Illegal abortion leads to circle of tragedy

     An abortion cost $50 in Chicago in 1941.
     Kinda cheap—$800 in today’s dollars—considering it was an illegal procedure, performed in secret, condemned by the church at a time when organized religion had even more of a stranglehold on American society than it does now, which is really saying something.
     Chicago women back then had abortions anyway, for the same reasons they do now, ranging from medical, financial and emotional necessity. It was a fairly routine procedure in 1941. Your doctor would jot down an address—190 N. State—and you’d hurry to the Gabler Clinic on the 6th floor.
     The Gabler clinic had been open since the early 1930s, mostly. It would be periodically raided, only to open again. Leading to the question of how this criminal procedure was performed an average of five times a day in the heart of the Loop for almost a decade.
     Therein lies the tale.
     One reason religious zealots have such success restricting abortion is that it is seen as affecting only women. So they marshal their zombie army of imaginary babies and send them off to do battle against actual living people—mostly young, poor women—and thus approach the New Jerusalem, in their own minds.
     While it is true that women are the primary beneficiaries of abortions, and suffer most when abortion is restricted, they are not the only victims of criminalizing a highly popular medical procedure. With the U.S. Supreme Court taking a case arising from Mississippi’s draconian abortion laws, and Texas’ “Heartbeat Law” criminalizing abortion after six weeks, now seems an apt moment to remember a case that rocked Chicago 80 years ago. A taste of what’s in store for us should the faith-addled fanatics Donald Trump placed on the high court overturn Roe v. Wade.
     They called it “The Million Dollar Abortion Ring,” for the nearly 20,000 abortions, at $50 a pop, performed at the Gabler Clinic. The clinic went from open secret to front page news after Detective Daniel Moriarity, a 15-year veteran of the state’s attorney police force, went to 4367 N. Lake Park, pushed past a maid, and fired five shots into what he thought was the sleeping form of Ada Martin, who ran the clinic.
     It wasn’t Martin. It was her daughter, Jennie, 24.

To continue reading, click here.

Eric Zorn takes the buyout

Eric Zorn at L. Woods.

     Impossible to say how many times Eric Zorn wrote the column I was too scared to write.
     Or didn't think to write. Or meant to write then forgot. Or got distracted by some trivial bullshit and wrote about that instead, while Eric concentrated on the Big Important Thing I was missing. Or kicked open the same door I had been gazing at, uncertainly.
     He did it again a week ago Sunday, in a lovely tribute to his parents, at first. He began with his mother knowing the words to the summer camp standard "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" better than she knows him—thank you dementia!—slipping in this wonderfully sly description of of the tune as a "nonsense ditty about the four-named apparent victim of identity theft"—if the cleverness flew past you, remember the "that's my name too!" part.
     Identity theft.
     Head-bowed respect at that one.
     After lovingly and accurately addressing this heart-breaking malady that I can't even allude to in my own column because my mom would be mad at me, using facts and perspective, he pivots the column to his family, an update on his wife and kids. A sense of dread rushed in, so strong that it became hard for me to keep reading. Because I knew what was coming. It was like how an object gets heavier and heavier as it nears the speed of light. Or watching a horror movie you've seen before. This is the part where he goes down the dim hall. There's the door. You know what's in the closet. I literally stopped reading the column, fled over to my blog to write this now, to put it off what I knew was coming, what has to come. A columnist doesn't bring his family onstage for a round of applause unless this is goodbye, and since I don't want it to be, I'm sticking my head in the sand here for a while. A sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If you don't open the box, the cat is alive.

     Of course I knew him first through his writing. I remember covering some suburban trial, and then reading his piece and thinking, ruefully: "Eric Zorn was in the same room with me, and I didn't know it!"

     We eventually met, more than 25 years ago. My second book, "Complete & Utter Failure" had just been published by Doubleday, so this would be in the mid-1990s.  He liked the book and wanted to meet its author. We had lunch outdoors on Broadway, I believe. I remember thinking, "He's very tall," the sort of in-depth intellectual observation that has fueled my writing ever since.

     At first I was frequently combative. Insecure people are often combative. I nicknamed him "The Professor," for his deliberate consideration and tendency to draw in experts. I don't like to do that, because it involves both more work and someone talking who isn't me.  That did not keep me from starting my third book with a vignette about Rob Sherman I lifted, uncredited, from an Eric Zorn column. 

     Our lives sometimes seemed to parallel each other. When Kent was born, I had the Tempo section with the column about the birth of Eric's twins, folded up in my back pocket as we rushed to the hospital. Reading material.
     We kept in touch. Some years I got the sense that, for Eric, that was like pulling up a lawn chair next to a car wreck and gazing, finger ruminatively tapping on his lips. I remember sitting with him at Harry Caray's, sucking at my lunchtime Jack-on-the-rocks, nodding at a waiter. "Why yes, I will have another." That could not have been fun for him.
     We became better friends after Jeff Zaslow died. Maybe now I was a friend short and needed another. Maybe it was that 600 mile round trip we took together in a day, driving to his funeral and back. We stopped at Eric's parents' house in Ann Arbor and I met them, the people he wrote about. A very long day, but we talked and got through it.
     I could still keep up a tone of joshing competition. In 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, I used Eric as a ventriloquist's dummy to mock terrorists. I'm not sure what he or anybody else felt; I found it deliciously funny. But we were more allies than competitors now. We'd meet at lunch at L. Woods, between our two homes, compare notes, bitch and brag. He and his wife Johanna and Edie and I even went out for burgers at Hackney's once, the kind of convivial normality that usually eludes me.
     Last summer, during the pandemic, the only house I went over for lunch was his. And he came over to mine. We sat there, talking, because really, how many newspaper columnists are there? How many white-guy-in-their-60s newspaper columnists, who can discuss the sudden frenzied undergraduate drama that has infected our profession? In April, Eric wrote a thoughtful column on slain 13-year-old Adam Toledo and was roasted alive on Twitter. "You might as well have shot him yourself," I said, as a crowd of growling ivory tower academics and wet-from-the-womb radicals skipped around him as if he were a maypole, jeering. Credit the ingenuity of humans: it takes a kind of genius to turn tolerance into just another form of cruelty, and racial sensitivity as a pretext to dismiss and trivialize opinions that don't precisely mirror your own.
     We can talk later about Zorn jutting out his chin and accepting responsibility for John Kass, by taking time off for his kids. "Then-City Hall reporter John Kass pinch hit in my column space while I was gone." OMFG. That's like me tossing off in the middle of a post about 1980, "That was the year I reached around Mark Chapman outside the Dakota and shot John Lennon, thrust the gun into his hands and disappeared into the crowd."

     I can forgive Eric Zorn leaving the door unlocked so John Kass could sneak into professional column writing, rendering Tribune punditry into a nauseating mess, like some drunk intruder crapping on the sofa. Because really, the sort of people who value a Kass ... well, I suppose their coin is good too, and a newspaper is a universe, or should be, or used to be, and if running astrology charts, "Love is..." and a gerbil-on-a-wheel of mouth-breathing right wing fuckery keeps readers happy, well, so be it. 
     I guess I can't put it off forever. And I suppose I could be mistaken. No, actually, I can't be. I've been writing a column for a while myself, and know how this shit works. Calling your family up one by one for an update, by name, like the end of "The Sound of Music," means something. Let's go see what it means.
     A cliffhanger. Eric gets to the point where he brings up "the crazy times here at work' and just stops.
      "No space left for that particular topic today!" he writes. "But stay tuned."
     My God, that's like the rocket in the last episode of "The Prisoner." I initially thought it was a very Steinberg move, to divide your farewell into two parts. But I flatter myself. What a sharp piece of writing.
     I started to tweet it. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck..." I began, then, feeling a rare pang of decorum, changed into, "Damn damn damn damn," about 10 times, then castigated Alden Capital. See, this is what they're tossing away. Stripping away the heart and liver of the Chicago Tribune, a civic institution since 1847, its frequent revanchist politics be damned. Hoping that the violated near-corpse blunders blindly forward for a few years while they make their money.

     I don't blame Eric. I wouldn't have done any different. The moment the buy-outs were offered, I was on the phone to him. I wasn't even certain why — the way you automatically reach out to someone whose house burned down. I couldn't give him my house but I felt like giving him something. Advice? My go-to advice is always "Keep the day job." That year snaps by so fast and then you're a person who used to work at a major newspaper.
     But the inevitability of the Alden Capital vivisection changed the calculus. Jumping through a window is bad, but if somebody is coming up the stairs to shoot you, then by all means, jump through the window and run away, bloody but alive. The choice was take the big trough of cash now, eight weeks' pay plus a week for every year, and leave, or stay and be fired in a month with far fewer muffins in your basket when you're turned loose into the dark forest.
     I wrote this, tweeted my distress at his leaving, and then sat back to watch the furor rise. And a shocking thing happened. Nothing. Crickets. Readers didn't even perceive that the column was his clearing his throat to say goodbye. "Half resignation letter, half suicide note," I explained to a colleague. My wife didn't see it either. Nobody seemed to, at least nobody I could see on social media. For the first time in my life I felt like calling up Robert Feder, the media critic, and rattling his cage. Are you on vacation? Didn't you read that? Well, make some noise, because apparently nothing is real until you say it occurred.

    That was enough to raise doubt. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was working out some deal with whatever human beings might be associated with Alden. Maybe someone there actually cares what kind of newspaper they publish.
     With that thought in mind, I couldn't inject myself into the dynamic and who knows, somehow fuck things up. Maybe negotiations are going on. So I put this on the shelf and waited, checking in on it every few days, like looking in on rising dough. That's why it's so long. Kept adding bits. 

     I waited for Wednesday's column which was ... about Bitcoin. Maybe the Alden folks won't let him go. Realize the Trib needs some intelligence and decency to balance the acid malice and juvenile irresponsibility of John Kass.  

     When everyone else figures it out, or he makes his formal announcement, then I'll pull the trigger. Which is why you're reading this today and not 10 days ago. It wouldn't matter anyway. The thing Eric and I do, comment intelligently in a well-written fashion, isn't what's driving the conversation anymore, not the way wild extremism does. Fanatics glitter in the spotlight while moderation creeps off to die alone in the shadows.

     How does it feel? Like a brontosaurus, under a darkening sky, up to its knees in a bog, slowly chewing a big mouthful of decaying vegetation, gazing uncomprehendingly at the heaving ribs of a stegosaurus that has toppled over on its side and is breathing hard, eyes staring, fixed. 

     Something like that.

     Ah, I see Eric has formally announced it. Robert Feder of course has the news. Time to pull the trigger. 
     I'm not sure how much of this protracted reaction is due to the obvious harbinger of my own professional mortality. Somewhere between a bit and a lot. Then again, Eric getting someplace first and doing it well usually meant that I had no need to go there at all. So maybe I've got a few years left before it's my turn, and the big thumb of doom squashes me down too. When Mary Mitchell retired, the paper held her a bash at a swank West Loop club, with a live band and an open bar and the mayor and special custom-made cookies and moist-eyed tributes. The place was mobbed. Clearly, I thought, Mary must be the greased hub upon which the city spins.

     "You're setting the bar pretty high for when I retire," I shouted over the crowd noise to the then-editor-in-chief.
     "You're never retiring," Chris Fusco said, and I peeled away, wondering if that was a complaint, a compliment, a plea, an augury, or some combination of the four.

Chicago Places #3: Hilliard Towers Apartments

Hilliard Tower Apartments, 54 W. Cermak, are a CHA senior residence.

     Am I the first guy to point out that Chicago had one architect who specialized in round buildings, Bertrand Goldberg? (Marina City, River City, Hilliard Towers Apartments, above). And another obsessed with triangles, Harry Weese (The Metropolitan Correctional Center, the Swissotel).
     What's that about?
     I'm sure dissertations have been based on flimsier observations, and while it would be possible to spin some BS about breaking the plane and the flat spatial prairie dynamic demanding non-rectangular shapes, my guess is that it's just coincidence. Chicago is a big place, and these two guys happened to be born and, after being boomeranged out into the world, Goldberg to Germany to work with Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus in Berlin, Weese to Boston and MIT, then return, as people do, to settle here. It doesn't have to mean anything.
     Oh, that's a cop-out, isn't it? I suppose I'm safe guessing that both were pushing against the brutalist rectangular boxes of Mies, the big cheese on the Chicago scene at the time they were coming up. (Goldberg, having been in Germany, knew German, unsurprisingly enough, and served as translator when Mies came to Chicago and made his pilgrimage to Taliesin to pay his respects to Frank Lloyd Wright, a task that had to require considerable tact, considering what a jerk Wright was). But I'd be skiing beyond my tips on that one.
     When I was sniffing around for something to say about either man, I bumped into a fact I didn't know about Weese. Here's how Ian Baldwin put it in "The Architecture of Harry Weese" in Places Journal a decade ago:

     The Vietnam Memorial as we know it today would never have been built without him. After Maya Lin’s entry board to the 1981 competition had been rejected, Weese, always uneasy with final decisions or consensus, dragged it out from the rear of the airplane hangar where it had been consigned. He swayed the rest of the jury and later championed Lin in the face of intense criticism.

     How cool is that? Of course, the Vietnam Memorial is sort of a pair of obtuse triangles, set at an angle to each other and incised into the earth. I hope that isn't the only reason Weese went to bat for it. But heck, stranger things have happened. And wouldn't it be ironic if such a moving monument that changed how war is commemorated was saved from oblivion because a judge was in love with scalene triangles?
     Speaking of monuments to national tragedies, do you think we'll ever commemorate the 600,000 and counting Americans felled by COVID? The Vietnam Memorial, on the Mall in Washington, D.C., remembers 57,000 Americans felled by political folly. Given the 10x difference in scale, we should do something even more dramatic—paint the Capitol black perhaps. But we probably won't.

Don’t be afraid; it’s just a street name change

     You’d think Chicago never renamed a street before.
     An ordinance changing “Lake Shore Drive” to “Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable Drive” was introduced in City Council in 2019. The idea flared up again in December, sparked heated debate, and finally seems to be inching toward fruition, despite opposition from the mayor and general foot-dragging reluctance of those who hate to see anything changed.
     Which includes myself. All things being equal, I’d stay with “Lake Shore Drive.” Name changes trip me up. I find myself cycling through the history of the names of Sox park—”I never want to go to Comiskey... er U.S. Cellular, I mean Guaranteed Rate Field.” Far easier to stick with one name, like “Wrigley. Field”
     Which used to “Weeghman Park.””
     The best argument for keeping “Lake Shore Drive” is that it’s a world famous street and Chicago doesn’t have many and should keep what few we’ve got. New York isn’t getting rid of Broadway.
     That said—and here’s my superpower—I also realize it isn’t all about me, or even about global branding. I can prefer it not be done and still be okay with someone doing it. Because there are good reasons for changing the name.
     And no, it isn’t about honoring DuSable.
     “The name of the street isn’t about people they’re named for,” said Bill Savage, a Northwestern professor whose next book, “The City Logical” is about Chicago streets. “It’s about making people who live here now remember them.”
     What the change would do is color the image of the city, both for residents and outsiders, bringing it more in line with the people who actually live here, turning from whatever emotions might be plucked by the words “Lake Shore Drive”—that song, the Beavis and Butt-head chuckle at its abbreviation. (“Heh heh heh, LSD, it’s the name!”)—to the range of feeling encapsulated by “DuSable Drive.” History has decided DuSable was a handsome, bearded man, based on the bust that I paused to admire Saturday night on a crowded, diverse Michigan Avenue. 
     Which used to be Pine Street. What bugs me about the debate, more than ooo-scary change, is the notion that this is all somehow new.
     “It would be the second street renamed in the city of Chicago,” The Defender suggested last December. “Journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells Drive was the city’s first street renamed.”
     I hate to snicker at The Defender, now a shell of a husk of an echo of its former greatness. But that’s just silly. Street names change continually throughout the history of the city. The streets were a hodgepodge, and had to be ironed out, otherwise there was utter confusion—a Michigan Street, Michigan Avenue and Michigan Boulevard. North Lincoln Avenue and North Lincoln Street intersected at Grace.

To continue reading, click here.

Chicago Places #2: Chess Records

    
     You discover a whole new city on foot.
     I mean, I knew Chess Records was at 2120 S. Michigan, because the Rolling Stones cut a little organ-and-harmonica instrumental there in 1964 called "2120 South Michigan."
     Or at least, I knew Chess had been there. Maybe it is incurious of me—okay, it definitely is incurious of me—but the question of whether the classic recording studio is still there never crossed my mind. Or if I knew, I forgot.
    Shameful. The place where Muddy Waters recorded "Hoochie Coochie Man" and Chuck Berry sang "Maybellene" and "Johnny B. Goode" and the Rolling Stones recorded "Satisfaction" (a year after recording Muddy Waters' not-at-all-similar "I Can't Be Satisfied.")
      Then again, had I known, it would have watered down the happy surprise of walking with my younger son down Cermak, exploring his new neighborhood, turning the corner onto Michigan, and seeing, first this little gated music venue, "Willie Dixon's Blues Garden," just south, a kind of foreshadowing, and then the famous building itself, which Willie Dixon's Blues Heaven Foundation owns. 

     All these years in Chicago, and I never parked the car and walked around Motor Row. That's one of the many glories of having children. For the first two decades, you show the world to them. And then, if you're lucky, they show the world to you.

Norwood Park Notes: Meeting with the arch goof

     I slid by Ravenswood Friday afternoon to chat with a 106-year-old woman for a future column.  Afterward seemed an ideal opportunity to detour by Norwood Park on my way home and finally meet our transplanted Austin bureau chief, Caren Jeskey, whose perspective has been embroidering and uplifting Saturdays for well over a year. I was about 20 minutes late. Traffic. Our meeting transpired exactly as she describes below. Yes, I did pause when I  read the opening. Mocking yourself is one thing; being mocked by another something else entirely. Then I decided, heck, it's a little late for personal dignity and, besides, it is good for readers to have confirmation from an outside, unbiased source that my occasional description of myself as an awkward goof is not comic exaggeration, but dry, dispassionate reportage, mere descriptive journalism offering up unvarnished reality as it actually is.

 

    A gray Honda minivan parallel parked on tree lined North Avondale Avenue in Norwood Park, the rear tire resting squarely on the curb near the grass. The driver got out, saw what he had done, got back in and tried again. He carefully maneuvered the van right back onto the grass. I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking “now that’s a suburban driver.” He got out and I half-jokingly called out “do you want me to park it?” but third time’s a charm, and without my help he managed to park the van squarely in the street.
     Neil Steinberg got out and we met, face-to-face, for the first time. We sat at a sturdy wooden picnic bench outside of add chapter Design & Art Cafe (https://www.addchapterart.com/), the occasional Metra train clanging into the station, squeaking to a halt, and whirring off again.

   I’d ordered a plate of cookies for us— after all, Neil’s birthday was earlier this week. One of the owners of add chapter, Nadia Muradi, explained that the fig filled cookies had no added sugar. The walnut filled cookies were slightly sweetened with simple syrup to “bring out the flavor of the walnuts.” They were made with Nadia’s mother’s tried and true homeland recipe “with her own twist.”
     Neil tried the hummus, which was made from scratch with fresh garbanzo beans and served with pita loaded with an herbal blend of thyme, oregano and mint, salt and olive oil. I went with spicy vegan cabbage soup served with crunchy rolls of thin pita that was seasoned and lightly fried.

     Before Neil arrived I had an oat milk latte flavored with cardamom, rose petals, and honey. I chatted with Nadia who shared some of her life philosophies with me. Nadia opened this space with the goal of providing a hub where all people feel comfortable. A place for “cultural exposure,” bringing those of varying backgrounds together. She believes in having open dialogue with others, even those who don’t see eye to eye with us. “I don’t have to attach meaning to every word others say,” she explained. She sees the best route as standing up for beliefs at times, but letting go and letting others be without sharing a differing opinion at other times. “We can have civilized conversation.” I like this. The path of harmony.
     Anyone else tired of fighting?
     To me, the phrase “add chapter” conjures up the sense that we can introduce something new to our lives at any time. When Neil sat down he shared that he sees this phrase as the possibility of adding a final chapter to our lives as we age, after we’ve accomplished what we set out to do in this lifetime. Nadia and her partner Samer “Sam” Khwaiss are also branding specialists. (http://voyagechicago.com/interview/meet-nadia-muradi-samer-khwaiss-add-chapter-design-river-north/). Nadia supports the idea of adding a new chapter to one’s current brand; reshaping and redefining projects and ideas as they grow.
     With the interesting and intricately naturally flavored beverages she offers— some sweetened with honey, others with maple syrup, and none too sweet— along with what feel like a spirit of creation, Nadia’s presence is calming and inspiring. I noticed a guitar in the window and asked her if they have live music. They were closed for most of last year and just reopened in May, but yes— they do plan to have indoor/outdoor performances and open mics in the near future. (I volunteered you Snezana Zabic: https://youtu.be/Vah7gZTwtdY).

     I felt completely at ease with Neil and felt as though we’d already met. I enjoyed his Chicago accent— adopted, yes I know— and was delighted to sit across from a writer I’ve enjoyed for many years. Neil’s book Out of the Wreck I Rise provided me with companionship in the fall of 2016 when I was living alone in the woods. Clearly, this was a day where I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Working with Neil has also made me feel even more that I belong here in this toddlin’ town.
     After a lovely snack, Neil and I walked over to add chapter’s art gallery around the corner. Samer’s work stopped me in my tracks. Canvasses full of stunning, melancholy faces deep in thought. Samer and Nadia are of Syrian descent. The complex history of that nation speaks clearly in the art. The faces of twin teenaged girls holding hands that Sam captured in one of the pieces took a hold of my heart, and I can still feel the intensity of what those girls must have gone through, and also their power and beauty. They are planning an opening later this summer.
     Let’s all meet at add chapter soon.

How is that oil supposed to get places?

     "People are the worst," says my older son, a phrase I keep in my back pocket for frequent reference, a sort of half explanation, half benediction. Actually, he puts a little oomph on the last word, "People are the worst!"
     Although, in their defense, people are great about learning new words. For my entire career, I've trotted out five-dollar words in this column, sometimes because they're apt, sometimes just to show off. Either way, readers invariably take it well, some even write in, grateful to learn a new term.
     Words like "juxtaposition." Setting one thing next to another, for comparison and contrast. To clarify a point that otherwise might be elusive.
     For instance. Remember in early May, when cybercriminals shut down the Colonial Pipeline? Suddenly people were panicked about gas shortages and price spikes. That video of some idiot (people ... are ... the ... WORST!) filling a garbage bag with gasoline. My guess is that nobody greeted the Colonial crisis with "Hooray hackers! I hope the pipeline never re-opens."
     Now draw a line from that to this week, with the Keystone XL crude pipeline finally scuttled after years of fighting environmentalists and Native-American protesters. Good news, right? Fight global warming! Three cheers for tribal activism!
     Let me ask you this: How is oil supposed to be transported? Because if it doesn't go by pipeline...

To continue reading, click here.