Sky’s the limit for new science museum chief

Chevy Humphrey in front of the Burlington Zephyr at the Museum of Science and Industry

     Forgive her office, Chevy Humphrey says, gesturing to the clutter of plaques and paintings, sculptures and awards, covering tables and propped against the walls.
     “It’s a mess, because I’m just moving in,” says the former head of the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix. “I worked 22 years in a basement. I didn’t have windows.”
     She does now, windows big time. Or rather, one enormous mullioned semi-circular window, oh, 20 feet high, looking out of what was once the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World’s Columbian Fair, and for nearly the past century has been repurposed as Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry at 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive.

Chevy Humphrey

     Humphrey is the MSI’s new president and CEO, and the first Black woman to hold that post. She arrived on the job in mid-January, her work cut out for her, professionally and personally. To get the MSI, shuttered like most everything else worthwhile by the COVID pandemic, back open and running, visited by streams — whoops, make that properly masked and socially-distanced individual raindrops — of awestruck visitors. And, at the same time, to adapt herself to a new climate, region and city after a lifetime — she’s 56 — in the sunny Southwest.
     Which leads to the first, obvious question: How could a person leave Arizona in mid-winter and come to Chicago? What were you thinking?
     “You know, it’s hard to leave my family and my team, but this was the right job for me,” she replies. “I’ve worked my whole career to be at this iconic institution, and when the opportunity came, I had to jump on it. I’m leaving a beautiful grandson, and my daughter. When I first got to Phoenix, 25 years ago, just me and my daughter, I didn’t know one person. I took a pay cut because I knew I wanted to be a CEO of a non-profit organization. I wanted to give back. I couldn’t do it in Texas, so I moved to Arizona.”

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Flashback 1998: What a way to make dough

The Cohen Brothers (Sun-Times file photo)

     Many years ago I was a card-carrying member of the Division Street Russian Baths. While taking the heat, men tended to converse, and I found myself talking with Terry Cohen.

     "What do you do?" I asked. He said he owns the Maurice Lenell Cooky Company.
     "Oh," I said. "I'd love to visit."
     "You can't," he said. I asked why.
     "The machine we use to make pinwheels, it's proprietary. We wouldn't want our competitors to find out how it works."
     "How about this," I suggested. "I'll come visit. You don't show me the machine, and I'll promise not to describe it in any way, and between my not seeing it, and not writing anything about it, your secret will be safe."
     That worked, and I got to visit, and taste a pinwheel warm off the line, surely a highlight of my career. The story, which came to mind earlier in the week, when Carl Swede wrote complaining that I'd dissed his native land, hasn't been posted before today. But with Lenell out of business since 2008, and everyone trapped in an eternal present, I figure we could all use a visit to a cookie factory.

     Like a liberating army, they come.

     Relentless. Unstoppable. Up to 10 million a day.

     As many as five production lines sending forth neat, geometric rows, 16 to a row, marching from the giant ovens at the rate of one row per second into a world hungry for their arrival. Hungry for their comfort. Hungry for cookies.
     You know their names: Pinwheel. Jelly Star. Almonettes. And those are just the most popular of some two dozen varieties of cookies baked each day, two shifts a day, at Harlem and Montrose in Norridge, at the Maurice Lenell Cooky Co. plant.
     Yes, that's "cooky" with a "y," for reasons obscure. "That's the way they spelled it on the incorporation papers," says Wayne Cohen, Maurice Lenell president, whose father, Sonny, bought the company in 1987.
     Like many cookies, the distinctive small, hard, sugary Maurice Lenell cookies originated in Scandinavia.
     Many of the recipes used at Maurice Lenell today were brought to Chicago by a trio of Swedish bakers—Gunnar Lenell, his brother Eric Maurice Lenell and their partner, Agaard Billing—who started the company at 3352 N. Milwaukee in 1937. The company moved to West Belmont Avenue in 1940 and built the current Harlem Avenue plant in 1956.
     A big moment for Maurice Lenell came in 1954, when its advertising firm, Isker & Adajian, designed the company's distinctive logo of a boy in a cookie jar. The cost was $150.
     Maurice Lenell doesn't advertise much anymore, though the company was featured in a local Chevrolet commercial in 1996. It advertised more in the 1950s and 1960s, sponsoring early TV shows from Chicago, and its radio ads, with folk singer Win Stracke, were familiar to many Chicagoans.
     By the 1980s, however, the company was sagging. The Stracke jingle was gone. Sales were flat, and the third generation of Maurice Lenell owners was shopping for a buyer.
     "They weren't too interested in running the company," says Cohen, who was raised in Skokie and went to Niles High School. "We grew up in the bakery business. I grew up with these cookies; there are a lot of positive memories. It is our responsibility to carry on the line the way we remember them so other people can enjoy it."
     The cookies are made in 1,500-pound batches, in massive Peerless mixers with rotating paddles. Bulk ingredients such as flour and sugar are piped automatically into the mixers; other ingredients—baking soda, salt—that kitchen cooks add by the pinch are added at Maurice Lenell with big scoops.
     After mixing for 10 minutes, the three-quarter-ton clump of dough is forced through strips of die cutters—outlined like stars or circles or crescents—and onto a conveyer belt. Adornments— sprinkles of sugar, the red jelly center of the stars—are added just before the cookies roll through the 100-foot-long ovens.
     The jelly sits in a long, rectangular trough that rocks above the conveyer line as the raw cookies pass underneath. The jelly-application process is surprisingly loud; BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! the device goes, the gallons of jelly jiggling and undulating as neat gobs of crimson are placed at the center of each star-shaped cookie.
     The raw dough takes about 20 minutes to become a finished cookie. The conveyor belt has occasional gaps to let crumbs fall through.
     A stroll through the factory plunges visitors into and out of wonderful smells: zones of almond, areas of hot sugariness, whiffs of vanilla and complex aromas that defy description.
     Cohen has owned the company with his older brother, Terry, since their father died in June. The Cohen brothers—and there is no way to say this politely—both have prominent bellies, a fact not entirely unrelated to their business. Asked about quality control, Terry Cohen merely pats his stomach and smiles.
     "Everybody is involved in quality control," says Wayne, who adds that the cookie that really catches people's interest is the Pinwheel. Unlike most mass-produced cookies, the Pinwheels differ from cookie to cookie. In some, the chocolate and vanilla doughs are loosely swirled, much like a yin-yang sign. In others, they are tightly swirled like, well, a pinwheel.
     "Making them is very labor-intensive," says Wayne, who stopped a photographer from taking pictures of the Pinwheel manufacturing. "It's a secret process. We had to have the machinery custom-made."
     About 200 people work at the company, many of them hand-packing the cookies in little corrugated paper cups. "It keeps the cookies from breaking and makes a nice presentation," Wayne says.
     "Our job is to make sure products are the same today as yesterday and past generations," Wayne says.
     The only innovation on the horizon is a 2-ounce pack of cookies, which will be introduced early this year.
     A decade after going through hard times, business is booming.
     "In the last six years we've gone from predominantly a Chicago company to shipping all over the United States to now shipping all over the world," Terry says. "We're one of the largest family-owned bakeries in the U.S."
     Spread of Maurice Lenell cookies over the globe might someday end one of the more distinctive Chicago traditions.
     "People stop by to pick up cookies on their way to the airport to visit relatives," says Terry, referring to the popular Maurice Lenell factory store where prices are rock-bottom. "When you leave home, it's like getting a piece of Chicago brought to you."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 1, 1998

History isn’t here to make you feel good

     The mistake people make about history is to treat it as a crutch to prop up their sagging egos. It starts in childhood, when kids meet a parade of airbrushed heroes. But you grow up, or should, and the pretty story learned in second grade must become a jumping-off point, the branch you fly from, toward the stars of what actually occurred. 

     To stay on that branch, preening your feathers, is to risk ending up an affirmation junkie, able only to process another hit of flattery.
     And we know what that looks like.
     In September, Donald Trump denounced as a “twisted web of lies” the simple reality that racism is baked into the crust of our American apple pie. He created the 1776 Commission to promote a happy gloss of American history to help his supporters feel better about themselves.
     But before we sluice away the plagiarized slop that Trump’s commission squeegeed together, since this is Black History Month, it might be worthwhile to wonder if the inclination to sugar-coat the past is limited to unreflective white folks.
     It is not.
     Which is too bad. Because once you break free from the need for history to lick your hand like an affectionate pup, you are primed for a clearer understanding of what went on back then and, as a bonus, what is going on now and what might occur in the future.
     For example. The election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, is generally presented as a seismic breakthrough and triumph. The power structure that previously served up an unbroken chain of 41 white mayors bowed its head and deferred to the rising might of African American Chicagoans as manifested in the personhood of the joyful “Here’s Harold!” Washington.
     Pretty to think so.

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Something about Sweden

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     The mail has been filled with fine distinctions lately. This exchange doesn't require any explanatory set-up. 

Mr. Steinberg;
     Me Again, that Medill kid who sat behind you saying newspapers exist to preserve democracy.
     “I have no particular interest in seabirds, the Baltic Sea or Sweden,” you wrote recently.
     Well, you just knew that would come back to haunt you. I view it as your cleansed version of Trump’s “shithole countries.”
     What a slight on my ancestors!, who created a large part of the “built environment” you now park yourself in before spreading your carbon footprint on the Metra run to suburbia. Back in the days, WTTW says, Swedes built Chicago.  

     Then, your recent column on poetry and politics further revealed your anti-Swedish bias.
     How could you totally ignore a fellow Chicagoan: one of the greatest, a three-time Pulitzer winner (how many on your shelf?) named Sandburg who espoused social justice long ago. He had a few words to say about Lincoln.
     This is more than a mental fog arriving on little cat feet. I bet you’d be first in line to rename Sandburg Village in today’s cancel culture, claiming Sandburg had a thing against barbers.
     There must be some anti-Scandinavian prejudice at work here; otherwise how can you explain denial of a guy whose politics certainly would resemble yours.
     I won’t go into Walgreen and some of the other Swedish ancestry notables who graced your fair city. You’re probably a CVS shopper anyway.
     I bet you think Andersonville was named for Anderson Cooper and that you never set foot in Ann Sather’s restaurant, or the Kungsholm for that matter!
     Next, like those in San Francisco, I suspect you’ll call for the renaming of Leif Ericson Academy on the West Side, claiming he was no more than a Viking plunderer.
     Makes me think that “You Were Never in Chicago.”
     Thank God, or Odin, that WTTW can set you straight.
     I suggest sampling the Ann Sather sticky bun recipe provided below and then engaging in some remedial history while watching You Tube videos of Burr Tillstrom and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, another great Chicago Swede.
     I won’t go into a discourse about Sweden itself: You can freshen up on the Nobel prize, Volvo, Dag Hammarskkold, Olof Palme and Astrid Lindberg and the mystery writers Stieg Larsson etc.
     If I were you, I’d start with Vilhelm Moberg, “The Emigrants,” who wrote about the Swedish diaspora to the US, a topical subject today.
     Hard to understand that a fellow who makes a career on knowing Chicago was so dismissive of its Swedish heritage.
     Hope to see you June 22 at Swedish Days in Geneva.
     Stay healthy and don’t get carjacked. 

     Carl Swede

     Not his real name. The last name, that is. His real first name of course is Carl. I might have pointed out that I not only have read Dag Hammarskkold's diary, but also owned a Volvo. But, manfully resisting getting into particulars, I replied:

     Dear Mr. Swede:

     I hope you're joking. But in case you're not, I would draw your attention to the word "particular." I said, I have no particular interest in Sweden, which you, again assuming you are, alas, in earnest, manage to conflate into some kind of slight. As if you expect, no demand that everyone be especially interested in all things Swedish. Why? It's a big world. Why not allow Sweden the average amount of interest given to other Scandinavian countries?
     I think my point is made. Just in case you are serious—email is a cold medium, and it can be hard to tell—would you mind if I ran your letter on my blog? They might also tend to not give the Elongated Country its full measure of attention, and I believe it would enlighten and educate my readers.
     Thanks for writing.

     This is the point where people usually vanish. But Carl replied, and while you might want to bail out here and go about your business, cutting and pasting takes a moment, so I'll run the correspondence out, with his reply.

     Well, yes, you can run it with the following understanding.
     This probably will be the closest for me getting a byline in the Sun-Times (yes, I know it’s not part of the paper).

     My Dad, rest his soul in Evergreen Cemetery (87th & Kedzie) would be pleased. He was a Sun-Times reporter covering Stevenson and Eisenhower campaigns in the ‘50s and was an early Nieman Fellow.
     1) I’m not on Google Docs or whatever the others writing emails to you use. I don’t want my email address used, just sign it Carl Swede, please. No city.
     2) Yes 93 percent of it was written with my tongue in cheek, or aquavit in throat, but there is a kernel of truth that’s as topical as today’s news about Charles Blow calling for a new black diaspora to the South by blacks to build a critical political mass.
     Mine goes to the loss in Chicago of a vibrant ethnic community (Swedes) now all but forgotten, thus the sensitivity.
     Swedes, when the Chicago story is told, deserve more than your description of the “average amount of interest given to other Scandinavian countries.”
     Gone are the groceries, clubs, bakeries etc. replaced by a museum in an awkward Andersonville location with ever-diminishing connections to Swedish culture. What’s Swedish about Swedish Covenant Hospital?
     Where did all those Swedes go? You can say that about many ethnic communities.
     Like Blow’s nostalgic call, what would it take to bring them back, or those who ran the now-lost Jewish deli, Italian gelato shop or German bakery?
     What have we lost by this loss in our urban fabric? By keeping these communities, does that mean we’re keeping others out?
     Yet we all crave getaways to Holland, Mich., or Frankenmuth, or Solvang, Ca, or Bishop Hill to capture those cultures. But when we arrive, we find ourselves in a romantic time warp with tinsel having no connection to today’s culture and politics in Sweden or whatever country.
     If we were presenting truthfully Sweden today, we’d need a strong Islamic presence and a bow to the Chinese owner of Volvo.
      3) Thanks for pulling your finest Chuck Berry on me. He had “No PARTICULAR Place To Go.”
     4) If you do use it, I hope to invoke Swedish Mrs. Olson, remember her?, and that we can meet at your location, central or suburbs, for a cup of coffee. This isn’t an onerous request because I’m 2200 miles away, and won’t be there for many months.
     Now that you know that my contribution was partly in jest using you as an opportunity to vent, I hope the offer to run it still stands.
     It would go well with a photo of an unshorn Sandburg or Tillstrom with Kukla Fran & Ollie.
    Best,
    Carl Swede

Most important Black History Month ever

 

     Timothy Thomas Fortune was a New Yorker. But don’t hold that against him. Nobody’s perfect, and he faced challenges greater than ours: Born into slavery in Florida in 1856, he moved to New York, where he spoke and wrote — he edited Booker T. Washington’s autobiography.
     In 1890, Fortune gathered 141 delegates from 23 states to Chicago on “the free soil of Illinois” for the first meeting of the National Afro-American League, an early civil rights organization. Fortune gave an impassioned speech, trying to move his audience to action.
     “Apathy leads to stagnation,” he said. “It is a narrow and perverse philosophy that condemns as a nuisance agitators.” Those who stand up, he said, are in fact essential to establishing their people as proud, free, equal and valued American citizens.
     Fortune saw a different path than history took: He thought the violence America used against Blacks ought to be met in kind: “The arsenal, the fort, the warrior are as necessary as the school, the church, the newspapers and the public forum of debate,” he said. “It’s time to fight fire with fire.”
     Were I a teacher, I might ask my class to discuss whether Fortune’s strategy would have worked better or worse in the slow crawl toward attaining the rights the Constitution hints all Americans deserve.
     That isn’t why I picked Fortune to kick off Black History Month. But for what he said when listing the reasons for his organization. The first is: “The almost universal suppression of our ballot in the South.”

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Welcome to my office, belatedly

  
     If I had to summarize the lessons of the Trump era in one sentence, I would say, "The Trump years were a painful lesson in the toxic danger of self-absorption, though many people were too fixated on themselves to notice."
     I'm as guilty as anybody—okay, not as guilty as those willing to scrap our democratic traditions, their own physical well-being and truth itself in service of a monster who whispers sweet nothings in their ears. But still pretty damn self-centered.
     Though I'm aware of it, and try to fight it, and occasionally succeed. I like to think that counts for something.
     For instance, in October, James Finn Garner, leading "Inside for Indies," a laudable effort to drive folks to independent bookstores for the holidays, asked me to give a tour of my home office. He didn't have to ask twice (well, okay, he did, but that was more from disorganization and delay than reluctance. I was glad to do it, eventually). There is something enticing about showing off your space. I definitely remember being in 7th grade, navigating the difficulties of Roehm Junior High School, and there being a hip young teacher, Miss Jones, a big 1973 afro, and I remember thinking, "If only Miss Jones could see my bedroom, she'd understand."
     Anyway, I showed off my office, in a video I shot myself, and the result was suitably low production value that I didn't see need to share it beyond the leaf-in-the-wind of Twitter and the raise-a-finger-and-clear-your-throat-in-a-riot of Facebook. Leading, after only 10 weeks, to a grand total of 177 views on Facebook, which give you an idea of the kind of small ball I'm playing here. Frankly, I was glad not too many people saw it, between my skipping the punchline in the 55-word story I read (the title is "Published") to my godawful attempt to read a Louise Glück poem.
     But a regular reader objected. A while back, and again this past week, Jakash writes:

     I asked about this once and you replied that you were considering it. I'll ask one more time and then never mention it again.
     Half of the commenters to your EGD post yesterday remarked about the photos of your old S-T office which accompanied it. (I was one of them, but still...)
     I think they, and certainly some other folks, would be interested to see that video of your home (and months-long primary) office that you filmed for that independent-bookstore supporting online series a while back. Maybe you don't agree, or maybe you have another reason for not wanting to post it. Which is fine, needless to say.

     Aw heck, if it's important to you, sure. So, with apologies in advance, you want me nattering on about books and writing in my home office for a dozen minutes, you can find it here.

Texas notes: I Don’t Believe in Ghosts

"Unhappy Ghosts Crossing the Styx" by John Doyle (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Rationalists are challenged by accounts of the irrational, like today's post by Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey. I think I'll shut up—an underutilized skill set of mine—and let her tell her story. Life is a mirrored disco ball, and not every facet has to reflect you, or me.
 

    BMX biker boys wowed us with their tricks at Fountain Square in downtown Evanston during endless summer days. We’d bike the few miles from our north Chicago neighborhood to the charming suburban town square to watch them pop wheelies and do loop de loops in the air. It seemed they were able to fly. We were smitten. Sometimes they’d flirt and we’d swoon. We’d finally tear ourselves away and race down Asbury trying to get home by curfew, and pedaled extra fast when passing the haunted house.
     It was a sleek white modern structure with no windows that we could see, and an abstract twisted humanlike sculpture on the front porch that scared us with its strangeness. The building that just didn’t look like a house seemed to have been dropped from Miami or somewhere else far away, cold and unfeeling. It did not fit in amongst the old rambling wood framed homes with wraparound porches set back on huge yards peppered with stately ancient oak trees. We decided ghosts lived there.
     One day, many years later, a friend of a friend asked me to dog sit for her Labrador Retrievers on that same block. The dogs and I ran around loving each other like Kermie and Miss Piggy. We ran through fields and took day trips to Lake Michigan. We’d wear ourselves out and then fall into heavy sleeps that prepared us to do it all again the next day.
     One night I left the pups and went to a meditation event at the local yoga studio. My friend offered me a ride home on his bicycle, and I hopped on. When we got back to the house we lay in the grass, stargazed and told each other stories until we got sleepy. He biked off and I went inside.
     After walking the dogs I wanted to spend extra time with the puppy Ella, a golden beauty. She would soon be locked into her own room to sleep, as she was prone to eating sideboards and whatever else struck her fancy when no one was looking. The old guy, Beau— a big chocolate lab— would get to come upstairs and sleep on the floor of the bedroom with me.
     We were in the TV room at the front of the house, and I was petting the dogs and half watching a show. Suddenly, Ella ran out of the room into the living room and started barking furiously up into the chimney of the fireplace. I figured it was a bird or squirrel and coaxed her back in with Beau and me.
     Just then I heard footsteps upstairs. Not “are those footsteps?” but clear, loud steps that sounded like they came from leather shoes worn by a man. I looked out the window to see if maybe I was hearing something from the neighbor’s place; after all, these old wooden houses were sure to carry sound. But no, that was not it. The house next door was hundreds of feet across a lawn and there was no way I could hear steps from that house.
     The footsteps stopped, then started up again. Ella barked. Beau’s ears perked up. I froze. I called a friend and told him what was happening. He was concerned and offered to come over, but he lived all the way in Hyde Park. Besides, the footsteps had stopped and of course they were just my imagination (I told myself).
     I was tired. I put Ella into her room and Beau and I went upstairs to sleep. I’d almost forgotten about the footsteps by then.
     In the middle of the night I woke up. For some reason I was sitting straight up in bed, and Beau was standing on the bed— very odd since he never got up on the bed at all. He was staring at me, and it seemed he was trying to tell me something.
     I looked over to my left. There they were. A translucent, man and woman in old fashioned ecru and sepia tinged sleeping gowns. They were petite in stature and their faces were serious, stoic. They just looked at me calmly, and I looked at them, paralyzed. After a few moments they turned and left the room. The walked out of the door and down the hall. Somehow I knew they’d be heading up to the attic, with an entrance tucked up into the hallway ceiling.
     I went back to sleep. The next morning I stripped the bed and brought the sheets down to the basement along with the towels I’d used during my stay. The owners of the house were coming home so it was time to clean up and clear out. Ella came into the basement with me and barked into every corner. I felt unnerved but went through the motions. I noticed what looked like a tree trunk in the center of the old damp concrete basement. I realized that a main support beam was, in fact, a tree trunk that had not been sanded down. It was beautiful and also added to the feeling of rawness of the innards of this ancient house.
     I decided I’d go to a Tai Chi class that day, taught at a local church by a man from China. He was renowned in the are for his masterful skills, and a sought out teacher. When I got there he welcomed me, as he does all new students, and I started my practice. When we finished he told me that the class meets for two hours more, in the library of the church, to study Taoist philosophy and the roots of Tai Chi. I joined them.
     I felt like I was in the twilight zone when I realized the topic of the day. Ghosts. They talked of ghosts like they were real and shared teachings of why ghosts exist and how to help them if they appear to you. Apparently they are there because they are not resting, and you can welcome them and perhaps they will feel free to leave this realm once they feel appeased.
     I’m not saying I believe any of this; that was just what was being taught that day, and the synchronicity was incredible.
     A few months later my friend— the one who'd introduced me to Beau and Ella’s humans— told me that her 8 year old son had informed her “I will never sleep at ‘Johnny’s’ house again. This boy was friends with the kid who lived in my ghost house. He told his mom “I hear a woman and man talking all night up in the crawl space and they keep me up.”
     Years later I saw the couple who live in that house. I said to her “there’s something I want to tell you but I have been afraid to since I thought you'd think I was crazy.” “Oh,” she said. “You saw the ghosts. I’ve never seen them but they show themselves to visitors.”