"Thank you for writing to the office of Neil Steinberg"

   

     As much as I complain about email, I still like it. Receiving email shows that what I'm writing is touching people, for good or ill. I read and respond to every one—with the exception of the perennially negative, who get one response, and then are immediately put into the filter and never read again.  My never responding does not seem to faze them. Many continue hectoring me, unperceived—I glance into the filter sometimes to see if anything wanted is there—like patients in some dim locked ward gibbering to the wall. I feel sorry for them, but helping is not within my power.
     The complimentary are received with gratitude. Those raising valid points have those points addressed. Rare is the email that evokes something extra, but such was the case with the email below, which arrived with the dawn Saturday. Why don't you read it and see if what leapt out to me leaps out to you:

Hello Neil, or Neil's staff,
     I want to comment that it looks like the Republicans have been holding their collective noses for so long that their noses have now become permanently pinched (hence, the label, "The Pinched Nose Party.")
     My dad was a staunch Republican all of his life, but he finally became disgusted with the GOP in the last years of his life and felt forced to switch allegiance.
     My father died in 2018, but I think that I can picture him, holding his fatherly nose and saying in a nasally voice, "desperado." It's not a good thing when our politicians, on either side of the aisle, become a bunch of desperate desperadoes.

     Notice anything? It's the salutation: "Hello Neil, or Neil's staff." I thought that was incredibly sweet. "Neil's staff"? I mean, who could possibly live in a world where a guy like me would have a staff? And suddenly I was plunged into the dream that my reader, who asked that her name not be used, had evoked. I thought a moment, and replied with the following:

     Thank you for writing to the office of Neil Steinberg. Unfortunately, due to the incredible volume of email he receives, not all correspondence can be shared with him. However, you can be certain that were he to read   your remarks about your father considering Republicans to be "The Pinched Nose Party,"     he would be gratified to learn them, and would in addition     express condolences for the loss of your father, 2018 not being all that long ago.

     Thank you also for reading the Neil Steinberg column. It is readers such as yourself, in Chicago, the United States and around the world, who have made the Neil Steinberg column a Chicago Sun-Times institution for nearly 25 years. Thank you as well for taking the time to write to Neil Steinberg. He highly values all his readers, and would wish you a good day, warmly and personally, if only he could.

          Best regards,
          Pierce Bronard
          Senior Assistant to Mr. Steinberg

P.S. Kidding. I'm lucky to have a job, never mind a staff. I've never had an assistant or legman and, the economics of newspapering being what it is, if I did I would have lost him long ago. But it gave me a smile to imagine what that might be like, having a staff, and I hope you will forgive me a bit of Saturday morning levity. I of course feel all the sentiments above, having written them myself. Thanks again for writing.

          Sincerely,
          Neil Steinberg

     Alas, no reply, so I have no idea how that was received, unless the reply is coming, via channels, some wildly indignant complaint even now filtering down through the Sun-Times hierarchy. But I didn't find anything offensive in it, and it certainly enlivened my morning, and as I say to new hires at the Sun-Times—or as I said, anyway, back when we actually had the chance to talk to each other—"Welcome aboard. If you're not having fun, you're doing this wrong."

Texas notes: Twinkies

Nancy Peppin was a Reno artist who painted Twinkies (Nevada Museum of Art)

     My usual role in the presentation of Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey's much-anticipated Saturday report consists entirely of providing the medium by which is it conveyed to you. But this entry is different since, in our friendly email communications during the week, I mentioned that I had spent the day ... wait for it .. researching Bozo's Circus, the beloved children's show. And thus a seed was planted...

     I have been thinking of my grandmother a lot. She lived on 95th near Commercial in an industrial part of Chicago, under the shadow of the skyway to Indiana. Acrid steel mill odors filled the air and choked us as we arrived. After an hour or two we’d acclimated and no longer detected the smell. We played in fields of overgrown prairie grasses and hid in the jungle of green bean vines in her backyard. We snapped bean pods off the vine and chomped on their sweet crispy shells and tiny green seeds inside. 

     Her house was simple with brown vinyl siding and a concrete staircase with a black metal railing leading to the front door. She’d be standing on the porch waiting when we arrived. My sister and I scrambled out of the wood paneled station wagon and into Grandma’s warm embrace, racing to see who could get there first. She’d have freshly baked bread on a cutting board in the kitchen, and toasted as many pieces as we wanted, each drenched in butter.
     If we were lucky we’d be spending the whole weekend there, along with our black standard poodle Felix. We’d wave at my folks as they drove off and then we were instantly lured back into Grandma’s cozy house. She spoke to us in a baby voice and used the same voice with Felix, who she also fed hot buttered toast. The love in her voice was tangible; she adored us to pieces.
     Grandma Marie spent most of her time in the kitchen, sitting at the oblong dark wooden table on a sturdy wooden chair with a rounded back and arm rests. She chain smoked and always had WBBM Newsradio 780 AM on a little black transistor with the antenna extended as high as it could go. When my sister and I were otherwise occupied, Grandma would play solitaire and sometimes pray with her rosary. She cried sometimes. A wooden plaque with an inlay of Jesus and his disciples at The Last Supper hung on the kitchen wall that she faced at all times, yellowed from years of cigarette smoke. I remember them looking sad and longing, as though they wanted things to be different.
     Grandma Marie was an ardent church goer and we’d join her for Latin masses— we’d genuflect, sit, stand, and kneel along with the rest of the congregation, a silent dance of sorts. The nave was drenched in Frankincense that wafted out of an ornate vessel attached to a chain that the priest waved hypnotically up and down and side to side. I had no idea what the priest was saying, but I simply loved being at my grandmother’s side. The smell of her Walgreen’s perfume, Emeraude, enveloped me. If I reached up to touch her arm it was crepe-like and as soft as a baby bunny.
     One day Grandma told us something that was such big news for little girls that we are lucky our little hearts did not palpitate straight out of our chests. She was taking us to Bozo’s Circus. As my mother recalls it, Grandma had requested tickets for us when we were babies, and maybe that’s true. What I remember is that we’d be leaving from the elementary school she worked at as a kitchen manager and taking a yellow school bus with the students to WGN studios. I was 8 or 9.
     That day I meticulously picked out my flared jeans with the roller skates on the back pockets that I had gotten at Wee Modern on Devon. I put my giant tube of Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers into my back pocket and I was set. My sister and I met my Grandmother at the school and piled on the bus with children we did not know. I felt at ease since all that mattered was Bozo. I remember being on the expressway and as we got closer I felt that I was about to achieve something great.
     We lined up in the hallway cordoned off by velvet ropes waiting to be allowed in. All of a sudden a man was talking to me, urgently. What was he saying? They needed girls in pants (most were wearing skirts) to play a game on the show and if I wanted to play I’d have to go with him right away. I got the clearance from my Grandmother and off I went.
     A dozen or so other kids and I were given a quick set of instructions. We divided into two teams and sat next to our teammates, across from the other team, our legs in V-shapes and our feet touching to create a human chain. We were tossed a balloon and used it to play volleyball, our only job to keep it afloat when it reached our side. The whole thing happened so quickly that I barely remember it, or the show at all. All I knew is that I was sitting on the stage of the Bozo show, cameras all around and felt very special. We lost the game so each won a box of Twinkies.
     As we rode the yellow bus back to the south side school I held my Twinkie box and fell asleep. It had been a long day.

Trump beast draws flies like Jim Oberweis

 

The Fortune-Teller, by Georges de La Tour (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Satire doesn’t belong in a newspaper. And by “satire” I mean stating what is not true for humorous or rhetorical effect.
     Why? Because people believe what they read in a newspaper. I learned that 20 years ago when, attempting a bit of Christmastime levity, I wrote a parody column thanking all the imaginary people who make my life a bed of ease: our gardener, chef, nannies, plus various assistants and a non-existent secretary:
     “If you’ve ever phoned my office, you’ve heard the lovely Georgia drawl of Miss Annie Sherman, and it’s a pleasure to start every morning with her always cheery “Hiya, chief!” and one of her homemade pralines.”
      All good fun. Until my mother phoned and said, “I didn’t know you had a secretary ... ” Ah, yes. No. Satire. Ever.
     That is a long way of explaining why today’s column originally began:
     “Is Oberweis milk merely watered-down white paint? Do Chicagoans need to be concerned that their Oberweis cottage cheese is actually made from the clotted secretions of alligators? They will be relieved to discover the answer is an emphatic ‘no.’”
     Actually, that wasn’t the first version. The first version involved poison. But as much as I wanted to start this column with a series of outrageous lies, I didn’t, even jokingly. Because people glance at stories. They misunderstand. And they believe what they read in the newspaper. It’s a weighty responsibility that journalists take very seriously. 

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Flashback 1994: Med Students Get Feet Wet Helping Homeless

     Talking to a friend earlier this week, the subject turned to medical stories. She mentioned that there is a Dr. Scholl College of Podiatry in Chicago. I replied yes, I wrote a story on their clinic to the homeless. It was years ago, but I can still nose those street people stripping off their socks.
     So this story came to mind. And today being Thursday, my first thought was to post it. Then I had a second, more troubling thought that perhaps should have occurred to me a long time ago, but hasn't until now: is it not odd for a journalist to not only recall his own stories after more than a quarter century, but then to imagine they are worth sharing with strangers? I think they are, but then I'm biased. But maybe there's something pitiful about the practice and I shouldn't indulge in it anymore. What do you think?

     Lamar Perkins' feet hurt.
     They should—he was on them all day, all week, doing what the homeless do, walking from place to place, looking for food, looking for money, looking to kill the time.
     "These dogs have been everywhere!" says Perkins, 42, slipping off his ruined shoes in a back room at the Center for Street People, 4455 N. Broadway. "These dogs bite."
     He puts his right foot up on a metal chair, where Tom Haberman, a third-year student at the Dr. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine, begins to clip his toenails.
     "Yeah, that's what I need," Perkins says.
     Six shelters in Chicago receive weekly visits from students in Dr. Scholl's Footcare for the Homeless program, a neat blend of altruism and education that has been copied in several big cities.
     For the homeless, it is a chance to have their hammertoes, their corns, bunions, calluses, trenchfoot, open sores, athlete's foot, and other painful foot conditions attended to by professionals for no charge.
     And for the students, it is a chance to do good and see conditions that they might not otherwise encounter in their four years of medical study.
     "It's good, solid exposure to enhance your mechanical skills," says Greg Whitaker, 26, from Long Beach, Calif. "It also makes your day, to reduce a callus for a patient, or a painful toenail. They feel better right away. It's extremely rewarding."
     As upperclassmen, Whitaker and Haberman can work directly on the feet of patients, supervised by Dr. Philip Gianfortune, an ebullient man who keeps the clinic running smoothly with his easygoing good humor.
     When more clean socks are needed, he calls for them with an operatic flourish and a cry of "Fresh socks!"
     When the sickening stench of unwell feet begins to overwhelm, he ventilates the room without agitating the patients.
     "Crack some of these windows open," he says, in a winking way. "Nothing personal, guys; it's just warm in here."
     The rest of the students—all freshmen —watch and make themselves useful however they can, digging into bags of supplies for powders and lotions, hovering in the background, waiting for a particularly exciting foot condition to present itself.
     "Onychogryposis!" Gianfortune announces happily, and the freshmen crowd around to take a look.

     In the span of two hours, the team sees ulcerated feet and many corns and calluses. They construct foam sheaths to protect hurt toes, check for the numbness that betrays untreated diabetes, and urge a woman with trench foot to keep her feet dry.
     The patients are good-humored, polite and appreciative.
     "I've been coming here a long time," says Morrie Bell, 28 and homeless for the last four months. He gestures to Gianfortune. "He's the best toe doc I ever saw in my life. He'll set your toe right. They're good doctors."
     Two freshmen on their first clinic visit are impressed and relieved that their fears of menacing homeless people and a bedlamlike clinic were unfounded.
     "I'm surprised at how efficient it is," says Michael Cornelison, 23, of Riverside, Calif. "As a first-year, you don't get a lot of hands-on experience. Finally, an opportunity for us to help out."
     "Not as chaotic as I expected," said Lisa Pocius, 24, of Lockport, who was nervous before she went to the clinic. "I didn't expect people to be so friendly."
     The last patient is Michael Alelunas, 55, who has terrible sores on both feet. He gets new dressings and antibiotics to fight the infection that already has created an ugly red discolored patch on one ankle. He asks timidly for new socks.
     "It's after 8 o'clock," says Gianfortune. "You know socks don't last until after 8 o'clock."
     The clinic costs Scholl about $30,000 a year, mostly for supplies, gas for the "Schollmobile" that runs volunteers to the six shelters they visit each week, and a small stipend for the faculty member who oversees each clinic.
     Though it receives financial support from organizations such as the Chicago Community Trust and the Washington Square Health Foundation, money is always tight. Gianfortune encourages his students to scoop up handfuls of free medical product samples at health fairs, and nobody can seem to keep up a steady supply of new athletic socks.
     "It doesn't do any good to treat people's foot conditions and then put old rags back on," he said.
     From the college's point of view, treating the homeless has a value to the podiatrists-to-be beyond homeless people's chilling collection of foot ailments.
     "It's an opportunity to give students experience in compassion," said Steve Davis, a spokesman for the school. "One of the benefits of the clinic is to help make them good doctors, doctors who treat people in their communities regardless of social condition."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 1, 1994

     Dr. Gianfortune retired last year, after expanding Dr. Scholl's outreach to needy communities. He still volunteers.

Which modern tyrant is most like Trump?

      What makes Donald Trump so terrifying? At least to those of us not lost in adoration and obeisance. It is that he represents a complete break from the past, from American history. Trump isn’t like any previous president. No sitting president has ever tried to subvert the electoral system and undermine the process of casting votes and then counting them, merely because he lost. This is a first. What on Sunday seemed like just another day of the president’s perpetual crybaby act, by midweek feels more like an attempted coup. Crude, flailing, obvious, yes. But a coup nonetheless. 

     So we wait to see if our country indeed becomes a failed state. Wait to see if our president will be a despot whose power is not based on the will of the people but on legal maneuvering, lies and sham, assisted by corrupt cronies, handpicked judges and the eager serfs who rejoice in it. Meanwhile, we in the press struggle to find a language to describe what is happening before our eyes.   

     A Washington Post article, “Strongman leaders take defeat poorly — just like Trump,” looks at dictators from Chile’s Augusto Pinchoet to Ugandan madman Idi Amin to Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, for clues to how Trump might finally leave the public stage.
     It’s practically giddy compared to The Atlantic. “Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Oban in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia,” demagogues who “subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible.”
     Check, check and check.

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Northbrook Voice: Do your share; give gifts

 

Holly Schulz in Hip Hip Hooray

     This is my piece in the November/December Northbrook Voice. I think it strikes a compromise between mere boosterism and something somebody would actually want to take the time to read. The assignment was to write about giving gifts for the holidays.

       
     Babies don’t know there’s a pandemic. Little Eli arrived despite all the world’s woes. Because I’ve known his mother since she was a newborn herself, and her parents since we were all teens, a gift was in order, crisis or no.   
     But what? An infinity of merchandise is available online. The Internet, however, wouldn’t help me pick a present the way Holly Schulz did, waiting behind the counter at Hip Hip Hooray, a jam-packed toy and game emporium at Northbrook’s Willow Festival shopping mall. “I’m looking for something for a baby...” I ventured. 
     “Babies are this way,” she said, cutting to the chase. “Boy or girl?”
     The holidays are approaching, and while dinner and celebrations may be up in the air, presents are not. In fact, presents are almost mandatory.
     “Right now, we are more isolated than we ever have been before,” said Lise Schleicher, owner of BasketWorks, a Northbrook based gift basket company. “Because we can’t actually go somewhere and be someplace, sending a gift is a physical way of reaching out and touching someone and saying ‘I’m with you, even though I’m not there.’”

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Beast is buried, but keep an eye on its grave

"Enrag'd Monster" by John Hamilton Mortimer (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Tap the average Democrat on the shoulder in 2019 and ask who they’d like to see elected president in 2020, you would not find a majority for Joe Biden.
     Not when there were exciting young candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang, beloved ideological warhorses like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I liked Kamala Harris, for her sparkling fierceness.
     Biden was a relic and a sideman, the guffawing Ed McMahon to Barack Obama’s Johnny Carson. Plus, at 78 by Inauguration Day, he would be the oldest man to assume the presidency, a full eight years older than Trump, four years his junior, was when he became president four years ago.
     Look forward, not back. Looking backward is the Republicans’ game plan. They don’t want a president, they want a time machine.
     Biden cleaned up well. The Democrats ran a tight, disciplined campaign. They buried their divisions in the face of overwhelming danger — thank you Bernie Bros., a grateful party salutes you! — the way the squabbling nations of earth unite to battle an invader from outer space in science fiction movies.
     My guess is the joy that radiated across the country this weekend was not so much exultation that Joe Biden will lead the country as relief that Donald Trump won’t.

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