Barber Shop story

     "Let me tell you a story," said Leonel Hincapie, the proprietor and staff of the Magic Scissors Barber Shop in Northbrook. He stopped cutting, and settled himself in a chair across from me.
     This was unusual. Not just unusual, unprecedented.
    Typically, our conversation begins with my entering the shop, several blocks from my home.
     "Hello Leo," I'll say.
     Sometimes there will be a customer, usually a man far older than myself. Sometimes not. Sometimes the barber will be in his chair, almost dozing.
     "Do you feel like a bit of business, Leo?" I'll say. Or something like that. Then I take my place in the seat, and tell him how I want my hair cut: same as always. That's about it. I'll close my eyes. WFMT plays soft classical music. Occasionally, I will ruminatively pick up a clump of cut hair and blankly examine it. He will say something about the gray. I will chuckle and cast the clump away. The haircut takes a long time, a half hour at least. The warm lather on the back of my neck signals we're reaching the end. Afterward, I thank him.
    "Thank you for your art," I'll say.
    But this was something different. Leo was sitting across from me, in the customers' chairs. I paid close attention.
      "I am from Colombia..." he began—I knew that. What I didn't know is that he grew up on a farm. A coffee farm. He left the farm, he said, and came to America, many years ago.
     "Ten years ago, I went back," he continued. To his father's old farm.
     "Did you meet anyone you knew?" I asked.
    No. But the coffee trees were still there. And he carefully collected 20 beans from the trees located on his father's old farm.
     Back in Northbrook, he planted the beans.
     "Nineteen of those 20 beans died," he recalled.
     But one lived.
     He showed off a tree in the corner of the shop, lush and dark green, maybe five feet high.
     That was it. I got up, still wearing the barber's drape, admired the tree, and congratulated him on it. Then I sat back down. He continued with my haircut.
     Not much of a story, I suppose, as far as stories go. Not heavy on plot. But I have thought about it since then, maybe because it is so simple, so enigmatic.
     And it does have a point, and the point is this:
     The tree lived. The 19 others didn't. But this one did. Not only that, but it was a coffee tree in the corner of a sleepy barber shop in Northbrook. How many times over the years have I sat next to that tree, thumbing through Chicago magazine, waiting my turn? Never realizing that the plant next to me was a precious memento of a South American boyhood, long ago.
     Now I know. And so do you.

The Saturday Snapshot #13

     Today's snapshot, an enormous pyramid of autumnal glory, comes from Tom Peters, who took it last week on Second Street in Momence.
     Thank you, Tom.
     There is comfort in the turning of leaves in the fall.
     For their beauty, of course, the amazing yellows and reds, oranges and, in the case of the burning bush in the back of my house, a bold magenta.
     But also in the fact that they take place at all. That life whirs through this yearly cycle of birth and death, flourishing and shutting down. Something regular, predictable, dependable.
     Thank you nature.
      If only our politics would be as orderly or as predictable. The sprouting of liberal freedoms, slow but blooming progress, then the chill November of extremism, and following winter of nationalism, despotism, as certain populations become uncomfortable with the idea of everyone competing on a level playing field as equals, and try to push down the people who are scrabbling up.
    We don't know, at what point in the cycle we are. Is this the end of February, with bleakness all around, but spring lurking, mischievously around the corner? Or is this the first cold breezes of late October, with months and months of icy suffering yet to come?
    Who can tell? Nobody.
    The changing of the leaves reveals a subtle strategy we might bear in mind. In temperate climates, trees tend to keep their leaves, replacing them gradually in three- to five-year cycles. And why not? The sun is out, it's dinner time. But in our colder regions, when long cold, sunless winters make production of nutrients of scant benefit, trees don't even try to make food, preferring to withdraw useful chemicals from their leaves and then shake them off after the first few frosts, resolving to try again in the spring, when conditions are better.
     Smart. Nature tells us to work hard when condition are favorable, but if there is a barren stretch ahead, to go fallow, save our strength, and reserve out energies for when they can do the most good.
     This is one of those times. Unlike the unavoidable arrival of winter, we all can make a tiny difference, harnessing our warmth against the gathering totalitarian bleakness. Show your true colors. Vote on Tuesday, for America and against fear.

Trump immigration stance bad demographics, bad economics — and immoral

Hiroshima

     Their children were grown. The house, empty. My parents missed having kids around, so they hosted a student from Japan, a young woman, part of a group of a dozen staying around town. Not long: six weeks or so.
     During her stay, the group took a trip to Niagara Falls, but the student staying with my parents refused to go.
     After the tears and drama, the reason was revealed. Half of Niagara Falls is in Canada. Another country. She was ‘chosen-seki,’ the descendent of Koreans who came to Japan when it occupied Korea between 1910 and 1945. Her grandparents were Korean and, as far as the Japanese were concerned, so was she, as would be her children, and their children, into eternity. She worried about going through customs with her friends; somebody might see her passport, discover her shame.

Harajuku district, Tokyo

      Sound cruel? It is. It’s certainly un-American. We don’t judge people by measuring their grandparents. The law is, if you are born on American soil, you’re an American citizen. It’s written into our Constitution; the 14th Amendment, Section 1: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
     Donald Trump’s campaign was built on fear of immigrants, from the moment he proclaimed Mexicans criminals and rapists. Faced with possible rebuke at the polls Tuesday, he returned to stirring up fear and hatred, demonizing a band of Central American refugees walking toward this country.
     Promising to dispatch 15,000 soldiers to spend Christmas waiting for them didn’t do the trick. So Trump is talking about unilaterally abnegating part of the Constitution (Gosh, is that a thing? Because then gun control becomes easy).

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Studs Terkel: Luminary for the little man

  

Studs Terkel, by Steve Musgrave (used with permission)

 
     Facebook is much and rightly maligned. But it does bring the past to your doorstep every morning. Wednesday it shared this status from Oct. 31, 2008—"Neil Steinberg salutes Studs Terkel, who died this afternoon"—necessarily terse, no doubt, because I was busy writing the below (or, more accurately, giving it a final once-over, since I had written it years before).

     Of course I knew Terkel, ever since he had me as as guest on his radio show in 1995, been to his jumbo bungalow on Castlewood a few times. I welcomed catching sight of him, sheaf of papers under his arm, cutting across Daley Plaza with his red socks. He was an oddly comforting presence. Though attempts to turn him into a warm, avuncular figure were always in vain: he was at heart a hard ass, a union man, a fighter, and a vastly important Chicago writer.

     Studs Terkel turned the voice of average Americans into a font of history.
     The Pulitzer-Prize winning author, television pioneer, theatrical actor, longtime radio host, unrepentant leftie and friend of the little man, died peacefully at his home on the North Side of Chicago on Friday afternoon.
     He was 96.
     "He had a very full, eventful and sometimes tempestuous life," said his son Dan. "It was very satisfactory"
     Studs—calling him "Mr. Terkel" always seemed overly formal—was a character. He liked to wear a red-checked shirt, a rumpled suit and had a stogie jammed in the side of his thick-lipped mouth. He enjoyed a martini well into his 90s.
     Though his dozen books were national best-sellers—Division Street America, and Working and The Good War—Studs was best known to many Chicagoans as an interviewer who hosted a talk show on radio station WFMT from 1952 to 1997.
     He was born in New York City, ironically enough, on May 16, 1912, and christened Louis Terkel. When he was 8, the family moved to Chicago, where his parents, Sam and Anna, ran the Wells-Grand Hotel.
     He later said that while he was "legally born" in New York, he came alive when he moved to Chicago.
     Studs spent his youth among the odd collection of hotel guests, some seeking work, others avoiding it. He credited his unusual residence with sparking within him an interest in the personal stories of regular people.
     He graduated from the University of Chicago School of Law, though he never practiced.
     Studs instead turned his energies toward the theater, appearing in 1934 in the groundbreaking Clifford Odets play "Waiting For Lefty."
     During the Depression, he worked on the Federal Writers' Project and performed in radio soap operas, usually portraying a gangster.
     It was around this time that he adopted the nickname "Studs" after James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy.
     While still a struggling actor in Chicago in 1939, Studs met and married a social worker and activist named Ida Goldberg. The couple had one son, Dan Terkell, who later added an extra "l'' to his last name. Ida Terkel died in 1999.
     After he served in the Army Air Forces in World War II, entertaining troops, Studs began a pioneering broadcasting career in television and a 45-year association with WFMT.
     "Studs' Place," an NBC program airing from 1950 to 1953, helped establish Studs as a nationally known personality. "Studs' Place" was a loosely plotted comedy set in a fictional Chicago barbecue joint. But Studs' past came back to cut short his future in television -- his socialist activities of the 1930s were seized upon by witch-hunting anti-communists who pressured NBC to drop his TV show, despite solid ratings, and Studs was blacklisted and unable to find steady work for the next several years.
     "To give you an idea of the fear," Studs told the Sun-Times in 1976, "an important soap opera producer once asked me to do some test scripts. I did them, but the sponsor said, 'No, we can't use him.' The producer berated me, as if it were my fault, 'How come you didn't tell me?' That's how deep the fear was."
     Unable to find work in television, Studs eked out a living making speeches.
     But even there, Studs was often hounded by Edward Clamage of the Illinois American Legion, who would tell sponsors of Studs' talks that they were hiring a "dangerous subversive."
     "Sometimes I would get canceled and other times they would let me speak," Studs recalled. "Then I'd write a letter to Clamage: 'Clamage, it comes to my attention that you are at it once again. Thanks to you, my fee was raised from $100 to $200. I owe you an agent's fee. Signed Terkel.' It wasn't true of course, but it made him furious. It was a way of getting back."
     Studs credited his blacklisting experience for his future prominence as a writer.
     "In a strange way, it helped me," Studs recalled. "I probably would never have gotten into writing books otherwise, or into WFMT. I was never publically pilloried; I was able to continue to make a living."
     He developed an interviewing style often referred to as "oral history," becoming a virtuoso of the tape recorder.
     Studs' first major work was Division Street America, in 1966. Later books included Hard Times (1970), Working (1974), Talking to Myself (1977), American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980) and The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, which won him his Pulitzer in 1985.
     His last book, P.S.—Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, is being published Monday.
     Studs also was a recipient of the Peabody Award, the Prix Italia, the UNESCO Award for best program on East-West values and the University of Chicago Communicator of the Year Award.
     Studs once said of his writing technique:
     "A tape recorder is a revolutionary instrument. It's no good for a talk with a movie actress or a politician, because they're so plastic. But a tape recorder on the steps of a housing project is something else again. There a person who a moment ago was just a statistic starts talking to you and becomes human, becomes a person. Then it gets exciting."
     Studs said in 1980: "If there's something I want to do, it's create a sense of continuity—that there is a past and a present and that there may be a future. And that there isn't any present unless you know the past."
     As far as social justice goes, "I'm on a quest," he said. "I'm Don Quixote. Of course I want to tilt at windmills. I want to tilt at other things. It's the Don Quixotes of the world–call them the seekers of the ideal—who keep the juices going, give them pepper, the salt, change it for the good."
     His son said a celebration of his life will be scheduled in a few months.
                                           

                                                      - - -

'PART OF A GREAT CHICAGO LITERARY TRADITION'

     "He was somebody who made you go away a better person. . . . Even people who were ideologically opposed to him loved him once they met him. Right-wing people, once they met him, treated him as their favorite lefty. . . . If you got in a cab with him, he'd have the cabbie's whole life story by the time you got out." 

    —author and historian Gary Wills, to whom Studs dedicated several books

     "Michelle and I were deeply saddened to learn about the loss of Studs Terkel, and our thoughts and prayers go out to his family. Studs was not just a Chicago institution, he was a national treasure. His writings, broadcasts, and interviews shed light on what it meant to be an American in the 20th century. He will be deeply missed by all who knew him, all who loved him, and all whose lives were enriched by the American stories he told."

     —Barack Obama

     "He was larger than life, yet he spent his life giving voice to ordinary people. Even at his 90th birthday, he could (and did!) regale the crowd with a 20-minute monologue covering everything from McCarthyism to show biz.'' 

     —Playboy Enterprises Inc. CEO Christie Hefner, who hosted a 90th birthday party for Studs

     "Studs Terkel was part of a great Chicago literary tradition that stretched from Theodore Dreiser to Richard Wright to Nelson Algren to Mike Royko. In his many books, Studs captured the eloquence of the common men and women whose hard work and strong values built the America we enjoy today."    
       —Mayor Daley

     "He had so many magnificent qualities—literary, personal, creative, political—it's almost too impossible to say how he will be best remembered. He was a total human being and a total Chicagoan." 

     —political consultant Don Rose, a frequent co-worker of Studs

     "He could touch places in people that they didn't even know were there. . . . I think that the thing [about Studs] that will last the longest is that he helped people learn how to listen to themselves and each other with respect and see value in their lives and in their work and in their thoughts and in working together.'' 

     —author Sydney Lewis, a WMFT Radio colleague and transcriber of several of Studs' books

     "The memorable Louis 'Studs' Terkel spoke to Chicago and stood for Chicago. And today we mourn his passing. . . . He will be greatly missed.'' 

     —Gov. Blagojevich

     "He had an ability to make ordinary people famous and make famous people ordinary. . . . He also was able to step back and let the person he was talking to take center stage.'' 

     —Thom Clark, president of Community Media Workshop, which founded the Studs Terkel Community Media Awards

                                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 1, 2008

"Voting for empathy ... The future. We can do better than than this."

  

Government Bureau, by George Tooker (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Either you sympathize with other people.
     Or you don't.
     That's it.
     That's our entire political moment right now.
     The rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.
     So here's mine.
     The key word in the first sentence is "other." Other people, different from yourself. Because empathizing with yourself and those exactly like you is easy.
     And ineffective.
     Tribalism was fine when humans lived in tribes. Building the modern world required putting aside prejudices and working together. Those who found it within themselves to say, "You know. . . this guy might be black ... but he could actually be a soldier, a professor, a quarterback. Let's give him a try" did better. Societies that made the leap did better.
     Lose sympathy and you suffer. Britain fled the European Union because enough Brits were convinced that membership meant a Turk might move in next door and, oh I don't know, do Turkish things. Smoke a hookah. So they blew up their own economy.
     We're next. The Republicans are at war with The Other: immigrants, Muslims, gays, Jews, blacks. Anybody who doesn't meet their hidebound notion of what an American should look like.
     The truth isn't on their side, so they lie, rationalize and blame-shift, while drumming up bogeymen to distract voters. It's happening in every race. Pick one one:
     The 6th District, Republican Rep. Peter Roskam against Democratic newcomer Sean Casten. Once, Roskam would be merely a bland GOP non-entity, endorsed by the NRA, calling climate change "junk science." The usual.
     Now the stakes are higher... 

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Outside the box: A visit to Chicago Mailing Tube Co.

  

     I had to call Chicago Mailing Tube Monday, related to a project I'm writing for the paper. To my amazement, I realized that I never posted the column I wrote about my visit there, 11 year ago. That seems a tremendous oversight, considering how much affection I have for their product—sturdy, sharply-made cardboard mailing tubes.

     Perhaps the visit is a worthwhile distraction, too. I don't know about you, but there is only so much time I can fret about our country declining into a feral state, and there is a comfort in the poetry of tangible objects. Back then the column covered a full page, and ended with a joke, so I've left it in, though I seem to think my audience consisted for politically-savvy 6-year-olds.
     Ken Barmore, by the way, passed away early in 2015, just shy of his 98th birthday.

     If you glance north out of the window of a commuter train shortly after it leaves Union Station, you might notice a sign with sleek stainless steel letters spelling out "CHICAGO MAILING TUBE CO."
     And if you are of a certain frame of mind, after seeing that sign for a sufficient number of years, you might begin to idly wonder about the cardboard tube industry, in general, and about this low brick factory in particular.  

     After a few years of speculation, you might find yourself climbing the stairs to the spartan second-floor offices of Chicago Mailing Tube, where you will meet Ken Barmore, 90, who bought the company in 1949.
     "There wasn't much to buy," he recalls, "one machine and six or seven people—nobody knew anything about the company."
     Chicago Mailing Tube was founded by three partners in 1902. Back then it sold a lot of snuff boxes—squat cylindrical containers similar to what holds chewing tobacco today. The containers were delivered by horse and wagon, and the company still proudly holds several city licenses for delivery horses.
     No horses anymore, but it does have 40 or so human employees, and a number of spectacularly complex machines, producing cardboard tubes in near-Dr. Seussian splendor: ribbons of paper flying off enormous spinning spools, puffs of steam, rivers of glue pumped from 3,000-gallon vats, pneumatic hisses and roaring spindles.
     The process is called "spiral winding"—3-inch strips of brown paper are coated with glue and then wrapped tightly around a metal core, or "mandrel," then squeezed by thick rubber belts.
     "The pressure is terrific," says Barmore, pointing to belts compressing the tubes. "You get a finger under there, it's going to be flat."
     Cutting tubes precisely is one challenge of their manufacture—lengths sometimes need to be within a tiny fraction of an inch if they are to be used in manufacturing, say to hold industrial wire.
     "This is a competitor's tube," Barmore says, standing among a forest of tubes in the "sample room," appraising a cylinder as tall as himself. He eyes the end carefully. "It's got a bad cut on it. It isn't square. A lot of companies, they couldn't use that."
     We think of tubes holding paper towels and toilet tissue, but they also hide in plain sight -- as Parmesan cheese containers, charity cans, crescent dough packages and masking tape roll cores. Tiny tubes hold bundles of wires in cars, and huge tubes form concrete pillars in construction.  

     "We used to make cores for machine-gun bullets for the Joliet arsenal," Barmore said.
     The brown paper in the tubes is 100 percent recycled and always has been -- Chicago Mailing Tube was green before green was cool.
     "We've always used recycled paper," Barmore says. "Fifty-seven years. It's a lot cheaper." How much cheaper? Between half and a quarter the cost of new paper.
     All the rejects, the poorly cut tubes, pieces of scrap, are fed up a conveyer into a grinder— it sounds like frozen turkeys raining down on a tin roof—then baled into enormous six-foot cubes to be returned to the mill to be pulped.
     How does a man get into the cardboard tube trade?
     "I wanted to get into the farm machinery business, but I couldn't make any kind of a deal," Barmore remembers. "I'm a farm boy, from Monroe, Wis. A dairy farm. I know cows."
     Why not stay down on the farm?
     "I hated it," he says. "I hated milking cows."
     This was during the Great Depression—Barmore is Monroe High School Class of '34—when collapsing milk prices had farmers dumping milk at the side of the road because it wasn't worth selling.
     "Things were very bad," he says. "Believe me, it was hell."
     He got a job candling eggs for $12 a week, repaired farm machinery, drove a bus in Rockford, found himself in charge of ordering coal for Central Illinois Electric and Gas.
     "How many pounds of coal to make a pound of steam, how many pounds of steam to make a kilowatt," he says. "I was figuring that out." Too many other jobs to list.
     Businesses are handed down, but his son, Tom, didn't want to make cardboard tubes.
     "He's a CPA—he didn't want to go into it," Barmore says. "He was not interested in tubes."
     Did that bother him?
     "I didn't want to be a farmer, so I figured, if he didn't want to make tubes, that's his business."
     But he has a grandson, Keith Shimon, who runs the business now.

   "I thought it would be fun, and it has been fun," says Shimon, 33. "It's been a lot of work, but it's been fun."
     Cardboard tubes are a $2 billion to $3 billion industry, according to Kris Garland of the Composite Can and Tube Institute based in Alexandria, Va.
     Competition from Asia is slight because of high shipping costs. A cardboard tube is expensive to ship.
     "It's kind of like we're shipping air, and the 10-inch tubes really fill up a truck," Shimon says.
     Thus, factories tend to be regional suppliers, much in the same way that local potato chip companies have stayed in business because nobody wants to ship potato chips very far.
     Technological progress has helped—better machines—and hurt the industry. Architects who once sent their plans in sturdy tubes now hit the send button instead. The American textile trade moving to China also hurt, because there is no need to make centers for bolts of cloth.
     Chicago Mailing Tube tries to stay ahead of a changing world by being nimble.
     "We pride ourselves in how fast we can react," Shimon says.
     "Customers call up today and the trailers go out tomorrow," Barmore says.
     Really? I ask.
     "Really," he says.
     

TODAY'S CHUCKLE
     I confess, I cooked this one up myself, in tribute to today's special topic. Apologies in advance:
     Q. What do you call toothpaste that is dozing at a briefing by former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card?
     A. A Card-bored tube.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 18, 2007

Jews may not like life more than you do, but they talk about it more

Babylonian lion (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   
     You know what's a primary Jewish value?
     Being alive.
     I hope I'm not spilling the beans here. Revealing some deep rabbinic secret. 
     But it's true.
     We like being alive. It's important to us. I can't say whether Jews like living more than gentiles, since I'm not gentile. I would assume everybody likes life equally. So maybe it's just that Jews make a bigger deal of it—"To life! To life! L'Chaim!" We talk about it more, perhaps because there's always somebody trying to kill us.
     Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon. Razed Jerusalem and took the Jews into captivity, more than 2,500 years ago. Various caesars. About 1500 years worth of Christian leaders. Assorted Russian czars. Don't forget Hitler, and his pal Stalin. After the formation of Israel, the Arab states. When they failed, the PLO and periodic freelance Muslim terrorists, cheered on by half the sophomores around the world.
     Let's not forget home-grown American haters, like the guy who murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh Saturday.
     That didn't happen in a vacuum, but two years into the administration of Donald Trump, our own miniature Mussolini who uses prejudice of all kinds to stir up and distract his base.
     "I am a nationalist," Trump said. Actually, what he said was "I am a white nationalist" but the "white" is unvoiced, like the "p" in "psalm." And if you didn't hear it, his far right supporters certainly did.
     Still. Mass shootings happen so frequently in the United States now—at churches, schools, music concerts, workplaces—that I don't feel inclined to join the chorus connecting this one to the anti-Semitism that Trump winks at. (Jews are the "globalists" that Trump refers to. Hitler called them "internationalists." And people claim there is no progress)

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