What's the hurry to get to St. Louis?

Typical St. Louis residents commuting to work in 2019

     Today is "But St. Louis IS Boring Day" at one of my favorite neighborhood watering holes, Wrigleyville's Nisei Lounge. At least it was, back in the day. I haven't been there in many years, but still recall the simple pleasure of passing a Friday afternoon in its dim, modest interior with a cue in my hand, sucking back beer and trading observations of the world as pool balls clacked and the juke box played.

     After the below was published a St. Louis radio station phoned me, on air, and invited me to visit the city and see its wonders. Trying to avoid the trip, for reasons clear below, I said that I couldn't imagine going without my family. So they flew us ALL down, put us up in the presidential suite of the Adams Mark Hotel. We got the full treatment—to a Rams game and that Buster Brown kids museum. As we were ferried across the St. Louis Zoo in a golf cart for our VIP tour, my wife leaned into me, eyes glittering wickedly, and whispered, "Piss off Montreal next...."

     Amtrak wants to send 16 trains a day hurtling at up to 125 miles an hour from Chicago to St. Louis. Which begs the question: Are there 16 trainloads of Chicagoans who want to go to St. Louis every day?
     I doubt it.
     Don't get me wrong. If you somehow find yourself in St. Louis, as I have on six or a dozen occasions, there are things to do. Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. That train station mall. The Arch. The Budweiser Brewery Tour.
     I've done the beer tour a few times. Which underscores a vital truth about St. Louis: If London takes a lifetime to master, then St. Louis takes about three days, and after that you find yourself back at Budweiser again. It gets old.
     All told, that doesn't bode well for the idea of high-speed bullet trains flashing between the two cities. I mean, think about St. Louis. What adjectives come to mind? "Sleepy" is one. "Warm" is another. "Muggy," a third.
     St. Louis, by definition, is not a place one rushes to. Whether you get there in an hour or three hours or five hours or a day is pretty immaterial. The very fact that you are going to St. Louis at all shows you have time on your hands. Frankly, I think people would be more inclined to increase the time it takes to get there, not decrease it. They would rather take a flatboat down to St. Louis, twanging on a mouth harp while Huck poles the raft along the meandering Mississippi, than take a high-speed train. I would.  

A shot, beer and this lovely, spot-on t-shirt all for $12.

     High-speed trains work in the East because they connect New York City to places like Boston and Washington, D.C. Each city is filled with people who need to travel in a hurry.
     Running a high-speed line down to St. Louis would be like filling an inflatable kiddie pool with a fire hose—you can do it, but there's a tremendous sense of overkill.
      Frankly, the whole scheme smacks of those suburban mayors who, from time to time, announce that the solution for suburban commuting problems is the creation of a $ 5 billion Disneylandlike monorail system between, say, Oak Lawn and Carpentersville.
     Look at foreign cities connected by high-speed trains. Tokyo and Osaka. Paris and the French Riviera. There is no need to imagine why people in Cannes would want to zip up to Paris, just as there is no mystery as to why Parisians might want to speed down to Monte Carlo.
     But St. Louis? Sure, I can see people there wanting to come here, their Model-A Fords piled high with chicken coops and butter churns and sofas as they snake their dusty way up Interstate 55 to look for a piece of land where they can be farmers.
      That's a one-way trip, unless they give up, overwhelmed at the tall buildings and the fact that their cheerful "Howdy!" is met with puzzled stares. They can lope home to Grandma's kitchen on Greyhound. No need for a high-speed train for that.
     Beyond Missourians who can't cut it here, who else might use that train? A few Wash U alumni heading for nostalgic weekends. Half a bleacher's worth of Cubs fans on game days. Put them together and how many Chicagoans go to St. Louis on an average day? Five? Twenty? A hundred? Tops.
     The entire question is probably moot anyway, since the line would be run by Amtrak, and they have a hard time getting their regular old pokey trains from point A to point B. I can't imagine Amtrak trains reaching 125 miles an hour, unless they're derailing over a gorge.
     Back in the days when Eva Marie Saint ran into Cary Grant on a train in "North by Northwest," there was a purpose and a romance to cross-country trains. Now, sadly, they exist mostly for penny-pinching retirees and acrophobics. The towns along the route where Amtrak says it will be blasting its high speed Chicago-to-St. Louis Cannonball Express are concerned about the increased traffic. They needn't be.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 27, 2000

     

Ricketts not first owner to go to bat for Republicans

     So baseball fans are grumbling because Todd Ricketts, Cubs co-owner and finance chair of the Trump Victory Committee, is dandling GOP fundraisers at a party Saturday night in a little property of his called Wrigley Field.
     Reaction was swift and predictable. ”BOYCOTT THE CUBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Jim McDonald demanded on Facebook. “Anyone who goes to Cubs games and spends money is actually supporting Trump. Who do you love more The Cubs or the future of the USA?”
     Oh please.   

     First off, the Ricketts family assumed controlling interest in the Cubs (it was too complicated a financial shell game to call it a “purchase”) in 2009. So the hefty profit off all those $10 beers have been funneling to right-wing causes for a decade. Odd that some notice only now, even claiming to shift their allegiance to the Sox, as if such a thing were possible.
     And remember from whom the Ricketts bought the Cubs: The Tribune Company. Not exactly Ben & Jerry’s. More like Fox News before the American Pravda was a gleam in Rupert Murdoch’s eye. Whether sneering at immigrants or urging isolation, the Trib was a foghorn of right-wing nuttery for decades, stretching back to the days when its owner, Col. Robert McCormick, began each morning licking the boots of Hitler.
     Yet fans still cheered Ryne Sandberg.

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Flashback 2011: Would so many still storm the beach today?

     On July 9, 1944, Corporal H. W. Crayton paused "somewhere in France" to write a letter to the parents of Raymond Hoback.
     "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hoback," he began. "While walking along the beach D-Day plus 1, I came upon this Bible and as most any person would do I picked it up from the sand to keep it from being destroyed. I knew that most all Bibles have names and addresses within the cover so I made it my business to thumb through the pages until I came upon the name above. Knowing that you no doubt would want the book returned I am sending it knowing that most Bibles are a book to be cherished. I would have sent it sooner but I have been quite busy . . ."
     Knowing he had found a book but not its owner, Corp. Crayton put the best spin he could on the situation.
     "You have by now received a letter from your son saying he is well. I sincerely hope so. I imagine what has happened is that your son dropped the book without any notice. Most everybody who landed on the beach D-Day lost something. I for one as others did lost most of my personal belongings, so you see how easy it was to have dropped the book and not known about it. Everything was in such a turmoil . . ."
     His hope was in vain—by the time the Bible arrived, the Hobacks had been informed that both Raymond Hoback and his brother Bedford were killed at Omaha Beach, one of 33 pairs of brothers to die, along with more than 2,500 other Allied soldiers, on D-Day, June 6, 1944, 67 years ago today.
     The standard reason given to remember such sacrifice is to "honor" those soldiers, but given that they are beyond the touch of what we can do or say, I think it's more important that we remember the devotion to country and willingness to sacrifice they manifested, a sacrifice that, thankfully, has not been demanded of most Americans for a very long time—so long that it is a valid concern whether we'd be able to respond in a similar fashion if called upon to do so again. I like to think we would, but wonder if people could ever be as selfless as they were then.
     Bedford Hoback was named for the town he grew up in, Bedford, Va., and 17 of the 30 Bedford men in Company A, 116th Infantry, 29th Division also died that day. It wasn't an accident that they were in harm's way.
     "You know, us Bedford boys, we competed to be in the first wave," said Ray Nance, one of the few to return. "We wanted to be there. We wanted to be the first on the beach."
     Maybe we're smarter now. Maybe we see the futility of war, particularly the wars we're fighting today in Afghanistan, in Iraq, wars that are not so clear cut. They certainly won't end cleanly. There will be no fall of Berlin, no signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri to cease hostilities. We'll just at some point stop and bring the troops home, blundering blindly forward until then.
     Well, that isn't entirely true. As always, we have our history to guide us, a history that shows Americans have always been willing to sacrifice, to rise to the occasion, to defeat evil, to pay a high price, when called upon. We did not choose to enter World War II, the war came to us. I can't say the same about the present wars—the cause might be debatable, the heroism of the soldiers isn't.
     But sacrifice is supposed to be spread out. One of the many awful aspects of the current wars is that the full burden falls on such a small segment of the American population: the volunteer military and their families. The rest of us too easily ignore what's happening. Many people know that June 6, 1944 was D-Day. Can you cite one significant date in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars off the top of your head? I certainly can't.
     The sacrifice wasn't always spread out in the past either. Bedford suffered a greater rate of D-Day casualties than any other town in America. That is why Congress chose to locate the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, dedicated 10 years ago today. The monument depicts bronze figures storming a beach, with one representing Raymond Hoback—whose body was never found—face down in the sand, his Bible spilling out of his backpack.
     Cpl. Crayton ends his letter. "Time goes by so quickly as it has today. I must close hoping to hear that you received the Bible in good shape."
     His parents did. The Hoback brothers' sister, Lucille Boggess, still lives in Bedford, Va., and still cherishes Raymond's Bible.
     "You still think about them and miss them and just wonder," she told a local reporter a few days ago. "What would their life have been like if they had lived?''

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 2011

City population grows by one

Frank Robert Schneider Sennett

     Congratulations to proud parents Denise Schneider and Frank Sennett, who welcomed baby boy Frank Robert Schneider Sennett on Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 3:54 a.m. Frankie weighed 6 pounds, 7 oz., and measured 20 inches long. All are doing well.
     And if you’re wondering what they’re doing at the top of the column, well, I originally intended to tag the happy news discreetly at the bottom. Why? Blame nostalgia. Not so long ago the paper boasted all sorts of bold-faced columns: Irv Kupcinet and Bill Zwecker, and of course Mike Sneed, who still runs on Sundays.
     There was a vigorous cosmopolitan swirl to those bold-faced columns. We weren’t a city of anonymous nobodies, hog-butchering and clock-watching unheralded and alone, but a glittering array of celebrities and quasi-celebrities and the connected powerful. Folks who counted. 

      Those days are gone, replaced by ... whatever the heck it is we have now. The top Chicago “influencer” is .... a 26-year-old make-up artist named Alexys Fleming, with 2.6 million followers on YouTube and 700,000 on Instagram. Not to take anything away from her. She seems good at what she does, and if the public is far, far, far more interested in learning how to transform into the Night King from Game of Thrones than in reading semi-witty critiques, the fault is not hers. (There’s actually more to Fleming than that; a diabetic, her ”Dumb Things People Say to Diabetics” video is funny and should be required viewing for anyone grappling with the ailment).
     But I digress. To tuck the news of little Frankie’s arrival at the bottom and let it sit there, to be honest, looked strange. And demanded explanation. And the more I explained, the longer it got and I realized that ... one of my favorite expressions when it comes to writing is a line from Napoleon: If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna. No half-measures, no shilly-shallying.
     So if we’re going to have a birth announcement, let’s do it up...

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Don't count those chickens quite yet.

      Boulder, Colorado is a liberal enclave if ever there were one, between the head-for-the-mountains University of Colorado, the swami spiritual Naropa Institute, and the geological layers of hikers and hippies-turned-techies and flush craft beer and herbal tea companies.. 
      The Boulder Book Store is perhaps the emotional epicenter of the town—not a single Ann Coulter best-seller in sight—and there I noticed this big display of oval stickers and rectangular magnets marking 01/20/21, "Trump's Last Day—Not soon enough!" 
       Pretty to think so.
       Maybe it is. 
       And maybe it isn't.
       My people have a term, a kina hora, which translates roughly as "evil eye." Not in the sense of placing a curse so much as knocking on wood. The idea roughly behind, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."
     Or, for those slow on the uptake: Trump might get re-elected. Then his last day would be 01/20/25. Not soon at all. That could happen. It's not only possible; it's probable—the president has an advantage, historically, and, say what you will, that asshole is president, and his herd of credulous dupe followers shows no sign of disillusionment.
     Recognizing the fact, that the deck is stacked against our country being delivered from the hands of its shame any time soon, is key to the Democrats' chances. Over-confidence was part of the galaxy of errors that led to Hillary Clinton's defeat. We should try not to reproduce her blunders, though this sticker, like so much going on right now, is not a cause for hope.
     I didn't buy one, but I got in line to buy some Belize chocolate. 
     "How long have you been selling those?" I asked the clerk, gesturing toward the display.
     "Since the beginning," she said, somewhat cryptically. 
     "I hope the date's correct," I observed. She didn't take the bait, but only looked at me, uncomprehendingly. 
    Trouble. 

Police forced to show courage legislators lack

     Virginia Beach is, to be honest, kind of a dump.
     “A tourist trap” is how I’ve described this unlovely coastal jumble of blockish ocean-facing hotels and pool-heavy motels, neon T-shirt and bicycle surrey rental stands, joints selling fried oysters and fish chowder, cramped stores hawking novelty shot glasses and Virginia is for Lovers beer cozies.
     We only visited because we were looking at southern colleges for the younger boy, and the grumpy dad doing all the driving insisted that he’d be damned if he was going to travel all the way from Chicago to the University of Richmond — lovely campus, great business school, they trust their kids with chunks of the endowment to invest, and the best mascot ever, the Spiders — without pushing 100 more miles and sticking his toes in the ocean for a few days.
     All things being equal, better to swim at Michigan City and save yourself a drive.
     There is, however, on the crowded and over-developed Virginia Beach boardwalk, a curious statue showing three figures, obscured up to their hips by a marble base, each with one hand interlocked, the other reaching down, as if offering passersby below a helping hand.
     It is the Virginia Beach Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Dedicated in 2012, it’s inscribed with 14 names of local officers who died in the line of duty. The bronze larger-than-life figures represent the police, the sheriff’s office and federal agencies.
     I thought of the statue after what Virginia Beach police chief Jim Cervera called a “horrific event of unbelievable proportion” occurred Friday afternoon: a dozen people murdered at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. Shot dead for ... well, whatever unknowable blend of petty grievance and flaring psychosis (and, never forget, easy access to automatic weaponry) causes a person to do such a thing.

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In new book, John Paul Stevens relates a lifetime of legal reasoning

John Paul Stevens in 2015

     I was engrossed when I heard former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speak to the Chicago Bar Association four years ago. Reading his new book was less captivating, for reasons I try to summarize in the Sunday paper today. 

     Chicago doesn’t cherish local boy John Paul Stevens as much as it should. Maybe next year, when the former Supreme Court justice turns 100, he’ll get his due.
     Though now is not too early to kick off the celebration by reading his new book “The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years” (Little Brown, $35).
     An unfortunate subtitle — apparently the book was five years in the making, though you’d think in that time somebody at his publisher would have noticed that Stevens places the presidential election of Jimmy Carter in 1978, as opposed to 1976, the year that event took place in temporal reality.
     Not to start with a gaffe in a book that is, generally, an engaging if, by necessity, legalistic account of the key issues that frame our national conversation.
     Stevens is so long-lived, perhaps it can be forgiven if the years blur.
     He remembers going to the 1929 World Series at Wrigley Field and seeing Babe Ruth make his called shot in 1932. His father and grandfather built the Stevens Hotel — now the Hilton Chicago — and, as a boy, Stevens met Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. His first job was as a wandering raisin tart salesman at the 1933 Century of Progress Fair, the fourth star in the flag of Chicago.
     Stevens was invited to become a Navy cryptographer, spending World War II deciphering Japanese communications, then returned to Chicago to get his law degree at Northwestern.

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