Off-Year Election Day

   A sticker? What are the activities where they give you a sticker upon completion? Cleaning your room? If you're under the age of 8, that is, or other chores? Doing the dishes. Picking up your room. The sticker affixed to the charts that organized parents create to try to instill some kind of personal responsibility in their children. 
     We didn't do those for those boys. It seemed beneath the dignity of a child. 
     What else? A well-done paper, again in elementary school. The proverbial gold star. Or a smiley face. I haven't done a survey, but my guess is that by middle school stickers are gone or ironic, the flourish of those teachers who instruct with a smirk of self-knowledge.
     And voting. I already felt silly, heading over to early voting at the Northbrook Village Hall Monday. I had tried to read up on what was involved—be an informed voter! The Northbrook Tower, a surprisingly readable little weekly, took the effort to talk to the school board candidates. But there were three running for three openings. It seemed pointless to care.
     "It's my right and I want to do it," I explained, slightly abashed, to the poll volunteer, who asked if I was the Neil Steinberg.
     "Well, I'm a Neil Steinberg," I said. "There's another in Skokie. Sometimes he gets my mail."
     For some reason that got me a provisional ballot. Something about my signature. Either way, I got to vote. 
     Turns out there were more candidate than positions for Oakton Community College Trustee. I voted for the Jewish names ("I ain't no freakin' monument to justice," as Nicholas Cage says in "Moonstruck").
     The sticker was the icing on the cake. It couldn't have seemed more ridiculous had they given me a lollipop. Maybe the radicals are right. It's all a scam. The illusion of control, of democracy.  Not meaningless, for sure—Donald Trump being elected over Hillary Clinton certainly had meaning. But some kind of joke nevertheless, one we participate in, yet aren't really in on.  The joke is on us.
     I wasn't too upset about the Mueller squib over the weekend because, frankly, the damage is done, and whether Mueller offered a laundry list of dead-to-rights criminal behaviors of Donald Trump, or the document as it stands—and we don't know what's in it, just the attorney generals' big thumbs up—hardly matters. The system groans under the offense being committed hourly against it.  Will it hold? Is this the bottom or is there worse to come?  Maybe this whole voting thing will be done away with, eventually, along with the free press, and we'll miss the ritual, symbolic though it might have been. The next meaningful election is a year from November. At least I hope it's meaningful. Either way, we get a sticker.

'Do I stay here?'—Love endures daily through dementia, separation

     "You're here!" says Paul Lovell, greeting his wife of 41 years as she walks into his room. "Don't go away!"
     She has come, as she does every day, to be with him at lunch.
     "You look so beautiful today," she says.
     "I do?"
     "No, the guy in back of you," she says. "You look really good. You got your blue sweater on. Your blue pants. Your blue eyes."
     "Thank you.," says Paul. "I gotta keep up with you."
     Paul is 89. Anita is 85. She lives in their tidy home in Morton Grove. He lives in Room 222 at the Presence Sister Bonaventure Rehabilitation Center in Park Ridge,
     Their conversation is a blend of teasing affection.
     "He can hear; I can't hear," she says. "I told him he can hear two worms making love in the yard. I can't hear anything." 

     "The reason you can't hear is because you're talking too much," Paul says
     They both laugh.
     "That's true," she admits.
About 1.4 million Americans live in nursing homes; half for dementia-related reasons. One is Paul Lovell.
     "It's sad, about my husband," Anita says. "Even though he has dementia, he's so aware of everything. He'll say 'Where you're going?' I say 'I'm going home.' I've been there all morning. He says, 'Aren't you home now?" I say "No. This is your home." He says, 'Are you going to leave me here all alone?" I say, 'You're not alone Paul. You have people taking care of you."
     She picks up a large book celebrating the 2006 centennial of Park Ridge Country Club.
     "I was the only Jew in the whole country club, don't you know?" she says. "I got nervous before we got married. He said, 'Don't worry about it."
     She finds a section about Paul.
     "Oldest man ever to win a club championship," she says.
     "Did I ever see that?" he asks.

     To continue reading, click here.

Lori Lightfoot: From high school point guard to ‘kickass trial lawyer’

Lori Lightfoot

     Chicago has a mayoral election April 2, pitting powerful Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle against Lori Lightfoot, who had served on two police boards and a few other public roles, but didn't have much public imprint. At least from my perspective. I had interviewed Preckwinkle many times, done stories with her, eaten breakfast with her. Lightfoot I had never met until we sat down to talk for this assignment, which was challenging for a number of reasons.       

     First, I was paired with Lauren FitzPatrick, an excellent investigative and education reporter, and I had to up my game, and try to push beyond my usual shambolic approach to match her energy and thoroughness. It was educational to work with her. There were also far more editors involved than usual, and I had to adjust to a team approach.

     Second, even though Lightfoot is only two years younger than I am, and grew up an hour from where I did, I had to work to find a handle on her personality. This story took a number of false starts, and several times slid wheels-spinning into the ditch before we managed to get it up on the road and going in the form below. It's long—2800 words—but I hope it manages to keep your interest.

     
      The moment University of Michigan sophomore Lori Lightfoot stepped inside her Ohio home for Christmas break, she knew something wasn’t right.
     There were no decorations, no tree, nothing. And her mother loved Christmas. Always made a big deal of the holiday.
     “Something’s wrong,” said her mother.
     The older brother who Lightfoot idolized had robbed a bank in Nebraska and shot a security guard. Their devastated parents were considering mortgaging their house to raise bail money. But her brother had spread word that if he made bail, he’d run. Their hardworking parents — her father, deaf, toiled as a janitor and at other menial jobs, her mother a caretaker — could lose their home.
     “So here I am, a 19-year-old, the youngest of four,” Lightfoot said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, “and I have to help my parents navigate through this incredibly painful and difficult circumstance, which really kind of reshaped my relationship with them for the rest of my life and their lives, and tell them it would be absolutely foolish for them to take this money out because he was going to flee and that, if he fled, they would lose their house.”
     These days, Lori Lightfoot isn’t shy about taking charge. But if you’re tempted to draw a line between her troubled brother, who would spend decades behind bars, and Lightfoot’s career in law, particularly as a federal prosecutor, putting criminals like her brother in prison, don’t. She says that wasn’t the reason.
     “It was really economics that drove me to think about the law,” she said. “I just wanted to be able to do something where I would be able to take care of myself financially.”
     If that seems a contradiction — such a pivotal moment in her life having zero impact on her professionally — get used to it.
     Lightfoot, 56, stands a good chance of being elected mayor of Chicago on April 2, which would make her the first African-American woman to do so and also the first openly gay person.
     There is a lot to unpack regarding Lightfoot, including many contradictions. And not just because she is 5-feet-1, maybe, yet played on her high school basketball team — point guard — and quarterbacked her intramural football team at the University of Chicago Law School.
     “Flag football,” she observed, as if someone might otherwise suspect she were playing tackle.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2007: Favorite Ledes

At the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office, 1991 (Photo by Bob Davis)

  
     Thirty-two years ago today, I joined the staff of the Sun-Times. As in past years, I thought I would celebrate with something from the archive and found this, written for my 20th anniversary at the paper.  I've recently written a couple posts that were, well, "self-pity" is the term one reader used. Reading this again cured me of that. I've been very, very lucky, to have had this job. And despite all the changes in the industry—no more gift cards on our anniversaries—still feel blessed to do what I do. The stories following a few of these ledes have already been posted on the blog over the years; in that case, I have a link on the last few words, for those who feel like reading the full article.

     When Kenny Towers, long ago the editor of the Sun-Times, interviewed me for a job here, I was a magazine writer, freshly returned and still sunburned from weeks in Haiti, where I was writing an article on voodoo for The Atlantic.
     I was a little reluctant to join a newspaper—20 years ago Saturday—because I was not a hard news kind of guy.
     My main goal was not news, per se, but to find something unusual, perhaps even strange, and write about it. Especially important to me was trying to craft a good opening—"ledes" they're called in journalese—because if the beginning of a story is dull, it doesn't matter what comes later.
     So in addition to the $100 gift card my bosses were generous enough to give me, I thought I would celebrate my two decades here by revisiting the ledes from some of my favorite stories. Your indulgence is appreciated, as always:

                                                               - - -

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—We were driving through bauxite country. The earth was red with the mineral, and our Jeep bucked and rattled over deep red ruts in the unpaved road.
     The bone-rattling eased a bit when we came to the streets of a small coastal town. Turning a sharp corner, we were stopped by a group of 50 young men, dancing wildly to a driving syncopation of drums, rattles, and whistles.
     Some wore bright masks, or had painted their faces. They flowed around the Jeep, hopping up and down, pointing their fingers at us through the open windows and chanting, in Creole, what my driver interpreted as, "You will die, you will die, you will die."
                                                             — April 19, 1987

                                                            - - -

     Dr. Bryan Foy gently scoops up the human heart and holds it, as he would a newborn chick, with one hand cupped underneath, one hand over the top.
     It is 1:24 a.m. at Illinois Masonic Medical Center, 836 W. Wellington. Foy turns, takes a step, and places the heart in a metal bowl of frozen slush. Taking a pair of long tweezers, he peers into the various orifices of the heart. It looks good.
                                                                —July 17, 1988

                                                            - - -

     Everything changed at 1:35 p.m.
     After hours of coffee, pizza, chat and routine treatment of cut noses and sore throats, the call came into the Christ Hospital emergency room Saturday afternoon: Two men with serious gunshot wounds were on their way.
     An operating room at Christ, soon to be the only hospital serving the South Side with an advanced trauma unit, was readied for surgery. . . . Doctors, interns and nurses gathered to map out plans.
     "Why don't we make the chest wound the 99?" said Dr. Joe Mueller, giving priority to a 33-year-old man who police told them by phone had been shot just above the heart. . . .
     Paramedics rushed in with the first victim. In agony, he tried to jump off the gurney. A dozen doctors and nurses held him down. Nurses slit off his pants while doctors began the "90-second survey," rolling him on his side to check for other wounds.
     The big man, with homemade tattoos, cursed the doctors, then cried out in pain.
     "Hold my hand, hold my hand," he said, and a nurse gripped his fingers.
                                                             — Jan. 15, 1990

                                                               - - -

     At 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, an alarm clock somewhere in a debris-strewn cornfield in Crest Hill began beeping, the call to a normal workday that was not to be, a day turned extraordinary by a tornado's vast, often bizarre power.
     The morning's light illuminated a skewed world. Objects thought of as massive were flung carelessly aside—refrigerators sat in the middle of fields, cars were not just smashed but tumbled and buffeted so they looked like crumpled balls of tinfoil.
                                                            —Aug. 30, 1990

                                                                 - - -

     They all end up here. All the clumsy drunks and the cocky felons; the innocent bystanders and the gang-bangers who flash the wrong sign. Everyone who dies in the street, dies by the grim forms of violence, dies alone and unknown.
     Whatever the cause, they are brought to the same address: 2121 West Harrison St. They are brought through the same side entrance to the same room: Room 174. They are weighed on the same big stainless steel scale. A mop and an industrial wringer bucket always wait nearby.
                                                           —Sept. 10, 1991

                                                                    - - -

     Jenny has sparkling blue eyes, a small, upturned nose and a cascade of curly blond hair tumbling over her right shoulder.
     With a rhinestone nail charm centered on each red fingernail, a dab of blush at her decolletage, and deftly applied make-up, it's easy to believe her when she says she spent three hours getting ready to go out.
     The shimmery blue and silver dress is custom-made, she says, and it's easy to believe that, too, since with the spike heels, Jenny tops out at perhaps 6-foot-7.
      "I'm a bigger girl, I know," she says, smiling radiantly. "I can't go out to a mall -- hey, I've got a football player's shoulders."
      So instead, Jenny has come here, to a banquet hall on the Northwest Side of Chicago, where the city's tiny, secretive transvestite community is having one of its many regular social functions. . . .
                                                          —May 24, 1992

                                                                   - - -

      Al Giacchetti is cruising for hookers.
      He slows his car on a Cicero side-street as two carelessly dressed women at the curb eye him. He stops the car. The two women saunter over.
     "Hey, honey," says a heavyset woman, who seems to be high, climbing in the car. The other woman is more cautious. "You're not the police are you?" she says, hanging back.
      "No, are you?" lies Giacchetti, who actually is the police, a member of the Cook County sheriff's police vice squad, helping wage law enforcement's nightly stalemate with prostitution.
                                                       —Aug. 21, 1995

                                                                      - - -

     Too bad you didn't stop by the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control and adopt that gray-and-white kitty I saw there the other day, because now Jennifer Harnisch has to kill it.
     And killing kitties is hard. . . .
                                                       —Oct. 11, 1998

                                                                      - - -

     The man could run. Everything else -- the fame, the money, the NFL records, the Super Bowl ring, the bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame—flowed from that essential fact. Walter Payton ran beautifully, with power, grace, intelligence and a certain poetry that left onlookers amazed and hulking linemen grabbing at thin air. He died shortly past noon Monday at his South Barrington home after a yearlong battle with a disease from which he could not run. 

                                                      Nov. 2, 1999 

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 18, 2007

Dinner-Less Dinner’s roots in Chicago go back nearly 100 years

The Foodless Banquet, Drake Hotel, Dec. 21, 1921

     The quicker a published mistake can be corrected, the better.
     That might be an antique attitude, a musty journalistic convention that has outlived its utility in our online wordstorm, too much of which borders on pure hallucination.
     A year ago I wrote about a novel fundraising campaign, the “Dinner-Less Dinner” of The Ark, a Chicago social service agency aiding poor Jews, bringing food to shut ins and such. That costs money, and by collecting money for a dinner that is never held, they do away with the bother and expense of renting a ballroom, warming up chicken fingers, pampering Chaka Khan. They send out a disc of chocolate and a donation card. Supporters get to eat chocolate and do not have to dress up, go downtown, and decide how much to bid on a basket of gourmet pasta and olive oil at the Silent Auction. Everybody wins.  

     Last year I asked where the idea came from; executive director Marc J. Swatez said:
     “It goes back to the 1990s. We had a development director who saw an article about a New York charity that did it.”
     That’s as wrong as a carnival owner saying they got the idea for a Ferris wheel from some ride manufacturer in New York 20 years ago. There’s a richer story, right here in Chicago, as the folks at the Spertus Museum were happy to inform me.

To continue reading, click here.

The Gnome Scale

     Frame of reference is so important. 
     Earlier this week, the Sun-Times had a cover story whose headline, "Why some neighbors hate 'Windy City Rehab,'" left me initially wondering how there could be a TV show shot in Chicago about addicts seeking sobriety without my knowing about it. 
     And then I began reading: Ohhh, that kind of rehab. Of houses. 
     There's usually humor to be found in that confusion. My pal Rob, a straight-laced NU classmate, was having his apartment gutted—his family moved to a hotel while the work was being done. During that time, I loved looking gravely at mutual friends and announcing, "Rob's going through a difficult rehab ... he had to move out of the house," and watching their faces. 
     Frame of reference can be less funny. Over another friend's house for dinner this week, and the cute little kids were brought out for introductions. 
    "How old are you?" my wife asked the little boy. He formed his index finger and thumb into an O so he would splay the other three fingers. He meant, "Three" but for a queasy moment the only thing I saw was the white power sign I've seen 25 times online. 
    One last example.
     We had a very windy day last week. And this is the funny part. My wife came home, saw that our three garden gnomes were down, and her first thought was this: that some mischievous child had kicked them over. Forgetting that our street hasn't had a mischievous child doing anything anywhere for about a dozen years, since our own boys were racing their bikes up and down the block.
     So her frame of reference: mischievous kids, and perhaps a tad of guilt over being the sort of people who prominently display garden gnomes. 
     I came home, saw the gnomes down, and my first thought was this: "the Beaufort Scale had been usurped." You know the Beaufort Scale, the 0-12 measure of wind force, a handy way to describe hurricanes and such.
    Always struck me as a little dry. The storm was a "9." Ho-hum. How much better to say, "Did you hear the wind last night? It was a 3 Gnomer for sure!"
     Here is where I would dig into the history of lawn gnomes. Fortunately, that has already been done—this article traces them back to Roman Times, with an emphasis on Germany and its tradition of trolls, etc., and a highlight that in 17th century England there was a job known as "ornamental hermit," whose duties were to live in a shack on the grounds of vast estates and go to seed in a picturesque fashion, to let their hair grow, their clothes decay, and lurk around in the distance. 
     You know, that doesn't sound like a half bad job. 

   
 

No quit in the boy

      Yesterday's post on quitting was something unusual. The back story is, I'm working on this big profile that's running Sunday, one of those rare collaborative efforts that requires conversations and team meetings and  careful calibration and fuss. There wasn't any gas in the tank for a post, so I grabbed this one I really intended to run should the day come when I decided to scale back the blog, made it less final, and put it up.
     It drew a good amount of reaction, and one line from regular reader Chris Wood resonated:
     "You're no quitter," he said. 
    And I thought, "Yeah, damn, he's right. I'm not." Which is a good thing, generally, I suppose. The unstated assumption that by not quitting you therefore go on to win. Pretty to think so. Growing up during the Vietnam War has to put a different spin on quitting—sometimes it's the smart thing to do, lest you end up Ahab and his crew on the bottom of the sea.  Sometimes quitting saves you from something worse. 

     In that famous line of Churchill's—"Never give in, never, never, never–never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty" people tend to overlook the next few words, "never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” But when is giving up sensible? That's the sticking point.
     I'm the one who used to say, "You can never fail as a writer: you either quit or succeed." And I suppose the success is in the doing of the thing, which is certainly true in my case. You can still win without ever standing on a podium; in fact, many people are pulled down by the weight of their accolades. I've seen it happen.
     Thinking about this, I remembered a moment related to my older boy. We were in Indian Guides—the last year they used the name, speaking of quitting. So Ross was about 7. We were at a summer camp, with cabins and a dining hall. There was a climbing tower, a mammoth assemblage of lashed together telephone poles, 47 feet tall. They had rigged up two stations, to move the crowd along, and the boys would climb at each, belayed by a rope. What happened is the kid would get five or 10 feet, if that, then give up, tap out and be belayed back down to the ground.
     Not my boy. He would climb a few feet, cling there like a monkey, gather himself, then push onward. For, oh, half an hour. Meanwhile generations of kids at the other station—I hesitate to put a number on it—5, 10, 15—attempted the climb, gave up after a minute or less, and were returned to Earth.
     My kid, like me not gifted athletically, had something that can be even more useful.
     "There's no quit in that boy," I said, marveling, head tipped back, squinting up at him with the other dads. It seemed to take forever, and at times I wish he would quit. There was almost something unseemly in this outsized determination. Eventually he attained the summit—I'm tempted to say he was the only kid to do so, but I don't recall that as a fact. I only remember that he did while most kids didn't.
     He must have gotten that from somewhere. It is true that one of my favorite quotes from the Great Cham of Literature, Samuel Johnson, is: "I will be conquered; I will not capitulate." That sounds like a plan though, now that I think of it, whether the end comes by defeat or surrender, the end result is still the same.