Jimmy Armstrong, dead at 55.

   

Jimmy Armstrong

     The great James Thurber once wrote, years after he had settled on the East Coast, that the clocks that struck in his dreams were often the clocks of Columbus.
    That's how it goes, not just for us guys from Ohio, but for everyone.
     When you leave your home town, it stays with you, lodged in your heart like a little snow globe, one that you take out on fewer and fewer occasions as time grinds on and give a gentle shake, trying to see the people inside through the swirling snows of yesteryear. It gets harder and harder to make them out, their figures fading as the years fly past. But they are still there, and occasionally one flickers into view, a faint ghost, to whirl once again for a moment before vanishing altogether.

     In Berea High School in the late 1970s, like all high schools, there were the jocks and the greasers—"racks" we called them, for murky reasons. There were the band geeks and the brains, the popular kids and the outcasts.

      And then there was Jimmy Armstrong, in a class all by himself. He was a cool cat. He proudly smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee, as well as other things, and philosophized. He played music. I remember pausing between classes, in the doorway of the school auditorium, listening, rapt, while he sat alone on stage in the empty room and noodled on an electric piano, all alone. He was good. 

     Jimmy was handsome, but had a deformed upper lip—it was a little thicker than it was supposed to be. He was sensitive about it—you were never supposed to ask him, and I never did. A substitute teacher once made a passing crack, probably in reaction to his mouthing off, and he stood up and pointed at her then chewed her out in a way I never forgot. I was dumbstruck that a kid could talk like that to a teacher, but that was Jimmy. The rules did not apply. He was Huck Finn.

     I can't remember why we hung out—it's been too long—but I know that once or twice I was at his house, near the fire station, and he was at mine. My guess is that Jimmy was cool, and coolness was something I sorely lacked, while he probably admired my smarts. I remember I used a word, "valkyrie," that he had never heard before. I explained to him what it meant, and he was just delighted. He was, he said, going to write a song about it. He was so happy, it made me happy. I'm not sure if he ever did, but I liked the idea of having an impact on someone who was creative, someone who was a musician, an artist. 

    For a few years after college I'd call Jimmy when  I went home to Berea to visit my folks. In 1984, he was opening for the Eurythmics at the Agora, and I went to see him play—at least I think it was him. There's this video online that gives you a sense of the music.  His brush with fame came in 1986, when he was on the TV show "Star Search" with Ed McMahon. But it was just a brush. I can't tell whether he was good or not, but either way, he never made it out of Berea. As the last line of his obituary put it: "But the ability to make something of his own inherent creativity continued to elude him." You grab, but the thing you're grabbing at dances mockingly away. I can relate to that.

    The last time I spoke with Jimmy was 20 years ago—I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show, talking about a book, and he phoned me in Chicago, so excited. Jimmy could have this little kid quality that cut through all the hipster pretense, an enthusiasm that was more endearing than hauteur could ever be, and I remember hearing him enthuse about seeing me on Oprah and smiling, thinking, "Not so cool now, are we, Jimmy?"
    The past 25 years of his life, I really have no idea. I went back to Berea with Edie, and he rolled by my parents' house with a friend. But the visit didn't go well; Jimmy was abrupt, even rude—I can't quite put my finger on why; perhaps in his view I was now conventional and domestic, playing house with this gal, while he was courting greatness. Maybe I caught him on a bad day. Edie didn't take to Jimmy, naturally, and that was that. Though that is not something to judge a person on. A woman who wrote to me from Berea a few days ago said she and her mom would often see Jimmy at church. "My mom and I always noticed how kind he was to his mother, how much he seemed to enjoy taking her to mass." That says a lot, but I couldn't tell you if he was generally a good or bad person, whether he lived a happy or sad life. Probably some mix of those, like most of us.

    The obituary on the Cool Cleveland web site mentions his "substance abuse demons"—The Plain Dealer specifies it as heroin.  Jimmy was the first person I ever heard mention "AA"—I think we were still in high school. I do remember bumping into him once downtown and us deciding to go to the state store to buy a bottle of wine, which we shared under a bridge in downtown Berea. Something novel for me, but a routine that Jimmy seemed familiar with. That sounds more debased that it really was—Berea was our hometown, as comfortable as an old shoe. Ducking under a bridge was something kids did on a summer's day, then. Some of us did, anyway. When we finished the bottle, I walked away thinking, "That was fun, but not how I want to spend my time." Maybe Jimmy should have left town and tried his luck at the big time. Maybe he did—I really didn't know him well. So maybe he did, though that can just end in another kind of disappointment.

    His funeral is today at St. Mary's Church in Berea, Ohio.  Jimmy Armstrong was 55.

Nothing to celebrate

   I thought about putting the flag out Saturday to mark the 60th anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ended legal segregation. And why not? It was a patriotic holiday, of sorts.
     Though the ruling didn't end segregation. It ended the legal underpinning of segregation which, as it turned out, was not really necessary for segregation to continue. It continues in Chicago to this day, and is the source of much that is wrong in the city.
     You can't even call Brown v. the Board of Education the beginning of the end, since segregation hasn't ended yet. You might be tempted to paraphrase Churchill and say it was the end of the beginning, but it wasn't that either.
     So what was it?
     Not quite nothing. A step, say, maybe not even a big step, but we told ourselves it was, at the time, because it seemed kind of big.  So a medium size step that caused a lot of commotion and a little change. And yes, things are different now, for some people. There are no whites-only drinking fountains. We have a black president.
     But are they different enough? Given how long this journey has been, how slow, how glacial progress, is it really honest to point at some dusty perceived breakthrough and pretend it was something it wasn't? Lies are bad enough without venerating them.
     In writing Monday's column, on this subject, I was reminded of just how little that ruling actually did. If you look at our problems today, in Chicago, so much is due to the legacy of segregation and racial bias. So many black people in the city are poor, and live in crappy neighborhoods and go to lousy schools and shoot each other as a matter of routine. Few people seem very surprised about it anymore. We sort of expect it. So do they.
     A good part—most, maybe; my guess would be a third—of white Chicagoans cling to the centuries-old notion that the black folk prefer it this way. That the current situation is their choice, their fault. Some percentage of the white and comfortable seem to believe that some people on the South and West sides, people whom they haven't met and don't know at all, somehow choose to be poor, go to lousy schools, to shoot each other, etc. Meanwhile, the white and comfortable folks—smart us—do the hard work and carry the intrinsic worth that allows people like ourselves to succeed. We're just better, somehow, and reap the rewards of our efforts.
     That's horseshit, of course.
     Yes, nobody's life is handed them on a platter. Yes, everybody struggles. But the struggles of some bear far more fruit than the struggles of others. Some have hope. Some have tools. Others don't. And race tends to be the deciding factor. Less so than in the past—thank you Brown v. the Board of Education. But still enough to be too much. Still enough to make any festivities feel hollow and delusional.
     Celebrating the anniversary seemed wrong; it should be mourned more than honored. Mourned as a lost opportunity. Another lost opportunity. Mourned as a reminder of how far we haven't come. Which I do in my column in the Sun-Times tomorrow. I didn't put out the flag.

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     In my 30 years of reporting for the Sun-Times, I've had cause to be there exactly twice, the second time last week. It is probably the most prominently-located yet completely-obscure place in Chicago—known to a select few, the masses not only kept out, but kept in ignorance of its existence. It wants no publicity. 
     Which is a shame, because the place has a wonderful back story, of why it's so improbably there, where it was no longer supposed to be.  I'll tell you the story of its endurance after somebody guesses where this is—this might be one of those that gets cracked early, by somebody who, like me, was invited in once or twice. Or maybe not— everyone I mention this to just gives me a blank look. Then again, maybe I just travel in lumpen circles. Maybe you go there all the time. Lucky you. Either way, hard or easy, today's question is: where are these lovely double swans? What IS this place? Since my stock of posters is dwindling, the winner will get ... a copy of my 2012 memoir, You Were Never in Chicago. Post your guesses below.  Good luck. 

POSTSCRIPT: Location cracked, but not at 12:05 a.m. this time, so I consider today's puzzle a success. Here's a shot I didn't want to print earlier, so as not to give away the game, to show you where today's location, revealed below, is located—that lovely oval dining room is secreted within this all black building, tucked behind the John Hancock's parking garage. 

The old and the young reaching out to each other, through the Internet

     On Monday, a colleague sent me a link to this touching video of senior citizens outside of Chicago helping Brazilian students learn to speak English. On Tuesday I was there, at Windsor Park retirement community in Carol Stream, watching the residents interact with students in Sao Paolo. The reality fell far short of the slick on-line presentation, and I had to mesh what I saw in front of me with what the seniors had already experienced. I didn't want to go too easy; this all might be a Brazilian advertising agency semi-scam whose sole purpose was to promote the school. I didn't want to go too hard; the seniors seemed to be having fun, and this kind of interaction could —emphasize "could"—have the potential to become something significant someday.

     ‘How do you live effectively, and not just wait?” asked Ruth Bamford, sitting in the lobby of Windsor Park, a senior home in Carol Stream, posing a key challenge of growing old, but not mentioning the thing being waited on.

     At this moment Bamford, 86, a former dean of student programs at Wheaton College, is waiting to help students in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with their English, part of a new program,  Speaking Exchange, that has caught the Internet’s fickle attention because of a touching video produced for CNA, a chain of 580 English schools in Brazil, that has racked up nearly a million hits on YouTube.

     “My nephew called me this morning and said, ‘Aunt Ruth, you’re famous!’ ” she said.

     The video was shot in April.

     “We were invited to be interviewed by this young man who was making a video for this CNA project,” Bamford said.

     Watching the video, viewers get the impression that this program has been going on for a while and the seniors developed a warm relationship with the students. Actually, the video was shot the first time the six Windsor Park residents and the Brazilian students had spoken. “We just have done it once, and it took us two full days,” Bamford said. “It was really quite a process.”

     Julia, her student, 14, was “quite shy” Bamford said, “so we related on that level. We were both having a new experience.”

     I visited Windsor Park, a luxurious senior facility of 600 residents with a $125,000 entry fee, to watch the second session.

     Two HP laptops were set up in a small social room, with tables and a spread of pastries and soda. Two more computers were across the lobby in a small dining room.
     Marion Carbonari, 85, waited in front of a laptop. Finally, a telephone bell rang and, with an assist from Windsor Park Executive Director Karen Larson, the connection was made. A man wearing a headset appeared.
     "Hi, who are you?" Carbonari said, with precision. "What is your name?"
     "Pedro," he replied.
     "Hi Pedro, I'm Marion. How old are you?"
     "I'm 31."
     "Thirty-one? You're a little bit old for the class." Turned out he was the technician. There was a lot of that. Trouble hearing, slight dismay that the well-scrubbed teens of the first session were gone, replaced by men in their mid-20s with five-o'clock shadows. No matter. The seniors plunged gamely on with questions about life in Brazil and information about themselves.
     "I live in a city called Chicago," Carbonari said, when her actual student, named Vincent, 20, appeared. "It's so good to have someone to talk to in a different country."
     Across the room, Ann Galezio, 75, was laughing, her face close to the screen.
     "Is there a girl in your life?" she asked.
     Seeing the process unfold in real life was reminder that, as with TV commercials, videos online can be deceptive. In the video, all is warmth and heart-tugging music. The process I saw was more hectic and disordered. Some of the media coverage referred to the seniors as "lonely."
     "I saw that," Bamford said. "We're not lonely here. I don't think this community would be described as lonely. I wouldn't ever say that. This is a vibrant community with lots going on every day."
     That said, the program is just beginning, and given what the Internet is mostly used for - buying books and shoes, trading snark, posting photos of your lunch - the idea that young people with something to learn could be paired with seniors with something to teach is vastly appealing.
     "Residents, like all of us, want to be part of something," said Larson, noting that 80 residents have signed up for the weekly program. "This gives them something to be part of, to contribute. The world now leaves this group behind. It's hard to plug them in, and this is an easy way to plug them in. Technology is making it possible; the way technology works now it's so simple."
     Bamford plans to keep being a part of it.
     "There's something so beautiful and exciting," she said. "Even as I watched it myself today, to see this young lady and this old lady speaking together, a thousand miles away from each other, effectively communicating. . . . This is a loving community, and I think it showed. A lot of old people are very loving and tender and kind. I think that emotion showed there. Talking to someone so far away, that you do not know at all, that you've never been introduced to. That's kind of a phenomenon, I think."

    

"Fagots Stay Out"

     Thirty years. More, thirty-two, almost. No family. No responsibilities beyond a job I loathed. Nothing to do after work but cruise down Santa Monica Boulevard in my 1963 Volvo P1800, maybe grab a few beers and a bowl of chili.
    A long time gone by, drop by drop. Yet it can can come surging back at the oddest times.
    For instance.
     Things were quiet on Wednesday, so rather than cab it back from lunch on North Michigan Avenue, I strolled the great boulevard. Kids were out in those jackets with the "=" equality sign on them—gay rights— raising money, or gathering signatures or whatever it is they do. I thought up a pithy line in case one came up to me—"You've already won, haven't you?"—but nobody approached me and I walked on, suddenly thinking of Barney's Beanery.
     If you lived in Los Angeles, as I did 32 years ago, you know the famous bar with the green and white striped awning, right where Santa Monica Boulevard veers southward, just before it intersects with La Cienega. Opened in 1927, Barney's was a dive with a past:  Charles Bukowski drank there. And Clark Gable. Erroll Flynn too. Clara Bow. Bob Dylan. Just about anybody who was anybody in LA. Janis Joplin ate her last meal here, supposedly. The Doors' Jim Morrison once urinated on the bar, and he and Joplin once got into a fist fight with each other here. 
     I knew of the place, vaguely, through a Tom Petty song, "Louisiana Rain," that has a line "Singing to the jukebox, in some all-night beanery." I'm not sure if Petty was referring to this specific all-night beanery (West Hollywood was not incorporated in 1982, so niceties like closing hours tended to be looser there).  But it was enough to get me inside, and I stayed for the chili and the late hours and the convenient pool tables. I liked to stand at the bar on a Friday, sip my beer, hope to meet somebody, maybe, toward that end, get some quarters and treat myself to a solitary game of pool. 
  So what's the connection between gay rights and this Los Angeles bar? When I frequented Barney's Beanery, in the early 1980s, their distinctive red matchbooks looked like this on the front—I didn't have to grab the image online, but just ducked down into the basement, where I have a big glass apothecary jar filled with dozens and dozens of the matches I once collected as little trophies of my travels and reminders of boisterous times. 
    Flip the matchbook over, however, and you find this.
    From the 1940s onward, Barney's had a sign reading "FAGOTS STAY OUT" in large letters behind the bar and, obviously, on their matches. The story was that in the 1940s there had been a police raid on homosexual acts in the bathrooms at Barney's, and the owner wanted to avoid that kind of thing. Times changed, and there had been protests, around 1970, but they didn't stick. We patrons didn't think much about it—I wasn't a faggot, so didn't mind, and what thought I gave to the matter was sort of a unspoken satisfaction, almost a pride. It was unusual, quirky. I remember thinking the slogan was part of the ambience, a sign that this was a genuine, authentic place, a tough dive that wasn't about to let itself be taken over by a bunch of pansies.
     I was 22. 
     Shortly after I moved back to Chicago, West Hollywood incorporated, and passed an anti-discrimination ordinance. Barney's Beanery took the sign down, and got new matches.     
     A sign of just how alien that idea is now, when I looked at the matches after all these years, I was struck more by the curious spelling—"fagots"—than the odiousness of the expression. It's a relic of times that are gone, thank God, and never coming back, nothing more. I think a lot of people are like that, still, today. Not so much they are haters as oblivious, which is why education like that being offered by the equality kids on Michigan Avenue is still important. Despite all our clear progress, we aren't as far away from "FAGOTS STAY OUT" as we like to think. You don't have to be a hater to be part of the problem, all you have to do is eat your chili and go with the flow.
     Before I returned the matchbook to its glass reliquary, I admired it and, for no particular reason, opened it up, and got a surprise. This: 

   So I must have met somebody there. Who was "Dina"? No idea. "312"—a Chicago number. Maybe I was still carrying the matches, trying to show off my worldliness, after I got back in Chicago. "Yup, just got back from LA." That sounds like my style. Maybe it was a Chicagoan I met one night in the bar at Barney's. Some things are too effaced by time to retrieve. It'll have to remain a mystery. Probably a good thing, too.

Cops not only answer to Chicago violence

     High school students volunteer more nowadays than when I was a kid.  No so much because they’re better than we were, though I think they are. Their schools not only make them do it, but colleges also expect it. Setting aside the conundrum of mandatory volunteerism, it is interesting to see the projects students come up with. Last weekend a pal of my older son’s threw a charity chess tournament. Another dug out buckthorn in a Cook County forest preserve.

     My high school senior wondered what he should do and I suggested The Night Ministry, the last line defense providing health care and food to Chicago’s impoverished and downtrodden. They have a mobile medical clinic on a bus that goes around the city. Volunteers—often from church groups—coordinate to be at each stop, waiting with food.

     Some of the stops require 200 meals, but Back-of-the-Yards is new on their circuit, so they suggested 20 suppers, which seemed more doable for an 18-year-old’s meal-making skills. He needed a helper to hand out the food, so I went along. It seemed prudent.

      Being a meticulous sort, I built in extra time for traffic. But 94 was fairly clear, so we got to the corner of 54th and Halsted at 8:15, a half hour early. Nothing to do but park and wait. The boy popped on his reading light and lost himself in his New Yorker. I watched the street scene, which was largely empty. Weedy lots, a bar of some kind directly ahead, people coming and going.

     The thing that really struck me were the police. Squad cars came by every minute or two. Up and down Halsted. Cruising in from side streets. One stopped for a long time in the alley across the lot to our right.

     Lots of cops. Still, most of the time, the cops weren’t there. Chicago is an enormous place. And it occurred to me, that the violence, which seems poised to explode this summer—Chicago had one weekend with 52 shootings in April—is presented as a police problem. If we get X amount of police to do Y, then this will get better. I’m not so sure that’s true. I think it’s more a case of police being one of the few things that can actually be controlled by the city. Focusing on police is an example of the adage, When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
     When people ask me my thoughts, I say "jobs." People with jobs are less inclined to go around shooting others randomly. I thought that was the smart, informed reply, but with a dozen shootings some nights, it also seems so hopelessly long-term as to be almost callous. Sure, good jobs would help. So would a pony. Guys won't be shooting so much if they're tending to their ponies.
     Part of me wants to say, "try everything." Curb the illegal guns flowing into the city, seize the ones already here, mobilize churches, prod fearful neighborhoods to take back their streets from gang-bangers and support their efforts with police.
     Another part wants to observe that this isn't something officialdom is going to sweep in and fix. Just as civil rights progress took countless individual acts of courage among people who sat down at lunch counters, in the front of buses, refused to be second-class citizens, so stemming violence is going to take individuals putting themselves at risk by standing up.   Kids shooting at each other are being failed by their families—heck, the fact that a 14-year-old was, allegedly, given the gun she used, supposedly, to kill her friend, should be a cause of echoing shock. Not shrugged off and forgotten. People in Englewood and Roseland need to realize this: The rest of the city doesn't care, not really, because it's not happening to them. Expressions of concern are mostly disingenuous attempts by people to wash their hands of the problem and feign compassion. Residents must be the ones who care. If family, friends and neighbors of a kid hanging with gangbangers won't stop him, what am I supposed to do?
     I'm not saying it's easy. But this problem needs a cultural shift. I've seen Chief Keef videos extolling guns and the thug life. I've never seen a comic mocking gangs, and how inhuman and idiotic they are. I don't think ridicule is going to end gang violence. But it is part of the "try everything" program.
     When I asked the boy what he took away from his Night Ministry experience, at first he just shrugged, as teens do. What about the people begging for an extra sandwich, I asked? The one instruction we were given about handing out meals was that people would ask for more than one, and we weren't to give in. As it was we were stripped of every scrap we brought and had to use the reserves on the bus. One man refused to budge. "Please," he said, staring hard at us, hand out. "Please. Please." We stood our ground; other people were in line. What about that part? I asked my son. Well, yeah, he said, there was that.

These bicycles are brought to you by....

     Here's a contradiction: I love brands but hate branding. 
     Certain products, packing, logos and labels simply have a beauty to them: Heinz ketchup in a glass bottle. The Tabasco sauce label. The Apple iMac. Ketchup in a plain glass bottle would seem generic, wrong.
     Liking the product itself can be secondary; I don't smoke but admire the Lucky Strikes pack.
     But it's somehow different when some non-product is slapped with a logo. A shiver goes down my back when  a heretofore unbranded space become branded. It seems bad, the seizing of public space by private enterprise.  I complained first and loudest that Chicago got nothing for its bike system while New York pried $42 million from CitiBank—hence "Citi Bikes." But now that Blue Cross/Blue Shield has stepped up, almost a year after the Divvy program commenced and is slapping its name on the bikes, well, I'm torn.
    Yes, the $12.5 million is helpful, for more bike stations and bike lanes. A tad more than a quarter of what New York got —we'll try not to think about that.
     But something about it...maybe because Blue Cross/Blue Shield has particularly ugly logos. A stick figure crucified on a crude blue cross, and the snake-on-a-stick caduceus. And what kind of company has two logos? You'd think they'd combine them into one decent logo.
     Maybe it's the year? We've bonded with Divvy, at least I have, and now it's changing. Maybe the change itself is unsettling. The United Center came into the world as the United Center, and therefore seems benign. If it had been the Bulls Center, first, that might have been different. It would be like the parents of a 1-year-old baby announcing that no, he isn't Charlie anymore, he's Ben. It would be weird.
     So maybe it's the retrofitting the brand onto the up-and-running sky blue image of the Divvys that's vexatious. Or it's a reminder that our government is broke and needs to raise cash, and this is how we like to do it. Taxes bad, branding good. So our communal space sells off parts of itself with a whiff of cowardice to boot. Hidden fees, fines, tickets, ads, anything that can't be called a "tax" by a political opponent.
      Maybe the worry is that someday our culture will resemble a NASCAR race car, festooned with sponsors. The bike system now, parks later. At least it's not school buses, not yet. Other places have tried that. Double unsettling, because kids are involved. "Attention class. This restroom break is sponsored by Gatorade..." I suppose we should be lucky it's not currency, not yet. The postal service has already sold off space on stamps to whoever wants it—and the joke is, few do.
     The logo started showing up on bikes last week, cluttered and unbeautiful and unwelcome.
     I suppose we'll get used to them. Or perhaps when the Blue Cross sponsorship is up in 2019, it will pass to other "blue" themed companies. Jet Blue, Blue Moon Brewing, IBM ("Big Blue," remember?).
     Maybe in time it'll even seem natural. The Wrigley Field name is so sacrosanct people forget it's hawking a brand of gum. But it is.