Are you eating enough cheesecake?

     Folks, the holiday season is upon us. A time to reflect on what's really important in our lives: our families, the great city of Chicago we live in and around, this marvelous country of ours, the United States of America, and of course, Eli's Cheesecake. 
     I try not to make assumptions about my readers. But my guess is, it might have been a while since you're had a slice of Eli's Cheesecake. Am I right? Nothing to be ashamed of. Life gets busy. People lose perspective, and forget what gives life savor and purpose, overlooking the place in the pantheon of perfection that smooth, creamy cheesecake holds.
     Me, I just had a slice of Eli's Cheesecake after lunch on Thursday, and it was delicious. The hardest part was choosing among the three, count 'em three varieties I have in my freezer. I chose strawberry, its bright red top harmonizing with the red stripes in our beloved American flag. An hour on the counter and it was at cool perfection for eating.
     I'll be honest, I usually save the cheesecake for my oldest boy, who just loves it. That's what cheesecake means to me: family, love, tradition. Home isn't home without cheesecake. 
    But cheesecake is meant to be eaten, and as significant as Eli's Cheesecake is to, say, the economic vitality of the state of Illinois, or the lofty position of Chicago among purveyors of our nation's beloved comestibles, we cannot lose sight of just how soul-shiveringly delicious Eli's Cheesecake truly is.
     That said, friends, let me draw your attention to the photograph. The special Eli's Illinois Bicentennial Cheesecake, star of our state's 200th birthday party on Navy Pier earlier this week. I don't have to identify the gentleman with him: Honest Abe Lincoln, whose affection for cheesecake is well-known.   
     Eli's Cheesecake has become synonymous, not only with love and family, but with Chicago, and with our most cherished values. That is only in part due of the inherent wonderfulness of Eli's Cheesecake, but also thanks to the tireless efforts of my friend, Marc Schulman, owner of Eli's and son of the founder.
       For those few people who don't instantly recognize the superlative nature of Eli's Cheesecake, its 30 varieties, one for every conceivable taste, how other cheesecakes just don't hold up, plus Eli's pantheon of non-cheesecake delights, such as thick, soft, delicious cookies, and those tiny, single serving fruit pies well, Marc is sure to remind them. 
     Sure, cynics might scoff. They could point out that, among Marc's many heroic efforts to bring knowledge of Eli's Cheesecake to those unfortunates who might lack awareness, is the paid advertising that Eli's has always sponsored on this blog. Let them scoff. There is no quality so pure, no democratic ideal so important that naysayers cannot find an argument against it.  I do not believe that financial considerations affect my view of cheesecake in the slightest. I loved it before I ever met Marc, love it during our many years of friendship and mutually-beneficial economic arrangement, and will continue to do so, long after his sponsorship ends, onward to the end of time. He did not ask me to write anything concerning cheesecake, but I was moved by that photograph to pen this spontaneous outpouring of my sincere heart.
     Nor does his sponsorship prevent me from turning my critical judgment about Eli's Cheesecake. Since absolute perfection is reserved for the Supreme Deity, it follows that even Eli's Cheesecake has a flaw, one I was reminded of while my wedge was diminishing before me today. When you are finished eating any given piece of cheesecake, a sign lights up in your head: "More cheesecake!" And it was only with difficulty, with an act of will on my part, to resist defrosting a second slice—another advantage to keeping it frozen, to deter spontaneous consumption. Cheesecake is not exactly a diet food. There, I said it.
     So let no one claim that my critical blade was dulled by commerce. Let complainers carp and dieters doubt, miserably nibbling at their celery. Me, I'm sticking with my family, my city, my country, the flag that represents it, and Eli's Cheesecake. If you do not, as I do, have three flavors in your freezer, then click at the convenient link at left and order one for yourself or for someone you love or, ideally, both. Or two. Or three. You will be glad you did, as will I. Do it now. 

Flashback 1999: Dec. 7, "Everybody was in their own grief"

Marine Cpl. Stanley Stephen Swiontek

     This story stayed with me and 17 years later I followed it up, visiting with Rosemary's brother, Rick.

     Every Dec. 7 for the rest of her life, for years and years, after the war was over and most people turned to other matters, Rosemary Martinotti's mother took out her gold star, the star that meant you had lost a son in the war, and put it in the window.
     Then her mother passed away, and the responsibility for remembering fell to Rosemary. She keeps a picture of her brother, Marine Cpl. Stanley Stephen Swiontek, in her living room. She still has the little pillow, with fringes, and a poem about motherhood, and a picture of the U.S.S. Arizona, that Stanley brought home for Mother's Day, 1941, the last time she ever saw him.
     "What a great guy," remembers Martinotti, who is attending the city's ceremony today at Navy Pier remembering Pearl Harbor and honoring Swiontek and the six other Chicagoans who died aboard the Arizona. "We were thrilled whenever he would come home."
     Swiontek was 26 and a cook aboard the ship, but to the kids in Roseland, he was a big deal. His younger brothers and sisters adored him.
     "My brother Ted and I were the cabooses—the youngest of nine," she says. "We used to fight about who was going to polish the brass buttons on his uniform. We were just thrilled with this tall person. Ted would say, 'I'm going to polish his buttons,' and I would say, 'Then I'm going to polish his shoes.' "
     She was 12 years old when her brother took that last furlough.
     "You know what we loved doing? All the kids in the neighborhood?" she says. "We used to love sitting around in the backyard, and Stanley would tell us all these stories about being in the Marines, on the ship. We'd just sit there, going 'Wow!' We just ate it up."
     When the family heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, it was almost as if they knew something bad had happened to Stanley.
     "All of a sudden, a pall came over the house. Everybody was in their own grief," she says. "We didn't hear anything for days. Then we got the telegram."
     The Arizona had sunk in nine minutes—1,100 men were trapped inside and most are still there, entombed. Stanley's family never even found out the circumstances of his death, only that he had won the right to sleep in that day.
     "He would have been on land otherwise," Martinotti says.
     Nothing was ever the same for her mother.
     "Ted and I often wondered what Christmas was going to be like," she says. "Because every year she went through her son's death on Dec. 7. It was so traumatic. My mother would get physically ill. It was exhausting. She never got a chance to truly and honestly get over it because they showed it, over and over again, every Dec. 7, the Arizona sinking, and she could picture her son, her favorite son, inside of it. It just tore her apart.
     "You see, if a mother's going to have a favorite son, then Stanley was her favorite, simply because he was so gentle. He was so handsome. He was so kind. He was just great.
     Alone among her family, Martinotti has never gone to Hawaii to see his ship.
     "I just couldn't do it," she said. "I still cry."
     But she is making a point of being at the ceremony today.
     "Because he meant so much to me. I was so proud of him. I'd say, 'That's my brother in that uniform.' "
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 7, 1999

Menorah as middle finger

     Hanukkah began Sunday night. It's a more subdued holiday in our household, with the boys away at school. We did put up decorations, a kind of muscle memory. And exchanged gifts — Rolling Stones tickets! And we lit a menorah, which we stick in the window. That's actually my favorite part of the holiday. The world pushes hard against Jews, sometimes, and it's a small joy to push back in a small way, as I tried to describe in this column from 2004.

     Perhaps I'm just not in the holiday mood. But am I the only one to think that Hanukkah is a pretty second-rate holiday? A minor festival which, due to its unfortunate proximity to Christmas, has grown to enormous proportions, somewhat hideously, the way the frogs in the pond at a nuclear power plant might grow to the size of footstools. Hanukkah music is tinny compared to the beauty of Christmas carols — we're grinding out "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel" while they've got "Silent Night." Those chocolate coins taste lousy. Dreidel is not a fun game. There's no tree. Ordinarily, Hanukkah would have the cultural significance of Tu B'shvat — Jewish Arbor Day, which you probably never heard of but would be a huge event if it and not Hanukkah fell in December.
     The only reason Hanukkah gets celebrated the way it does — with gifts and decorations and fuss — is to ape Christmas hoopla, as a sop to the kiddies, who otherwise would drive their parents crazy out of gift envy.
     Yes, I'll munch my share of latkes. And yes, lighting the menorah can be a nice moment, if the kids muster the self-control to stop yammering "presents, presents, presents" for a few seconds.
     And there is one aspect I truly savor, something very personal: when I take the lit menorah and set it in the front window, which I've always considered a vigorous "Up yours, we're still here" to all the anti-Semites over the centuries and prowling the outside world today.
     I softly mutter my own little blessing to those people, a two-word benediction I won't repeat here, as I set the brass menorah on the windowsill. A small, triumphant moment.
     So maybe Hanukkah isn't so bad after all. It must be my mood.
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times Dec. 10, 2004

Flashback 2010: "The rich subtlety of sign language will knock you out"

  

     On a dare from a reader, I wrote an obituary for myself four years ago, and posted it yesterday on Facebook, part of my routine of tossing up old blog entries on their anniversary to garner a few dozen extra clicks. The piece mentioned, among the stories I had written, one about translating a show tune into American Sign Language, and another reader, with a deaf child, said he'd like to read that. I remembered liking the piece and dug it up.

     You never know when the gray thunderheads of routine will part and a beam of something bright shine through; call it grace, beauty, whatever. Something that lingers.
     It isn't in the overheated, windowless office of the director of the International Center on Deafness & the Arts in Northbrook, listening to a detailed rendition of her career. Nor on a tour of the center. Nor seeing many photos of famous alumna Marlee Matlin. Nor even watching deaf students choreograph a dance from "West Side Story," being staged at the Centerlight Theatre this February.
     Just as I start wondering when I can politely grab my coat and bolt, we come into a cluttered work room. At a table sit Christine Erickson, the theater program director, Gina Matzkin, a costumer and longtime program participant, and a teenage girl, Lauren Holtz.
     Each has a ring binder open in front of her. They are in the midst of translating the lovely lyrics to "Somewhere" into American Sign Language.
     "Right now, we're struggling with the first two lines; 'There's a place for us/Somewhere, a place for us,' " says Erickson. "We're trying to give that a really nice picture."
     There is no American Sign Language sheet music for "West Side Story." Translating word-for-word doesn't work, because ASL is not a mere visual approximation of English, but a distinct language (popular, too -- about as many Americans speak ASL as speak Italian).

EACH WORD HAS TO BE LABORED OVER
     "The words, 'There's a place for us,' " says Erickson. "The girl singing the song is not talking about it being for her and somebody else. What we're trying to figure out is, should she be signing 'us' meaning 'me and you,' or for 'them,' Tony and Maria, or for 'all of us.' It gets complicated."
     That it does. Take the third line, "Peace and quiet and open air." "This is going to be tricky. 'Peace' and 'quiet' are the same sign," explains Erickson, dusting her hands together and then spreading them apart, palms down.
     "I would prefer to keep 'peace' and do something else for 'quiet,' " Erickson says, suggesting the index-finger-to-lips gesture librarians are famous for, one that means, unsurprisingly, "hush" in ASL.
     "I like it," says Matzkin. Then there is the matter of keeping up with the beat. "Take my hand" is three syllables. The ASL symbol—one hand clapped over the other at your sternum —is one beat. The solution: break the gesture into three separate parts; the lower hand is presented, the upper hand claps over it, and the pair are drawn to the chest: Take my hand.
     "'Time to look, time to care,'—what does that mean?" asks Lauren, 15.
     "Life goes by so fast," says Erickson, shifting gears. "You have to stop, look around, spend time with the people you care about. What do you think it means?"
     "That," Lauren said, earnestly.
     We get into a discussion of ASL. There are regional accents—"Halloween," is signed differently in different parts of the country. People can sign loudly, softly, gently, strong. Men sign differently than women.
     In spring 2009, they did "Grease," which has a song going over various car parts.
     "I had to go home and ask my husband," says Matzkin (both are deaf). She signs "pistons"—a vigorous gesture of two fists driving up and down.
     "Somewhere" ends with a plaintive "Somehow/Someday/ Somewhere." They puzzle.
     "You guys overuse the word 'some,' " Matzkin tells me (By "you guys" she means the hearing world. Deaf society is the most militant of the various groups with disabilities, and if anywhere here I give the impression that ASL is pretty, I apologize for the insult).

     They consider "True how, true day, true where."
     "I'm not in love with the 'true,' but it might work," says Matzkin.
     They end up with "Possible. Future. Out there"—each gesture a double pump that echoes the two syllables of "Somehow, someday, somewhere."
     "From the top," said Matzkin.
     Lauren stands up, an elfin girl in a purple leotard. The freshman at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights is a quick study, and nails the lyrics they have just worked out while the song plays on a boom box, gesturing faster than I can write it down: a finger to her lips for hush, signing "together" by making O's out of her thumbs and forefingers and locking them together, then the big finish.
     "Someday"—she signs "future," palm at her temple, then slicing out.
     "Somewhere"—she signs "out there," thrusting her right arm, straight out, then her left, a gesture of Evita-like triumph.
     That the above description does not drop your jaw in delight, if you are not struck by the moment's charm, the fault is mine, limited as I am to the written English language. If you saw Lauren Holtz sign "Somewhere" in ASL, you'd know what I mean.
     But we all must labor under our limitations.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2010

The world keeps turning for Illinois manufacturers

  

     So how does a reporter keep his job during an era of newsroom downsizing? One way, I believe, is to be useful beyond your allotted tasks. Thus I had two stories on the front page of Sunday's Sun-Times, neither stemming from my actual job, that of being a daily news columnist.
     The first was the obituary of George H.W. Bush. Writing obituaries was a practice I started back when I was on the night shift, because it allowed me to a) pass the time; and b) get myself on the front page writing a story that was both important and wasn't going to be touched by anybody else. Nobody asked me to write Bush's obit, I just did it, because I knew he had a Chicago connection—I pick subjects who are national figures with Chicago roots.
     The second was this essay on Illinois manufacturing, in one of the special little magazines that the paper has been inserting in the Sunday edition. My boss asked me if I would do a general piece celebrating Illinois manufacturing, in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of the state, and I said, "Sure!" I love visiting factories and poking around.  The challenge was finding a few that would let me in on short notice. I first thought I should slide over to Caterpillar or John Deere. But my window of opportunity was very narrow—the paper said, in essence, do it now—and both plants were dark for re-tooling.
     So I picked Replogle, for the simple reason they moved to Indiana and came back. Plus I had been to their old factory years ago. I selected Plochman's, because I adore mustard. And PCB because I'm a hard-ass, and thought going to a bearing plant would bring unexpected wonder, and was right.

    Lucina Miguel has a job unlike any other performed by Illinois’ 571,800 other factory workers. She glues strips of a map of the Earth onto large plastic spheres for Replogle Globes, one of 13,000 manufacturing companies in the state.
     That task once fell to founder Luther Replogle, who started making and selling handcrafted spherical creations out of his Chicago apartment in 1930. Success followed over the next several decades and Replogle eventually became one of the largest globe manufacturers in the world.

     But times change — strapped school systems just don’t buy globes in bulk like they used to — and the ailing company was purchased in 2010 by Herff Jones, and relocated to Indiana. The Indianapolis maker of yearbooks, class rings and diplomas didn’t quite know what to do with a retail supplier like Replogle and was about to shut down the business before a group of its former executives bought it back.
     And returned it to Illinois.
     That transaction is a single snapping twig in the whirlwind of acquisitions and divestitures, growth and contraction, and openings and closings that have blown across the Illinois manufacturing landscape since long before it became a state.
     In 1702, the state’s first documented manufacturer, a buffalo skin tannery started by Frenchman Charles Juchereau de St. Denys, opened. The area was hit by an epidemic almost immediately and the tannery was abandoned the next year.

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George H.W. Bush: last in a line of American presidential military heroes

     The first president of the United States was a military man. General George Washington not only led the Continental Army but as a young soldier fought in the French and Indian War for the British.
     We get that much in elementary school.
     What might be news is that most American presidents were in the military: 26 of the 44 men who have served as president also served their country in uniform in some capacity. (Because Grover Cleveland’s two terms were interrupted by the election of Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland is considered both the 22nd and 24th presidents, thus the number of men who were president always lags one behind the number of the presidency; Donald Trump, therefore, is the 44rd man to hold the office and the 45th president.)
     With the death Friday of George H.W. Bush, the most recent American president who fought, this is a good moment to examine the link between the military and the Oval Office.
      Washington might have set the precedent of serving two terms, but his military background certainly wasn't a model: he was followed by two decades of non-veterans. Washington left office in 1797, the next military man to be in the White House was in 1817, with the swearing in of James Monroe, who had dropped out of William and Mary College to fight in the American Revolution in 1775 and was wounded in the Battle of Harlem Heights (though James Madison, while not in the military, saw more combat than many who were, as we will see).
     Military heroism helped a number of presidents win office. Andrew Jackson was of humble origins — he was the first president born in a log cabin —and gained fame by his victory against the British in the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the war of 1812. William Henry Harrison was so linked to a particular battle that it could serve as his name — his 1840 campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” refers to an 1811 battle against a confederation of Native Americans at the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers in Indiana.
     Many presidents not generally remembered as soldiers in fact served — Abraham Lincoln was a captain in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War. And sometimes “service” is a broad term — seven American presidents claimed to have fought during the Civil War, though that includes Andrew Johnson, who was military governor of Tennessee in 1862.
     As the presidency is by definition a political position, the issue of exactly what kind of military service a president tendered becomes important. Seeing combat is the general measure of worth, but not always. Dwight Eisenhower, the first World War II vet elected president, graduated West Point in 1915 and was never under fire in his nearly 40-year military career, yet that was not held against the Supreme Allied Commander.

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2006 flashback: "People, it's just Gerald Ford"

Lamentations over the Death of the First-Born of Egypt, by Charles Sprague Pearce (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

     Maybe I'm getting old. 
     That thought crossed my mind as I was lecturing someone on Facebook Saturday. He had posted a photo of George H. W. Bush throwing up in the Prime Minister of Japan's lap, after falling ill at a banquet. "Really?" I asked, sincerely miffed. The man had died 12 hours earlier.
     We lose perspective, and have to spin our spin constantly, like dervishes. Bush was a blue blood and a former CIA director and didn't snap to the AIDS crisis, and those flaws have to be pushed forward, lest we consider anybody respected, anybody admirable, anybody beyond reproach, as if any of us could have done better.

     I can't really get behind that. It's Trumpspeak. Our current president needs to portray everyone as suspect, everyone as guilty, everyone as bad as he is, to mask his own inadequacy. He can't be truly loathsome is everyone else is loathsome too. 

    Untrue. Everyone is not the same. Yes, we all succeed in some ways and fail at others. But some do better. George H.W. Bush wasn't perfect but he wasn't Donald Trump either, not by a long shot, and that is why his passing is causing more commotion than it might otherwise. Genuine affection. Real respect. To the man, not the office. Wednesday is a national day of mourning for George H.W. Bush. He will lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda beginning tomorrow, the first former president to do so since Gerald Ford did it, a dozen years ago.

     Gerald Ford, Gerald Ford...that brings back a memory. When he died, in 2006, the media also went all solemn. They also closed the markets, as they're doing for Bush  Wednesday. Back then, it struck me as overblown and ludicrous, and I wrote the following protest. Now, doing so seems not-quite-so-ludicrous. Maybe Bush was a better president than Gerald Ford. Maybe his example of dignity, the Japanese prime minister notwithstanding, and adherence to American values is something we need to go out of our ways to honor in the age of Trump. To remind ourselves what we were and what we might become again, if our nation is not already irredeemably poisoned. 
     Or maybe I'm just getting old. 

     Tell me I'm not alone here. Please. Tell me that, like me, you were slightly taken aback to wake up Tuesday and find it a national day of mourning, with the markets closed and mail delivery suspended.
     All for Jerry Ford.
     Don't get me wrong. Good guy, Ford. Served his moment on the world stage well, or well enough. Deserving of our respect.
     But c'mon! The man was 93. A ripe old age. I'd sign up for 93 right now, and so would you. All these ceremonies—seven full days of tribute and prayer, pomp and circumstance. And this is the stripped-down version, supposedly, streamlined at Ford's request. I'd hate to see what they would have done otherwise—flown in the pope, tolled the Liberty Bell, dressed George W. Bush in sackcloth and ashes.
     This is un-American, this groveling at the feet of lost kings, and I blame Princess Di—her funeral left us, like the Victorians, addicted to cemeterial splendor. Votive candles flickering in the rain and black crepe, pipe organ dirges and riderless horses. I wouldn't be surprised if they raise an obelisk to Ford, surrounded by statues of veiled ladies, sprawled with grief and labeled "Sorrow" and "Loss" and such.
     Let's not even go into the grim specifics—George H.W. Bush telling mourners how Almighty God spared Ford in World War II so he could eventually lead this nation. (A bad road to go down, since it raises the question of why couldn't the Lord also have had pity on the 50 million or so who perished in World War II while He was mucking about in human affairs, looking out for Jerry Ford.)
     The presidency is worthy of respect. But this is beyond respect and into pageant and excess. I kept thinking: Geez, don't spend it all, every time. You need to hold back a bit, sometimes. Maybe it's the media's fault. TV took what are in essence private moments—the movement of the casket—and made them into public display.
     If we do this for Ford, dead at age 93, what'll we do for the next Lincoln?
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 3, 2007