'You have to like it better than being loved'

       When talking to young people about writing, I try to get them to think about their audience. To whom is their primary responsibility? To themselves? Their readers? The publication they're writing for? The subjects they're writing about? 
    How do they balance these often competing interests? 
    I maintain that the order is 1) readers; 2) yourself; 3) publication and, 4) subject.  If you put yourself first, riffing on whatever your private fascination happens to be with little regard for its effect on those reading, that's a recipe for boredom. 
    If you put the publication first you're a hack (I believe good writing IS putting your publication first, though your boss might not realize it at the moment). 
    And if you write for your subject, you're a whore, pleasing one person while the rest can go hang.
     Thus you have to expect to take heat from one of the parties lower down the pecking order, particularly subjects, who chronically feel ill-used, no matter how delicately treated. 
     When I wrote a piece about an opera soprano last week, I thought I had hit a sweet spot where all involved would be pleased. I hadn't. The Lyric complained, quite forcefully, and I had to remind them that I didn't write it for them. I am writing for readers who, truth be told, care little for the opera, less for Wagner, and have to be led to the subject via something they do care about, like fitness.  There was no deceit—I explained to the singer exactly what I had in mind. But she obviously didn't quite believe me until she saw it in print, which was a shame. 
     That happens a lot. 
     Regular reader Tom Evans mentioned the column below as an instance where those written about felt ill-used, though he wasn't sure why. I'm reprinting it so you can try to find what the problem is. I have a hunch. This group finds Sherlock Holmes and his world a font of fascination, while my column views them with a certain awe for feeling that way. I didn't share their passion, and that offended them. I didn't do it to slight them, but because a) I'm not a particular Holmes fan and b) I was writing for readers who, mostly, were not in thrall with Arthur Conan Doyle. 
    That's the price you pay for being written about and for writing. As Marge Piercy's great poem about the writing profession, "For the young who want to," ends: "You have to like it better than being loved."

     First, the toasts.
     We all rise, holding our glasses high, and Dr. Franklin Saksena rhymes: 

            She used to sing at La Scala
            And met the king at a gala
            She threatened to send their picture to the king's future wife
            Which was bound to cause a lot of strife
            During the pantomime ball,
            Sherlock Holmes found the pictures in the wall
            But Irene Adler outwitted them all
            What gall.

     He finishes—after a few more stanzas—with "To Irene Adler!"
     At which the dozen men assembled in a pine-paneled party room at Mirabell, a North Side German restaurant, hoist their glasses to the villainess and exclaim "Hear hear!" Then more toasts.
     Welcome to the March meeting of Hugo's Companions, a group devoted to that great detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful sidekick, Dr. Watson. There are about 280 such groups nationwide, 25 or so in Illinois. 

      "What we have here is one of the most vibrant Sherlockian communities in the country," said Donald J. Terras, past president of Hugo's. "No other city I know of in the world has as many Sherlockian groups as we do here in Chicago."
     The Sherlockians regard the Canon—their reverent term for the 56 short stories and four novels about Holmes and Watson written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—with deep affection.
     "We're all pretty much enamored with that time period—a simpler, less complicated time," explained Bill Sawisch, current president of Hugo's Companions. "Holmes and Watson represent what was good in the world at the time. 'It is always 1895' is something people say quite a bit in these groups."
     They are called "scion" groups since they descend from the original Sherlockian club, the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1934 in New York City by journalist Christopher Morley. The oldest Chicago group, The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic)— the "(sic)" is part of the name—was begun in 1943 by Chicago Tribune book columnist Vincent Starrett. Hugo's Companions formed in 1949. There are more.
     Why so many? Why don't Conan Doyle fans all form together into one society with a band of chapters speckling Chicago?
     "That's a very good question," said Sawisch, who is also president of the STUD Sherlockian Society ("STUD" being short for "A Study in Scarlet") and, rather than answering, launches into a protracted digression, an occupational hazard when talking to Sherlockians: "Everything started with the Hounds, Hugo's being the next group, then the Criterion Bar Association. That group started because of Hugo's Companions, with the wives meeting..."
     The participation of women, while settled in modern society, is still an issue here where, remember, "It is always 1895."
     "In some ways it's still controversial," said Margaret Smedegaard, who along with three other wives of Sherlockians founded the Criterion Bar in 1972. "The Baker Street Irregulars started admitting women about 10 years ago, and that helped. There is a recognition that women are just as capable in the Sherlockian world."
     Just as capable . . . of drinking beer?
     "As intellectual, as knowledgeable," she said. "Many of them have written articles."
     After dinner, announcements and a quiz, during which members show an alarming command of the minutia of the story "The Six Napoleons," Tom Evans rises for the evening's entertainment, a talk on "The Real Dr. Watson."
     "There will be no need to take notes in order to pass the test," jokes Evans, reassuring us he will hand out copies of his speech afterward, which he does.
     "I was going to begin by saying the several influences bearing on preparation of these remarks amounted to a 'synergy of serendipity,' but my Webster's unabridged dictionary tells me that isn't quite right, so I will call it instead a 'confluence of coincidences'..." begins Evans, explaining that his talk came out of a request that he toast "this most familiar inhabitant of our Sherlockian world."
     They do recognize the fictional aspect of the tales, if grudgingly.
     "Whether Inspector John H. Watson M.D. is or is not real can be a matter of conjecture," says Evans, whose talk addresses three questions: "Just who was he, what was he really like and, for those eccentrics among you who might hold to the bizarre notion that both Holmes and Watson were fictional characters, what real person might have inspired his creation."
     Twenty-nine minutes later, his talk concludes.
     Young people, for reasons mysterious, are not racing to join Sherlockian groups, and the membership ages.
     "We've lost a number of great people over the years," says Evans. "I don't know how much of a future any of us have."
     The evenings concludes, as tradition dictates, with a reading of a poem by Vincent Starrett called "221B" the Baker Street address where Holmes and Watson live in the stories and, to some, live to this day:
     "Here dwell together still two men of note/Who never lived and so can never die," Sawisch begins. "How very near they seem yet how remote/That age before the world went all awry."

     The poem, thick with yellow fog and splashing hansom cabs, concludes:
     "Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
     And it is always 1895."
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2011

Lee Harvey Oswald wanted butter on the table

     I'm not sure I ever get to the real point in this column, which came to me only today. What I was trying to say is that there is more interesting stuff in the Kennedy assassination story than the standard "Who done it?" question that can never be answered. Stuff that most people don't know and won't learn from this new data dump. That comes across, at best, as a subtext in the column itself, so I thought I should say it directly first thing.

     Many hieroglyphics have never been read. At least not since whatever tomb or ruin where they were discovered was unearthed. The papyrus or pot shard is collected, put into a drawer at an academic institution to await someone to come along and read it. Fifty or 100 years might go by.
     Just as well. When scholarly eyes finally fall upon ancient writings, they find not a beautiful poem or key piece of history but a sales receipt, another inventory of wheat or a recipe for beer. Most of life is ordinary, even under the pharaohs.
     That truth echoes to the current day. Ordinariness abounds though we refuse to accept it.
     The last batch of classified Kennedy assassination material — thousands of pages — is expected to be released Thursday.
     Oh goody, just what we need. More words about the Kennedy assassination. Because there just aren't enough now. We're curious about the new batch even though we have only the vaguest notion of what we already have.
     In one of those coincidences that would look trite in fiction, I can, as I sit here writing, shift my right knee six inches and touch 21 volumes of "HEARINGS BEFORE THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY." Sturdy blue volumes, each with the Great Seal of the United States on the cover.
     The 2-foot-high stack is under my desk because the Sun-Times is moving its office to the West Loop. Part of the process of squeezing our physical presence to fit a smaller space has been shedding books. The Kennedy report was fished out of a dumpster by a colleague, then abandoned at my office like 21 blue-swaddled babes since I'm the crypt keeper, apparently, for this kind of thing.

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Great Moments in Public Relations #1

     
     Let me say off the bat: I know lots of skilled public relations professionals. Thoughtful, hard-working, competent. My column would be a far less diverse, less interesting place were it not for the continual pitches of people trying to catch the attention of the media and promote worthwhile stories. Happens all the time. 
     But not always. PR can also be jarringly off-putting, particularly considering the goal: to present something in a favorable light. From the robotic, going-down-a-list-and-now-I've-got-to-you phone calls, which never work, to the off-point, don't-you-read-the-column? pitches that I could never write about in a thousand years, to information that is just so trivial, such a stretch, it's hard to imagine that the most charmed hireling could hope for success, not matter how well-paid.
    Then there is mere carelessness. I am certainly susceptible to that. I can misspell a word and often do. So carping about others, who don't have a fabulous hive intelligence like the readers of this blog to set them straight, well, runs the risk of making me something of a hypocrite.
    But heck, there's a lot of that going around lately. And what's more fun than spotlight the deficiency of others? In that light, I'm going to start an occasional feature I've dubbed "Great Moments in Public Relations," where lapses in the publicity craft are held up for inspection, censure and ridicule. I'm not optimist enough to hope that it'll help keep the industry on its toes. But at least we can have fun, and show that some minimal communications standards remain. 
    Sit back, enjoy, and see how many of these gaffes you've encountered. Or committed.

1. Dear Your Name Here.

     We know these aren't really personal notes. But do you have to grind our faces in it? Particularly this one, from a Los Angeles firm, natch. Nothing screams "We're not paying attention" like the sans serif-to-serif shift. I've also gotten Dear ______ emails. Really?


2. Please be our guest ... tomorrow. 

     This Tuesday message is what prompted me to write this today. Happens more often than you would expect, though not always on the Messenger app on Facebook. I did my best to obscure the identity of the writer, since I'm not trying to drive anyone to leap off a bridge, since their intentions were good, I suppose. I replied by saying that I wouldn't go to a dinner honoring myself on a day's notice. Another man would be insulted; I was more amused.

3.  Dear Kneel...
  

     To be honest, so many people mangle my name—Neal, Niel, Neil Steinburg—that it doesn't even bother me anymore, and it would be petty to let a good idea go by for that reason alone. I actually responded to this email and we discussed the topic. Then I realized I did it last year.

4. Pay particular attention to that first sentence.

     I normally wouldn't even glance at a press release from N'Digo, not after its publisher sold herself to Bruce Rauner (plus, of course, her low attacks on me for suggesting that Carol Moseley-Braun wasn't going to be elected mayor of Chicago). They all go straight to trash, where their publication belongs. But figuring I should round out this list, I thought I'd give it a read and see whatever lapse was waiting. I didn't have to read far....
 
     So that's the opening salvo. Please feel free to share your own examples, and perhaps we can make this a bi-monthly event, if the interest is there. Or if this exercise is just too mean—I've had that thought too—let me know and this can be the first and last occasion.

But can that virtual finger painting go on the refrigerator?

Brad Newman, left, and Christine Lee prepare food at the Bennett Day School on West Grand Avenue in Chicago. 

     Food is a lesson that lingers.
     I can't recall much about the learning being doled out at Fairwood School in 1966. Something about Henry Hudson, something about pilgrims.
     But lunch is still very clear. I can see those metal pans of boiled hot dogs, the Borden ice cream sandwiches, frozen hard in industrial deep freezers. A dime apiece; a nickel for half a sandwich.
     Lunch is still important, judging from the Bennett Day School, a new private elementary on West Grand Avenue.
     "It's part of a dialogue between the students and teachers," said director of admissions Amanda McQuade, noting teachers eat with their students, teaching them how to converse and conduct themselves. Eating is carefully integrated into the curriculum; for instance, kindergartners eat in their room.
     "At this age, going into the cafeteria was way too over-stimulating for them," said Sara Violante, a senior kindergarten teacher. "We eat five to six kids at a table, one teacher at each table modeling how to interact with each other, engaging in conversations. It's definitely worked very well, especially having three teachers in the classroom."

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It's a dog's life

   

      I rarely pre-meditate places before I go—that is, rarely wonder about what they'll be like when I get there. Because what I find is invariably so completely different than what I would have anticipated.
      Take Saturday. The Chicago Botanic Garden had its "Spooky Pooch Parade," a once-a-year chance for canines to be dressed up in their Halloween best and invade the Botanic Garden's otherwise pet-free environs. I'd never gone before, but they asked me to be a judge, and of course I said "Yes." How could you not?  
     If I had to guess, I would have pictured a smattering of costumed dogs. Some owners. Maybe they'd saunter by while the judges scowled and scribbled. Maybe we'd hold up panels with numbers on them. It would be casual, meandering, low key. 
     Instead it was surprisingly busy, frantic. Dogs of all sizes, teacups to cattle, owners from infants to oldsters.  Meanwhile, I was busy, asking questions, trying to be fair en masse and on the fly
     What is fairness? What did being a judge mean? It meant I was given a clipboard and a pen and set before a long line of people and their dogs. Some judges were picking best overall costume, or best puppy, or best senior—owner, I think. My task was to pick the owner who most resembled their pet. "Resemblance" is key, the judges' instructions explained.

I put Kitty in costume but didn't enter her.

     Three hundred dogs entered, meaning there were a least 500 people, if not more. I had to ask each one the name of the dog, its registration number, age, costume. There was a place for my comments and a score. I tried to be light, positive, encouraging, but found myself straining to hear the dogs' names above the din. Rover? No, Grover. 
     Most people do not actually look like their dogs. Nowhere close. Particularly the young people who were competing—I'd say half were children. And the costume ensembles did not really resemble their dogs either. So they'd be Dorothy and Toto—I had several of those—or R2D2 and an Ewok. Nicely matched, but not looking like one another in the slightest, supposedly my most important metric.
     A consideration I instantly considered setting aside. You want to give it to a kid, right? The prize would mean most to someone young. They feel life most keenly, its frequent slights and occasional honors.
     Or would that be bad? Skewing the contest in a way it shouldn't be skewed? There was nothing about the worthiness of the recipient in my instructions. And where does spookiness come in? Should I favor the rare scary costume over the sea of cute?
     My scoring settled into giving 11s and 12s to people who had tried but weren't in the running—slapped together costumes—and 13s and 14s for those worth considering, rigs where dog and owner matched to a laudable degree. 
       My initial favorite was a guy who dressed as peas in a pod and a dog also dressed as peas in a pod. They matched closely. "Did you make that?" I asked, and he said he did, radiating a certain sincerity, almost a sadness, that made me want to choose him.  What kind of guy makes a peapod costume for his dog?
     But really? Give it to the adult man rather than the three girls who dressed as crayons with their dog—albeit in store-bought Crayola t-shirts. Does store-bought disqualify them? Why? I was swayed for a while by two teens who dressed as shark victims—it was a Spooky Pooch parade, and this was one of the few creepy costumes. Plus it was hand-made. So points for concept. But, again, they didn't match their shark-dressed dog at all, which is what I was supposedly judging. 
     We broke for lunch and I shared my dilemma with the other judges. They, in essence, shrugged. Afterward, we assembled on a riser with the people before us. The throng gathered around us, expectant. I scanned around for my peapod guy, but he was nowhere to be seen. Would it be bad to give the prize—a bag filled with $500 worth of dog goodies and coupons—to someone who wasn't there? Nor were the crayon girls nor the shark victims, as far as I could tell. There were a lot of people. I hoped for time to puzzle this through, but the host called on me first, standing on the far left, to deliver my winner. At that moment my gaze fell upon a couple dressed as the Minions, in yellow terry rompers, with their goggled dog also very Minion-like. They certainly resembled one another. I called an audible and gave the prize to them, immediately wondering if I had done so too precipitously. They seemed happy. The adults I mean.
    Judging is hard. What criteria is most important? The guidelines set out by the Botanic Garden? To reward effort—there was nothing in my instructions about favoring something homemade; just the opposite, they pointed out, for my purposes, costumes weren't even necessary. And how about the desire to give the prize, and the measure of happiness that prizes bring, on someone deserving?
     No doubt I was over-thinking this. It was just a dog contest. I came away not so much gladdened for giving the prize to the winners, as sorry that I had to ignore so many losers. Some of us are not cut out to be judges.
       

Baha'i celebrates a bicentennial: "People can just walk in."

  

    Chicago is a center of so many things—the blues, candy, pinball—it's easy to lose track of some of the quieter examples of this, such as the Baha'i faith, which isn't as fond of violence and repression as most religions are, and so tends to be overlooked, with the exception of its one magnificent local manifestation, the splendid Baha'i Temple in Wilmette.
     Today, Chicago Baha'is are celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Mirza Husain-ali Nuri, or Bahá’u’lláh as he came to be known, "Glory of God." in Iran in 1817. He was the messenger of the other totem of Baha'i, the "Bab," whose bicentennial is in 1819.
     If you feel like partying, you can go to the South Shore Cultural Center tonight—here are the details—for the rest, I thought it an apt moment to unearth my look at the Baha'i faith and Temple at the building's centennial five years ago.

     Ask most Chicagoans what they know about the Baha'i faith, and they might mention the House of Worship, a magnificent domed edifice of delicately latticed concrete on the lakefront in Wilmette.
     The temple is hard to miss—at 191 feet high, you could easily tuck the Jefferson Memorial inside.
     "It's on people's radar that this landmark, this unusual building is there," said Glen Fullmer, a spokesman for the faith. "But they're largely unaware of what it stands for or where it came from."
     The Baha'is have just completed a 10-year, $20 million restoration of the building, the oldest and, in their view, holiest of seven Baha'i temples scattered around the globe. The work is completed just in time for a celebration at the end of April to mark the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the building's cornerstone.
     "It does not act as a church with a congregation," said Fullmer. "All the Baha'is don't go there for their weekly worship. That building is considered a continental house of worship, a symbolic building. Most worship is happening in people's homes and little community centers."
     That might come as a surprise. Press Chicagoans for details of Baha'iism, and you'll most likely draw a blank, which is too bad, because in many ways the faith is unique among global religions.
     In a world of controversial priests and fiery imams, there is no Baha'i clergy whatsoever. Anybody can conduct a service. Administration of the religion is handled by elected boards without spiritual authority. They have no rituals. Services tend to be readings from the holy books of other faiths—the Bible, the Torah, the Quran—as well as singing.
     They don't proselytize vigorously—Baha'i missionaries will never come to your house and try to convert you. "It's very much a do-it-yourself religion," said Fullmer.
     Nor will they ask for money—they only accept funds from other Baha'is.
     The religion's central belief is that the earth is one country and humanity its citizens, that all religions reflect the will of a single God and all are equally valid. They stress education, equality and an elimination of prejudice.
     The faith started in Persia—in what is now Iran—in 1844.
     Its central figure was a man named Mirza Husain-ali Nuri, who took the name Baha'u'llah, whose teaching and writings form the foundation of the faith.
     The Baha'i consider him on par with Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Buddha, who all share equal status as divine prophets.
     About 5 million people follow the faith worldwide, with about 170,000 in the United States, with 2,000 of those around Chicago, where in 1894 an insurance salesman named Thornton Chase became the first Westerner to adopt the religion.
     Within five years, there were several hundred Baha'is in and around Chicago. They quickly decided to build a temple to house the growing religion. Representatives from Chicago went to what was then Palestine to meet with Abdu'l-Baha, the son of Baha'u'llah, who had taken over as leader following his father's death in 1892. He encouraged them to build a temple, and the dedication was something of a carrot to get him to come to Chicago, which he did.
      Several years were spent scouting a location. Jackson Park was considered, but Wilmette was settled on for its rural setting and inexpensive lakefront land.
     Despite his presence, the May 1, 1912, dedication was something of a bust, as far as cornerstone ceremonies go. First, the guest of honor was two hours late. Second, the ceremonial trowel would not pierce the thick springtime grass and somebody had to run and borrow a shovel from a nearby road crew.
      And third, there wasn't actually a cornerstone, but only a chunk of limestone scrap that a woman had begged from construction workers and taken to the site on a horse-drawn streetcar.
     Money still had to be raised. Construction did not begin until 1920, and the temple was not completed until 1953.

   Still, the crude cornerstone remains as a symbol of the do-it-yourself quality of the faith, to this day surrounded by a triangle of velvet ropes in the ground floor visitor's center at the temple.
     Above, the temple seats 1,200, and is accessed by nine doors—the number nine is highly significant in Baha'i, representing unity.
     Work on the nine gardens around the temple is just now being completed, the final stage of the rehabilitation project.
     "We repaired the entire temple itself, cleaned it and got it ready for its next 100 years," said Scott Conrad, a California architect who has been project manager on the refurbishing.
     About 25 percent of the surface area of the building was rebuilt, including the steps, which were completely replaced.
     To clean the intricate concrete work, skilled mountaineers were hired from Alaska and Colorado to rappel down the building, cleaning the facade with brushes.
     "It is considered the world's most exquisite concrete building," said Conrad, standing among a mass of purple flowers being planted in advance of the centennial. He said the gardens were never before quite up to what the founder's son had hoped for when the temple was first planned.
     "These gardens are completely new," he said. "In the Baha'i community, the gardens are part of the temple, and these gardens are a fulfillment of Abdu'l-Baha's wish."
     Now, what they would like is for Chicagoans to visit.
     "There is a misconception, 'Oh, this must be secret,' " said Fullmer. "The temple is open every day. People can just walk in, sit and enjoy the spirit and serenity of it, regardless of their faith. It's a sacred place they can go. That's really the hope of the Baha'is, the main purpose of it."

           —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 22, 2012

'Don Quixote,' ripped from the headlines

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, by Honore Damier

     "Self-praise is self-debasement."
     "Craziness has more companions than wisdom."
     "If a man cannot govern himself how can he govern others?"

     Now seemed a perfect time to flee into "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes, to get lost in the vast 400-year-old Spanish novel of a deranged knight and his trusty mule-borne sidekick, Sancho Panza.
     You can run but, alas, you cannot hide, and a vexing present will sneak up where least expected. I don't want to suggest that "Don Quixote" is suddenly a political novel, ripped from the headlines of 2017.
     Let's just say the tale of a delusional old man who blunders about, claiming to help people while actually attacking innocent passersby and then interpreting the resulting fiascoes as embellishing his legend of unmatched glory, well, there was a certain unexpected relevance.
     Or as the Knight of the Sorrowful Face says: "The woman they call Fortune is fickle, and blind and drunken and doesn't know who she raises up or sets down."
     Tell it, brother.
     I do have to give technology a nod. Our brave new digital world gets a bad rap for mooting books, and rightly so. But the sword cuts both ways, to offer a proverb in the spirit of Sancho Panza, that endless font of aphorisms. Technology can also be literature's friend.

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If I don't see it, it's not there

     I wanted to share this reaction to last week's Mike Ditka column with you. No further comment is necessary. 

Hello Mr. Steinberg

     I disagree with your assessment of so-called racism and this social injustice that the Left/Progressive seemed so fond of throwing around around so much.
     Individuals you mentioned like Mohamed Ali and another one from that time frame did not suffer from Racism or social injustice.They rose to the top of their respective professions and made millions from their efforts. Jesse Owens was a classic figure in his own right and showed what a Black man could do during the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin, Germany when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis held power.
     Yes in a small degree racism does exist yet you need to include some from ALL race's not just some Caucasians. This social injustice doe's not exist since people from all race's made millions and are successful in their respective fields and professions.
     There was no need to put down Mr. Ditka of his statement by saying he is not a man for saying what he did. Is not the left for dialog or his it for dialog under their own terms Mr. Steinberg ???
     Mr. Ditka right in his assessment of what was and is happening now and then.
     Hope to read your next article soon.

Respectfully yours

Joe P.*

* He signed his full name, but I'm abbreviating it, as a kindness.

Making English muffins won't add a second to the Trump administration

   

     Maybe we're doing this whole Trump thing wrong.
     Maybe liberals—horrified, rapt, gazing fixedly at each new jaw-dropper through latticed fingers, only tearing our chalky faces away from the endless slow motion train wreck to grab each other hard by the shoulders and screech, "Can you believe this?"—have fallen into a rut.
     Shock gets old. On Monday Trump lied that Barack Obama never called families of fallen soldiers. On Tuesday, trying to wriggle out of that lie—or sincere delusion, what does it matter?—Trump asked whether Obama called Gen. John Kelly after Kelly's son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, using his chief of staff's personal heartbreak as a tissue to blot the mendacious froth from his own lips. By the time you read this Wednesday, Trump will have sailed off into new territory with some unimaginable false tweet, callous remark or cruel policy.
     Must we flinch at each one?
     Maybe we need to step back, breathe, take a break, consider the big picture. Yes, this is an ordeal. We've also sailed off someplace strange and have to live there for the foreseeable future. Exiles in Crazyland. Everything this president says is still important, but not in the traditional, reflect-reality sense of importance. It's important in the yet-more-evidence-of-unfitness sense. But who really needs more evidence? At this point, either you get it or you don't. I certainly get it, and bet you do too. If you don't, well, instead of writing to me in all caps shouting how much you don't get it, consider this: just because you don't perceive something doesn't mean it's not there. Can you get that?
     For those who grasp what's happening, a ball peen hammer on our skulls, a thought: this nightmare is also an opportunity, a chance to be better people, ourselves.
     What should we do? Nurture your own non-Trump reality. Because otherwise, he can poison your whole life and you go mad, and there's too much of that already.
     Work at making your non-Trump existence richer. I did something recently that I've never done in my entire life and, I would bet, none of you have never done either, or even contemplated doing.

     I made English muffins.

     A longtime reader, Don Lennie, sent me a batch of English muffins years ago. They were really, really good. I meant to whip up a batch myself, but who has time? So years passed. Then recently he wrote me, signing his email, “The English muffin guy.” And I realized that I had been negligent.
     The process took about five hours, including two long breaks for rising. I’d say it was a full 90 minutes of effort, from securing the yeast, gathering the ingredients and utensils, mixing, kneading, rolling, cutting, setting out to rise and cleaning the floury, dough-crusted kitchen. Finally — who knew? — frying the rounds on a griddle. English muffins are fried like pancakes. More cleaning. Wrapping the bounty.
     So worth it. Lennie said he got the recipe from the Cincinnati Enquirer in the 1970s and has been perfecting it ever since. They taste so good, fresh and flavorful, with hints of cornmeal and a whisper of yeastiness. I ate some, froze some for later, and gave a few to grateful neighbors.
     Life can be better than what we’ve got, but we need to work at it. There’s not much we can do about the president. He’s unfit, probably unwell, and until Robert Mueller lays out his treachery in stark detail we’re stuck with him. Maybe even afterward. Anything is possible, in the worst sense of the term.
      But also in the best sense of the word. You aren’t stuck with the mediocre muffins sold in stores. You can make your own fresh, fantastic muffins. It’s permitted. I believe now is a time to make our own reality, to keep track, certainly, of the pickax strikes at our national foundation. But filtered. Because whether you are serene or disturbed, happy or anguished, it won’t take a second off of the daily disaster, the hourly horror unfolding in Washington. The president is not changing and his supporters cannot change. But we can change. In fact, we have to.

   
   

Have a nice day!

     The smiley face, a graphic low-point of the 1970s, if not of all time, has had its iconography thoroughly documented already, by Smithsonian magazine among others. So I won't bother rolling it out here, except to note that for some reason the smiley face is less objectionable when  shrunken to an emoji at the end of a sentence. 
     Why? Perhaps because it is so very small. Or, more likely, because the internet is a cold medium, nuance is often lost, and if there weren't a way to telegraph that we are speaking in jest, well, we would all be forced to slit our wrists in a warm bath. 😊
     Or maybe we just got used to it, our standards of communication worn down like a rock under a waterfall. OMG.
     Then again, "Have a nice day!" the one-size-fits-all blow-off vale we tossed at each other for decades, wasn't exactly the Sermon on the Mount either. Let's not blame technology for reflecting our flaws.
     On Sunday, in Evanston, before we slipped by the offices of Legacy.com for the Society of Professional Obituary Writers breakfast, my wife and I killed time by stopping in that mecca of all things baked, Bennison's, where we picked up a laudable baguette for dinner. I noticed that their creative bakers had augmented smiley faces with, for want of a better word, frowny faces.
     "Which sell better?" I asked the clerk, who indulgently pulled their tray out of a case at my request so I could photograph them properly. She said that the smile faces are more popular—I guess all is not darkness quite yet, or else people are trying to cheer themselves up however they can, allaying this Trumpian gloom with simpering sweets. 
     Although some people, she continued, will specify the frowns. "They'll order four at a time," said the clerk, who reluctantly agreed to be included in the shot, and I didn't want to push my luck by asking her name. You can't be too careful in this world. No wonder we're so glum. I didn't have the presence of mind to buy a cookie, so I can't say whether I went smiley or frowny—the latter, definitely. Besides, they are a better value: you get extra chocolate icing, in the form of of those vexed eyebrows. Next time.

Christine Goerke: "You can't do this if you're not healthy and strong"

Christine Goerke, right, rehearsing with Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid.

     If you are daunted at the prospect of sitting through five hours of Wagner, imagine performing it on stage.
     Picture leaping from rock to rock, dressed in armor, crying "Ho-yo-to-ho," then singing, in German, in tune, and loud enough to be heard over a 93-piece orchestra all the way in the back row of the Civic Opera house 212 feet away.
     Contemplate doing what soprano Christine Goerke does night after night in "Die Walküre," which opens Nov. 1 at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
     "It's very much like running a marathon," said Goerke, relaxing after a recent rehearsal for the second part of Richard Wagner's epic "Ring Cycle" that Lyric began last year. "I will be on stage about three hours. It's very physical."
     Described by one top critic as "now arguably the finest Wagnerian soprano in the world," Goerke in person is whatever the opposite of a diva is: warm, easy-going, quick to laugh, a reminder that when she isn't traveling the world singing opera, she is a New Jersey mother of two girls, married to a construction superintendent.
     "They are the love of my life," she said.
     Goerke sings Brünnhilde, the most recognized character in opera. When Bugs Bunny dons a winged helmet with braids, he is parodying Brünnhilde.
     "The huge lady with the braids," as Goerke describes her. "A stereotype we are fighting right and left."
     It's a stereotype that, like Bugs, is 75 years old, harkening back to the "park and bark" days when enormous sopranos stood on one spot and belted out arias. While Wagnerian singers can still be large — Goerke is 6 foot and generously proportioned — they also must be fit. Goerke bristled only once in our conversation, when I suggested that her character evokes the adage, "The opera ain't over until the fat lady sings."
     "No. Absolutely not," she said. "I am busting my ass to try to be healthy."

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Encounter with an owl

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

"Malle Babbe" by Frans Hall

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's NFL protest stand immoral, un-American

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The Barnett sisters

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

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

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

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

Mike Ditka is not a Chicagoan

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

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