Book Week #7: "I should like to have been at Chicago a year ago"

      When the University of Chicago Press asked me to write a book about Chicago, my first thought was: "But I live in Northbrook ... and I was born in Cleveland!" Which sort of dictated how the book was written, from an outsider's perspective, about newcomers who arrive at Chicago and try to make their way.   The result was my seventh book, "You Were Never in Chicago." One essential quality is that, no matter when you arrive at the city, you are always made to feel you just missed the Big Moment. Trying to explore and, perhaps, debunk this notion, I took what were considered essential moments in Chicago history and began leaping back to see what they actually thought about the place. Guess what: they tended to look backward toward some mythical better time, too. 

     The carnation-wearers, the bamboo-cane leaners, the nudge-and-winkers, the organ-grinders, the First Ward Ball revelers, in grand procession headed by Bathhouse John Coughlin, proudly leading his “harlots and hopheads, his coneroos and fancy-men, his dips and hipsters and heavy-hipted madams” to use Nelson Algren’s piquant description, “coneroo” being slang for a con man.
     That city, that world, is gone—or so the common wisdom goes—replaced by the dull, packaged, homogenized present, our tepid moment of compromised mediocrity. The funny thing is, people always feel that way—pick whatever era in history seems most exciting, most distinctive, real and alive, then examine that period closely; you will find that Chicagoans of the time were also nostalgic, also troubled by what they considered society’s decline, also confronting a problematic present while mourning some imagined superior past. Take 1927—a giddy whirl of bathtub gin and tommy guns and flappers in sheer silk dresses doing the Charleston. Chicagoans back then were aghast at their city’s criminality.
     “We are known abroad as a crude, ill governed city. We are known for our ugliness,” Chicago treasurer Charles S. Peterson bemoaned in December 1927, when forming a committee to bring another world’s fair to Chicago—1933’s Century of Progress—in an attempt to dilute the city’s gangland reputation by recapturing the lost promise and excitement of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a grab at the fading memory of innocent joys: the White City, the Ferris Wheel, and Cracker Jack.

   Leap back to the 1893 world’s fair, however, and Chicagoans, while certainly basking in the glow of their renewal, also despaired whether the city would prove worthy of all the attention. They worried about disease, about being up to the task of hosting multitudes, and they steeled their resolve by remembering the city’s courageous, unified, and tireless response to the Great Chicago Fire.
     “Our first duty, gentlemen of the City Council of Chicago, is to keep the city in a healthy condition, so that when the world comes here it will not enter upon a charnel house,” said mayor Carter Harrison Sr., in his inaugural address on April 17, 1893, a month before the fair opened, calling it, “the most trying period of Chicago’s history, except when the besom of destruction passed over it at its mighty conflagration.”
     Yet at the time of the Great Fire, in October 1871, Chicagoans saw not only heroism, but also a sinful city scourged. “Fleeing before it was a crowd of blear-eyed, drunken and diseased wretches, male and female, half naked, ghastly, with painted cheeks, cursing and uttering ribald jests as they drifted along,” the editor of the Chicago Tribune wrote to the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, describing the fire. For strength, beleaguered Chicagoans recalled the difficulties of the city’s founding. “The rain that helped put out the flames created pools of mud, reminding survivors of the city’s swampy foundation,” wrote historian Ross Miller.
     But at the city’s swampy foundation . . .
     Charles Fenno Hoffman approached Chicago on a frigid New Year’s Eve 1833, five months after Chicago had incorporated as a town, at a meeting where 12 residents voted yes and one voted no. The night before Hoffman’s arrival was spent twenty miles away, east along the lakefront in “a rude cabin built of stems of the scrub pine, standing behind a sandy swell about 200 yards from shore.”
    The twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker lay huddled in a buffalo skin, with his saddle for a pillow, listening to experienced Chicago hands trade stories of the money to be made, of the “meanness, rapacity, and highway robbery (in cheating, stealing, and forcibly taking away) from the Indians.” Hoffman felt “indignation and disgust” at the practices described, but also a certain regret.
    “I should like to have been at Chicago a year ago,” he told his cabin mates.
     You get the picture. Hoffman hadn’t even gotten to Chicago yet and was already wishing he had arrived sooner—a common sentiment in an era when real estate prices could soar by the hour. There is a tendency to denigrate the present, whatever it is, because we know so much about it, while romanticizing the past, whatever it was, because its less pleasant details grow fuzzier with each passing year, accentuating the cherished highlights even more. This impulse can be particularly acute for newcomers, who missed the great era of the day before yesterday, arriving, as they must, in the confusing, compromised swirl of today, and so can be left with a permanent sense that the party is always ending just as they show up. The party is never now.

Book Week # 6 -- "The twirling universe stops dead."

     I'd never have thought to write a recovery book. Then again, I'd never have thought to go into recovery. But circumstances forced my hand — 10 years ago last week — and landed me in the middle of it. If I've learned one thing from reading Dante, it's that if you find yourself in hell, take notes.
     So I did, and wrote "Drunkard"—originally titled "Death of the Drunkard," based on a line I spied on the vaulted ceiling of a Vilnius tavern. But the geniuses at Dutton didn't want to have "death" in the book's title, not that it mattered. Not a best-seller. Though I still hear from people who were touched by the book, and that is enough. I've also heard that it's one of the few recovery books that makes a person want to drink, due to passages such as the following:

     I don't drink right away. No, no, no. That would be wrong. Overeager. As frantic as I sometimes am, staring intently at other, lesser bartenders, who often lag, too slow to notice me, too slow to get off the phone, too slow to find the Jack—there, you idiot, right there!—so slow I want to slap the bar and snarl, "Hurry the hell up!" As eager as I sometimes am, moving down the bar and dipping my head to catch their attention. As carefully as I track the composition of the drink—the glass, the ice, the booze—once it has arrived, I always pause to gaze for a rapt moment at the filled glass, the ice, the Jack, the square napkin, the dark linoleum bar. The twirling universe stops dead, the Jack its motionless epicenter. I pick up the glass and take a long draw.
     You probably do not drink whiskey. You might not drink at all—a third of the country doesn't, a statistic that astounds me, the way I am astounded by the fact that one-third of all Americans believe in UFOs and two-thirds believe in angels.
    But whiskey tastes wonderful—sweet and smoky, cold and comforting. The first sip doesn't do much but reassure you: the overture, the fugue, the opening beat of the orchestra saying, "Just wait; you're in the right place." Soon—two sips, three—the glass is half empty and the grating clank of the day begins to soften and fade. I've made it. I am rescued, plucked from the icy chop and flopped gratefully into the lifeboat, covered with a wool blanket and heading for home. 

Book Week #5: "Brother, it's a dirty one!"

     I loved writing "Hatless Jack," my exploration of the history of men's hats, using John F. Kennedy's life as a narrative arc. I felt like I was exploring a lost world, and it helped me understand the general societal trend toward individual freedom, an era of shucking of rules, including the need to wear hats. Granta brought out an edition in England that was well-received, with a full page in the Times of London Book Review. Though the book is about men's hats, not all the characters in it are men: 

     Hatcheck girls came to occupy a particular niche in American culture in the 1920s and 1930s. They were both helpful and alluring—halfway between a sister and a slut—and their toehold on the bottom rung of the nightlife world of fancy clubs and restaurants made them perfect grist for all sorts of modern Cinderella stories in books, movies, and, occasionally, in real life. A number of society matrons, such as candy heiress Helen Brach, started life as hatcheck girls....

     If checking hats was an art form, its prima donna was Renee Carroll, the "hat check queen" at Sardi's, the famed theater district restaurant in New York City. Carroll was a brash redhead with a sharp tongue and an easy manner with the rich and famous, and her methods explain why it was estimated that 99 percent of men tipped their hatcheck girls. Though not particularly good-looking, the "snap-eyed, voluble" Carroll kept her clientele in line with a careful mix of flattery and bullying. For tippers, there was the carrot of being recognized.
     "When I accept a coat," she wrote in her 1932 memoir, In Your Hat, "I look at the label immediately and read the man's name that his tailor usually writes just inside the inner coat pocket. I call the gentleman by his name and remember it afterward, refusing to give a check for his coat and insisting on knowing faces and garments every time. This, of course, flattered the gentleman who, in turn, tips better."
     For nontippers, Carroll had a ready arsenal of sarcastic lines and gestures. She would hand quarters to steady nontippers (although this did not necessarily shame them. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Saroyan would wordlessly pocket the quarter, so she stopped giving it to him).
    She slathered on guilt. Hatlessness was no excuse. When French star Maurice Chevalier showed up at Sardi's without a hat, Carroll told him that she had just paid to see him in the movies the night before, and was it fair that he was now refusing to pay her the "customary fee"? Chevalier meekly went back to his car, got his hat, and checked it, tipping a dollar.
     Words were not even necessary for a hatcheck girl to make her feelings known. This is how fellow hatchecker Blanche Hollard described the reception given a nickel tip in the 1940s.
    "Some girls, however, extend the palm of their hand with the offending coin in it, and then look incredulously up at the man's face," she writes, in her own published confessions. "It most cases he immediately says, 'I get your pardon I thought I gave you a quarter.' Then, an exchange is hastily transacted."
    "If you give a hat check girl less than a quarter, she'll give you a look that you will carry around with you for the rest of your night-clubbing days," Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in 1942. "Brother, it's a dirty one!"
     Carroll had Sardi's customers so spooked that men would routinely tip her, even if they din't have hats to check. Playwright Ward Morehouse forgot to tip Carroll in his rush to make a steamship, so he sent her a five-franc note from Paris and a letter of apology.

Books Week #4: "Get on the goddamn ship, Dad!"

     "Don't Give Up the Ship" (Ballantine, 2002) was my biggest bomb. Nobody reviewed it, to my memory, or if they did, it was with a shrug. It wasn't excerpted anywhere. My parents despised it. Which seemed fitting after the difficult voyage with my father on his old ship, where he had been a radio operator in the 1950s. Writing it, I figured: "I'm 40 years old. At some point I get to just say what happened." Still, with the passage of time, I'm proud of the book, and glad I went on the trip. Or as I tell myself whenever I am tempted to bemoan the whole thing: "How bad could an experience really be where someone pays you $50,000 and you end up in Venice?" 

     The pier was hectic with a festive, summer camp sort of commotion, busy with families, girlfriends, boyfriends, and cadets—trim teens in bright white shirts and dark navy pants, their "salt-and-pepper" uniforms. They towered over their parents. Mothers held bunches of balloons. Fathers lugged big portable coolers, cases of soda, cases of juice. I worried that we were unprepared—we had no juice—and puzzled over the balloons. At least a dozen families had brought bunches of them. They seemed an odd, child's birthday party touch.
     My father stopped short and I ran thud into him, like a vaudeville act. Disentangling ourselves and our rolling luggage, I wondered, Is this how it's going to be? Frick and Frack? I looked around to see if anybody had noticed.

  Turning onto Dock 19, where the ship was tied up, I saw that the pier was named for A.F. Olivet, the no-nonsense captain during my father's cruises. I paused to make note of that, and of the dinghies moored under a protective wooden roof leading to the ship. They had bold, forward-straining names:  Courageous, Freedom, America, Magic.
     Looking up, I saw that my father, the good New Yorker, had kept walking. I called to him—"Dad! Wait!"—and he turned, "I'll go slow," he shouted back. But he didn't go slow. He strode toward the ship. I hurried after him, the luggage wheels humming against the concrete.
     I got alongside the ship, almost to the gangway, just in time to see him go up without me, lugging his suitcase, a wide smile spread across his face. He said something pleasant to the officer at the top of the gangway, and disappeared inside the Empire State. I stood on the pier a moment, shocked, then raced after him, hefting my suitcase in both hands and clattering up the awkward low metal steps. After months of arranging—the conversation, the phone calls, the formal letters, the visits—I had figured that our boarding the ship would be an obvious moment of high drama: an exchange of loving glances, a pat on the back, a shy filial smile, a fatherly ruffled of the hair, a deep breath and up we go together, arms linked. Ta-daaaaaah!
     Not in this life.
     "What's your hurry, sailor? I hissed, out of breath, catching up to him at the cabin, C1, marked by a note card reading MR. STIENBURG SR. and MR. STIENBURG JR.
     He offered this explanation: he wanted to get his suitcase aboard before the tide came in, raising the angle of the gangway, making it more difficult to walk up. He actually said this. Stunned, I turned away, puzzling whether his excuse was a mountainous lie or, worse, a sincere delusion.

Bold adventurers

     I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: how was I going to do this? Six weeks with my father. A month at sea, then ten days in Italy. We'd kill each other. Or I'd kill him. Or myself. Or he'd kill me. One way or another, somebody was going to be killed.
    Then the anger, a hot fluid at the back of my brain, drained away, and I almost laughed — the tide, so ridiculous — and I remembered that, up to this moment, I had been genuinely worried my father wouldn't get on the ship at all. That despite his promise, when the moment finally came, he would freeze up in the gangway. Many times I had imagined, not entirely without pleasure, him grasping the handrails, white knuckled, rigid, me behind him, ramming the heel of my hand into the small of his back, forcing him forward, "get on the goddamn ship, Dad!"
     That had been the preconception. The reality was 180 degrees opposite. Instead of hanging back, fearful, needing a shove, he had raced ahead, excited, forgetting all about me. Realizing this shocked away the anger. It struck me that, all all these years, I didn't know my father at all. Not a bit.

Book Week #3: "Do you have any identification?"

     "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances," true to its name, was a pain in the ass. My long-time editor and, I imagined, friend, went our separate ways because of it. The 1996 collection of 26 essays about the frustrations of life only received a few, largely dismissive reviews.  It didn't sell that well, though "F is for Fat" was excerpted in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, which was a consolation prize.  The chapters I most enjoyed were those panning Disney, Elvis and UFO fanatics, but the beginning of the "J is for Journalism" chapter resonates, particularly given my post last week on trying to do a story about the Chicago Public Schools. It never ends. 

     Maya Angelou is filled with joie de vivre. She strides onto the podium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel and begins to sing. "I shall not be moved. I shall not be moved. Just like the tree that's planted by the water, I shall not be moved."
    Her voice is deep and strong. She then begins to talk, telling stories, reciting her poetry. You are powerful, she tells her audience. You are beautiful.
    The crowd eats it up. They roar, these two thousand women attending a national women's conference. They applaud. 

    Sitting in the back, hunched in a dark corner of the huge ballroom, I scribble a few of Angelou's more succinct comments onto a narrow pad. I didn't want to come here—had felt that sinking sensation I get when given an assignment I consider to be a dog. But now that she's up there, singing, reading, speaking, laughing, the whole process is so skilled, so entertaining and, yes, so uplifting, that I am having a good time.
    Maya Angelou is finished. She is escorted from the stage. The two thousand women finish clapping and make for the exists. I have one more task. Journalism has conventions as strict as kabuki, and a story of this sort, the "Famous poet speaks here" story, must end with a blurt of audience reaction: "It was great," said Jane Doe, dabbing a tear form her eye. "I greatly enjoyed the greatness of the great Maya Angelou."
     I pick  a women at random—somebody pausing, a straggler from the herd. "Hi, I'm Neil Steinberg," I say. "I'm a reporter from the Sun-Times. I'm writing a story about Maya Angelou's speech and I wonder what you thought of it?"
     She flees without a word, just turns and rushes away, as if I'm a panhandler. So does the second woman I ask. This leaves me frustrated and a little angry. There is an inverse law in reporting—the more benign the information you are seeking, the more difficult it will be to get. When I stopped hookers on Cicero Avenue, every single one, without exception, told me anything I wanted to know—about their neglected kids, their raging drug habits, how much money they charge for sex.
     But these professional women at the Hyatt don't want to talk. I have no idea why. Overeducation? They know what happened to outspoken people during McCarthyism. Prudence? They see the villains who unwisely consent to be grilled like burgers by Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" every Sunday, indicting themselves, babbling, ruined. Professionalism? They are trained not to speak to the media—"Call public affairs, they'll answer your questions."
     Or maybe they're just struck dumb by Maya Angelou's eloquence. The third woman I approach and ask about the speech doesn't run away, but she doesn't answer either. She just stares at me, with the startled expression a frog must give a swooping raptor. So much for Angelou's brave words about romance and beauty and power.
    There is a pause, the woman and I looking at each other. Then I do something I haven't done before or since in my entire professional career. I raise my hand into the gap between us and snap my fingers three times in front of her face.
     "Hel-lo!" I say, and she unfreezes, utters a syllable or two, then runs away.
    That's it. I figure, I'll do without the quote, or use the woman's monosyllable. I tried, which is the important thing in journalism.
     Outside, a lovely autumn day. I stroll west on Wacker Drive, toward the newspaper. On a corner I encounter a knot of three women, talking to each other, still holding programs from the conference. Okay, I decide, the full Boy Scout try I whip out my notebook, uncap a pen, present myself to the group and utter my burning question. There is a pause.
     "Do you have any identification?" one of the women asks. 

Book Week #2: "There is no alternative but death and failure."

     I'm on vacation this week. So, hoping to keep you occupied, I'm running brief excerpts from my seven published books and, on the last day, a glimpse at my upcoming book. This is from "Complete & Utter Failure," published by Doubleday in 1994, from the chapter on bad timing. 

     The most unambiguous cases of bad timing are those people brushed aside by what English pundit Clive James has called "the Fonck Factor." Rene Fonck was a French aviator pushing hard int he mid-1920s to be the first person to fly from New York to Paris nonstop, thus claiming a $25,000 prize offered by businessman Raymond Orteig.
      Fonck was confident the prize was his. He convinced aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky to provide a S-35 triple-engine airplane—the most advanced plane at the time and, at $105,000, also the most expensive. Since such an epic flight deserved a certain degree of magnificence, the interior of the plane was beautified by an interior decorator, who added panels of Spanish leather and mahogany walls so that it resembled "a tastefully furnished drawing room." Fonck ignored Sikorsky's plea that the aircraft first be thoroughly stress-tested. With a takeoff weight of 28,000 pounds due to the extra fuel, 10,000 pounds past its design maximum, a stress test might have been a good idea. To make matters worse, the plane was loaded down with all sorts of optimistic tokens, from a bouquet of orchids for the French President's wife to a full-course celebration dinner for six, prepared at a New York hotel and packed in vacuum containers so it would still be hot when consumed at the Crillon in Paris. Moments before the departure from Roosevelt Field, on the cold, gray dawn on September 21, 1926, Fonck was handed yet another gift from a well-wisher. He "lifted it in his hand to test the weight, and with a rueful look placed it aboard the already overloaded plane," according to the New York Times report the next day.....
     Literally burdened with the expectations of success, the plane never became airborne. Its landing gear collapses during take-off, and the plane cartwheeled into a gully at the end of the field and burst into flames. The plane's mechanic and radio operator were killed. Fonck and his navigator survived. Later, Fonck summed up the rash by uttering this wrenching expression of Gallic grief, "It is the fortune of the air," and immediately vowed to make the attempt again.
    Alas for the gallant Fonck, the following spring, on May 20-21, 1927, a 25-year-old former airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh, flying a stripped-down single-engine plane (pilots preferred those two- and three-engine planes in case one of the engines died in the middle of the Atlantic; Lindbergh was thinking of saving fuel), alone without a crew, crossed the Atlantic in 33 hours, 30 minutes. At times holding his eyes open with his thumbs, or hanging his head out the window to be revived by the icy air, Lindbergh also reported that he kept himself awake by repeating "There's no alternative but death and failure" over and over again.
     Lindbergh got the fame and fortune. Fonck got, well, Foncked.

Book Week #2: "Hi, I'm a stranger writing a book on failure..."

     Writers, like people in general, inflate their own significance, so I try to emphasize my complete lack of impact on the culture around me, since it happens to be true. The closest thing I ever did to being an innovator of anything was the "Shiver like rhesus monkeys" chapter of Complete & Utter Failure, which followed a girl through a year of the National Spelling Bee. Myna Goldberg was inspired by it to write "Bee Season," so she says in the book's acknowledgments, which kicked off the whole bee-as-literature genre, with the movies and plays and such that followed, all of which did better than my book, although it was reviewed, well, in the Washington Post, and landed me on "Oprah," so I shouldn't complain either.

     My plan was to pick someone who had competed in the nationals the previous year, on the assumption that she had to be good to have gotten that far once and, having whiffed victory, would redouble her efforts this year.
     I settled on a twelve-year old girl named Sruti Nadimpalli, basically because she lived close to Chicago and her last name did not present the phone book problems implicit in finding Gary Lee, the other local speller who had made it to the nationals the year before.
     Even as I was leaving a message at the Nadimpalli house, I was nervous about explaining precisely what I had in mind. I couldn't lie and say I wanted to track Sruti's triumphant return to the nationals, culminating in victory this time.
    But I couldn't say I wanted to document her second failure on the national stage either, to observe her humiliation and dissect it for my own particular purposes. "Hi! I'm a stranger writing a book on failure, and thought that I'd devote seventy-five pages to your young daughter, provided you give me access to her...."
     What then to tell the mom? In my mind, I had conjured up a wildly protective, fictional mother for Sruti, someone who would share her daughter's bee compulsion. A fearsome image who would probably turn me down cold. And then what?
     Even at the moment we were on the phone together—up to the point when Sruti's mother, in her charming, lilting accent, asked "And what is this book about?"— I wasn't sure what to say. Naturally, I fudged. I said that the book was about "success and failure," then slowly peeled away the success part.
   As always, the reality was more interesting than what I had imagined before the fact. Dr. Nadimpalli didn't need me to soft-pedal at all—she quickly grasped, and even seemed to embrace, the idea of the spelling bee as a failure metaphor, and cheerfully agreed to present my proposal to her daughter. A week later I was at their home.

Photo atop blog: Tom Mansfield, a guard at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, standing before "Homage to Uccello #5" by Boston artist Anna Hepler.

Book Week #1: "I would sooner send my son to hell than send him to Yale."

Carry A. Nation at Yale

      I'm taking a break for the next week. And while my wife would respect me more, I believe, if I just left the blog blank—"'Every goddamn day' doesn't mean you have to post every goddamn day," as she so sensibly puts it—the truth is some tiny handful of people expect something new here every day, and by gum, I don't want to disappoint them. It's a disappointing enough world as it is without my adding to the general swamp of let-down. Besides, I hate to stop now. A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson said, but it's my hobgoblin, and I'm sticking with it. 
     So since I have eight days to fill, and have written eight books, I'm going to run an excerpt each day from each of my books, secure in the knowledge that it'll be new to most people. I thought of tying it in somehow with Banned Books which was last week. But none of my books were ever banned, unfortunately, as that's a boon to sales, something would be censors never get their heads around. I'll include a link where you can buy the book, but as most are out-of-print, it's a pure service, since the money won't go to me, and you can check them out of the library too, if you are interested.
     The first excerpt, from "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks," which came out in 1992, is perhaps my favorite episode in the book:

     Like most collegians, then and now, Yale students at the turn of the last century liked to drink and have a good time. In fact, students at Yale had a special reputation for living the high life. "I would sooner send my son to hell," a minister's wife said at the time, "than send him to Yale."
     In 1901, a group of eight party-happy friends got together, secured four rooms at Fayerweather Hall—three for study and sleeping and the fourth as a sort of clubhouse—and dubbed themselves the "Jolly Eight."
     A fellow student, a junior not in the Jolly Eight but feeling "a real or fanciful grievance" against one of its members, sat down on February 20, 1902 and typed out a letter to hatchet-wielding saloon-busting temperance crusader Carry A. Nation, describing the club as a "party of Yale men who have banded together to promote the cause of total abstinence," calling itself the Jolly Eight "to show that men may lead consistent and yet cheerful lives." He asked for words of counsel and encouragement from Nation.
     A short time later, the group received a letter and several autographed photographs of Nation, shown standing with an open Bible in one hand an upraised hatchet in the other. The author of the letter was found out and confronted. He confessed his guilt, the Jolly Eight let him off with stern threats. It was assumed the prank had run its course.

   They had seriously underestimated Nation, who was capitalizing on her career breaking apart saloons by lecturing on the carnival circuit and even in burlesque houses, taking donation and hawking her little souvenir hatchets. Her zeal had made her something of a national joke.
     On September 29, 1902, the letter-writing Yalie, whose name has been shielded from posterity, was walking on the campus when a fellow student ran up and informed him that Carry Nation was waiting to see him in the rooms of the Jolly Eight. He assumed the club was getting its revenge for the letter—"It was preposterous," explained an eyewitness narrative of the event, published in 1931 in the Yale Daily News. "Carry Nation had only occasionally been even read of, demolishing some saloon in distant states." But his smugness dissolved into terror when he discovered the somber Nation seated in the center of the Jolly Eight's Fayerweather suite.
      Nation, who was not known for her savvy, suspected nothing. She had spoken several times on campus, years before, and soon was lecturing a hasty gathering of the Jolly Eight and their guests on the vices of drinking and smoking, not to mention short skirts and foreign foods. Her audience was respectful, though many had to bite their lips to force back a smile. 
      "Occasionally a man would as decorously as possible bolt out of the room to explode in laughter in the entry and then return, composed," the Daily News said.
     Those in attendance reported that Nation's smiling face clouded into an angry frown when she noticed a well-filled pipe rack hanging over the fireplace. But some quick-thinking "Eight" explained that the pipes were trophies given up by smokers persuaded to abandon the vice by their organization.
     "It was a reply worthy of a degree in itself," noted the history, and Nation bought it.
     Nation then announced she would speak from the steps of Osborn Hall at 5 p.m. In the meantime, she went to visit friends in New Haven and to harangue a dean for serving champagne sauce in Yale commons.
     If it may seem odd that Nation was not informed by someone that her host on campus was a drinking club, remember that Nation was known for her attacks on saloons. The driving force behind keeping her deluded was a general desire to get her out of town before she could turn on Yale's beloved tap houses.
     "The deception must be continued for should Mrs. Nation learn the truth a hatchet crusade would be inevitable and would probably be directed upon Mory's where near-innocent tobies of ale attended upon surpassing rarebits and English mutton chops," reasoned the narrative. "The newspapers, always eager to distort with sensationalism any unfortunate mention of Yale men, would revel in the story of such an attack and, to the unknowing, make Yale appear to be an inebriate's asylum."
    At 5 p.m., Nation mounted the steps of Osborn Hall, a grandiose structure with soaring archways. she was robustly cheered and members of the glee club, scattered throughout the audience, led the crowd in singing "Good Mornin' Carry."
     It was a wild, stormy encounter, with Nation trying to deliver her temperance message amidst the constant interruptions of cheers and increasingly double-entendre songs from the crowd (such as "Down with King Alcohol," which pleased Nation until the part of the drinking melody where the singers make the down-the-hatch gesture). 
     Finally, after about an hour, during which Nation managed to have some respectful silence by brandishing her bible aloft, the songs grew more blatantly inebriate, the catcalls more unabashed, and she beat a hasty retreat.
     The prank would have just been an amusing episode had it ended there. But it didn't. Invigorated by the day's events, eight students—it is unclear whether these were the Jolly Eight or another group from the Yale Record—grabbed a camera and flash apparatus and headed for Nation's room at the New Haven House.
    Waiting until Nation had finished selling her little hatchets (with DEATH TO RUM emblazoned on the handles) to a crowd in the hall, the men interviewed Nation about her views on prohibition and requested she pose for a photograph. 
     In 1902, taking a photograph after nightfall was a complicated process. It involved extinguishing all the lights, exposing a photographic plate in darkness, igniting flash power, then covering the plate before turning the lights back on.
     Nation was handed a glass of water. It was explained to her that she would be photographed toasting to temperance with life's essential liquid. The eight students took the places around her. One held another glass of water, to toast with, but he others were empty-handed.
     Empty-handed, that is, until the lights went out. In the momentary darkness, the Yalie to Nation's right produced a large beer stein, and the others reached for concealed props and arranged themselves around the temperance leader in a tableau the Daily News compared to a "Bacchanalian orgy." 
     ...Later, [the photographer] doctored the second photograph to add a cigarette in Nation's hand and a foamy head on the beer stein. It looks as if Nation has just blown a trio of perfect smoke rings to the delight of her drinking buddies....
    To rub in the insult, the real Yale Record published the photo on October 1, 1902, adding the caption: 'I have always taken mine straight,' she said, laughing."
      One can't help but wonder if Nation ever caught on to how much she had been ridiculed during her day at Yale. It appears likely she did. In her 1908 autobiography, Nation displays herself as a woman quite aware that she was taken for a fool in New Haven. Her chapter on college life is titled "The Vices of Colleges, Especially Yale."

Stuff happens

 

     Did Jeb Bush really say what the Washington Post reports him saying, in regard to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon?

     "We're in a difficult time in our country and I don't think that more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It's just, it's very sad to see. But I resist the notion -- and I did, I had this, this challenge as governor, because we have, look, stuff happens, there's always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."

    Stuff happens? Really? Isn't that what his brother said in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005? Oh well, what's a guy to do? It's not as if the president can help or anything. Donald Trump says some crazy, opera buffo stuff, but at least he wants to be president to do things. I expected more of Jeb Bush, as the adult in the room, than shrugging, sorry-not-my-table indifference to the nation's woes. If it were a big business in trouble, he'd suddenly find himself motivated. 

    "Stuff happens" is going to haunt him, during the brief period he is a presidential contender in 2015, assuming it isn't over already.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, Hive. You're so smart. You're so good — win every time, you do. 
     Score: Hive: a bazillion; Neil: zip.
     Okay, smartypants (or should that be "smartypantses"? Hmmm, thoughts? Because "pants" already has an....)
     Sorry, back to the matter at hand. So where's this guy? I'm not going to give you any clues at all. None whatsoever. Somewhere in Chicago. Well, one clue then. Probably not a synagogue, since Jews are forbidden from decorating their sanctuaries with human images, though we don't make the big honking deal about that other religions do, and I will name no names. You know who you are.
     That's two. Two clues. But no more.
     Enough. Time's tight. I've going to be taking a week off at the paper. My wife would respect me more if I left the next eight days blank here, but I'm not going to do that to you. Or me; I do have my reputation to consider. Instead I'm going to kick off "Book Week" tomorrow, featuring excerpts from the seven books I've written and, on the eighth day, a first glimpse at my next book. 
     I was going to loosely tie it into Banned Book Week last week, though none of my books have been banned, alas, because that's great publicity. Not incendiary enough, I guess. And my books, because I have seven published and one on the way.
     Yes, eight days is more than a week, technically, for you sticklers, no need to point out the obvious, though everybody else does. Publishing being what it is, you have to play with the conventions a bit. A little added value.
     Post your guesses below. Winner gets one of my superfine 2015 blog posters, unless you've already won that, and then we'll find something else for you. Have fun, good luck, blah, blah blah, ba blahbitty-blah.
    Boy, I need that vacation.

Humanity lower than ducks

    In Oregon on Thursday, nine people were ...
    You know what? I'm done with parsing shootings. There's nothing else to say about them anymore, and I feel like I'm part of the slaughter process: the killers kill, the victims die, the cops rush in, and then the explainers explain. Count me out. Just because crazy people mow down innocent bystanders to scratch some unfathomable itch doesn't mean I have to dig around in the gore trying to extract a heaping handful of something that feels like sense. 
      Here, one last sentence: People are murdered pointlessly in this country by lunatics using guns that they can get too easily, and nobody is going to do anything about it.
     Did I leave anything out?
     Good. I'll direct your attention to the trio of sleeping ducks above, seen at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Life's a beautiful thing, and should include ducks, and naps, and napping ducks, and naps in general, which are restorative, and good for the inner mental balance. 
     Ducks understand that; people, not so much. 
      The world as I would have it would occupy itself debating exactly how much time a productive person can guiltlessly spend napping. Not the whole day, obviously, the nap would lose its specialness and nothing would get done. But some time must be carved out in a culture that just doesn't emphasize napping enough. If it did, each desk would be a little higher off the floor, and have a foam mattress underneath. "No Burt, 2 p.m. won't work for me—I'll be napping under my desk, burping animal cookie scent. How about three?" 
     Of course, I suppose it's hard to focus on parsing the positive aspects of the midday snooze for humans as well as ducks in a culture where YOUNG PEOPLE ARE KILLED RANDOMLY FOR NO REASON AT ALL AND NOBODY CARES OR DOES ANYTHING....
       Sorry. Ducks, um, use the sun to help maintain body temperature, in between hunting for fish, and ... ah ... never killing each other just for the heck of it, just because they're disturbed and powerful weapons are scattered around by the hundreds of millions. Which makes humanity, I suppose, less evolved than ducks. Lower than ducks, even. despite our vaunted brains or, rather, because of our vaunted brains, which aren't so vaunted, if you ask me.  
      Okay, I'm drifting back into the killing in Oregon, when the truth is, in five days we won't even remember it.  The ducks, however, may stick in mind. They're so cute. And peaceful. 

But how does my Snickers bar FEEL?

      In the marketing biz, clever can drift into cliche in a moment. 
      That moment came, for me, in the checkout at Target last week, when I looked at the tray of Snickers candy bars and noticed that the distinctive "Snickers" logo had been replaced by a variety of mildly negative adjectives—"Impatient," ""Cranky," "Confused"— that tied in with their clever advertising campaign insisting "You're not you when you're hungry."
      It may be be different, but it's also late, maybe even done to death, that fourth partygoer showing up at the Halloween dance dressed as the Internet. An idea isn't creative if it's been done to death. Ideas that are done to death become cliches. And cliches like "done to death" make the audience flinch, not smile.
     Okay, we get it: labels were sacrosanct, so playing with them is, well, playful, or was. 
     But how long as it been? It was back in 1999 that Heinz, desperate to draw in young customers to its flagship product, started offering green and purple ketchup, for children, and tried to lure teens with "Talking Labels," instead of "Tomato Ketchup" they said things like "Psst. Over here" and "Are Your French Fries L0nely?" It must have worked, because in 2001, they expanded the line, with "Not new and improved" and "Desperately Seeking Tater Tots." 

     Clever. Also 14 years ago. I'm sure the strategy goes back even further. For years, 7-Up's  slogan was, "You like it; It likes you." I loved that, the idea that the damn soda likes you, is sitting on the store shelf, pining away for you. It was a bold faux claim, charming for being so patently untrue.
     Last year Coca Cola started putting generic friendly terms its cans. "Star," "Bestie" "BFF," "Legend" and slapping specific names on its small bottles. 

     Maybe the Coke name game started the "Enough already" process. I don't want my soda to say, "Share a Diet Coke with your Dad." I've already given them money. Isn't that enough? 
     At some point, marketers jumped the shark, and for me its those Snickers bars, There's something creepy, almost bi-polar. about them. I want to be able to bite into a Snickers (actually, I don't want to bite into a Snickers, ever, haven't for years and wouldn't start now) without having to wonder whether I've begun to hallucinate or does the label really read, "Confused?"

    I don't want to overreact. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. But at some point, where Tide is shrieking, "You smell!" and Wrigley's gum labels suddenly coo "Blow me," we're going to want this to stop.  
    Look at this label on a Yasso frozen yogurt bar (excellent, by the way, 100 calories each, if I didn't limit myself to one a meal I'd eat three). As it happened, my mother and I spoke an hour earlier. But what if we hadn't? What if we were quarreling? What is she had just died, and I went to console myself with a frozen treat?
     See, that's the thing. Products are supposed to be mass market items. I don't want Stephanie's personalized soda; I want my generic Coke. Quirk is the opposite of mass market. If I come home from the funeral, I just want a can of Coke. I don't want a can of Coke that says, "Darling" on it. 

     The reason these twists on  labels worked in the past is because labels are expected to be bold but not personal. Lipstick might be bright magenta, but it doesn't say, "Hey liver lips! Show a little self-respect." Once that is no longer generally true, once they start frequently being sly, and all boxes grab you by the lapels and scream in your face, all bets are off, and the slyness loses all value, like all those million bottles of hot sauce all with highly idiosyncratic, risque  names,"SWAMP ASS TIT-KICKER HOT SAUCE," and such. They're so individual, they're dull, and cheap-looking, and you reach with gratitude for good old Tabasco, with its classic, unchanging label.
      At Target, I picked up some Tabasco sauce, and noticed the box seemed to think it was auditioning for Tod Browning's "Freaks" ("One of us! One of us!") Not a huge difference between "Are you one of us" and 7-Up,'s "It likes you." But quirky repetition grinds a consumer down. Find something new. 
    
      


           

Are you a real person?

     Stephanie Scott is a forensic psychiatrist, football lover, journalist and educator. Elli Mcguirk is also a forensic psychiatrist, as well as a dancer backpack ninja, web talent and "good friend." Raina Tipps is also a backpack ninja.
     Forty-seven people followed me on Twitter Monday. Much more than the usual handful I expect in a day. I couldn't help but look closely at my new flock. Perky young women, mostly, with odd, strangely capitalized names, sharing a suspicious confluence of interests. Romaine Mcpeters, Tanya Preusser and Margot Lopez are each a self-proclaimed "beer drinking coffee junky," as opposed to Marta Sumter and Laura Salzman who are just coffee ninjas, and Melba Mcclary, a mere coffee "enthusiast."
     It dawned on me — quite quickly, considering all the years I thought the Kinks song "Lola" was about a girl — that these were not the Twitter identities of actual people who had fallen under the spell of my high quality journalism, but faux identities generated by computers.

     The idea is, you are followed by a robot, glance and see a pretty face who also likes coffee, and you follow them back, then suddenly are getting their curious blend of non-sequitur factlets—"Apart from the burial of Unas, only the Pyramid of Teti displays the Cannibal Hymn"—intermixed with come-ons for holistic web sites: "5 Natural #Herbs To Detox Damaged Lungs."

     If you are unfamiliar with Twitter—and geez, get with the program, at this point it's like being unfamiliar with shampoo—it's a an online communication network where you blast messages at your band of followers while in turn being blasted by messages of the people you follow. Somehow in all this, communication occurs, or did, before all this random commercial garbage began to gum it up.

      Fake Twitter accounts are not news, except to me. The fake accounts story has been rattling around for a few years. Back in the 2012 election, it was pointed out that a significant percentage of Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's fan base were fake accounts. The way it works is you go to certain sites where you basically buy followers, for a penny apiece. These drive up your Twitter numbers, and people are more impressed with you.

Julia Khorramchahi,

      I wondered where they got the photos, so plugged a few into Google's image search. Ammie Arthurs, a Halle Berry type, was swiped from "The Hottest Short Hairstyles & Haircuts for 2015."   Elli Mcguirk? The photo was actually Elena Mazur, a communications consultant in Toronto. Maryjo Kratz was Julia Khorramchahi, a "Brazilian/Iranian human being" and "digital marketer" also from Toronto. The "human being" made me suspicious — could these Canadian flaks be using their own photos to generate fake accounts? I sent a few queries and Khorramchahi responded.
      "Defnitely NOT my doing!" she tweeted to me. "Thanks for pointing it out; will report that account right away."

     Okay then. I was left with the moral quandary. A person on twitter is judged, in part, by the size of the following herd.  As it happened, Monday's busload of mannequins pushed me over the 5,000 follower mark, a milestone I had been anticipating for a while, though grimly aware how small beans that is on the online world.
     So some of my followers on Twitter are not a cargo cult of actual living people, scanning the skies for my next essay. Who cares?  We already tolerate people in our lives who really aren't there.  The woman guiding you through giving your information when you call a credit card company is not really talking to you. Miss October, smiling alluringly from her centerfold, is not really here.
     If you believe the view of the future in movies such as "Her" and "Ex Machina," then we will happily have relationships with electronic intelligences and robot inamoratas.

Not a real person either

     Why not? Raggedy Andy was not really my pal, though I thought so at the time. Why not accept company where you find it? Perhaps as people become more robotic and absent, shuffling around, gazing at their phones, the phones will become more human and present. Talk about irony.
     On second thought, no. I decided to purge my robot harem, on general principles. Boosting your numbers with fake followers is like wearing elevator shoes—the solution is worse than the problem.
     So goodbye Frida Byham ("skiing fan"). Goodbye Jessica Phillips ("Total bacon specialist.") Goodbye Noelle Shyes ("Javadicted.")  I have enough fake friends as it is without tolerating more.

Frightened bureaucrats throttle our American freedoms

  

Bill McCaffrey, chief of CPS communications, in theory.

      Stories fill the paper, discussing certain issues, visiting various places, introducing particular people. Readers read them, never pausing to wonder how those stories got there. 
      Some are pitched by eager publicists, but more often a reporter had to press, make phone calls, send emails, cut through layers of bureaucracy, wheedling quotes and permission from hesitant administrators.
      I'm not complaining, it's part of the job. 
     Sometimes it works, and the story gets in the paper. Sometimes it doesn't. I've been doing this long enough to take disappointment along with success. But this one particular experience, well, let me tell you.     
     Several years ago, I thought about a story I did in 1986 at the Chicago public high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail. It was one of my favorite stories, because of the surprise, not just to find classes being held—teenage prisoners still must go to school—but because the teachers were so positive and enthusiastic, not at all what I expected. 
     Merely reposting the story here seemed lazy. Most of the teachers I quote are probably dead. I wanted to go back, to re-report it, see what had changed in three decades. I started with Tom Dart. He likes to show off the jail, but on his own terms, and the school didn't fit into his PR program. But gentle pressure, and the passage of a couple years, finally won permission.
     There was still a hitch. Though the school is in the jail, it's run by the Chicago Public Schools. You can't just walk in. So I started on the CPS last June, beginning with Judy Pardonnet in their communications office. I figured that gave me plenty of time to get it in the paper when school started.
     We eventually had a pleasant conversation on the phone, around July, and permission seemed forthcoming. Then nothing. She wouldn't return my emails or calls, and I tried for weeks. Finally, irked, I began what I call the "demon dialer" --- call her and call her and call her, every hour sometimes. Eventually she picked up. 
     She was apologetic, and passed the blame up to Bill McCaffrey, the chief of CPS public relations, pictured above. He won't allow it, she said, for reasons mysterious. 
     So I started trying to contact him.  July melted into August which morphed into September. He never responded. He never returned a call or an email. Earlier this month, Forrest Claypool, the head of CPS, came into the newspaper to talk to the editorial board about all the problems in the school system. I sat through 45 minutes of his spin, then approached him as he left and laid out what I wanted to do with the high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail..
      He said sure, talk to Bill McCaffrey. 
      At that point McCaffrey did phone me back, made some positive noises, then promptly disappeared again. I know the schools are in crisis, and there's lots to do. But he didn't have to write the story; all he had to do was give me permission. 
     For some reason I would not give up. I begged Kelley Quinn at the mayor's office to pressure Claypool—he and Rahm are supposed to be great pals, brother control freaks trying to herd the cats of civic government. I asked the publisher to intervene directly, and he did. 
       Nothing. Not even a reply. The CPS reaction to my simple, reasonable request for a mundane feature story is perhaps the most unprofessional performance I've encountered in 30 years of Chicago journalism, They lacked the consideration to even say "No" so I could stop asking. Just silence. Weeks and weeks. The September back-to-school moment has come and gone. 
     I give up, and am posting the story I liked so much from 29 years ago. It was an inoffensive thing, a nod to the hard work that teachers do, day in and day out, in the Cook County Jail. The teachers there now might want to ask their bosses why their efforts could not be showcased in the newspaper.
     I shudder to think why it was possible for a young freelancer to write it in 1986, but that months of steady pressure could not replicate it in 2015. We are a nation with freedom of the press, in theory, but that freedom is curtailed and hobbled by fearful government bureaucrats who lack faith in themselves, in their organizations and in their employees, and so gag them, not realizing that the gag is a worse indictment than anything they might say. Those terrified of bad publicity use that fear to bat away good publicity, then wonder why all the news about them is bad.
     Bottom line: our American freedom erodes, undermined, not by foreign enemies, but by domestic cogs.  
     Enough.  I tried my best. When Forrest Claypool moves on to his next posting, building his resume for his mayoral run in 2018—Rahm's definitely done after this term—I will try again with the next head of CPS. It's was an interesting story, then, and I bet it would be interesting now.
     Until that happy day: This ran in the Sun-Times on August 5, 1986 under the headline, "Headline:Enthusiastic students flock to jail's classrooms behind bars." It's quite long, but that's how we did it once upon a time. 

     At first glance, the rooms could be any classrooms anywhere.
     They have all the right equipment - desks, chalkboards, globes, handmade mobiles and construction paper silhouettes of Lincoln and Washington stapled to bulletin boards. Above the chalkboards are green strips with large alphabets of cursive writing.
     If it weren't for the Sheriff Richard J. Elrod calendars hanging in each room, you might expect a group of laughing fifth-graders to return from recess at any moment.
     When the students do arrive, they are all wearing the lone school color - beige. They wear the same beige T-shirts and beige cotton pants. Stenciled on the back of the shirts and the pants are "D.O.C." - Department of Corrections. This is the basement of the Cook County Jail, where the Board of Education runs a high school 12 months a year.
     The students are between 17 and 20 years old - the youngest group in the jail. They attend classes from four to five hours a day in a broad range of subjects, taught by 50 full-time teachers.
     If the cheery, standard classrooms come as a surprise, the teachers are even more so. Rather than being a burnt-out group of gritty survivors, filled with tales of the frustration of trying to teach hardened street toughs, they are enthusiastic to the point of zeal, and say they prefer teaching in the jail environment to teaching in the regular public school system.
     "My students are the nicest group in the world," said Daniel Fitzgerald, who teaches during the year at the Nettelhorst School and spends his summers teaching at the jail.
     "If I had this kind of demeanor in the school year, my teaching would be a breeze. I've been coming here for the past four summers, and it's a real pleasure. I had a student today thank me about four times for helping him with a new math problem. All the way to the door - thanks again, thanks again, thanks again. I would never get that at my school."
     According to Phillip T. Hardiman, executive director of the jail, teaching positions at the school are in great demand from other teachers in the school district. Many of the teachers in the jail have been there for more than 20 years, and few leave prematurely.
     "In order (for a new teacher) to get into the jail school, one of our teachers has to die or retire," said Hardiman.
     "Most people have a misconception of what it is like in jail - they think of bars, inmates with tin cups," said Robert Glotz, director of security at the jail. "The funny part is (teachers) are far safer here than in a grammar school or high school."
     "We have very, very few discipline problems, if any, here in the jail," said Andrew Miller, who began teaching in the jail in 1956. "As a matter of fact, my role as assistant principal is primarily involved with having each student placed in the appropriate classroom setting. There is very little disciplining needed."
     But because the teachers enjoy what they do does not mean their job is an easy one. The majority of teens who come into the jail are dropouts with emotional and developmental problems and reading levels that average around the fifth grade. They are frequently hostile toward the idea of school and are lacking in self-esteem. On top of everything, there is no way to control how long they will be in the school. Stays in jail range from a few days to two years, with the average stay being around a month, so the teachers face classes that are constantly changing.
     "You have to be a special individual to work in that setting," said John Gibson, who was principal at the school for 5 1/2 years and is now principal at John Marshall High School. "They're working with a clientele that puts great demands on the teachers. A lot is taken out of a person.
     "The high turnover is one of the major problems. You may begin to see attitudinal changes, and then the student is gone. Teachers, like anyone else, like to see results - it's hard to work with a young person for three weeks or three months and suddenly that student is gone. It takes a special kind of person to deal with it."
     Gibson said the teachers in the jail have to be sincere, committed and dynamic because that's the only way to reach the students in jail.
     "Otherwise the students would simply come in and put their heads on the desk and that would be the end of it," he said, adding that the enthusiasm among jail teachers tends to be "contagious," passing from older to younger teachers.
     Despite the disappointments often found in a jail environment, the teachers all have their tales of success, such as the one about the student who earned his high school equivalency degree in the jail and went on to graduate magna cum laude from Northern Illinois University.
     And there's the man who approached Andrew Miller in San Francisco, stuck out his hand, smiled, and said, "You're Mr. Miller. You said something to me in the basement of the Cook County Jail that changed my life. . . ."
     Even if a student is not reached by the teachers at Cook County Jail, they hope that perhaps some good still can result from their efforts.
     "Even if we are unable to have the kind of success we expect with youngsters, we believe that attitudes are being changed about schools," said Gibson. "When they begin to experience success in the classroom, that spills over to younger siblings - or children. Many of them have children of their own. We know some of this is taking place. It pays dividends to larger society for years to come." 

     As far as the classes themselves, they tend to stress practical information and life skills. Thus, the science class will focus on public health or drugs, while in history the class learns about such basic Chicago information as the name of the mayor and the tallest buildings.
     Despite their veneer of street sophistication, the teens in the jail need this rudimentary information.
     "Those great big semi-adults with beards and muscles - they are fathers, they've committed all kinds of crimes and have all kinds of venereal diseases," said Miller. "These great big grown men have not learned the first thing about how to take care of themselves. They can't put a stamp on an envelope - to put a stamp on a letter you have to write letters, and they don't write. So they put the stamp on the wrong corner."
     In a recent class, Anthony Picciola had his students answer a series of multiple choice questions about their feelings - how they react when in a group, when happy, sad, angry. The class had several purposes - to get the students to read aloud, to think about themselves, to learn to discuss their emotions and participate in a group.
     Jesse Lee, the jail social worker, stopped by on his rounds and gave the group a pep talk.
     "You gotta be prepared," he said. "You gotta have a plan."
     He walked over to the desk of a student named Bob - a young man with a thin mustache and tossled hair - and asked him what kind of sports he played. Bob, in jail on charges of residential burglary stemming from his $100-a-day cocaine habit, stared at his desk while he answered - his feet constantly tapping, his fingers drumming on the table.
     He played tight end in football, he said, left field in baseball. Lee, seizing on the sports connection, made an analogy between having a realistic game plan and winning the game, trying to get the students to see the need for foresight and planning in their own lives.
     "I don't think you're gonna get a person in here saying, `We're looking for coke abusers - all the coke abusers line up, we've got jobs for you.' " Lee said.
     "This is what makes the school go, the staff," said Miller. "We have a fantastic staff. Our social worker staff are just crackerjacks. Our staff is especially trained to handle the difficult boy. Most of the youngsters are dropouts who happen to get in trouble with the law. They come here and, maybe for the first time in his life, someone listens. For the first time, he has structure and discipline. This is something he badly needs and, believe it or not, these boys welcome that."