Radio days

      Monday's column mentioned the anticipated merger of the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ which, while it has been reported, still flew under the radar for some readers.
     "I missed that completely!" writes Robert Nanni. "I infer from your writing that you are in 
favor."     
     I wrote him back that indeed I am. While I haven't been on the station much in recent years, I've been reporting on WBEZ longer than I've been on the staff at the paper. When I was a mere egg, in my mid-20s, trying to find a fingerhold on Chicago media after being unceremoniously fired as the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal, I started doing regular segments on Ken Davis' show, Studio A, beginning in January, 1986 when I was dubbed, with a healthy sprinkle of irony, their "World Correspondent" and spent most of that year wandering the world of Chicago, an assignment for which I was paid nothing—a reminder that the Internet didn't create the phenomenon of news organizations taking advantage of ambitious young people willing to work for free. The shtick was that once a week I would pop up on the phone in from someplace unexpected.
      My first broadcast was buck naked, from a sensory deprivation tank at Space Time Tanks on Lincoln Avenue—a fad at the time. I floated in total darkness atop warm, heavily saline water, waiting for the call. For about an hour, at one with the universe, an amoeba  on the calm surface of an antediluvian sea. Serenity settled in, just before the door ripped open, there was a blinding light and a draft of cool air, someone handed me a phone and Ken Davis asked me on live radio what I had been thinking the moment before he called.
     "That I ... had to go to the bathroom," I said, frowsily. "Wondering whether I should crawl out of the tank or wait until after you called."
      Somehow they liked it. The next week I broadcast from a pay phone at an early morning bar, Tiffany's, in Cicero, after a wake-up shot and a beer—such places were in the news at the time.          Other vignettes followed, almost random except they were all odd: watching a chicken being slaughtered at John's Live Poultry, its throat slit, the poor bird then dropped headfirst into a galvanized funnel, a thin stream of blood running out the bottom, it's claws scratching futilely on the metal. Northeastern's Human Performance Lab, checking in from a treadmill while undergoing a stress test. From Ragdale, the writer's colony in Lake Forest, where I had gone to finish a novel, a bit of which I obliviously read on the air. From the table of an acupuncturist. From the Playboy Club. That June, from inside the scoreboard of Wrigley Field during a game. Looking at the enormous water cooling system in the attic of the new State of Illinois Building.
     Being live radio, my segment didn't always work. For April Fool's Day, I tried to do a broadcast that was from an entirely white room, supposedly, which struck me as a clever idea. But it fell flat. A few weeks later, I was in the lab of a Chinese engineer working to turn moon dust into concrete for NASA, but the laboratory's switchboard didn't put the call through. To top it off, I walked outside and found I had locked the keys in my car. I was 25. I had to return the following week.
     The broadcasts became so routine that some days I merely noted "WBEZ broadcast" or "WBEZ" in my 1986 Waterstone's Literary Diary. 
     Once Ken phoned me at some ungodly hour—3 in the morning say—and ran a tape. I was so composed, talking with him, that listeners later thought I must have had advanced warning. But I didn't. I was just quick-witted and willing to play along. Still, as the efforts of the young so often do, the whole effort really didn't go anywhere, and eventually we parted ways and I went into newspapering, which paid far better. Some people get their foot in the door and become David Sedaris. Others become, well, me. Still, I remember it being fun, and kept going back to WBEZ over the years—for a while, Eric Zorn and I were regulars on Fridays, recapping the week's news. I know we were hoping to become a cherished radio item, but that never happened either. Given that track record, I can't imagine the station is tapping its foot waiting to get me back on the air, not that I would let that stop me. What's the T.S. Eliot line? About those "who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying." Yes, something like that.

Journey back to paper’s rocky past

     I’ve only glimpsed the back of my neck once in the past year and a half. Once is plenty. It happened by accident in the fall of 2020, in a chair at Great Clips. I thought: Better prepare the barber for a shock.
     “Spinal surgery. A C3-7 laminoplasty,” I said. “I’ve never summoned the courage to look at it.”
     “Here, I can help with that,” the barber said cheerily, angling the handheld mirror so I could see.
     Oh. It looked like somebody planted an ax in the back of my neck. Good thing I had to sit in the chair while my hair was cut. Even then, I was somewhat shaky walking away. Not a little-unsteady shaky. But I-hope-I-don’t-keel-over shaky. I never looked again.
     Despite the jarring sight, it was still good to be reminded. There is a certain amazed pride in surviving an ordeal. I sometimes say to my wife, out of the blue: “I still can’t believe that happened.”
     It’s a handy phrase when processing difficulties. Like nearly two years of COVID craziness, or the Jan. 6 insurrection. It doesn’t mean I doubt the reality — far too much of that already. Rather, it’s like a slow whistle of appreciation, almost awe. Wow, remember that? Did that really happen? Amazing.
     That line came to mind reading Cyrus Freidheim’s new book, “Commit & Delivery: On the Frontlines of Management Consulting.”
     Not a book I would typically pick up. A management guide, filtered through the soft focus of retirement. But its author used to be CEO of the Sun-Times and gave me a copy. “Commit & Delivery” shares Freidheim’s business wisdom culled at places like Chrysler, United Airlines and Amoco.

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Flashback 1997: In the chips at Jays

Tom Howe, at the Jays potato chip factory in 1997 (Photo by Rich Hein for the Sun-Times)

     Twitter gets a bad rap, and rightly so, what with all its helping fascists spread lies and undermine democracy. But Twitter does have value. I was just wondering what to post today when I noticed a tweet by Natalie Y. Moore, WBEZ correspondent and author (I've read her book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation; it's excellent). She was waxing nostalgic: "My all-time favorite field trip as a kid was visiting the Jays potato chip factory. We got paper hats and free chips at the end."  Small world. My all-time favorite visit-to-a-factory story was going to Jays.

      I liked this, not just for the chips that I too got at the end (no paper hat, alas). But, because after absorbing the complicated clamor of a factory, with its complicated assembly lines and industrial processes, I realized what Jays' biggest challenge was: getting the chips from Point A to Point B, unbroken. 

     Jays went out of business in 2007, but the brand lives on, purchased by Snyder's. 

     A potato chip is a delicate thing. Fragile. A pound of pressure will crush it. So when you're moving 250 tons of chips through your plant, as they do every day at Jays Foods, you need to have a system.
     "You don't buy potato crumbs, you buy potato chips," said Tom Howe, CEO and co-owner of the Chicago company, at 99th and Cottage Grove. Jays makes 125 different types and brands of chips and several hundred varieties of popcorn, puffs, twists, pretzels and assorted bagged munchies.
     Jays combats the tendency of potato chips to crush into flinders with a variety of conveyer belts, radial filling chutes and gently vibrating slides, where masses of chips, a yard deep, are gradually massaged forward, the outer layer of chips shearing away like the face of a glacier.
     The raw material is far easier to handle. An entire semi-trailer of sturdy North Dakota "chipping" potatoes can be emptied in a matter of minutes, by backing the trailer onto a hydraulic lift, tilting it 45 degrees and letting the potatoes—grown for their thin skins and low moisture—tumble out.
     About a dozen semi-trailers' worth of potatoes arrive every day. The potatoes are immediately separated into big and small sizes for a purpose both reasonable and extraordinary: Big potatoes make big chips that go into large bags; small potatoes make small chips for lunch-size bags.
     "Nobody wants to open a small bag and find three big potato chips in it," Howe said.
     Computers keep track of everything, shunting potatoes to 15,000-pound holding bins. Each bin feeds into a pipe containing a turning screw—a version of the ancient Archimedes screw used to pump water—that moves the potatoes from the bin to conveyer belts, to where they are washed and skinned, the skin scrubbed off by metal bristle brushes.
     No machine can detect if a potato is rotten inside. So a pair of human inspectors reach into the passing brown parade and give the potatoes a quick squeeze. Occasionally, they snatch one and slice it open, usually revealing black areas of rot, a skill they attribute to experience.
     "I know," said Alicia Jimenez, asked to explain what about a potato tips her off to slice it open and find rot.
     The naked potatoes are sent into high-speed chippers—spinning brass rings, each with eight blades inside, straight blades for straight chips, ripple blades for ripple chips.
     The blades cut the potatoes, but the potatoes take their revenge. Every three hours the blades are dulled and the line must be stopped so the old rings can be replaced by new rings with sharpened blades.
     The sheer quantity of slicing spews big foamy banks of starch from either side of the chipper, which calls to mind a washing machine gone berserk.
     Potato chips account for about 55 percent of Jays' business. Older Chicagoans might remember the chips were called "Mrs. Japp's Potato Chips," for the wife of Leonard Japp Sr., who founded the company in 1927.
     Then came Dec. 7, 1941. Two days after Pearl Harbor, Japp's was changed to Jays—no apostrophe, since there is no "Jay."
     "They recognized it was not in vogue to call something 'Japp,' " Howe said.
     The raw chips spend three minutes cooking in hot corn oil, which is constantly circulated and filtered. Then they are salted, and flavorings—barbecue, for instance, or sour cream and onion, are added.
     After the chips are fried, there is another quality check, in which women pluck burned and deformed chips out of the masses passing by. The chips are conveyed on a link grid, wide enough to let broken chips fall through.
     The chips also are laser-inspected, rushing, in a single layer, over a complex device called an Opti-Sort Scanner. Chips with dark spots or holes are detected by a laser, which instructs one of 82 small tubes to fire a puff of air that knocks the substandard chip off the line, into a discard bin.
     The discards—about 3 percent of production—are gathered up and used: Starch is drawn out and sold to cornstarch makers; the rest goes to hog feed. Just as the stockyards were said to use every part of the pig but the squeal, at Jays every part of the potato is used but the rich, earthy smell.
     Jays even tried to sell burnt chips to the public once, about 20 years ago. "Consumers kept telling us they liked the brown chips," said Len Japp Jr., recalling the "Brownies" variety. "It went over like a lead balloon." Japp and his father, now 93 and honorary chairman of the board, sold the company to Borden in 1986. "They almost ruined it," Howe said, citing a slump in product quality and neglect of the Jays distribution system. "They lost the connection with the consumer."
     By 1994, Jays was on the rocks and the Japps, allied with Howe, bought the company back. "Not too many people have a second chance in life," said Japp, whose children are in the company.
     Getting the chips in the bags is another challenge: You can't just fill up bags and seal them; the chips would be smashed. Rather, a conveyer pours chips -- gently -- on the central hub of a large, wheel-like device, where the chips scatter into 15 buckets that are, basically, scales. A computer monitors the weight of each bucket and opens up the exact combination that, in this case, will fill a 14-ounce bag. The bags are packed into boxes that read: "HANDLE LIKE EGGS."
     While not exactly perishable, potato chips do have a shelf life of about eight weeks, only one day of which is spent at the plant.
     "Potatoes that are in this morning will be in our branches tomorrow morning, ready to hit the streets," Howe said. Jays is still a regional brand, sold in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Missouri. But business has grown 50 percent in the past two years.
     "We connect to people's lifestyle," Howe said. "People treat themselves with Jays. We're in the fun food business."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 26, 1997

Ravenswod Notes: Free Bird

"Lady Murasaki Sets a Bird Free from a Cage," by Yashima Gakutei (Met)

 

    

     It's probably telling that while Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey writes at the start of the day, as you will see, I do my most regular writing at night. Not the writing here, mind you—writing for public consumption benefits from the freshness of the morning. But my journaling comes, usually, in the evening, with few flights of fancy or deep thoughts, but a dull just-the-facts plod through what happened that day. I do that because in a year or five or 10, I might want to know some specific, and there it will be. 

     "You have lingered sweet, between our hearts, like an everlasting soul.” 
     I’m not sure where this came from; I found it written in the jacket of one of my hundreds of pages of journals and I like the ring of it. Over the years I’ve gone through periods of fastidious daily writing. I’ve also had times where I forget how important it is for the ink to meet the paper. Or I was too distracted, defeated, or exhausted to lift that pen and tend to my inner garden.
     Writing is a way we can get to know ourselves and the world. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, teaches a daily exercise she calls Morning Pages. Per her instruction, when I was disciplined enough to do so, I’d roll out of bed each morning (maybe after a quick run to the loo), sit up, and spill three full pages of stream-of-consciousness musings onto the blank 8x10 sheets of lined paper. When I took the time to do this, years ago, I found that my innermost fears and hopes revealed themselves. Dreams were recalled in vivid detail, the mind fresh from sleep. Realizations and epiphanies abounded. The practice is to write non-stop, even if a sentence or two reads “I have nothing to write.” The goal is not to create a quality product, it’s to unveil what is hidden in the corners and crevices of the psyche.
     I am not a fan of repression, nor of passive aggressive behaviors that stem from inner (often unrecognized) anger or pain that becomes a puppet master if not unsupervised.
     The father of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) Dr. Aaron Beck died earlier this month at the age of 100. He contributed an invaluable piece to the puzzle as far as helping sentient beings (who sometimes forget that we are sentient, as we numb ourselves through various means) learn to hear their inner voices. There is usually an element of criticism in these voices.      We judge ourselves and others, rather than focusing on our permanent values and goals. Once the messages are unveiled, we can learn to decipher the thoughts and beliefs that hold us back. Through CBT we can shut the mean person inside of us down when needed in order to move forward, take risks, and act courageously despite core beliefs that would prevent us from success and greater happiness. We can be our own worst enemies, or we can thrive by reparenting ourselves in gentle and loving ways that dispel the myths about ourselves that a patriarchal, shaming, unrealistically puritanical, capitalistic, materialistic society places upon us.
     I’m a nostalgic person who has a hard time letting go. I sometimes feel regretful about opportunities I’ve squandered, and other mistakes I have made. Through CBT I’ve learned to be more accepting of my decisions and of myself, warts and all. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve always done the best I could with the tools I had, and I often fell short because the toolbox was near empty. I can also celebrate the many successes I've had, and I'm shedding the idea that I need to be better than I am while also striving to improve.
     A cool, middle aged white haired hippy-ish man, an Austinite who works at Book People, a two story mecca where one can get lost for days, turned me onto a book called Taming Your Gremlin. He said it helped him hear his inner critic and say adieu to some of it. Clients have experienced their inner critic to sound like their own sometimes; other times it’s their mother’s, father’s, or a punitive nun or another authoritarian, judgmental person. The voice is mean, not inspiring or helpful. It does not say “you are valuable. You are good enough the way you are. You are lovable. You are safe.” (Why is Stuart Smalley suddenly coming to mind?) It says “You are a disappointment,” or some variation. The voice is not true. It’s not even yours.

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

            —Maya Angelou

Don't be afraid; it's just history.

     There are two ways to be great.
     The first is by actually being great, doing great things, winning victories, achieving big goals.
     That’s the hard way.
     The second path is to be great by pretending to be great, insisting you’re great now and always have been, while ignoring or denying all the stuff about you that isn’t so great.
     The easy path.
     Look at Communist China.
     Much about China is truly great: a civilization nearly 5,000 years old. Culture. Cuisine. More than a billion citizens. Proud, strong, rising.
     Not great enough, apparently, for its totalitarian leadership. They demand that everything be considered great, and banish all that is controversial, complicated or embarrassing.
     In April, China’s cyber censors set up hotlines that allows citizens to denounce each other, turning in those who “defame national heroes.” Questioning the party’s version of the past is branded “historical nihilism.” People go to prison for quips about history.
     This is not great, but petty. Not strength, but weakness. There is a reason our nation’s First Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
     The idea was that dictating what religion to practice, or what citizens can say or not say, is the work of tyrants. The reason we broke away from England is because we were sick of that. And because permitting all kinds of speech is like permitting free scientific inquiry: it allows ideas to compete, and the best to rise to the top. It fosters greatness.
     Or at least it did, before social media put its thumb on the scales, and encouraged Americans to isolate themselves in their own personal echo chambers.

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‘So much good came out of the bad’

Nate Moser

     Nate Moser stood in a Skokie courtroom and thanked those who helped him stay out of prison.
     “My defense — thank you,” the Navy vet said, adding, to laughter, “and the prosecution—thank you.”
     “You don’t hear that very often,” interjected Michael J. Hood, a District 2 associate judge.
     Then again, it is not often that the legal system goes to such effort to help those caught up in it. This was not a usual session in a typical courtroom, but graduation day in Veterans Court, one of Illinois’ 123 problem-solving courts. The idea is, rather than use justice as an indifferent conveyor of punishment, to turn it into an engine of compassion, resources, and attention, trying to address the problems that land military veterans in trouble.
     “This is the best form of justice, the most successful program we have,” said specialty court coordinator Kelly Gallivan-Ilarraza. “We have the team approach. The case manager, probation officer, public defender, state’s attorney, problem-solving court coordinator, sit around the table and talk about what the person needs. Whatever they need, we try to get them: housing, education, employment. If they had mental illness, if they need medication, if they need treatment, whatever it is, to get them the tools so they don’t come back.”
     While Veterans Day, which falls on Thursday this year, is a time to praise veterans and their heroism and sacrifice, the difficult realities facing many veterans often are overlooked. Of all military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, 9% have been arrested since their return, and veterans are at greater risk for substance abuse, suicide and problems related to PTSD and head trauma. Plus a trauma only now being recognized.
     “We’re seeing a lot more cases of military sexual trauma,” said Sherisa R. Benson, veteran’s justice outreach specialist at Captain James A. Lovell Health Care Center, the VA hospital in North Chicago. “It’s a fairly recent thing. People consider it a disorder now. It’s something that we screen for.”

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Flashback 1998: Paralyzed veteran shows different kind of heroism

Cart with Wounded Soldiers, by Théodore Gericault
                  (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The paper decided to run today's column tomorrow, so it appears on Veteran's Day, an occasion I've tried to mark when I could. This column stands out despite the years because I remember approaching the VA—I was looking for a veteran wounded in service whose injury affected his life today, and they offered up Maurice Valeriano.
     Then they tried to yank him back, as you will see, after discovering his injury wasn't combat-related. I said No, somehow that makes it even more apt. I hope you agree. I wish I could offer you an update, but I couldn't find anything recent on him. Perhaps a reader will.

   When children at the schools he visits ask Maurice Valeriano how he was wounded, the ex-Marine has no good battle story to tell. No shell fragment. No sniper's bullet. No land mine.
     Valeriano, a quadriplegic, wasn't wounded at all, in the technical sense. He was injured, his neck broken diving into the ocean in Okinawa.
     Which, if you think about it, for a soldier, is far worse than being wounded. Your body is just as damaged as it might have been in battle. But there is a pause; the respect automatically granted battle-injured vets, particularly at this time of year, with Veterans Day this Wednesday, gets yanked back, if only a bit. Talk about adding insult to injury.
     It's a fine distinction, but real. The Veterans Affairs official who referred me to Valeriano sang his praises over the telephone as a sterling individual, a grievously wounded Vietnam vet who overcame his injuries to go on to a career with Paralyzed Veterans of America.
     Then she called me back. Whoops. A mistake. It turned out he wasn't injured in battle at all. Never been to Vietnam. Perhaps, she said, I would like to be referred to somebody else.
     That second call said it all. I don't blame the VA official. She was only being sensitive to human nature. The public is stingy with its sympathy. A soldier injured at a depot in Kansas or, as in Valeriano's case, a diving tower in Japan, seems somehow fake, as if they were trying to pull a fast one.
     This is vastly unfair. No bullet gets fired in wartime that isn't loaded on a truck by one soldier and unloaded by another and inventoried by a third. The vast bulk of military personnel never see a battlefield.
     Yet the tales of sacrifice we think of—if we think of them at all—are all thrilling war stories, of smoky trenches and clattering helicopters. As if the guy who gets run over by a truck at Fort Bragg isn't serving his country, too. Aren't they casualties? Aren't they filling a role even more difficult than hero: the role of the uncelebrated fallen? Aren't their tales worth a passing thought?
     "I went into the Marine Corps when I was 17," said Valeriano, now 34. "I come from a family of Marines. My brother. My cousins. It's a family-type tradition to serve my country."
     Valeriano was a mechanic stationed in Okinawa. He was swimming with a bunch of buddies in the ocean. He dove off a diving tower.
     "I hit bottom, hitting my head," he said. "I became a quadriplegic. The funny thing about it is, I never passed out. The water was so crystal clear, I was laying face forward, looking at my arms and legs and wondering why I can't move them. There was no pain, no blackout."
     His buddies fished him out. He had fractured his C5/6 vertebrae. He was told he would never use his arms or legs again. He was 19.
     "You think your life's over," Valeriano said.
     He spent six months in the hospital, most of it at Hines, here in Chicago. It turned out he had some function in his arms—enough for him to battle his way into a manual wheelchair.
     "They wanted to stick me in an electric wheelchair," he said. "There was this World War II vet. He said, 'Whatever it is, don't let them put you in an electric wheelchair. Make the effort.' To this day I thank that man."
     It took him a while to re-enter life. "I stayed home for three years, watching soap operas, trying to deal with my disability," Valeriano said. An offer of a job from the Paralyzed Veterans of America got him working; he now counsels vets.
     Valeriano was married, now divorced, and has two twin sons, age 12. I had to ask: "Artificial insemination?"
     "It was natural," he said. "Most people think that if you're paralyzed you can't do that sort of thing. Everybody's disability is different, but I was blessed and fortunate not to lose that ability."
     Valeriano said not many fellow Marines give him trouble. "When a guy is having a bad day, he might say, 'What are you talking about? I was hurt in Vietnam. I stepped on a land mine. You were hurt in a diving accident.' "
     He agrees, in a way, calling his work with paralyzed veterans "a form of guilt" for being denied the chance to prove himself in war.
     "That's one of the main reasons I'm here," he said. "For me to make it here by 8:30 in the morning, I have to get up three hours early -- I can get up at 4, 5 o'clock in the morning. Why am I doing this when I can sit at home and collect $ 1,300 a month in Social Security? I wasn't injured in combat. The government is doing a good job taking care of me. I almost have to do it."
     It can take Valeriano an hour just to put his clothes on in the morning. He does it because he feels it's his duty. I find that heroic.
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 8, 1998