Wozzeck: The shock of the (90-year-old) new

 David Portillo as Andres,
 Photo courtesy of the Lyric Opera. 

I realize that today's discussion about Alban Berg's Wozzeck, currently on stage at the Lyric Opera, will not be everyone's cup of tea.  But the opera puzzled and irked me and, trying to make sense of the thing, I turned to the Lyric's General Director, Anthony Freud, for help. He was such a sport, that while we sail off into deep waters, I hope you will either tag along with us or, if you do not care to, forgive me and show up tomorrow, when we'll be hearing what Caitlyn Jenner has to say on her visit to Chicago. 

     The Magic Flute is beautiful and happy. Madame Butterfly is beautiful but not happy. And Alban Berg's Wozzeck is neither beautiful nor happy, though others disagree, at least about the "beautiful" part. The critics at both Chicago papers raved about it. 
    What did they hear that I didn't?
    I last experienced—I almost said "endured"—Wozzeck when the Lyric performed it 23 years ago and,  not to mince words, hated it. It struck me as shrill and ugly, an ordeal imposed upon the audience for reasons mysterious.
     It would be exaggerating to say I enjoyed it more on my second viewing, but I disliked it less, and  found myself plunged into thought, even as it was unfolding, asking questions like, "Why are they doing this?" then "Why am I seeing it?" and "How can people like this?"
    The plot, thin as it is, matters more than the plots of most operas. It is about a common soldier, Wozzeck, living a life of regimented brutality as the servant of the swinish Captain. His love, Marie, the mother of his child, is canoodling a vile Drum Major. A team of grim doctors gleefully anticipates the fame that will be theirs when Wozzeck's condition, whatever it is, is fully dissected. Spoiler alert: it does not end well.
     The music is atonal, meaning that there are not lush harmonies that swell and follow rhythmic patters we associate with songs. There is nothing to hum. I could easily have shrugged it off as the kind of eat-you-peas homework plucked out of the long history of opera that the Lyric feels compelled to inflict upon its audience, out of a strange compulsion to shine its light into the darkest corner of the canon, the way art museums intersperse their Monet and Van Gogh and Renoir shows with the occasional rude black and white slashing shock of Franz Kline. 

     That seemed simplistic. I beseeched the Lyric's general

Anthony Freud

director, Anthony Freud, asking him to help me. 
      "Why are we doing it?" Freud mused. "I think it is, in common with all great art, about the human condition,  about post-traumatic stress disorder, about poverty, about the relationship between an oppressive society and and oppressive system, and about people making moral judgements. In my mind, it's an incredibly topical story."
     "So it's about modernity?" I blubbered. The romantic age could be expressed with murmuring Bach harmonies but once you started gassing people in trenches you required something that sounds as awful as the reality it represents?
     "If you are talking about music, that's completely subjective," Freud replied. "You are entitled to find it ugly. I find it incredibly expressive, moment by moment, describing the characters' thoughts, feelings, relationships. I think there is a lot of really beautiful music."
     Freud's reference to the characters' thoughts "moment by moment," made me think of James Joyce, and I received a whiff of the philistinism that might be underlying my complaint with Wozzeck. If somebody told me that, heck, why chew on Ulysses, where you have to consult Cliff's Notes just to realize somebody is taking a piss, when you can slurp down a dozen Agatha Christie mysteries, one after another, like milkshakes?  And the answer is that Joyce is trying to replicate the sweat and funk of granular reality in words, which is not always pretty but ultimately worth the heavy lifting. Not everything in life is fun and beautiful. Why should art be?
     But Freud said there is beauty aplenty in Wozzeck,  if you know where to find it.
    "All of Marie's music is really lyrical, " he said. "The third scene of Act 1, the opening of act 3, very beautiful; a kind of aria in the 3rd scene — the way Berg writes for Wozzeck is totally different, music capturing the jagged, angular moment." 
    That's it, isn't it? If reality were one long carnival, we could move happily from Puccini to Mozart and back. But the reality of war and death jars, and so does Wozzeck. My go-to-man on these issues, Henry W. Simon, says it quite well.

    Berg and his operas Wozzeck and Lulu epitomizes one aspect of a certain time and place. Wozzeck was conceived during World War I; its composition was completed immediately after that war; and it received its first stage performance, in Berlin, in 1925. It deeply stirred all of Middle Europe of that period. And that period was the period of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the period of Franz Kafka, the period of the rise of National Socialism. In music it was the period that saw the most violent breakdown of old ideas of melody—and, even more, of harmony.  It was revolutionary, it was intellectually curious, it was unstable, and it reflected the sickness of the German soul. 

    But Freud—the director, not the doctor—would not yield the field on the loveliness of the piece.

"The orchestral interlude, the passacaglia  between the penultimate scene and the final scene, Wozzeck has just been drowned and we're about to be confronted with the horror of the ending: all we can hope for in the future is more of the same," said Freud. "It is a catharsis,  in an orchestral interlude, up to that point are incredibly short, 20 and 30 seconds, here we have an emotional climax of the piece that is extraordinarily expressive, to my ears, an intensely emotional passage, lasting three or four minutes, an eternity in the context of Wozzeck. In it, I hear Puccini, I hear Mahler, I hear a music founded in Romanticism. I think Berg constantly shifts, the whole idea of atonality means no more music anchored in predictable keys or series of patterns. It's completely free to respond moment by moment to characters ' thoughts, actions, it's full of tune but the tunes last three seconds rather than 30 seconds. 
     If you consider it was created in 1925, it was a time of shock in art, and Wozzeck stands out because, while we came to embrace certain radical works, lessening their impact, it still has a sting. 
    "Picasso's portraits, when they were created regarded as utterly radical and offensive," said Freud. "Now they possess a classicism of their own ,compared to what has happened to visual arts since. One of extraordinary things about Wozzeck, a piece 90 years old next month,, is this: in which other art form would a 90 year piece be regarded as modern? Yet it is radical. It is revolutionary. Berg forged ahead in way he composed, in way he structured , but it is anchored in tradition. He is not rejecting tradition. He values his inheritance, but sees himself as a champion of moving that inheritance in new directions....It is now nearly 100 years old, yet it speaks to us as if it were written today. Our our ears are more accustomed to more comfortable sounds, but actually I think Beethoven,  in his day, was as radical as Berg."
    Beethoven died nearly a century before the premiere of Wozzeck. Maybe that's the problem. At 90 years old, Wozzeck is too new to be comfortable, not yet. But that's coming. Maybe in 2115, a dilettante-yet-unborn will emerge from the Civic Opera House, blinking into the day after seeing Pffft! an opera composed in 2020 using chainsaws and chickens in vises, and think. "Heck, what was that? Why can't they put on something fun, a good old classic opera, like Wozzeck?" Something to look forward to.

To be honest, after talking to Anthony Freud, I'm tempted to see it again, just to see if I can draw more out of it. Third time's the charm. For those similarly inclined, "Wozzeck," three shows remain: Nov. 12, 16 and 21. 





 

Mmm mmm good!

     Campbell's Soup is delicious. Right now, in our pantry are five cans of delicious Campbell's Soup: Chicken Noodle, of course, Cream of Chicken, Chunky Manhattan Clam Chowder, Cream of Mushroom, vital for making green bean casserole at Thanksgiving, and my favorite — heck, everybody's favorite — Tomato.
     Still, five cans of delicious, economical Campbell's Soup are not enough, and next time I'm at the grocery, I'll have to stock up on even more delicious, economical, nutritious Campbell's Soup ... sorry, I was reading the website for One Million Moms, a fundamentalist hate group — whoops, a group that, to use its own words, is "fed up with the filth many segments of our society ... are throwing at our children."
     An organization that, a few days back, called for one of its famously ineffective boycotts against Campbell's Soup.
     Why? This time, what they consider filth is a TV commercial that Campbell's began airing last month to promote its Star Wars-themed cans. Here's how One Million Moms describes the spot:

     A homosexual "married" couple is featured prominently with a young boy (their son) in the new Campbell's Soup advertisement. Campbell's #RealRealLife campaign aims to change the face of the American family. It starts off with the first man feeding soup to the little boy and in a "Star Wars" Darth Vader voice says, "Cooper, I am your father." Then the other man also feeds his son a spoonful of soup and says, "No, no, no, I am your father."

   A fairly accurate description, except for the contemptuous quotation marks — the couple, a pair of New York actors, aren't "married," quote unquote, they're married, period, two real men actually married as is legal, thank merciful God, in every state in the United States. The "aims to change the face of the American family" crack speaks volumes of the kind of person upset by this. Because — stop the presses — the face of the American family has changed already. Some people have not gotten the bulletin obviously. They wake up every day expecting to find themselves in Mayberry in 1962, if not Salem in 1692, and thus the world of 2015 as it actually is must come as an awful shock to them, a daily stupefication they of course project onto others:
     "How confusing for this little boy and for all children viewing this commercial," the One Million Mom website imagines. "Obviously, Campbell's is sending the message that homosexual men are raising children."
     Umm, homosexual men are raising children, who seem to wrap their heads around the two dads thing quite easily. 

     And Napoleon escaped from Elba. I'm sorry if I'm the one to tell you.
     I'd credit Campbell's for being pioneers, but they're not. Mainstream companies were rushing to win the hearts of gay and lesbian consumers (not to mention people like me who are just patriotic Americans who like to see our country's freedoms respected) last year. If you want to point to the first gay couple in a television commercial for a major company you have to go back to — ready? — 1994, when IKEA focused on a gay couple buying one of their high-quality tables. The heartbreaking detail is the commercial ran only after 10 p.m. so children wouldn't see it and — oh, I don't know what was supposed to happen to them — be flabbergasted.
     One Million Moms — a notional name if ever there were, perhaps because "A Few Dozen Angry Frightened Moms" didn't carry the same punch— seem to think heterosexuality is so lightly held that a Campbell's soup commercial can shake its foundations. They also, I should point out, illustrate the fundamentalist betrayal of the faith that supposedly motivates them, since all major religions preach that we are formed in God's image, and that He loves us, as his creation, one and all. By casting gay lives as sinful choices — as irrational as presenting left handedness as a sinful choice — and using it as a pretext to demonize certain people is a strategy that is not going away, no matter how much it fails, time and time again.
     And fail it does. One Million Moms not only serves as de facto PR staff for companies like Campbell's, publicizing the thing they hope to decry, it actually brings such commercials into being. J.C. Penney once created a TV ad featuring a gay couple as a direct reaction to One Million Moms attempting to punish them for hiring Ellen DeGeneres as a spokeswoman.
     Bottom line: Huge retailers like Campbell's, IKEA, Procter & Gamble, Tylenol and Nabisco — all of which have featured gays and lesbians in commercials in recent years — do not lead society. They follow, tagging along, selling stuff. By the time Campbell's Soup is running ads featuring the people you hate, you've already lost. Of course bigots — bigotry being a subcellar of ignorance — don't realize this. Maybe they can't. Their tragedy. And ours.

The secret ministry of frost

     A fine, frosty morning dawned Monday, and Kitty and I took an extra few turns on our morning ramble to inspect nature's fleeting handiwork. 
      Frost could use some PR. As far as precipitation goes, it doesn't get anywhere near the attention of its more voluminous brethren, rain, snow, hail or even fog. 
      Perhaps because frost inconveniences no one. No one ever said, "I'd love to go, if it weren't for this darn frost." The most powerful punch frost delivers comes as metaphor, for creeping age and death.
      It used to be called "hoar frost," though that term would only confuse people if used in conversation nowadays, as it would no doubt be heard as "whore frost," and imagined to be perhaps a colorful antique term for some symptom of venereal disease.
     "Hoar" means a grayish white, usually relating to hair—we speak of people being "hoary with age"—and I noticed Monday this little display of flattop hairiness on the frost atop our Weber grill, a quality associated with frost. Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, if nothing a book of fine distinctions, defines frost as "more fluffy and feathery than rime which in turn is lighter than glaze."
     Frost forms first on metal easiest because metal cools quickly, and frost is a phenomenon of cold drawing out moisture from the air.  Frost is really just frozen dew, the condensation that forms when the temperature drops and the air can no longer hold the water that's evaporated within it. The night before had been clear with little wind, perfect conditions for forming frost, a situation that Samuel Taylor Coleridge refers to in his beautiful ode to his son, "Frost at Midnight," whose opening lines are, "The Frost performs its secret ministry/Unhelped by any wind."

Coleridge

       When Coleridge wrote that, frost already was well-freighted with symbolic value.  Six years before Coleridge used frost as a somber frame around his son's new life, Robert Burns had written, in "Highland Mary" in 1792, "But, oh! fell death's untimely frost/That  nipt my flower sae early." The habit frost has for killing plants — in full evidence Monday, as a purple Persian shield I had meant to whisk into the house was turned black from the cold — was transferred to human.  Shakespeare wrote of "An envious sneaping frost," in"Love's Labor Lost," "That bites the first-born infants of the spring." ("sneap" is an archaic term for a rebuke, what we'd now call a "snub.")
     Just as it is winter that makes the springtime so sweet, so it is death that makes our lives so precious. At the ending of "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge places all his good wishes upon the cradle before him, while pushing away thoughts of frost and its friend, " the sole unquiet thing" stalking us all. 

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw;
whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

     For writers, there is a parting lesson here in the value of revision. Coleridge re-wrote this poem at least seven times, changing what had originally been "the secret ministry of cold" to "the secret ministry of frost," which just sounds more poetic. Indeed, that's perhaps the best way to think of frost: as poetic cold.

Frost, left.

Chicago could use a new poet

     Think about your mother.
     How would you describe her, to a stranger?
     "Nice smile" or "brown hair" or "made angels out of copies of The Reader's Digest, folded over and painted gold"?
     Here's Patricia Smith, writing about her mother:

     Whenever I dream her young, I see red dust on her ankles and feet. Those feet were flat and ashy, steady stomping, the corn on her baby toe raw and peeled back. No shoes could hold them. Those feet were always naked, touched by everything, stones asked her to limp and she didn't. Low branches whipped, sliced her skin, and they urged her to cry and she wouldn't.

     And that was her mother only below the ankles, as a child, still in Alabama. Though that changed after what another writer would describe as, "she took a bus north."
     This is how Patricia Smith put it:

     Apple cheeks, glorious gap-tooth fills the window of the Greyhound. For the occasion, she has hot-combed her hair into shivering strings and donned a homemade skirt that wrestles with her curves. This deception is what the city asks. I dream her sleeping at angles, her head full and hurting with future, until the bus arrives in the city.

    The city she's heading toward is Chicago, so Smith can be born here, 60 years ago, and become our city's poet.
     What? Chicago's poet is Carl Sandburg? Really? Still? Nice guy, played the guitar. But he's been dead almost 50 years. "City of the Big Shoulders" first appeared in print 101 years ago. Saying Carl Sandburg is the city's poet is like saying the Cubs star is Gabby Harnett.
     Better off with Patricia Smith. A living city deserves a living poet. Smith writes poetry that sears and sizzles on the page. Like Sandburg, she worked at a Chicago newspaper, the Sun-Times, which she joined on March 23, 1987 — I know that date precisely because I was hired on the same day. We two made up the staff of The Adviser, a Wednesday insert that taught readers how to organize their garages and exile Japanese beetles from their lawns.

Patricia Smith

   We didn't like each other. In her eyes — she never said it, but she didn't have to — I was a privileged white guy, buffed by Northwestern University to a bright white guy sheen and deposited near the summit of the hill that she had to drag herself up by hard work.
     I called her "Queen of the Nile," behind her back, a sort of backhanded compliment to her air of dignity, if not hauteur. She wrote her poems in the newsroom, on the glowing green ATEX computer screens.
     Smith left the paper, went to the Boston Globe, then left journalism, under a cloud that becomes less worth recounting with each new honor given her: last year, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, early this year, the Library of Congress' Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. There's many more, but you get the idea. She teaches at the College of Staten Island now.
     She does get back to Chicago. She has won four National Poetry Slams, and reads at the Green Mill, whose Uptown Poetry Slam would be the pride of Chicago, if the city knew enough to take pride in the pivotal place Chicago holds in American poetry. Home to Poetry magazine, which published T.S. Eliot's first poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when both were young, and continues to offer wonder, every month.
     I've seen Pat read at the Poetry Slam. Jaw-dropping, and it'll be interesting to compare her performance in the loud, crowded, boisterous bar to how she manages the austere glass shrine the Poetry Foundation built to itself at 61 W. Superior when she reads there at 7 p.m. Tuesday, joined by fellow poet Reginald Dwayne Betts. I'm going, and my wife, after I read her "Building Nicole's Mama," is eager to go, and you want to go too, even if you don't know it yet.
     Because as powerful as Patricia Smith's poems can be to read — and some are delivered like a slap — they really should be read aloud, preferably by the poet herself. But until then, here, try this, from the essay about her mother I quoted above:

     Chicago. Say it. Push out the three sighs, don't let such a huge wish languish. Her world, so big she didn't know its edges, suddenly not enough. She's heard the dreams out loud, the tales of where money flows, and after you arrive it takes, what, a minute? to forget that Alabama ever held sugar for you.

Operable bollards

     Some words you're proud to know.
     "Neurofibromatosis," for instance,  the medical term associated with what people think of as The Elephant Man's disease. It feels like an accomplishment just to pronounce the word, and I admit, after learning it while writing an article on facial disfigurement last year, I let it roll off my tongue a few times more than I needed to, just to savor the mastery of saying it.
      And other words are something of an embarrassment.
     "Bollard," for instance—those squat posts used to keep vehicles out of certain areas. I'm quite ashamed, actually. Maybe I just assume that nobody knows what "bollard" means, that it's too esoteric a word. Maybe it sounds somewhat naughty, like "bollocks."

Bollards

      Which is why I took a small comfort from this sign. "Operable Bollards," which must baffle some people -- it refers to those circles in the ground to the left. The bollards rise, either manually, or pneumatically, at the touch of a button in some engineer's office, to cut off the driveway to the Allen Center at Northwestern University. (It was the lower sign, "Authorized Vehicles Only," that prompted me to park my car, stupidly, and walk to the building, while other cars, either authorized or, more likely, not as cowed by signage as myself, came and went).
     I seem to recall a Wall Street Journal article, years ago, about bollards that rise out of the ground being a thing in Los Angeles, both a status symbol and a way to make certain that nobody is going to steal the Ferrari parked in your driveway. I did a bit of digging. They're also known as "retractable" or "telescoping," bollards, and will set you back about $500 if you raise and lower them manually, ten times that for automatic bollards that rise up using a mechanism. 
     The word, by the way, is not that old—an 1840s nautical term, according to the OED, referring to the posts on ships where ropes are secured. The Oxford guesses that it comes from "bole," a term for tree trunk that dates to the 1300s. 
     Now the question is, knowing "bollard," how long will it be until you're showing off to friends. "There's the store, just past those bollards." My bet is, if you read this blog, it'll be sooner than later. You can blame me.
     

Drone encounter

     Heading to the train Thursday afternoon, I noticed a white drone hovering about 15 feet above the center greenery of Wacker Drive, just south of Lake Street. A DJI Phantom drone, operated by a young man who toggled a joystick on a remote control box. 
     I shot a brief video of its flight. 
     Drones are buzzing around the public imagination, and not in a good way. Much in the news, and worrisome to people who assume they'll be peering through our windows and killing us randomly. Though as a student of the history of technology, if I know one thing, it is that every new advance is greeted as an unacceptable threat. As if we have this deep well of terror in our souls and grab out a handful to smear on every new thing that comes along. 
     Electric light, the telegraph, the telephone, TV, computers, all were the opening gong of doom.  Yet each was woven into the daily tapestry of our lives, no longer unacceptable, because each did change us, in ways great and small. What we didn't realize was, being changed, we were not the same people who fretted at their arrival. Even that most perilous of advances, nuclear energy, proved tamable in the long run, or at least didn't kill us all, as we once expected, and not without good reason.
        Right now drones are little more than expensive toys. The drone I saw costs about $1,000. I know that'll change, and soon. I can't imagine the air will someday be thick of them, hurrying on their business. But then I couldn't imagine we'd all carry cell phones either. 
      I know this. Yet every time I hear about Amazon wanting to deliver packages by drone, I still think, "Huh? How is that going to work?" A drone is going to take off from the roof of an enormous facility in Des Plaines, motor over to my place, to drop off a book?  That can't be. They still seem like their cousins, jet packs, as one of the will-0-the-wisps of the future that we pine for but never achieve. They'll be good for taking arial shots of real estate and not much else.
     Said the guy who hasn't ordered a ride on Uber yet.

     When the young man brought his drone down, I asked him what it was for. School perhaps?
     "We're doing a project right now, for something called Radpat," he said. I should have quizzed him more, but I had a train to catch, so thanked him and hurried to Union Station, assuming I'd be able to figure out what "Radpat" was. 
     All I could find is a project measuring background radiation, which makes sense, I suppose. That might be something a drone could be helpful with, though I'm not sure how. Maybe he meant "Radpad," a service for finding apartments. That could work too. 
     Anyway, Nov. 5, 2015 I saw my first drone hovering above Chicago. I figure, I might as well make a note of it, to look back on when they crowd the sky like migrating geese. 

Lake County lessons echo

     Lesson #1: The coroner takes the heat.
     That's his — or her — job.
     They not only have to examine dead bodies all day, a tough enough task, but then must share their findings, even when they contradict what powerful people wish were the truth.
     It's a lesson we've been taught before, but the jaw-dropping case of Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz reminds us again, a necessary lesson, because we keep forgetting. Nor is it the only lesson here.
     For those just tuning in: law enforcement in Lake County has been dealt a triple black eye.
     First, a corrupt cop stole money. If that weren't bad enough, he stole it from a fund set up to benefit kids, then considered murdering the official questioning his finances.
     Second, he killed himself and made it look like he was attacked by three assailants, sparking a manhunt, that briefly rounded up innocent suspects.
     Then the third, self-inflicted blow: Dr. Thomas Rudd, the Lake County coroner, examined the body, assessed the evidence, could not rule out suicide and was raked over the coals by Lake County law enforcement, loudly criticizing Rudd for "unprofessionalism." The commander of the Lake County Major Crime Task force said Rudd's findings put "the entire case at risk."
     Thank God he did.
     Before we in Chicago ride off on that high horse we've climbed up on, let's take a trip down memory lane, to 2009.
     This case should seem familiar.
     Two words: Michael Scott.
     Remember him?
     President of the Chicago School Board and pal of Mayor Richard M. Daley. He walked to the edge of the Chicago River, shot himself and tumbled in.
     The Cook County medical examiner at the time, Dr. Nancy Jones, examined the body, and said it looked like suicide, which enraged Daley, who denounced her as a publicity hound.
     "Her claim to fame, she has claim to fame — you know her name," squeaked the mayor. "That's why the Chicago Police Department has to do a thorough investigation, regardless of what the medical examiner says. They have to do a thorough investigation and come to the conclusion. He or she can say anything they want. But they have a responsibility to the family and society."
     A week later, the police department's thorough investigation said, umm, yeah, suicide.
     The mayor never apologized to Jones, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Keystone cops in Lake County to apologize to Dr. Rudd.
     Apologies are overrated anyway. What we need are guidelines. We've reviewed one. This terrible case underlines two more that might help us grasp the next time this sort of thing happens, which it will:
     Lesson #2. Cops always circle the wagons. They support their own, until the last moment it can be plausibly be done and long beyond. Truth is an airy abstract of no interest. Justice is what happens when the case goes their way. Toward that end, they'll ignore the obvious, plant evidence, lie on the stand, whatever it takes to back each other up (and expend a good deal of bile lashing out at anyone rude enough to mention it; trust me here). The reason police violence is constantly in the news is because the abuses that police once casually committed and routinely covered up now can be posted online for all to see.
     Lesson #3. Nobody wants to believe a loved one committed suicide. Ever. Not without a note, and often not even then. After Scott killed himself, Chicago magazine ran an elaborate conspiracy theory explaining why he was done in by shadowy forces. This despite the fact that the Chicago police had video documenting Scott's last minutes. To the defense of grieving families, suicide seems such an negation of their love, such a rude gesture in their direction, they'll clutch at anything that suggests otherwise. And suicide can be a very rude gesture, make no mistake. Phil Pagano was the head of Metra. He knew, better than anybody, the trauma that Metra engineers suffer when people jump in front of trains. He knew that, and made eye contact with the engineer driving the train as he stepped onto the track in front of it.
     Neither of these three truths are pretty or pleasant, and the one about police is hard to take. Yes, cops can tell the truth, when convenient. But when it comes to other cops, well, let's put it this way: remember that time a Chicago cop faced the wrath of his fellow officers to expose a dirty cop? Me neither.

Inside the girls' locker room

  

   I had two columns in Wednesday's paper, which was unusual enough. I chose to post the one about Spike Lee's "Chi-raq" yesterday, and save this one, about the controversy around whether Palatine should allow transgender teens full access into their new gender's school locker rooms, for today.

     Though I have to admit, I started to get the nagging suspicion, reading my emails Wednesday, that I side too much with the school district below, and while I'm posting this today (every...goddamn...day) I'm considering taking another swing at this issue, either tomorrow or next week. Maybe I'll get it right this time. In the meantime, your thoughts are appreciated. 

     My wife and I, sitting on the 7:34 into the city Tuesday, immersed in our his-and-hers copies of the Sun-Times, both on the same page, at the same moment, reading the same article, headlined "LOCKED OUT," a story about Palatine School District 211 refusing to comply with Department of Education demands that it allow a transgender teen, transitioning from boy to girl, unrestricted use of the girls' locker room at one of the district's high schools.
     District 211 students are allowed to use locker rooms of the sex they identify with — itself perhaps a shock to those not been paying attention to the whirl of cultural change — but are required to use a curtained area to disrobe and shower. One transgendered student found this stigmatizing and sued. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights is siding with her. The school district is standing its ground.
      "This is a case where I'm inclined to side with the school district," my wife said.
      "Maybe," I replied. "But wouldn't the same rationale keep lesbian students out of the girls' locker room?"
     No surprise that my wife and I each approached this issue from our own gender viewpoints. She assumed the concern was teenage girls being exposed to the sight of the equipment of this female-in-mind-but-not-yet-in-anatomy transgender teen. While I assumed the problem was allowing someone who is physically a boy, despite her aspirations otherwise, into the girls' locker room, where she might nevertheless ogle her classmates.
     Not the most accurate view of transgenderism, perhaps. But this is a new world we've sailed into, and we should expect a bit of blinking surprise as the new scenery clicks into place. I don't think that makes me a hater.
     It's an astounding debate to be having. If acceptance of gays has been swift, on the glacial scale used to measure progress for women and blacks, then the shift in society's view toward transgendered individuals is doubly astounding. We seem to have leapt overnight from "Boys Don't Cry" contempt to District 211 jumping through gender hoops and the feds threatening to withhold millions of dollars because it isn't high enough.
     Two conflicting interests are in seemingly irresolvable conflict here: the desire of privacy among the cisgender teens, i.e. those content with the gender biology assigned them, and transgender teens who want to be waved into every corner of the locker room with no rude attention drawn to any inconvenient anatomical features.
     "The district really has worked diligently and mindfully on serving the needs of all our students, including transgendered students," said District 211 Superintendent Daniel E. Cates, noting that the district has been scrupulous about adjusting to students' needs.
     "If a transgendered student comes to us, we don't hesitate to change their name, or change their gender within our system," he said. "Many districts are struggling even with bathroom access, which is not an issue with us, because we are able to provide some privacy."
     "Privacy" seems the key concept here. Boys-becoming-girls can use the girls' locker room, but discreetly, behind curtains provided for that purpose. The district expects "commitment from any transgender student to simply observe an individual measure of privacy," Cates said. "We believe transgender students would prefer privacy areas."
     "Wouldn't all students prefer privacy?" I replied. I know two teens — no names please — who went through four years at Glenbrook North High School without ever taking a shower, to my knowledge, a practice which, I am told, is not uncommon. Maybe the result of this delicate matter will be that, in trying to accommodate exceptional students, the long loathed, strip-down-for-your-classmates locker room routine will be banished to history, along with naked swimming and posture lessons.
     "That's exactly what we believe may come out of this," said Cates. "Measures of privacy allow developing teenagers to choose for themselves whether or not to use privacy areas ... safeguarding matters for transgender teens we believe will be helpful to students in our locker room."
     That's how it usually works out. What seems like it might be a burden done for a few ends up benefiting all. While I'm inclined toward kindness toward any teen struggling with sexual identity, their fervent desire to stride easily into the girls' locker room and be welcomed as one of the gang is still, at this cultural moment, constrained if they also possess a penis. Like it or not, society is going to teach them that lesson; they might as well learn it in high school.

What if "Chi-Raq" paints too rosy a picture?

"Slaughter of the Innocents," altarpiece detail, Philadelphia Museum of Art

     On a usual day in Chicago, the big story Tuesday would be the release of the trailer of Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq," which would seem to be the fulfillment of the worst fears of City Hall.
     It begins with flashing red letters, "THIS IS AN EMERGENCY," then a gunshot, the red stars of Chicago, dripping blood, and a voice, "Homicides in Chicago, Illinois, have surpassed the death toll of American Special Forces in Iraq."
     But whatever outrage the mayor might be tempted to indulge in should be resisted, given the facts on the ground. A 9-year-old boy gunned down Monday, perhaps deliberately. A few hours later and a few blocks away, a promising young woman murdered.
     Watching Spike Lee's trailer in the wake of that and it seems stylized, funny, wrong. A cartoony, Quentin Tarantino version of something serious as death.
     In non-movie Chicago, Kaylyn Pryor, 20, who a few weeks ago won Mario Tricoci’s 2015 "Mario, Make Me a Model" competition, was standing on a street corner in Auburn Gresham when a car pulled up, shots were fired. She was taken to Christ Advocate Medical Center and pronounced dead. That was 6:20 p.m. at 7300 S. May. Two hours earlier, six blocks west and six blocks south, Tyshawn Lee, 9, was shot in the head and back and died at the scene.
     I haven't seen the movie. That'll be released Dec. 4. And I'm not criticizing it. Maybe it takes the stark horror of crimes like the deaths of Pryor and Lee and makes them real and heartbreaking.
     But it is in rhyme, an update of "Lysistrata," a 2500-year old play about the women of Greece trying to end the Peloponnesian War by withholding sexual favors from their men until they agree to a truce and transporting it to Chicago in 2015 — well, you can't accuse Spike Lee of being derivative. The words seem right.
     "Welcome to Chi-Raq," exclaims Samuel L. Jackson. "Land of pain, misery and strife."
     The words are right. But delivered with a swagger, while wearing an orange suit. The two minutes-and-change trailer makes it seem like "Schindler's List" done as a Warner Brothers cartoon, with Bugs Bunny in the lead.
     I hope I'm wrong.
     But just as all the feel good pink ribbon breast cancer ballyhoo in October is increasingly criticized for making it seem like defeating cancer is a matter of enough positive attitude, so the implication that, even in a fantasy, the black women of Chicago's violent neighborhoods could bring this to an end if only they tried, well, there is something ugly lurking there.
     "We're going to make sure these fools put down these guns," Lysistrata says.
     Uh-huh.
     "Lysistrata" was a comedy, remember. Although it does share one sad fact with "Chi-Raq." Both productions are about wars that were still going on when they debuted. One thing is very clear, whatever the full movie turns out to be. Any embarrassment that Spike Lee's movie brings to Chicago is deserved. We should have been embarrassed by this ongoing human tragedy already, no movie necessary.

Steve Bartman: the song that never ends

     I worked on something I intended for tomorrow, but the topic was so thoroughly trivial — a change in tea box design — that I needed to marshall sufficient oomph to pull it off, and I wasn't able to, yet. Maybe a few days marination might help.
    So in lieu of something substandard or, worse missing a day (Every ... goddamn ... day!) I thought I'd post this, which was in the paper last week, and did cause a bit of a stir, drawing the range of comment, from support to those who felt that the only reason the story is in the public eye is because the media keeps bringing it up (one of those points that isn't half as clever as it seems, since most everything in the public eye is only there because the media keeps bringing it up). 
    Enough prologue. If you're missing baseball already, a parting glance at your favorite fan and mine, Steve Bartman. 

     Nothing tumbles into oblivion quite like baseball immediately after a team is eliminated from the playoffs.
     Straight from full-throated, spotlit frenzy to a dim chorus of crickets.
     Chicago was festooned with blue banners, the media thundering every angle; every 80-year-old coot who kept his ticket stub from the 1945 World Series was paraded blinking into the glare.
     Easy for me to keep quiet, then. But now, with the city settling down, there is a piece of unfinished business.
     Steve Bartman. The one guy the media really wanted in its clutches. Another season of the epic silence maintained — for those lucky few in blissful ignorance — since the eighth inning of game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship series, with the Cubs up 3-0 over the Marlins, when Bartman, tried to catch a foul ball and perhaps, maybe, kept Moises Alou from doing so. The Cubs folded, as they tend to. Bartman had to be escorted from Wrigley Field by security while fans pelted him with trash.
     He issued an apology the next day, and since then has kept mum.
     Bartman had nothing to apologize for. It would not have been the final out. The Cubs blew it all on their own.
     If Bartman had truly intruded upon the play, the umpire should have ruled spectator interference and called the batter out. Yet nobody blames the umpire. The public doesn't even know his name.
     We all know Bartman's name, which is the problem, and this would have melted away long ago had Bartman done what most people do — babble into any convenient microphone. Instead, Bartman refuses comment.
     Noble, perhaps. But also a red cape waved before the foaming bull of the media which, like nature, hates a vacuum.
     I'm writing about this now because I assume the young, talented Cubs team will be in contention again next year, the media will grab its harpoon and set out once again in pursuit of Bartman.
     Maybe, in the quiet of the post-season lull, a seed of sense can be planted.
     What could Bartman possibly say that would reward the media for its dozen-year quest? He could have lived the existence of Job, squatting in dust at the gates of the city, and express it with the eloquence of Joseph Conrad describing Lord Jim's wanderings around the South Seas, trying to escape his shame, and frankly it would still be inadequate. Silence is his best option.
     It is also his right. The way Bartman is being treated is a category error. He's being presented as a kind of baseball goat — an ESPN film in 2011 compared him to Bill Buckner. But Bartman is not a player who muffed a play. He's a fan, or was, before all this started. He's allowed to grab any fly ball that comes within reach. Yes, he might have pulled back. And Moises Alou might have sprouted wings and flown. Both are violations of human nature.
     Bartman should instead be included in that realm of anonymous individuals who are pushed unwillingly into publicity, along with modest heroes and crime victims. We have civil rights in this country, and hounding innocents is un-American.
      His silence has a kind of nobility though, as with noble acts, there is a cost. By not talking, he inadvertently keeps the thing alive. Were I his PR adviser, I'd say spend an hour with Carol Marin and be done with it. As long as he maintains his silence, he'll have ESPN reporters leaping from the bushes. The only way to end it is to feed the beast.
     I thought I would float this past his camp, so phoned his spokesman, lawyer Frank Murtha.
     Why doesn't this ever go away?
     "It somewhat baffles me," he said. "If I thought we'd still be talking about it 12 years later..."

     Instead the story resonates, and not just in sports media.
     "The thing most disturbing in this cycle is The Onion," Murtha said. "That's just outrageous."
     The satiric web site ran a bit where Bartman pleads to be killed in order to lift the Cubs curse. In this post-Charlie Hebdo period, you can see how this might worry Bartman.
     "What are the boundaries of satire?" Murtha asked. "Given the world we live in, people do horrendous acts. We still have some security concerns. We've had actual calls, to his place of employment."
     So for the record. ...
     "Steve won’t be interviewing with anybody about it," Murtha said. "When and if he chooses to speak or comment about it, it will be at a time and place and medium of his choosing. Not to say that time will ever happen."
     I hope he does, simply to make this go away. Because otherwise, it will never end.

Economic fear makes governments do bad things

   
     Being a Democrat, I know the government sometimes does good things.
     In Illinois, for example, the state supports programs for residents with disabilities, services for the blind, transportation for those with limited mobility.
     Or did, before the economic crunch prompted our leaders to push those people over the side of our foundering ship of state. You can't blame Bruce Rauner for this; Pat Quinn started peeling the fingers of the needy off the gunwales. Rauner just picked up where Quinn left off, and he seems to relish the process.
     Which I suppose points to the true essence of government, like every human activity: some good (helping the disadvantaged) and some bad (deep-sixing the needy).
     Though sometimes governments do things that are purely bad.
     For instance China. In the 1970s, panic over population growth — we thought we'd all be shuffling through dense cities crawling with people — inspired Chinese leaders to require that couples bear only one child. That grotesque intrusion into the intimate lives of their citizens was finally reversed last week, and so the news was filled with stories of the decades of horror that the rule imposed — compulsory sterilizations and forced abortions, infanticide — preference for sons prompted couples, particularly in the countryside, to murder their infant daughters. Life magazine ran a haunting photograph of a baby left in a forest. Some American tourists had found the baby and took her to a hospital, which returned the infant to the woods to die.
     That kind of awfulness overshadowed two very significant aspects of the Chinese policy that deserve attention.
     First, it didn't work. The birth rate in China in 1970, before the One Couple/One Child rule was begun, was 33 births per 1,000 population.
     By 1998, China's birth rate had fallen to 15 births per thousand, cutting its birth rate by more than half.
     Which would be impressive, except other countries, without the draconian One Child rule, had nearly the same result or more. South Korea's birth rate was 31 per 1,000 in 1970; in 1998 it was 14 per 1,000.
     In Thailand the change was even great: 37 per 1,000 in 1970, 16 per 1,000 in 1998.
     What happened? Birth rates fell everywhere, no coercion necessary, because the world urbanized and grew in affluence; couples living in cramped city apartments don't want as many kids as couples trying to run a subsistence farm. People did voluntarily what the Chinese government was trying to force them to do.
     Millions of second-born Chinese — I've seen estimates around 12 million — entered the world in rightless limbo and became shadow people, the Chinese version of illegal immigrants, without official documentation because they weren't supposed to be born and thus unable to go to school or get medical care. I used to savor a little-known coincidence of the two countries: the United States and China are nearly the same size geographically, the U.S. at 3.8 million square miles, China at 3.7 million square miles. Add to that a second eerie coincidence, one that has more real world significance: both nations have about 12 million residents living in permanent limbo, "but they're illegal!" the identical empty cry of those in both nations who would rationalize the injustice.
     Which leads to the second point about the one-child policy: it was inspired by economic fear. The Chinese wanted their country to grow, and worried overcrowding would sap their success. They didn't realize that trying to avoid one problem — too many people — would create a worse one: too few young people supporting a graying population.
     Economic fear is also driving policy in Illinois now. The disadvantaged are given the heave-ho, eroding the humanitarian atmosphere of the state, with the middle class's turn next, right now being seized by the back of the pants by Gov. Rauner for the tip over the side in his quest to destroy public unions. Even if he's successful — not a safe bet by any means — his actions, like the Chinese One Child policy, would instill much suffering while not creating an economic boon. Sure, it might mean more jobs, but those jobs would be worse.
     So we go from being a state with good jobs struggling to pay its bills to a state struggling less but with no middle class. Government policy prompted by economic desperation tends to fall hard upon regular people, whether China's One Child policy, or Mayor Richard Daley selling the parking meters, or Rauner's demand that unions be gutted as his ransom for agreeing to a budget.
     People will be hurt, and it won't end up helping anyway. A shame you have to be a Democrat to see it.

Sweet sorrow

I noticed on Twitter that Walter Payton passed away on this day in 1999. I remember that very well, because the City Editor turned to me and told me to write his obituary. I almost laughed out loud: I knew NOTHING about Walter Payton. I had attended exactly one Bears game. 
    But I was nothing if not a quick study. And Mark Brown must have helped me fill in the gaps, because on Nexis he is listed as co-author of the following, though I couldn't point out what parts are his and what parts are mine. The top certainly is mine, because I remember puzzling how to begin the thing, then deciding, "Start with the obvious and work from there." 

     The man could run.
     Everything else -- the fame, the money, the NFL records, the Super Bowl ring, the bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame -- flowed from that essential fact. Walter Payton ran beautifully, with power, grace, intelligence and a certain poetry that left onlookers amazed and hulking linemen grabbing at thin air.
     He died shortly past noon Monday at his South Barrington home after a yearlong battle with a disease from which he could not run. Until the end, he kept the seriousness of his condition a secret, a fact that left many of his fans grasping for answers like those stunned defenders.
     Mr. Payton, 45, was felled by bile duct cancer, said Dr. Greg Gores of the Mayo Clinic. In February, Payton had disclosed he was suffering from primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare liver disease, and needed a transplant.
     Former Bears linebacker Mike Singletary said he visited Mr. Payton at home Monday morning and prayed aloud with him at his bedside.
     "There was definitely a peace there I had not seen all year," Singletary said.
     Mr. Payton's son, Jarrett, a freshman running back at the University of Miami, appeared at Halas Hall to read a statement on the family's behalf, concluding with thanks to the people of Chicago.
     "You adopted my dad and made him yours. He loved you all. You have made this our home. We are proud to be among you," said Jarrett Payton, who remained composed during his statement and left without answering questions.
     Mr. Payton was the NFL's all-time leading rusher. His lifetime total (16,726 yards) is nearly a mile more than the career total of Barry Sanders, the former Detroit Lions star who ranks second on the list with 15,269. He covered every last inch as a Bear, from 1975 to 1987, and played on the Bears' victorious Super Bowl XX team. In a sport rife with devastating injury, Mr. Payton came away nearly unscathed: In 13 seasons, he missed just one game, over his objections.
     "He was the best football player I've ever seen, and probably one of the best people I've ever met," former Bears coach Mike Ditka said.
     Mr. Payton, who only revealed his liver illness after being stung by cruel rumors concerning his obvious weight loss, stayed mostly out of public view afterward.
     The disease, the cause of which is unknown, left him increasingly debilitated. After he appeared at Wrigley Field in April and threw out the first ball at the Cubs' home opener, Mr. Payton was so drained he had to cancel a speech the next day.
     This was a man who, not too many years before, could walk the width of a football field on his hands and bench press 390 pounds. Mr. Payton was famous for his fitness. His workout routines were grueling -- running up sandy embankments, shoveling dirt in the hot sun. He had half the body fat of an average fit man. His conditioning helped keep him from injury -- by running on his toes, he didn't plant his feet as much, reducing the punishment delivered by tackles.
     They called him "Sweetness" in college, because of his sweet running style, but like so much about Walter Payton, his nickname was deceptive. "From the start it was a misnomer," Sports Illustrated wrote in 1984. "He could fake and juke with the best, but what he really liked to do was run over people. 'Toughness' would have fit better. Opponents accused him more than once of actually going out of his way, of avoiding the open field or maybe even slowing down, just to take another shot at a defender. Payton admits he has done that."     
     Mr. Payton is credited with reviving the use of the stiff-arm, which had fallen from favor.  
     His teammates loved him.
     "He's a good, down-to-earth person, a humble person by nature," close friend and former Bears fullback Matt Suhey said in 1984. "He's very appreciative of the people around him. He doesn't want anybody to dislike him, and I don't think there's one guy on the team who does."
     But like many celebrities, Mr. Payton also was a person of contrasts: He was a savvy businessman whose techniques -- depending on one's point of view -- could be aggressive or grasping, visionary or over-reaching. He announced many business goals -- purchasing an NFL team, for instance -- that never came to fruition.
     Mr. Payton also loved pranks.
     "Firecrackers would go off in the middle of the night when we were all asleep," recalled former Bear running back Roland Harper, who was Mr. Payton's roommate on the road. "Walter would always say it wasn't him. But we knew, we knew."
     He was the most famous athlete in Chicago for a decade -- Chicago's adulation serving as a practice run for the arrival of Michael Jordan, in many ways his successor.
     "Walter was a Chicago icon long before I arrived there," Jordan said in a statement from his office. "He was a great man off the field, and his on the field accomplishments speak for themselves."
     Yet Mr. Payton also guarded his privacy, to the point of shyness. He moved his family to a five-acre compound in South Barrington to keep them away from prying fans, who nevertheless sometimes appeared on his doorstep. Mr. Payton was invariably polite in sending them away.
     Like Jordan, Mr. Payton was a fierce, driven competitor who hated to lose at anything, whether it was football or foosball. When he sprained his ankle on the last game of the 1976 season, losing a chance to catch O.J. Simpson in the race for the NFL rushing title, Mr. Payton was carried from the field weeping.
     He could be emotional. Mr. Payton did not always present the smiling facade of the hero. He had a tendency to complain. Before he was elected to the Hall of Fame, he announced that he might not accept the honor -- several players he felt should be in the hall were not. Immediately after his election, he demanded to know if the vote was unanimous because it would "bother" him if it wasn't.
     Despite such outbursts, he was generally modest; when the praise turned to him, he made a point to always pass it around.
      "Football is a team game," he said, upon his induction in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 1993. "And it takes everyone on that team to make a product such as these Hall of Famers."
     He was born Walter Jerry Payton in Columbia, Miss., on July 25, 1954, the youngest of three children of Alyne, a dietician, and Peter Payton, a factory maintenance worker. He remained close to his Southern roots -- he enjoyed hunting and fishing, and was often described by sportswriters as "blue collar."
     Mr. Payton didn't start playing football until his junior year at Columbia High School, when he transferred over with other students from the all-black Jefferson High School. His coach, Charles Boston, credited Mr. Payton's performance in the opening game of the 1970 season -- he sped to two long touchdowns to beat rival Prentiss -- as helping to smooth over those troubled times.
     "That did it for integration," Boston said. "The people didn't see a black boy running down the field. They saw a Columbia High Wildcat."
     At Jackson State University, Mr. Payton led NCAA Division II in football scoring with 464 points, the most in NCAA history. He was Football Roundup College Player of the Year in 1974, and sportswriters felt he would have won the Heisman Trophy if he had attended a bigger school and not a small, all-black college.
     Mr. Payton's moves at times reflected the grace of dance for a good reason: He was a dancer and, as with everything, worked hard at his technique. As a sophomore at Jackson State, Mr. Payton entered a "Soul Train" televised dance contest. He came in second.
     He graduated with a B.A. in special education, and had a lifelong fondness for children -- he had a standing order at the Bears' front office to be notified if there was something involving children that needed doing. His cherished Super Bowl ring disappeared after he loaned it to a suburban high school to motivate its championship-bound team.
     The Bears made Mr. Payton their first-round pick in the 1975 draft. In his first game, he had eight carries for zero yards. He rushed for just 679 yards on the season.
     Other than the strike-shortened 1982 season and his final year, he never again rushed for less than 1,000 yards, a benchmark of greatness for professional running backs.
     Records began to fall before him like so many bowled-over defenders.
     On Nov. 20, 1977, Mr. Payton, battling the flu, rushed for 275 yards -- the most ever by a player in a single game -- and scored the only touchdown in a 10-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings at Soldier Field.
     "Maybe later it will mean something, in three or four years or so, after I'm out of football," he said in the locker room. "Right now, it's just another game."
     Another great moment came on Oct. 7, 1984, when he passed Jim Brown's all-time rushing record of 12,312 yards. His teammates mobbed him. Play was interrupted for three minutes. The ball was plucked away and dispatched to the Hall of Fame. President Reagan phoned from Air Force One. When Mr. Payton said to give his regards to Nancy, the president put her on the line.
     Mr. Payton was noted for his versatility. He not only ran well, but caught passes, threw devastating blocks, could punt like a first-stringer and was once put in as quarterback.
     Part of the legend of Mr. Payton's imperviousness to injury came through his ability to play through pain. In the last game of the 1983 season, he carried the ball 148 yards despite several cracked ribs.
     "It's a mental thing you have to deal with," he said.
     Mr. Payton played a key role in the Bear's championship 1985 season. There was controversy over Ditka's decision, with the Bears up 37-3 late in Super Bowl XX, to tap 310-pound defensive tackle William "The Refrigerator" Perry for the one-yard carry for a touchdown, instead of giving Mr. Payton what would have been his only Super Bowl score. Mr. Payton spoke bitterly about it, in both public and private.
     After he retired in 1987, the Bears retired his jersey, No. 34.
     In the years since his retirement, Mr. Payton became known as a businessman, owning nightclubs, restaurants, and other establishments. He was the first African-American owner of an Indy race car.
     As recently as July he purchased a minority share in the expansion Arena Football League team that will play in Rosemont in 2001.
     When Mr. Payton was approaching Brown's revered rushing record, he was asked about the importance of statistics. He said the rushing record might be one of his bragging rights someday.
     "You know how guys are when they get old," he said, quickly pointing out that broken records won't be the most important memory of his playing career.
     "The things I've gained personally from these people," he said. "The love and friendship that I've obtained, it means more than any numbers could ever say."
     Survivors include his wife, Connie, son Jarrett and daughter Brittney. Services will be private at the family's request.
     A committee has been established to work with the city on a tribute at Soldier Field sometime next week.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 2, 1999