Ronald McDonald stumbles

     You don't need shifting technology to rattle your industry. Tastes change. The world draws away from your product.
      Even something as popular as hamburgers.

      McDonald's is starting to sag, according to an intriguing front page story in Crain's Chicago Business. (The story isn't online, but if you want to subscribe to Crain's for $69 and read it, click here).

      "Ronald McDonald isn't aging well" writes Crain's Lisa Bertagnoli, noting that the share of McDonald's business represented by families with children under 12 has slid from 18.6 percent of McDonald's in 2011 to 14.2 percent today.  A small shift, but a shift nonetheless. Add to that, as the markets have surged this year, McDonald's stock has slid 4.1 percent.

     The burger giant is in trouble.
     Why? The short answer, the story dances around, is the food's crap, and parents are becoming wise to it. As are their kids, who increasingly want a burrito as a treat. Which I would file under "Refreshing Good News" for everybody who isn't a McDonald's franchise owner or investor. 

      They lost me years ago. As someone who has been eating McDonald's, less and less, for 45 years, I can vouch for the trend. The place used to be an exciting indulgence. You're on a trip, you slide by McDonald's for a burger and fries. An Egg McMuffin in the morning with a cup of coffee, maybe some hash browns, counted as breakfast. The stuff was also good for late night munchies, a milkshake and a couple cheeseburgers to sober you up for the drive home. Then the kids arrived, and they had to be brought for bribe lunches of Chicken McNuggets and Happy Meal toys. They still do big business. McDonald's still has 14,000 locations.  But the winds are shifting.

      If youth is lost, the future is lost. My boys, 17 and 18, were weaned on McDonald's, but now make a face if I were to mention McDonald's. I used to be good for a cheeseburger a year, but now I can project how I'll feel after eating that cheeseburger, the greasy-toothed, what-have-I-done feeling, and resist.
     When, during our summer vacation the family had to stop at at fast-food strip, McDonald's was scorned by the boys for Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken (I couldn't do those two either, despite being quite hungry. I pushed on to a White Castle, whose food, while no better than McDonald's from an objective point of view, still carries nostalgia and an emotional attachment. Loving White Castle is being hip to the siren lure of arcane Jack Keroac Americana. Loving McDonald's is just being a prole).

     McDonald's is actually worse than laid out in the Crain's article.  The restaurants themselves, which used to be these red and white tile gems, are uniformly ugly. You can't get out quick enough, which might be intentional on their part.
     Their graphics blow too. Who is this bag supposed to appeal to? It's just hard on the eyes. Any independent coffee shop has a better palette and more pleasing visuals.
    Plus service at McDonald's is a depressing parody of what the dining out experience should be. The one circumstance over the past three years where I might actually order something at a McDonald's is while waiting for a train at Union Station, where I might slide over to get their 99 cent vanilla soft serve cone. 

      Which you would think would be hard to screw up—frozen comestible substance balanced atop a dry sugar cone.  I'm not expecting homemade, and their cone is fine, once you get it.
     But first they have to give the assemblage to you, and here's where McDonald's really falls on its face. From the slurry mumbled greeting "Welkumcdonah, may-eyetekurder?" to the receipt wordlessly thrust in your direction, it's as if the process of buying food at McDonald's was designed to humiliate you, as punishment for eating there.

     The last time I ordered a cone at McDonald's (underline that "last" because I wouldn't go back) nobody even bothered to hand me my cone. It was just set, by a harried worker, down the counter, where it sat, while I listened to them calling out numbers, in the charmed notion that somebody would call my number and hand me the friggin' 99 cent cone. Eventually, when the numbers edged past the one on my receipt, I realized that the cone just sitting there must be mine, and snaked a hand in and took it, while the nine people behind the counter all looked at me like I was stealing the thing, and slunk off to eat it, feeling somehow debased and ashamed. 
     Half melted too. Though the worst part was just watching these miserable employees stumble about their business. I felt guilty giving money to that, like I was supporting some kind of crime akin to human trafficking.
     So good riddance to McDonald's—the downside is that it's very big, and will no doubt take a very long time to vanish. If it weren't so huge, and so dripping in bad faith and skewed values—they're the people who think Ronald McDonald is attractive—I'd hold out hope for a turnaround. Nobody wants to see a company die. But in this case, they had their run, and you can't say the world will be worse off when they're gone.

   A reader shared this video of Jim Gaffigan, America's funniest comic, nailing McDonald's. 

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Kentucky ventriloquism museum stares down visitors

     FORT MITCHELL, Ky. — What makes something strange? And why does strangeness draw us in and grip us so?

     That is a mystery.

     Something made my wife, a few months ago, standing 300 miles northwest in the gift shop at the Art Institute of Chicago, pick up Matthew Rolston’s Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, a foot-square coffee-table book containing close-up portraits of some of the 800 ventriloquist dummies at this museum.

     The intimate, unsettling photo on the cover grabbed her, enough that she lugged the 5-pound book over to me. I flipped through it and agreed when she later suggested we detour on our road trip through the South to this small town, spend the night, then tour the private museum.

Lisa Sweasy

     Credit Lisa Sweasy, the curator of the Vent Haven Museum. I don’t believe a person walking through the cluttered rooms alone, trying to meet the unblinking gaze of those hundreds of dummies and disembodied heads, glancing at the photos and the brief white placards, would derive a fraction of what she gives visitors for their $10. Which is good, because you can’t see it without her: admission is by appointment only.

     “Welcome to Vent Haven, thanks for coming,” she said to my family and four other guests, part of the thousand or so visitors who tour each summer. “This is the world’s only museum dedicated to ventriloquism.”

     Sweasy did not start out as a ventriloquism expert. She was a junior high school math teacher and one of her students was the daughter of the lawyer for the man behind the museum, William Shakespeare Berger, a Cincinnati businessman who, on his first trip to New York in 1910, bought a dummy as a souvenir, Tommy Baloney.

    Tommy’s on display, among the legions of now-silent totems from a little-honored art form, one whose popularity waxes and wanes — mostly wanes in recent decades, though in 2008, ventriloquist Terry Fator signed a five-year, $100 million contract to perform in Las Vegas.
     Sweasy gave us the history of the place, a hobby that became an obsession, standing outside three small cottages, explaining, "once we go in there, you'll stop listening."
     She got that right. It is breathtaking, almost shocking, to walk in. The cognitive system that humans use to process social cues is jarred: they're not alive, of course, they're dolls, puppets, dummies, whatever, though some seem startlingly close to life.
     Part of what made Sweasy so interesting is that, though she was very well-versed in the lore of ventriloquism, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, she was no shill.
     Most visitors, she said, see the dummies and "personally find them the stuff nightmares are made of—four out of five visitors to the museum have that reaction."
     She thinks what snags you is the stare. "Psychologically so inappropriate to stare at one another," she said. "When humans do it, they're either going to kiss or hit you."
     I ran by Freud's theory of the unheimlich, or "the uncanny," that uncomfortable zone between human beings and inanimate objects. A rag doll is not scary because it doesn't look alive, but a mannequin can be close enough to creep you out.
     Not that the museum itself focuses on the macabre. Rather it is a celebration, not just of the dummies, but of the craftsmen who made them and the performers who worked with them, with a large display for the most famous ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen — who got his start at a Chicago talent show in 1925 — and his Charlie McCarthy, a replica (the original is in the Smithsonian). There is a wall of mementos and photos of revered Chicago carver Frank Marshall who made dummies for Paul Winchell and others.
     The museum goes up to the present day, though I admit that the neon green, furry, muppet-like puppets held little interest for me. I think the highest recommendation I can give it is that my two boys, 17 and 18, spent 90 minutes there without a murmur of complaint.
     Again, credit Sweasy. She was a font of information. She put on white gloves and showed us how the dummies operate, their heads containing a watch's complexity worth of levers and rings that not only make their mouths move but, sometimes, their eyes, their ears twitch. Some could smoke; some had their hair flip up in surprise.
      And for your Bright People Can be Surprisingly Thick file add this: Driving away, I wondered aloud where the "Vent Haven" name came from. It wasn't the town, or the guy who started the museum. What was it?
      "Vent is short for ventriloquist," said my younger son. "A haven for ventriloquists."
      Ah yes. That would make sense.

The museum allows visitors to pose among one section of dummies. Kent and friends.

A river (of concrete) runs through it

     I got so wrapped up in recounting our college trip that I neglected to post this column that ran in the newspaper last Sunday. The story has an interesting genesis. It began because I noticed all the Prairie Materials concrete trucks coming and going at the new skyscraper being built at Wolf Point. "Hmmm, concrete," I thought. "There's a substance you don't read about much." So I phoned Prairie Materials, and went to visit them in Bridgeview. We had a very nice lunch, and they were forthcoming enough, though really didn't show me much of their operation. That was supposed to come next. Before it could happen though, I bumped into some Ozinga workmen at a job site on Franklin Street after mistaking their work gloves for lilies. Once I got in touch with Tim Ozinga, the Praire Materials aspect sort of faded into the background, which is something of a shame. To me, this story could have been twice as long; as it was, many fascinating details of the substance were left on the cutting room floor, such as the fact that concrete continues to set, for decades, not getting weaker, but gathering strength as the years pass. An example for us all. 

     Pick the most perishable substance: a) whole milk b) bakery bread c) newly mixed concrete.

     If you answered, “c,” fresh concrete, then you probably already know a little about the rivers of beige-gray flowing around Chicago this summer.

     Milk is good for about a week. Bakery bread, a day. But you have 90 minutes from when cement, aggregate and water are mixed into a batch of concrete before it starts to harden like, well, cement.

     So if the hundreds of concrete mixers plying Chicago’s roads seem in a hurry, they are.   Not only is the concrete in their drums setting, heating up as it does, but construction in Chicago is heating up too: After a long, harsh winter that was hard on the construction trade, the summer saw a jump.

     “Business is definitely headed in the right direction,” said Tim Ozinga, a member of the fourth generation running Ozinga Bros., the city’s largest concrete company. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand in the marketplace. This year is very promising.”

     From the reconstruction of the Ontario Street Bridge on the Kennedy to the Navy Pier Flyover to the expansion of the Chicago Riverwalk to the first of three towers at the billion-dollar Wolf Point project, concrete projects big and small are taking place all over the city.

     Hiring is up in construction generally in Chicago — up 5.1 percent in the 1st quarter of 2014, according to Moody’s, compared to the same period in 2012, and the national cement market is rising 10 percent a year.

     A note about those two terms, cement and concrete, since they’re often confused: Cement is a binding agent, made of powdered limestone and gypsum, that goes into making concrete, which is what you get when you add everything from gravel to fiber optics for translucent concrete, which is possible but pricey. Cement is to concrete as flour is to bread, or would be if bread were 10 percent to 18 percent flour.

     Chicago is known for its concrete buildings, not only Marina Towers, but Lake Point Tower and Water Tower Place.

      “Concrete has long been a major player in Chicago,” said Bill Baker, chief structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
     The Chicago region is peppered with concrete plants: Ozinga has 50 around Illinois, Indiana and southern Michigan; Prairie Materials has 22. The reason is so concrete can be mixed as close to the work site as possible; for really big jobs, mobile mixing plants are set up at the construction site.
     "It's a perishable product," Ozinga said. "You can only go so far with it and maintain the quality and integrity."
      A generation ago, concrete was thought of as a single substance; contractors would call up and order a truck full of "mud." But now, just as bread comes in hundreds of varieties and flavors, thousands of concrete mixture are used for all sorts of purposes - for setting underwater, weather resistance in roads, high strength in skyscrapers. There are ductile concretes that bend and porous concretes that allow water to flow easily through.
     "We really should give it a new name," Baker said. "We call it 'concrete,' but it's the stuff you see on the sidewalk and the stuff you get delivered to the site - they're both gray, but that's about it."
     The surge in tall buildings and advances in concrete technology are directly related. Trump International Hotel and Towers and Dubai's 2,722-foot-tall Burj Khalifa - both Skidmore, Owings and Merrill buildings - are concrete.
     "Today's concretes are not your father's concrete," said Lawrence Novak, director of structural engineering at the Portland Cement Association in Skokie. "Our ability to produce stronger and stronger concrete has really fueled the ability for us to go taller and taller with the high-rise buildings. If your concrete strength is low, you need bigger and bigger columns for support, and you wind up with a building that's all column on the first floor. We can make columns smaller and buildings taller and lighter."
     Illinois is something of a center of concrete materials research, not only with Portland, which was once hired by NASA to make moon dust into cement, but the University of Illinois, renown for its concrete studies.
     "Chicago for a long time has been a major leader in concrete technology," Baker said. "Chicago got used to very, very high-quality concrete."
      "People are always drawn to use concrete in very flexible and creative ways," said David Lange, a professor of civil engineering at U. of I., who explained how advances in concrete lead to design breakthroughs in architecture. "Another interesting trend is the emergence of self-consolidating concrete."
     Concrete has to flow into a form, and any kind of design or detail requires concrete to be packed or vibrated to fit into the crevice and avoid the formation of voids. That's why concrete surfaces are typically, up to now, flat and smooth. Self-consolidating concrete "flows easily into formwork without vibration, which makes possible a lot of very complex shapes," Lange said. "We seeing that come into the U.S. market."
     Chicago's most notable recent buildings, like the Trump tower and Jeanne Gang's undulating Aqua Tower, have been concrete, and more such buildings are on the way.
     "There are about 18 high-rise residences planned for Chicago, all made out of concrete because concrete gives you the ability to form it in any shape, when hardened a unique combination of high strength and fire resistance," Novak said.
     Baker said changes in technology will allow more "fluid" designs to concrete buildings. "We're looking at origami."
     The composition of the concrete isn't the only way technology affects concrete building. Trump's tower required some of the most powerful pumps ever developed for concrete construction to move a stream of it up 60 floors.
     Usually, concrete is moved in fleets of trucks (a new McNeilus standard mixer costs $185,000). Ozinga has 500 trucks, 100 of them running on natural gas, though not so much because it's cleaner but because it's quieter, a consideration in the city. Also key is size; Ozinga is developing a smaller concrete truck to better navigate tight urban spaces.
     Concrete heats up as it hardens, so much that venting the heat has to sometimes be figured into construction design, embedding water pipes that were later caulked in. Heat also sometimes required trucks to have ice poured into their hoppers to keep the contents cool. New chemical mix-ins help reduce that need.
    At Ozinga's main headquarters on the near Southwest Side along the Chicago River, trucks are filled with various mixtures of concrete for specific jobs. Getting the mix right is crucial, because there's no point hauling concrete designed for highway pours to roadways to a high-rise.
     The process is itself a mixture of high and low tech. Work orders come in through pneumatic tubes but are tallied on computer screens. An electronic gauge measures the resistance on the truck drum motors to determine each mix's "slump" - the term used to measure the consistency of concrete. In the field, workers perform the slump test (Concrete InFocus magazine called it "a sacred rite") by filling a foot-high cone with concrete, waiting, then removing the cone and measuring how many inches the pile of wet concrete slumps down.
     What happens to those trucks that don't get to work sites in time? Or find that workers aren't ready? You can "kill" the load - sugar works in a pinch to render concrete unsettable. If there's time, truck drivers hurry back to base where the concrete is poured into huge blocks, usually with a metal cable embedded in them to be moved by crane, and the blocks are used for ballast and various projects.
     And yes, sometimes the concrete hardens in the drum.
     What then? Somebody has to go in with a hammer and chisel to chip it out.

Selfie in a concrete mixer: with Tim Ozinga

Saturday fun activity—Where IS this?

    Talk about serendipity.
    I've been fighting a cold this week; even stayed home to rest on Wednesday, which is something I hardly ever do, and set my wife speculating when the last time it happened.
     "Years?" she wondered. 
    "Probably," I replied. "No idea." I soon was on the mend, but on Friday I thought I had better undergird my recovery with a big bowl of hot soup. My brother, whom I meet about every week for lunch, said he knew just the place ... well, I better not go into details, lest I give it away. Very good soup. I'll tell you all about it after somebody cracks this.
     Or doesn't.
      After lunch, rather than exiting the restaurant into the street, my brother head into an intriguing side lobby entrance of this building, with me following like a pull-toy duck. I'm rewarded with this ornate cut lead screen. Fantastic, isn't it? You don't really see it from the sidewalk, you have to step inside. All because I had a cold. Lucky me. 
      So where is this lovely lattice? Somewhere in the Loop is the only hint I'll give. Maybe everybody knows this thing, but I had never seen it before bumbling upon it on Friday. Have you? The winner gets ... something good, I'm tired of giving away books, makes them seem common ... this lovely maroon t-shirt from the Sonya Shankman Orthogenic School, whatever that is. It's never been worn, to my knowledge, 100 percent cotton, no size on the tag but it seems large. I have no idea how I got it, but it has sat in a drawer in my office for some span of years. It's been freshly laundered, so it's ready to wear, and all yours if you can guess today's puzzle. Good luck. Remember to post your answers below.  

Postscript:  

Well, at least it wasn't cracked by 12:03 a.m., the way it sometimes is, but this one was guessed correctly — 182 W. Lake — at about 11 a.m. The 1930 building has been redone into condos and the grille work, I discovered, is by a little-known Chicago master named Edgar Miller. Step inside and take a look some time. The restaurant, opened less than a year, is Ajida Japanese Grill & Ramen. The miso oodon was supurb for $13 and, unsurprisingly, by the next day my cold was completely gone.  That's worth a visit too. The wait staff was extraordinarily friendly and helpful, too.

University of Illinois needs to do more than lower tuition

     So the University of Illinois is worried because more potential freshmen get admitted but decide to go elsewhere.

     A valid concern. It won’t be much of a University of Illinois if the school is all exchange students from Ghana and Qatar.

     In 2006, 58 percent of students admitted from Illinois ended up attending; last year, it was 45 percent. At this rate, soon the only thing “Illinois” about it will be the name.

     How to get more homegrown kids to go to our big land-grant college? Maybe, Illinois leaders wonder, they should lower tuition. That way, kids won’t be so quick to grab attractive college deals from other states.

     That’s a start. Going to Illinois used to be bargain, but relentless cost-cutting has eroded quality and boosted costs at our still-great-despite-everything university system.

     But money is only one factor in the swirling confusion of college. As the father of a boy who just snubbed U of I to fly way the heck off to college in California, and another who is a high school senior in the midst of visiting schools — nine since spring, including Illinois — I feel well-positioned to give the Illini powers that be some friendly advice as to how they can make their university more attractive to hard-to-please locals.

     Numbers to keep in mind are 63 and 41.

     Sixty-three is the acceptance rate at Illinois. The acceptance rate at University of Michigan is half that. Illinois could let in fewer students, hoping those it did admit might get the sense they had achieved something truly significant by being admitted and actually go.
     Yes, a lot of kids work like demons to get in, and are deliriously happy if they do, U of I representing the attainment of their dreams. I don’t want to minimize that.
     But many others apply to U of I and don’t attend because they consider it a worst-case scenario “safety school” — the fire ax behind glass if they don’t get their top picks.
     You can cut the cost. A tougher trick is making U of I a place where more students really want to go or, rather, publicizing that it offers more than size and a campus farm.
     Which leads us to the second figure: 41. The ranking on the U.S. News & World Report list of “Best Colleges.” Rankings have become an end unto themselves as overachieving students and anxious parents fixate on the lists and ratings.
     “There’s this insidious effect,” agreed Chris Kennedy, president of the board of trustees, pointing out how University of Illinois-Chicago leapt ahead of Champaign in the rankings by making it easier to apply. “Does that make it a better school?”
     They also need to work on intangibles. I was shocked, when I started to think about the school seriously, to realize how little I knew. My impression for 20 years was this: Urbana-Champaign is a place where kids get raped in the woods. Why? Because in 1995 a serial rapist prowled campus.
     Is that fair? Of course not. But balance is a rare quality in the college hunt, and I’ll give another example: Name one Illinois professor. How many came up with “Bill Ayers,” the unrepentant ’60s radical? He taught at U of I-Chicago, and isn’t even there anymore. Add the murderer, also gone, and the latest hate tweeter, never hired, and Illinois risks becoming the place where kooks teach.
     When I visited campus in March — for the first time; I never had reasons to go before — I was surprised to find it … attractive. Pleasant, not the seedy sinkhole of downstate grimness I expected, but bristling with programs and libraries and quirky collegiate peculiarities, like a squirrel watchers club.
     After taking the tour and attending orientation, I could see my boys going there, even though they continued fixating on stats.
     Kennedy said the board has pledged to keep the number of Illinois students “no fewer than in the past” though the student population might be fattened with more foreign students paying full freight.
     He is concerned Illinois will try to win over applicants by offering less need-based aid and more merit scholarships, which sound good, though schools give them to well-off families whose students are high achievers, including his own daughter, offered a sports scholarship. “Why are they giving the Kennedys a scholarship?” he said.
     Kennedy added that while the image of Illinois indeed is “big,” that “is only the start.”
     “I don’t think it’s the size that should blow you away,” he said. “It’s the quality of programs, the engineering, accounting, massive talent in liberal arts and sciences. That’s what makes the institution great.”
     But try to tell the kids of today that.

Divvy Diary: Take my bike, please!

    Ka-thunk!

     Of all the satisfying physical aspects of riding a Divvy bike in downtown Chicago — standing on the pedals to pick up speed and make it through that yellow light, dragging the pad of your thumb across the serrated wheel that rrrrings the bell — returning the blue bomber to its station port after a jaunt and slamming the thing home is one of the more satisfying.

      Ka-thunk!

     You’ve made it, alive. You guide the handlebar with one hand, while the other lifts the seat slightly as you ram the front wheel vigorously into the docking mechanism.

     Ka- thunk!

     You are rewarded with a sound halfway between a Cadillac door slamming and a shell being jacked into a pump shotgun

      Ka-thunk!

      The little light goes from yellow to green — bike received, thankyouverymuch. You give the handlebars a hearty tug to make sure the bike is secure. And you can walk off, confident that you aren’t on the hook for the $1,200 a bike costs if you don’t return it.

      That’s how it works.

       In theory.

       In reality, mechanical systems break down. There are glitches. Only in Indiana Jones movies will a mechanism in a cave since pre-Columbian times perform flawlessly when you step on the wrong stone.

     One day a few weeks back I was heading to lunch at a favorite spot — Star of Siam: beef and broccoli to die for. I went to park, as always, at a nearby station, Kinzie and Wabash, at the foot of what once was the IBM building and now is ... oh, why must things change? ... the 330 N. Wabash building. Slam the bike home.

     Ka-thunk!

     But no little green light. No closing clamp. The bike rolls freely back. Broken, I assume. Some of these locking mechanisms are always broken. There were are five more open ports. They can’t ALL not work, right? That would be an utter impossibility. This is the city that works.

So I roll the bike back, drag it a foot to the left, and jam it into the next port.

     Ka-thunk! Six strikes, you’re out.
     No go. There were six empty docks because none could accept a bike.
     There is a station three blocks north, I learned last time this was full. Not far away.
     Pedal three blocks north, wait for a break in traffic, cross Grand, notice that four more docks are open. Whew! These can’t all be inoperative, too, right? Maybe seven is the charm, come on, Lucky Seven!
     Ka-thunk. Nothing.
     Three empty ports left, and I utter a small prayer to the God of Divvy Return.
     Ka-thunk. No.
     Two left. I imagine myself heading back to the Sun-Times, parking there, and walking back over in shame. Some convenience. My devotion to Divvy, revealed as a lie.
     Ka-thunk!
     The little green light winks, the bike is as solidly docked as a fireplug is attached to the ground. Mitigated joy! I toddle to lunch.
     Later, I run this past the Divvy folks.
     “It’s not broken docks, per se,” said Elliot Greenberger, Divvy spokesman, explaining that sometimes it takes a moment for the locking mechanism to close, but instead of waiting, impatient riders will roll their bikes back, during which time the dock locks, and then roll them forward and the station thinks it already has their bike secure.
     “If you’re making this a teaching moment,” Greenberger said, “push your bike in firmly, and wait [for a] green light.” Will do.
     What Divvy is selling is time. You can walk to a certain place in X minutes, or Divvy it in X/3 minutes. The question becomes is the cost, helmet hassle and risk of death worth the time gained? The uncertainty of dropping off a bike adds to the calculus. If I’m meeting someone for lunch, I can’t plan on gliding from Point A to Point B and then parking the bike and hurrying on. Time must be built in to find a working dock.
     To me, it’s still worth it. I try to take Divvys whenever I can. Sept. 3 is my first anniversary as a Divvy member. I’ve signed up again for a second year; $75 is a true bargain — even a better deal for college students, as Divvy is about to announce a $55 annual membership for them.
     According to Divvy, in the past year I’ve taken 153 trips — tossing out the trips that are 3 seconds long, shifting from a dock that seems broken to one that gives the green light. Let’s say 140 trips. About 55 cents a trip. Just to put your butt in a cab costs six times that. And Divvying often is faster and certainly better for you. Divvy makes the city more fun. Usually.

Steinbergs in the Southland: The college march to the sea

The University of Virginia

     Who knows what motivates people? They often don't know themselves, and even if they do, or think they do, opinions change.

     My oldest son Ross, for instance, at the outset of his search for a college, announced that he was not interested in schools in California. "Too far away," he said. I pouted—no Stanford!—but also viewed it a compliment. The boy doesn't want to be too far from the familial nest. So we did not consider West Coast schools. Our tour last summer was of eight colleges exclusively on the East Coast. Places you could drive to in a long day. 

    He is at college now, almost needless to say, at Pomona. In California. I've never seen it.

    Our second son, hot on his heels, now a high school senior, wants to go into business. Thus we have visited strong business-oriented colleges nearby like Northwestern and Marquette and Notre Dame and, in the first half of August, took a swing through the South to look at six southern colleges: Vanderbilt, Davidson, Wake Forest, College of William and Mary, University of Richmond, Washington and Lee University, and three in passing, Duke and University of Virginia and the Virginia Military Institute, which I slipped away to explore myself, briefly.
     Why the South? I have put that question to him in several different ways, and piecing the answers together and squinting, I get: most bang for your buck. Which makes sense. Not everybody can go to Harvard or should. They have good schools down there, but not everybody in the United States even considers them, well, because they're down there. One essential in business is finding value where others overlook it, and if my kid could do that right out of the box, well, I'm not going to stand in his way. And the food's great.

     Still. While last year I had been eager to finally set my eyes on such stories schools as Princeton and Yale, I had almost no mental image of any of these southern schools. Vanderbilt I had glimpsed, a few years back, when the family spent two happy weeks traveling around Tennessee. A gate of some kind. The rest, I knew almost nothing about, a few crumbs. Wake Forest is big in sports. University of Virginia was founded by Jefferson and is the subject of a cutting Karl Shapiro poem that my father liked to quote.

     And that's about it. College of William and Mary? It's old, right? But as a father I am nothing if not equitable when it comes to my boys, and if the first one got a two-week, 2,500 mile trek through the colleges of his choosing, by God so would the second. I tried not to think about the fact that he did not end up attending any of those colleges. It was not a waste, because we had fun, and if my younger boy didn't go to any of these, well, so be it.

Orientation at Vanderbilt

    "How many of you all are first time visitors to Vanderbilt?" asked admissions counselor, Ben Gutierrez, in a grey suit and salmon tie. Hands shot up. "A lot of you all."
     I savored those "you all's" — there's a joy in finding the epitome cliche right where you expect it, like hearing someone in Boston say they'll go "pahk the cah."   
     He asked an ice breaking question that no college session had yet asked: who thinks they have the weirdest high school mascot? A few prospects were tossed out, but the prize was retired, obviously, by Atoka High School Wampus Cats, from Atoka, Oklahoma (a folkore version of the cougar, a glance at Wikipedia reveals that four other high schools also have a wampus cat).
       Gutierrez lauded what he called "southern comfort experiences"—people smiling, holding the door for you, and of course, the food.  We had eaten the night before at the Loveless Cafe, whose claim to making the best biscuit in the world might be disputed, but not by me. Of course, not everyone might be looking for that. When he asked who in the audience liked country music, hands stayed folded in laps. "Wow, very few," he marveled. I was lucky in that a magazine once asked me to interview Loretta Lynn, so I boned up on her oeuvre and developed a healthy appreciation for country music, a true American art form, like jazz.

Vanderbilt University

      Teens are another matter. Gutierrez soldiered on, Vanderbilt is right in the heart of Nashville, he said, "a growing city of 1.7 million." That figure gave me pause, since Chicago has 2.7 million. Turns out, Nashville has 600,000 people, which means our host exaggerated the size by a million plus. (He probably meant the Nashville metropolitan region, which does have 1.6 million people, but covers 13 counties, including other cities such as Murfreesboro.  On that scale, Chicago has 10 million people. Though perhaps he merely misspoke).
      The stat that leaped out of his presentation, put two fingers in its mouth, and whistled was on an otherwise dull chart of where Vanderbilt students come from: most from Tennessee, naturally enough, but the second most prevalent source of students is Illinois—526, more than even New York or California.
    Suddenly I saw the sense of the Southern Gambit.
    Our guides were  pair of students, Jevaugn from Washington, D.C. and Rani from Beirut, Lebanon, who regaled us with tales of his mother, who worried about her son leaving the security of Beirut ("Are you safe?" she asked him) and who bristled when he referred to his dorm as "home" -- "Are you so quick to forget about us?" Based on his mother and his looks, I assumed he was Jewish, a misconception I only gradually let go of after I asked him if there were much of a Jewish community in Beruit and he said, "No, none."
    They showed us the commons. "We kind of based it on Harry Potter," a phrase used at so many schools to often to describe anything ornately clubby that it should be retired at this point. Which I suppose it will as the series, a cultural obsession five years ago, recedes.

Proudly walking backwards: Tour of Davidson

     Next stop, Davidson College, in Davidson, North Carolina, which Forbes had just named the No. 1 Best College in the South. Hopefully they use a more rigorous formula to evaluate the school than I did, because based on the answers to "Why did you come today?" the handful of prospective freshmen at the orientation session managed strangle my opinion of the place, aborning in the bassinet.
    "It's close to home," said one.
    "My mom made me come," said another, and a third said something very similar about her mom forcing her here. A big percentage of the college experience is added by the people you go to school with, and the image of prospective freshman being so clueless as to announce that to a room of strangers staggered me. I'd have clapped my hand over my kid's mouth had he said that. It also surprised me to learn that 26 percent of the incoming students are varsity athletes, which made the school seem like an athletic program with classes attached. Though other schools were to cite a similar figures.
     My son, needless to say, liked it very much, and the more "Really, you like this?" vibe I radiated, the more enthusiastically he seemed to like it. I struggled manfully to shut up.
    "You absolutely do not have to be a Presbyterian to go to Davidson," our guide, Jennie, told us, which somehow was not comforting. She was one of those guides who took great pride in walking backward, and was the first to stride in reverse full speed into a post, though no damage seemed done. She also pointed out "boxy wooden desk things" in the commons.

Wake Forest

     When I first stepped onto Wake Forest's campus, suddenly the second word in their name flashed as if in green neon. "Ah, Wake Forest." The place is practically in the deep woods—it relocated from the town in the 1950s, and all the buildings seemed as if they were built at the same time. I missed the orientation, taking the Honda in to the dealer in Winston-Salem to check it out after encountering a stray truck tire tread on the highway. But I showed up in time for the tour, held in the rain. Rain is supposed to dampen (sorry) your ardor for a school, but Wake Forest is just the sort of place you could happily wander around for four years. The fact they offer classes is icing on the cake.
    Our guide, Dan, a pre-med, presented his coming to Wake Forest as a kind of personal epiphany. He knew, just knew, the moment he stepped on campus that this was the place for him. I snuck glances over at my own boy. I didn't expect that kind of certainty. Maybe that's a good thing, a sign of flexibility. My friend who is a college admissions adviser said Rule No. 1 in applying to colleges is: Do not set your heart on a particular school. That's a recipe for finding yourself at a wonderful school yet unhappy, since it isn't the one you wanted most.  
      The College of William and Mary is one of the oldest in country, set next to colonial Williamsburg. The buildings were charming and old, and we paused in front of a statue of Jefferson.

College of William and Mary

     "This is old TJ, as I like to call him," our guide said. Greek life was treated the way fraternities and sororities are always treated in these tours—handled with tongs. "I really like it, and it adds to my experience," our guide said, "but I wouldn't like it if it detracted from others," he said. 
     My older boy, who gamely tagged along even though he was weeks from starting his own college, sent his buddy Matthew, who would be attending College of William and Mary, text updates—mildly taunting him, no doubt, based on everything I know about the boys (and because, at Vanderbilt, he had been taking pictures of slavery-related objects at a library display and sending them to another friend who would be going there, along with tweaks, no doubt along the line of: "See the sort of place you're going to.") Occasionally a guide would notice his Pomona t-shirt and expound on what a great school it was, which also pleased my lad to no end.

University of Richmond

      The University of Richmond is the school that stood out, for me. The administrators greeted us with a sincere zeal that was a full twist stronger any of the nearly two dozen schools I've visited.  They just seemed to want us more—handing out coupons that waved our application fee, as a reward for coming out. 
     "We want to put you in the shoes of a spider," said Austin Kelso, the administrator who greeted us—Richmond has the best mascot, the spiders, and a shirt so cool I thought of buying one, "Fear the Spiders." As fine a school as Pomona is, its mascot is still Cecil the Sagehen. 
     More significantly, Richmond's Robin School of Business will take $300,000 from the school's endowment and allow juniors and seniors to invest the sum for them. They also have their own electronic trading floor. I tried to catch my kids eye and do a little Isn't-that-cool? eyebrow dance, but he wasn't willing to look at me.
     The campus, set around a lake, is lush and lovely, the buildings new yet refined. It helped that we had the best guide, well, that I've had in nearly 20 college tours, a budding journalist, Andrew Jones of Houston, Texas, who wasn't affected, wasn't preening, just commenting directly about school life. He wrote his class schedule, which had no classes Monday, Wednesday or Friday, on a white board in a classroom.
    "Who thinks this is a good idea?" he asked. "Who thinks this is a bad idea?"
     Bad college guides, I've learned, obsess over themselves, sharing more than you care to know, or recite some canned nasal speech. Jones was a person, talking as people do.
     During the tour of a dining hall, we saw these fabulous desserts laid out, rainbow cakes and special pies. I was ogling rows of homemade cookies, thinking "A savvy school would give us a cookie."
     "If you want a cookie, take one," Jones said, reading my mind. You don't attend a particular college because someone there gives you a cookie. But it doesn't hurt.
     Washington and Lee University, to my surprise, is directly associated with both men, perhaps the two most heroic figures in American history. George Washington gave stock to get the college going, and Robert E. Lee assumed its presidency after the Civil War to help the battered school get up off its knees. He's buried there, and so is his horse, Traveller.  Of all the schools we visited, Washington and Lee really radiated Southernness, with its row of red brick buildings and square columns.

     We toured first. On one hand, 75 to 80 percent of students are in the Greek system—the sorority houses are lined in a row, and we viewed them from a far distance, as if that is as close as men could get. 
    On  the other, if Richmond was impressive for giving 300 grand to finance students, Washington and Lee dumped $5 million of its endowment into the laps of its investment club. That had to be an educational experience.
     Our guide talked about the honor system—many of these Southern schools have them. You can take your final home to do, and leave your computer on a tree stump, since all students sign a pledge to be scrupulously honest. By this time, I had heard it enough to ask, carefully, how many students were brought up on honor charges? It seemed almost an elaborate system for inflating grades by allowing everyone to openly cheat under the cover of honor. But I was reassured this is not the case. If it works at colleges, we should all take honor pledges: society would be improved.
     The Washington and Lee information session, however, was held in a long, thin room where, out the windows to the left, men worked with howling leaf blowers while, out the windows to the right, they worked cutting bricks with a shrieking masonry saw, and it was distracting enough that I wondered: if the woman in front of us were as dynamic as the school supposedly made her, why she couldn't either get them to stop, or march us all to a different, quieter room, rather than compete against these distractions. 

Virginia Military Institute dorm rooms

     Kent and I had to duck out, to get him to his interview. While he in shirt and tie talked with an administrator, I strolled over to the Virginia Military Institute, which is directly next door. I was impressed with its crenelated silhouette, though when you walk through the gates you are confronted with a sight that resembles nothing more than a prison. I ducked into the chapel, and was surprised to find the area where normally you would find, oh, pictures of Jesus and such, was a painting of the rebel charge at the Battle of New Market during the Civil War. Yes, it was VMI cadets doing the charging, but still, in a church? Remember, the person who said, "The past isn't dead, it isn't even past," was a Southerner, William Faulkner.
     The University of Virginia we didn't tour properly—too big for consideration. But I wanted to see  the famous campus, and we clomped around looking at the Thomas-Jefferson-designed building, the central dome, alas, being under heavy reconstruction. We happened upon room 13, where Edgar Allen Poe lived, restored to how it might have been during his residency. An English grad student was moving next door -- the rest of the rooms are in use -- and we chatted with her pleasantly. We walked the breadth of the place, I can't say I regretted Kent's idea not to apply, and then on tiptoe left.
     That night at dinner, I called up the Karl Shapiro poem about the University of Virginia on my smart phone:

University of Virginia

               

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew

Is the curriculum. In mid-September

The entering boys, identified by hats,

Wander in a maze of mannered brick

      Where boxwood and magnolia brood

      And columns with imperious stance

      Like rows of ante-bellum girls

         Eye them, outlanders.

In whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace,

Under the arch, and lofty banister,

Equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass;

The exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet”

      And visitors on tiptoe leave

      For the raw North, the unfinished West,

      As the young, detecting an advantage,

         Practice a face.

  

Duke Gardens

   The college glimpsed least was Duke. To be honest, we only toured the botanic garden in the center of campus. It was quite beautiful. As for the rest of the school, well, I hear they have a good basketball team. 
     As we headed northward and westward home, I was glad I had come—these were fine places all, and he'd do well in any he got in. He seemed leaning most strongly toward Vanderbilt or Washington and Lee, but these things change, and I'll be quietly drumming for Richmond. It really was an excellent cookie.

Virginia Military Institute