Goodbye old tree.

    People never had trouble finding our house.
    "It's the one with the giant maple in front," I'd say, "the one with the tire swing."
    That was enough. They'd see the tree, massive, 60 feet tall and almost as wide, then behind is, hiding, our 1905 farmhouse.
    The tree was one of the oldest in Northbrook: easily 125 years old, and was perhaps the best feature about our place. A living link to the 19th century. 

    "I bought the tree," I'd tell visitors, "and the house came with it."
     In autumn, it was a mountain of orange and yellow. In winter, framed severely against the blue sky. It sprang to life every spring, and in summer was green and cool, interjecting itself between our house and the sun's fierce transit.
     The bark was thick, creased, more like armor plate, like something on a gnarled prehistoric beast.  How many hours did I sit on the front porch and just stare at it? It was age itself, serenity itself, the embodiment of permanence, of true beauty that endures forever.
     But trees, like people, do not actually live forever. And our tree was slowly dying. We noticed it years ago. We tried tending it, hired arborist after arborist to pump nutrients into it, wire together its sagging gigantic limbs—that enormous branch, pointing due south, seemed ready to crack the tree in half.  
    Every year there was more deadwood, and every year we'd cut the deadwood out and hope for a rally, or at least for the decline to stabilize, though no expert thought that possible.  It was slowly falling apart. On morning, maybe five years ago, a 10 foot section that must have weighed 200 pounds  was noticed dangling, about 20 feet up, right above the sidewalk, a sword of Damocles. I ran to the hardware store, bought sawhorses, blocked off the sidewalk and called a tree trimmer to get it out before it killed someone.
    One tree company, asked for an estimate to cull the deadwood, just turned in a proposal to remove the tree and grind out the stump. Our initial request had not made sense to him. Another guy just looked me directly in the eye and drew his finger across his throat. I felt like we were  giving CPR to a corpse.
     The arctic winter of 2013/2014 was particularly hard on it. We cleared the deadwood away, again, and hoped for  miracle. But this year it came back looking worse than ever.  The bark fell away in sheets. The ants moved in. The sap bled down the white, barkless trunk, as if the tree were weeping.
     Still, I was going to remove the deadwood again, give what was left another summer. But that one huge arm of the street shot out over the sidewalk. I wasn't just gambling with my own life, kneeling down to pick up the papers, always tossed directly underneath, I wondered if the last thing I'd hear would be a loud "crack" and I'd look up just in time to get a kisser full of tree.
     I was also gambling with the life of everybody who walked past. All the kids in the neighborhood.
     So we took it out Monday. I surprised my wife with how calmly I took it, avoiding the hoopla I might have felt compelled to indulge in. No ceremony, no ring of neighbors holding hands, encircling its enormous trunk—10 foot six inches in circumference. No poems, no tears. We did not, as we had considered, have the lumber treated and turned into furniture. That would have made it all somehow worse, by its paltriness, like erecting a sail to try to stop the world from turning. I paused at the top of the stairs Monday morning, took one last look, then headed off to work. I never even said, "Thank you." But then again, trees aren't doing what they do for the thanks. That's just how they are.
     My wife tried to put the best spin on it.
     "It's dying," she said. "Maybe it's in pain."
     Hard to tell. I don't think so. It's not as if you could ask it. Either way, it's not in pain any more.
     It helps that last year, I planted an identical sugar maple under our dying giant's dry branches. And I made a point of gathering a half a dozen seedlings that our fading Goliath had thrown off. I'll take these orphan saplings out into various spots and plant them, to give the old guy a new lease on life. That's the lesson nature teaches. Each of us dies, every tree dies too. But trees still go on. Life goes on. The new maple has a century to go, but it'll get there. I won't, but it will. Someone else will mourn its passing.

This is not my anemone

      "This is not my anemone," I said, with mock surprise. My wife looked down, at the flower bed in front of us at the Chicago Botanic Garden, read the sign I had just read, and sighed.
     A pun, and not a very good one. I pronounced it "enemy." But it's really "ane-mone."
     So worse than a pun, a mangled pun.
     Humor itself is a low form of writing—fragile, fleeting—and puns are a subchamber of that. "He who would pun would pick a pocket" Alexander Pope wrote, in the Duncyiad, perfectly capturing the sense of disrepute related to gimmicky wordplay.
     What's the appeal? I think it has something to do with connecting words. There's some kind of hardwired joy, for those unfortunates afflicted with a propensity to pun, with drawing a line from one word to another.
      Being funny is secondary. For instance, like many boys, I played with slot cars, and of course became familiar with their various little motor parts. The brushes, the armature. When I came to Chicago, seeing the street name "Armitage" conjured up "armature" in my mind. It wasn't in any way witty, so I didn't say it aloud, but I think that automatic connection, one word to another close to it, flipping meanings, is what drives the punster.    
     The link forms in mind and there's nothing to do but toss it out.  My wife, since she's usually the one around, in usually the victim.
     Or benefactor. Sometimes puns are funny. You might remember the Pope quote being spoken by Doctor Stephan Maturin in "Master and Commander," after Russell Crowe's Captain Jack Aubrey makes a pun. He points to a pair of weevils crawling on the table and asks the ship's surgeon to pick one. After some goading, Maturin picks the larger one. The captain is triumphant.
    "Don't you know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weavils?"
    That sets the table aroar, but there was a lot of drinking going on, which usually helps a pun.     
     Though sober puns can sometimes hit. My wife and I were working in the garden, it was hot, and we were thirsty. She mentioned that she had made some mint iced tea that was waiting inside.
     "I put some of this mint in it," she said, gesturing to our tub crowded with fresh mint, which has to be restrained so it doesn't take over the garden.
    "That's good, that'll make it extra-minty," I said, then paused, the the pun forming before my eyes. "As opposed to excrementy, which would be bad."
     I'm not sure whether that was funny, but she laughed, and  I laughed too. Maybe you had to be there.

Happy 90th birthday, Ed McElroy

Sharon Fountain, left, and John L. Smith, right talk with Ed McElroy at the Chicago Crusader. 

     Readers of "You Were Never in Chicago" will remember the chapter called "Driving With Ed McElroy." What they probably don't realize is that Ed is responsible for the book's existence: it was that chapter, originally an article in the Chicago issue of Granta, that prompted the University of Chicago Press to ask me to write a book about this fascinating city.
     And that is just one way that I'm in Ed's debt, for generally taking me under his wing and showing me the ropes in the city. I could not let Ed McElroy's birthday pass unheralded. He turns 90 Monday, and the big party at the Beverly Country Club is today. This is a longer version of a story that ran last Monday in the Sun-Times. 

     Ed McElroy is making his rounds.
     Natty in a pinstripe suit, the shirt and tied picked out for him by Rita Marie, his wife of 60 years, he parks his black Cadillac in a no-parking zone on Halsted Street and strides into the  office of the Bridgeport News, briefing me on the way: the editor's husband is a Chicago fireman, the owners and I share a religion.
     "The guy who owns the paper is one of yours," he tells me. "His father was a friend of mine. Really Jewish too."
     If that seems a slightly startlingly remark in this day and age, well Ed is not quite of this day and age. He's 90, or will be on July 20, a living, working slice of the Chicago way that somehow has magically escaped the claw of time, a shoe leather and handshake man in an impersonal electronic world.
     

Ed McElroy talks with Janice Racinowski at the Bridgeport New.

Ed McElroy visits the Bridgeport News
     "How many years you and I go back?" Ed asks editor Janice Racinowski, sitting in the otherwise empty office.
     "Well, let's see..." Racinowski replies. "I'm going to be 58 next year. I started when I was 15 going on 16. So, 43 years."
     There is a lot of that with Ed. He knows you, he knew your father, he sometimes knew your grandfather. I'm slightly surprised, almost incredulous, when I meet older Chicagoans who don't know Ed.
     I should admit up front that I am not writing about Ed the way I would write about any random Chicagoan. Ed's my friend, so whether hailing him on his birthday is self-indulgence or news, well, I'll let you decide. But favors to Ed have a way of rebounding well for all concerned. Last month I went down into the Thornton Quarry because Ed asked me to—I only vaguely knew the quarry was there. The story led the Sun-Times web site for most of the day, the public rapt to learn about the huge hole they've been driving by forever.
     So was I helping Ed, or was Ed helping me? Or a little of both, the truest definition of the Chicago way.
     Ed McElroy was a radio reporter for WJJD in the 1950s and 1960s, and as such has chatting up everyone from Martin Luther King to Jackie Kennedy. He has represented judicial candidates, police organizations. He visits dozens of small newspapers and brings them good news, literally.
     "We leave the bad news to the bigger papers," says Racinowski. "This is all just neighborhood news, meetings, stuff we feel people would be interested in, for their benefit."
     Some of that material comes from Ed, photographs of awards dinners, of the honor ceremonies. He drops them by, picking up stacks of paper to show his clients, always pausing to chat.
     "He's one of the nicest gentlemen you'll ever meet," says Racinowski. "Fantastic stories. I love listening to the older stories. "
     Like the story about his wedding.
     He married in 1955, two weeks after Richard J. Daley was elected. Ed had worked on Daley's unsuccessful 1948 campaign for mayor. But the outgoing mayor was his mother's friend, so some delicate negotiating was in order.
     "My mother came from 31st street, and so did Martin Kennelly," says Ed. "For eight years he was mayor, my mother knew him quite well. So Dad Daley gets elected, he's going to be an usher at my wedding. Then my mother said 'Edward, Mayor Kennelly has to be at your wedding.' I said, 'You know ma....' 'Edward, the mayor has to be at your wedding.' 'Okay mother, he'll be there.' So we worked it out. Kennelly came to the church and Dad Daley came to the reception.."
     By then he was announcing six-day bicycle races, female baseball leagues, and part of that was drumming up publicity.
     "I used to announce stock car races. An editor said, 'Ed, if you could get a picture I could run it.' People liked that I came around. then I got into more the public relations side."
     On the public relations side, Ed makes himself useful. He's driven several future presidents around Chicago.
     John F. Kennedy to name one.
     "In 1959 Dad Daley called me, said I want you to go out and pick up the senator from Massachusetts," remembers Ed. "I said what's his name? 'John Kennedy.' Don't mean a thing. What's he look like?" They ended up on Rush Street, for dinner and a few nightclubs.
      Barack Obama to name another.
     "This kid from Hyde Park gets elected state senator," says Ed. "Now I'm not in love with people from Hyde Park. That's where Despres comes from" — Leon Despres, 5th ward alderman and do-good reformer. Ed, being old Chicago, is no fan of do-good reform. "I'm not paying too much attention to Obama. [State senate president Emil] Jones says, 'Hey, be nicer to this guy.'"
     Ed told Jones, 'Well, he's one of yours, I don't like him."
     Still, Ed complied.
     "So I start being nice to him. I bump into Obama at this party, he's all alone. 'Where are you going?'' Home. 'I'll drive you home.' Drive him on a couple rounds of the district. Never a foul word. None of that cheap talk. As high class as could be. So I take him one day to Beverly Review."
 

Bob Olszweski Jr.

   "Barack Obama sat in this office right here," says Bob Olszewski Jr., the Beverly Review's editor-in-chief, in the cramped, shabby offices at 105th and Western. "Ed came by, wants us to meet this guy. 'Barry Obama!'' Yeah, whatever. Editors roll their eyes and cringe because you know, a lot of the stuff Ed sends out is PR. But there always somebody from the neighborhood or from the area, so I can justify it, and the help he has given us over at the paper ... whatever Ed McElroy wants around here, he pretty much gets."
     Ed also stops at the Crusader, at 6400 S. King Drive.
     "Ed knows everybody," says John L. Smith, the ad manager. "Ed is a great guy. Everybody in the neighborhood loves Ed. Been one of the few people who come and help every community. He does everything. He helps everybody. We have never, ever called him on anything and he did not respond. Ed has always been there. I don't remember when he wasn't."
     You don't have to ask Ed the secret to reaching 90. He has never had a drink or smoked a cigarette. Or drank a cup of coffee. Or gambled. Or chased skirts.
     "I played full court basketball three nights a week until I was 75 years old," Ed says.
     Still, at 90, there is a whiff of sadness.
     "Now almost all my friends are dead," says Ed.
     And the city has changed. Coming out of the Bridgeport News, he spies an orange parking ticket slapped on the windshield of his Cadillac.
     "A ticket on Halsted Street!" Ed marvels, as if he can't believe it.
     Still, despite the occasional indignity, Ed keeps scrambling, basically, because he always has.
     "Life is tough. My dad died when I was four years old. He died in 1930. There was my mother, with three boys, and what the hell does she do?"
     He makes both a living, and a lot of friends.
     "Ed McElroy is a fine American," says Olszweksi. "He knows life is about helping others and they'll help you....Ed came in and offered his help and he's done nothing but help us from the day we met him.... The old fashioned way. Go meet people. put the shoe leather in, get to know people, establish relationships... So there's a bunch of love out there for this man, I tell ya, a lot of people know him and love him. They don't make 'em like this anymore,"
     Olszweksi turns to me.
     "How did you meet him?" he asks.
     "I've always known Ed," I reply.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Summer is going fast. Have you been away? Made any plans to get away? Perhaps to the ... well, where is this thing, silhouetted against the summer twilight? It shouldn't be that difficult: how many of these are there? But maybe it'll take a few tries. Maybe not. Either way, post your guesses below. The winner gets a limited edition 2015 blog poster, suitable for tacking onto the wall. Good luck. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     At first, it might seem that this Chicago electrical vault manhole cover is impossible to place. But if you are conversant in the esoteric language of Com-Ed service glyphs, you can easily determine exactly where this ...
     Kidding. Actually, the Saturday puzzle is being posted at 7 a.m. today, since I previously said that I would do it, as a favor for those who sleep in yet want a chance to crack the puzzle, then promptly forgot, provoking complaints. So all you night owls, apologies, but you'll have to check back in the morning for the actual Saturday Fun Activity. Get some sleep. 

Chicago Fire Week #5: Firemen in pajamas

I had planned to round out Chicago Fire Week with my story about the Paxton Hotel fire, but it somehow never made its way into Nexis, and this one is perhaps even better, because it's representative of a problem in the department. I've been talking about it when I give speeches to PR groups for the past 15 years, a perfect example of how a hostile media office can turn a generic puff piece—the fire department starting to issue pajamas—into something negative. 
     The Chicago Fire Department began issuing pajamas in 1999, because firehouses were increasingly coed and you couldn't ask fire fighters to sleep in clothing unless clothing was provided. But the fire department, stung by some video that a local television station had run about a beer party in a firehouse, didn't want to cooperate with this story. He said they would drop off a pair of pajamas, but wouldn't allow us to photograph a firefighter actually wearing a pair. So we had to pose a photographer in the pajamas, for illustrative purposes. Nor would they say enough to round out a brief news story. So I had to go looking for someone who would say something, in this case a pissed off union head, who explained why the money being wasted on sleepwear should have been spent on better protective clothing.  A textbook example of turning good press into bad by holding grudges, which should be saved for junior high school.  It's a vicious circle: the fire department, like cops, bungles opportunities for good press, so disproportionate amount of press about them is bad, which makes them more bitter and press averse, which leads to more bad press.  It's sad really. 

     The phrase "firefighter pajamas," conjures up images of cotton PJs, about a Size 3T, brightly decorated with hook and ladder trucks and red helmets and Dalmatian doggies.
     The reality is not quite so festive.
     The new standard issue Chicago Fire Department pajamas -- or "authorized sleeping attire" -- are dark blue shorts and V-neck T-shirts, each decorated with the Fire Department logo. They're a part of the uniform as of Wednesday.
     But in the troubled Fire Department, even an issue as initially simple and innocent as pajamas is fraught with controversy.
     "It's humiliating, absolutely," said Bill Kugelman, president of Firefighter's Local No. 2. "The money that they're using for this could be used for other purposes, like safety and health and equipment."
     Fire Department spokesman Will Knight said he had "no idea" what the pajamas cost.
     Kugelman said he had just returned from a union convention in Washington, D.C., where the pajamas were the cause of much merriment at Chicago's expense.
     "We were the laughingstock," he said. "It was the talk of the seminar."
     On the record, firefighters -- who tend to keep an eye toward department politics -- were uniformly positive about the change.
     "They're comfortable," said John Sullivan, a 20-year veteran at Engine Company No. 98, on Chicago Avenue just east of Michigan. "They fit."
     Off the record, they were more critical.
     "Some of the men think it's ridiculous," said a firefighter who didn't want his name used.
     Ridiculous enough that someone at the department created a parody of the general order establishing the sleepwear. The joke "general disorder" mandating "nightly jammie checks" offers this synopsis:
     "It is the policy of the Chicago Fire Department that the fully grown personnel of legal majority (otherwise known as adults) who comprise this department and who operate equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, make life and death decisions on a daily basis and manage to lead normal, healthy and productive lives are not capable of making a decision on how to dress for bed."
     After initially suggesting there was no particular reason for the new sleepwear, fire officials admitted the change had to do with the growing number of women in firehouses. Of the 4,200 Chicago firefighters, about 200 are women -- mostly paramedics -- and they share fire stations during 24-hour shifts.
     "More and more female firefighters are on the job, and that is only going to increase," department spokesman Kevin MacGregor said. "We'll eliminate any kind of problems that could occur. . . . That's what we hope to do with this thing."
     Kugelman said he imagined the move was done with sexual harrassment lawsuits in mind.
     "Why else would they do this?" he said. "No other department has them. People are wondering why in the hell we have jammies when we don't even have bunker gear (special protective clothing). New York City got bunker gear and cut their injury rate by 85 percent. They don't have jammies."
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 2, 1999

Chicago Fire Week #4: "It got hot, dark and very intense"

 

Photo courtesy of bobanddawndavis.com

   This is the second part of my two part series on fighting a fire, the one that caused all the trouble. As the firefighters described going into the burning building, I asked what seemed a simple question: Why go inside? Why not fight the fire from outside? Wouldn't that be safer? That led to the "It's the Chicago way" quotes, which naturally upset every suburban fire department, and then upset the Chicago Fire Department, which blamed me. The question whether it was true was a side issue. It actually touched upon very sensitive issues of truck staffing—fires are  increasingly rare, and suburbs get by with far fewer firefighters than Chicago does. At one point during the controversy that followed the column's publication, one of the men I interviewed called me and asked if I couldn't just say I had made the quote up. That bothered me—I said no, I wouldn't say that, and had the quote on a high quality digital audio recording, and if they denied it was said, I'd put it online. The whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth, since my only goal had been to describe how a fire gets fought.

     Fighting a fire is part mental and part physical, part team effort and part individual achievement, somewhere between tearing down a house that's aflame and winning a football game where you risk dying if you're not careful and sometimes even if you are.
     On Friday, we followed Engine 106 to a fire at 3037 W. Belmont and met a few of the firefighters from Battalion 7, and if you missed it, you might find today's column more rewarding if you read Friday's first, perhaps through the miracle of Internet technology.
     As the column ended, a resident who had fled the building begged firefighter Rich Irwin to "Save my baby!" If you expected Irwin to immediately bolt up the stairs and snatch the tot, you've seen too many movies.
     Remember, Irwin was on the street -- there were a dozen guys in the building already, working a hose up the stairs to the burning third floor, cutting holes in the roof and feeling around in the smoky second floor with their hands. To be honest, news about the baby caused "a surge in adrenaline" and not much else. "Either way, we're going in for a primary search," said Irwin.
      A reminder that, more than even heroism, firefighting requires strategy. You might have wondered, for instance, with flames pouring out of the back staircase, why didn't the firefighters park themselves behind the building and hurl water on the fire directly from there? Why sneak up on it?
     "We always come from the unburnt part to the burning part, always," said Lt. Frank Isa.
     Fires are not so much extinguished as they are beaten back. Had Engine 106 come in from the rear, they would have merely pushed the fire into the rest of the structure and lost it.
     "In Chicago, we do what's called an 'interior attack,' " said Isa. "We go to the seat of the fire. A lot of suburbs will hit it from the outside."
     That's a point of pride among Chicago firefighters. They do not stand around pouring water on the roof of a building while it burns to the ground. They grab their axes, strap on their masks, and go in to fight a fire face-to-face.
     "It's all about being aggressive," said Scott Musil. "And pride. We're not in the suburbs."
     "[The suburbs] do an exterior attack," said one firefighter. "That's why they lose most of their buildings. If we stood back and put water on, we'd feel like we weren't doing anything."
    "It's the Chicago way," said Larry Langford, the Chicago Fire Department spokesman, and isn't it nice to see that "the Chicago Way" doesn't just refer to Rahm Emanuel cussing out clerks but also to the more aggressive, perilous and effective approach to fighting fires?
     So where were we? Tino Durovic kicked in the door on the third floor, a wave of heat and steam hit him, burning his face and ears, even under his mask and hood. He instinctively dived face first to the floor (General Fire Tip: It's safer on the floor; many people who died in a fire standing up would have lived crawling.)
     The heat melted the reflectors on Durovic's helmet -- not necessarily a bad thing; a firefighter wants his gear sooty and scarred. Firefighters will sometimes take a new turnout coat into the alley and drag it around a bit, to give it character and avoid showing up at a fire gleaming like a newborn babe.
     Durovic didn't stop advancing when he got burned, by the way. Nor when his low-air warning alarm went off. (Firefighters carry a bottle containing 30 minutes of compressed air -- regular old air, don't call it "oxygen," oxygen would be ignited by a spark at a fire and burn your face off. But that's 30 theoretical minutes of air; if you're working hard, breathing fast, with your adrenaline up because you're trying to save a baby, you can easily run out in 15).
     "It got hot, dark and very intense, but we had to hold that stairway," said Isa.
     "There was no time to get out," Durovic said. "We'd lose the whole thing. I yelled to Frank, 'Gimme more line!' "
     A brave thing for him to do?
     "Anybody else would have done the same thing," said Durovic. "Any other fireman."
     In fact, others did, when they finally pushed the fire back, the nozzle spraying 250 gallons a minute, Durovic, his air gone, handed the nozzle over to Eddie Lashley, who held until his air went, then handed it to others. Fighting a fire is far more complicated and requires far more firefighters than I can mention here.
     "We're in the third floor, thanks to everybody," says Isa. "Once we made the third floor, we beat it. It's simple as putting it out. Now we can attack it. We meet it face-to-face and say, 'You're done; it's over.' We call in [and say] 'Battalion 7 -- the fire's knocked.' "
     There's still work to do, and still danger -- knocking holes to drain hundreds of gallons of water to keep the floor from collapsing under you, for instance.
     Durovic, I should mention, when he finally went down to get more bottled air, collared the lady with the baby. Exactly where, he asked, had she left that baby?
     Oh, she said, her baby goes all over.
     Her baby was a cat.
     If you feel deceived, imagine how the firefighters felt.
     Actually, they took it in good humor. All part of the job.

                     —Originally published Dec. 6, 2009