Book Week #1: "I would sooner send my son to hell than send him to Yale."

Carry A. Nation at Yale

      I'm taking a break for the next week. And while my wife would respect me more, I believe, if I just left the blog blank—"'Every goddamn day' doesn't mean you have to post every goddamn day," as she so sensibly puts it—the truth is some tiny handful of people expect something new here every day, and by gum, I don't want to disappoint them. It's a disappointing enough world as it is without my adding to the general swamp of let-down. Besides, I hate to stop now. A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson said, but it's my hobgoblin, and I'm sticking with it. 
     So since I have eight days to fill, and have written eight books, I'm going to run an excerpt each day from each of my books, secure in the knowledge that it'll be new to most people. I thought of tying it in somehow with Banned Books which was last week. But none of my books were ever banned, unfortunately, as that's a boon to sales, something would be censors never get their heads around. I'll include a link where you can buy the book, but as most are out-of-print, it's a pure service, since the money won't go to me, and you can check them out of the library too, if you are interested.
     The first excerpt, from "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks," which came out in 1992, is perhaps my favorite episode in the book:

     Like most collegians, then and now, Yale students at the turn of the last century liked to drink and have a good time. In fact, students at Yale had a special reputation for living the high life. "I would sooner send my son to hell," a minister's wife said at the time, "than send him to Yale."
     In 1901, a group of eight party-happy friends got together, secured four rooms at Fayerweather Hall—three for study and sleeping and the fourth as a sort of clubhouse—and dubbed themselves the "Jolly Eight."
     A fellow student, a junior not in the Jolly Eight but feeling "a real or fanciful grievance" against one of its members, sat down on February 20, 1902 and typed out a letter to hatchet-wielding saloon-busting temperance crusader Carry A. Nation, describing the club as a "party of Yale men who have banded together to promote the cause of total abstinence," calling itself the Jolly Eight "to show that men may lead consistent and yet cheerful lives." He asked for words of counsel and encouragement from Nation.
     A short time later, the group received a letter and several autographed photographs of Nation, shown standing with an open Bible in one hand an upraised hatchet in the other. The author of the letter was found out and confronted. He confessed his guilt, the Jolly Eight let him off with stern threats. It was assumed the prank had run its course.

   They had seriously underestimated Nation, who was capitalizing on her career breaking apart saloons by lecturing on the carnival circuit and even in burlesque houses, taking donation and hawking her little souvenir hatchets. Her zeal had made her something of a national joke.
     On September 29, 1902, the letter-writing Yalie, whose name has been shielded from posterity, was walking on the campus when a fellow student ran up and informed him that Carry Nation was waiting to see him in the rooms of the Jolly Eight. He assumed the club was getting its revenge for the letter—"It was preposterous," explained an eyewitness narrative of the event, published in 1931 in the Yale Daily News. "Carry Nation had only occasionally been even read of, demolishing some saloon in distant states." But his smugness dissolved into terror when he discovered the somber Nation seated in the center of the Jolly Eight's Fayerweather suite.
      Nation, who was not known for her savvy, suspected nothing. She had spoken several times on campus, years before, and soon was lecturing a hasty gathering of the Jolly Eight and their guests on the vices of drinking and smoking, not to mention short skirts and foreign foods. Her audience was respectful, though many had to bite their lips to force back a smile. 
      "Occasionally a man would as decorously as possible bolt out of the room to explode in laughter in the entry and then return, composed," the Daily News said.
     Those in attendance reported that Nation's smiling face clouded into an angry frown when she noticed a well-filled pipe rack hanging over the fireplace. But some quick-thinking "Eight" explained that the pipes were trophies given up by smokers persuaded to abandon the vice by their organization.
     "It was a reply worthy of a degree in itself," noted the history, and Nation bought it.
     Nation then announced she would speak from the steps of Osborn Hall at 5 p.m. In the meantime, she went to visit friends in New Haven and to harangue a dean for serving champagne sauce in Yale commons.
     If it may seem odd that Nation was not informed by someone that her host on campus was a drinking club, remember that Nation was known for her attacks on saloons. The driving force behind keeping her deluded was a general desire to get her out of town before she could turn on Yale's beloved tap houses.
     "The deception must be continued for should Mrs. Nation learn the truth a hatchet crusade would be inevitable and would probably be directed upon Mory's where near-innocent tobies of ale attended upon surpassing rarebits and English mutton chops," reasoned the narrative. "The newspapers, always eager to distort with sensationalism any unfortunate mention of Yale men, would revel in the story of such an attack and, to the unknowing, make Yale appear to be an inebriate's asylum."
    At 5 p.m., Nation mounted the steps of Osborn Hall, a grandiose structure with soaring archways. she was robustly cheered and members of the glee club, scattered throughout the audience, led the crowd in singing "Good Mornin' Carry."
     It was a wild, stormy encounter, with Nation trying to deliver her temperance message amidst the constant interruptions of cheers and increasingly double-entendre songs from the crowd (such as "Down with King Alcohol," which pleased Nation until the part of the drinking melody where the singers make the down-the-hatch gesture). 
     Finally, after about an hour, during which Nation managed to have some respectful silence by brandishing her bible aloft, the songs grew more blatantly inebriate, the catcalls more unabashed, and she beat a hasty retreat.
     The prank would have just been an amusing episode had it ended there. But it didn't. Invigorated by the day's events, eight students—it is unclear whether these were the Jolly Eight or another group from the Yale Record—grabbed a camera and flash apparatus and headed for Nation's room at the New Haven House.
    Waiting until Nation had finished selling her little hatchets (with DEATH TO RUM emblazoned on the handles) to a crowd in the hall, the men interviewed Nation about her views on prohibition and requested she pose for a photograph. 
     In 1902, taking a photograph after nightfall was a complicated process. It involved extinguishing all the lights, exposing a photographic plate in darkness, igniting flash power, then covering the plate before turning the lights back on.
     Nation was handed a glass of water. It was explained to her that she would be photographed toasting to temperance with life's essential liquid. The eight students took the places around her. One held another glass of water, to toast with, but he others were empty-handed.
     Empty-handed, that is, until the lights went out. In the momentary darkness, the Yalie to Nation's right produced a large beer stein, and the others reached for concealed props and arranged themselves around the temperance leader in a tableau the Daily News compared to a "Bacchanalian orgy." 
     ...Later, [the photographer] doctored the second photograph to add a cigarette in Nation's hand and a foamy head on the beer stein. It looks as if Nation has just blown a trio of perfect smoke rings to the delight of her drinking buddies....
    To rub in the insult, the real Yale Record published the photo on October 1, 1902, adding the caption: 'I have always taken mine straight,' she said, laughing."
      One can't help but wonder if Nation ever caught on to how much she had been ridiculed during her day at Yale. It appears likely she did. In her 1908 autobiography, Nation displays herself as a woman quite aware that she was taken for a fool in New Haven. Her chapter on college life is titled "The Vices of Colleges, Especially Yale."

Stuff happens

 

     Did Jeb Bush really say what the Washington Post reports him saying, in regard to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon?

     "We're in a difficult time in our country and I don't think that more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It's just, it's very sad to see. But I resist the notion -- and I did, I had this, this challenge as governor, because we have, look, stuff happens, there's always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."

    Stuff happens? Really? Isn't that what his brother said in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005? Oh well, what's a guy to do? It's not as if the president can help or anything. Donald Trump says some crazy, opera buffo stuff, but at least he wants to be president to do things. I expected more of Jeb Bush, as the adult in the room, than shrugging, sorry-not-my-table indifference to the nation's woes. If it were a big business in trouble, he'd suddenly find himself motivated. 

    "Stuff happens" is going to haunt him, during the brief period he is a presidential contender in 2015, assuming it isn't over already.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, Hive. You're so smart. You're so good — win every time, you do. 
     Score: Hive: a bazillion; Neil: zip.
     Okay, smartypants (or should that be "smartypantses"? Hmmm, thoughts? Because "pants" already has an....)
     Sorry, back to the matter at hand. So where's this guy? I'm not going to give you any clues at all. None whatsoever. Somewhere in Chicago. Well, one clue then. Probably not a synagogue, since Jews are forbidden from decorating their sanctuaries with human images, though we don't make the big honking deal about that other religions do, and I will name no names. You know who you are.
     That's two. Two clues. But no more.
     Enough. Time's tight. I've going to be taking a week off at the paper. My wife would respect me more if I left the next eight days blank here, but I'm not going to do that to you. Or me; I do have my reputation to consider. Instead I'm going to kick off "Book Week" tomorrow, featuring excerpts from the seven books I've written and, on the eighth day, a first glimpse at my next book. 
     I was going to loosely tie it into Banned Book Week last week, though none of my books have been banned, alas, because that's great publicity. Not incendiary enough, I guess. And my books, because I have seven published and one on the way.
     Yes, eight days is more than a week, technically, for you sticklers, no need to point out the obvious, though everybody else does. Publishing being what it is, you have to play with the conventions a bit. A little added value.
     Post your guesses below. Winner gets one of my superfine 2015 blog posters, unless you've already won that, and then we'll find something else for you. Have fun, good luck, blah, blah blah, ba blahbitty-blah.
    Boy, I need that vacation.

Humanity lower than ducks

    In Oregon on Thursday, nine people were ...
    You know what? I'm done with parsing shootings. There's nothing else to say about them anymore, and I feel like I'm part of the slaughter process: the killers kill, the victims die, the cops rush in, and then the explainers explain. Count me out. Just because crazy people mow down innocent bystanders to scratch some unfathomable itch doesn't mean I have to dig around in the gore trying to extract a heaping handful of something that feels like sense. 
      Here, one last sentence: People are murdered pointlessly in this country by lunatics using guns that they can get too easily, and nobody is going to do anything about it.
     Did I leave anything out?
     Good. I'll direct your attention to the trio of sleeping ducks above, seen at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Life's a beautiful thing, and should include ducks, and naps, and napping ducks, and naps in general, which are restorative, and good for the inner mental balance. 
     Ducks understand that; people, not so much. 
      The world as I would have it would occupy itself debating exactly how much time a productive person can guiltlessly spend napping. Not the whole day, obviously, the nap would lose its specialness and nothing would get done. But some time must be carved out in a culture that just doesn't emphasize napping enough. If it did, each desk would be a little higher off the floor, and have a foam mattress underneath. "No Burt, 2 p.m. won't work for me—I'll be napping under my desk, burping animal cookie scent. How about three?" 
     Of course, I suppose it's hard to focus on parsing the positive aspects of the midday snooze for humans as well as ducks in a culture where YOUNG PEOPLE ARE KILLED RANDOMLY FOR NO REASON AT ALL AND NOBODY CARES OR DOES ANYTHING....
       Sorry. Ducks, um, use the sun to help maintain body temperature, in between hunting for fish, and ... ah ... never killing each other just for the heck of it, just because they're disturbed and powerful weapons are scattered around by the hundreds of millions. Which makes humanity, I suppose, less evolved than ducks. Lower than ducks, even. despite our vaunted brains or, rather, because of our vaunted brains, which aren't so vaunted, if you ask me.  
      Okay, I'm drifting back into the killing in Oregon, when the truth is, in five days we won't even remember it.  The ducks, however, may stick in mind. They're so cute. And peaceful. 

But how does my Snickers bar FEEL?

      In the marketing biz, clever can drift into cliche in a moment. 
      That moment came, for me, in the checkout at Target last week, when I looked at the tray of Snickers candy bars and noticed that the distinctive "Snickers" logo had been replaced by a variety of mildly negative adjectives—"Impatient," ""Cranky," "Confused"— that tied in with their clever advertising campaign insisting "You're not you when you're hungry."
      It may be be different, but it's also late, maybe even done to death, that fourth partygoer showing up at the Halloween dance dressed as the Internet. An idea isn't creative if it's been done to death. Ideas that are done to death become cliches. And cliches like "done to death" make the audience flinch, not smile.
     Okay, we get it: labels were sacrosanct, so playing with them is, well, playful, or was. 
     But how long as it been? It was back in 1999 that Heinz, desperate to draw in young customers to its flagship product, started offering green and purple ketchup, for children, and tried to lure teens with "Talking Labels," instead of "Tomato Ketchup" they said things like "Psst. Over here" and "Are Your French Fries L0nely?" It must have worked, because in 2001, they expanded the line, with "Not new and improved" and "Desperately Seeking Tater Tots." 

     Clever. Also 14 years ago. I'm sure the strategy goes back even further. For years, 7-Up's  slogan was, "You like it; It likes you." I loved that, the idea that the damn soda likes you, is sitting on the store shelf, pining away for you. It was a bold faux claim, charming for being so patently untrue.
     Last year Coca Cola started putting generic friendly terms its cans. "Star," "Bestie" "BFF," "Legend" and slapping specific names on its small bottles. 

     Maybe the Coke name game started the "Enough already" process. I don't want my soda to say, "Share a Diet Coke with your Dad." I've already given them money. Isn't that enough? 
     At some point, marketers jumped the shark, and for me its those Snickers bars, There's something creepy, almost bi-polar. about them. I want to be able to bite into a Snickers (actually, I don't want to bite into a Snickers, ever, haven't for years and wouldn't start now) without having to wonder whether I've begun to hallucinate or does the label really read, "Confused?"

    I don't want to overreact. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. But at some point, where Tide is shrieking, "You smell!" and Wrigley's gum labels suddenly coo "Blow me," we're going to want this to stop.  
    Look at this label on a Yasso frozen yogurt bar (excellent, by the way, 100 calories each, if I didn't limit myself to one a meal I'd eat three). As it happened, my mother and I spoke an hour earlier. But what if we hadn't? What if we were quarreling? What is she had just died, and I went to console myself with a frozen treat?
     See, that's the thing. Products are supposed to be mass market items. I don't want Stephanie's personalized soda; I want my generic Coke. Quirk is the opposite of mass market. If I come home from the funeral, I just want a can of Coke. I don't want a can of Coke that says, "Darling" on it. 

     The reason these twists on  labels worked in the past is because labels are expected to be bold but not personal. Lipstick might be bright magenta, but it doesn't say, "Hey liver lips! Show a little self-respect." Once that is no longer generally true, once they start frequently being sly, and all boxes grab you by the lapels and scream in your face, all bets are off, and the slyness loses all value, like all those million bottles of hot sauce all with highly idiosyncratic, risque  names,"SWAMP ASS TIT-KICKER HOT SAUCE," and such. They're so individual, they're dull, and cheap-looking, and you reach with gratitude for good old Tabasco, with its classic, unchanging label.
      At Target, I picked up some Tabasco sauce, and noticed the box seemed to think it was auditioning for Tod Browning's "Freaks" ("One of us! One of us!") Not a huge difference between "Are you one of us" and 7-Up,'s "It likes you." But quirky repetition grinds a consumer down. Find something new. 
    
      


           

Are you a real person?

     Stephanie Scott is a forensic psychiatrist, football lover, journalist and educator. Elli Mcguirk is also a forensic psychiatrist, as well as a dancer backpack ninja, web talent and "good friend." Raina Tipps is also a backpack ninja.
     Forty-seven people followed me on Twitter Monday. Much more than the usual handful I expect in a day. I couldn't help but look closely at my new flock. Perky young women, mostly, with odd, strangely capitalized names, sharing a suspicious confluence of interests. Romaine Mcpeters, Tanya Preusser and Margot Lopez are each a self-proclaimed "beer drinking coffee junky," as opposed to Marta Sumter and Laura Salzman who are just coffee ninjas, and Melba Mcclary, a mere coffee "enthusiast."
     It dawned on me — quite quickly, considering all the years I thought the Kinks song "Lola" was about a girl — that these were not the Twitter identities of actual people who had fallen under the spell of my high quality journalism, but faux identities generated by computers.

     The idea is, you are followed by a robot, glance and see a pretty face who also likes coffee, and you follow them back, then suddenly are getting their curious blend of non-sequitur factlets—"Apart from the burial of Unas, only the Pyramid of Teti displays the Cannibal Hymn"—intermixed with come-ons for holistic web sites: "5 Natural #Herbs To Detox Damaged Lungs."

     If you are unfamiliar with Twitter—and geez, get with the program, at this point it's like being unfamiliar with shampoo—it's a an online communication network where you blast messages at your band of followers while in turn being blasted by messages of the people you follow. Somehow in all this, communication occurs, or did, before all this random commercial garbage began to gum it up.

      Fake Twitter accounts are not news, except to me. The fake accounts story has been rattling around for a few years. Back in the 2012 election, it was pointed out that a significant percentage of Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's fan base were fake accounts. The way it works is you go to certain sites where you basically buy followers, for a penny apiece. These drive up your Twitter numbers, and people are more impressed with you.

Julia Khorramchahi,

      I wondered where they got the photos, so plugged a few into Google's image search. Ammie Arthurs, a Halle Berry type, was swiped from "The Hottest Short Hairstyles & Haircuts for 2015."   Elli Mcguirk? The photo was actually Elena Mazur, a communications consultant in Toronto. Maryjo Kratz was Julia Khorramchahi, a "Brazilian/Iranian human being" and "digital marketer" also from Toronto. The "human being" made me suspicious — could these Canadian flaks be using their own photos to generate fake accounts? I sent a few queries and Khorramchahi responded.
      "Defnitely NOT my doing!" she tweeted to me. "Thanks for pointing it out; will report that account right away."

     Okay then. I was left with the moral quandary. A person on twitter is judged, in part, by the size of the following herd.  As it happened, Monday's busload of mannequins pushed me over the 5,000 follower mark, a milestone I had been anticipating for a while, though grimly aware how small beans that is on the online world.
     So some of my followers on Twitter are not a cargo cult of actual living people, scanning the skies for my next essay. Who cares?  We already tolerate people in our lives who really aren't there.  The woman guiding you through giving your information when you call a credit card company is not really talking to you. Miss October, smiling alluringly from her centerfold, is not really here.
     If you believe the view of the future in movies such as "Her" and "Ex Machina," then we will happily have relationships with electronic intelligences and robot inamoratas.

Not a real person either

     Why not? Raggedy Andy was not really my pal, though I thought so at the time. Why not accept company where you find it? Perhaps as people become more robotic and absent, shuffling around, gazing at their phones, the phones will become more human and present. Talk about irony.
     On second thought, no. I decided to purge my robot harem, on general principles. Boosting your numbers with fake followers is like wearing elevator shoes—the solution is worse than the problem.
     So goodbye Frida Byham ("skiing fan"). Goodbye Jessica Phillips ("Total bacon specialist.") Goodbye Noelle Shyes ("Javadicted.")  I have enough fake friends as it is without tolerating more.

Frightened bureaucrats throttle our American freedoms

  

Bill McCaffrey, chief of CPS communications, in theory.

      Stories fill the paper, discussing certain issues, visiting various places, introducing particular people. Readers read them, never pausing to wonder how those stories got there. 
      Some are pitched by eager publicists, but more often a reporter had to press, make phone calls, send emails, cut through layers of bureaucracy, wheedling quotes and permission from hesitant administrators.
      I'm not complaining, it's part of the job. 
     Sometimes it works, and the story gets in the paper. Sometimes it doesn't. I've been doing this long enough to take disappointment along with success. But this one particular experience, well, let me tell you.     
     Several years ago, I thought about a story I did in 1986 at the Chicago public high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail. It was one of my favorite stories, because of the surprise, not just to find classes being held—teenage prisoners still must go to school—but because the teachers were so positive and enthusiastic, not at all what I expected. 
     Merely reposting the story here seemed lazy. Most of the teachers I quote are probably dead. I wanted to go back, to re-report it, see what had changed in three decades. I started with Tom Dart. He likes to show off the jail, but on his own terms, and the school didn't fit into his PR program. But gentle pressure, and the passage of a couple years, finally won permission.
     There was still a hitch. Though the school is in the jail, it's run by the Chicago Public Schools. You can't just walk in. So I started on the CPS last June, beginning with Judy Pardonnet in their communications office. I figured that gave me plenty of time to get it in the paper when school started.
     We eventually had a pleasant conversation on the phone, around July, and permission seemed forthcoming. Then nothing. She wouldn't return my emails or calls, and I tried for weeks. Finally, irked, I began what I call the "demon dialer" --- call her and call her and call her, every hour sometimes. Eventually she picked up. 
     She was apologetic, and passed the blame up to Bill McCaffrey, the chief of CPS public relations, pictured above. He won't allow it, she said, for reasons mysterious. 
     So I started trying to contact him.  July melted into August which morphed into September. He never responded. He never returned a call or an email. Earlier this month, Forrest Claypool, the head of CPS, came into the newspaper to talk to the editorial board about all the problems in the school system. I sat through 45 minutes of his spin, then approached him as he left and laid out what I wanted to do with the high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail..
      He said sure, talk to Bill McCaffrey. 
      At that point McCaffrey did phone me back, made some positive noises, then promptly disappeared again. I know the schools are in crisis, and there's lots to do. But he didn't have to write the story; all he had to do was give me permission. 
     For some reason I would not give up. I begged Kelley Quinn at the mayor's office to pressure Claypool—he and Rahm are supposed to be great pals, brother control freaks trying to herd the cats of civic government. I asked the publisher to intervene directly, and he did. 
       Nothing. Not even a reply. The CPS reaction to my simple, reasonable request for a mundane feature story is perhaps the most unprofessional performance I've encountered in 30 years of Chicago journalism, They lacked the consideration to even say "No" so I could stop asking. Just silence. Weeks and weeks. The September back-to-school moment has come and gone. 
     I give up, and am posting the story I liked so much from 29 years ago. It was an inoffensive thing, a nod to the hard work that teachers do, day in and day out, in the Cook County Jail. The teachers there now might want to ask their bosses why their efforts could not be showcased in the newspaper.
     I shudder to think why it was possible for a young freelancer to write it in 1986, but that months of steady pressure could not replicate it in 2015. We are a nation with freedom of the press, in theory, but that freedom is curtailed and hobbled by fearful government bureaucrats who lack faith in themselves, in their organizations and in their employees, and so gag them, not realizing that the gag is a worse indictment than anything they might say. Those terrified of bad publicity use that fear to bat away good publicity, then wonder why all the news about them is bad.
     Bottom line: our American freedom erodes, undermined, not by foreign enemies, but by domestic cogs.  
     Enough.  I tried my best. When Forrest Claypool moves on to his next posting, building his resume for his mayoral run in 2018—Rahm's definitely done after this term—I will try again with the next head of CPS. It's was an interesting story, then, and I bet it would be interesting now.
     Until that happy day: This ran in the Sun-Times on August 5, 1986 under the headline, "Headline:Enthusiastic students flock to jail's classrooms behind bars." It's quite long, but that's how we did it once upon a time. 

     At first glance, the rooms could be any classrooms anywhere.
     They have all the right equipment - desks, chalkboards, globes, handmade mobiles and construction paper silhouettes of Lincoln and Washington stapled to bulletin boards. Above the chalkboards are green strips with large alphabets of cursive writing.
     If it weren't for the Sheriff Richard J. Elrod calendars hanging in each room, you might expect a group of laughing fifth-graders to return from recess at any moment.
     When the students do arrive, they are all wearing the lone school color - beige. They wear the same beige T-shirts and beige cotton pants. Stenciled on the back of the shirts and the pants are "D.O.C." - Department of Corrections. This is the basement of the Cook County Jail, where the Board of Education runs a high school 12 months a year.
     The students are between 17 and 20 years old - the youngest group in the jail. They attend classes from four to five hours a day in a broad range of subjects, taught by 50 full-time teachers.
     If the cheery, standard classrooms come as a surprise, the teachers are even more so. Rather than being a burnt-out group of gritty survivors, filled with tales of the frustration of trying to teach hardened street toughs, they are enthusiastic to the point of zeal, and say they prefer teaching in the jail environment to teaching in the regular public school system.
     "My students are the nicest group in the world," said Daniel Fitzgerald, who teaches during the year at the Nettelhorst School and spends his summers teaching at the jail.
     "If I had this kind of demeanor in the school year, my teaching would be a breeze. I've been coming here for the past four summers, and it's a real pleasure. I had a student today thank me about four times for helping him with a new math problem. All the way to the door - thanks again, thanks again, thanks again. I would never get that at my school."
     According to Phillip T. Hardiman, executive director of the jail, teaching positions at the school are in great demand from other teachers in the school district. Many of the teachers in the jail have been there for more than 20 years, and few leave prematurely.
     "In order (for a new teacher) to get into the jail school, one of our teachers has to die or retire," said Hardiman.
     "Most people have a misconception of what it is like in jail - they think of bars, inmates with tin cups," said Robert Glotz, director of security at the jail. "The funny part is (teachers) are far safer here than in a grammar school or high school."
     "We have very, very few discipline problems, if any, here in the jail," said Andrew Miller, who began teaching in the jail in 1956. "As a matter of fact, my role as assistant principal is primarily involved with having each student placed in the appropriate classroom setting. There is very little disciplining needed."
     But because the teachers enjoy what they do does not mean their job is an easy one. The majority of teens who come into the jail are dropouts with emotional and developmental problems and reading levels that average around the fifth grade. They are frequently hostile toward the idea of school and are lacking in self-esteem. On top of everything, there is no way to control how long they will be in the school. Stays in jail range from a few days to two years, with the average stay being around a month, so the teachers face classes that are constantly changing.
     "You have to be a special individual to work in that setting," said John Gibson, who was principal at the school for 5 1/2 years and is now principal at John Marshall High School. "They're working with a clientele that puts great demands on the teachers. A lot is taken out of a person.
     "The high turnover is one of the major problems. You may begin to see attitudinal changes, and then the student is gone. Teachers, like anyone else, like to see results - it's hard to work with a young person for three weeks or three months and suddenly that student is gone. It takes a special kind of person to deal with it."
     Gibson said the teachers in the jail have to be sincere, committed and dynamic because that's the only way to reach the students in jail.
     "Otherwise the students would simply come in and put their heads on the desk and that would be the end of it," he said, adding that the enthusiasm among jail teachers tends to be "contagious," passing from older to younger teachers.
     Despite the disappointments often found in a jail environment, the teachers all have their tales of success, such as the one about the student who earned his high school equivalency degree in the jail and went on to graduate magna cum laude from Northern Illinois University.
     And there's the man who approached Andrew Miller in San Francisco, stuck out his hand, smiled, and said, "You're Mr. Miller. You said something to me in the basement of the Cook County Jail that changed my life. . . ."
     Even if a student is not reached by the teachers at Cook County Jail, they hope that perhaps some good still can result from their efforts.
     "Even if we are unable to have the kind of success we expect with youngsters, we believe that attitudes are being changed about schools," said Gibson. "When they begin to experience success in the classroom, that spills over to younger siblings - or children. Many of them have children of their own. We know some of this is taking place. It pays dividends to larger society for years to come." 

     As far as the classes themselves, they tend to stress practical information and life skills. Thus, the science class will focus on public health or drugs, while in history the class learns about such basic Chicago information as the name of the mayor and the tallest buildings.
     Despite their veneer of street sophistication, the teens in the jail need this rudimentary information.
     "Those great big semi-adults with beards and muscles - they are fathers, they've committed all kinds of crimes and have all kinds of venereal diseases," said Miller. "These great big grown men have not learned the first thing about how to take care of themselves. They can't put a stamp on an envelope - to put a stamp on a letter you have to write letters, and they don't write. So they put the stamp on the wrong corner."
     In a recent class, Anthony Picciola had his students answer a series of multiple choice questions about their feelings - how they react when in a group, when happy, sad, angry. The class had several purposes - to get the students to read aloud, to think about themselves, to learn to discuss their emotions and participate in a group.
     Jesse Lee, the jail social worker, stopped by on his rounds and gave the group a pep talk.
     "You gotta be prepared," he said. "You gotta have a plan."
     He walked over to the desk of a student named Bob - a young man with a thin mustache and tossled hair - and asked him what kind of sports he played. Bob, in jail on charges of residential burglary stemming from his $100-a-day cocaine habit, stared at his desk while he answered - his feet constantly tapping, his fingers drumming on the table.
     He played tight end in football, he said, left field in baseball. Lee, seizing on the sports connection, made an analogy between having a realistic game plan and winning the game, trying to get the students to see the need for foresight and planning in their own lives.
     "I don't think you're gonna get a person in here saying, `We're looking for coke abusers - all the coke abusers line up, we've got jobs for you.' " Lee said.
     "This is what makes the school go, the staff," said Miller. "We have a fantastic staff. Our social worker staff are just crackerjacks. Our staff is especially trained to handle the difficult boy. Most of the youngsters are dropouts who happen to get in trouble with the law. They come here and, maybe for the first time in his life, someone listens. For the first time, he has structure and discipline. This is something he badly needs and, believe it or not, these boys welcome that."