S. Rosen’s bun star of Chicago style hot dog

     If the Chicago-style hot dog were a hit TV show, the title character would, of course, be the star: a Vienna hot dog, made in Chicago.
     Beloved supporting characters would be yellow mustard, Plochman’s please, the brand mixed — ingredients in mustard aren’t cooked, just blended — in nearby Manteno. A pickle spear and neon relish plus, for that healthful touch, tomato wedges and onion bits. Followed, last and least, by the twin oddities of sport pepper and celery salt.
     If you actually like those last two, well, God bless you. I’d rather dress my hot dog with the vendor’s thumb, pickled and dusted in cooties.
     We could talk about those elements all day, and people do. Yet somehow, the endless Chicago-style hot dog conversation never gets to the foundation, the one unsung actor who literally holds the whole show together: the S. Rosen’s poppyseed bun.
     Let’s fix that.
     “We are the bun purveyor in the city of Chicago for well over 95% of all the hot dog stands,” said Mark Marcucci, president of Alpha Baking Co., which owns S. Rosen’s.
     He’s sitting on the second floor of the Lyndale Avenue facility, immediately south of Hermosa Park and three-quarters as big. The building used to house Mary Ann bakery —the logo is still on the floor in the entry — and though there is no sign whatsoever on the street, this is a spot in fast food history.

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Car for sale

 

     I keep reading about how there's a shortage of cars, both new and used, because of supply-chain issues, a certain microchip that is hard to find.
     Frankly, I don't believe it. When I drive around, I pass dealership after dealership jammed with cars. Plus all the car that anybody could ever want is sitting a few doors down from my house, just waiting to be snapped up by some lucky person.
     It's hard to miss this candy apple red 1966 Mustang convertible, which my neighbors, Ray and Terry Garcia, are offering for sale, well, because the time seems right.
     The car has about 99,000 miles, and has been garaged for so long I only learned of its existence a few years ago, when they pulled it out and took it for a spin. I was gob-smacked. How could someone own such a thing and the neighbors not know? But that's the Garcias: they are people of parts, as Shakespeare said, and I'm always finding new aspects to them. They travel and have a wonderful green thumb. Terry zips around the neighborhood on an electric bike. Ray was a Marine and worked for the Post Office and a master gardener and, frankly, if I heard he had been an astronaut and gone to space, well, I'd be surprised, but not really that surprised.
     Honestly, I'll be sad to see the Mustang go. I've enjoyed passing it as I walk Kitty over the last few days. Though I couldn't help but notice that their method of advertising—parking it at the end of their driveway with a sign—is not the most tech savvy in our interconnected world. So I volunteered use of my blog, where hundreds can be expected to notice it. First, because I'm a nice guy. And second, I need to repay them for having the coolest yard on the block, with its gorgeous, perfectly maintained beds of prairie plants and wildflowers, not to overlook their folk art display of found objects any one of which is a delight just to look at, plus all the cup plant seedlings they've passed along to me. It's a debt I can never repay. 
     They aren't asking a fortune—$19,000, which is less than what you'd pay for some anonymous piece of garbage that nobody would look at twice. And unlike most used cars, this can be counted on to keep its value.
    That's it. I would buy it myself, only for the lack of a spare $19,000—okay, that isn't true, but there are taxes and a new bathroom to install and pay for, and, maybe trips to take, so zipping around town in this sharp little baby is out of the question. For me.

     But maybe you made a wiser career choice, and have a more glamorous life, and can pick it up as easy as snapping your fingers. If that is the case, email them at tgarcia45@gmail.com and see what you can work out. But don't hesitate; it won't last long. 

Chicago Notes: Great Lake

     Former Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey casts her eye upon our inland sea:

     Lake is too small a word for the great body of water east of Chicago. That’s why I’ve started telling friends “I’m down at the ocean” during my regular sojourns to its shore. One friend responds in kind. She recently texted me “heading down to the ocean now,” putting a big smile on my face. It just makes life seem more exciting.
     The other night while at the oceanfront near Foster, a man in a kayak floated a few hundred feet off the beach after the lifeguards left. He was there for an hour or so, and I thought “what a kind soul,” thinking he was acting as the evening lifeguard once the city guards had cleared out for the evening. His presence was reassuring.
     Meanwhile my family and I struck up a conversation with a nice lady and her 7 year old daughter Sara. Sara and my 8 year old nephew Anthony struck up quite the beach friendship and before too long had dug a hole nearly as deep as they were tall. They were very proud and Anthony kept calling out “Peaches!”—my favorite nickname—“Come over here! Look!” with an ear-to-ear grin.
     A perfect summer evening.
     Sara’s mother told us that the man on the kayak is her husband. He was not actually lifeguarding at all— he just likes to float around out there to decompress. Still cool, and I am sure he’d have sprung into action if any of the night swimmers got into trouble. When he came back to shore we swapped stories about “Lake” Michigan.
     As you probably know, the Great Lakes (ok, fine. I guess I’ll have to call them what they are and not what they seem) comprise the largest fresh water body in the world. You also may know that Michigan has tidal waves called seiches (https://isgs.illinois.edu/seiches-sudden-large-waves-lake-michigan-danger) and is regaled with meteotsunamis on a regular basis (https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2738/NOAA-research-shows-promise-of-forecasting-weather-driven-tsunamis).
     Sara’s father shared stories of people getting caught in whirlpools of water that form in areas of the lake disrupted with concrete docks. He told us that Foster beach is quite safe because the open space creates a climate of calm.
     Nearly 20 years ago I was out on the water with friends and an experienced sailor who docks his boat at Montrose Harbor. We had a lovely day and headed back to shore. Several people got off of the boat, including a friend and her infant son. El Capitán decided we’d head back out for round two, though the weather appeared foreboding. In fact, other sailors who had also headed back cautioned us against going back out. The captain would have none of it for we were hardy sailors.
     With trepidation I joined the group of fifteen or so—most of us landlubbers and the rest the small crew who’d keep us safe. Sure enough, what seemed to be out of the blue, a storm blew in. I have never been on a body of water so choppy. The crew flew into action while my friends and I sat in a circle above deck, holding hands and crouching together. We did not have life jackets on. There was no time. I heard the faithful praying fervently.
     At one point our 39.1 foot craft could not stand up to the waves. The boat was on its side, perpendicular to the water, and while we clutched each other we watched the crew work furiously to right the ship. They succeeded with much effort and what felt to be an eternity. We were able to make it back to land. Needless to say this was one of the most terrifying things I’ve lived through, and since then I have mostly shied away from invitations to sail on private boats in Chicago.
     Lake Michigan is no joke. Nothing to trifle with.
     I was once watching a surfing documentary with my brother John who lives in California and has always been a huge (real) ocean lover. I was surprised and delighted to see brat-eating, beer-drinking South Siders catching huge waves somewhere near the Illinois Indiana border. I can’t quite think of the name of the movie, but will share if and when I do. Dees, dems and dosers with bellies drinking Hamm’s and catching waves is too good to miss. (As a half South-Sider I am allowed to say these things).
      I can’t talk about the lake without talking about my maternal grandparents, Olive and Carl. They met at Oak Street Beach almost 100 years ago. Olive was adorable and young, and I can picture her in my mind’s eye, standing on a concrete post in her swimming costume. Carl must have taken that photo. Carl used to fish off of Navy Pier before it became a fortress, and we’d share fried fish at the little shack at the end of the pier.
     It’s so very good to be home.

Columbus fans could learn from Cleveland

 

   Someone named Natalie at something called “SeatGeek” sent me an email offering White Sox tickets for Friday’s game against the Cleveland Indians. I blinked at it.
     “Didn’t they change their name to the ‘Guardians?’” I wondered. Yes they did, but only after this season. Ah.
     Sure, I could get all sentimental about a century of baseball tradition being scrapped. Weep how I loved Chief Wahoo as a child and, to be honest, still do. How my mother was an Indians fan, my grandfather before her.
     But you know what? Truth is, I’m an adult now, and understand the world is not all about me. I have my own sense of self-worth, one not dependent on the icons of my youth being carried into perpetuity on the shoulders of the public, like plaster saints borne aloft in some dusty village procession. Times change. Certain stereotypes fly in 2021 while others do not. I can’t explain why the Fighting Irish Leprechaun is OK while Chief Wahoo isn’t.
     Though I can try: It has something to do with the Irish coming here and doing pretty well, eventually, while the Native Americans already were here and didn’t do well at all, not once the white newcomers were done with them. I bet if no Irish Catholics actually attended the University of Notre Dame, its pugnacious mascot would be seen in a very different light.
     Still, when I heard Cleveland is changing the name to “Guardians,” I winced. Leave it to Cleveland to pick a dud. I had been pulling for “Spiders.” It’s such a cool name, with roots — Cleveland was the Spiders before it was the Indians. And I’d been to the University of Richmond, and was so impressed with its way-cool Spiders mascot I almost bought a Spiders t-shirt.

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Neil Steinberg's Day off

 

St. Regis Tower viewed from Maggie Daley Park's Cancer Survivors' Garden

     Left to my own devices, I'd rather be working. And between the column and the book and the blog, God knows there's plenty of work to do. So when my wife suggested we chuck our obligations Wednesday and go downtown for a "vacation day," to ensure we wouldn't make noise and bother our oldest while he's downstairs taking the New York State Bar Exam, I went along, batting away qualms.
     Such as the moment, early in the morning, when I was at my desk, pulling reference art for the artist illustrating my book to base drawings upon. "Why am I going anywhere when I need to get this done?" I thought, grimly. I shook that off.
     We boarded the 7:56 Metra downtown. "Smiling faces under those masks!" the conductor urged. "Let's have those masks on please." People complied. Arriving downtown, we walked across the Loop. Normally we'd have gone to the Art Institute—it's been a year and a half since we've been inside. But it's closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, due to COVID crisis scheduling, so we picked up tickets for the 10 a.m. Chicago Architecture Center river tour on the Emerald Lady. I'll admit that my enjoyment of the tour was tempered by already knowing just about everything the docent said, and more. I had to retrain myself to keep from shouting out what I thought were salient details she sidestepped. But Edie loved it, and it was fun to spend 90 minutes on the river on a gorgeous warm summer day, first up the north branch to the Freedom Center, then down to River City, and back along the main branch, out to the lock. She didn't make a single factual error, and that might have riled me too, because I was primed and waiting for the joy of correcting others. 

     After, we headed to Ming Hin for a dim sum lunch, then crossed Randolph and wandered Millennium Park. Neither of us had actually been in Maggie Daley Park—we always pull up at the Bean—and it was fun to explore the place, with its clunky climbing walls and Cancer Survivors' Garden, which has a great view of Jeanne Gang's St. Regis, née Vista, Tower. There are a series of metal plaques offering advice to those facing cancer, including the dubious proposition that you can beat it if you really set your mind to the task, and that a good doctor will be a man. But I still managed to enjoy the place, despite, or perhaps because, of that.
     We swung over to the Chicago Yacht Club and walked down the lakefront, passing Segway tours and women in hijabs learning to kayak. We ended up relaxing in the lobby of the newly open Palmer House, enjoying a cold beverage and sharing a brownie, which the Palmer House claims to have invented and may very well have. There definitely were more people downtown, and it's good to be among them and see the city opening up, if only briefly before the next crisis arrives.

How do blind people pick up after their dogs?

     Four times a day, Leslie takes her black Lab for a walk outside her home in the northwest suburbs. “Get busy,” she commands.
     If you’re wondering why you’re reading a third column in a week about picking up after dogs, well, stick with me, and you’ll see there is no choice here. Some threads simply must be pulled.
     If you recall, Monday’s column quotes the Cook County animal law, Sec. 10.8 (r): “No person shall fail to remove feces deposited by the person’s cat or dog, except service animals...”
     This drew an email from former Sun-Times book editor, Henry Kisor.
     “Your column today, with all the poop about designer poo bags ... was interesting — and shocking,” he wrote. “Shocking in your citation of the Cook County law about cleaning up after your dog. Why should handlers of service dogs be exempt from that? I use a service dog, and like all other service dog handlers I have ever known, I clean up after my dog.”
     I replied that perhaps the clause is meant not for people who are deaf, like Henry, but for the blind. How could a blind person pick up after a dog?
     “The way I pick up after my dog, first of all, feel for her movement,” said Leslie, who asked me not to use her last name. “I can tell she’s moving around in circles, or sniffing, through the leash.”
     She also didn’t want me to use her dog’s name, lest someone read the article, see her on the street, and shout “Rover!” or whatever, and come over and pet the dog. You’re not supposed to do that. Service dogs are working.
     “You don’t want to give someone a chance to distract the dog, for safety reasons,” she said.

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Flashback 1987: " Lawyer test `worst,' bar none - It's agony--but you can't practice without passing it"

    The bar exam begins Tuesday. Both my sons are taking the two-day, 12 hour test remotely, because of COVID. My older son will take the New York state bar exam, my younger, the Illinois. This is the second generation of my being in proximity to the test: 34 years ago, I nervously hovered in the background while my wife-to-be took the bar. The memory is clear: we stayed at a hotel downtown, the Westin, as those taking the bar did, to be near to the examination site, and eliminate any risk of traffic tie-ups. The night before we wandered Rush Street, looking for a restaurant that appealed to her. At 1 a.m., after we had gone to sleep, workers started ripping up Michigan Avenue under our window. That was a surprise. We coped. At lunchtime, I hurried over to the hotel from work and ordered room service—cling peaches, cottage cheese and a baked potato, comfort food—so it would ready when she got there, and awaited her arrival. That moment of expectation is what lingers: the covered plate on a little cart, the silent room, gazing out the window at the street, waiting. After she returned to the exam, I went down to the front desk and demanded they change our room to one not facing the street. I also wrote this story. 

     

     On Tuesday, 2,236 people will sit down and face perhaps the most difficult and important test of their lives: the Illinois bar exam.
     For weeks, in some cases months, these would-be lawyers have hibernated with their lawbooks, shunning friends and family. They have enrolled in expensive cram courses, gnawed their fingernails, downed gallons of antacid and, above all, studied, studied, studied.
     While much controversy surrounds the two-day, 12-hour, 216-question exam, most of it centering on whether the time-consuming exam should be given at all, there are two things that cannot be disputed: It is a grueling, difficult, maddening test, and you cannot practice law without passing it.
     "I still have nightmares, awful memories. I don't even like to think about it," said Anne Burke, a Southwest Side attorney and wife of Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th).
     "It's absolutely one of the worst experiences you can go through," said William H. Wise, an attorney and part-time law instructor at DePaul University. "If it was up to me, they would get rid of all the bar exams. The questions they ask are so obscure and minuscule, things that in my 22 years of practice have never come up."
     How obscure? Past bar exams have asked questions about property law from 1670.
     "That's what's so crazy about the bar exam," said Nisha Kumar, who is taking the bar on Tuesday, hoping to join the ranks of the approximately 40,000 lawyers practicing in Illinois. "They're testing us on law that no state has been following for decades, yet we have to know that to practice law in Illinois."
     About 90 percent of the students taking the bar pay $795 for an intensive review course called BAR-BRI, designed to reacquaint them in seven weeks with the information it took three years of law school to learn.
     "Think of how you would like to take a final examination on something you studied in school three years ago," said Richard J. Conviser, an Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law professor who began BAR-BRI 20 years ago. "Nobody enjoys the experience - it's a lot of hard work under pressure."
     The exam is given in February and July. It consists of two parts. The first, an essay section, asks 16 questions relating to Illinois law. The second, known as the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), is the same in 49 of the 50 states and asks 200 multiple-choice questions relating to nationally applicable law.
     Just the act of responding to so many questions in so short a period of time makes taking the bar almost an act of physical endurance.
     "By the second afternoon, I was so emotionally and physically exhausted it was an effort just to finish it," said Jo Ellen Bursinger, who took the exam in February. "Afterward, we went out to dinner, and I was so exhausted that I couldn't even eat or drink."
     Despite elaborate preparation, some people are not able even to finish the test, never mind pass it.

   "In the morning of the first day the room was filled," said Burke, who took the exam in 1983. "After the lunch break on the first day, some people were missing and never came back. The same thing happened every day. They just couldn't handle it."
     Frank Morrissey, one of the five state bar examiners who write and oversee the test, said they often try to keep people from leaving.
     "Sometimes we can talk them into going back in," he said. "I remember one young man—his wife had served him with divorce papers the morning of the exam. He walked out about 10:15 a.m., saying, `I just can't think.' I said, `What are you going to do for the next two days, just sit in your apartment? You've got this time set aside, why don't you reconsider and go back in?' The guy went back in and passed the bar exam."
     To take the bar, a person needs to have done four things: graduated from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association (there are nine in Illinois), passed a brief morals test, paid a $150 fee (the entire bar exam procedure is funded solely by entry fees) and submitted five character references and three notarized affidavits attesting to his moral character.
     There is a long wait to get test results back—as much as two months. The examiners are reluctant to discuss exactly how the passing cutoff point is determined, but in general 70 percent correct will earn a passing mark. Test scores are not released; the new lawyers simply are informed that they have passed, the others that they failed and must try again.
     Although Illinois has one of the highest passage rates in the country, about 15 percent of the applicants who take the test fail. Those who fail can request an audience with an examiner, who will discuss their essay answers.
     Everyone who has endured the bar exam has a tale to tell: the student who had a nervous breakdown and had to be taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital's emergency room for observation. The armless student who, two years ago, went in and took the exam with her feet, even though she could have requested a scribe.
     Perhaps the greatest bar exam story of all is the famed Marsha Spak episode, which took place the second day of the exam in February, 1979.
     It was noon. Having finished the morning session, Spak, a January graduate of Chicago-Kent, headed toward the Ritz-Carlton, where she had taken a room to rest during the two-hour break. Her husband, Michael Spak, saw her crossing the street from the hotel window.
     "I had lunch ready for her," he said. "An $18 sandwich, sent up by room service. But I kept waiting and waiting."
     Spak was kept waiting because his wife was trapped in the elevator, between the 12th and 13th floors, in complete darkness.
     "I was all alone," she said. "My first thought was: I'm going to miss the exam. I was not at all concerned about falling or being killed, only that I was going to have to take the exam all over again."
     The hotel manager refused to pry open the doors, fearing damage to the expensive wood finish. Half an hour passed. An hour passed.
     After almost 1 1/2 hours, the elevator finally was unjammed, and with minutes to spare, Marsha Spak—too terrified to get back in the elevator—raced down 13 flights of stairs and back to the exam room. She arrived just as the test booklets were being handed out.
     She passed.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 26, 1987