Handy concept #4: Pattern recognition

     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues with a phenomenon which inspires a great deal of American nuttery.

Pattern Recognition 

    A twig snaps. You freeze, staring into the darkness. A form gathers itself into a bear. You run and don't look back.  If it turns out to be a bear-shaped bush that sent you dashing across the savanna, well, you'll probably never know your mistake.  You're gone and, like those with the most acute pattern recognition, you live to reproduce, and pass down your sharp eyesight and honed reflexes. Fear is protective. There's no upside for standing there too long, blinking into the darkness, thinking, "Hmmm, now is that really a bear?"
    Thus human beings are good at finding meaning in patterns, and acting on those meanings, even when the meaning is a spurious one. It worked well for tens of thousands of years.
     Doesn't work so well now.  Modern life doesn't serve up many predators to detect lurking in the shadows. But our complex world still deluges us with information, more so than any rain forest, and people still want to find meaning in their half-seen perceptions and passing glances. 
     Often it's benign. Who hasn't felt a frisson of pleasure, detecting bunnies and ducks in the clouds? Who hasn't gazed at an object and suddenly recognized something hidden, such as the cheerful face in the photo of the red Austin-Healey Sprite above?  There's a harmless pleasure in it. 
     Sometimes the pleasure is not so harmless. The Sept. 11 attacks are among the best documented crimes in modern history, but naturally, a few facts among the multitude don't easily fit, or don't seem to easily fit, and to those of a certain twist of mind, it is natural to apply their finely-honed pattern recognition to that bare framework of inconsistency and then stretch the most elaborate fantasies over it. Suddenly, to their eyes, the official version of what happened is a lie, and this flimsily supported fabrication is the truth. It's as if some viewers convinced themselves that giant bunnies were really lurking in the clouds and started demanding that the Air Force shoot them so we could make rabbit stew.
     Why do people conjure up these conspiracies? Epic events — like 9/11, like the Kennedy assassination—create vast volumes of data, enough to provide grist that some people, inclined to reject the standard narrative by an intrinsic suspicion, can stare into the sea of information and recognize whatever pattern or plot they care to find. They find a validation in it, a false power, a way to elevate themselves among the common herd, who credulously believe that World War II actually happened. Thus every smudge in the sky, every blurred light becomes an alien mother ship, every plausible explanation is discarded for a malign one backed by a few scattered twigs of evidence. That there are actual conspiracies, from time to time, only makes matters worse. Those also back up their belief that they have secret knowledge, and they insist that anyone who questions them is being willfully blind and a dupe.
     There is no question: pattern recognition can be useful, leading us to draw valid insights out of masses of random information, recognizing significant designs and meanings. Sometimes there really is something dangerous in the shadows.   
     More often there isn't, and pattern recognition leads us down the road to over-reaction, self delusion and folly. The key is applying rigorous thought to immediate impressions. Before you bolt, ask: what am I really seeing here? Examine all the facts, not just the ones that line up with the dots you want to connect. Is that really a bear? Or is it a bush? Gather all the facts, don't just cherry-pick the ones  propping up your hunch. Are we seeing instances of a new trend? Or is it the "three examples make a movement" lazy lifestyle reporting you see, even in respectable newspapers?
      The key to pattern recognition is to use it, rather than let it use you. Otherwise, one salient detail pops out and suddenly you're fleeing in misplaced terror across the veld. Some people can be set off by a single observation. They see an inverted triangle, and the epiphany hits them: "Oh my God -- Lou Malnati's ... Illuminati! How clearly do they have to spell it out?!?!" There are a lot of people who think like that; try not to be one of them.

Handy Concept #3: Regression to the Mean

     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues with the engine behind many an otherwise inexplicable disappointment in life.

Regression to the Mean

     Let's say you do something excellent: write a best-selling novel, bowl a perfect 300 game, pitch a no-hitter. Congratulations. What do we know about how your next effort might fare? Because you've already proven yourself as capable of something great, will you probably do even better next time? Or will you likely do worse?
     Sorry to report, the tendency is for you to do worse, because of a nagging little reality known as "regression to the mean." It tells us that when there are averages of something -- most books sell crap, most bowlers bowl under 200, most pitchers give up hits during a game—that any exceptional achievement is by definition a rarity and the next attempt will, probably, bend toward the average, as opposed to away from it. A study of more than 4,000 major league baseball players who had batting averages above .300 in a season found that 80 percent did worse the next season.
    The classic example involves military pilots. When trainees would do well in flying exercises, their superiors noticed that if they were praised for their performance, they would do worse on the next outing. So they started criticizing good performances, until they realized that outstanding flying was followed by lesser results whether the pilot was praised or criticized.  
    There is a comforting corollary to this -- just as superior performance will, on average, be followed by something worse, so a really bad job should be followed by improvement, again on average.
    Bearing this in mind helps us grasp specific examples of falling short, which should not be surprises, but expected.

    “Regression effects are all about us," Amos Tversky and Daneil Kahneman wrote in their influential 1973 paper on the subject.  "Most outstanding fathers have somewhat disappointing sons, brilliant wives have duller husbands, the ill-adjusted tend to adjust and the fortunate are eventually stricken by ill luck. In spite of these encounters, people do not acquire a proper notion of regression. First, they do not expect regression in many situations where it is bound to occur. Second, as any teacher of statistics will attest, a proper notion of regression is extremely difficult to acquire. Third, when people observe regression, they typically invent spurious dynamic explanations for it.” 
     That has to be of some comfort to guys like Frank Sinatra Jr. 

Divvy Diary: Biking with the mayor

     This was a strange story. At first I was told the press wasn't invited to this ride, but I was, which is the sort of distinction guaranteed to give any reporter pause. On one hand, who'd turn down riding bikes with the mayor? On the other, it's almost like they're saying, "We're barring real reporters, but you're a tool, so you can come along." I don't consider myself a tool, so I went, if only to be there if he pedalled into an open manhole. The whole thing was supposed to be off the record, but I complained enough that parts got nudged back on the record. ("I'm trying to earn a living here," is what I actually said to the mayor). It made it harder to write an interesting piece about a puffball event, but there you have it. The line I use about Rahm Emanuel is that he's so concerned about his image, it makes him look bad. Still, I had a good time, and the mayor seemed at ease. We rode around, and then all had lunch at Revolution Brewing, and he was candid, though also distant, as is his way. Still, compared to the aloof, frozen lock box of a personality of his predecessor, Richard Daley, Rahm is Holly Golightly, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. 

     I had to go to Milwaukee and Wabansia to meet a man.
     Monday was the latest in a string of beautiful mid-October days. A Divvy station is there, so I thought to bike it, my first long-distance — OK, 3 miles — trip on Chicago’s bike system. I left the Mart at 10 a.m.
     The system isn’t intended for long jaunts — you are limited to a 30-minute trip before Divvy starts piling on fees. But I figured, even at my plodding pace, I could make it to Wicker Park in half an hour for my appointment.
     The city was criticized when the program rolled out over the summer for not putting enough stations in the far-flung (and poorer, and minority) areas of the city. But reports from London and Paris, which have similar bike share programs, show that might have been a wise call for Chicago. Paris, which in good socialist fashion scattered its stations evenly around the city’s poorest quarters, is finding big problems with theft and vandalism, problems that London — and Chicago — have so far avoided by keeping the bikes mostly around the city center.
     Heading to meet this guy, I took Orleans north, until it dead-ended at Division Street, then a left, past where Cabrini Green used to be. Times change. Right on Clybourn. I was distracted by a big shrine, pulled to the curb. Photos of a bearded young man, an expanse of plastic flowers stuck into a chain-link fence. "WE LOVE YOU BOBBY" freshly chalked on the sidewalk. A 26-year-old Groupon employee, killed last May, allegedly by a drunken

Mercedes driver. The rider was wearing a helmet. Didn't help. Also on the fence, a poem, protected in clear plastic.
     "I don't want to get on my bike," it begins. "But you, Bobby Cann, wouldn't want that. You would want everyone riding whenever and wherever possible."
     That's all you can do. Sitting on your duff can kill you just as readily as cycling can.
     At 10:22 a.m. I reached Milwaukee and Wabansia. The fellow I was meeting wasn't due until 10:45. My plan was to stroll over to the Chicago public library across the street and poke around. But the library doesn't open until noon on Mondays. Hard times.
      A group of young people were assembled, winners of some sort of contest. Their reward: to meet the same guy I was meeting. I asked one of them to tell me about the event, emblazoned on his yellow T-shirt. "I'm not allowed to," said Brian, 29.
     Here's an idea, not a new idea, perhaps, but a good one: free press. You talk about your event, it gets into print. Think about it.
     At 10:51 a.m. Mayor Rahm Emanuel showed up. The plan, as best I understood it, was to ride our Divvy bikes around the Logan Square area. The mayor likes bikes.
     I expected some kind of Potemkin Village sham, with traffic held back and city workers hastily slapping orange and red paint on fallen leaves. But it seemed fairly straight, with the mayor in the lead, and the young people affiliated with the event following.
     We stopped at a small park that will be an entrance to the new Bloomingdale Trail - nobody is going to call it "The 606," and those pushing the digits ought to give up trying. We stopped at the shuttered Congress Theater, where the city's director of historical preservation, Eleanor Esser Gorski, spoke briefly. She also talked at the Illinois Centennial Monument in Logan Square, which was designed, she said, by Henry Bacon, the architect of the Lincoln Memorial.
     "This is why I love the city," said Emanuel, pedaling a blue Divvy bike, helmetless, along Logan Boulevard. He seemed buoyant.
     Emanuel said that Milwaukee Avenue has the most commuter bike traffic of any road in the country, at some 4,000 bicyclists a day. He is pleased that "Divvy" has so quickly become an accepted verb in the Chicago argot. That won't keep branding rights from being sold—he said for $5 million or $6 million—to pay for upkeep and bike lanes. But that whoever buys the rights will keep the "Divvy" part, and so it'll be "Eli's Cheesecake Divvy Bikes" or whatever. (Citigroup, which owns Citibank, locked up naming for New York's bike-share program, dubbed "Citi Bikes," paying $41 million for five years).
     After lunch, I cast a longing look at the L at California, but figured there will be time for that in winter. Hopping on a bike, I peddled south. Chicago isn't supposed to have hills, but there seems to be one on Chicago Avenue. As I approached the paper, my half hour was running out, so I cut down Kingsbury, I was going to check the bike in and get a new one, starting the clock over, like a Pony Express rider getting a fresh mount. But it felt so good to not be on a bike—I figure I rode eight miles—that I decided to walk, stiffly, a cowboy too long in the saddle, back to the paper. New York gives you 45 minutes.

Handy Concept #2 — Cognitive Dissonance

     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues, with a concept that is something of a flashlight, to help understand a woefully common condition. 

Cognitive dissonance

"A man with a conviction is hard to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
                                   -- When Prophecy Fails

     Cognitive dissonance is why you should never argue with Tea Party members. 
     It is the established psychological phenomenon that, in the face of being shown to be wrong, many will cling to their error even more tightly, and shut out the conflicting information, to avoid the grating clash of having their core beliefs scrape against reality (hence "dissonance.")
     “Presented with evidence unequivocal and undeniable” that a certain belief is mistaken, they nevertheless “frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than even before," wrote three psychologists from the University of Minnesota, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter in their classic study, When Prophecy Fails. 
     Published in 1956, the book was written by researchers who infiltrated a cult led by an Oak Park housewife, Dorothy Martin, who believed—and convinced her neighbors to believe—that the world would end on Dec. 21, 1954, and she and her followers would be swept up to heaven by flying saucers.  You can read my column about the Oak Park doomsday cult by clicking here.
     The world didn't end, but Martin and certain of her crew believed even harder in the saucers, and in a doomsday that had been postponed. In fact, they worked harder to win new recruits. 
    Why? The personalities of many people are closely intertwined with their fallacious beliefs— their faith, their prejudices, their extreme political positions are accepted as givens and beyond evaluation of question. On the other hand, the non-existence of angels, the desirability of a certain policy of the president's, the need for gun laws, are not ideas they can entertain, because to do so would threaten what they see as the core of their existence. It's a matter of pride, and maintaining inner harmony. They'd rather be wrong than admit to being wrong and adjust their attitudes.
     This is why I stopped debating politics with a lot of people. I am not the Idiot Police, and if someone wants to cling to folly, that is their business, their misfortune. Sure, it's tempting to do otherwise—it's our misfortune too, since they often insist their error become our dogma. When you see someone posting on the dangers of vaccines, you want to say, "Surgery is dangerous, too. People die. All the time. Are you against surgery too? What about car travel?"
     It gets you nowhere. 
     By the way, the flying saucer cult that Dorothy Martin founded, the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara, still operates to this very day, in Mount Shasta, California. Delusion takes on a life of its own. You can't stop it, you can only recognize it and try to give it a wide berth.

Handy Concept: #1. The Self-Selective Group

Intellectual Toolbox Week 

"The Watch," by Hebru Brantley

    "Great minds discuss ideas," Eleanor Roosevelt once said. "Average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." 

      That's one of those statements that sound a lot more profound than it actually is. First, much would depend on the particular idea, event or people being discussed.  If the idea at hand is the physical existence of elves, a great mind wouldn't spend too much time pondering that one. Second, the more you consider her remark, the more it seems a half-clever backhand to just about everybody, since human beings, being social, discuss each other most of the time, then interesting events, only occasionally drifting off into the airy abstraction of ideas. When my kids come home from school, I don't say, "What ideas did you talk about in school today?" I say "What happened in school today?" (Not that it matters what I ask. Great teens don't discuss ideas; average teens don't discuss events; small teens don't discuss people).

     Since the idea (woo-hoo, look at me, I'm a great mind, I'm discussing an idea! ) of having a week devoted to a particular topic worked so well in August (fiction) and September (stuff I love) I thought I would veer in the opposite direction from cool things and focus this time on intriguing ideas, but to try to avoid any taint of smug brainy vanity, let's call this week's theme, "Handy Concepts." That has a more down-to-earth feel. More than anything, each is a useful notion to have in your back pocket, like a wrench, a few tools to tuck in the back of mind for future use. An Intellectual Toolbox.

       Years ago I was walking through the men's locker room at the Lakeshore Athletic Club. I must have just read one of the periodic articles about what a fat nation we've become, how a third of American adults are obese. But the men around me weren't obese—just the opposite: they looked pretty fit. Varying ages and body types, but not one true fatty among them. 
      Maybe, I mused, at my locker, the study is exaggerating...
      Then it struck me. Oh, right. I wasn't looking at a random sample of men in American. I was looking at men who belonged to a health club. And by definition, those men would be more fit than was average for two reasons: a) just joining demonstrate concern for the condition of one's body and b) by being a member, they occasionally use the club, and that helps a person be in better shape too. 
     I'd be more embarrassed to admit this lapse were it not so common.  The self-selective group fallacy is a pit we all tumble into, sooner or later. It explains why the opinions of other people in other parts of the country can seem so unexpected and hard to believe. Being surrounded by people we know creates the illusion that that's how people are, generally. My friends live in and around Chicago, we tend to be liberals, so don't, for instance, believe in crazy conspiracy theories or fetishize guns. It's comfortable to believe the world is also like this. We forget that we are forming false judgments based on the incomplete evidence offered by the people we chose to associate with, who are all members of our club. 
     People forget that their cocoons don't represent consensus. Having grown up marinating in their church or small town, they march out into society and incredulously discover that everyone isn't like them. A lot of our political Punch & Judy show is due to people falling prey to the self-selective group fallacy.
     The idea of self-selective groups is also useful in recognizing polling bias. If you interview people at a mall about shopping, your survey is already skewed pro-shopping, because your sample is made up of people who are already at a mall. They're in the act of shopping already. If you take your shopping poll at a library, you may find very different results.
     Or to cite a real, close-to-home example. When former Illinois senator Carol Mosley-Braun ran for mayor of Chicago in 2011, the N'Digo weekly did a poll of its readers and found Carol beating Rahm Emanuel by a vote of 27.4 percent to 22.7 percent. Carol celebrated this as great news. “CAROL MOSELEY BRAUN BEATS ALL MAYORAL CANDIDATES IN LATEST N’DIGO POLL” her campaign trumpeted.
     In the fact-based world, those results would have only been encouraging had the poll been taken of a random cross-sample of all Chicagoans. But it wasn't. The poll  was of N'Digo readers, whom the weekly admitted were mostly African-American ladies.
     "Moseley Braun issued a press release bragging that she bested Rahn Emanuel, barely, among politically active black ladies, nearly a quarter of whom were voting for Emanuel," I wrote in the Sun-Times. "That's like me bragging that I beat Rahm Emanuel 3-2 in a poll of those sitting around my dining room table, if you take the joyous yip of the puppy as a vote for me. Would you view that as a mark of certain Steinberg victory, or a sign that two members of my own family wouldn't even vote for me?" You can read the entire column here.
     Once you realized that Carol barely squeaked ahead of Rahm, even among black women voters, you had a glimpse how thoroughly she was going to be trounced. As it turned out, she received a pitiable 8.9 percent of the vote, which means the bias of the N'Digo poll tripled her actual support. 
     My pointing this out, by the way, inspired Carol's forces to brand me a racist and picket the paper, demanding that I be fired (you can view the video here).  In her closed, self-selective world, the picketing seemed like a good idea that might lead to a practical result. Outside that world, however, it was a cause for astonishment and a mix of amusement tinged with pity. 
     A reminder that being able to think things through, using concepts such as the self-selective group, is not without risk. Many can't make that leap along with you. Many who can't perceive that biases are introduced by their like-minded associates, and so will assign other motives to your belief. They will tend to view your ability to see outside their circle as a kind of malign magic.

Dan Savage puts Obamacare in perspective

I don't normally do two posts a day — one seems plenty. But I have a weeklong series starting tomorrow, "Handy Concepts," and the newspaper tossed up my Monday column early, so I thought I might as well post it here as well. There's no one like Dan Savage to cut through the fog and bullshit about a topic, and he does so to great effect, at least on me, regarding Obamacare in his new book, "American Savage."

     For a moment, I was almost sorry Dan Savage is gay, sorry that he writes a sex advice column, sorry that he’s someone who can be so easily dismissed by the people who need to hear him most.

     Sorry that he waited until Chapter 13, 203 pages into his new book, “American Savage,” to turn his incisive mind to Obamacare, long before the Republicans shut down our government and held it hostage over the issue.

     I had been half watching the shutdown through latticed fingers, as the latest chapter in the endless political Punch & Judy show to which our politics have devolved. I did not see it in the clear, moral terms Savage paints, didn’t see the deep hypocrisy.

     “Jesus commanded his followers to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and care for the sick,” Savage writes. “Making health care available to all seems like a no-brainer, Jesus-wise among the most Christian projects a president, or a nation, could possibly undertake.”

     But it isn’t, for reasons he explores. Tea Party sorts despise the government. They hate the president even more. “Barack Obama is bad,” Savage writes, channeling Tea Party thought. “He runs the government (bad) and he’s a socialist (bad). And if a government-running socialist is for something, well, then that thing must be very bad.”

     This, despite the fact that Obamacare is tepid, far from the one-payer system found in every other civilized country in the world. Even though it is basically a giveaway to the health-insurance industry that doesn’t quite fix the problem (the chapter is called, "Still Evil. Less Evil. But Still Evil.") a policy first thought up by Republican think tanks and first tried in Massachusetts by a Republican governor - Mitt Romney, remember him? - who would later completely renounce its undeniable success in a jaw-dropping, soul-damning attempt to be president.
     "If a Republican president had signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law - crafted by a conservative think tank, beta-tested by a Republican governor, backed by the health-insurance industry - the GOP would be crowing about how it represented a triumph for conservative thought and governance," Savage writes.
     But alas, the Worst Man on Earth except for, maybe, Satan, is behind it, so it must be opposed, no matter how ethical, no matter how necessary. Savage revisits oblivious claims of Republican politicians that everyone has health care. "You just go to an emergency room," George W. Bush blubbers.
     Then Savage documents the truth of the situation. Thousands die every year for lack of insurance and the medical care that comes with it. He quotes a study from Johns Hopkins Children's Center: "Lack of health insurance might have led or contributed to nearly 17,000 deaths among hospitalized children in the United States."
      I can't summarize the entire 23-page chapter. I wish it could be made into a pamphlet, or emailed to every voter, but that would suggest Obamacare opponents are thinking sincerely, and they're not. Conclusions first, reasons cherry-picked later.
     He even does something I didn't think possible: earn respect for Justin Bieber. Savage quotes a Rolling Ston e interview where the Canadian pop star sneers at us. "You guys are evil," Bieber says. "Canada's the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don't need to worry about paying him." That peace of mind somehow offends religious Christians, and Savage takes time to find out why: They believe it smacks of "government control" and "coercion."
     "Obamacare isn't Christian because Jesus Christ wants each of us to make an individual choice to be charitable. Collective acts of charity - a society coming together to make sure all citizens have access to health care - isn't Christian because Jesus wants us to choose to be charitable."
     Which strikes Savage as odd, because "the very same Christians who oppose collective, coerced, society-wide action to provide health care to all . . . turn around and argue that we must take collective, coercive action as a nation to prevent women from having abortions."
     On second thought, it doesn't matter if he is a gay sex columnist. No one is listening to reason anyway. If this battle were about sensible policy, it would never have started. Once a group turns its own religion's moral system upside down, once it hypocritically oppose its own program and kneecaps its own country to do it, the members are beyond argument, no matter the source. The clear thinking of Savage's analysis braces those of us who stand firm in the face of this implacable enemy in our midst. That is enough.

Impressioni d'Chicago

Sympathy is in short supply and it must be rationed, apparently. So when Columbus Day comes around, lately all we can seem to do is reflect on the undeniable barbarity of Columbus toward the indigenous people he found here, and shrug off the prejudice that Italians faced coming to America, which compelled them to form the holiday in the first place. Which strikes me as wrong. Why should history be divided so neatly into the good and the bad, when there is pity — and blame — enough for all? Since some journalists — no names please! — make such a point of repeatedly rolling in tales of the Mafia and Italian-American criminality, I thought, Monday being Columbus day, it might be a good idea, if only as a change of pace, for the briefest nod at a few of the Chicagoans of Italian extraction who weren't Al Capone or his descendants:

     Giuseppe Giacosa was a playwright who turned to writing opera librettos, penning three Puccini classics — La Boheme, Madam Butterfly and Tosca — before he died at age 49.

     He also traveled and wrote a book, “Impressioni d’America,” visiting Chicago just before the World’s Columbian Exhibition . He was taken, as all visitors were, by the industry, “enormous factories, interminable streets, amazing shops, deafening sounds.”

     And by the smoke.

     “I did not see in Chicago anything but darkness: smoke, clouds, dirt,” he wrote, noticing something unusual for sale, “in many shop windows certain apparatus for covering the nose, a kind of nasal protector, or false nostrils.”

     Chicago is a city that has hosted one wildly overpublicized Italian-American resident — Al Capone — and millions who are underrecognized, from those who spent their entire lives here, to visitors such as Giacosa, who stayed for a week.

     With October being Italian Heritage Month and the Columbus Day Parade on Monday, this seems an apt moment to look at a few of those overlooked Italians.

     Driven from Italy by the extreme poverty there, immigrants to Chicago found the same waiting for them here and had to take the most menial jobs to try to escape it: "street sweepers and pavers, railroad workers . . . bootblacks, barbers, and scissors-grinders" according to historian Bessie Louise Pierce. "Later they might attain the envied status of small merchants and fruit peddlers or seek jobs in the factories."
     They faced such prejudice that L'Italia, Chicago's Italian-language newspaper, published lists of restaurants and hotels they could patronize. Oscar Durante, its vigorous editor, pushed his compatriots to "Americanize" and had a policy where the newspaper would provide any reader an escort to Chicago's naturalization office and pay the 50 cent registration fee.
     Not all were fruit sellers. The founder of the Chicago Pasteur Institute at the Rush Medical College was Dr. Antonio Lagorio, Chicago-born son of Genoese immigrants. Chicago's Italians became successful real estate brokers and restaurateurs, first for their own community and then for a city that grew to love their fare. It's a tradition continued to this day by the likes of Phil Stefani, Joe Mondelli, Steve Lombardo at Gibson's. Tony Durpetti at Gene & Georgetti, the Capitanini family at Italian Village, which Alfredo Capitanini opened in 1927.
     But those are well-known names, and the majority of Chicago's community was unsung.
     "Anonymous heroes of our past who built buildings with the sinew and muscle helped build the great Chicago scene," said Dominic DiFrisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans. "Laborers, bricklayers, especially ornamental plasterers of the magnificent theaters in Chicago — 90 percent were Italian. The Italian people enriched and illuminated Chicago in so many ways with labor and intelligence. We're great Americans, yet we continue to honor the past given to us by incredibly courageous people."
     One Italian-American typically overlooked is Florence Scala, who stayed put and fought for her home when most of the Taylor Street Little Italy was being bulldozed in the 1960s for the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
     It gave her a conflicted view of Chicago, similar to Giacosa's. She told Studs Terkel in Division Street: America that "I've always loved the city . . . I love it and hate it every day. I hate that so much of it is ugly. . . . I hate the fact that so much of it is inhuman in the way we don't pay attention to each other." But mostly she loved it, just as her father did, who came here from Italy and lived to be 98.
     "He never went back to Italy," Scala said. "He didn't want to. He'd say, 'This is my country, America.' "
Photo: sculpture of an early Roman, The Art Institute of Chicago. 10/12/13.