Gruene Coal Company

   

     A friend was sick, and I offered to bring her some cookies from D'Amato's. She wasn't familiar, and I said, "Last coal-fired bakery oven in Chicago" and sent her this column. Re-reading it, after five years, I thought, "That's a nice column," and decided to lay it out here, as a reserve, in case I ever found myself at midnight with another day looming and nothing to share, or, if you're reading this on Oct. 13, in the Upper Peninsula where I can't access the Internet to write a blog post. That day must have come last night, because here this is, for your reading pleasure. And if your reaction is, "I read that in 2009!" well, I enjoyed reading it a second time, and I wrote the thing. 

     If you've never seen four tons of coal dumped in an alley — and my guess is you haven't — it's a surprisingly complex process.

     As the bed of Paul Schoening's blue dump truck tilts slowly upward, a lone preliminary lump of Harlan County, Ky., coal tumbles to the ground, as if reconnoitering.

     Then, the whole mass shifts, slightly, almost expectantly, while remaining on the truck bed.

     Then, a scattering of pieces, ranging in size from eggs to loaves of bread, clatters to the asphalt.

     Then, all at once, the coal crashes down in a roaring cascade, five long seconds of dry, percussive sound, like 10 bowling balls scattering a hundred bowling pins. The 8,000-pound pile is a yard high, 10 feet across and 6 feet wide.

     Five men, employees and owners of the Coalfire Pizza Company, 1321 W. Grand, set upon the coal with shovels. Using two green wheelbarrows, it takes half an hour and 40 trips to move the coal into the restaurant's coal bin.

     DOWN TO 2 CUSTOMERS

      Coalfire is one of two remaining customers of the Gruene Coal Company, the last coal hauler in Chicago.

      Once, the combustible black rock — the carbonized remains of plant life that dinosaurs failed to munch — heated most buildings in Chicago

     "Calumet High School, it was unbelievable," recalls Schoening, who in his first and best year — 1968 — sold 10,000 tons of coal.

     Now, he sells 100 tons a year. A dozen tons to Coalfire, the rest to D'Amato's Bakery two blocks east, at 1124 W. Grand (the one owned by Victor D'Amato, not to be confused with the D'Amato's Bakery at 1332 W. Grand, owned by his brother, Matteo).

     The proximity of Gruene's last two customers can't be coincidence, and isn't. Coalfire was started three years ago and intentionally opened near D'Amato's.

     "One of the reasons we chose this location was D'Amato's was right down the road, using the coal bakery oven," says owner Bill Carroll. "We figured, if someone objects to our using it, it's [already being used] right down the road."

     Why a coal-fired pizza oven?

     "Mostly, it's to get a high temperature," says Carroll. "You can achieve a similar high temperature with wood, but the coal fire burns a little more evenly. You don't have to stoke it as much, and it's a little cheaper."

     Co-owner James Spillane suggests a more nostalgic reason — both men are from Massachusetts, home of coal-fired pizza.

     "I wanted to burn coal," he says. "I really couldn't tell you the difference between wood-fired pizza and coal-fired pizza. But coal — coal fuels cities; coal was the fuel of the Eastern cities."

     Midwestern cities, too. Chicago was once defined — and blighted — by coal. "Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal, wreathed in palls of gray smoke," wrote Richard Wright, of his first visit here in 1927.

     IN 1913: 800 COAL DEALERS

     Gruene Coal, founded in 1883, was among 800 coal dealers listed in the city's 1913 directory. It has been Chicago's only coal company for decades. Schoening, a weathered but jovial mustachioed man in a watch cap, is its owner and only full-time employee.           

     Most of his income is from selling fuel oil — he considers coal "a hobby" and a tribute to his dad, who owned the Old King Coal Company on the Near South Side.

     The next day — and this was coincidence — Schoening made one of his monthly deliveries to D'Amato's. This was a much easier process, since D'Amato's oven uses crushed coal — stoker coal — which a rusty hopper shoots into the oven.

     The bituminous coal — softer, smokier coal than the harder, better-burning anthracite — is like coffee, in that it costs the same ground or whole: about $1,350 for 4 tons, delivered. Here it doesn't get dumped in the street, but is poured, through a hatch in the back gate of the truck, onto a black rubber conveyor belt that hurries the coal through a little metal door in the May Street side of D'Amato's and into the coal bin in the basement.

     Above, workers place loaves of dough on wooden pallets attached to long poles and thrust them into the oven to bake, a job unchanged for 5,000 years.

     Across the street, Vic D'Amato, sitting in his small office at the wholesale branch of the bakery begun by his father, brothers and himself, considers the question — why keep the last coal-fired bakery oven in Chicago? — with a patient grimace, as if a child had asked something naive.

     The building, he explains, was constructed right after the Chicago Fire. It was built around the coal oven — the oven is part of the building itself and hence part of D'Amato's Bakery. It's still there — he doesn't actually say this, but I sense it — because anything else would be wrong.

     When she heard that I was visiting D'Amato's, my wife had instructed, "Bring home bread." So I dutifully secured a loaf.

     That evening, I brought home the loaf of D'Amato's bread that had been baked that morning on a large wooden pallet shoved into the century-old coal-burning oven.

     "This is very good bread," my wife said, more than once, adding further instructions: I was to return frequently to get more of this very good bread.

     I cut myself a thick slice, buttered it and took a bite. Delicious. Yet. Perhaps it was me. I'm sure it was me — but I somehow thought I detected a trace of coaliness; not a flavor, but a hint, a suggestion. A second bite. It must be psychological. But, yes, a whisper of coal.

Barney never says, "Hiya kids, let's talk about the Marburg virus!"

     Ebola is all over the news, and readers seem divided between those who feel the media is blowing it out of proportion, and those who suspect the whole thing is far worse than we're being told, no doubt a government conspiracy. That Fox News... The former have a point. The odds of Ebola taking hold here are very small, because in the United States, gravely sick people are not cared for by their relatives at home the way they are in Africa, and the chances for the handful of cases that reach our shores then spreading are miniscule. 
      But an illness as savage as Ebola has a fascination all its own—not many people are killed by sharks, either, but look at the coverage shark attacks get. Media coverage is not a meritocracy, not a reflection of carefully-calibrated social science values: it's more a kindling and reflecting of  public fixations. Ebola was of interest when only a few hundred cases were known about, years earlier. The growing alarm over Ebola reminded me of this column, a decade ago, about my older boy's childish interest in disease. Oddly, it mentions two books that also appear in Wednesday's column. And if you're wondering, yes, reading this made me miss the lad, now 18 and off in California, studying, particularly the parting note about college at the end. He kept me on my toes, as you will see.

     It's 5:13 a.m., and I'm sitting in my office at home, tapping happily away. I've been at it since 4 o'clock. Not the ideal work time, but my 7-year-old wakes up awfully early.

     Every day, I tiptoe by his door, and — boing! — he bounces out of his room, wanting to play chess and Othello and Cathedral and Breakthru and Uno and Stratego, sometimes all at once.

     I always have work to do. I sincerely want to tell him, "Scram, kid!" But I open up my mouth, and "Sure!" comes out. Every time. We end up playing until it's time for me to bolt into the shower.

     Anyway, it's exactly 5:13. Here comes a quick patter of bare feet on the red-pine floor and —whoosh — I'm enfolded in a big, arms-stretched hug. Such a sweet early-morning moment. He puts his cheek against my back and says — I swear to God — "Tell me about tuberculosis."

    I wheel around in my desk chair and gape at him, thinking: Where in God's name did THAT come from?

     "Well..." I say, buying time, "it's an airborne lung disease that used to kill a lot of people until it was brought under control by modern medicine." I tell him what I know, about TB wards and quarantines and Eugene O'Neill. He's sitting cross-legged at my feet, beaming up at me. When I finish, he says brightly, "Tell me about another disease."

       What would you do? In hindsight, I should clap my hands together and chirp, "Chess time!" But I don't. I think: OK, this is strange, but why not? It's education, right? Maybe he'll become a doctor. I pick something historic — scurvy — talking of the British navy and limes.

     Warming up now, I segue into AIDS — also an important illness! — and he listens politely about HIV and immune systems and sub-Saharan Africa. I try to present the sanitized, 7-year-old version — in my tale, AIDS is something that happens to drug addicts — but keep being nudged toward the more complicated truth, such as after he asks, rather perceptively, "But, Daddy, if it just kills drug addicts, they're bad people, shouldn't we just let them die?" Then, I have to get into mothers passing AIDS to their babies, and addiction, and sex, and stuff.

     It is about an hour later, I have gratefully moved on to a more comfortable area — bubonic plague — and after fleas and rats and plague-ridden corpses being catapulted over the walls of besieged medieval cities, I am just telling myself, "My, isn't THIS going well!" when, quite suddenly, it falls apart. My boy dances away, chanting, "Bubonic! Bubonic! Bubonic!" It begins to dawn on me that I am in trouble.

     "Now, now, none of that," I say, arms extended, fingers spread. "I told you about the plague because I thought you were grown up enough to learn about it. Hundreds of millions of people died. I can't have you singing 'bubonic plague' all day in school. It isn't right."

     In the days since, I've been trying to control my folly. My boy who, like most 7-year-olds, can sometimes act 17 and sometimes act 3, has kept begging to learn about diseases. I've tried to stick to manageable, non-gruesome, kid-friendly illnesses. — like polio and pellagra. I've done research to learn talking points. (Did you realize that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln had smallpox?) I savored the existential thrill, just last night, of saying, "If you sleep past 6 a.m. tomorrow, and let Daddy work a little, I'll tell you all about rickets."

This is the book the older boy picks up.

     And, most importantly, I kept this all from my wife. She doesn't understand guy things like being fascinated by deadly illnesses. 

     That is, I kept it from her until Thursday morning. I am telling both boys — the 5-year-old has joined the fun — about cholera, also a historically important disease, and its role in the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. My rendition must be dull because my older boy opens up a book on germs that I have pulled off the shelf to crib from and goes through the contents — they teach these kids to read, which I once thought was a good thing. He points to the entry for Marburg/Ebola virus, something I know a bit about, having read Richard Preston's The Hot Zone. I start pontificating about the blood pouring from the various orifices and people's skin falling off. The boys get so excited, they want to share the cool information about this affliction with their mother. Before I know what's happening, they bolt away.

     I will spare you details of the ensuing argument, though the image of my wife bursting into the bedroom, eyes blazing like an angry lioness, shouting, "Are you INSANE?" will stay with me forever. I try to muster a defense — history, medicine, science. She isn't buying any of it, but keeps shouting, "Strep! Why can't you teach them about strep! Or the common cold! These are children! Think of Barney. Barney never bounces out and says, 'Hiya kids, let's talk about the Marburg virus.' "

     I try to shift the blame. "And who told him about tuberculosis anyway?" I say hotly. "That sure wasn't me. I didn't say, 'Good morning, buddy, ask me about TB.' "

     "It WAS you," she hisses. "Don't you remember last week? When everybody had coughs? And you said" — here, she mimics a blowsy, pedantic voice — "'It sounds like a TB ward in here.'"

     Oh. Whoops. Yes, that was me. My arguments blown out of the water like the Lusitania, I limp off to work to brood. No, boys, I will not explain the Lusitania. Wait until you're in college. And sorry, honey.

                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times Feb. 28, 2003

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     As someone who still appreciates books, the more the better, I had to gape in admiration if not wonder at this man's office. It's not often you see a workplace with such an emphasis on the written, paper-printed word, but then again, in this case, I suppose it's fitting. Whose office is this? And where is it located? I'm tempted to zig cross field and give the winner some smoked deer jerky from Held's in Slinger, Wisconsin, but that's an acquired taste. So, in keeping with today's theme, I'll present the winner with a signed copy of my most recent book, "You Were Never in Chicago." As I'm in the UP today, I might not be able to moderate the guesses as steadily as I usually do, but I'll get to them when I can. Good luck, post your guesses in the comments section below. 

Gone to Michigan....

     "Under what conceivable philosophical, moral or aesthetic system," I asked myself, shuffling forward in this line to escape the deafening, smokey, netherworld of Union Station this past Wednesday, "could you possibly even consider justifying being back here on Friday when you could instead be driving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?"
     No answer came.
     Every year, I join my buddy Rick and a half dozen guys at his compound on the shores of Lake Superior. We hike and read and swim, briefly, in the chill lake, certain to be extra cold this time of year. We eat heartily and the other fellows drink heartily. We sit in his ample, wood-stove sauna and then leap into the frigid waters to cool off. I bring a couple cigars. We have deep conversations, sometimes pop into town—Ontonagon—for cheeseburgers. Last year I shot a composite crossbow and used a chainsaw, both for the first time. Regarding the latter, I prefer my Gransfors Bruks Swedish Forestry Axe, which I bring along with me, and put to good use, clearing the sides of the road. And there is firewood to split.
      This year, I don't know, why, but I paused, tired. I wondered, "Do I really want to do this? Again? The fourth time. Quite a lot, really." A seven hour drive up. That's a big drive for a long weekend. There's so much work to do here. The book deadline, already booted back once, looms. All those source notes to write. And the newspaper. And this. Every goddamn day. And tons of chores around the house. The spring cleaning of the garage which somehow never got done and became fall cleaning and, the way I'm going, winter cleaning, cycling back on spring again, undone. The porch needs painting. I tried to cobble together a rationale for sitting this one out. 
      But I didn't like the person who was making that argument. He seemed grim and old and tetchy and dutiful and drab. Frankly, the one who's going to the UP feels sorta grim and old and tetchy and dutiful and drab, too, but I'm expecting that to loosen up somewhere around the Wisconsin border. Then there's Held's, near Slinger, and the smoked deer jerky we'll pick up. Always do. Hacking into it as we drive, like gnawing on a wallet. "It tastes like a burned down house," Ross once said. It does, too, but in a good way. "Don't bring any home this time," my wife cautioned.
      After I subdued the impulse not to go, I picked it apart. The fuzzy blue blankie of routine. Wanting to do what you always do, always, even more than something which is demonstrably better. Minimizing your effort expenditure. Even something where you know what' it'll be like because you've done it before and liked it every time. It must be important to me, because on the windowsill is driftwood from the shores of Lake Superior, and in the corner, a perfect walking stick of birch, light, bleached gray-white in the sun, the top gnawed by a beaver. To keep it propped there all year, yet even consider not bringing it back for its annual excursion home.... stupid. Glad I dodged that bullet. Have to keep in mind: pause sometimes, often even, because before you know it, you'll be pausing forever, and wish you had paused even more, and hadn't worked so damn much.

       

Is there such thing as an artistic photo of a cute kitty?

     My appreciation of cute kitties is limited.
     Or was. 
     That seems to be in flux, I have discovered, to my amusement and quasi-horror.
     Just last spring, when I was searching for a plausible April 1 joke, I shifted this blog to feature kittens in yarn. That seemed an apt metaphor for all that is cheap and sentimental and time-killing about the online world. This fabulously advanced technology, digital computers and a world wide web, used to pass along cute kitten photos. Sad. 
     Then my co-author, Sara Bader, passed along the photo atop the blog, which she took. And my first, unfiltered, uncharacteristic thought was, "I love that. What a cool photo. I'd like to post that photo atop my blog."
      Several theories:
      A) Maybe it really isn't a good photograph, but my judgment is skewed by bias. Sara is my co-author. We've been working on our new book, Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery for, jeez, nearly four years now. A better, harder-working and more valuable partner I cannot imagine.

      When Sara isn't working in publishing in New York, or busy with our book, she volunteers taking photos of cats for Infinite Hope, a pet rescue shelter in Brooklyn, so the photos can be posted and people can fall in love with the cats pictured and rush to adopt them.  
     So maybe my esteem for her, and admiration for the noble purpose behind these photos—to find the cats good homes— colored my sense of the photo. I recognize that. Or,
     B) Maybe it really isn't a good photo, but my judgment was warped not so much by bias but by age.  Old people are famously susceptible to all kinds of maudlin crap: sad clowns and oils of giant-eyed puppies cowering by garbage cans and schmaltzy violin orchestras led by that Austrian imbecile who always pops up on PBS, or did back when I used to watch TV even a little. Perhaps admiring this photo is a Bad Sign, which I seem to find more of as the days run on.
     C) It actually is a good photo, serene, nostalgic in a positive way, with a 1940s vibe, a sense of time, of years past, from the clock and the black and white photograph of the young girl, and I picked up on it, showing the kind of iconoclastic courage that I flatter is still my strong suit, despite my slide into dotage. A sophisticated critic like George Jean Nathan could praise Krazy Kat, which was shocking for its time, and I can praise cute kitties. The masses of hipsters assume that certain artistic forms are tot zur kunst as they say in German, "dead to art," but the truly savvy know otherwise. Why not a laudable cute kitty picture? Lawn gnomes are sentimental junk, but a really great sculptor could craft a lawn gnome that would make you cry. It's possible, is it not?

     Actually, I have no idea if they say tot zur kunst in Germany. I just made that up. It seemed to work better put that way. Which is my definition of art: art is what you can get away with. 
     Okay, caught me again. It's not my definition. Andy Warhol actually said "Art is what you can get away with." But I agree with him and thought, for a moment, it might be some kind of surreal twist at what I'm striving to make the end of my rumination on photographing cute kitties, to pretend I said it. Maybe the kittens have rendered me punchy. Maybe I am, independent of the kitties, and am just blaming it on them, which is sad. But anyone can take a picture of scary twins or an albino covered in bees make it seem artistic. But with all the cute kitties flooding online, it takes something special to snap a really good photograph of a cute kitty. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking with it.  I wanted an excuse to post the photo of Linus behind the clock, and now I have done so.

Terrifying Ebola virus "quite likely" to hit Cook County

Cooler, Illinois Anatomical Gift Association

     Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story” has sat on my shelf for the past 20 years. And though I haven’t cracked it since reading it last in 1994, I knew exactly what I would find when I opened the book again Friday: that horrendous description of the death of a Frenchman whom Preston calls Charles Monet, a worker at the Nzoia Sugar Factory.
     Monet had been exploring in the bat guano- and elephant-dung-caked caves of Western Kenya. He came down with a mysterious illness that started with “a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs” and quickly got worse: headache, fever, violent nausea, facial paralysis.
      “His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance ... the eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red.”

     To continue reading, click here.