The whole world was watching

     When the paper asked me to write a Sunday story commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, I at first despaired. How to compress such a sprawling, complicated mess into the span of one newspaper story? And how to make something so familiar interesting again? But I happened to know someone who was there—Abe Peck, my old Medill professor. And talking to him, I realized, "I need a cop to balance him." And the rest sort of fell into place.

     Abbie Hoffman is dead. So is Jerry Rubin. Tom Hayden, too. Their fellow protesters who disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the last days of August 1968 are either gone or have become the very thing they once viewed with contempt: old.
     But Abraham Yippie is very much alive at 73. 

      “It’s a long strange trip, from Daley/Nixon to Donald Trump,” said Abe Peck, now a professor emeritus at Northwestern’s Medill School, surveying the 50 years from today’s roiling political scene to when he was editor of the Chicago Seed underground newspaper, his pronouncements signed “Abraham Yippie.”
     Mayor Richard J. Daley is dead. So are police Supt. James B. Conlisk and his deputy, James M. Rochford. The public officials and police officers who thought they were protecting their city from an onslaught by hippies, communists and radicals are gone or scattered.
     But Officer Robert Angone is very much alive at 78.
    “It was a big joke,” said Angone, then a tactical cop assigned to the Gresham District, now retired to Florida. “The SDS, Jerry Rubin’s group, Abbie Hoffman’s group — they were in a competition to get the attention they wanted. They wanted to get arrested the most, yell the loudest. We had all these goofy factions going on.

       The generation that didn’t trust anybody over 30 is now in their 70s and 80s. Their crew-cut contemporaries who didn’t trust those with long hair are the same. The divide they both gazed across with mutual incomprehension and disgust is very much with us, as the earthquake events of their era reach their golden anniversaries — traditionally the moment when human memory begins a steep decline and dry history picks up the story to carry it forward into eternity.
     But before that happens, stand on Michigan Avenue, in front of what was then the Conrad Hilton Hotel, and feel your eyes sting from the tear gas. Cock your head and listen, hard, for the chant, faint at first, but returning to the roar it was in Chicago that final week of August 1968.
     “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching…”

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The Saturday Snapshot #2

Bud Biliken Day dancers (photo by Vic Speedwell)

     When I asked readers to offer snapshots for this new Saturday feature, I had no idea the quality I would be getting. Beautiful nature shots, fun travel photos. I was gratified to receive hundreds of submissions.*
     But far-and-away the best, in my view, is this photo of dancers waiting for the Aug. 11 Bud Billikin parade, sent by Matt Grosspietsch, who writes:

     My wife Vic Speedwell took the attached photo at yesterday’s Bud Billiken parade. Vic is a Physician Assistant at Heartland Alliance and spent the morning doing back-to-school health screens for kids at the parade. She did not see much of the parade as she was busy with her colleagues screening over 80 kids, but she did find time to take this great photo.
     I like the matching uniforms, shoes, and hairdos. I especially like the variety of expressions on the kids’ faces as they await the start of the parade and it makes me regret not having been there to see them march.

I asked Vic if she had anything to add, and she elaborated:

     I was cycling to a meet-up location at the Bud Billiken parade and had to stop for this fabulous group. When I asked if I could take a picture of them, some said “sure” and some said “whatever.” They are the Empire dance team and earned huge cheers from the crowd. I love their Beetlejuice/Nightmare Before Xmas/Zombie costumes. 

     Which leads to a final point. As a white person contemplating this photograph, to me it seems to have an unintended racial subtext. When I first saw this photo, I thought, "If I ever had to illustrate an article on the challenge of being a black person navigating white society, I couldn't do better than this." Obviously not the message the dancers are trying to convey. So here's my question: is that an appropriate reaction and, if so, how much does that aspect make this an intriguing photograph? Discuss. 
    Oh, and please keep those pictures coming. I'll continue posting them on Saturdays as long as I have a snapshot worth sharing.


*Due to a production error, the number of photos submitted was grossly overstated in the opening of today's post. In reality, only about a dozen photographs were sent in by readers. Maybe fewer than that. Say 10. Or eight. Whatever the actual figure, everygoddamnday regrets the error, and regrets the common vanity and hunger to be more significant than one actually is that inspired it. 

Halfway house helped thousands find sobriety; now it needs your help

Guildhaus executive director Kevin Lavin, under a photo of the halfway house's founder, fireman Jack King.

     Over the past few years, I've gotten to know Kevin Lavin and become familiar with the good work going on at Guildhaus in Blue Island. I don't rattle the cup much, but I'm rattling it now. If you want to donate right away, without taking the time of having your heartstrings plucked like a harp, you can go straight to their GoFundMe page here. Otherwise, you'll have to read this story and then hurry to help out, as I did.  It's important.

    One of the best things about being a recovering alcoholic is it makes you more inclined to help others.
     Even if you don't particularly want to. Even if you're kinda busy.
     Doesn't matter. You have to. Because you know that someone helped you when you needed it. Passing that help along is just basic fairness. So even the most self-absorbed, sorry-not-my-table kind of guy—me for instance—talks to the messed-up drunk who phones out of the blue. Goes to lunch with a stranger and makes the pitch for the hard path.
     Or, in this case, drives the 99-mile round trip to sit in Kevin Lavin's office at the Guildhaus in Blue Island to hear his bad news.
    "Financially, we're in a very serious position," said Lavin, executive director of the South Side halfway house. "What happened was, we started the new DUI outpatient center, which was a drain. It hasn't come to what we thought it was. That was part of it. Part of it we started falling behind on our taxes  ... we were working from loans we borrowed from people. Now we're upside down."
     Located in an old bottle factory across from the Cal-Sag Channel, the Guildhaus has beds for 22 residents, plus its addition, Guildhaus II, sleeps 26. It was founded 30 years ago by a retired Chicago firefighter, Jack King. Some 18,000 alcoholics and—increasingly—addicts have gone through the Guildhaus, and if each one dug into his pocket and found $20 their problems would be solved.
     Lavin is a former commodities trader—you might remember his story from a couple Thanksgivings ago. After getting sober himself, he quit the world of finance and joined Guildhaus, which runs a residential, 12-step treatment program that requires counselors and therapists, administrators and assistants. All that costs money. Every year, Guildhaus runs about a $200,000 operating deficit. At first, he could pass the hat to his old pals.
     "The first year I did it was easy," Lavin said. "The second year you go back to the same guys, it's not so easy."
     While I was there, I had dinner with the residents—chicken, creamed corn, bug juice. Hearty, but nobody stays here for the food.
     "For me, it's the blend the people, the counselors, the family atmosphere," said Mike. One resident had been through rehab 10 times—it's a struggle even when you have help.
     "It was tough, but worth every minute of it," said Fred.
     Prudence dictated I call around.
     State Rep. Kelly Burke (D-36th) is on the Guildhaus board.
     "They provide a great service in helping people get through their addictions," she said. "They're seen their population move from people with alcohol problems to people with opioid problems. The need is acute. To be in the community, close to where a lot of these guys grew up and live, so they still have family support, is really important at a low time in their lives. There are not a lot of places for people to get quality drug rehab and counseling; it's important to keep centers like this open."
     To protect residents, the Guildhaus is unobtrusive. But that hurts when it comes to fund raising.
     "Exactly," said State Sen. Bill Cunningham (D-18th).
     "One of the reasons for its success is the place keeps a low profile. That's important to people it traditionally serves, who come from law enforcement and other first-responder backgrounds. It was one of the few places where first-responders on the South Side felt comfortable going," Cunningham said.
     "There is a long-established sub-culture among first responders that does not lend itself to participate in recovery programs. It's seen a a sign of weakness. A lot of cops and firefighters think that seeking help will be held against them. One of the real services that Guildhaus provides is, it's a trusting environment. I know a lot of constituents who have taken advantage of it," he added.
     "His work out in Blue Island has been magnificent," said Jim Sexton, mayor of Evergreen Park. "His work is very good, but it is challenging financially. The state and feds aren't giving anybody anything, so you gotta figure out another way."
     That way is astonishingly easy. Go to the Guildhaus web page. Click the big green "Donate to GoFundMe" bar. When I went Thursday, I saw that they had raised $1,400 from eight people over the past month. A start, but not nearly good enough.
     We can do better. I swallowed hard and kicked in $100. Anything you can give helps.
     "All these guys that've been been through the house," said Lavin. "If they see this in the paper and they see that we're in trouble. We need help to keep this institution going. Because we save lives."

Book Review Fortnight #3: "Irons in the Fire"

Estes Park, Colorado 

   I remember writing this review of one of my heroes, John McPhee, and being daunted by the thought that he would read it. So I tried to find the right balance of fanboy praise and legitimate criticism. 
     Thank goodness I've finished the beast of a feature I've been writing for the past few days. Now all I have to do is cut a thousand words out and we'll be good to go. Which means I should have an original column back here Friday. Thank you for your patience.

     I used to puzzle as to how John McPhee wrote his books. Did he carry a tape recorder up that tree? If so, how did it catch conversation above the roar of the chain saw?
     Did he take notes in that canoe? If so, how did he paddle?
     Maybe he just remembers everything. Maybe—sacrilege!—he makes some of it up.
     Ultimately, it doesn't matter how McPhee, a staffer at the New Yorker, writes his books. The important thing is, he writes them, and here they are, amazing works of reporting and composition, on subjects from citrus fruit ("Oranges") to Alaska ("Coming Into the Country").
     In one classic piece, "The Search for Marvin Gardens," McPhee intercuts between playing a game of Monopoly and touring the decaying reality of Atlantic City itself, the model for the game. I can't imagine a writer reading the essay and not feeling a pang of inadequacy at the cleverness of the concept, the skill of McPhee's interviewing. I sure did.
     At such times, returning to the question of technique, I suspect that McPhee is God. The God metaphor has proved helpful in recent years, as McPhee veered into the dry realm of geology.
     He knows what he's doing, I would tell myself, falling back on the Mysteries Defense. It isn't for us mortals to question him. If we find certain topics difficult to digest, that's our fault.

First-rate McPhee
     But this attitude wears thin, and it was a relief that McPhee's 25th book, "Irons in the Fire," is first-rate McPhee with not so much geology.
     In the title essay, McPhee heads for Nevada cattle country to patrol with the state brand inspector. That might itself sound dry, but McPhee crafts his story into something out of Zane Grey, complete with lawmen getting the drop on bad guys as they reach for their shooting irons. ("You will die if you grab that gun," says one).
     McPhee clearly adores these people, and fills the chapter with small, precise observations. "Christopher Collis, aged 10, crewcut, removes his spurs, hands them to his mother, and runs into the pasture to assist his father."
     The other major essay, "The Gravel Page," looks at forensic geology. Yes, it contains sentences such as, "The assemblage included hypersthene, augite, hornblende, garnet, high-titanium magnetite, high-temperature quartz."
     But these literally and figuratively rocky passages are redeemed by the forensic—buried bodies and criminals on the run. McPhee swoops from Japanese World War II balloon bombs to the murder of Adolph Coors III to Mexican drug kingpins, born aloft by his awe for experts who can look at a handful of pebbles and determine where in the world they came from.
     A description of a toppled tree in his essay on the largest virgin forest on the East Coast contains the best McPhee simile in the book: " ... you find whole root structures tipped into the air and looking like radial engines." (Not as good, perhaps, as the "gin-clear water ... cold as a wine bucket" in his book "Coming Into the Country," since most readers nowadays don't know a radial engine from a radial tire.)
     Speaking of tires, the book contains a trek through used-tire disposal, touring the nation's giant tire dumps as if they were national parks. The "tires are so deep they form their own topography—their own escarpments, their own overhanging cliffs."
     Two other chapters are slighter, briefer affairs—a look at the mason repairing Plymouth Rock, and a visit to a blind writer who uses computer technology.

Occasional missteps
     And one essay completely fails. "Rinardat Manheim," I finally figured out, was written from the vantage point of an exotic car dealer (with McPhee's comments confined to brackets). Handing the narrative reins to some guy who describes three different models of car as "the ultimate exotic" must have seemed a good idea.
     The occasional misstep is the price of experimentation. Only rarely does McPhee make a choice that, though clever, stops you cold. The sentence "Waggoner was grata" was one. I eventually figured out he was playing on the phrase, persona non grata, a distraction equivalent to the author bolting into the room and slapping the book out of your hands.
     Pulling a sentence out of McPhee and complaining about it, however, is ingratitude on par with challenging God to defend athlete's foot. McPhee has written some of the best books of reporting of the past 30 years—"Oranges" and "Giving Good Weight" and too many to name.
    Whether "Irons in the Fire" serves to satisfy the unquenchable McPhee craving of us long-time faithful, or sends novices hurrying to explore his previous masterpieces, the book is, like the Earth itself, a finely wrought wonder whose possible flaws only remind us of how lucky we are to have it in the first place.

—Originally published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 18, 1997

Book Review Fortnight #2: "Apocalypse Wow!"

I Am Temple window, Chicago.

  

   I bowed out of writing my usual Wednesday column, which is rare, perhaps unprecedented, for me. But this big Sunday feature I'm working on just won't gel, and I need to get it under control. Luckily, I have a number of Plain Dealer book reviews from the late 1990s all teed up and ready to go. Such as this one, reprised a little reluctantly, since it hoots at a book by James Finn Garner. Garner is a Chicago writer, and a Facebook friend, and I hope, should this find its way to him, he realizes, as they say in The Godfather, that this isn't personal. It's just business.


     Give this much credit to all those UFO fanatics, millennium-fixated mystics and assorted true believers congregating at the edges of society, clamoring for a spot in the mainstream.
     At least they're sincere.
     Whichever ludicrous bit of doctrinaire ignorance they cling to, no matter what lunatic philosophy they arm themselves with against an indifferent cosmos, they inevitably seem to believe it whole-heartedly.
     Until the next thing comes along.
     Sincerity, in fact, is their problem. No iota of doubt troubles them, no hesitation enters their minds, as they endorse dogma that most rational people wouldn't consider in their giddiest moments.
An apt attempt 

     So it is perhaps apt that James Finn Garner, the Chicago performer whose "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" trilogy sold millions of copies, attempts to deflate the entire realm of earnest gnostic hoo-ha with a blast of razzing insincerity.
     His new book, "Apocalypse Wow!," is a sort of Baedeker of millennialism, delivered with more sly winks and elbow nudges than a season's worth of "Monty Python's Flying Circus."
     "So slap on your rocket packs, kids, and come along as we try and figure out just what will happen when the year 2000 pounces on us ...," he writes. "All it takes to discern these mysteries is an open mind and a credulous nature."
     Does it ever. What follows is a quickstep through the year 999, Nostradamus, papal prophecy, Millerites, global pole shifting, Jehovah's Witnesses, Edgar Cayce, tea-leaf reading, Atlantis, pyramids, UFOs and on and on.
     Garner obviously doesn't believe a word of it, though at times his delivery is so dry he almost seems to. On the previous turn of the millennium: "Rivers swelled with floods greater than anyone had ever seen. Earthquakes split the ground and swallowed up whole cities. Epidemics swept through the countryside that put the plagues of Egypt to shame. The sun appeared twice in the sky. Fire and rock rained from heaven. Poodles walked on their hind legs and played the banjo."

Footnotes to humor
     That last sentence is a joke, and in case we miss it, he has a footnote, "Just kidding. Banjos hadn't even been invented yet."
     Now if this seems funny to you, go out and get Garner's book. For me, it quickly became tedious. So much so that I found myself mapping his sense of non-sequitur humor, which I diagram as: Fact A; Fact B; Fact C; a Banana.
     Granted, Garner has chosen a tough topic for himself. The loopiness of the paranormal crowd makes them almost beyond parody. Not that American Indian rituals or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are off-limits for humor. It's just that the payoff of Garner's jokes— "SATURDAY: Channeled a previous life as a peasant baby in 18th-century China. Died within two days from dysentery. Just our luck!"—doesn't seem sufficient reward to offset the grimness of the subject.
     What the book could have used is some reporting. For a moment it seemed as if Garner was actually going out into the real world to encounter the odd people and beliefs he is mocking. And he may have. Or not, to use Garner's favorite blow-off shrug phrase. It's difficult to tell.
     Humor is, if nothing else, a counterbalance to reality. By not taking a firm position, Garner slides into the very morass of muddy thinking he is trying to satirize. He accomplishes something I did not think possible: His hipper-than-thou smirking and indifferent wandering from subject to subject actually makes the tedious, stand-by-your-cult crowd seem, by comparison, to possess a sort of steadfast dignity.

      —Originally published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 11, 1997

Book Review Fortnight #1: "The Writer's Desk"

Hamburger stand in New Haven, Connecticut 

     The middle of August. Ugh. I don't know about you, but this whole working thing is starting to get on my nerves. What better than to put put out a big "Gone Fishin'" sign and leaving this space blank for a couple weeks. 
    Not my style, alas. Besides, not working isn't really on the plate. I've got a big project I've got to crank out for the paper by week's end that won't write itself.  
    So to make life easier all around, I've dubbed the next two weeks Book Review Fortnight, and disinterred book reviews I wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the late 1990s. I imagine you haven't read any of them, don't remember them if you did, and never heard of the books they discussed. As an added bonus, about half are pans, and criticism is far more fun to read than praise. I'm impressed that even with writers I admire—John McPhee—I manage to find fault; I guess I was sort of a hard-ass at the time.

     The coy approach to "The Writer's Desk" would be to begin by rhapsodizing about the top of my own sturdy cherry computer table. There is a fierce Indonesian carving and a baseball signed by Hank Aaron and a photograph of my son and a little blue "Don't Give Up the Ship" flag purchased at Put-in-Bay for $2 one fine summer day.
     But you don't know who I am, so you probably don't care what my desk looks like. Such indifference is part of the problem with Jill Krementz's book of photographs of authors at work.
     Not that Krementz's authors are unknown. Quite the contrary. Most are among the biggest names in literature: John Cheever and Toni Morrison and Tennessee Williams and John Updike, who wrote the introduction. Thrown in is a seasoning of newcomers, such as Veronica Chambers, and obscure poets (are there any other kind?) such as Nikki Giovanni.
   But while you might recognize many of Krementz's 55 subjects, at least by name, odds are you won't care about more than a handful. And little in the photographs themselves, or the accompanying text, is well-wrought enough to spark interest.
     The fault is not with the authors, of course, but with the photographs. You don't need to like Bette Midler to appreciate Annie Leibovitz's photo of her covered in rosebuds. But you have to be fan of Jean Piaget to enjoy the sight of him lighting his pipe.

      That said, three of the pictures are outstanding: E.B. White, in a dim cabin whose window reveals a bright Maine bay. John Cheever, his right hand completely displaced by a glass of booze. The glass looks attached to the wrist, and supposedly was.
     And Pablo Neruda, busying himself at a Napoleonic desk with a floor-standing flag beside. He seems every inch the South American bureaucrat—undersecretary for metaphor in the Ministry of Poetry, perhaps.
     Closer examination reveals—God, could it be?—his Nobel prize, its display box open, set facing the visitor's chair, screaming to be admired.
Majority not rewarding
     Krementz is an experienced photojournalist with a number of books to her credit. Yet the majority of the photos here do not reward careful examination. Bernard Malamud dials a phone at a desk in a room. Terrence McNally types. Archibald MacLeish uses a pencil.
     Several of the photos struck me as jokes, to be charitable, or lies, to be not.
     George Plimpton rolls a piece of paper under the platen of his typewriter, oblivious to two babies on the floor behind him. Terry Southern wears sunglasses in a darkened room, drinking a big whiskey, with three different editions of "Candy" scattered about, perhaps for inspiration.
     Does this reflect reality? Does Susan Sontag actually sit upon a narrow backless bench and write? Does William F. Buckley weave his magic while talking on a telephone in the back of a limousine? Did Eugene Ionesco really write with a huge, comical, ostrich feather pen, ignoring the typewriter at his elbow?
     The brief accompanying paragraphs, cribbed from the Paris Review and other literary interviews, provide scant insight.
     "I have no work routine," says John Irving. "I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come," says Toni Morrison, whose photo is typical. She is seen on a couch, writing in a spiral notebook. In the background, dark forms: a chair and, perhaps, a table. Morrison is right-handed.
     I do give Krementz credit for eventually clearing up the mystery of how this book came to be. In the acknowledgements, she personally thanks Random House boss Harold Evans, and drops the fact that Kurt Vonnegut is her husband and John Updike her dear friend, whom she loves and has photographed on 39 occasions.
     A vanity publication. Now it makes sense.
     Had Krementz told the circumstances surrounding the taking of these photos, that might have provided worthwhile insight, or at least some interesting stories. As it stands, the book is more of an in-joke. Hubby Vonnegut is shown in his bathrobe, doing the crossword puzzle, which I'm sure got a big laugh among the gang at Martha's Vineyard.
     —Originally published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 2, 1997

Uber CEO vows to steer company past recent troubles: ‘We will win this war’

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

 

     “The Pickwick Papers,” set in 1827, begins with Charles Dickens’ kindly hero, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, “his portmanteau in hand, his telescope in his greatcoat pocket, his notebook in his waistcoat, ready for the reception of any discoveries worthy of being noted down,” setting off on his adventures from the coach stand at St. Martin’s-le-Grand.
     “Cab!” he cries.
     From then until a decade ago, that was one of three common ways to find a taxi — present yourself where cabs usually congregate, stand on the curb, arm flung in the air and hope a cab happens by, or, if you have time, phone a cab company.
     A new method was added in 2008, when two software programmers, looking to ease the challenge of finding a taxi in San Francisco, came up with a program they called UberCab.
     The company quickly grew by ignoring numerous strict regulations regarding cab companies in cities Uber entered. Taxis need expensive licenses, called medallions. Drivers also require lengthy training — the newspaper once sent me to get my cabbie license; the course prepping for the exam took three days.
     Uber sidestepped all this by insisting it owns no cars, employs no drivers, so it isn’t a cab company — it dropped the “Cab” from its name to boost this argument. It’s just a piece of software, the way eBay isn’t a department store...

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