Karen Lewis, 1953-2021: "Sometimes profane, but always profound"

     Karen Lewis was a fighter.
     As the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, she battled for the best contracts her members could get, even as she struggled against aggressive brain cancer.
     “Tell our delegates let’s get ready to fight!” Lewis said as she went into another surgery.
     The death of the 67-year-old Lewis was confirmed Monday by her spokeswoman.
     Lewis clashed fearlessly with Rahm Emanuel, calling him a liar and a bully and worse, to his face. She dealt Chicago’s combative mayor the first public defeat of his mayoral career when she outmaneuvered him in the 2012 Chicago teachers strike, winning raises for her membership in a stumbling economy and inspiring teachers nationwide.
     “It had a riveting effect across the country,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million member American Federation of Teachers. “You heard that a lot in 2013, 2014: ‘Just like it happened in Chicago, it can happen here.’”
     Lewis was angling to give Emanuel an even bigger blow in what was expected to be her own campaign for mayor in 2015.
     Lewis formed an exploratory committee and was “seriously considering” a run, she said, and polls showed her beating Emanuel. But a brain cancer diagnosis late in 2014 forced her to abandon her plans. As it was, her handpicked surrogate, Chuy Garcia, made Emanuel sweat, forcing a run-off election Lewis occasionally participated in, despite faltering health.
     “A force of nature, smart as a summer day is long,” said Weingarten. “With a heart as big as the city of Chicago.”
     The always outspoken Lewis was twice elected CTU president. In April 2016, just days after Lewis led a one-day teachers walkout to draw attention to deadlocked contract talks, she was appointed to her third three-year term; the CTU governing body canceled the election because she had no opponent.
     Lewis condemned Chicago Public Schools’ addiction to borrowing. “We cannot continue down this road to perdition,” she told the Board of Education. She spoke out, demanding “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children, be legally protected.

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True greatness comes from facing history

 

“One can’t walk in the streets and the newspapers are not allowed to print the truth, because they are afraid that the Polish currency would be shaky. A Jew is not allowed to go out in the street at night because his life is at risk.”

     You know the great thing about centuries of slavery in the United States? The big positive that gets overlooked, even during Black History Month, between Harriet Tubman and those wood cuts of tightly packed slave ships? I should probably draw this out, because a lot of readers are thinking, “What?” reaching for the cudgel of outrage. But there is one undeniably positive aspect to both slavery and the 150 years of oppression that followed.
     Ready?
     That we can talk about it now, honestly, openly, write and discuss, and contemplate our nation’s difficult and tortured past, unafraid. That is an undeniable greatness of America, one to be proud of. Because not every country can manage it.
     This week, in Poland, a verdict will be handed down in a libel case against two historians, Barbara Engelking, with Warsaw’s Polish Center for Holocaust Research, and Jan Grabowski.
     The pair co-edited a book, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland.” Lucky for them, they couldn’t be prosecuted over a 2018 Polish law that criminalized associating Poland or Poles with World War II atrocities — that effort was greeted with such international derision it was reversed.
     But the government still funds the Polish League Against Defamation, which sued the authors for recounting history that contradicts their sense of unmitigated national glory by suggesting that one individual credited with saving Jews also sent them to their deaths.

     “In America, one’s life is safe. Here a Jew’s life is worthless ... My friend and I were in the garden, sitting on a bench, engrossed in a book. All of a sudden, several hooligans appeared holding sticks in their hands ...”

     Like our own country for the past half decade, and nations around the world, Poland fell in the grip of resurgent nationalism. A shameful political philosophy that believes a country becomes great, not by actually doing great things, but through talk, threats and pressure. Their greatness is declarative — tell everybody “We are great!” Over and over and over.
     Poland has a long history of anti-Semitism....

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Walk the dog

   

Kitty

     "I can't walk the fucking dog."
     Spoken in a kind of amazed, compressed, staccato anger. "I can't ... walk the ... fuh-king ... dog!"
     Late December. The occupant of the White House bracing himself in the doorway of the Oval Office, leaving claw marks in the lintels, howling about stolen elections. The Last Lie. And the biggest, and most damaging.
     As if that weren't bad enough. Our little dog Kitty hurt her leg. Running figure eights around our living room, pure enthusiasm, unaware of political developments. Adding injury to insult.
     She had needed a bath. Because her coat had gotten too long. Because there is a global pandemic and getting the dog groomed seems a thing that can be put off. Because I had administered the dog bath, and set her down, and she did her yippee figure 8s, and I let her because, well, she's been doing it for a decade and maybe it would help her dry off, encouraging the evaporation process. So it was sorta my fault, when she let out a shriek, and came up limping, her little back right leg curled up. Hurt. There was nothing to do but pat her and stroke her and let her rest.
   "We'll see how she is in the morning," I said. But that night, about 9 p.m., gently scooping her off our bed, intending to take her outside, she let out a yip of pain, and we hustled her to the animal hospital instead. Because I'm not going to go to sleep and leave the dog in pain. They gave us some doggie aspirin and told us to see the vet in the morning. Probably a torn meniscus. $225 please.
     "Like Derrick Rose," I said, exhausting my Bulls knowledge.
     We took her to her regular vet the next morning. Probably a torn meniscus—x-rays are pointless, since they wouldn't show the ligament. Have her keep off it as much as possible—no long walks. No stairs. Another $225 please.
     We blocked our stairways off—our house has four levels—with broken down paper boxes.
     I would carry her down the front steps of the house, a half block to one of her favorite spots. And this is the heartbreaking thing. She wanted to go. Go go go. Pulling the leash. Wanted to do our usual walks. True grit. 
     Dogs are heroes of routine. It broke my heart to see her surging forward, all determination, her little back leg curled up.
     "She can go as fast as three legs as she can on four," I marveled to my wife.
     I worried about her. About having to drop $5,000 on dog knee surgery. About not being able to walk her for two months. She'd get fat. I'd get fat. It seemed the final indignity. I can't go to the gym. Or restaurants. Or see friends. Or travel. Or see my parents. The country is dissolving before my eyes and NOW, I can't ... walk... the ... fuuuuuucking dog!"

      It seemed too much. And a reminder that distant abstract woes, no matter how enormous, do not register the way small private ones do. I'm sorry that 450,000 Americans have died in the past year, and try to use that fact as a rag to stuff in my mouth whenever I feel inclined to complain about anything, which is often. But nothing sliced through this whole COVID nightmare like watching that 15 pound bichon-shihtzu mix powering forward, its little leg back right leg curled up, useless.

     But time passed. I carried that dog up and down the street, scooping her up after she did her business, imagining my neighbors tisking and tutting from behind their curtains. "That strange old man is carrying his dog again. He must have completely lost his mind. They say he drank, you know."

     And then after a span of days—four, five, a week, two, hard to say now. Less than a month—she started tentatively putting her weight on her right rear foot. A few steps at first. I sobbed, I'l admit it. Briefly, out of relief, and joy. The leg works, and it's getting better. Thank you thank you thank you.

      And it has. Two months in, she never curls it up. She boldly powers through what we call the "used ta" walk—the walk my wife used to take with her before she—my wife—got her current job. Eight blocks round trip. About a mile. The spheres returned. Things go wrong, but things get better. If you let them, if you listen to the vet and crumble the little cylinders of joint herbs into her food and are patient. Recovery is possible. You never know how precious ordinary life is until it's yanked away. Someday I'm going to be sitting in that Thai restaurant on Madison Street, as the waitress slides my beef and broccoli before me and shake my fists in exaltation and cry out, "Yessssssss!" But not yet. You just have to wait.

Texas notes: Dark Knight

    I've been to a number of vegetarian spots around town, from Blind Faith to the Chicago Diner to Raw, and I've never run into ... well, I'd better let our Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey tell it.

 

    Karyn’s Fresh Corner was a vegan raw food restaurant that had a longer run than any such establishment in the country— located right on Lincoln and Roscoe in Chicago. Back when I truly treated my body as a temple and was ultra careful about what I put into it, I tried the raw vegan food thing for a while. Karyn’s was a mainstay for me. Raw nut breads, elixirs, and salads so fresh the veggies sometimes walked off the plate.
     For my graduate school party at the 95th in 2002, the chefs went above and beyond to meet my preferences. They prepared plates of vegetables and legumes arranged in colorful complex patterns. I received special dispensation to bring my own dessert. Of course I chose one of Karyn’s delectable pecan pies, sweetened with dates. The crust was made from soaked and sprouted nuts that were ground down into a flour.
     She opened Karyn’s Cooked in River North in 2003 and I was thrilled. It’s not easy to get highly palatable, fresh vegan food and she had it down. (Sadly, they closed in 2016 but I recently found out that Karyn began a pop-up vegan spot at Jam on Kedzie last year).
     When The Dark Knight came out in 2012 my then-boyfriend and I took the Brown Line to the Chicago stop and took the short walk to Karyn’s Cooked around the corner. It was a hot night and the air conditioning welcomed us.
     After we had ordered our enchiladas and polenta, and shot a couple of immune boosting potions, we chatted and drank pink hibiscus tea. Suddenly the whole place stood still. I watched as my boyfriend and everyone else who was facing the door stared, frozen; their eyes popped out of their heads and their jaws dropped.
     I turned and understood. Two women were walking in, one more tall, elegant and beautiful than the next. Each of them wore platform shoes that gave them five or six more inches of height. I wondered how they could balance?

      They strutted over to a small bar I had not noticed earlier. It had two bar stools and was facing a mirrored wall. The best seat in the house. A handsome dark haired man wearing salmon colored skinny pants was their chaperone, and this was before skinny pants had really hit Chicago. I decided he must be Italian.
      A man ran over with a third stool and placed it under the bottom of the woman who had not yet been seated at the bar. I thought “it must be nice to look like that.” I said to my boyfriend, “I am sorry but I will be staring at them for a while.”
     I drank them in. One of the women had long flaxen gold hair with thick braids creating a frame around her face. She was wearing a black bra top, à la Madonna, and a pleated silk skirt the color of butter. A gold medallion of a lion’s face casually hung down from the waist line on a piece of black ribbon. The other woman’s hair was equally impossibly blonde. She wore a dark green and burgundy damask mini skirt with pine trees and deer, the type of material you might see used as upholstery in a log cabin upstate New York. Her top was a black concert midriff tee shirt tailored carefully to look ripped just so. Chanel?
     I whispered to my boyfriend: “do you think they are dominatrixes?”
     When we got up to leave something took over me, like a cartoon character floating through the air towards the aroma of freshly baked pie. I beelined to the bar. Up close I could see that the women were wearing so much makeup that it seemed they were unable to make any expressions with their faces. When they laughed I heard tinkling sounds come out and their mouths moved a little and their eyes shone, but everything else was fixed in place.
     I said “I just wanted to say how beautiful you are.” The man slapped his salmon thigh and guffawed, looking incredulous for some reason. I did not miss a beat— this was not about him. and I just had to know more.
     “I’ve never seen anyone dressed like this in Chicago. Maybe in Milan or Vienna, but not here.” They thanked me and giggled. The medallion lady was wearing black shoes with white polkadots and miles of a platformed sole underneath. She said “thank you. They are Jeffrey Campbell,” whatever that meant.
     I had a couple more questions. “So I know you don’t live here, and I know you both must do something interesting in your careers. Am I right?” Braided blonde looked at her friend and now both were laughing in a pleasant way. “You’re right. She lives in LA and I live in New York. I’m a singer and she’s a musician.” I said “well, thank you for making my night,” and headed towards the door.
     I noticed that a very large bald man and my boyfriend were talking and the bald man looked unhappy. When we got outside into the sultry night air my boyfriend looked at me and said “well. While you chatted up Lady Gaga, her bodyguard was trying to get me to go over there to get my ‘wife’ to leave.” 

      “What did you say?” I asked. He said “she’s not my wife and I don’t tell her what to do.” (What a cool guy). Then it hit me. “That was Lady Gaga? Wow. What does she sing again?” He asked me if I was serious and I was. “Poker Face?” he told me. “Oh my god! I love that song!” I said as we danced down the street heading to a movie in much simpler times.

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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