Why "O Holy Night"? Kinda religious for me, with all that falling on one's knees and nights divine. A French carol, incidentally, composed in 1847, the familiar English lyrics written in 1855 by a Unitarian minister, John Sullivan Dwight.
    I pulled at the thread, and immediately realized: Harry Chapin.

Harry Chapin

     When I was a teenager, I was a big fan of his songs about sad, thwarted people. Many dismissed them as sentimental, but to me they were moving. He had a couple hits—"Cats in the Cradle," "Taxi." I liked him enough to go see him twice in 1978, at Blossom Music Center outside Cleveland, and at Pick-Staiger Hall in Evanston. At both concerts he did something I had never seen a performer do, before or since. After the Blossom show, he stood amongst the fans, signing his "Every Year is World Hunger Year" t-shirt. I bought one and he signed it. 
     And at the Evanston show, he was running late coming straight from the airport. A student with a guitar was pressed into service, as an impromptu warm-up to distract the crowd until he arrived, and after he did, he not only thanked the kid, but had him sing a little with him. Later in the show, Chapin stepped around the microphone and sang, acappello and unamplified. He had a powerful voice.
    Of all his catalogue of songs, about small people and their frustrated dreams, the one that really got to me was "Mr. Tanner," the story of a mediocre talent from Ohio that begins:

Mister Tanner was a cleaner from a town in the Midwest.
And of all the cleaning shops around he'd made his the best.
But he also was a baritone who sang while hanging clothes.
He practiced scales while pressing tails and sang at local shows.

    But the joy music brought to him wasn't enough—fame beckoned.  His friends urge him to do something with his talent. Mr. Tanner gives in, goes to New York to try to grab the brass ring. He holds a recital.  In the song, Chapin recites the scathing review: 

     Mr. Martin Tanner, baritone, of Dayton Ohio, made his town hall debut last night. He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary for it to be consistently interesting....

     Tanner returns to Dayton and never sings again, except late at night, softly to himself, sorting through the clothes.
      At several points in the song, Chapin bassist Big John Wallace sings the refrain of "O Holy Night," a soaring counter-melody.
    "Fallllll on your knees, hearrrrr the angels' voices..."
     So that's where "O Holy Night" came from, pressed into my mind by Mr. Tanner.
     But why is "O Holy Night" in the middle of a pop song about a cleaner from Dayton? That was trickier. Harry Chapin died in a fiery car accident in 1981—in a VW Golf, if I remember correctly, something that kept me from ever wanting to drive in small cars.
      I tried his surviving brother Tom, put in a call to the Harry Chapin Foundation, which carried on his work to fight world hunger. 
     The answer was waiting in an obscure interview in a Chapin fan publication from 2004, where Wallace is asked that exact question. He replied: "It was spliced together because it was operatic, and Harry knew it from Grace Church. It came from a review he read about Martin Tubridy and is the actual review."
     Tubridy was an ad man, not a cleaner. He was from Astoria, Queens, not Dayton, Ohio. But he really was a baritone who sang at local shows, good enough, at least in his own mind, that he rented Carnegie Hall and put on a performance. The New York Times sent a music critic. Its single paragraph backhand March 28, 1971 on page 63:
     "Martin Tubridy, a New York bass‐baritone, made his local debut in Carnegie Recital Hall on Friday night with Mitchell Andrews at the piano. His performance of two Purcell songs and Schumann's 'Liederkreis' cycle was not up to professional standards, lacking tonal steadiness and adequate phrasing...."
     That's what inspired Chapin to write the song, which appears on his 1974 album, "Short Stories." After Wallace outed him, people began calling Tubridy, asking: was he Mr. Tanner? Was he from Dayton? 
     So Tubridy was a little frosty when I phoned. But once he realized I wasn't one of those people, he warmed.
     No, he hadn't been a Chapin fan, he said, or had any idea he was the inspiration of the song until a decade ago. 
     "I fell in love with his music once I found out about him," he said.
     Unlike Mr. Tanner, Tubridy did not quit. He kept singing, despite the negative reviews—there were more to come—and a good thing, too. He met his wife, Marlane, while both were performing in an off-Broadway production of Guys & Dolls. For a long time, he didn't want to be associated with Mr. Tanner.
     "I knew about this, but just wanted to push it out of the back of my life," Tubridy said. "Only when Howie Fields called did I realize what it means to people."
     Fields is the drummer of the Chapin family band, which kept performing after Harry Chapin's death, headed by brothers Tom and Steve. Fields called over the summer, wanting to know if Tubridy, now in his 70s, would perform the 'O Holy Night' part in "Mr. Tanner" at a concert last month raising money for the Harry Chapin Foundation.
     "The man just gave and gave and gave," said Tubridy. "I decided to do the performance with the band."

Martin Tubridy (left) and Howie Fields before the Nov. 12 concert
 (Photograph by Peter A. Blacksberg © 2016)

     You can see the Nov. 12 performance on YouTube.
     "It was surreal," Tubridy said. "It doesn't seem like this could actually happen. A standing ovation. Incredible, really."
     There really is only one thing left to say:
      Mr. Martin Tubridy, baritone, of Weston, Connecticut, sang the 'O Holy Night' counter melody in 'Mr. Tanner' with a fullness, strength and conviction which, while at one point hard to hear over the audience cheering, was consistently interesting.
     Particularly, at the very end, when the lyrics are, "He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole," but you hear Tubridy shift to, "it just made me whole."
     Music will do that. Critics pan and the years pass. But if you stick with your dreams long enough, keep singing, and are very lucky, maybe, just maybe, you'll get to do your stuff for people who cheer and critics who rave. Or even if you never do—the usual result—just the trying will make you whole. Merry Christmas.

A taste of heaven

     I visited a slice of heaven and a glimpse into hell Thursday, all within the span of a couple hours.
     Heaven might be overstating the case. But it was very white, and lovely. Which came as I surprise, because I was driving east along Lawrence Avenue, one of the more unlovely streets in Chicago. It was getting on 9 a.m., I had not had my coffee, and I was looking for a place, anyplace, to get a cup before I arrived at my destination. I pulled over at a Greek bakery, Hella's Pastry Shop, 2627 W. Lawrence -- only now, as I type it, does the name seem ironic.
    "Do you have coffee?" I asked, and as Gus, who has worked there 30 years, poured it, I looked around. Usually a bakery has a wide variety of offerings, but this place had one, predominantly. Tray after tray of kourabies—to use the bakery's spelling—a Greek Christmas cookie, filling the glass case, and the wall behind the counter. The effect was surreal, cinematic, charming. 
    I asked about the cookies, of course, and Gus suggested a dozen at $9.50. I already had breakfast, so compromised with a half dozen.  Gus gave me a complimentary honey cookie, wrapped in a napkin, and I ate that on the spot. It was very good, and I mentioned another Greek restaurateur of my acquaintance. His honey cookies ... Gus knew him, and he and I exchanged a knowing, sorrowful glance. Yes, well, baking is an art, is it not? And art, by definition, is not open to all, despite effort and intention.
      The bakery, he said, has been there for 50 years. These things take time to perfect. There was a sign in the window I admired on my way out. "All nicely wrapped." That was very sweet, in a way as sweet as the cookies. 
     The kourabies were very powdery -- not the best cookie to eat sitting in your car, but I managed. They were worth the care needed to eat them and the clean-up required, some diligent brushing and flicking. These crescents can be made with almond, or walnut, but these seemed a straight shortbread. I limited myself to two, saving the rest for the family, though that took an application of will as the day progressed. 
    Leading us to hell. As for hell, well, that's more complicated, as hell tends to be. You'll have to read my column on Monday. There too, I might be overstating the case, but again, only slightly.


     

You can lead a girl to slaw, but you can't make her eat

  
  

     This is one of my favorite columns; I'm posting it so I can show it to people. It has an interesting back story. A chef I admire, Sarah Stegner, was coming to my kid's junior high school to make cole slaw. What I thought would be the story — the award-winning chef interacting with the school lunch ladies — did not turn out to be the interesting part. 

     What turned out to be the interesting part was the reaction of a group of 12-year-old girls I stumbled upon in the lunchroom. I was a little skittish about using them -- people are sensitive about being in the newspaper, and no parents had been consulted, no approval sought. None was needed, of course. A free press may go about in public. But I didn't want the story spoiled by aggrieved parents. So after I reported this but before it ran, I did something I had never done before, or since. I phoned the mother of the Queen Bee student I focus on, to tell her the column was coming, and seek her permission to use her daughter's name. To my relief, she didn't mind.  

     Lily Jaeger, 12, a willowy wisp of a girl, is sitting in the cafeteria at Northbrook Junior High School, picking at her lunch: a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips.
     That isn't all she brought to eat of course -- she also has two sandwich cookies and some gummy bears in a brown bag.
     "I originally had applesauce in there but I took it out," she explains.
     Neither Jaeger, nor her seven friends crowding cozily together at a table, have touched the free cole slaw set out for them.
     "Too healthy," explains Kayla Fox.
     "We like junk," laughs Maddie Caplis.
     "It's yellow . . ." says Shayna Lutz.
     "If it were blue . . ." speculates Jaeger, in a dreamy tone suggesting that, well, then it might be an entirely different story.
     The slaw is indeed yellow -- a rich orange yellow that suggests fresh peaches, which comes from the organic golden beets and roasted organic squash used to make it, along with ripe pears, apples, cabbage, honey and a sprinkling of roasted pumpkin seeds.
     The slaw has just been prepared in the school's kitchen by Chef Sarah Stegner, who spent years running the dining room at the Ritz-Carlton, and Chef George Bumbaris, her partner now in the Prairie Grass Cafe and Prairie Fire shrines to carefully-crafted seasonal comfort foods. This is "Slaw Month" at the junior high school, which has Stegner and Bumbaris coming in each week to disguise good-for-you organic vegetables and fruits as cole slaw. "Hell's Kitchen" this ain't.
     "As a chef, you are a leader in the food community whether you are conscious of it or not," says Stegner, explaining why she is here. "You set the pace for what's out there. If you can give a little bit of direction and guidance and help, you should do that."
     Receiving direction are Donna Eckles, the food service manager at the school, and her staff of three: Linda, Joyce and Petra.
     Cafeteria ladies do not have a good reputation -- popular culture tars them as mean and their food as glop delivered with the ring of a big stainless steel spoon against a metal tray. But Eckles, in her blue smock with snaps and her name on a metal tag, who received her culinary training on the job at Libertyville High School, works smoothly alongside Stegner, in her crisp white chef's tunic with cloth buttons and her name embroidered on it, who studied at the Dumas Pere Cooking School and received the James Beard Award, twice.
     "Part of this is trying to get the staff here to do the setup, to work with them," says Stegner, who found Eckles receptive to ordering and preparing the organic produce.
     "She did this, and I'm sure it was not easy for her. She peeled butternut squash and diced it up. She had to call the farmers and tell them where to deliver."
     The school scrapped its fryer years ago -- fries are now baked -- and welcomed Stegner.
     "She's really nice," said Eckles, who has cooked with Stegner before. "Sarah has come and done a chicken dinner with the whole works, broccoli slaw. We do Tallgrass burgers, and they did guacamole sauce."
     That would be 100-percent grass-fed beef burgers from Bill Kurtis' Tallgrass ranch, the only beef served at Northbrook Junior High, a choice the school explains is healthier and not too expensive, when you factor in money saved by using organic-fed chicken. Lunches here cost $3, just 50 cents more than at the Chicago Public Schools, which has its own healthy initiatives starting this year. ("We have salad bars in Englewood," says CPS spokeswoman Monique Bond.)
     Getting kids to eat slaw is another matter
     Erik Dieschbourg, 11, is first to take a sample of the cole slaw, adding it to the pizza and chocolate ice cream cup on his tray.
     "Is it good?" asks Reid McCafferty.
     Dieschbourg tries a nibble.
     "Yeah," he says, without enthusiasm.
     The consensus is that the yellow slaw looks "gross" but those who try some like it.
     Madelyn Rowan, whose hand is covered with scrawled notes, dissolves into giggles before hazarding a morsel. "It's really good," she says, to her unconvinced friends.
     "Wash it down with this," says Maddie Tatham, 11, extending a Chewable Lemonhead in her direction.
     Lily Jaeger reconsiders rejecting slaw.
     "Is it free?" she asks, hopping up.
     "She's not going to eat it," confides Shayna Lutz. "She's going to pick at it, say 'Eww' and start crying."
     Not quite. Lily returns with a cup of slaw. She holds it dramatically at eye level, examining it closely, her features a symphony of disgust. She holds it to her nose and sniffs.
     "I smelled it," she announces to her seven friends, hoping that will placate them. It does not. Goaded, she gives a shrug, then plucks up a shred of slaw between pink polished nails and raises it to her mouth, gagging as Shayna instantly brings a napkin to Lily's lips -- the way a mother would do with a child -- so her friend can spit the shred out.
     Lily trots off to the water fountain, then returns, nibbles delicately upon a salt & vinegar chip, as if to settle herself, then decrees:
      "It's actually not that bad."

                            –Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2010

Repeating "We are SO screwed..." over and over is not a success strategy

“Now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like."                                                                                                     — Michelle Obama

     Oh, I don't know about that.
     Yes, the brittle fraud we elected president has been scraping together a rogue's gallery of right-wing goofs and fringe mediocrities as his Cabinet.
     Yes, he has been as manic on Twitter as ever, firing off poorly spelled salvos at all who dare question him. Yes, he has been willfully blind to Russian meddling in the U.S. election, leaping to slam our intelligence agencies while making goo-goo eyes at Vladimir Putin.
     Pretty grim. With the promise of more grimness to come, as every closet bigot, neighborhood bully and tin-hat lunatic feels emboldened to strut his stuff in public, praising Trump all the while.
     But how does recognizing this translate into lack of hope? Just the opposite. Hope is required now. The first lady gets that. "Hope is necessary," she continued, pouring out her heart to Oprah.
     It sure is. Merely repeating "We're screwed" over and over is not a success strategy.
     Four reasons for hope:
     1. The Curse of the Outsider. President of the United States is the first elective office will Donald Trump hold. You know who that evokes? Jane Byrne, whose only elective office was one term as mayor of Chicago. Remember Jane? She won by opposing insiders like Ed Vrdolyak and Charles Swibel then, once in power, panicked and ran into their arms. We're seeing that already with Trump. Just because he thinks governing is easy won't make it easy...

To continue reading, click here. 

A kaleidoscope of crazy

     There's a lot of crazy in the world. I know that — heck, I coined the phrase. And I believe it. But you can believe something to be true, sincerely, in your heart, and still marvel at specific examples. 
     For instance....
      Take yesterday's column, about Chicago police recruits taking ethics training at the Illinois Holocaust Museum. It was a long, seven hour day, spent at the Holocaust museum, 9 a.m to 4 p.m., with 113 would-be cops.  Too long to be at the Holocaust Museum. I do not recommend it. Not to take anything way from the institution. It tends to bring a person down. 
      Still, it was worth it, because it led to an interesting story, I felt, delivered fairly directly. No need for me to get on a soapbox. Just present the interesting thing going on. It raises enough important questions on its own.  
       If you haven't read the column, read it here.
       Done? Feel like you've understood it? Good. Now we'll have the police reaction. Pause, to imagine what that reaction might be. What do you think a veteran police officer would say? Got your idea? Good. 
    Here's the reality. We'll just use one, but he expresses a common reaction. The most common reaction:

I am a highly decorated, retired Chicago Cop (31yrs.)with several thousand( you read that correctly- several thousand) arrests under my belt. Comparing The CPD to the Nazi Third Reich is so insulting & idiotic, that I really don't know how to respond. I would also imagine that comparing innocent Holocaust victims to "Inner City Thug Casualties" is just as insulting to the Jewish People. I don't think any Holocaust Victims were robbing,shooting,wielding weapons, car-jacking or threatening anyone, when they were murdered...........do you?You owe Cops an apology.

     What do you say to that? It's just so sad. It made me sad to read, to think about, not because it was a unique reaction, but because it is the common condition nowadays, not just with cops and this story, but with so many people. Our vision has become kaleidoscopic. We can look at the most mundane thing and see a shattered, swirling mosaic of crazy. What can you do in the face of that? Nothing.

Horrors of the Holocaust help teach ethics to Chicago police recruits

     The morning began with bagels, coffee and activities — stand up if you've volunteered, that sort of thing. Then speaker Kelley Szany, director of education at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, drew the attention of 113 Chicago Police Department recruits to a large pad of paper at each table and asked them to draw a line down the middle and make a chart.
     "Left side, how you see yourselves as officers," she said. "Right side, how you think others see you."
     That took five minutes. Then she went around the room, asking one recruit from each table to stand and read what they had written.
     Cops see themselves as professional, fair, heroes, leaders, brave, respectful, loyal, sharp-looking, dedicated, motivated, honorable, helpful, caring, comical, authoritative, among other qualities.
     The public, however, sees them as aggressive, unfair, rude, selfish, power-hungry, robotic, corrupt, biased, lazy, bullies, violent, drunks, racist, killers, overweight . . . plus a few positive qualities, like courageous and trustworthy.
     It seemed an odd exercise, here at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, a summer camp icebreaker, particularly when they were urged to "please use your police voices." Something soon forgotten in the grim journey the officers-to-be, all in their 20s and 30s, were about to take.
     But we would circle back to it during the "Law Enforcement & Democracy Initiative," a unique day of ethics training given to CPD recruits.
     Szany walked them through the role the police played in the German Republic becoming the Nazi Third Reich. She passed around photos of street scenes, of officers with dogs, of police publicly humiliating mixed-religion couples.
     "What sort of police functions do you see happening in these photographs?" she asked, explaining the process of eroding civil rights.
     "When we look at the Holocaust, when we look at genocide as a whole. . . . What we know is that genocide does not happen in a vacuum," Szany said. "Genocide always unfolds in almost an evolution, and in stages, and at every point in these stages . . . we as citizens can choose how we are going to respond. Individuals, organizations and governments can choose how they want to respond. . . . We are going to learn, even if you do not think it is possible to say 'No, I will not participate' it is possible."
     They toured the museum, opened in 2009, following a path that moved Europe's Jews from warm scenes of family life to being an ostracized, ghettoized, terrorized, then murdered minority.
     The recruits listened carefully and were obviously affected. At least one couldn't eat her box lunch.
     "They get why they're here," said a 28-year-old recruit. "The parallels are frightening."
     She was one of several Polish immigrant recruits. (The police department asked me not to use their names because they haven't been vetted as department spokespeople.)
     "I'm from Lublin," she said. "I would pass the Majdanek concentration camp every day on my way to school. [When the program began] I was thinking, 'What does this have to do with my police work?'"
     Then she made the connection.
     "It might happen, even here."
     In the afternoon, they heard a terrifying account from a Polish survivor, Aaron Elster, who lived for two years, hidden in a windowless tin attic. Perhaps the most unsettling moment was a 2009 "60 Minutes" report, "The Bad Samaritan," about David Cash, a college student who looked the other way while his best friend raped and murdered a 7-year-old in the restroom of a Las Vegas casino.
     Retired police Sgt. Diane Shaw connected the dots: the way the German police went along with inflicting horror and how police today go along with wrongs around them, making Chicago what one expert called "the capital of the Code of Silence."
     "How willing are we to lie for somebody, to protect them?" Shaw asked. "Or rationalize things to ourselves. [David Cash] had a code of silence. Do you think there were people who remained silent during the Holocaust? They didn't speak out, for any reason."
     "That was a huge surprise," said one recruit, a 38-year-old former bricklayer. "Now I see how they are tying it all in. It fits like a glove."
     To watch the 113 recruits—military disciplined, polite, attentive, smart, sincere, well-intentioned—inspires some hope for the future of our troubled department. But only some. They have another training ahead of them, the training of the street, even longer, more intensive, and you have to wonder if their day in Skokie will stay with them. The organizers pressed the cadets to retain that positive self-image, to always be the officer they saw when they looked at themselves that morning.
     "How you see yourselves, you were right on target," said Shaw, displaying a few charts. "You are proud. You should be. Honest and courageous. These are things you should continue to strive to be. Sometimes this gets tough. . . . You are the authority figure. [Hitler] used the uniform for the worst possible way. If he can use the uniform to the worst, how can you use your uniform for the best? The challenge is, what can you do to change your world? You're going to go to a district, to a watch, to a beat. When you get to those places, how are you going to change that part of the world for the better? How are you going to use your police uniform and your police powers for the better?"

Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster shares his experience with Chicago Police recruits.

Next they'll leave you a mop and a bucket

     We're used to clicking on buttons online. Sending emails, ordering products, answering questions. 
      And we're used to the on-line world intruding upon what is still thought of as Real Life—we all carry a smart phone and pull it out at idle moments and gape at it, as if we're expecting to find the answer to our unease there.
     But suddenly finding the on-line world's feedback buttons in tangible reality; this seemed something new. In a men's room in Navy Pier. The choices, in case you can't read the photo, are, if "The restroom is clean and properly supplied," press the green button. If "The restroom needs supplies," press the yellow button and, should "The restroom needs cleaning," press red.
     Initially charmed by novelty and the let's-pitch-in-and-put-on-a-show quality of the thing, and by the fact the new bathroom, with its cool grey tiles, was indeed clean and supplied, I pressed the green button. 
     Not realizing, first, that I was undoing the whole washing-hands thing by touching the green button. And second that I was also being dragooned into unpaid janitorial service. 
     Right now, the economic model is that an employee is hired to clean the restrooms, and part of that job is determining when the rest rooms need to be cleaned and re-stocked. This button system, cute though it may be, is like scanning your purchases at CVS or the Huffington Post gulling its readers to write the posts they then read. The first step into a new way where mops and buckets and rags and cleaner are stacked in the corner and if customers want a clean john at Navy Pier, they clean it themselves.
    The devices, by the way, are called "Smiley Boxes," are powered by batteries, and use low power radio waves to communicate with a central location. They're the creation of a Swiss firm called FeedbackNow, 16 years old with hundreds of customers. They're part of "The Internet of Things," keys that tell you where they are, refrigerators that order milk when it runs low, that sort of thing.
    There is something charming to that notion as well, a reminder that we are not atomized individuals, but part of a greater system and we can help out. If I had to summarize the cause of Donald Trump's advent in one sentence, I'd say, "Americans forgot they're all part of the same society." Thus they look to their own narrow interests, frame every problem as a matter of maximizing their own convenience and the rest can go hang. 
    But who are we helping by providing feedback to keep the bathrooms clean? Not the dwindling number of janitors. These buttons frame the bathroom problem this way: how can we know when the toilet paper is out without having an actual employee check? 
     The problem could be framed a different way. For instance: how can bathrooms be kept clean while employing the maximum number of people? Stated that way, we could look to how they do it in certain European countries, where you'd expect some elderly pensioner to be sitting stoically on a chair in the corner of the bathroom, keeping an eye on things, collecting centimes on a plate. Not the glamorous retired life we see in financial planning commercials, but it would solve a lot of problems for the idle, lonely elderly while raising the general condition of bathrooms. We could have clean bathrooms because every hour somebody on salary with health insurance and a pension comes by and cleans it. 
     Sadly, we don't seem to frame our problems in how to create the best advantage for the greatest number, but how to do what is necessary as cheaply as possible to that even more money can flow to fewer and fewer lucky individuals. And we see how well that is working.

Go see Frank Babbitt perform "A Christmas Carol" at 2 p.m.

   

     We met four friends Friday night at the Winnetka Community House to see Frank Babbitt perform a dramatic reading of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." It was a lovely evening, just like before — Edie and I saw him do it a couple years ago, and were keen to go back, and felt obligated to press others to go with us. 
     It's a natural reaction. After we heard Frank's powerful, thrilling performance, falling easily into the voices of Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Marley's ghost, Tiny Tim, and all the other marvelous characters in the tale, punctuated by passages of carols and dances and tunes played on the viola—Frank is a violist at the Lyric Opera—Edie said exactly what she said last time, "He needs better publicity."
    It's not that the performance wasn't well-attended. It was. Thirty people or so, filling out the small, intimate space, more or less. But they could have had a few dozen more.  There should have been.
    Consider this. Tickets are $10. You don't have to haul downtown. You don't have to pay to park. You can buy tickets at the door. Ten bucks. They give you coffee and sweets. You hear a deathless classic tale—based on the 1868 reading copy written by Dickens himself— read by a masterful actor who is also a world class musician. You get to laugh—Dickens is very funny. And cry, over poor Tiny Tim. Oh, and it'll get you in the proper Christmas spirit and remind you that, even if you are not a Scrooge-caliber jerk, there is always time to be a better person. 
     Quite a lot, really. There really should be people hanging from the rafters when he does this—and Saturday afternoon, Dec. 17 at 2 p.m. is the last time he's doing it this year. I'm tempted to go and I saw it last night. 
     Anyway, whatever you're planning to do this afternoon, if you're within 25 miles of Winnetka, you won't have nearly as much memorable fun as if you decide, aw what the heck, you'll go hear Frank deliver "A Christmas Carol." You can't say you weren't told. You can find details about Saturday's performance at 2 p.m. by clicking here. Afterward, you can write to me about how much you loved it.

Eventually the truth sinks in. Doesn't it?

     What I remember most about the days after 9/11 was that nothing was funny. There was no joke to be made, no mitigating light remark to soothe the terror of such a sudden attack on such prominent landmarks—the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—resulting in 3,000 deaths of ordinary Americans going about their regular lives.
     And then the Onion came out, and offered the perfect story, under the delightfully deadpan headline, "Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell."
     With the dateline, "JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS," it contained paragraphs like:

     "I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"

     I did not — and God, it hurts me to have to say this directly, but we seem to have come to that place — believe I was reading an actual news report about the eschatological fate of the 9/11 hijackers. The Onion is humor, parody. Yes, occasionally certain tone-deaf dolts would wave an Onion story over their heads in sincere alarm—Chinese government agencies seemed to be particularly prone to this—but that was part of the fun. People fell for this. 
     It was only after the recent presidential election,  when the role of "fake news" in luring Americans to vote for the fraud and Russian puppet Donald Trump was being debated, did I pause to consider where The Onion and its ilk would fit in to this new landscape, with the deep credulity of our fellow citizens suddenly in all-too-clear relief. 
    Will The Onion be vetted as "fake news" and appropriately flagged so that readers who might think that Bill Clinton was actually dispatching vowels to the Bosnian cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny, as the Onion reported in December, 1995, would not be led astray? 
    What a sad world that would be. How easily the perpetrators of fake news will either strip off the fake news designations or wrongly apply whatever little "IT'S REAL!!!" smily face that Facebook creates to reassure readers that what their reading has a relationship with reality. And what about the stretched, spurious, one-sided arguments that pundits — myself included, I am told — weave? Who decides?
    Here's a thought. Instead of vetting the facts, why not teach people to be more skeptical? To have a baseline knowledge of history, science and current events. To be particularly dubious about reports that tickle their own biases. So you don't show up at a suburban pizza parlor with a gun looking for the child sex ring you've been told that Hillary Clinton, whom you hate with the burning white hot passion of a thousand suns, runs there.  
   Journalists have been trained to do this. "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out" to quote the famous City News Bureau edict. We can train the public too. 
    Yes, incredible stuff does happen, and there's little harm in saying, "Really? Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature? Says who?" I remember when I was told that a suburban bank president had put a note praising Hitler into his bank's newsletter. "Suburban bank presidents don't praise Hitler in their bank newsletters," I said, drily, at first. But I checked it out anyway. Turns out, this one did.
     Consider the source. One reason fake news is thriving is that the Republicans, uncomfortable with the truth of their existence, have done such a good job of discrediting what is called with a sneer "the mainstream media." Even though that is the place most likely to reflect the living world. Which is why they hate it so. If there were a stranger sitting in your living room, and every day, as you came down the stairs to breakfast, he loudly announced, "You're ugly and on your way to do stupid things that will hurt your country," you'd hate him too, even if it were true. Especially if it were true. 
     That said, upon reflection, the idea of making people more skeptical is naive, because it is predicated on the notion—the flimsy notion—that people want to perceive the world as it actually is. When all evidence indicates the contrary: what they want is to dwell in whatever phantasm they find comfortable, and will not only decorate the walls with the baldest lies, but passionately defend their right to do so. 
     Where does that leave us? Carrying on as before, perhaps. Fake news has a value, as a parodic reflection of the world. It's fun. Last April 1, despairing of topping the previous year's announcement that "April is Puppetry Month," I considered not doing an April 1 post—besides, I was too tired of the blog. 
     Then I went with that thought, with a post headlined, "The End," announcing I was quitting. Every single since fact in the post was an outsized lie, from my claim to have 5,000 readers a day, to saying my column was praised by Carol Moseley-Braun, who despises me, to mentioning my column runs five days a week in the Sun-Times. 
     After it was posted, I heard from a number of colleagues I respect, giving their serious condolences, which surprised and horrified me. Including, the author of an important Illinois political blog, sniffing around in that I-smell-a-lie fashion we reporters have. Did I, he wondered, insinuatingly, really earn $10,000 a month from blog advertisements? I let him go on a bit.
     "So let me get this straight,"I finally said. "You're asking me about something in my April 1 blog post? You read something I posted on the First of April, and you want to know if that April 1 post is factually correct? Is that right?" I kept saying versions of this, and eventually the truth sank in.
     That's a beautiful phrase, isn't it? Eventually the truth sank in. If only we could hope that would happen with the American public. But it won't. Or at least it will take a long, long time. That is the truth here. A scary truth. Small wonder we're having such a hard time letting it sink in.

Bicyclists! If you want to live, blow that red light!

     For Mad Max messengers, tattooed, wrapped in chains and merino wool, riding their $2,000 titanium alloy bicycles painted matte black to deter thieves, a red light is not a command to stop so much as a gentle hint there might be traffic whizzing ahead, so they should put on a burst of speed when threading between the cars and trucks.
     I knew bike messengers did that. Turns out, most everybody else does too.
     At least according to "POLICIES FOR PEDALING: Managing the Tradeoff between Speed & Safety for Biking in Chicago," a new study by the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University.
     Turns out only 1 in 50 cyclists stop at stop signs if there's no traffic coming. A quarter don't stop when there is traffic. Red lights fare a bit better.
     Not only that, but the study gives the practice a big thumbs up.
     Which is a relief because, to be honest, even I roll through the stop signs and sometimes the lights.
     On my sky blue Divvy, huffing from Point A to Point B, I come to a red light, slow, and yes, I will jut a foot out and actually stop if there's cross traffic coming. If not, a quick glance left and right, a mental "So long, suckers!" tossed at the cars dutifully waiting, and onward across the street.
     Not only a way to conserve forward momentum — so important to tired 56-year-old legs pushing a 45-pound Divvy — but also as a safer way to ride.
     What might be dangerous, counterintuitively, is NOT blowing the red light.
     The DePaul paper cites a 2007 London study shows women are killed by large trucks at three times the rate of men, and they offer one of those Malcolm Gladwell-type explanations:
     “The Transport for London report posits that women are more vulnerable to truck collisions due to their tendency to be less likely to disobey red traffic signals than men. By going through a red traffic signal before it turns green, men are less likely to be caught in a truck driver’s blind spot. Instead, they get in front of the truck before it starts to enter the intersection.”
     I knew it felt right to blast out ahead of traffic before those trucks. The study also encourages the city to make such “Idaho Stops’ legal (so called because Idaho did just that in 1982 and bike accidents went down). Though I don’t imagine Chicago police are writing many tickets on rolling through red lights — about 1,300 tickets a year are written to Chicago bicyclists, the “vast majority” for riding on the sidewalk, illegal for those older than 12.
     The study also found what I already know — I love studies that do that: bikes are a better way around town. In 33 out of 45 matched trips between randomly chosen points in the city, biking is faster. And these were long trips — average seven miles. For trips of a mile or so, the bike wins hands down. Faster than a car or cab, which have to sit at lights remember.
     And cheaper. A yearly Divvy membership costs 30 cents a day. It costs $3.25 just to get in a cab, which I hardly ever do. I broke down and got in a cab last week, because it was 5 p.m. and I was at the Hilton on South Michigan and figured I’d race to Union Station and catch an earlier train. Big mistake. The ride cost $10 — well, that’s what I spent when I realized I could walk faster and get out. The only reason I took the cab, I realized grimly, was it had been so long I forgot what they are like.
     There is one hazard the study doesn’t mention. We are a country that, it is increasingly clear, is built on disregard for social order and on generalized envy. If bicycles are officially allowed to blow through red lights, will it be long before cars start doing the same? Leading to the kind of chaotic free-for-all that makes traffic such an ordeal in Third World countries. We do seem to be drifting in that direction, if not pedaling hard in that direction.

The Typo Department

 

     You know what I hate? I hate when somebody finds an error, a typo, a factual slip, in my copy, and then waves it over their head as a general indictment of myself and my writing.
     I hate that.
     As a writer.
    However, as a reader, it is a different story.
     Sometimes I'm reading along, reading, happy as a clam, and I stub my toe on somebody else's mistake. It stops me dead. Such as what happened Wednesday, reading "POLICIES FOR PEDALING: Managing the Tradeoff between Speed & Safety for Biking in Chicago," the new report by the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University. Friday's column is going to revolve around it.

     I appreciate the well-designed cover. Admire the lay-out of the "Study Team" page with its four authors and three designers. I enjoy the concision of its executive summary. 

    Then on page two, the first section, "I. POLICIES AND REGULATIONS GOVERNING BIKING IN CHICAGO."This paragraph:

     Although Chicago has received national attention recently for its bike-friendliness, it is often overlooked that the city has embraced and encouraged this mode for many decades. The city has a long tradition of investing in biking infrastructure, starting in earnest with Mayor Calvin Harrison, who created a bike path from the Edgewater neighborhood to Evanston and made bicycling a prominent part of the 1897 mayoral campaign. Between the 1960s and early 2000s, both Richard J. Daley and Richard M. Daley also demonstrated a commitment to cycling improvements, including off-street trails and protected bike lanes.

    Did anything leap out at you in that paragraph?
    Maybe "Mayor Calvin Harrison." No? Because it sure popped me in the nose. Based on the year, they mean Mayor Carter Harrison. One of the most famous mayors in Chicago history not named Daley.
    Yes, I know, to write is to err. Yes, I know I am capable of making the same kind of mistake and worse.
    But still....
    Calvin Harrison. Perhaps because it's in the very beginning of an academic report with four authors. Perhaps because it's such a famous mayor — really, it's like citing Mayor Harvey Washington.
    I sympathize with those behind the study — which I found useful and interesting and write about on Friday. But c'mon guys. A thing like that calls the rest into question. And at the very beginning. If you're going to drop hair in your food, at least have it in the dessert and not the appetizer.
    Writing is a learning experience, and I've learned, from this, just how vexing those mistakes are, to a reader. Next time someone plucks a Calvin Harrison out of my copy, I plan to be less testy, less defensive, and more sincerely aghast. It really undercuts all your hard work. 

The Russians taking us over was once a college joke

     Growing up in the 1970s, I often heard Ohioans mutter darkly about the Russians "taking us over." Which, even as a green Buckeye bean, struck me as insane. The United States was so big and powerful. What were the Russians going to do, occupy us?
     A reminder that Donald Trump didn't invent projecting your own flaws onto others. We feared and hated the Soviets as aggressors, even though we were the ones who tried to strangle them in the cradle. How many Americans know that, in late 1918, U.S. Army Gen. John J. Pershing invaded Siberia with 5,000 American soldiers? A daft attempt to overthrow the Russian Revolution. Of course they'd be suspicious of us after that. We were indeed out to get them, and had already tried once.
     How our country, so fearful of Russia, could turn around in 2016 and unilaterally surrender to Moscow, is a mystery. How could it elect this panting fanboy of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin? Then nod grinning as people do in nightmares, as he staffs his Cabinet with Russian flunkies like Putin pal, wearer of the Russian "Order of Friendship" and our next secretary of state, apparently, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson.      

     This is the stuff of jokes, of bad undergraduate humor. Junior year of college I wrote a brief graphic novel for the school humor magazine called "Let's Capitulate to the Russians," illustrated by future New Yorker cartoonist Robert Leighton.
     In it, the United States preemptively surrenders to the Reds. Suddenly the culture that can't produce a toaster that anyone would buy except at the point of a bayonet finds itself masters of what was once America. 

To continue reading, click here.

Rob Sherman: Atheist. Activist. Asshole.

      It was easier to sympathize with Rob Sherman's cause than to sympathize with Rob Sherman. On one hand, he fought the good fight that others shirked or shrugged off—to resist the easy infiltration of religion into government, to hold America accountable to its secular ideals, and to frustrate those all-too-eager to put the weight of the law behind the symbols of their own particular faith. 
    On the other, he could be so grating about it, filing his lawsuits, haranguing officials, showing up at the newspaper on Sept. 11, 2001, practically unhinged, insisting that this, THIS is what religion leads to. I was glad he was doing what he was doing, I suppose. I just wished he would do it far away from me.
    The long-time Buffalo Grove resident seemed to be mellowing lately, branching out—he ran for Congress in the 5th District on the Green Party ticket last fall, promising to preserve jobs for coal miners and get "In God We Trust" off our money. He did not win.     
    During the campaign, I ran into him at the Sun-Times, having his portrait taken. He seemed in good spirits, and I was cordial, and wished him well. He had recently moved to a home with an airplane hangar in Poplar Grove. It was unwelcome news Sunday to read in the Daily Herald that a plane belonging to Sherman, 63, had crashed, killing its pilot. The coroner was slow to officially identify the victim as Sherman, but eventually it was announced that Sherman had died in the crash. Condolences to his friends and loved ones for their loss.
      For the rest of us, well, Rob Sherman was sui generis. There was no one like him, and in the years to come we might find ourselves wishing there were. It took courage to do what he did, and while he had flaws, he without question had fortitude. Even though his vexing qualities might be what first spring to mind. When I wrote "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances" in 1996, it seemed natural to begin the book with Sherman, and I'll reprint it here, as my tribute to this unique figure on the Chicago area landscape. I know the headline might strike some as a little harsh, and I went back and forth on using that last word. But then Sherman was a lot harsh, for decades, and it only seems fair. 

     Rob Sherman is a pest. he'd be the first to admit it. A professional atheist, Sherman has spent years pressuring suburbs around Chicago to purge their town hall lawns of nativity scenes and their crests of crosses and other religious trappings. He is as common a sight at city council meetings as folding chairs.
     Needless to say, people hate him. Sherman is pushy and aggressive and gets communities worked up over issues they'd rather not think about. And he never goes away.
     Even those who sympathize with Sherman sometimes find themselves blanching at his tactics. He is locally famous for having dragooned his young son, Ricky, into being a reluctant poster child for the atheist cause. The most notorious incident took places eight years go, when a columnist* visited Sherman's home and Ricky, then six, was trotted out for display.
    "Do we celebrate Christmas?" asked Sherman
     "No," Ricky answered.
     "Why not?" Sherman quizzed.
     "I don't know," Ricky said.
    "Because we're what?" Sherman persisted.
    The son was puzzled. "Smart," he ventured.
    "Because we're what?" Sherman prodded. "It starts with an A."
    The child thought a moment. Then it came to him.
     "Assholes?" he said eagerly. 

*Not me, incidentally, but Eric Zorn, and I half admired, half winced at how I seized his vignette for my own purposes. 

"Pipelines are everywhere"

Worker from Foltz Welding preparing an oil pipeline for installation. 

     PATOKA, Ill. — Crude oil comes out of the ground hot, then stays warm for weeks as it travels at a casual walking pace — about 3 miles an hour — through the nation's 2.5 million miles of oil pipeline, moving from well to refinery.
     The drama over one stretch of one pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota caught the nation's attention for months, until it ended in victory — for the protesters, for now — last week when the Army Corps of Engineers said it would not grant a right of way for the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River near the Sioux land.
 

Oil tank

   But focus on the episode ignores a greater truth — that our nation, which consumes more oil than any other, depends on these pipelines to slake its bottomless thirst. The Dakota Access Pipeline cost $3 billion and will be finished sometime next year, if not passing near the Sioux land, then passing by somewhere. It's nearly 90 percent complete now.  
     Trace its route. The Dakota Access Pipeline, a 30-inch carbon-steel tube, begins in the oil fields of North Dakota, heads southeast for 1,172 miles, and ends here, in downstate Illinois, where its final stretch was laid last summer. It's a muddy field, awaiting re-planting, next to land owned by Energy Transfer, the consortium building the disputed pipeline, piled with green pipe that will be used to construct the final 10 percent.
     It's not the only pipeline in the world. Here it is joined by pipelines arriving from New Orleans, from Pontiac, Michigan, from Owensboro, Kentucky, from Alberta, Canada via the Keystone Pipeline, also controversial. More than a dozen separate lines converge around Patoka, running underground, about 4 feet deep along U.S. 51 then turning down "pipeline alley" to feed what is known as the Patoka Oil Tank Farm. More than 50 enormous white oil tanks....

To continue reading, click here.

Patoka Oil Tank Farm

In for the long haul

     Someone once asked Lord Byron what it was like to live his life in a poetic frenzy.
     No man, he replied, can live his life in a state of poetic frenzy. How would he shave?
     I've been thinking of that line as, day by day, President-Elect Donald Trump has been filling out his cabinet with a rogue's gallery of the corrupt, the deluded and the unfit—though not Rudy Giuliani, thank God for small favors. Trump's supporters insist that credit be given for his right decisions, and I will happily flutter my hands to heave and cry "Hallelujah" at Giuliani being denied the world stage. The thought of that man, either insane or doing a fine imitation of insanity, becoming Secretary of State. The mind reels.
     And you really don't want your mind reeling too much, not every day, all day. Very unsettling, a constant state of reeling. At least mine for me. I know I've written that Trump's continuous  stream of lies and insults have to be responded to, forcefully. But can decent people spend the next four years continually keening in grief and alarm?
     My wife walked into my office Saturday, sincerely aghast at Donald Trump's latest jaw-dropping statement: bitching about being Time magazine's "Person of the Year." 
    "They were very politically correct," Trump told a rally at Baton Rouge, before polling the audience, who were enthusiastically in favor of "Man of the Year."
     Time magazine, though it had previously named women "Man of the Year"—Wallis Simpson, Elizabeth II even, ironically "American women" in 1975—changed the slogan to "Person of the Year" in 1999. 
     Is there a difference? 
     Sure. Any change is a little jarring. I remember when Ace commercials went from "Ace is the place with the helpful hardware man" to "Ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks," or some such thing. The groove of habit is etched into your mind, and any deviation just feels wrong, even if it is an improvement. You'd have to be a boob to urge Ace to go back to "man"—many of its employees are women; why exclude them from the advertising? So customers don't notice a shift?
     The adult adjusts to change, but the child, or the child within, howls for the old to be returned, now. The entire basis of our current political moment is an infantile retreat into nostalgia; fleeing into the past, when white men were in charge and life was better, so we have to get back there right away. 
     "Political correctness" is now the all-purpose, one-size-fits-all label that the Trumpians use to dismiss the new standards of racial, ethnic or sexual sensitivity.  Upset that your local bus station has gone back to water fountains labeled "White only" and "Colored?" Don't like the yellow star sewn to your coat? Cope with it, you lost! Try not to be so politically correct!
     It wasn't that I didn't share my wife's outrage, I do. Rather, I have my outrage meter dialed down of late. You go to the forest, you wear yourself out if you start pointing out each tree. I used the Time magazine opportunity to talk about pacing. The world has officially gone crazy, as a wave of backward-looking nativism that the lumpen population has been gulled into believing will bring prosperity. Britain departed from the European Union like a passenger leaping from a plane because he doesn't like who's seated next to him.  The Philippines elected a murderous madman in the form of Rodrigo Duterte. Now we've got four years of Donald Trump. We'll be lucky if by May France hasn't elected Marine Le Pen. 
    This is a nightmare that is only beginning. Years will pass until it peaks, until the wave crashes and begins to roll back and we can see what our soggy world has become.
     I'm not saying we surrender, lay back and let the changes wash over us. They of course must be resisted. But fear and outrage are not in themselves productive.  
    "Dismiss your grief and fear," Virgil has Aeneas counsel his men in "The Aeneid." "Save your strength for better times to come." 
     That's worth considering. This is a long-haul situation, where seismic forces are driving the world in a direction, and we have to, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, ride this strange torpedo to the end. 
     You read about these situations, in history books usually before wars. Suddenly the old order, which worked for so long, is repudiated. New passions are stirred. The lowest echelons rise up and claim control. I can't get too upset about Trump wishing women were back in the kitchen, their existence not diluting the value of his Time magazine honor—which, at the risk of falling into a trope, was extended to Hitler in 1938, Stalin in 1939. But I'm saving that outrage for when we start nosing into war with China. Though it might be argued that the cataclysm is necessary, it's what brings people to their senses, when they'll look up and go, "Oh, we elected a brittle baby with no knowledge and no curiosity. That was probably a bad thing."
    So a practiced numbness.  And not without cause. The most terrifying aspect of Trumpism, for me, is how news, facts and discourse are all undercut, debased. You can't inform and you can't argue, because they reject you prima facie. It's like watching a horror movie. The audience can scream "Look out! Don't go into the barn!" all they like, but those on screen won't hear them.
     The only hope is for them to eventually figure it out for themselves when the fact of where Trump is going  emerges. And for that to happen, he has to get there. I hate to say it, but I think we have to hit the canyon floor first.
     That sounds defeatist. But all the various deus ex machina miracles people are hoping for—the Electoral college fails to validate the election—are just that, miracles. Impossible pipe dreams. We're strapped in, and the roller coaster car is clicking up that first, enormous hill. I just can't start screaming my head off right now, because I sense that's coming whether I scream, stay silent or, as I've been doing, gaze with fixed horror as the amusement park grows more distant and that first downward plunge draws ever nearer. It's going to get a lot worse than this, and fast.

Saturday fun activity: where IS this?

     Careful Facebook readers might know I've been downstate earlier this week, working on my column for Monday. But I sort of fudged where I was. I did take a lunch break and walk through this old building. It isn't a residence. So what is it?
     To be honest, I wasn't thinking of the contest when I took the picture. Had I been, I might have framed the building a little better. It drifts off to the right. Normally, I'd have a few shots so one might turn out. But this time, I merely trudged out to almost the proper distance, turned, and snapped one picture. It was cold.
     Still, it will serve our purpose. I imagine someone will nail it at 7:01 a.m.
      The prize is going to be one of the 2015 posters -- with the year waning, I've decided it's time to retire those, to remove them from sale, take the ads down from the blog page, to make room for more paying advertisers (hint, hint). It's one thing to reference them a year later, to cite 2015 in 2016. Another for them to linger as the years click on, like guests at a party who won't leave when the host starts doing the dishes. An air of sorrow creeps in. So if you don't win today, yet want one, but have been delaying for whatever reason, because that's what people do, order in the next few weeks or lose your chance.
     Have you seen this rectangular pile of Jacksonian Era bricks? Where is it? Place your guesses below. Good luck.

John Glenn: astronaut, hero, guy who got Kennedy to put on a hat.

     John Glenn passed away Thursday. The astronaut and senator was a true American hero.  I had the honor of interviewing him once, and it says something about his regular guy demeanor—he was an Ohioan, after all—that he agreed to speak with me about an obscure episode in his life related to hats and John F. Kennedy. The story appears in a truly odd book, my history of the decline of men's headwear as told through the life of Kennedy, "Hatless Jack." 

     The hatters lobbied Kennedy, but they were too sophisticated to try to physically slap a hat on the president's head. Not all his guests were that savvy. The most routine White House ceremonies were a cause of concern for Kennedy.
     "Kennedy had a horror of hats," Sidey wrote. "He had an even greater horror of being forced to don the unorthodox headdresses of visiting delegations."
     Kennedy's military aide, Major general Chester Clifton, recalled a worried Kennedy taking him aside and seeking reassurance before the visit of a group of Native Americans in the Rose Garden.
     "They're not going to give me a bunch of feathers to wear, are they?" Kennedy asked.
     Whether Kennedy wore a proffered hat or not was definitely a function of who was making the attempt. While Kennedy did not want to be crowned by just anybody, if the situation was right, he would permit it to happen. The president had enormous respect for Colonel John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. Kennedy had been worried about the flight, going so far as to invite Glenn to the White House beforehand to talk about safety. When Friendship 7 later made its three and a half revolutions around the earth, there was indeed great concern that the heat shield had come loose, which would have doomed Glenn to a fiery death upon reentry.
     But the shield held. Glenn survived his flight—for which he received an extra $245 in flight pay—to become the greatest American aviation hero since Charles Lindbergh. A relieved Kennedy hurried to Florida to congratulate Glenn in person and pin the Distinguished Service medal on him.
     Kennedy, Glenn, the astronaut's family, and various NASA officials then toured the space facility, in a hectic scene, a "crush of reporters, photographers, Secret Service men, spectators and employees."
     There was a small presentation at Launch Pad 14. Glenn produced a green hard hat that the base manager had given him. It was like those worn by the launch crew, except emblazoned "J.F. Kennedy, President, U.S.A." and "John Glenn, First Manned Orbital Flight, 2-20-62" (conveniently forgetting Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man—albeit a Russian—to orbit the earth) along with a painting of a globe surrounded by three orbits. He presented it to Kennedy.
    "This will make him an honorary member of the launch crew," said Glenn. Kennedy put the helmet on and then removed it. "Glad to have you aboard, sir," Glenn said.
     The most interesting aspect of this particular encounter is that it reminds us of the power of image to corrupt impressions of history. Even though Kennedy undoubtedly wore the helmet—there are photographs of him wearing it—by the time the episode reached one memoir, it had been massaged so as to fit Kennedy's reputation.
     "There was a bit of byplay as Glenn, knowing JFK's aversion to funny hats, tried and failed, as so many had failed before him, to put a hard hat on his head," wrote William Manchester in a book about his years with Kennedy.
     Glenn, incidentally, denies knowing about Kennedy's dislike of hats or trying to put one on him mischievously. "I wasn't aware of his aversion to hats or anything," he said. "I didn't know anything of it. I just put it on, thinking it was okay."
    Glenn said it was spontaneous act of his part.
    "We were out showing him the launch pad and on the pad out there normally everyone is required to wear a hard hat," Glenn said. So when we got out there, standing there, I just put it on him ... He wore it for a little while. he didn't take it off immediately."