Abandoned Babies Week, #2: 'Please take good care of him'

Baby Monsarrat, by Clarence H. White (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     April is Safe Haven Month in Illinois, and before the month is out I wanted to reprint a few columns I've written over the years on the subject. This was originally headlined "Abandoning our kids, then and now." It could not be written today because reporters no longer have access to the Sun-Times clip file, which is stored in Addison, supposedly.

     They put the babies in shopping bags. In laundry baskets. In pasteboard boxes.
     They carried them to tavern restrooms. To ash cans. To park benches. To shrubbery. Then they left them.
     The past is a foreign country, the saying goes; they do things differently there. And as universal as the act of abandoning a child may seem, they did it differently in the 1940s, as I learned after finding an envelope of old newspaper clippings marked "CHILDREN -- ABANDONED: 1950 AND PRIOR" and entering a world both very strange and sadly familiar.
     The heart-wrenching notes struck me first. The mothers wanted to explain:
     "I'd give my soul to keep her myself but what sort of life would she have being born out of wedlock? This is the best way I know," wrote the woman who left her baby in the Milner Hotel in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1946, phoning the clerk afterward and asking him to "take care of the valuables left in Room 138."
     That was typical. They wanted the babies found.
     The mother of a 2-week-old boy left in the shrubs across from 2440 Lakeview in July, 1945, phoned police and told them where to look. The same night, a 6-week-old girl was found in the hallway at 4840 S. Paulina. The mother had awakened residents, then fled.
     The notes tout bloodlines and tweak finders toward pity.
     "Please take good care of him—I can't keep him—Haven't the money—But I love him—Born June 29, 1941," read a note on the baby found in a pew at St. Mary's Catholic Church.
     Mothers left poignantly precise instructions: "He gets baby cereal three times daily and orange juice once and cod liver oil," read a note pinned to the blue sweater of the 5-month-old baby boy left in the foyer of 1726 Augusta, in 1949. "He has a light cold and I fear for his health. He takes eight ounces six times daily. I left my home and I do not know what to do.
     "Maybe somebody can do better than I can."
     They were abandoning their children, but with an eye toward their welfare. The woman who asked a stranger to watch her 6-week-old boy at the La Salle Street train station "for a few minutes" never returned. But she left behind a little suitcase of baby clothes.
     "Please take care of my baby," read a note on a stroller containing a chubby toddler left in the foyer of a home at 4011 N. Lowell. "I can't afford to take care of him any longer. Please don't turn him out."
     Sometimes they didn't.
     Switchman Jack Bowen, who had four boys, found a newborn girl in a pasteboard box under a railroad viaduct near 45th Street in 1944, and said he'd like to adopt her. Mrs. Francis Weprin already had a newborn in 1942, but when she discovered a 10-day-old in a white bonnet in her building's foyer, she offered to keep him anyway.
     I do not want to suggest that women did not leave their babies to die in freezing alleys in the 1940s. They did. They murdered their babies and mailed the bodies to the post office.
     But such callousness was the exception; lately it seems the rule. Mothers of today do not leave notes, according to Chicago police. "They don't want to get caught," a spokeswoman said.
     The problem was seen as a crisis then.
     "Unwanted, neglected and abandoned children are becoming Chicago's biggest headache," columnist Sydney J. Harris wrote in 1944. "Social workers admit they are almost licked. Police can do little. The courts fume, but are impotent to halt the wave of derelict mothers who leave their children."
     The crisis isn't so keenly felt today. Which is odd, because in 1946, there were 4,200 children in Cook County being cared for by the state.
     Last year, that number was 35,559.
                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 8, 1998

'The world wouldn't be a world without the newspaper.'

Labor, by Will Barnet (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     You know what's hard work? Deboning whitefish. A machine can't do it. So a guy stands in a chilled room—has to be chilled so the fish won't spoil. He runs his bare—has to be bare, so he can feel the pin bones—left hand over the whitefish, while the right one pulls out the nearly-invisible bones with a needle-nosed pliers.
     I know this because I once watched it done. And what did the whitefish deboner talk about? How fortunate he was to have his job. How happy it made him.
     That stuck with me, and explains why I winced, a little, at the Sun-Times' new slogan: "The hardest-working newspaper in America."
     My first thought was: "How do we know? Did we study all the other newspapers? Because otherwise we've installed a lie atop the front page."
     Loyal employee that I am, or try to be, I groped for a bright spin: "mere puffery," as my lawyer friends would say. Like "World's Best Coffee." Why not? The Tribune called itself "The World's Greatest Newspaper," for half a century (a boast fossilized in the call letters "WGN") and that wasn't true either.
     So I understand why “hard-working” now appears on every page of our print editions. What is the task of this newspaper? Only absorbing everything happening now in the entire world with an emphasis on Chicago and Illinois. Filter out the superfluous and present the essential events in a completely accurate and public form within a few minutes of their occurring. Do so, lately, in an environment where bald lies are boldly uttered at the highest levels while preserving a reputation for accuracy so great that our mistakes are remembered forever. “IT’S REAGAN AND FORD” a Sun-Times front page headline trumpeted about the 1980 presidential ticket. It wasn’t.

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Abandoned Babies Week, #1: "You never forget seeing a dead baby"

    

Daguerreotype of a dead baby, 1840s (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     
     April is Safe Haven month, a reminder that, for the first 30 days after giving birth, new mothers who cannot care for their infants can leave them, no questions asked, at fire houses, police stations and hospitals. Since the law was passed in 2001, at least 126 babies in Illinois have been sent on their way toward loving homes in this fashion, and saved the risk of dying after being abandoned, as often happens to newborns who are not delivered to a secure location. 
    I've written about the law over the years, and this week will be posting a couple of those columns here. This one was originally headlined "Show your concern over real babies."


     You never forget seeing a dead baby. This one was maybe a month old, perfect features, mouth slightly open, bluish skin, swaddled in a blanket, waiting its turn on a stainless steel table at the Cook County Medical Examiner's office on Harrison Street.
     Nearly 20 years later, I can see the baby as if it were in front of me now. My buddy, the photographer Robert A. Davis, and I were doing a profile of the first Cook County medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein. We had been watching Dr. Stein work since 5 a.m., and we hadn't flinched at the man who had laid on the floor of a transient hotel for two weeks in the August heat (well, OK, a little flinching when the sheet was first drawn back), or the young guy shot through a lung, or any of the other unfortunates who had been rolled in and cut up.
     But the baby seemed a different matter entirely. Neither Bob nor I had kids yet, but we both must have known they were coming, because something told us that, story or no story, this wasn't a deposit we wanted to make in the old memory banks.
     "C'mon," I said, nodding toward the door. "Union-mandated coffee break." We left the baby to Dr. Stein.
     I mention this, because when young women abandon their babies, it often means not only a slow, painful death for the baby -- which would be bad enough -- but also a grisly discovery for whatever poor person stumbles upon the baby too late. A dead baby is hard enough to see in the morgue, where you expect it. I can't imagine what it does to a person who opens a trash can and finds one.
     Tuesday is National Safe Haven Day, which Gov. Quinn has declared is Save Abandoned Babies Day in the state.
      Illinois passed a temporary Safe Haven law in 2001, designating hospitals and fire stations as places where new mothers could abandon their unharmed newborns without fear of legal repercussion.
     Originally the babies had to be 3 days old or younger, but after the law was made permanent in 2005, it was expanded to cover infants up to 30 days old, and police stations were included.
     The Save Abandoned Babies Foundation estimates that 55 Illinois infants have been turned over to state care because of the law, including Lilli, whose mother left her at Engine 98's firehouse in 2008.
     "We are so grateful that our daughter's birth mom knew about the law and was brave enough to follow through on that plan," said Lilli's adoptive mom, Carrie, a northwest suburban woman who didn't want her last name used out of privacy concerns.
     "In her case she didn't know she was pregnant, she had delivered the baby at home, and knew enough about the law [that] she knew she would be able to bring her to the fire station."
     Lilli is now 2, and likes baby dolls and books.
     "Lilli has helped make our family complete," said her mother. "She's so, so cute. We couldn't imagine our lives without her."

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR

     The clattering sound you hear is dozens of anti-abortion activists pounding away at their keyboards. "Dear Stinkberg," they write, "how can you even pretend to care about babies when you approve of women murdering their children in the uterus?? Please see the attached 12 color photographs of aforementioned diced children . . . ."
     And the answer — not that they are interested in an answer, but let's pretend — is that I, like most Americans, differentiate between actual, born-and-alive-in-the-real-world-now babies and the fertilized egg the size of the period at the end of this sentence that typically gets aborted.
     This of course flies by the anti-choice crowd, who have deemed these "babies" with such forceful finality that I'm sure the idea that they're simply locked into a convenient fantasy will shock, amuse and offend them. They've found their label, their metaphor, their easy code word, and they're sticking with it, just the way that the hate-immigration crowd has seized on the word "illegal," and though try as you may, nothing will make them perceive the falsity of their stratagem. ("Really? Concerned about illegal immigration only because it's illegal? What other 'illegal' things are you really worked up about? Just illegal immigration, huh? Nothing else? Thought so. Hmmmm. . . maybe it's the immigration part and not the 'illegal' part then, cause there's a lot more illegal stuff that you're ignoring. . . .")
     Caring for actual babies is hard, and the state struggles to find enough foster homes to park them in. That's another reason why people gin up this outsized concern for other people's non-babies: It's easy. You can stand in the street holding a 5-foot photo of a tiny bloody foot, call it a day, tell yourself you've saved a lot of babies, when in reality you haven't changed one diaper. Merely professed your undying concern for proto babies, which hardly exist, and ignored a bunch of baby babies, who most certainly do exist and could use your help. And you felt morally superior to boot. Congrats.
     Just wanted to put in my two cents, because these people act as if nobody else thinks about these things except them. Most people give this matter careful consideration, even those who are dismissed as hell-bound whores murdering their infants.
     Respect for life means respecting those who are actually alive, even if they make decisions that go contrary to your personal religious scruples. It's a tough-to-grasp concept, I know, particularly if you don't even try to understand.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 2010

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition to Beto O'Rourke

   

     "We have to hope and pray that things turn around in November," a friend said over dinner on Friday.
     I felt a muscle in my jaw tense.
     "If only Ted Cruz could be defeated in the Senate," a Facebook friend mused. "But I'm not holding my breath. Texas is a red state ... So I wouldn't bet on Cruz losing this year. But I can dream, can't I?"
     Hope. Pray. Dream. A certain peasant fatalism has crept into Democratic thinking.
     Not without reason. Our nightmare president builds his cult of personality every day while the party supporting him sheds its values and beliefs, rolling at his feet like puppies.
     Yet surrender is premature. Our nation was not forged and preserved by a bunch of quitters.
     So while I try to religiously avoid all Facebook debates as pointless time sinks, I couldn't resist commenting after his "dream" remark: "Well, that and send Beto O'Rourke money. I am."
     Everyone knows who Ted Cruz is. The most hated man in the Senate. "Lucifer in the flesh," in John Boehner's memorable description. But who is Beto O'Rourke? He is the Democrat running against Cruz this November and doing surprisingly well. Last week, a new poll showed a close race, Cruz leading 47 to 44 percent. O'Rourke has raised more money than Cruz, thanks to small donors such as myself.
     No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas in 24 years, so it's a long shot. But Satan's senator is obviously scared.
     Even before O'Rourke's victory in the March 6 primary was confirmed, his campaign aired a radio commercial mocking O'Rourke's first name, accusing him of changing it to appeal to voters. In response, O'Rourke released a photo of himself as a toddler, wearing a sweater with "Beto" — his nickname since birth — stitched across the front.
     Cruz's actual first name is "Rafael," a reminder that Trump does not hold monopoly on either deceit or hypocrisy.

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Cookie dough wins

     "Pick up some romaine lettuce," my wife said on Monday. 
      I was going to the supermarket and asked what we needed.
     "Okay honey," I said. Romaine hearts were on sale, two packages for $4. Seemed like a deal, because usually they cost three or four bucks apiece. Though we already had a package at home, I eat a salad almost every day. No harm in stocking up. The stuff lasts a while.
     "Throw away the romaine lettuce," my wife said on Wednesday, pointing to a Centers for Disease Control directive that romaine might be tainted with deadly E-coli.
     "Okay honey," I said, thinking, guess that's why it was on sale. 
     I'll be honest. Left to my devices, I would take my chances and just eat the stuff, washing it first, as I always do—a vigorous dousing in the salad spinner—Get behind me, Satan! All you germs, down the drain!
     It's not that I'm against caution. I wear my seatbelt and my bicycle helmet, usually. I look both ways crossing the street and own a variety of insurance.
     But certain kinds of caution are a bridge too far. The worry about salmonella from cookie dough, for instance. I once crunched the numbers for getting salmonella from raw eggs, and they're infinitesimal. Which means, in a country of ... check ... 325 million people (crikey, I thought it was 310 million; they'r reproducing like rabbits!) that somebody is going to get salmonella from raw eggs. But it probably won't be you. So grab a spoon and scrape away, clutching the big stainless steel mixing bowl to your chest, going after that delicious dough, beaming like a child, as primal a joy as there can be (well, ahem, ignoring a primal joy or two).
    Why pitch the lettuce but eat the cookie dough? A good question, and one that deserves a logical answer.
     We can eliminate the listen-to-your-wife factor, because she certainly shook her finger in my face vigorously about the cookie dough, to which I responded with a shrug and a lick of the wooden spoon.
     If that isn't it, then what?
     In the case of the lettuce, the tiny risk of sickness is weighed against the loss of a $4 investment in produce (it's not worth four bucks to spend 45 minutes returning it to Jewel, assuming they would take it back, which they might not). It's not worth $4 to risk getting sick. Caution wins. 
     In the case of the cookie dough, the tiny risk of sickness is balanced against a lifetime of eating raw cookie dough when the opportunity arises. As barren a prospect that can be imagined, especially in a life where a few pleasures have already been pitched over the side in the name of survival. So in the tug-of-war between tiny risk of sickness and decades worth of cookie dough, cookie dough wins.
     Make sense?
   

Flashback 2011: "Got $5 million? Give it to the Goodman now!"

  

    Be careful what you wish for.
     Because my fervent mumblings, asking God why, WHY won't somebody significant run against Rahm Emanuel were answered by a flash mob of potential opponents, led by former police superintendent Garry McCarthy, crawling out of the tar pit where he and the other Ditka-grade knuckle-draggers reside and tossing his tiger skin in the ring.
    Now I've been forced to re-evaluate my visceral loathing and years-long write-off of Rahm. Yes, he's a jerk. Yes, he mishandled the Laquan McDonald shooting—to be kind, either mishandled or is complicit in covering up a murder.
    But Garry McCarthy ... sweet Jesus no.
    The Sun-Times ran a story Saturday that after businessman Willie Wilson, one of the vanity candidates challenging Rahm, helped him out by blowing off the contribution cap. Rahm promptly raised $1.6 million by snapping his fingers. Which made me think of this column, from the early days of the Emanuel administration,  back when I still manfully struggled to like the man. 
    I don't know if I ever could again. But I suppose I might have to try. Despite his flaws, Rahm Emanuel does ... ah ... does have ... bi-lateral symmetry. That isn't saying he's human. But it's a step in that direction.

     Before he was mayor of the city of Chicago, before he was congressman from the 5th District, before he was an adviser to two presidents, Rahm Emanuel was a fund-raiser, and while I knew, in a dry intellectual fashion, that he was a good one, I really didn't realize just what that meant, on a gut emotional level, until I slid by the Goodman Theatre Thursday morning for breakfast.
     It was the sort of look-to-the-future event I normally wouldn't be caught dead at, but a variety of small nudges put me there: a) they asked (you'd be amazed at how many organizations screw up that part); b) there was food; c) the mayor would be there—that usually means something is worth glancing at.
     Coffee was being zupped, scones nibbled. I ran into my pal, the director Robert Falls, and teased him about his play "Red," starting Saturday. ("Gee Bob," I said, or words to that effect, in my best faux naive wide-eyed fashion. "That play was such a big hit on Broadway - whatever made you bold enough to decide to put on your own production here?")
      Then we moved to the auditorium, to listen to the five, count 'em, five speakers who went before Emanuel: Roche Schulfer, the Goodman executive director; Falls, its artistic director; Patricia Cox, chairman; Joan Clifford, the Women's Board President, and Shawn Donnelley, the immediate past chair.
      "This is a milestone in the long history of the Goodman Theatre," Schulfer began, with the rest of the remarks—plus a short film—recounting how the Goodman is an important institution, one that is culturally diverse, one which moved from its original home at the Art Institute 10 years ago, an edifice that helped revitalize the theater district, and now is well on its way to assembling a $15 million endowment to guarantee its continuance, having already snagged $10 million in pledges.
     As thrilling as all that is, I didn't see how it belonged in a newspaper column. I clicked my pen shut and tucked my notebook away.
     Then it was the mayor's turn to speak.
     "This is a no-brainer," he said. "You're here. You know what it's about. It's the last $5 million ... Here's the deal, folks: 10 years ago this was a dead zone. You've anchored something. People from around the world come here because of this theater. Finish it."
      The contrast between Emanuel and the sincere yet sedate directors and chairs who went before him was enormous. If the general emotional tone behind their remarks was this-is-an-important-cultural-institution-worthy-of-support then Emanuel's was the-house-is-on-fire-get-the-baby-out, where giving $5 million to the Goodman right now is the baby.
     As Emanuel continued, it turned out this isn't just about the Goodman. It was bigger; the fate of Chicago itself hangs in the balance.
     "When you think of downtown today, you think of the theater district," he said, jabbing a finger in the air. "You raised $10 million already. Finish it! You are not just a cultural institution, you are an economic engine. You know why you're here. Let's finish the job."
     But driving the economy of Chicago turned out not to be the full extent of it either; the future of creativity itself is at stake. No other city in the world allows artists their freedom.
     "In Chicago, you can create," he said. "You can't do that in New York, you fail [there], you might as well get a passport out of town because you're never going to succeed again. In Chicago . . . you can do something, maybe not make it, improve it, come back and do something. That's in the visual arts, architecture, theater, music, dance, in every other space. No other city has what we have."
     Bits of this I had heard before, but never had I experienced the full rendition, and it struck me, hearing him, that fund-raising is also a performance, when done well. Emanuel was doing the hard job of taking material people already knew and selling it to an audience.
     It worked; the donations are expected.
     "I would be surprised if we didn't get some today, he was so persuasive," Cox said after.
     Ever since the days of Daley I, the media saying anything positive about a mayor automatically is seen as an act of toadyism. Believe me, I'm loathe to do it; I have my own audience to think about. I'm eager to sink my pointy teeth into his leg as soon as possible.
     But Thursday wasn't the day to do it.
     It gets bad press, but fund-raising is an art, like acting on stage in a tragedy or playing the blues in a club or running the football at Soldier Field, and to the pantheon of uniquely Chicago peak artistic experiences—Brian Dennehy performing Eugene O'Neill at the Goodman, Muddy Waters perched on a stool, bending a note, or Walter Payton breaking a tackle on a Sunday afternoon—you have to include Rahm Emanuel shaking a cup for a good cause. It's a bravura performance.
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 16, 2011

Cool tools #3: Wilton Tradesman Bench Vise.

 
     The vise is the heart of any workshop. A vise holds what's being cut, steady and unwavering. You'll notice I've added an extra layer of support before bolting the Wilton—which has four bolts instead of the standard three—to my work table, to encourage it not to pull through the particleboard.
     The really extraordinary thing about this Wilton Tradesman Bench Vise is not that it weighs 70 pounds or its sleek green finish or that it rotates 360 degrees: it's where the glorious object is made: not China, not Mexico, but Carpentersville, Illinois. The company began in Chicago in 1941 by Czech immigrant Hugh W. Vogl, and while some production has moved down to the union-unfriendly state of Tennessee, these "bullet vises"—so-called because the screw is encased by a rounded casing that keeps out grit—are still made locally.
     Don't overlook the little square anvil area. Very useful.
   The obvious question is what connection does "vise," the badass tool, have with "vice," the bad personal habit? The romantic in me would conjure up a t00-easy answer: some medieval moralist opining how we are squeezed by the shame of our moral failings.
     The actual, the world-sucks-but-we-have-to-live-in-it answer is "there's no connection." In fact, "vice" is used for both the tool and the sin in most of the English speaking world, the depravity-related meaning being older, and tracing to the Latin "vitium," meaning, simply enough, "fault, or defect." The thing with jaws pressing together is from "vitis," or vine, which grow in corkscrews ("Vite" is screw in Italian). Without the casing that Wilton so handily features, the large screw mechanism was most distinctive. 
     In his great 1755 dictionary, Samuel Johnson defines vice as "1. The course of action opposite to virtue; depravity of manners, inordinate life" then "2. A fault; an offence." The third definition is, obscurely, "The fool, or punchinello of old shows," citing Shakespeare, and only in his fourth definition gets to "A kind of small iron press with screws, used by workmen" citing a Dutch word, "vijs," which must, like all of Johnson's etymologies, be taken with a big blue Morton canister of salt. 
     Only in the United States is the "vise" spelling generally used, trying to get a little distance I suppose between our tools and the urgings of Satan.
     It was this column, almost a decade ago, that first put the Wilton company on my radar. And in my basement.

     "This isn't Chinese. I can tell from the box, they're American," says Gordon Stade, holding a microphone and sitting high in a booth mounted on the back of a red Ford F-250 pickup truck parked in the middle of the Northbrook Garage. "What are they, Jerry? They're tire wrenches, boys."
     The "boys" are 50 or 60 men, substantial, hardworking men, many in baseball caps, some in bib overalls or leather jackets atop plaid shirts atop hooded sweat shirts. Others wear sleeveless T-shirts, one showing off a red-white-and-blue Chevy logo tattoo. They crowd in a circle around the truck, fully bearded or scraggly faced, pony-tailed or balding, rail thin or hauling around cantilevered beer keg guts. They are truckers and towers and garage mechanics, the kind of guys who would show up early Saturday morning to bid on one and a half centuries of clutter from what, until last weekend, was one of the oldest businesses in the United States, the Lorenz auto garage on Shermer Road, which began as a horse carriage repair shop in the 1840s.
     Think of how cluttered your garage is—now imagine that on an immense scale after five generations. Hydraulic jacks and chain hoists, tow cables and breaker bars and tires stacked chest-high. Huge hooks attached to pulleys the size of dinner plates. Shocks and wrenches and little boxes of little bulbs.
     And air hoses—red air hoses.
     "I'm going to sell 'em to you, you can send air all over the farm," says Stade, a livestock auctioneer, himself in business 55 years out of Huntley. "Fifty? Who'll give me 10? Now 20. Now 30."
     Not being in the market for a 25-ton press or an acetylene outfit or the hood from a Firebird, I didn't plan on attending the auction. But the warm weather drew me outside, and I wandered over—the brick garage, built in the early 1920s, looks like something out of a train diorama and is only two blocks from my house.
     I take my place among the men gathered around Stade's pickup truck, which moves along the center of the garage, selling first one pile of stuff, then another. A pair of axes goes cheap —I could use a good axe—so I think to register at the trailer in the back, resolving not to buy anything I don't actually need.
     So no 5-Speed Heavy Duty Drill Press produced by Central Machinery of Hollywood, Calif. No hubcaps from a Nash Rambler. No "Your LaSalle—An Owner's Manual" from 1938.
     "We're selling the trailer, boys," says Stade, who wears a cowboy hat and speaks in an easy, burbling patter. If the family farm has to go, this is the guy you want selling it.
     "He's really good at what he does; he'll get more per item than anybody," observes a big bearded man standing next to me, Chris Horcher of Horcher's Towing of Wheeling. Horcher is here for trucks and chains—"I would have bought more, but he was getting more than the chains cost new."
     I don't want to fall into that trap. But when the longest industrial extension cord I have even seen in my life is held up for sale, I remember scrambling to piece together every cord I own. One hundred feet of heavy-duty orange extension cord goes to bidder No. 106—me—for $6, and lugging the coil makes me feel like less of a well-scrubbed scribbling toff amongst men who actually work for a living.
     I pause to admire a vise—two feet long, made by the Wilton Tool Corp. of Schiller Park. Dappled with 50 years of hammer blows and saw nicks, worn, with a dust brown patina, it looks more like a natural formation, something carved by the wind perhaps, than an object manufactured by human hands.
     "You need a vise?" asks a guy, who sees me examining it. "These are not made in China, you know."
     "Every man needs a vice," I answer. "And frankly, I've been lacking in the vice department lately."
     But this is not the crowd for wordplay. I hang around for more than an hour, hoping to snag the vise, or at least one of the tire irons—those big metal X's, not the little jack sticks that comes with cars nowadays. Lunchtime approaches, however, and I decide to leave the tools to those who really need them. I am also afraid that I'll shrug and make the easy observation: that, as if our big car companies failing were not bad enough, now even the corner car repair shop is going down, breaking apart and spilling its contents to the winds.
     Despite the fever dreams of the village fathers, I can't imagine a hip restaurant opening in this yawning cavern. I can't see the high-ceiling space, with its skylights and metal struts, becoming a mall—a candle shop and an olive oil boutique and a stand selling artisanal cheeses—not one that ever progresses beyond an artist's drawing published in the Northbrook Star. My bet: It'll sit empty for the next five years.
      That goes without saying. More worthwhile noting is that my wistfulness for the Wilton vise was misplaced—Wilton, now of Elgin, made its first vise in 1941 and is still going strong. The Wilton Web site touts 132 vises—though whether they are made in China or here, I could not immediately determine. Either way, I might have to pick one up because sometimes a man needs a vise.
    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 9, 2009