Ron Magers: The Last Man Standing

Ron Magers

     They were the generation after the black-and-white TV pioneers, the Floyd Kalbers and Len O'Connors, and before broadcast news shattered into tiny pieces against the Internet.
     Big personalities with big hair and fat 1970s neckties, easy to caricature: Walter Jacobson, feathers flying, squawking indignation. Carol Marin, our avenging angel, wielding her fiery sword of justice. And the king of the roost, Bill Kurtis, orotund and oracular, saved from Ted Baxter pomposity by the glint of self-knowledge.
      All have cut their anchor chains, slowly slipping out of the camera's gaze: Carol bursting into academia. Bill riding off into ranching. Walter, well, slithering someplace even more obscure than CBS.
     And now Ron Magers, the last man standing, takes his bow Wednesday night on WLS Channel 7 after 50 years in broadcasting, 35 of them in Chicago.
     "It's hard for me to take this all in," he said. "People are so nice."
     Since when? What Magers is seeing is his own niceness reflected back at him. If I had to pinpoint what kept Chicago watching Magers, night after night, rather than giving him the bum's rush to Pittsburgh, I would say it was not his niceness — that would get cloying — but his wit, that suppressed grin. Ron Magers was a funny man doing a serious job....

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How much snot can a snot-sucker suck?

     This might be the best idea.
     Or not.
     I really can't tell.
     We don't have a newborn, anymore. Haven't had one for, geez, almost two decades.
    And when we did, I seem to remember a blue bulb, with a nozzle at one end, used—by my wife God bless her—to extract snot from their noses.
    So maybe the "NoseFrida—The SnotSucker" is a huge improvement over the blue bulb system.
   I'll let you judge.
   It certainly caught my eye, as I was trucking through Bed, Bath & Beyond last week. Or its clear, bright Swedish graphics did. No question what's going on here. Though I did, skidding to a stop, think, "What the hell?!?"
     I would recommend a visit to the fridababy web site for all those who find themselves tasked with what they call "sticky situations." The yuck factor is balanced by friendly graphics and unflinching copy help gild over what they're talking about with a shiny veneer of art. The text points out that a filter is involved which keeps the sucked snot from being drawn into the mouth of the parent, which is almost reassuring.
    A NoseFrida, including four all-important filters, is $15.99. They sell them everywhere. Nordstom carries it.
    Notice their other products. NoseFrida is only the flagship device. There is also Windi, "The GasPasser," a valve designed to be inserted in your baby's posterior, to ease its farts out and reduce gas pain. Another product that might be vastly helpful. 
     Or Fridet, "the ButtWasher" designed to replace moist towelettes.
     There's more, but you get the picture.  
     They seem to be trying to corner the gross bodily substances market.
     As a fan of products, and marketing, generally, if not these in specific, I had to pass them along, and seek your thoughts. They're sold all over the world, so someone must buy them.
     My errand at Bed, Bath & Beyond, by the way, was to buy special pants hangers for my 20-year-old, who is spending his summer in Washington, D.C. His mom is under the illusion that only the proper hanger stands between him and hanging up the dress pants he needs to wear every day at his internship.  I assured my wife that, considering how his pants end up with the rest of his clothes, in bunched knots piled on the floor of his bedroom, the type of hanger they aren't being hung upon is really not all that significant. Wire hangers will do the job nicely. But she was adamant, insisting that hangers have powers to draw a man to order, to paraphrase Homer.
    The quote, from Book XIX of the The Odyssey, as translated by Robert Fagles, is: "Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin." I've seen it quoted more poetically as "The blade itself incites to deeds of violence," but I'll be damned if I can find which edition that's from. 
     What they mean, in essence, is: the tool encourages the action. So a SnotSucker draws — quite literally — a baby to better breathing. Or so is the theory. Anybody ever use these things? 

"Do you want to die? ... Or do you want to be OK?"

     When this study came out last winter, I began looking for an actual Chicago lawyer who would talk about alcoholism. The fact it's nearly June shows how difficult that was to find. Then again, when I was writing about neckties, it was hard to find a lawyer who'd go on record saying, "I need to wear a necktie in court." I wanted to drive that home in this column but, space being what it is, decided to just let her talk, and not hang in the background, commenting.

     Princeton undergrad. Harvard Law. Partner at a big law firm in Chicago.
     "Theoretically, I'm smart and should know better," Harris said. "It just wasn't the case. It's a disease, unfortunately. My father's side of the family. I just happened to get it."
     The disease is alcoholism, which not only runs in families but in certain professions. Journalism is one, let me assure you. And law is another. A study published earlier this year of 12,825 attorneys by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the American Bar Association found that 20 percent of attorneys engage in "hazardous, harmful and potentially alcohol-dependent drinking." That's one in five, twice the average for people in general.
     "Lawyers are more likely to be problem drinkers," said Patrick Krill, director of the Legal Professionals Program at Hazelden and one of the study authors. "It's a very stressful environment with an abundance of alcohol."
     For Harris, the problem began slowly.
     "I drank moderately at college," she said. "I started as the only African-American woman attorney at the firm, and felt a lot of pressure to succeed. I wanted to fit in. Every Wednesday and Thursday we'd go out for cocktails. It was the culture...."

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Republican Fear Junkies

    Honestly? I'm not afraid of Donald Trump becoming president.
    First, because I do believe Hillary Clinton will win.
    Yes, that might be the dark star of hope, its unseen gravity distorting my judgment and pulling me toward an optimistic conclusion. But so far, as much as the electorate disdains Hillary, they hate Trump more, and with good reason.
    And second, should the United States suffer the ultimate infamy of Donald Trump being elected president, we'll survive it. We survived eight year of George W. Bush, we'd survive Trump too, for a number of reasons.
    A), He's erratic. The Republicans are embracing what he says, now, gingerly, the way you'd hug someone with dirty clothes. By an act of  intellectual gymnastics they forget his saying the opposite, whether years ago or yesterday, and ignore the inescapable reality that Trump could change again and will, as circumstances dictate. So no Wall, no barring Muslims, none of the truly crazy stuff, or not much of it.
    Though that could, again, be hope talking.
     B), what I've dubbed The Curse of the Outsider (op cit, Jane Byrne, Jimmy Carter). You sweep in from nowhere, knowing nothing—and knowing nothing is Trump's modus operandi—and you can't get anything done. Yes, the GOP hierarchy are lining up behind Trump, to their eternal shame.
    John McCain! I still can't get my head around that. McCain endorsed Trump. After Trump insulted him personally, and sneered at all American POWs. I never would have imaged it possible. McCain, and his quisling cast of defeated cowards amble, cringing, onto the Trump stage to join Chris Christie, in his dunce cap and chains. 
      But will they really work hard for his vague platform of ad hoc idiocy? 
      And the Democrats, freed of any lingering requirements of concern for governance by eight years of bitter Republican obscurantism, plus the genuinely vile and impossible programs Trump advocates, not to mention his bullying, my-way-or-the-highway demeanor, and they can sit on their hands and watch, grinning, as Trump tries to enforce his folly.
    C). Have you looked at his face? The strain. The white circles around the eyes. He just doesn't look like a well man. Yes, his keeling over dead sometime in the next six months would be a deus ex machina solution. But God looks kindly upon America. Or did.
     Not to get overly personal and mean, which smacks of Trumpism. I don't wish the man dead, just not living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The toughest challenge, facing him, is not to become like him. Because we lose that game, since he's better at being him than we are. 
     "When fighting monsters," as my favorite Nietszche quote goes, "take care not to become a monster."
     The whole thing does make me very sad, and not just for the Republicans. You have the Bernie Sanders crowd, buying lies as outrageous as Trump's, mirror image promises. Like two halves of a coin, like Raskalnikov and Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment. Sanders and Trump would look trite in fiction (not that Crime and Punishment is trite, but the symbolism would wilt in lesser hands, and whoever is authoring our current farce, it ain't Dostoevsky. Bulgakov maybe.)
     The Sanders supporters are already going all Ralph Nader on us, and daring suggest there is no different between Trump and Clinton.
    They must not have been listening Friday, when Trump said he would end no-gun zones (while standing at the NRA convention, a no-gun zone, which would be staggering hypocrisy if he, you know, cared).
     Clinton, Trump said, slipping into pure hallucination, is hot "to release the violent criminals from jail" while snatching away the guns of law abiding citizens, particularly our blushing, vulnerable daughters and mothers.
     "In trying to overturn the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton is telling everyone— and every woman living in a dangerous community — that she doesn't have the right to defend herself."
     His appeal to female voters, I guess.  
     Meanwhile Clinton sticking to her guns, so to speak, called for the sensible gun safety measures that 92 percent of the country endorse.
    Seems like a difference to me.  
     And it's so astounding -- I'm not scared, I'm amazed -- that even the most rabid gun fan could slurp that up, this wild, obvious pandering. But they do. They're fear junkies. Terror makes their hearts pump, makes them feel alive. They gotta have it to get through their days. It's like they're living in a horror film. They need to rationalize building an armory in their basement, stockpiling food. And with America safe and secure, the economy humming along, well, that's not in the script. So they manufacture this bogeyman. For seven years the quiet, reflective, almost timid Barack Obama, who did utterly nothing regarding guns, was the guy who woke them up at night in a cold sweat. His election and re-election caused a surge in gun sales. And now Hillary Clinton is forced onto that procrustean bed.
    On Saturday, I created the first hashtag I ever made on Twitter—hashtags are ways to organize tweets. It's #GOPFearAddicts. Please feel free, when you find examples of the Republican Party waving lies to terrorize their flock of bleating cowards, to contribute your own. Then I squinted at it, and made it #RepublicanFearJunkies, which is longer, but sounds better. We'll use them both and see which proves more popular. I imagine we'll have quite a collection by November, when Hillary wins. But not without every sane, patriotic American lashing himself or herself to the wheel and fighting to save our country from, if not ruin, then humiliation and insanity.
   

A hot dog and coffee on Touhy....

For those outside the Chicago area: yes, there's a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Niles.

    
     File this one under, "No wonder should go unremarked upon."
     Spent the morning in West Englewood, reporting on a story — we'll get to that next week — finishing up about 12:30 p.m. Time for lunch. I considered a couple Harold's Chicken Shacks; when in Rome... But there wasn't anywhere near by to park, and I just kept driving.
     Somehow, parking a few blocks away and ambling over to get in line and grab lunch in Englewood seemed a Bad Idea. Maybe I was being timid. 
     Hurtling down 95th Street — man it gets suburban fast — I passed countless Burger Kings and McDonalds and Wendys and Popeyes. Never considered those for a second. Not hungry enough for fast food, except of course for White Castle, which are special.  White Castle has a soul.
    But the pair I passed were on the other side of the street, and U turns for Sliders.... I kept going. 
     Onto 294 North. Love that road. Fast. I had an errand in Niles, so got off at Touhy going east. By now I was getting hungry. Papa Chris Place presented itself. It was well after 1 p.m. A hot dog would do the trick. I went in, ordered a char-dog, mustard, grilled onions, and ketchup. They didn't give me grief over the ketchup, not so much as a haughty glance. But that wasn't the wonder.
     Cup of black coffee.
     It was a decent dog, good pile of hot crinkly fries. Ate, checked the morning's email. When I finished, I took my tray to the garbage, fished out the green plastic basket I had thoughtlessly tossed in, after my eyes strayed over the "Don't throw your basket out" sign. Returned the ketchup bottle to the condiments, not far from where a Sun-Times sat ready for the next patron hungry for more than food. Went back to the table, retrieved my white styrofoam cup of coffee, and was leaving. The restaurant is set up so that, to exit the seating area, you have to pass by the counter, and as I did a woman behind the counter called to me, "Can I freshen up your coffee for you?" 
    I hadn't drunk much, maybe an inch worth. Good coffee, but hot, and I was eating. But I set down the cup, lifted off the cover, and she topped it off. 
    I can't remember that ever happening at a hot dog or burger joint, never, not once in my life. It certainly would never happen at a McDonalds. No minimum wage automaton would ever stop a patron going out the door to give him more coffee. That's probably a fireable offense at McDonald's. 
     "Thanks," I said. "This is my first time here. And thanks for subscribing to the Sun-Times." That last part probably sounded crazy and she ignored it, but I was glad they had the paper sitting out on the counter.
     "Come back again," she said.
    A nickel's worth of coffee. But it made me very happy, stepping into the parking lot, to see this sight, the Leaning Tower of Niles.  Not the bonus coffee, of course, but the gesture. A small kindness, a generosity of spirit, manifesting itself in subtle ways. I figured, whatever blurt of good publicity this blog could offer would be an apt way to return the kindness. It's the small things that make life rich. 

"Fourth City" just doesn't sound right

     "Third City." Chicago hasn't quite wrapped its head around that one yet, have we?
     "The Third Coast," yes. Particularly the fine Thomas Dyja history of Chicago of that name. Read it; you'll be glad you did.
     Otherwise, "Third Coast" is a bit shared, a bit greasy, like one of those loaner jackets at a fancy restaurant: too many other folks slip it on for anyone to be comfortable in it. Lots of cities on the Great Lakes use the "Third Coast" moniker. Cleveland has a number of "Third Coast" businesses. Milwaukee too.
     To be honest, Chicago is still leaving claw marks on "Second City." We were second in the United States in population for so long, starting in 1890 and for most of the 20th century, following New York, which was humiliation aplenty. We got used to it, with a little brother swagger. New York was so far ahead, almost triple the population, there was no hope of catching up. So we might as well turn the silver consolation prize into a point of pride.
    Then Los Angeles scooted past us in — wait for it — 1982, which shows you just how hard we cling to former glory. We ignored the shift out of ego and because Los Angeles really isn't a city at all, not a proper one but a vast agglomeration of contiguous places....

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Never ever gonna golf.

     No, as a matter of fact, I've never golfed, not once in my life.
     Not from any animus. I'm not anti-golf. I have no opinions or emotions about it.
     If you asked me why I have never golfed, I guess the honest answer is that I've never had the opportunity. Nobody ever asked me. My father, a nuclear physicist from the Bronx, never golfed, not once. Nor did I know anybody who golfed. 
     My in-laws did. It seemed a fun, quasi-athletic thing, and did tempt me. Since I've been in suburbia, for the past 15 years, when it got warm I'd promise myself to slide over to whatever that golf course is on Willow Road and take a few lessons. 

    But May would turn into June, and June into July, and I never did it, and this year the intention isn't there. 
     Not that I haven't been on a golf course: I have. A magazine once sent me down to Montego Bay, Jamaica, where I walked 18 holes at Round Hill with Arnold Palmer, interviewing him for a story, or trying to. He wasn't having a very good game; in fact, that might have helped me to never take up the sport, because Arnold Palmer wasn't having fun, and he's really good at it, generally.
     It was a beautiful place, though. Like being in heaven, but with golf.
     Rich people seem to always golf—it's the reward for their lives of success, fame and money. Michael Jordan and whoever's president, tycoons and stars and such. They all love golfing. Which made me a little tempted. Here's something people do hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and I've never done once.
   Well, I did go to miniature golf, which is fun, but also doesn't count. And I seem to remember going to a driving range, some time in the hazy historical past, but my guess is I was no good at all. Should I find myself on a course, I know I'd be horrible, and I can embarrass myself plenty here, in print, without seeking out further embarrassments in the physical world.
    I was prepared to go golfing with my younger son. But he didn't take to it either. Golf camp might have something to do with it. He was maybe seven years old, and we sent him to a five day "Golf Camp" at the Northbrook Park District. I imagine it was two hours of basic golf tips in the morning. 
    At the end of the first day, my wife called me at work. 
    "He's quitting golf camp," she said. "You'll have to call them and get our money back."
    I asked her to wait, let me talk to the lad first. I sat him down and gave him a speech that went something like this: "You can't quit golf camp. First, because it's golf camp. Everything else you do for the rest of your life will be harder than golf camp. If you can't get through golf camp, what will you be able to get through? Second, it's golf camp. It cost $200" (or whatever the figure was). "When you get older, you're going to want us to buy you guitars and automobiles and pay for college tuition, and we're going to say, why should we spend this money when we threw away money on golf camp and you didn't even go? Third, it's golf camp, it's five days long, and I'm making you go through with it."
     That speech worked. Actually, talking out what the problem was worked. It turned out, the instructor, in trying to impress upon the kids how dangerous a driver could be, slammed on forcefully on a fence post, splintering it, and that scared my boy, who was seven, remember. Once we got to that point, he was able to make it through the week.
    But golf never stuck with him, and I can't say I blame him. It must be genetic.