Flashback 1999: Murders in Naperville hit too close to home

Detail of "The Slaughter of the Innocents," Vatican Museum, Rome

  
   There's a lot of sorrow in the world. As a columnist, I spend a good deal of time processing it for readers, or trying to help them process it, giving voice to something that, I hope, helps somehow. 
     Today is the 20th anniversary of a notorious Naperville crime, when Marilyn Lemak killed her three children. Why? Maybe because she was depressed. That's what she said. Maybe, as prosecutors insisted, she was trying to get back at her ex-husband. I suppose it doesn't matter now. I was curious what I wrote, and this is it: notice the date: 10 days after the crime. Even then, I was a fan of  waiting. A helpful strategy not only in writing, but in life in general. Time is our friend, until it's not.

     The murder of the Lemak children is the sort of crime that echoes. It sneaks into your safe and warm home, folded into a newspaper or leaking through the television, and it stays there, for a good long time. It is an evil vapor, a poison cloud in the corner, which you strain to ignore while trying to figure out how to make it go away.
     The Naperville neighbors, of course, are shocked. But parents in general are also shocked. For all parents, this is not only a hideous crime but also a betrayal of the cause. How could one of us have done this?
     It isn't that children are never murdered. They are. But we have, in the backs of our minds, a filter, a cast of usual suspects we expect to do the deed—selfish 15-year-olds, babbling crack heads, longtime lunatics. We understand it then.  

Marilyn Lemak

    But this one just doesn't fit. Forty-one-year-old Marilyn Lemak, with her cranberry Victorian house and her active-mom schedule, doesn't seem cut out for the role. She's miscast, unqualified, which magnifies the horror of the crime she is charged with committing. So we search, as experienced processors of such terrible stories, for the key that makes this one understandable. To explain it, or rather, to explain it away. To get it out of the house.     
     We could blame the struggle over a divorce, but the evidence is mixed. In the Lemaks' house, a small knife was found plunged through a wedding photo. Yet Mrs. Lemak's attorney said it "seemed like a garden-variety type of divorce," and the couple had worked out visitation and custody.
     We could blame mental illness, though there is a circularity to that reasoning. Anyone who could do such a thing must have been mentally disturbed at the time, obviously. But what about the day before? Or the week before? Was it there all the time and nobody saw it? Or was it not even there?
     That's why this is all so extraordinarily chilling. Being a parent is hard, at times very hard. It flays you down to a single raw nerve. I remember my wife, when our second boy was a sleepless newborn, stepping into the bathroom to pound the radiator and scream, out of exhaustion and frustration. I would have done the same thing, but I was too tired.   

     This is not to say that parenthood is grim. I tell my childless friends, when they survey the wreckage of our formerly elegant lives and ask what the appeal of this intrusion could possibly be, that having a child is like giving somebody the world. Literally, the great big spinning globe, handed over free in a gift box. There are tiring times, but the reward is that you can slap your knee one morning and announce, at your whim, that today carousels will come into being. Then you head down to Navy Pier and plop the boys on a couple of gaily painted horses and take videos while they go up and down, delighted, and if you didn't actually conjure the carousel from thin air yourself, then the result is exactly the same.
     If having a child is like giving somebody the world, then killing a child is like destroying the world. It has the same finality, the same terrible tragedy. The staggering senselessness defies understanding, but we go over it again and again anyway, looking not, I believe, for understanding, but for reassurance. We want to locate a comforting fact that shows us that we ourselves are not capable of this act, that it came from some foreign, alien place, the land of the psychotic. But if a nice soccer mom could just crack, spontaneously, then what is to say that any of us—all nice, all normal—couldn't someday crack, too?
     Our view of these murders is skewed because they happened here, not in France, not in California. They loom huge in our views because they took place down the road, in that nice house, the house everybody aspires to. Proximity means something. The Internet be damned, distance is still real. Half of a sub-Saharan nation can rise up and slaughter the other half, and we don't have the energy to raise a yawn. But even an area as big as the Chicago metro region is still a community. The same identification that lets you feel pride when the Bulls win a championship forces you to feel the proximate horror of this act. As if we all lived on that street.
     Now that understanding is slow in coming, I want to suggest that, if the comforting explanation is finally revealed, we not embrace it too eagerly—that we recognize that the gulf between those who crack and those who carry on is not as wide as we might desire.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 14, 1999

End of an era, probably. Last Ford Taurus rolls off the line.

Last Ford Taurus rolls off the line at Chicago Assembly, Friday, March 1, 2019.

     Today's subject is unusual for me, perhaps. The short answer is: someone at the paper asked me to do it. The plan was to actually be at the Chicago Assembly plant when the last Taurus rolled off the line. But Ford wouldn't allow that, despite my pleading. Nor would they allow me to talk to any workers. Nor was the union any help. Still, I had to fill the column SOMEHOW, and all that delightful information about what a lemon the Taurus was when it first was produced was sitting in the open palm of Our Friend History, just waiting for me to pluck it out. I think the story would have turned out shinier, from Ford's point of view, had they let me into the plant, where I've visited in the past. But I think it is also interesting to remember how this American success story struggled at the beginning.

     All good things must come to an end, and Ford Motor Company's good thing, the Taurus sedan, came to its end Friday as the last of what was once the most popular automobile in America rolled off the Chicago Assembly Plant.
     "Taurus broke new ground at its start and we're thankful for its role in our portfolio," said Mark LaNeve, Ford's vice president for U.S. marketing, sales and service.
     That's one way to put it. What the Taurus did at the start, when the new 1986 model was introduced, was stumble out of the blocks, badly. An innovative car — the first vehicle Ford with front-wheel drive — "the latest in Ford engineering and design" was initially plagued by problems.
     A week after it debuted, 4,500 Tauruses and Sables — its twin sister under the Mercury nameplate — had to be recalled due to faulty ignition switches. More recalls followed to replace window glass, which had a tendency to shatter. Followed by problems with surging and stalling engines. And transmission troubles. Not to forget a smell of rotten eggs that took Ford months to solve.
     In all, 80 percent of buyers of new Tauruses and Sables reported significant problems, J.P. Powers & Associates reported at the time. One owner, picking his Taurus up from having its power steering fixed at the dealer, had the transmission fail on the drive home.

RoboCop

      Yet the flagship survived its difficult birth, for a variety of reasons. First, the car just looked cool. Based on the Sierra, introduced in Europe in 1982 — some called it a "spaceship" — the Taurus seems futuristic, with headlights and fenders flush into the body and a sleek, aerodynamic look — to see how radical it was, compare it to the sharp corners of the Ford Granada, the car it replaced. The       Taurus' look won the car a starring role as a Detroit police cruiser in "RoboCop" (the story is that the police car designed for the movie drew guffaws of derision on the set, and director Paul Verhoeven was just starting to panic when he saw a new Taurus drive by).

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The Saturday Snapshot #29

     My wife being a lawyer ruined the Shedd Aquarium for me, for many years.
     I probably should let you puzzle over what the connection could be for a little while, one of those links utterly mystifying until revealed, when it becomes obvious.
     The answer: her white shoe law firm would have its Christmas party at the Shedd. A band, a bar, a dinner—I always ordered the fish, it seemed an amusing perversity.
      Because of this, when there wasn't a lux party going on, the aquarium seemed plain. Just fish. I'd go back to do a story—my look at the enormous backroom operation feeding the fish is one of my favorites—but unlike the Art Institute or the Field Museum or the MCA, it just wasn't someplace I was going to swing by on my own volition.
     Years went by. 
     That changed over Valentine's Day. My wife and I didn't have any plans to go out-of-town this winter, so decided on a "staycation"—a morning at the indulgent Ancient Aire Baths, lunch at RL, and then a visit to the aquarium.
     Somehow, I knew I would like it more than previously, and I also knew exactly why: my iPhone. Somehow, taking photographs of the colorful fish made it more real than just looking at them. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, it just is.
    We spent two hours there, took in the whale show, bonded with an octopus to such a degree that I don't believe my wife will ever eat them again, not even perfectly broiled at Pstaria, though knowing myself I will find a way. I learned more about fish in those two hours than I've learned in the previous two decades, with plenty of intriguing species I want to explore more fully at a latter time, such as the swirling vortex of "false herring," a spinning sphere of fish which, given the name, must be something else masquerading as herring though, alas, the Shedd guide narrating to a group about fish in the tank could not illuminate the situation. I'll get on that.

Sea nettle

     

Is Chicago as open-minded as we want to believe? We’re going to find out

Two Draped Females, Etruscan, 3rd century (Met)

     What do Burr Tillstrom and I have in common?
     Partial credit if you said “an inordinate interest in puppets.” Tillstrom created “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” a Chicago kiddie TV show in the late 1940s that broke into national popularity.
     And I’ve written about more puppetry than I have about football, certainly more than is wise for a man supposedly trying to align his work with the interests of his readers. Though in my defense, I missed the International Puppetry Festival this year because, frankly, I forgot. So safe to say that my passion for puppetry is far below Tillstrom’s.
     But puppetry is not the answer I’m looking for. No, Tillstrom and I are both members of Chicago’s Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame — inducted in the same class in 2013, in fact.
     I’ve never put that in the paper before. Not that I’m ashamed of it — I’m proud. I’ve got the three-inch tall chunk of crystal they give members right here, with the Seal of the City and my name and “Friend of the Community” lest anybody suspect that being inducted means I’m gay — Seinfeld fans, all together now: Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Portrait Busts of Two Women (Met)

     No, I haven’t mentioned this before because I’m modest, or pretend to be, and don’t like to tout what scant honors I receive. Plus it wasn’t germane to whatever I was talking about. Now it is, I think, because I want to put into context my reaction to a certain aspect of our historic mayoral election.
     Wednesday morning. WBBM radio was reporting the scene from the Lightfoot campaign headquarters the night before, and noted that Lightfoot’s wife and 10-year-old daughter joined her at the celebration.

     At “wife” I sorta … the word I first thought was “flinched,” but the truth is something far milder, not at all physical. Ten times milder. A shift, like hearing the single peal of bell, far away.

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Peering into the hole

     

     You ever use an outhouse? The kind with the hole, lots of graffiti, maybe a rustic wooden seat? In a national park perhaps?
     When you do, after you gird yourself for walking in, and let the door slam, as you position yourself to use the thing, particularly if you are a man and, you know, standing up, do you find yourself, even for a moment, glancing down into the hole, at the odiferous slop within? My guess is you do. It's natural. Even though you already know what's there, and even though looking is not a pleasant experience, you look anyway, just briefly. I won't speculate why.
     That's kind of my approach toward the email spam filter. I know what's there. And I generally don't look. Except for those times that I do.
     Such as after Monday's column on Michelle Obama's book, "Becoming." The comments, on my blog, on Facebook, in emails, were all of a kind. Some where, "Oh, I read that book, it was wonderful."And others were "Oh, that's quite the recommendation, I must read that." One aspect of reading the book that I couldn't fit into the column was my hope that it would help white Americans understand the black experience, an empathy gap that has existed from our country's founding and still sits like a Grand Canyon of incomprehension, only bigger and ugly.
     At the same time, New York Times columnist David Brooks did one of his periodic columns where he balances the left and right, calling for us both to respect each other and meet in the middle and create paradise. He makes some good points, about society and its shifting emphasis, while completely ignoring the glaring imbalance between left and right. Ignoring that while the left has its extremists, the right has an enormous block of hopped-up haters as solid as a granite wall and just as unyielding. Contempt is the ground they walk upon, revulsion the air they breath. I just ignore them, which is a perfect illustration of the difference. They gape in revulsion at the thing they oppose; I go on with my life.
     Between the emails and Brooks, a curiosity began to grow, a mere tickle at first, and then I found myself going through the series of clicks, calling up the stygian craphole of my spam filter to sample what is within.
     Just a brief glance.

     From Greg Soligo:

Did Michelle cover in the book how she and her thoughtful, decent husband lost their law licenses? Just asking. Neil, as a shill for the Democrats you are pathetic.  Hey, how does a President become a millionaire? Inquiring minds want to know. Next time skip the bs. Wait then you wouldn’t have a column.

    I suppose, in the name of moderation, I could have written him back that the Obamas did not lose their law licenses, that it was just another in the septic stream of lies that the right uses to cramp reality so it reflects their souls.. But what would be the point? It wouldn't affect him in the slightest, certainly, but only waste my time and encourage future communication from someone who already earned a spot in the filter for some forgotten excess.
     From Tony Zucchero, under the subject "Moochelle:"

     You libtards are still obsessed with this women. We still have to read this bullshit? All those magazine covers she was on for what ? Because she is black? Who cares if she is black or white. You care because all you libtards have is identity politics. You have a beautiful, intelligent current First Lady who speaks 5 different languages as is truly beautiful inside and out and you cannot find one magazine cover or one positive article. Hang on to your identity politics that is one of the many reasons President Donald J. TRUMP will win in a landslide in 2020. #MAGA,#Build the Wall.

    Here I broke policy and did reply:

So I take it you won’t be reading her book?

     For all the good that did.

     Had enough? More. Under the heading, "Moochelle" this, from Edward Heinz:

"You two are both alike, you hate Trump and America!!!! SNOWFLAKE"

    You get the point. Not to limit ourselves to the spam filter. There were also phone calls, such as this, from my favorite, Robert Glomb. I wish I could convey the sarcasm dripping off his voice. I should probably post a link so you can hear it, but that would take more effort than it's worth. He calls almost every time I write a column. I myself usually don't listen past the first few syllables, the contempt almost strangling the man. But in this case, for the purposes of transcription, I listened the totality of his message, which ran:

     Welllllll good morning, Mr. Steinberg, the Trump hater. So you read her book, Michelle Obama, now you think she's sitting on a pedestal. Well , for one, for a person who has to write a book about themselves, put themselves on a pedestal. As far as I'm concerned, that book is fictional. Have a wonderful day. Good bye.

     Fictional, the book he hasn't read, I feel safe assuming, and never will read. Which leads us to remember the basic point of what Michelle Obama had done to earn such violent contempt. Do I need to say it? Of course not.

Ed Burke might be a loser even though he won

     Well THAT was fun. Most election nights find me heading for the door at 5 p.m., casting a wistful look at the gathering newsroom excitement. This year, our political editor asked me to write something about embattled alderman Ed Burke. The City Council's longest-serving alderman, so chatty with the press when plugging a pet cause, wouldn't talk to me leading up to the election, and his press person wouldn't even tell me where his victory party was to be located. But that information was acquired, and I grabbed a cab down to the Red Barrel, at 52nd and Archer, marched in, took a seat at the bar. But before I could say "O'Doul's," I was told this was a "private party" and given the bum's rush outside, where I bumped into sharp young Sun-Times photographer Matt Hendrickson, on his way in. I stood on the curb while he tried his luck, and after he was similarly ejected we retired to his car to warm up and strategize. The City Desk suggested I head back to the paper—we still didn't know how the vote would pan out—while Matt stayed on the scene, and a good thing too, as he eventually snapped a memorable photo of Burke's fedora, a symbol of his old school ways that will perhaps now take him to prison.  Meanwhile I hoped to get back and update the holding column I had written with the initial election results. Uber chose that moment to balk, flagging a cab on Archer didn't work, and I ended up shivering up Archer Avenue to the Orange line and hopping an 'L' to the Loop. I can't say I contributed mightily to the Sun-Times excellent Election Night coverage, but it wasn't for lack of trying. 

     Ald. Edward Burke stopped by a 14th ward polling place Tuesday morning to thank election workers. He didn't take off his raincoat. .
     "Pretty cold out there," he said, setting down a box of candy. Burke chatted for a few seconds about turnout, expected to be at a record low. Then he backed out the door.
     An Election Day ritual. But that was about all that was usual about Burke’s 13th and perhaps last aldermanic race. Accused by the government of attempted extortion, stripped of his powerful finance committee chairmanship, time may be running out for a man who has wielded clout in Chicago for half a century.
     The wonder is he lasted this long.
     On March 11 it’ll be 50 years since Burke, 75, was first elected to City Council. Typically he ran unopposed in the ward where he grew up, where his father Joe was alderman before him. This year he was challenged by Jaime Guzman and Tanya Patiño, acolytes of foe Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.
     Together, Guzman and Patiño had raised less than $150,000 in the last quarterly filing. Burke had nearly $5 million, and seemed poised to cruise to victory late Tuesday.
     Still, Burke was facing one of the more significant challenges since he won a secret ballet for Democratic committeemen in 1968 by three and a half votes.
     The FBI took the warm glow off Burke’s Golden Anniversary by raiding his ward offices in November, and again in December, charging him in January with demanding that a Burger King franchise steer business to his law firm. In return, he would stop opposing the remodeling of the chain’s 4060 S. Pulaski location, the feds alleged.
     Will Burke have long to enjoy his victory?

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Election Day 2019, Part I

     Election Day in Chicago. Finally something on the political scene to be grateful for, to give thanks that the clown car that for months has been pulling up at various forums, disgorging candidates—14, count 'em, 14 on the ballot—will finally be sent to the junkyard.
     Not that it was always 14. It used to be more. In November, it was 21.  Easier to keep track of the Chicagoans who weren't running for mayor.
     Fourteen, until this evening. To be replaced by two, Godzilla and Rodan, who'll immediately set to wrestling each other, rolling around on a scale model Chicago, crushing it to flinders, metaphorically. That battle to be determined by another vote in April.
     Which two?
     While we ponder that, the New York Times had a tell-tale effort in its Monday paper. A full page, asking "a few questions" to nine of the 14 candidates.  The article was telling for a variety of reasons. First, being the Times, it never explained why these nine, and what about the other five made them not worthy of the cut.
     Second, each candidate was asked two semi-serious questions—to describe Rahm Emanuel's term in three words, and to name "Chicago's biggest challenge." Gentle pitches right down the middle. And two completely trivial questions: "Dibs or no dibs" and "Favorite Chicago skyscraper."
     Meaning that half of the questions the Times chose to present potential future mayors of Chicago the day before the election were fluff. Kinda tells you where the Gray Lady stands on Chicago. A far outer borough joke to amuse its readers on a slow news day, as comic relief from actual issues.
     For a moment I thought they also gave away the game by putting Bill Daley front and center, the favored candidate of Illinois billionaires and establishment publications in other cities. But a second look and I realized the Times lined up our would-be leader in alphabetical order, as if they were kindergartners, which does indeed make a certain sense.
     The skyscraper question—a single click removed from the classic "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"—was also telling. Garry McCarthy, Paul Vallas, and Willie Wilson picked the Hancock Building, which the Times took pains to explain was renamed "875 North Michigan" last year (who knew?)
   Amara Enyia and Susana Mendoza picked the Willis Tower, calling it the Sears Tower, of course.
   I didn't realize real people actually liked these examples of brutalist giganticism. It's like saying your favorite flavor of ice cream is "cold." But nothing should surprise in Chicago politics. Daley said the first thing I completely agree with him about, picking the charming spun sugar Venetian wedding cake of the Wrigley Building as his favorite. Hints at a soul, which is par for the course. Bill always seemed the most humanlike of the Daley clan, the Daley most likely to fog a mirror. Or maybe the Wrigley Building just tested well.
     Lori Lightfoot also picked a pair of buildings—the Wrigley Building is actually two buildings, with two different addresses, connected by a nickel sky bridge. She chose Marina Towers, which is defendable, in a retro 1960s way. Toni Preckwinkle, unable to color between the lines, picked the Cultural Center, noting its not a skyscraper. I suppose we should be glad she didn't pick pancakes, which are not a skyscraper either.
     And Gery Chico picked the Daniel Burnham's Reliance Building—to be honest, I believe he deserves to be mayor for that choice alone. Apt yet not playing to the crowds, exactly the sort of independent thinker Chicago needs as mayor.
      But I don't see Chico making today's cut. I'm normally not a fan of handicapping elections, but on my hobby blog, why not? All we can do now is wait, and the time must be passed somehow.
     One slot belongs to Bill Daley, because of the mesmeric powers that the Daley name has over Chicagoans to vote against all common sense and their best interests. That and the enormous bucket of money he collected from the billionaires whose interests he'll put above all else, while running an endless loop of TV commercials claiming what a salt-of-the-earth Chicago guy he is.
     The other ... I wish I could say Lori Lightfoot, based on the Sun-Times' powerful editorial lauding her lack of ties to the Old Guard.  But anyone young in her potential base in the African-American community would drift Enyia, thanks to the fluke of her Chance the Rapper endorsement or, if older, to Preckwinkle, whom I've said before I personally prefer, were the election up to me, which it's not.
    Mendoza has promise, and I wish I could say it would be her. But a sick feeling that just came over me now, at this second, my fingers tingling on the keyboard: it will be Gerry McCarthy, simply because a Daley-McCarthy race would be so horrible it makes sense. A cruel joke disenfranchising two-thirds of the city's population and revealing the whole system as the bald lie it certainly is.
     So that's my prediction—Daley v. McCarthy. Why? Because it's hard to go wrong in politics nowadays betting on the nightmare scenario.