Encounter with an owl

     If human eyes were as big as owl eyes, relative to our heads, they would be the size of oranges. Then maybe we, too, would be able to swivel our necks 270 degrees, the way owls can—out of necessity, since their eyes are not mobile eyeballs, like ours, but tube-shaped, like a pair of binoculars, ideal for hunting small animals from the air at night. 
     This is an Eastern Screech-Owl—the hyphen looks odd, but if it's good enough for Sibley's, it's good enough for me— encountered Friday on the south bank of the Chicago River, just west of Orleans. 
     I was hurrying to catch the 5:12, noticed a group of city dwellers along the riverbank, fishing—the Friends of the Chicago River, having an event—and then saw this fellow perched on the leather gauntlet of Natalie F., who works for the Brookfield Zoo. I detoured down the stairs to the river bank to take a closer look.
     Eastern Screech-Owls range across the entire United States east of the Rockies. Screech-Owls west of the Rockies are Western Screech-Owls, aptly enough, and almost identical, except they have no red varieties. Their loss, as the red is quite pretty.
      This owl, I was told, is named "Weasley," obviously a nod to the red-haired Weasley clan in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, whose use of owls as messengers has to count as one of the more creative uses of owls in fiction.
     Though not the only one. The best magic-based kids book series before Harry Potter also prominently features owls. In fact, chapter four of C.S. Lewis' "The Silver Chair," the fourth book of his Chronicles of Narnia, is called "A Parliament of Owls," his description of a gathering of owls to discuss their business of the day (and itself a pun on Chaucer's allegorical poem, "The Parliament of Fowls"). The term stuck as a collective noun to denote groupings of the bird.
     When our boys were growing up, my wife and I read them "Owl Babies," an excellent picture book by Martin Waddell, illustrated by Patrick Benson. It has a very simple plot. Three owlet—the term for young owls— siblings, delightfully named Sarah, Percy and Bill, wake to find their mother gone, and the entire plot is their fearful wait for her. (Though I'm not an expert, mom looks like a Spotted Owl to me).

"Malle Babbe" by Frans Hall

     Publisher's Weekly called the book "hauntingly lovely," and years ago, when I went over for tea and chocolate cake at Ann Lander's East Lake Shore Drive condo, I brought her a copy of "Owl Babies" as a present, knowing she collects owl figurines and images. She was pleased with it.
      I'm tempted to sail off into owls in art, where they represent everything from the devil and madness, such as in Frans Hals "Malle Babbe," a 1630s painting of a drunken madwomen, to wisdom and calm. In ancient times Athena, the goddess of wisdom was often depicted with an owl mascot. 
    Well, maybe just a little side trip. The most famous ancient Greek coin, the tretradrachm, featured Athena on one side, and an owl on the other, starting the tradition of putting animals on the backs of coins, and in ancient times the coins were referred to as Owls. 
     Coveting the thing and wondering how available they are, I went on eBay, and was surprised to see specimens of the 2500-year-old silver coin for as little as $400. Then again, the owl tetradrachma is perhaps the most forged coin of all time, so buyer beware.
    I think I'll do without. Besides, there is no need to spend big bucks and reach back into antiquity to find what may or may not be an authentic  Greek owl coin. Greece struck a number of modern versions, including 1 and 2 drachma coins, issued by the military junta in 1973, a nice example of which can be had on eBay for $4.
     

Obit Week #3: "The conscience of the council—Leon Despres

      With the Society of Professional Obituary Writers in town for their annual convention this weekend, I thought I would reprint a few of my own obits from over the years. This is perhaps my favorite.
  
     Few things are sadder or more haunting than to imagine what Chicago might have been like had anyone listened to Leon Despres.
     For two decades, he stood virtually alone in the Chicago City Council and called upon humanity's better nature, only to be ignored or ridiculed.
     Mr. Despres, 101, who died at his Hyde Park home Wednesday morning, was the alderman representing the South Side neighborhood's 5th Ward from 1955 to 1975 and "the absolute conscience of the city," as former congressman and judge Abner Mikva once dubbed him.
     In retirement, he remained active and was involved in fighting a high-rise condo in his neighborhood.
     His son, Robert, said Mr. Despres' mind was very sharp until recently, and that one of the secrets to his longevity was having an "army of friends."
     Mr. Despres battled, unceasingly and eloquently, against Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Democratic Machine. He tried to make Chicago a more decent and fair city than it became, and though he seldom won, he never gave up.
     He fought racial repression at a time when bold action might have prevented incalculable suffering and loss.
     "The Board of Education is shortchanging the children of Chicago," he told the City Council on Jan. 17, 1963, asking that it "electrify the world" and "vote for the greatness of our city" by withholding tax funds until the board ended segregation. "It is educating nearly all children in damaging racial isolation. Separate education is never equal education, and, in addition, the board is providing inferior facilities and teaching staffs for most Negro children."
     The measure was resoundingly defeated.
     Often, the only vote cast for his resolutions was his own. Alone, he voted against the council's ban on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s open-occupancy marches in August 1966, while Daley's black aldermanic puppets denounced him for dictating to blacks where their best interests lay.
      When Mr. Despres opposed the construction of new Chicago Housing Authority high-rise buildings, just one alderman sided with him. The buildings would become a monumental failure, sinkholes of crime and despair that plagued the city for decades.
     The City Council of Mr. Despres' day was a tempestuous body of colorful figures, most of them slavishly loyal to Daley, whom Mr. Despres called a dictator and wasn't shy about castigating to his face.
     "One of the prime attractions at any Council meeting is watching Despres lecture the mayor, his finger wagging practically under Daley's nose, pouring out a dazzling array of statistics and studies and sociology and sheer guts," longtime Chicago reporter Lois Wille wrote in 1970.
     Such antics bewildered and angered aldermen who unwaveringly toed the Daley line. The late Ald. Vito Marzullo once called Mr. Despres "wholly irresponsible, a nitwit, a vicious person and a menace to the City Council and the public at large."
     "Sit down before I knock you down," said Ald. Thomas Keane, one of several aldermen to physically threaten Mr. Despres.
     "Despres has been told to shut up—in one form or another—more than any grown man in Chicago," Mike Royko wrote in the Chicago Daily News in 1972.
     Even his attempts to foster the barest civic decency were quashed.
     When he introduced a resolution decrying the bombing of a black family's house and reaffirming "the fundamental right of all law-abiding citizens to purchase and occupy homes anywhere in Chicago, regardless of ancestry or race," the Council voted 38-4 against the measure.
    Mr. Despres fought against discrimination in hospital staff appointments, cemeteries and housing. Sometimes, he even won. The day in August 1967 that Mr. Despres and two others called a special session on fair housing, Daley suspended the licenses of three real estate brokers for refusing to show homes to blacks. It was the first time the federal Fair Housing Law of 1963 was enforced in Chicago.
      He was the first to raise an alarm about the dangers of lead paint.
     He drafted the city's first ordinance establishing a landmarks preservation commission and led the fight to save Frank Lloyd Wright's extraordinary Robie House after the Chicago Theological Seminary announced plans to demolish the peerless architectural treasure to build a new dorm.
     Along with Ald. Charles Chew (17th), Mr. Despres chartered two airplanes to take 184 people to Alabama to participate in King's voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965.
     He fought official artistic censorship, once a notorious Chicago hallmark. When the City Council voted its "unqualified condemnation" of Wright Junior College for putting James Baldwin's Another Country on the required reading list of a contemporary literature class, Mr. Despres called the resolution the "most degrading kind of censorship. This body will make Chicago the laughingstock of the country by lynching a book," he said. Only two other aldermen voted with him.
     He also fought to abolish the police department's secret spying unit.
     On a variety of issues, Mr. Despres expressed a vision approaching prescience. In 1965, he urged the CHA to consider low-rise, scattered-site housing. When fire destroyed McCormick Place in January 1967 -- a building Mr. Despres once called "a damaging monstrosity" -- he declared, "This is a marvelous opportunity to rebuild it somewhere else." It was rebuilt on the same lakefront-hogging site.
     Mr. Despres' vision was not clear on every issue, though. His sensitivity to the problems affecting the urban poor, for instance, initially blinded him to the threat posed by street gangs, which he called "very important manifestations of urban life" in 1970.
     "It's very important to realize that along with the pathology and the criminality of extortion, killing, beating and violence, there are also positive elements of association that ought to be developed," he said.

     He was born Leon Mathis Despres on Feb. 2, 1908, the son of Samuel and Henrietta Rubovitz Despres. Most friends called him "Len." The family moved to Hyde Park when he was 3. He started at Hyde Park High School, but his mother decided he wasn't working hard enough, so she sent him to boarding school in Rome and then Paris, where he saw—he would later say—James Joyce's Ulysses, newly published in the window of Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on rue de l'Odeon.
     Mr. Despres returned to Hyde Park to attend the University of Chicago. He received his undergraduate degree in 1927 and his law degree in 1929. On Sept. 10, 1931, he married Marian Alschuler. She died in 2007 at 97.
     Tall, slender and scholarly, Mr. Despres set out on a career of improving society through law. From 1935 to 1937, he was a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board. He also became a socialist, and visited exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in Mexico, a trip that saw him escorting legendary artist Frida Kahlo to the movies while her husband, Diego Rivera, painted a portrait of Despres' wife.
     "She was very attractive, very pretty," he said years later of Kahlo. "We had a good time. I had no idea she was an icon."
     He was general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Illinois division, from 1948 until 1955, when he was elected to the City Council. He fought bitter election battles in 1955 and 1959. Then the Machine swung around and gave him a kind of tacit approval -- in 1966, he was the only aldermanic candidate endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans.
     Mr. Despres served as Council parliamentarian from 1979 to 1987. He also served on the Chicago Plan Commission during that period. Over the last decade, he returned to private practice.
     His memoir, Challenging the Daley Machine: A Chicago Alderman's Memoir, written with Kenan Heise, was published in 2005 by Northwestern University Press. "I expect defeat," he once said, referring to a certain city budget battle, but also, in a way, to his entire career. "Nevertheless, I have to make an effort."
     Paddy Bauler, the famously corrupt Chicago pol, put it to Mr. Despres this way: "Len, the trouble is you think the whole thing's on the square."
     In addition to his son, survivors include a daughter, Linda Despres Baskin, and a grandson, Frederick Despres. Services are pending.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 7, 2009

Trump's NFL protest stand immoral, un-American

[ 

   

The Barnett sisters

 Donald Trump might think that he is the law, that his will dictates what Americans can say or do. He might consider his tweets edicts from on high, and that his values are our values because he says it's so.
     But he's wrong.
     We are a nation of laws, and those laws have evolved over many years, sparked by people more courageous than Donald Trump, finessed by legislators more diligent than Donald Trump, and weighed by judges far smarter than Donald Trump.
     Take the NFL protest. The key to that situation is found, not in the president's latest tweet but in the actions of a pair of schoolgirls during World War II.
     Marie and Gathie Barnett were 8 and 9 years old. They attended a four-room schoolhouse in Charleston, West Virginia. The sisters were Jehovah's Witnesses. So when it came time to salute the flag, they refused, since their faith considered that akin to worship of a graven image. This had become an issue in the 1930s as American states, catching the nationalism bug contorting Europe, began mandating that schools recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
    The school expelled the girls. According to a 1941 West Virginia law, their parents faced 30 days in jail and a $50 fine for raising children who refused to salute the flag.
     Their father, Walter, sued, citing Exodus 20:4: "Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image."
     The Barnetts won in state court, a judge observing, "tyrannies of majorities over the rights of individuals or helpless minorities has always been recognized as one of the great dangers of popular government."
     The school board appealed. The case found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court ....

     To continue reading, click here.

Obit Week #2: Harry Caray—Baseball's joyful elder cheerleader

     The Society of Professional Obituary Writers is having their annual convention in Evanston this weekend, and to mark the occasion, I'm reposting some of my favorite obituaries. This one cemented Harry Caray in my heart — while fans tend to love him for his exuberant Cubs broadcasts, I developed a deep respect for him over how he refused to praise the mediocre White Sox. His line "You can't ballyhoo a funeral" is a sentiment which, alas, I've had more than one occasion to quote.  

     Harry Caray, the joyful elder cheerleader of baseball whose career lasted so long it seemed it might never end, is dead.
     For more than half a century, Mr. Caray added his unique personal color to the broadcast of thousands of baseball games, first in St. Louis, then for a season with Oakland, followed by 11 tempestuous years with the White Sox and a long, golden twilight with the Chicago Cubs.
     With his huge, squarish eyeglasses and his slurred but somehow endearing mangling of players' names — which he would often then pronounce backward with a chuckle — Mr. Caray was a beloved figure whose reputation was only enhanced by the many dust-ups he had with management and athletes — but significantly, never fans — over his long career.
     Unlike many of his broadcast contemporaries, Mr. Caray, whose popularity made him a multimillionaire, always called them as he saw them.
     "Hey, you can't ballyhoo a funeral," Mr. Caray said in 1975, after being told that his broadcasts of the floundering White Sox were less than enthusiastic.
     That he wouldn't sugarcoat bad teams — and between the White Sox and the Cubs he described many — was one of the keys to Mr. Caray's success, as was the fact that, as lousy as the games often were, Mr. Caray found a way to have fun.
     Mr. Caray's age was always something of a mystery. He called himself 78, but the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday that his birth certificate showed him to have been born on March 1, 1914, making him 83. He was born Harry Christopher Carabina and orphaned at age 4. He was raised by family friends under tough circumstances in a gritty area of St. Louis. He changed his name in high school.
     Later in life he would become a major supporter of the Maryville Academy for boys, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and often speaking to the youngsters about his difficult childhood.
     After high school he drifted into sales, selling gym equipment. He was 19 years old and earning $25 a week when he decided to take a pay cut and try radio broadcasting, for WCLS in Joliet at $20 a week.
     He started his professional baseball broadcasting career for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1944. The Anheuser-Busch brewery owned the Cardinals, and Mr. Caray was never shy about quaffing his boss' product with gusto during broadcasts.
     Mr. Caray was a life force; he would conduct fan interviews in the bleachers, stripped to the waist to enjoy the sunshine. Once, during a particularly scorching summer day, he broadcast a game in his underwear, a sight captured by a wire service photographer.
     In 1961, a game was halted after Mr. Caray, reaching for a foul ball, knocked his record book out of the booth, sending the pages fluttering down over the field. Umpires called time and helped pick up the pages.
     When the Cardinals won the pennant in 1964, Mr. Caray was so excited he bolted from the broadcast booth and worked his way to the screen behind home plate, where players heard him shouting, "The Cardinals win the pennant! The Cardinals win the pennant!"
     In 1968, he was hit by a car and critically injured while crossing Kingshighway Boulevard in St. Louis. More than a quarter-million letters poured in from well-wishers.
     Ironically, in light of his future employment in Chicago, Mr. Caray particularly enjoyed taunting the Cubs. While the Cubs were suffering their famous late-season collapse in 1969, the Cardinals were, along with the Mets, surging forward, and Mr. Caray would end his broadcasts by singing, "The Cardinals are coming, tra-la, tra-la."
     That was Mr. Caray's last season in St. Louis. After 25 years with the Cardinals and at the height of his popularity, Mr. Caray was fired by Augie Busch. The rumor — never publicly confirmed but never denied — was of an unwise dalliance between Mr. Caray, who was married three times, and one of the Busch wives.
     Mr. Caray endured an unhappy year with the Oakland Athletics. It was a bad match. He didn't get along with owner Charlie Finley, who tried to get Mr. Caray to change his trademark shout of "Holy Cow" to "Holy Mule" to reflect the team's mascot at the time.
     Mr. Caray did not comply.
      Instead, as always, his candor got him in trouble. He publicly compared windy Oakland to "being in Siberia."
     Unhappy on the West Coast, Mr. Caray took a risk in the 1971 season and tied his fortunes to the sagging White Sox, who were so unpopular at the time that no AM station in Chicago would carry their games. Attendance in 1970 had been less than a half-million fans.
     A makeshift statewide network was cobbled together — an Evanston FM station carried the games in the Chicago area — and Mr. Caray's pay was pegged to attendance, which kept his razor tongue at least a little in check.
     "It's a bee-yutiful day in Chicago," he would say, surveying a deserted Comiskey Park. "Lots of nice seats out here still available."
     In the early 1970s, Mr. Caray was more of an attraction than the lackluster team.
     "The paunchy, florid-faced Harry, who is 54, puts on a show that often rivals the action on the field," the Wall Street Journal noted in a front-page story on Mr. Caray in 1972.
     Years after it became unpopular to do so, he would leer at female spectators — "Hey, there's quite a gal sitting up there in a low-cut dress," was a standard line. Sometimes no description was necessary as a camera cut away between pitches to focus on an attractive, most likely bikini-clad, bleacherette. Mr. Caray would simply chuckle once or twice and offer a nugget of wisdom like: "You can't beat fun at the old ballpark."
     Few seemed to mind the asides because, well, Harry was just being Harry.
     His presence in the broadcast booth was good for the box office. After Mr. Caray joined the Sox, attendance more than doubled, to about 1.25 million a year, though the team also improved in this time.
     Despite his popularity, Mr. Caray's candor got him in hot water in the mid-1970s, first with his radio station, WMAQ. When WMAQ announced it was dropping baseball the following year, Mr. Caray used his pre-game show to interview a young producer, asking him loaded questions intended to ridicule the idea.
     The station responded by firing the producer and putting Mr. Caray on a seven-second time delay, so future comments about the station could be bleeped out.
     Mr. Caray then vowed to pay the producer's salary until he found a new job and sat mutely in the booth, letting his partner call the game, until WMAQ removed the delay.
     No sooner had he patched things up with WMAQ than he was sparring with White Sox management, which once called him on the carpet and threatened to keep players off his pre-game show unless Mr. Caray softened his approach.
     "The night after we talked to him, he was back ripping the same players," a Sox executive said.
     The real rupture started on a June day in 1974 when Sox manager Chuck Tanner, facing the bases loaded and no one out in the sixth inning, called in left-hander Jim Kaat.
    Mr. Caray noted that the next six Red Sox due up were right-handers and observed, rather mildly, that the percentages were against such a change.
     The Red Sox hammered Kaat and the White Sox and touched off several years of increasing bitterness between Mr. Caray and the Chicago players, who actually began blaming the broadcaster for their poor performance.
     "Some of the guys are so worried about what Harry Caray is going to say on the air, we can't relax and play our game," said third baseman Bill Melton, one of Mr. Caray's principal victims, in 1975.
     That was the season Melton got into a shouting match with Mr. Caray in a Milwaukee hotel lobby. "Either Harry's got to go or the team's got to go," said White Sox owner John Allyn, who proceeded to fire Mr. Caray at the end of the 1975 season.
     Salvation came from an unexpected source. WMAQ threatened to dump the team's broadcasts if Mr. Caray wasn't rehired.
     "Without Harry Caray, (the Sox) aren't very valuable," WMAQ's general manager said. "If the owners don't approve of Harry, I'll say find another station."
     Mr. Caray, who of course was rehired, responded with characteristic timidity.
     "I can't believe any man can own a ball club and be as dumb as John Allyn," he said. "Did he make enough to own it, or did he inherit it? He's a stupid man. This game is much too complicated for a man like John Allyn."
     Not surprisingly, one columnist's readers named Mr. Caray "The King of Controversy" in 1975. "He could make a Ping-Pong match interesting," a fan wrote.
     One staple of a Harry Caray game was the seventh-inning stretch, when fans would sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" under his enthusiastic direction. The tradition started in 1978, when Sox owner Bill Veeck asked Mr. Caray to sing during the traditional break. Veeck reasoned that because Mr. Caray did not have a good singing voice, fans would join in, said Jimmy Piersall, a former sidekick of Mr. Caray's.
     It worked. The tradition continued through Mr. Caray's tenure at Wrigley Field. When it was time to stretch, fans turned around and looked up at the broadcast booth, where Mr. Caray would shout, "Lemme hear ya!" before launching into the baseball standard.
     More often than not, in the Cubs broadcast booth at least, Mr. Caray would end the song with a futile exhortation: "Let's get some runs!"
     Mr. Caray also was known as the Mayor of Rush Street for many years, especially during the 1970s. Plainly put, he liked to drink. "A man who usually glows after dark" is the way columnist Tom Fitzpatrick described him, and Mr. Caray made no attempt to hide it.
     "I'm a convivial sort of guy. I like to drink and dance," he said, before Wrigley Field had lights for night games. "When I got up here, I said I was sure glad I wasn't doing Cubs' games 'cause with a 4 a.m. closing law, I don't think I'd make it to many of those afternoon contests."
     But he had to adapt, because he moved from the Sox to the Cubs in 1982. The switch to the North Side would eventually make Mr. Caray a national celebrity, thanks to the many cable outlets across the country that carry Cubs broadcasts on WGN-Channel 9.
     In 1987, Mr. Caray missed the first several months of the season after suffering a stroke. The opening day that year was the first he had missed in 41 years. That same year, he opened a namesake downtown Italian restaurant that became a popular eatery and sports-theme bar.
     "My style is a very simple one," he said in 1975. "Be entertaining, be informative and, of course, tell the truth. If you don't have the reputation for honesty, you just can't keep the respect of the listener."
     Mr. Caray had plenty of opportunities to assess his career, and, as always, he told it as it was:
      "Listen, I'm the best baseball announcer in the country. The fans relate to me because I react to games, just like they do. I live and die with my team. I'm ecstatic when they do well and disgusted when they play badly.
     "Most announcers are shills and Pollyannas. They never knock the club that employs them, and they always look on the bright side. But fans know enough about baseball to tell when an announcer is sugarcoating, and they resent it. If a player makes a lousy play, I say so. Otherwise I'd be insulting their intelligence."
     Mr. Caray was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame in 1988. In 1989, he was honored with the Ford Frick Award at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. He was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1994.
     Mr. Caray is survived by his wife of 22 years, Dutchie; sons Skip and Chris; daughters Patricia Eddy, Michelle McFadden and Elizabeth Caray; stepsons Mark Griffith, Roger Johnson and Donald Johnson; stepdaughters Gloria "Tuni" Weller and Elizabeth "Muffie" Newell; 14 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
     Mr. Caray's broadcasting legacy will continue. His son Skip is the longtime voice of the Atlanta Braves and the National Basketball Association. And Skip Caray's son Chip is a play-by-play man, hired by the Orlando Magic in 1989. Chip Caray was to join his grandfather in the booth for Cubs home games this year.
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 19, 1998

Mike Ditka is not a Chicagoan

     When someone denies the real pain of another, there’s always a selfish reason. Maybe, like right-wing radio hosts claiming the Sandy Hook schoolroom slaughter was a hoax, they can’t bear to consider the cost of their gun infatuation. Maybe, like Holocaust deniers, they are utterly unwilling to see the subjects of their hate in a sympathetic light.
     Then there’s former Bears coach Mike Ditka, in the news again, rejecting the idea that black players who take a knee during the national anthem have anything to protest.
     “I don’t see all the social injustice that some of these people see,” Ditka said Monday. “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”
     Where to begin?
     First, we can recognize his honesty. I’m certain he doesn’t see social injustice. Though a glimmer of the blindness of what he just said may have flashed through even his eyes, because, Ditka added, “Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people.”
     Ya think? Too busy running from camera to camera, flapping your gums, coasting off your victory (well, really Buddy Ryan’s) 32 years ago. A third of a century. How come you couldn’t find time to curl up with a book of American history?
     For Iron Mike, and those freshly arrived from Mars, a quick synopsis: Our country was built on slavery, which coined much of its wealth. That was followed by 100 years of Jim Crow serfdom and horror that ended . . . what time is it now? I’d feel uncomfortable suggesting it ended at all, but slid into a new, more opaque phase where the economic system itself takes the place of hooded night riders and snapping German shepherds.

To continue reading, click here.

Obit week #1: Ronald Reagan: "From movie star to political star"

     The Society of Professional Obituary Writers is holding its fifth annual conference—"ObitCon 2017—in Evanston this weekend. I have been invited to attend and though I typically avoid all professional groups—I find them more dispiriting than inspirational—I think I'll stop by. I've enjoyed writing obituaries for 20 years, generally of famous people with connections to Chicago. It's interesting to learn about people's lives, and to send them off with the proper fanfare. I thought I would feature a few of my favorites today, Thursday and over the weekend.

    I'm particularly proud of is this one, for President Ronald Reagan, because I despised Reagan when he was in office, not realizing there was far worse to come. Despite this, I kept my own feelings in check—one definition of "professional"—and wrote a piece I believe was thorough and fair.

    

     Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, whose career glided with apparent ease from Hollywood stardom to the White House, died Saturday.
     He was 93.
     The only native Illinoisan elected president, Mr. Reagan exuded a folksy charm and warm humor that delighted supporters and infuriated opponents. A former corporate spokesman, he embraced big business and was a staunch opponent of communism and the Soviet Union, which he famously dubbed the "evil empire."
     "The Great Communicator" never lost an election. When he left the White House in 1989, public opinion polls showed him to be the most popular president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, Mr. Reagan also had his impassioned detractors, who dubbed him "the Teflon president," for his ability to deflect criticism, and found his immense charm hollow in the face of his policies regarding Central America, AIDS, the environment and defense expenditures.
     Mr. Reagan was the nation's oldest president—just two weeks shy of his 78th birthday when he left office—and he suffered from Alzheimer's disease in recent years that kept him mostly out of the public eye, though his name and legacy were invoked at the 1996 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.
     Ronald Wilson Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911, above a bakery in tiny Downstate Tampico, the second son of Nelle and John Reagan. His father, a shoe salesman, was also an alcoholic, and more than one historian has suggested that Mr. Reagan developed his relentless cheeriness as a defense against his father's frequent drunken lapses.
     His family moved around frequently. Briefly, as an infant, he lived on the South Side of Chicago, and then in Galesburg, Monmouth and back in Tampico. When he was 9, his family moved to Dixon, where he went to high school.
     Mr. Reagan graduated in the class of 1928. "Life is just one grand sweet song," his yearbook caption read, "so start the music."
     He went to Eureka College on a partial football scholarship. There, he became active in student politics and was elected student body president.
     He graduated in 1932, with a degree in sociology and economics. The same year, he was hired as a sports announcer for WOC in Davenport, Iowa. He worked his way to WHO in Des Moines and became a local celebrity for his broadcasts reconstructing games from telegraph reports.
     In 1937, Mr. Reagan took a screen test, and Warner Bros. offered him a seven-year, $200-a-week contract.
     His first film, "Love Is on the Air," was a disposable B-movie trifle that set the pattern for most of his 50 or so films. Mr. Reagan was seen as a dependable, workmanlike actor, often playing clean-cut, all-American roles.
     He did act in several critically acclaimed movies, notably "Kings Row" (1942) and "Knute Rockne—All American" (1940). In the latter, his portrayal of dying football star George Gipp led to one of his presidential nicknames, "the Gipper." He made his last Hollywood movie in 1964.
     In 1940, Mr. Reagan wed actress Jane Wyman, whom he met while they were filming "Brother Rat" (1938). They had two children, Maureen and Michael (a third, born premature, died the day after birth in 1947). They were divorced in 1949. He was the first and only president to have been divorced, but it was not an issue in his campaigns.
     In the divorce proceedings, Wyman blamed Mr. Reagan's involvement with the Screen Actors Guild–and his wanting her to share his interest–as putting a strain on their marriage.
     Mr. Reagan honed his political skills in the guild, serving as its president from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960.
     He entered the Army in 1942 as a second lieutenant, rising to the rank of captain by the time he was discharged in July 1945. While his opponents made much of the fact that he spent the war making training films, Mr. Reagan's poor eyesight—he wore contact lenses his entire professional life—kept him out of combat.
     In 1952, he married another actress, former Chicagoan Nancy Davis. Mr. Reagan had met Davis when, alarmed that her name had gotten on mailing lists for left-wing organizations, she appealed to him for help.
     They had two children, Patti and Ronald, and appeared in several productions together. Nancy Reagan was to have a tremendous influence on her husband's life and was a powerful figure, both in public and behind the scenes, after he became president.
     Mr. Reagan's movie career slumped in the mid-1950s, and he signed on to host television's "General Electric Theater." His experience as a corporate spokesman, more than anything else, is thought to have influenced his switch from liberal Democrat to right-wing Republican—a move he did not formally make until the early 1960s.
     When "GE Theater" ended in 1962, he switched over to the TV series "Death Valley Days," which he hosted until 1965.
     By then he had become a political powerhouse. He co-chaired California Republicans for (Barry) Goldwater in 1964 and delivered a televised speech in support of the GOP presidential nominee that established Mr. Reagan as a major fund-raiser and rising Republican star.
     Despite his Hollywood success, Mr. Reagan tended to downplay his experience as an actor. When he first ran for the California governorship in 1966, he listed his occupation as "rancher."
     The first public office Mr. Reagan held was governor of California. He won handily, defeating incumbent Pat Brown by nearly a million votes.
     Mr. Reagan was a conservative governor, reining in spending and cutting the size of government, raising taxes and reducing welfare rolls. Talk of his running for president was almost immediate. He was put forward by the party's right wing in 1968 and won 182 delegate votes at the convention, third behind Nelson Rockefeller and Richard M. Nixon.
     Mr. Reagan was re-elected as governor in 1970 and support built for him to run for president if Nixon didn't run for a second term. In 1971, Mr. Reagan was the top pick among voters asked who should run if Nixon stepped aside.
     But Nixon ran for re-election.
     Mr. Reagan did not try for re-election as governor of California, leaving office in 1975. He spent several months on the lecture circuit, then announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination.
     He narrowly missed pulling off a coup, receiving 1,070 convention votes, 60 short of what he needed to deny President Gerald R. Ford the party's nomination. Still, he delivered a stunning speech, ostensibly in support of Ford but of such power and vision that many in the hall saw it as confirmation that they had just nominated the wrong man.
     Mr. Reagan had a lock on the 1980 nomination, sweeping the primaries and driving out all rivals.
    He showed his rhetorical power in debating incumbent President Jimmy Carter, already handicapped by the dual woes of a miserable economy and the hostage crisis in Iran. Brushing aside charges that he would undermine world peace with a genial, "There you go again," Mr. Reagan delivered his famous question: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
     The country answered a resounding "No." Mr. Reagan carried 44 states -- 90 percent of the electoral vote -- and received 8.5 million more votes than Carter, his margin of victory a full 10 percent of the popular vote.
     Mr. Reagan's inauguration was a day of high drama. As he finished his brief inaugural address, the Islamic revolutionaries who had been holding 52 American hostages in Iran finally freed them.
     His first formal act as president was to declare a national day of thanksgiving for the return of the hostages.
     Mr. Reagan's eight-year presidency nearly was cut short at the start. Seventy days after he took office, he was shot in the chest by a deranged man outside the Washington Hilton Hotel.
     He was rushed to George Washington Hospital, where he walked into the emergency room. He had lost three pints of blood, and doctors later said that had treatment been delayed for five minutes, he probably would have died.
     Even at such a moment of duress, Mr. Reagan displayed his quick wit. "Honey, I forgot to duck," he told Nancy when she rushed to his side.
     A vibrant man who enjoyed horseback riding and cutting wood at his California ranch, Mr. Reagan surprised everyone with his quick recovery.
     Significant occurrences of the Reagan years include the nomination of the first woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, and a brand of supply-side economics that was dubbed "Reaganomics."
     Mr. Reagan addressed the faltering economy that had helped elect him with a combined three-stage tax cut and slashed federal spending.
     The nation responded by going into severe recession—by late 1982, unemployment was at 10.6 percent, its highest since before World War II.
     But the economy gradually responded—whether on its own or in reaction to Mr. Reagan's medicine—and by 1984, matters were healthy enough for Mr. Reagan to win a landslide victory over Carter's former vice president, Walter F. Mondale.
     During the first debate between the two, Mr. Reagan seemed faltering and uncertain, and his age became an issue in the campaign. But once again, he used humor and a deft delivery to defuse the issue, quipping in the second debate: "I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."
     People bought it. Mr. Reagan's electoral victory—525-13—was the most lopsided in history. He also carried 59 percent of the popular vote.
     The recovery that helped re-elect Mr. Reagan was built on borrowed money, however. Mr. Reagan's budgets added more than $1 trillion to the national deficit.
     Foreign relations under Mr. Reagan were marked by his firm anti-communist stand. His "Star Wars" defense program, which called for constructing a laser-guided anti-missile shield around the nation, was much discussed. Billions of dollars was spent toward its development, though many doubted that the system was technically feasible, and in the end it came to nothing.
     While Mr. Reagan had declined to meet with a Soviet leader during his first term, upon re-election, the Soviets softened their stance toward the United States, and Mr. Reagan embraced Mikhail Gorbachev when he rose to power, meeting with him four times at summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow.
     Mr. Reagan considered his resilience against the Communists as responsible for the fall of communism across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.
     The culmination of Mr. Reagan's Soviet policy was the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty in 1987, slashing the stockpile of nuclear weapons and providing for on-site inspections.
     Mr. Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and provided money, arms and training to the contra rebels in Nicaragua in an attempt to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government.  
     The president clashed repeatedly with Congress over his support for the contras, and Congress' withholding of funding led to the great scandal of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra affair.
     In late 1986, it was revealed that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran in exchange for Iranian assistance in freeing hostages in Lebanon.
     This embarrassment turned into full-blown crisis when it became known that the Iranians were overcharged for the arms, with the profits illegally funneled to aid the contras.
     Though Mr. Reagan claimed not to know of the activities, he was harshly criticized by the Senate commission formed to look into the affair, and several members of his administration went to prison.
     After he left office, Mr. Reagan busied himself at his California ranch. In late 1994, he announced to the nation, via a handwritten note, that he had Alzheimer's disease, a progressive neurological disorder that erodes the mind and memory.
     Even after being found to have Alzheimer's, Mr. Reagan continued to go to his office at Los Angeles' Century City, exercise, chop wood at his ranch, golf and attend church on Sundays.
     In 1995, the Reagans allowed their names to be used by the Chicago Alzheimer's Association, which renamed its grantmaking division the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute
     While his family reported that Mr. Reagan remained physically strong and kept the good-humored "twinkle" so characteristic of him, his memory deteriorated severely in recent years as his disease progressed, and he often failed to recognize family members and close acquaintances, and was kept almost entirely out of the public eye.
     Reagan's oldest daughter, Maureen, died in August 2001 at age 60 from cancer. Along with Nancy Reagan, his three other children survive.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 2004

After Cook County scraps soda tax, try a tax on deceit

 
     When ordinary politicians lie, and the lie blows up in their faces, do they shake their fists to the sky and exclaim, "But it looks so easy when Donald Trump does it!"?
     I should call Toni Preckwinkle and ask.
     The Cook County soda tax was never about battling obesity or diabetes. Rolled out Aug. 2, the penny-an-ounce tax was met with public outcry stoked by ferocious advertising by the soft drink industry.
     The Cook County Board president kept insisting that, rather than a bald cash grab, the tax was instead a basic health measure, like flossing. Your kids are too fat, Preckwinkle told voters, and since you can't keep the little brats from guzzling Mountain Dew, I'm going to help you by picking your pockets.
    And to think people objected.
     But all those TV commercials, some $5 million worth paid for by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ignored one simple fact, and I wish I had thought to check this a month ago: These taxes don't cut obesity.
     Cook County isn't the only fiefdom to attempt this stunt. About five years ago, over in Europe, nanny-state governments made a push to cut obesity. Turns out —who knew? — Europeans are also too fat, just like Americans. So Britain, France and other nations dabbled with jacking up taxes on fats and sugars, closely observed by an army of clipboard-wielding academics.
     What did they find?
     "The overall impact of a soft drink tax on calorie consumption is likely to be small," concluded "The Effects of A Soft Drink Tax in the UK" published in the May 2015 issue of Health Economics.
     Not only don't the taxes cut obesity but—and this is so delicious, were it not so sad—when it comes to poor consumers in particular, increasing taxes on unhealthy foods like sweetened soda has one of those counterintuitive effects that make human nature such a delight to ponder.
     A new study found that increasing tax on unhealthy food decreased the consumption of . . . wait for it . . . healthy food, as low-income consumers cut down on lettuce so they can continue to enjoy the junk they like best.
     "A nontrivial number of respondents in the low-income group (39 percent of the total) behaved in a manner opposite to the intention of the policy," noted "Distributional Impact of Fat Taxes and Thin Subsidies," published last month in The Economic Journal, referring to a study in France. "They allocated a larger share of their budget towards unhealthy food and a smaller share towards healthy food"
     Ah people, God love 'em.
     Of course there are lots of studies and, not being a politician, I must be fair and mention some studies support such taxes; Denmark, for instance, seems to have blunted butter consumption with a high tax. But still, it's most pronounced effect is not improving health but raising money.
     And that's an important effect. Cook County is broke, and somebody has to pony up money to run the place. Though why the burden should fall unduly on the shoulders of poor people who bring pleasure to their lives with Coca-Cola on a hot day is beyond me. Plus, I have to mention, from firsthand knowledge, that the tax was also a logistical and PR nightmare for groceries, who had to administer the tax.
     Customers were alienated. I still can hardly slink guiltily into Sunset Foods without feeling like the assistant manager is giving me the stink eye for trying to get back the Cook County tax they unfairly charged me on a case of flavored, though not sweetened, bubbly water.
     Now the soda tax is pretty much cooked, with 12 of the 17 commissioners on the County Board Finance Committee pledged to repeal the tax when the it meets Tuesday. The full board is scheduled to vote Wednesday.
      I guess the finance committee will just have to find something else to tax. A shame they can't conjure up a way to tax lying; the receipts would be enormous, though I imagine our political leaders would complain of their cost to their pocketbooks. To which we say: Well boo-hoo, just suck it up. It's for your own benefit.

Sixty-four thousand

Drug users, Lower Wacker Drive, December, 2016

      64,000.
      You aren't supposed to start a sentence with a number, never mind a stand-alone sentence or paragraph. 
      Maybe it should have been:
      Sixty-four thousand.
      Either way it looks wrong, which is fitting, since 64,000 is the number of Americans who died from drug overdoses last year. That just seems wrong, and is, though the figure is accurate.
      News to me. I'd have guessed the number half as much. But deaths from drug overdose have shot up—compare that figure to some 40,000 Americans who died in highway accidents in 2016, and that was a particularly bad year on the road, due to more texting and more driving in general, because of lower gas prices.
    The figure popped out of this fine New York Times story about Dr. Thomas A. Andrew, the former medical examiner in New Hampshire, the state hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, who quit his post after 20 years and entered the seminary in the hopes of steering young people away from using and dying from drugs instead of cutting them up after they already have.
      Overdoses, the article pointed out, are the leading cause of death among people under 50, and the problem is so severe that OD deaths have actually cut two months off life the average life expectancy for Americans.      
     As terrible as was the killing of 58 people a week ago in Las Vegas, that is the death toll from drug overdoses about every eight hours in America, 365 days a year. If only we could focus our attention on the daily, pervasive problem as intently as we focus on this relatively rare one. But that is our way—scared of sharks while shrugging off heart attacks. 
     And as with gun deaths, drug overdoses have powerful financial interests, in this case pharmaceutical companies, that encourage pervasive use while ignoring, more or less, inevitable misuse of their products
     The problem can only be expected to get worse, as our government tries to fight drug use through increased punishment, and because of our general inability to admit to social problems, never mind do anything about them. 

Metra raises a stink

     Two stories:
     1) Twenty-five years ago, my wife and I were in Paris, getting ready to take the TGV down to Cannes for a mid-winter sojourn at the Carlton (I've been waiting a quarter century to write that sentence). 
     The evening before, we thought we would buy some provisions for the trip, some bread and cheese, and went to Fauchon, the great supermarket. I bought a can of lime tea, my tribute to Proust, which I still have, and we tried several cheeses and settled on one.
     Then we returned to our hotel.
     Within an hour or two, the cheese we had bought began to reek. The odor filled the room. We had to put the cheese in a garbage can and set it in the hallway.
     The next day, settling into our seat for the high speed journey to the Cote d'Azure (TGV stands for "Train à Grande Vitesse" or "very fast train") when we took a breath and recognized the smell of the same cheese from the night before, the meal of the people directly behind us. 
     We looked at each other and laughed.
     2) Then last week, I was getting onto the Metra train, pressed the black oblong on the door, stepped into a train and caught the distinctive miasma of McDonald's—McStench. I looked down, saw a woman digging into a big red cardboard pouch of French fries. Feeling nothing toward the woman but pity, I span 180 degrees on my heel and found another car. 
    These two episodes would never had emerged from the bog of memory and fused in my mind were it not for this sign, glanced stepping off of the 5:12 at Northbrook on Friday. If you can't read the words, the message from  P. Ewe says "Ticket. Check. Stinky food. Check. Annoyed fellow passengers. Check!" 
     Granted, Metra is famous for confusing, pointless and counter-productive communications—from announcements of trains arriving that have already arrived to the garbled station announcements to various glyphic signs and symbols. 
    But this one takes the cake, so to speak. Four flaws come to mind:
    First, this sign, to the degree it is directed at anybody, is intended to shame would-be carriers of stinky food, encouraging them to consider their fellow riders. Question: who thinks of their food as "stinky"? Answer: nobody in the world. "Stinky" is an assessment that others, who are not consuming the food in question, make. The people eating the food like that kind of thing. They don't notice anything objectionable, or they wouldn't be eating it.
    Second, the most common offender, the smelliest food found on Metra trains is ... what? The aforementioned McDonald's of course, whose oil is as rank and distinctive as a corpse. And where do Metra passengers typically buy their putrid-smelling food? At the McDonald's at Union Station. Metra is urging you not to buy the food they're selling at the train station (which, I know, is not owned by Metra, as the railroad always points out when some part of it falls on the heads of commuters. But still. Why put up signs? Go yell at Amtrak.)
     Third, punctuate much? How about "Ticket? Check. Stinky food? Check. Annoyed fellow passengers? Check!" Question marks are free.
     And finally, have you ever been annoyed at somebody on a train because of how their food smelled? Oh, as in 25 years ago in France, you might notice it. You might even be bothered by it, like last week. But trains are big, long places. There's always somewhere else to go. No need to expend energy getting angry at somebody. So the posters are appealing to people who don't know they're being addressed, for the benefit of easily-annoyed parties who might not even exist. Nice work Metra. Your dollars at work. 

Rich Cohen's "Story of a Curse" captures Cubs glory

Rich Cohen, right, at Harry Caray's on Kinzie.

     Rich Cohen is having a better life than I am. He's younger, handsomer and his books sell better. Keith Richards thinks Rich Cohen is cool. The only whisper of coolness I can claim is that I know Rich Cohen.
     Most galling, he's a better writer than I am. His recent book — he's written 11 — was about the Rolling Stones. I ate it up, even though I have no interest in the band. That's the definition of a good writer: someone who can hold your attention on a topic you otherwise care little about. I had zero curiosity about Lyndon Johnson until Robert Caro hooked his fingers into my nostrils and led me through three thick books about LBJ like a drover pulling an ox with a ring through its nose.   

     Before the Stones, Cohen wrote "Monsters" about the 1985 Bears. I enjoyed that, and know little about football and care less. I spent more time reading Cohen's book about the team than I've spent watching Bears games over the past decade.
     How does he do it? Sharp writing spiked with fascinating facts, like the unexpected connection between the name "Bears" and the Cubs, the topic of his latest book, published Wednesday, "The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse.
     In it, he offers three things: first, a history of the team filled with amazing trivia — Zachary Taylor Davis was the architect of both Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park — and unexpected juxtapositions. I knew Hack Wilson lost a ball in the sun, and I knew he had a great season, hitting 56 home runs. But I didn't realize one followed the other, that the standout season was poor, sodden Wilson's desperate attempt to erase the shame of missing that ball.
     Second, Cohen, who grew up in Glencoe, chronicles his own lifelong love of the Cubs, despite their curse, "a futility that lasted so long we turned it into a religion."

To continue reading, click here.

"Thoughts and prayers ain't enough"

 

    Cynicism comes so easily nowadays. The country is divided by hatred and mutual incomprehension, our divisions longstanding and entrenched, our leaders paid off or impotent. Lies spewing from corrupted news sources, with no agreement which is fair, which foul. Our president is a superannuated infant, reflecting the worst among us, astounding even the most jaded every single day with his bottomless baseness and continual bad faith. 
     What hope for progress is there? Haven't we been steadily deteriorating for years, decades? 
     Umm no, not really. Fifty-eight Americans were killed Sunday by mindless violence. When I was growing up, that was a good week's casualty list in the Vietnam War. The last administration did actually catch the will-o-the-wisp of health care, not in an ideal form, but one much improved, available to millions of people, heretofore cut-off. The unexamined hate that used to be just accepted, the stage convention of our public life, the curtains and the scenery, now seems glaring wrong, in many quarters, and is challenged. We can't avoid the horrors, they fill our vision. But the good is there too, if we look for it.
    Or bumble upon it. I was walking the dog Tuesday morning and there was Lee Goodman, who lives a few blocks down my street. Writing on his garbage can. Which is something he does, getting the word out. Lee quit his practice as a lawyer a couple years back to devote his energy, full time, along with his wife Nancy, to repealing the 2nd Amendment.
    A quixotic quest, in an era when even discussion of the possibility of discussion is shouted down by paid lackeys in government and their duped constituents. But he's doing it. He wrote a book, outlining his ideas. Tuesday he emblazoned his garbage can with a sign: "Thoughts and prayers ain't enough," a rebuke to the hypocritical pro forma pieties that our leaders mouth in lieu of actually doing or saying anything. 
     In one light, a futile act. How many people go down Center Avenue and see a garbage can? In another, a testament of faith in the ultimate victory of rationality, of goodness. The internet has raised communication to a howl, where reaching a million pairs of eyes is nothing. Only a start. Still, there are those quiet voices speaking to anyone who will listen. Even an empty street.
     We talked a bit. The new Dick's Sporting Goods on Skokie Blvd., he said, is carrying long guns. He led a protest there the night before, and was pleased with the turn-out. Hunting rifles and shotguns are not the problem, in my view, and opposing them only gives credence to the right wing canard that the left wants to ban all guns everywhere. Lee goes over the line, sometime, in my view, such as when he protested the installation of an old Army howitzer by Village Hall. 
     But Lee's committed anti-gun, no half measures thank you very much, and I understand the purity of his stand. If all the people pushing for silencers and armor-piercing bullets can cash their checks and mail out their hyperventilating fundraising appeals, then Lee can organize his quiet protests and deliver his trash day messages. If there were more people like him, then maybe our country wouldn't be in the mess it's in.
     He isn't bowing his head in resignation at our national disgrace, but is doing whatever he can to combat it, and I have to respect that, and add what little boost I can, barely more than a sign on a garbage can, but it's all I've got.
     After I wrote the above, I noticed this tweet, from my friend Rory Fanning, which sums up what I was trying to say better than I could manage:

Before Americans can talk gun control they have to have empathy

     Hiking is fun. It's exercise amid nature, among trees and birds.
     There is also the sense of being far from civilization. Though that was blunted Saturday at Starved Rock State Park, where there is a problem with visitors blundering off cliffs. So many boardwalks and railings have gone up that I felt, at times, not so much like a pioneer striding through virgin forest as a cow being herded through a chute into a slaughterhouse.
     As we walked, talk turned to the constant staccato pops drifting from across the Illinois River. "What is that?" a trail mate wondered. Small explosions in a quarry, maybe? he ventured.
     "Gunfire," I replied. "Some big gun range with people blazing away at old refrigerators." Bingo, I later discovered, online. The Buffalo Range Shooting Park in Ottawa, with rifle and pistol ranges, skeet and trap, and a shooting pit.
     Also fun. Though it was eerie Monday to hear that exact sound — the stutter of automatic weapons — on the videotapes from Las Vegas, where a deranged man fired on a country music festival, killing 59 and wounding 525, the worst mass shooting in modern American history.
     Facebook immediately lit up with people wondering whether this latest horror is enough to nudge us, finally, toward meaningful gun control. It was all I could do not to start time-wasting Facebook spats by jumping in with, "No, of course not."
     Why? Well, it never is — not in recent years — though sensible gun laws would still be useful, and sponsors of a bill loosening restrictions on silencers pulled it, for now. I'd like to imagine restricting high-capacity magazines might come next, but I doubt it. It's imaginable.      While firing streams of bullets at old washing machines is certainly fun, balancing that fun against increasingly common slaughters, a unified and rational country might come to that decision, the way we decided to require seat belts even though, at the time, men complained they rumpled their suits. I don't like the chutes at Starved Rock, but I understand their purpose.

To continue reading, click here.

You can hear me talk about this column with WGN's Justin Kaufman here.

The Monty Hall Problem

     Monty Hall died Saturday, a fact I learned after it was posted on the Facebook page of my brother-in-law, a retired math professor.

      And if you're wondering the connection between the host and creator of "Let's Make a Deal" and mathematics, then you are not familiar with The Monty Hall Problem, a simple yet vexing statistical puzzle. 
    Simple, if you see it, and vexing, if you don't, particularly for those trying to explain it.

     Remember the show: Would-be contestants in the audience came to see the show in outrageous costumes, waving signs and props, hoping to catch Monty's attention and be selected to compete. They would swap what they had brought, bartering their way higher and higher, hoping to get to the final challenge, which involved three doors, cleverly named Door No. 1, Door No. 2, and Door No. 3.  Behind one of the door was a new car.

     The lucky contestant would be asked to pick one of the three doors—let's say she picked Door No. 1. 
    Then Monty would announce that he would let that contestant stick with the door she picked, or choose another door. But first, he'd say, let's see what is behind one of the doors you didn't pick. He would open, let's say, Door No. 3, and reveal a burro, or a goat, or some such thing.

    Now, Monty would say, do you want to stick with the door you picked, Door No. 1? Or would you like to take your chances with Door No. 2?

    What should the contestant do?

    The average person trying to puzzle through the problem might say, "Okay, the chances of getting the new car are one in three at the beginning and, tossing one door out, become one in two, but that holds for either door, so it doesn't matter whether you stick or switch. 

    That's wrong.  

    According to statistics, the contestant should always switch. The odds are better with the other door, and not just a little better, but twice as good. 

    How can that be?

    The quick trick to understanding is to imagine two types of strategies: Always Stick, and Always Switch. 

     In order to get the car, what must Mr. Always Stick pick in order to end up with the new car? He must pick the door hiding the car because later, given the chance to switch, he won't, and is left with his initial choice. To get the car, he has to pick the car right off of the bat.

    And what are the chances of picking the car first thing? One door in three, or 1/3.

    Now thinks about Always Switch. How does Miss Always Switch get the car? By picking the car? No, because if she picks the car, she'll later switch away from it. So to get the car, she has to pick one of the donkeys. And what are the chances of picking a donkey? Two in three, or 2/3. 

     So Always Stick's chances are 1/3, and Always Switch 2/3, or twice as good.

     Do you see it? No? Don't feel bad. My experience is that people often don't. A lot of people. Twenty-five years ago, after "Ask Marilyn" columnist Marilyn vos Savant presented the problem, up to then the stuff of obscure mathematical journals, in her popular column in Parade Magazine, readers deluged her with mail claiming she was wrong. 

      Many people I've tried to explain the problem to just can't get it, to my eternal frustration. What throws them off is the final choice, between two doors, seems like it should be 50-5o, because they know one door has a car and one a burro. They are forgetting the winnowing process, the throwing out of the third door, which affects the odds for switching. The odds for sticking remain what they were at the beginning—one in three; but tossing out one remaining door changes the odds considerable for taking the door that isn't thrown out.

      Let's put it another way. I am going to give you a choice between two wallets, and your goal is to find the wallet stuffed with cash. Wallet A is picked from a pair of wallets, one containing cash, one empty. Wallet B is selected from a group of a hundred wallets, only one of which contains cash. Of the two wallets I offer, which wallet should you pick? Even though you are being presented with two wallets, you should always pick A, because the odds of B containing any money are very small. Thus can the odds of picking between two things not be 50-50.

     Very confusing, I know. And I probably should have addressed the slaughter in Las Vegas instead. But honestly, at least this problem has an actual solution that can, with the application of brainpower, be solved. The other one seems merely impossible, at least for now and the foreseeable future. 

And that's why Trump is president

I don't watch Fox News. I don't have to, I can discern its talking points just by what my readers parrot back to me. For instance, on Monday I wrote about Trump's racist air horn—"dog whistle" implies a subtlety he no longer feels required to adopt—and I got in response emails such as this, thoughts planted in their heads by Trump and Fox News, sprouting as neatly as rows of seedlings in garden.

Neil,

President Trump definitely should not have sent the tweet, "they have to have everything done for them." PR suffers a catastrophe and his tweets never help any situation. He was wrong.

I think he is frustrated, as I am, with a US territory so horribly in debt caused by mismanagement and overspending by its local government. Didn't Congress just give them $100 billion of our tax dollars? They could have and should have since they are on an island, been better prepared for a hurricane, by improving their infrastructure over the years. Instead the local government borrowed and wasted billions. In effect, they didn't do anything to help themselves. The PR citizens seem to be completely different from the citizens of Houston, all over Florida, New York, New Jersey, etc. All those other communities and local governments seemed to have the "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" mentality, unlike PR

—Mike K. *

Yeah pal, I bet the fiscal management of Puerto Rico has been a big source of frustration to you...

Racists—and I haven no idea if this reader is one, though he does an amazing impression—are also cowards, so don't express their hatred directly. Rather they hock up reasons, even nonsensical, hypocritical reasons. Our national debt is $18 trillion. His reasoning—Trump's reasoning—that nations in debt should not get relief, or are somehow responsible for their own woes, would mean that nowhere in the United States is worthy of help. Which perhaps is what he's going for. Anyway, I had to share this.

But why stop here? Let's look in my Spam filter, for readers I've previously blocked because I just don't want to have their spew irritate my eyes.

Some 80% of them are on disability or welfare. 80 billion in debt. .  Federal oversight needed as bankrupt. 65% obesity rate .  Write about that.  So yes. These “ brown skinned “ folk. Are welfare dependent pigs .
—Bill G.

You want more? There's more. But that's enough for now, though I reserve the right to add more as the day progresses. Sheesh. 

* I decided to shield the writer from being publicly associated with his thoughts, as a kindness, because even if he isn't aware enough to be embarrassed, he should be.