RIP, Dr. Quentin Young

     Dr. Quentin Young, age 92, died March 7 in California. He was an energetic advocate for public health, and a man deeply involved with his time, whose patients ranged from Martin Luther King to the Beatles. You can read Maureen O'Donnell's fine obituary here. I tapped his deep institutional memory in 2001 regarding a problem that has only gotten worse since then.  

Dr. Quentin Young

     More than half a century has passed. But Dr. Quentin Young still remembers the grim details of his 20 days on the septic obstetrics ward at Cook County Hospital in 1948.
     "I was fresh out of medical school," says Young, 77, a well-respected Chicago physician. "I was a resident, an intern. I had OB service for 60 days at Cook County. At the time, there were three services. You had 20 days on each: Normal OB, for most women. Pathological OB, for the numerous women with heart and lung problems and TB. And then there was the third service: the so-called septic OB, a euphemism for women who had been damaged in self-induced or criminal abortions. Of course, all abortions were criminal then."
     And may someday again be. I called Young because one of George W. Bush's first acts as president was to cut federal funding to overseas family planning organizations that mention abortion to their clients -- a small step in itself, but the opening salvo in the coming battle to roll back abortion rights.
     Perhaps all the way back to 1948.
     A year most people do not remember. But Young does. It was not the happy time that lives in our nostalgia. He was seeing dozens of women a day who were so desperate to have an abortion they tried to do it themselves, using whatever was at hand.
     They douched with bleach or peroxide. They used paintbrushes and cocktail stirrers and pencils and knitting needles. And yes, they did use wire coat hangers.
     "Of course they did," says Young. "They hurt themselves, perforated their uteruses, they came in bleeding, with difficult-to-treat infections."
     The ones who were in comas, who had raging fevers, would be treated by the more senior doctors. Intern Young would finish up the more straightforwardly botched jobs begun by back-alley butchers, or themselves.
     "As a young intern, I was responsible for completing the septic abortions that the women had begun, to save them from ill health or death," he says. "The volume was so large. I would do 20 D&Cs a day."
     Damage was often severe.
     "Many became infertile," he says. "Many had abscesses. Many had to have hysterectomies. Some perished."
     The women were only lightly anesthetized, and Young would speak with them as he worked.
     "I was struck with how readily the women would talk about what they did," he says. "For my part, I was appalled they took that risk, and they would try to explain it to me, why it had to be, how their personal circumstance could not bear the having of an illegitimate child or, if they were married, how they had many children. There was a good deal of guilt about it.
     "If they had paid for the abortion, they would go to hotels and people of unknown credentials would put them on table, do the procedure and leave them there. It had all the grim vulnerability and fear we associate with criminal abortion."
     Young's score of days on the septic ward changed him.
     "I was fresh out of medical school," he says. "I had not formed views on abortion, other than that it was illegal and undesirable," he says.
     But his experience led to a fresh realization.
     "Abortion is not a modern development," he says. "Every civilization had it. The fact is, it will take place. The question went from should it take place to how to make it safest for women. I've never seen a happy abortion. It's always a source of great concern, thought and contradiction. For many the alternate is a ruined life, so they do it. I'm not an enthusiast for abortion. I've simply come to understand it should be medically safe."
     And it is medically safe, and legal. For the time being.

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 25, 2001

Enough with the kid, already

     At one level, the Adam LaRoche's Kid Saga is one of those insane situations that only crop up in baseball. At another, it echoes with a common workplace dilemma.  

  

    It's spring break. My younger son is somewhere in Georgia — I'm fuzzy as to where — rowing with his NU crew team. My older son is busy with friends before he wings back to California on Tuesday.
     Neither is sprawled on my office floor.
     But not so long ago, they'd both be spending a lot of their spring break under the chairs in my office, vigorously manipulating their men — a ragtag squad of knights, soldiers, monsters, superheroes and the occasional farm animal.
     They loved coming to work with Dad. Loved it. Because they so adored their father, their hero ...
     Kidding. I'm savvy enough to know that I was the smallest part of that equation, which in their mind involved, in order of importance: 1) six hours of Nickelodeon 2) sugary drinks 3) breakfast at Harry's Hotdogs at Randolph and Franklin 4) lunch in a fancy restaurant and 5) me.
     Then I mentioned in a column that my older son had spent three days straight at work.
     The city editor promptly popped his head into my office to tell me exactly what designated hitter Adam LaRoche, whose 14-year-old son, Drake, had a locker in the team’s clubhouse, was told recently by White Sox management: Enough with the kid, already.
     Unlike LaRoche, I did not promptly quit. I’m mystified by the whole quitting thing. These baseball jobs, they’re hard to get, yes? Harder, even, than newspaper jobs?

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Update: In 2019, pulling this column up after three years, I checked up on Adam LaRoche to see how he was faring after quitting the White Sox over the incident with his son. I assumed I'd find him ensconced at another team. I didn't. He walked away from a $13 million contract with the Sox, the apparent end of his professional baseball career. Wow.     

Updated update: In 2021, I checked back on LaRoche, now a cattle rancher in Kansas, selling black angus beef nationwide. 

Take Your Son to Work Or Else Day

Kid, what kid?

     The saga of Adam LaRoche, who quit the White Sox this week after they told him he was bringing his teenage son Drake to the locker room too much, prompted me to write a column for tomorrow about the jaw-dropping kerfuffle. In researching it, I pulled up this column from a decade back, about taking my own kid to the paper.

     Thursday was Take Our Daughters and Sons and Transgendered Offspring To Work Day, or whatever they call it, and when my oldest boy begged to go, at first I flatly refused.
     "I'm not having you miss a day of school so you can sit in the newsroom and watch Nickelodeon for six hours," I said.
     If that sounds harsh, and not the warm, Iliad-reading daddy image I cultivate, the explanation is that he was just at the office three weeks ago, during spring break. Both boys were. This "holiday," to use his word, seemed artificial to me, something contrived, cooked up to spur the negligent, like Sweetest Day. I saw no reason to conform.
     But youth is about conformity. My boy whined and wheedled. He insisted that kids were supposed to miss school. Nobody would be there, just him, all alone in an empty classroom, the orphan boy.
     I held my ground — I can do that sometimes. Until the unexpected — he burst out weeping, and wailed how he didn't go last year because I was in Israel and didn't the year before because I was in Taiwan and now he'd never go. Confronted with his steel trap memory, I wilted, The Bad Dad.
     "OK, OK," I said. "Fine, go." I know you're not supposed to give in, and know that by admitting it I will hear from every reader whose parents weren't wavering milquetoasts like me, about how parental firmness gave them spine and ginger and allowed them to live through the Great Depression on grit alone. Good for you. I couldn't stand seeing him cry and yielded, figuring: How long is he going to want to be with me?
     I don't know what he's getting out of it — he's in the newsroom right now, watching Tom & Jerry. The Sun-Times isn't like TribCo, which is probably entertaining staffers' kids with jugglers and ponies and actors dressed up as Col. McCormick giving workshops about how to paint enemies red. Here, they don't even put out a salt lick.
     But I'm getting something out of it. Your children are a mirror of yourself. Going out the door in the morning, my wife suggested my son write something for the column, something about his school.
     "But what if I write something bad?" he said.
     "Write good things about school," my wife instructed.
     My 9-year-old replied: "I want to write about its faults."
     My wife looked at me and we both burst out laughing. "It must be in the genes," she gasped.
                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 29, 2005

Technology nostalgia

The Lights of Other Days, by John F. Peto

     Glance at this painting at the Art Institute.  
     Not a famous work. Not "American Gothic" or "Nighthawks." Hung on a panel in a display of 19th century American design, perpendicular to the gallery, so I had to lean in to try to take a proper photo of it. 
     "The Lights of Other Days" by John F. Peto, a minor tromp l'oeil artist. 
     Still, the century-old work gave me pause, because he's doing something we like to do, and imagine is a modern emotion—rhapsodizing past technologies. In this case, the lightbulb, which had replaced the candles used for centuries, was about 25 years old and spreading rapidly. Peto gathered the dusty, tossed out candle holders and lanterns for one last group shot the way, for a decade or two, authors used to laud their typewriters, the whap-whap-whap of the keys, the thunk of the carriage return.
     Until they said, "Aw, the hell with it," and got a computer.
     You could see the nostalgia for a flame lit world. The soft glow. The romance.     
     But not so much that we still do it. We could. Candles are still around. You could light your house with them. But you don't, because it's bothersome and expensive and you'd end up burning the place down. That happened back then. 
     A reminder that nostalgia is a filter, a screen, that only lets the good part through. We remember the glow and not the burned down houses. 

You've been warned, honey

     Hey ladies!
     Put aside your mixing bowl of cookie batter, or lapful of tatting, or supermarket tabloid, or whatever inconsequential thing is occupying your tiny little attention span at the moment. Gather around. Old Uncle Neil has something important to discuss exclusively with my female readership.
     And no, this isn't another liberal cri de coeur — whoops, sorry gals, "cry from the heart" — over Donald Trump's raging sexism, his continual put-downs of women and descent into vulgarity. Yes, that kind of thing is infectious. No doubt part of the pathology explaining Trump is the unspoken male desire among his reality TV fans to get back to living in a man's world. Less worrying about bruising the delicate sensitivities of feminists. More seeing who can pee the farthest.
     To be honest, a Trump nomination, while steadily moving from impossible farce to inevitable tragedy, is in my mind still among the realm of Things too Awful to Imagine. And perhaps with good reason. The GOP establishment isn't frantic because of Trump's policy stands — they agree with him; they want a wall. No, they're frantic because in any half-sane world, Trump loses to Hillary Clinton.

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Killing kitties is hard

  

     City Council is considering an ordinance that forbids animal shelters, including Chicago animal care and control, from killing unadopted pets. The bill pushed by Ald. Ed Burke, the father of ill-considered ordinances, which makes me wonder whether all aspects of it have been thought through. Will it, like the plastic bag ordinance, make the situation WORSE, by jamming shelters with animals they can't get rid of?  What will become of the tens of thousands of animals that come into custody of Chicago and are not adopted? It reminded me of the time I slid by the city animal control center to watch them euthanize animals.

     Too bad you didn't stop by the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control and adopt that gray-and-white kitty I saw there the other day, because now Jennifer Harnisch has to kill it.
     And killing kitties is hard. They can't simply be put inside the big rolling blue metal cages along with the older animals and wheeled into the gas chambers. Kittens are too young; they have too much hemoglobin in their blood. Harnisch has to grab each kitty, individually, and inject it with an overdose of sodium pentobarbital.
     That isn't the tough part, however. Picking up kittens and injecting them is easy, physically—at that age they are so trusting, so affectionate. The tough part is thinking about it. Although, like anything repeated over and over again, it becomes routine.
     "You get used to it," said Harnisch, 26, who said she is "bothered but not haunted" by her job at the Southwest Side center. "It's still very hard. I try to zone it out and not think of the actual act I'm doing. I don't think I could bring myself to do it if I knew."
     That thought came back to me a lot. I don't think people know. Know, for instance, that the puppies they drop off, rather than being extra-adoptable (people love puppies) are usually killed the next day. They can't be adopted until they're fixed, they can't be fixed until they're 2 months old, and young ones can't be kept that long.
     Even in the new facility, built in the mid-1980s, with cheery red-enameled brick and clean interiors, there is room for only 600 animals.
     That sounds like a lot. But last year 28,314 dogs and cats, with a good number of rabbits, guinea pigs and the occasional strange beast (such as a Sonoran Sidewinder) were brought to Animal Control. Only 1,677 left through the front door -- adopted into homes. Another 1,318 were recovered by their anxious owners.
     And the rest? Do the math. The majority -- 25,319 -- left through the back door, dead, in big fiberglass tubs filled with thick plastic liners. Pull back the plastic and take a look. They appear to be sleeping.
     Putting them to death is relatively painless, supposedly, but still not pretty. The animals, in groups, are placed in one of three gas chambers -- stainless-steel cubes about 4-feet-square, with a sliding door of scratched and smudged glass.
     A worker stands in the next room and pushes a button, watching through two chunky glass blocks built into the wall. The process takes 25 minutes. Carbon monoxide, pumped from tanks, fills the cubes.
     The dogs yowl and scratch. They move even after they are dead. Eventually the chambers grow quiet, and the gas is evacuated. Then the bodies get dumped. The Department of Streets and Sanitation sends trucks to take them to the incinerator on Goose Island: 369,274 pounds of pets last year.
     Last week, the city announced an increase in Animal Control staffing and adoption advertising so that fewer dogs and cats are destroyed. Actually eliminating the practice seems impossible right now.
     To stroll through Animal Control is to pass from sweetness to horror and back. You have to steel your heart.
     There, in the break room, is Popeye, an adorable Boston terrier that is one of three pet mascots at Animal Control. He's missing an eye -- he was hit by a car and his previous owners, confronting the prospect of medical expense, abandoned him.
     There, in the room with the buttons that start the gas, is a guillotine with sheet-metal sides and a long, rusty-yet-sharp-looking blade that is driven down pneumatically. Not that they use it to put animals to death—it's only used in rabies cases, when state laws mandate that the brains be examined. The heads are sent to the Health Department.
     This all makes grim reading, but the executive director of Animal Control, Gene Mueller, didn't try to hang a lot of fancy tinsel on the operation.
     When I asked him how he rationalized his job, he said this:
     "I'm a veterinarian. I'm involved with animals because I love animals. I have the terrible duty for society of disposing of their mistakes. We try to provide a humane method of euthanasia for these unfortunate animals.To end up here is far better than being run over by a car or tortured or some other horrible fate."
     Hard to argue that. Hard to see what happens at Animal Control and then ignore it. Ignoring it is part of the problem. People have these romantic notions about animals. They don't want their pets neutered—oooh, too unnatural. They don't want them to be kept indoors. Oooh, too much like jail. They want them to experience motherhood.
     "What everyone thinks is, 'I can find homes for these six puppies,' " Mueller said. "What they fail to understand are the implications. First, they've taken six homes from shelter animals, animals that already exist and will be destroyed because they don't have homes to go into. Second, you have no control over what is done with those puppies. You give them away, each could have six puppies. The problem increases geometrically."
              —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 11, 1998

Our M & M race for Senate

     Illinois became a state in 1818, and its first two senators were elected to staggered terms: Jesse B. Thomas, for six years, and Ninian Edwards for two, before running for, and winning, his second, six-year term.
     This kept the senate elections staggered, generally, and formed two tracks, like M & Ms racing at a Bulls game, and it's easy to view them as in competition.
     Spoiler alert: Track No.1 is winning.
     Track 1's Thomas proposed the Missouri Compromise that limited slavery, and Track 1, as we shall call it, has seen a pantheon of greatness—Stephen Douglas. Paul Douglas—and skill, such as Charles H. Percy, Paul Simon and his protege, Dick Durbin who, since 1997, carved out a niche for himself as, if not a name that will echo through history, then a no-drama workhorse twirling a dozen policy plates at once, bringing home the bacon to Illinois, year-in, year-out.
     But on Track 2....

     It's first occupant, Edwards, who as governor sent the Illinois militia to ambush Indian tribes, was forced to resign midway into his second term, after being exposed penning anonymous, unfounded attacks on a political rival.     

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