Flashback 2007: Delightful and unexpected; Family vacation to Tennessee -- yes, Tennessee

     I was puzzling over what to write in the paper Wednesday and, through some random brain circuitry quirk, got to wondering what Eddie Montgomery is up to.
       Montgomery is the surviving half the Montgomery Gentry country music duo—his partner Troy Gentry died in a helicopter crash last September. I saw them on stage twice, and admired their powerful performance and honest, intelligent music. 

     Turns out that in February, Montgomery issued an album they had finished just before Gentry died, and not only has been touring, solo, but as chance would have it is coming to Bloomington, a mere 140 miles from Chicago, this Saturday night, playing at the Grossinger Motors Arena. Tickets are available.

     That seemed reason enough to dig deeper. So much of concert music is canned bologna  nowadays, I thought the Kentuckian's performances in the wake of Gentry's death might be more genuine and heartfelt than the standard fare.
    "I know I'm supposed to be a big badass outlaw or whatever," Montgomery told Rolling Stone in March. "But when we hit the stage a couple weeks ago without him, I was so nervous. I was like 'Oh my God' – I thought I was gonna get sick. But finally I felt him in there, and I started smiling."  
     Monday I contacted Montgomery's management and asked to talk to him for a few minutes about how he's holding up without the man he's been harmonizing with for so long—the duo officially formed in 1999, but they played together for decades before that. Maybe I'll hear from him Tuesday, most likely I won't on such short notice, but as I tell the boys, "It's called "trying.'"
     There aren't many groups that I like, but Montgomery Gentry songs are a few cuts above, and I quote them from time to time in the column. Now that I think of it, I would have included the recovery anthem "Some People Change" in my recent book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," but after going through the time and expense of tracking down Beth Nielsen Chapman and paying her a fortune for "Save Yourself," I didn't have the heart.
     No matter, in checking what I wrote when I first encountered the group, I came upon this travelogue to Tennessee, and thought it merits posting.

     The day before we left, I walked a cigar down Wacker Drive.
     Why go on vacation at all, I wondered, when it is so very pleasant right here? What sights could be possibly better than these? Especially in Tennessee, of all places?
     Ah, well, I concluded, with a melancholy puff. People do these things. The boys and the wife are looking forward to it -- she has her heart set on climbing some mountain and staying at a lodge there. Might as well go without complaint and see what happens.

                                                                  - - -

     Nashville has its own Parthenon. Who knew? A full-scale replica, not of marble like the one in Athens, but concrete-studded with pebbles, smack dab in the center of a city park. It's huge.  

     Inside, a 42-foot-tall statue of Athena, facing a pair of 24-foot-tall, 7.5-ton bronze doors so skillfully hung you can move one with your pinkie.
     Delightful and unexpected — here, in the Bible Belt, where people put Ten Commandments magnets on their SUVs, they erected an enormous pagan temple with a gilt Greek goddess in the center.
     And this was just the first morning of the first day. 

                                                      - - -

     My experience with country music began and ended 20 years ago with "Coal Miner's Daughter." But we were here, so why not go to the Grand Ole Opry?
     A great show. Impressive how they draw the audience into their 80-year tradition with a short film and a Minnie Pearl imitator revving up the crowd. They welcomed us to their 4,252nd consecutive performance, then got down to business with a blast of fiddle and a brace of blur-legged dancers.
     Acts came and went. White-haired pros with half a century at the Opry mixed with ingenues making their debuts.
     "This song is going to be on my new album, and I'd like to do it for you," said Jennifer Hanson, a leggy lass, touchingly sincere, introducing a tune called "73" that outlines the fracture of her family, its title referring, courageously, to the year she was born.
     Then a duet called Montgomery Gentry burst onstage. A driving beat, great lyrics — especially "Lucky Man" — sharp showmanship and twangy music. I had never heard of them before but instantly could tell that these guys were good. We bought their new CD and couldn't stop listening to it as we drove across the state.

                                                              - - -

     Homemade biscuits. Moon Pies. Sweet tea. Goo-Goo Clusters. Fried strawberry pie. Fried banana pudding. Turnip greens.
     Carthage. Alexandria. Tennessee's ancient world motif isn't limited to the Parthenon — 170-year-old wallpaper at Andrew Jackson's home shows scenes from mythology. No doubt an attempt back then to lend classical luster to a frontier nowhere.
     Fishing barefoot in a river. Riding horses through dense woods. We spent three days hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, whose beauty defies words — trees covered with delicate lichen and moss, banks of wildflowers, 10-mile-wide mountain vistas. The boys, whom I expected to drag their feet and pine for TV, instead surged ahead, particularly the older kid, as if he had been waiting his whole life for this. We went from worrying he'd refuse to climb to worrying he'd skip off a cliff.
     We stayed at the place my wife dreamed about — LeConte Lodge. No electricity, no roads, it's supplied by pack llamas. Toward evening, we watched the mist roll eerily up the mountainside, just like smoke.

                                                                   - - -

     After the park, Pigeon Forge, a godawful, endless strip of chain restaurants and go-kart tracks that makes Wisconsin Dells seem like the Garden of Eden. One could easily juxtapose it to the Smokies and make a compelling argument for the extinction of the human race.
     Too easily, and just as Tiger Woods doesn't practice two-inch putts, so I don't traffic in the obvious. I made the best of it and taught Kent how to shoot pool.
     Besides, that's where we saw the Dixieland Stampede, Dolly Parton's revival of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Any experience that includes live thundering bisons and a piglet race supposedly redeciding the outcome of the Civil War cannot be all bad.

                                                                       - - -

     "Martin Luther King stayed in a motel?!" marveled Ross, as I tucked him into bed in our room at the Peabody. Ironic — to him, King is a famous person, so of course he would stay somewhere fancy, like the Peabody, with its famous lobby-dwelling ducks and its duckmaster with his red jacket and gold-headed duck cane.
     I was explaining that tomorrow we'd visit the National Civil Rights Museum, cleverly carved out of the shell of the Lorraine Motel, where King was murdered in 1968.
     Like the whole state of Tennessee, the museum far exceeded expectations — a vivid, throat-clenching, eye-misting experience. We spent three hours there — the boys learning the saga for the first time, me picking up information I didn't know: For instance, King was stabbed by a deranged black woman in 1956. He later laughed off the incident, which seems the right approach to such situations.

                                                                       - - -

     Much of the country is still woods, and driving across its vastness was supremely reassuring. During the trip, the London terror plot unfurled, and the standard crew of flag-waving cowards took to the airwaves to announce that the only way to combat terrorism is to preemptively renounce the freedoms that terrorists oppose.
     Fools. It's a great country, and while we certainly can be harmed, we'll win in the end, if we keep faith in ourselves.

                                                                     - - -

      Memphis has a pyramid. Who knew? And of course Graceland. I went; how can you not? And since the place has been picked clean, culturally, there didn't seem any point to criticize. So I just went and enjoyed. It actually was interesting, and I learned stuff. His life, despite all the buffing, seemed hollow. By the time Elvis was my age, he had been dead for five years, and I decided that, all things being equal, I would rather be me than be Elvis, a revelation worth driving 1,900 miles to receive.

                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 15, 2007

'Don't give advice' and other useless, unheeded commencement suggestions

     Welcome friends, family members, residents of Chicago and environs.
     This is the commencement season.
     They have already begun, these solemn ceremonies, grand processions and groaning brass overtures, at institutions great and small, and will continue for a month and a half, from Loyola University Chicago, all this week, until ... Northwestern University, bringing up the rear, Friday, June 22.
     I'll be at NU, seeing the younger boy off into the world. But first, I'll be at Pomona College in California. Two boys, two commencements, boom-boom, one after another. Because the younger lad flashed through college in three years, itself a lesson on the value of paternal advice, since, when he raised the idea, I urged him to linger and enjoy college. You'll have a lifetime to work.
     He shrugged and did what he wanted. That's what kids do.
     Leading to my first piece of advice for commencement goers: don't give advice. Really, don't. The grads don't want to hear it, probably won't hear it, and you're giving it anyway, not based on their lives, but yours. We pretend we're trying to spare them our mistakes, but what we're really doing is trying to pick the music for a party we're not invited to.
     No matter. Advice will be given. Speakers famous and obscure will don black robes and puffy velvet hats, and share wisdom. Dream dreams. Live life.
     But what about the audience? Who speaks of our hopes?
     Nobody. Maybe we don't need it; our hopes are right in front of us, a snaking line of black-robed almost-graduates, taking selfies.
     To be honest, the person needing advice is me: fashion advice, first. Pack a sport coat? I consulted the video of the 2017 Pomona commencement to assess what the audience was wearing. A few old coots in jackets, but mostly men in their shirtsleeves.
     "Wear what you're comfortable in," my wife suggested. "It's California."
     Everywhere is California now. So my next bit of advice is: wear clothing. For an audience member to even ponder fashion inflates yourself to a significance you don't enjoy. You're a speck of color in the crowd.
     Bring mints. They help the time go by.
     Try not to cheer your graduate. Because every single graduate has family, and a brief delay after each makes the ceremony even longer than it already is. However, for some families, this graduation represents not the latest step on a perpetual victory lap but a revolution, a stirring breakthrough. They have to cheer, to scream out the names of their babies.
     I always thought the stern warnings against cheering reflect white privilege. What do they expect? Everyone in the audience to pat fingertips against palms and whisper, "Oh look, Muffy, junior is reaching another summit ..." So don't cheer unless you have to. If you do, go crazy. You earned it. Well, technically, your kid earned it, but that kid would have been selling drugs on a street corner if you didn't ride herd over him 24/7, and you know it and I know it even if the kid doesn't know it. So you earned it, too.
     I already know what I'm going to do, and I didn't realize this until I started to watch the Pomona video. I'm going to cry, and I'm not even sure why.
     Relief? No. If I could close my eyes, call out "One more time!" and open them to find myself standing at Evanston Hospital, awkwardly clutching a red-faced bundle wrapped in a soft blankie, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant once more having to squeegee up all that vomit in the white-tiled restroom at Zephyr ice cream parlor. It was on the ceiling.
     Pride? Maybe that. The boys turned out far better than I ever imagined, so far ahead of what I was at their age I can't even take credit. I was present, said stuff that nobody listened to, paid for things, but in the end, I feel like a rooster crowing at the sunrise, marking an occasion that I did not actually bring about.
     Maybe confused amazement. That sounds right. Really, it's as baffling as if I stepped out of pre-school orientation and returned to find my sons magically grown, grinning adults in neat beards, patting me once on the shoulder as they hurry off. Huh? What? How did that happen?

"Furst things furst."

     The ability to tell if something is sincere or a joke is vital for a reporter. 
     So it was with some unease that, researching Friday's column about LimeBike, the company introducing self-locking, electric-assisted bikes to the South Side, I watched this safety video introducing the system. And found myself ... confused.
      It's some kind of arch parody of an in-flight safety film, correct? I mean, it has to be. With those silly uniforms, the lime green ties and neck scarves, not to mention buttons, badges, belts and shoes.  The unplaceable European accent.  "When biking with company" isn't even American English. The simpering smiles. The vogueing hand gestures. The confetti at the end.
     So definitely a joke, of some sort. But why? LimeBike is an American company that operates within the United States. No Dutch parent to have inherited the creators of this video from. What then? Some marketing company's idea of fun? I hate to be the person who takes stupid things seriously, but something about this left me puzzled, and it isn't the sort of question you could ask the company—what's with the video? They could barely muster a comprehensible response to my wondering why they never actually come out and tell riders to always wear helmets, but merely show helmets being handed to bikers, who then immediately discard the helmets, apparently, and go riding without them. They emphasize the need to comply with vague regulations, as if wearing a helmet were a legal nicety and not a vital stratagem to keep your brains from being smeared over the curb.
     Maybe I'm getting old.
     Back in the '80s, when David Letterman was king of late night TV, sincerity was considered toxic, and every young person went about life wrapped in a cocoon of protective irony. That got tiresome, eventually, and was seen as a kind of emotional cowardice. I hope this video is just an example of marketing gone horribly wrong, and not evidence that fey sniggering is back. I can be as ironic as the next guy, but in its place. 
      Looking for edification, I poked around the LimeBike site, and watched a second video, a Matrix homage browbeating riders to park their LimeBikes responsibly. That one is less distressing, and gives me hope that the safety video is simply singing in a key I can't quite comprehend. 

"Furniture zone"? 

     And yet. Some of the safety tips seemed translated from another language. What the hell is a "furniture zone"? Is that intentional? A mistake? How did that happen? 
      The LimeBikes weren't bad—although that electric motor has a worrisome quality I didn't have room to elaborate upon in Friday's article. When a rider tries to move forward slowly, say edging into an intersection, it wants to project the rider forcibly forward, to get the bike going, and I can see it thrusting bicycles into harm's way when the rider is trying to approach a hazardous situation slowly. 
      Come to think of it, there isn't a word in the safety video about getting adjusted to the electric motor either.  I understand not all of their bikes have them, and the video has a one-size-fits-all, "we're happy to be in your city" generic quality. But still. It's irresponsible. You don't want to find out about the electric motor when it pushes your bike in front of a speeding truck.
      I hope I don't seem safety-obsessed. But it seems you should be able to avail yourself to a new bike system without first passing through a gantlet of smirking sardonicism. They're going to feel pretty stupid when under-informed and poorly-cautioned riders start suing them, and those goofy videos are shown to granite-faced jurors in courtrooms across the country.

Duck on the roof

     There's a first time for everything.
     After coming home to our old farmhouse on pretty much a daily basis for the past 18 years, I thought I had seen every possible permutation, every one of the old place's various moods and aspects. Pelted by rain, piled with snow. Lit up like a cruise ship at night. Dappled with shadow in the years it was dwarfed by a mighty sugar maple, far taller and older than the house itself. Flaws obvious in the bright sunlight after we lost the tree, a crying need for a new roof (done) and a new paint job (soon).
      But I'd never seen our house straddled by a duck. Pausing to chat with a neighbor across the street, glancing over to catch sight of a male mallard standing sentinel on the peak of the roof, next to the chimney.  I broke off our talk and wandered closer, as if mesmerized.
      Yes, we have ducks. A couple. For the past few years now. At least I assume it's the same pair. Hard to think they keep being replaced, one set flying off, a new pair arriving. 
      I'll look out the kitchen window and see them, rooting for seeds knocked off by the smaller birds at our bird feeder.  They lay their eggs somewhere on the property—one year in my compost heap, forcing me to refrain from tossing grass clippings in during their brood's gestation. One season they paraded around with a half dozen ducklings. It was like living in a children's book.
    Generally I see them during the regular appearance in our backyard after a heavy rain of what I once saw described in a real estate listing as "a seasonal pond," aka a yard that floods. 
     The male duck—the "drake"—has an emerald green head, a showy display intended to attract the drab, dun-colored female. 
      If you think I'm going to insert a joke here, you're out of your mind.
     Safer to swerve into etymology. "Duck" is a very old word—more than a thousand years, tracing back to the Old English "duce" meaning, unsurprisingly, "dive."  The 39 species of ducks in North America are divided between divers, which submerge entirely in water to feed, and dabblers, which go face down but leave their backsides on the surface. 
     The mallard, anas platyrhynchos, is the largest dabbling duck, and the most common, found in North America from the Bering Strait to Florida.  Ducks quack, of course, but the female mallard also is given to "deep, reedy laughing" according to my Sibley Guide to Birds. Which might not be unrelated to the fact that the male duck is one of the few birds with a penis.
      In this rare, but if I may be so bold, fortunate minority of penis-possessing birds, ducks are joined by geese and swans; otherwise, about 97 percent of birds don't have penises. To fertilize the females, males simply "mush their genital openings together," according to this National Geographic analysis of avian penises that will tell you more than you can ever care to know about the subject, assuming I haven't done that already. 

Mallards were on the first U.S. Duck Stamp in 1934

     If you feel comfortable around ducks—perhaps now more of a challenge than usual thanks to the above paragraph—it might be in part because ducks have been accompanying humanity for thousands of years. Wild ducks are depicted on the walls of Egyptian tombs; the Chinese had domesticated ducks 4,000 years ago, and ancient Romans raised them in incubators. 
      Few ducks are endangered, because they are so good at adapting to the world around them. And because duck hunters are so passionate about their sport. Duck hunters contribute far more to preserving wetlands and wildfowl refuges—hundreds of millions of dollars through the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service's Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps—than those whose interest in birds doesn't include killing them. Gun aficionados often pretend that they are not given their due, when appropriate, or that somebody is trying to restrict their rights. But duck hunters help the environment, adding to the nation's population of ducks rather than reducing it, and can hunt ducks with their duck hunting guns until the end of time, as far as I'm concerned. 

Ancient Chinese bronze of a duck

 While generally placid—they have a serenity, like Buddhist monks strolling around a monastery courtyard in contemplation— ducks nevertheless do not enjoy an comfortable place in human  psychology. Though less aggressive than geese, many duck words have negative connotations—"sitting duck," for instance, which originates from drakes molting after reproduction and being unable to fly. Ducks in popular culture invariably are angry and thwarted, whether perennial loser Daffy Duck, sputtering and irascible Donald Duck (who debuted in 1934, same as the duck stamp; one wonders what about that year was so conducive to ducks) or, even worse, his miser uncle Scrooge McDuck. I can't think of a positive duck character—Howard the Duck? Nope. The Ugly Duckling isn't a duck at all but, as he he discovers to his vast relief, a swan.

    At the beginning of "Pecked to Death by Ducks," global nature humorist Tim Cahill points out that, despite the title, "There are no ducks in this book."

     Then why the title? He tries to explain:  

     In Bali, I was examining ceremonies in which men and women, overcome with religious zeal, fell into trances and acted like various animals: horses, monkeys, pigs. These people were said to be "sanghyang." A man who becomes entranced and stomps like a horse is called "sanghyang djaran." 
     I had noticed there were domestic ducks all over Bali. Children brought them back from a day of feeding in the rice paddies. You'd see a lovely child with a white flag in her hand leading a row of waddling  self-important ducks over the levee just at sunset. 
     Why, I asked Nyoman, is it that I never see someone fall into a trance and become bebec, a duck? Nyoman said he really didn't know. It just wasn't done. Nobody knew how to act like a duck. 

     That is true. When we try to imitate ducks, we always fail. "Duck, duck goose," a seemingly innocent childhood game where youngsters become faux ducks and are chased by geese has been much maligned in recent decades. Neil F. Williams picked it second in his 1992 Physical Education Hall of Shame, right after dodge ball, for its potential for embarrassing  children, not to mention being a physical activity where the majority of participants sit around and do nothing for most of the game. 

    "The task for the goose is nearly impossible," Williams wrote in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance. "But usually the goose is encouraged by the incessant, high-decibel screaming of the other students, who have little else to do." 
     Why this general contempt for ducks? There is little scorn for the generic robin or the murderous hawk. I went into the backyard and studied my old married duck couple, slowly rising from their seasonal pond and walking off, together, like a pair of professors lost in conversation, arms behind their backs. Maybe because so many birds we see both in flight and on the ground—geese, crows and sparrows come to mind. Or almost exclusively in flight, like hawks. Ducks seem to be always earthbound, waddling or swimming. I never seem to notice ducks on the wing, and begin to suspect they are birds who can fly but choose not to.
     That doesn't sound right either. But it's the best I've got. I'd ask the ducks but they're, you know, ducks. They keep their own counsel.

South Side gets tired of waiting for Divvy, brings in its own bike systems

One of many pretty homes on Bell Avenue.

      Go online and look at a map of Chicago's Divvy bike system. You'll see a mass of blue tags densely packed on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, each tag marking a dock where ride share bicycles are located.
     Zoom in, and the docks separate out, and you can see they start, at the north, at Central Street in Evanston, spread as far west as Austin Avenue at the Oak Park border, and are concentrated in the Loop, sometimes with two on the same block. Scanning down the map, they thin out until the southernmost Divvy station, at 87th Street and Wabash in Chatham.
     Eyeing the 580 or so blue inverted raindrop markers, you might not even notice a vast chunk of the city has no Divvy stations at all: Nothing south of 26th Street between Western and Harlem avenues, all the way to the city's southern border at the Little Calumet River and 138th Street. An area of about 20 square miles.
     Quite a lot, really.
     Since the system debuted in 2013, residents of the Southwest Side have been pestering Divvy to come to their communities. And for years Divvy, which is owned by the City of Chicago, has said: patience. We're on our way. The system has to expand contiguously: otherwise, you'll have bikes but nowhere to go.
     Finally, the South Side lost patience, gave up on Divvy, and, on Tuesday, welcomed not one but two new bike systems: LimeBike of California and Pace of Massachusetts.
     In my capacity the Sun-Times unofficial bike share chronicler, I grabbed my helmet and headed to Beverly to see how the new bikes work.

To continue reading, click here. 

A Jay Bushinsky memory

Jay Bushinksy

     Robert Feder reports that Jay Bushinsky died Wednesday at his home in Israel at age 85 (sixth item). That brought a smile to my face—not because of his passing, I'm not that much of a bastard. 
     But at my single Jay Bushinsky memory, which I will attempt to reconstruct.   
     For many years he was the Sun-Times Jerusalem bureau, which itself evokes a whistle of wonder. But he would get back to Chicago from time to time, and one of those visits he was speaking to a local Arab group's dinner, briefing them on the Situation in the Middle East.
     I can't remember which group or when this occurred.  But I must have been working one of those awkward evening shifts—say 4 p.m. to 12 midnight. Most reporters would bring a sack lunch but, grandiose fellow that I am, given to comforting myself with pleasures, I would take myself to dinner. And this particularly night, facing another empty evening, I had slid over to a sushi emporium and loaded up. Back in the late 1980s there were more sushi places downtown than there are today. 
     Upon my return to the paper, an editor told me to hustle my ass over to some location and cover the remarks our own Jay Bushinsky was giving, before this Arab group.
     That too was a dinner, and my memory is rolling up, bloated with raw fish and vinegar rice, and having these very solicitous Arab folks around a big table gently urging foodstuffs on me while Bushinsky spoke.
     "You must try this," they would say, "we call it hummus. It is delicious." "Please sample some of this fallafel. You will like it." 
     I tried, in my most polite fashion, to explain that I had just eaten dinner, and this fare, rather than being unfamiliar, was my own people's food as well. I wish I could but I can't. That didn't work, and I ended up having to eat a bit, just to satisfy them.
     That's it. There is a second, shadow memory, a faint echo: that the attendees at the dinner were not pleased with Jay and whatever he had to say. Maybe I wasn't either, because I remember kind of cringing. Maybe because he was telling them the truth and I was too uninformed to recognize it. Maybe because he was off-base. I can no longer recall. 

   

Aunt Jemima welcomes us into an 1893 World’s Fair that’s not so fun to recall

     Sometimes the obvious sit in plain sight, unnoticed, until someone points it out.
     Despite a lifetime of eating hot dogs, a connection eluded me until I attended Northwestern literature professor Bill Savage’s lecture about ketchup during the Chicago History Museum’s Hot Dog Fest three years ago and he casually dropped the bomb.
     “Two immigrant brothers came here and in 1893, at the World’s Fair, had the brilliant idea to put a viener, a Viennese sausage, in a bun, and voila, the hot dog is born, or at least the Vienna Beef hot dog is born.”
     Ohhh, Vienna led to wiener just as Frankfurt led to frankfurter. Makes sense.
     With the 125th anniversary of the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition May 1, expect fond visits to Chicago’s debut in the global spotlight. The fair’s impact stays with us, in the many products debuted: from Vienna Beef to Aunt Jemima pancakes, from the Ferris wheel to the zipper. The blue ribbon that Pabst beer boasts of on every can was awarded at the 1893 fair. 
     Wait a sec. Aunt Jemima Pancakes … hmm … maybe we better skip that one. Awkward. Uncomfortable.
     Besides, the product had really debuted a few years earlier. The creators of Aunt Jemima went bankrupt in 1890, and a second company relaunched the brand at the fair, hiring a South side cook and former slave named Nancy Green to wear an apron and kerchief and dole out pancakes.
     Too late to turn back now. Anyway, speaking of impact that lingers, Aunt Jemima, and the uncomfortable racial stereotypes clustered around her can do more than ballyhoo pancakes. She also welcomes us to consider an aspect of the fair that, while not as eagerly appreciated as hot dogs or beer, is just as current and far more important.
     In 1890, when the Chicago fair was first being planned, black Americans tried be included in the great exposition—to see their achievements highlighted and celebrated. The Civil War had been over for 25 years. They were citizens now. They had legal rights, supposedly.
     Their effort failed, entirely. No members of the fair committee formed by President Benjamin Harrison were black. There was a representative from Alaska, but when African-American groups officially complained, the president responded that there was just no room.
     "The embarrassment of being ignored by the White House was almost matched by the embarrassment of begging for what Negroes regarded as their right of representation," one historian noted.
     Blacks couldn't even get jobs as guards at the fair. They would try, and be turned away. Of the 65,000 displays and exhibits at the fair, none highlighted the achievements of an African-American.
     Not that they were excluded entirely. White organizers brought in villagers from Western Africa and set them up in a thatched enclosure.
     "As if to shame the Negro," Frederick Douglass wrote, "the Dahomians are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."
     Douglass contributed to a cri di coeur issued by Ida B. Wells. Fresh from a speaking tour of England, she wasn't about to yield the fair to Nancy Green and her pancakes and happy tales of plantation life. Wells printed 20,000 copies of an 80-page booklet titled, "THE REASON WHY the Colored American is not Included in the World's Columbian Exposition" and had them distributed to fairgoers.
     The preface states:
     "At Jackson Park are displayed exhibits of [America's] natural resources, and her progress in the arts and sciences, but that which would best illustrate her moral grandeur has been ignored. The exhibit of the progress made by a race in 25 years for freedom as against 250 years of slavery, would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of American institutions which could have been shown the world."
     Casting a wide net, the preface was also written in French and German.
     Much of the pamphlet was taken up with lynching, which would peak in 1894. Douglass' introduction, if you substitute execution by skittish cops for lynching, could have been written yesterday.
     "No proof of guilt is required," he wrote. "It is enough to accuse, to condemn and punish the accused with death."
     The pamphlet laid out heartbreaking documentation of black achievement in the arts and sciences, including lists of patents, who could have had a place at the fair, if only society allowed such a thing.
     It would be a double irony if today we looked back warmly at this fair as a high water mark and ignored, once again, the lives of those who were excluded.
     Sometimes the obvious sit in plain sight unnoticed until someone points it out.