Boulder flashback 1999: Traffic signals curb risks

      I have an affinity for fire hydrants, traffic signals, street lamps and stop signs. So it made sense that I would notice a new kind of WALK sign that is now ubiquitous but I first noticed on a trip to the People's Republic of Boulder.

BOULDER, COL.— How you cross the street says a lot about who you are.

     Young bucks, for example, clad in the false immunity of youth, saunter into the intersection whether or not they have a WALK sign, laughing and talking among themselves.
     They never notice the cars jamming on the brakes, allowing them to live. Or, if they do, they toss an indifferent "Hey, kill me" shrug.
     On the other hand, we older people tend to respect the crossing signs. We perch patiently on the curb, holding our coats tight at the collar, waiting for the signal.
     There is safety in the cautious approach, though it does hold its own kind of danger—an emotional rather than physical danger. It's humiliating to stand planted like a palm, respectfully gazing with Pavlovian obedience at the DON'T WALK sign while assorted passersby—old ladies and 8-year-old boys and such—brush past, crossing in that yawning period of time after the WALK signal goes off but before the light changes.
     I thought this was a problem with attitude, perhaps a lack of courage. But an invention I spied while visiting Boulder, Colo., not only suggested it is a mere technological matter but also presented a clever solution.
     Boulder has a downtown pedestrian mall, the way Oak Park used to, only this one succeeded and is popular with mobs of shoppers, jugglers, funny hat salesmen and grubby youth hanging out, waiting for Jerry Garcia to rise from the grave.
     At the mall's main intersections, surging crowds tended to fill the intersection the moment traffic stopped and not leave until the cars actually began rolling forward, shooing them to the curb.
     To address this problem, Boulder installed a WALK/DON'T WALK sign unlike any I have ever seen: the moment the little pedestrian is displayed, signaling it is OK to walk, a red big numeral next to it begins counting down the seconds until the street light will change and traffic will start up again.
     "We call them the Countdown Pedestrian Heads," said Joe Paulson, signal operations engineer for the city's transportation division, explaining that the city put them in last year at two high-traffic locations.
     We talked a long time about pedestrian signals. I never thought about it before, but the reason you have trouble at crosswalks is because, when the system was designed, they tried to economize and squeezed the information conveyed by traffic lights with three signals—red, amber and green—into just two signals: WALK and DON'T WALK.
     "It's an unfortunate nomenclature," Paulson said. "What we really mean to say is, start crossing and if you haven't started, don't start now."
     Paulson said the countdown indicator, which begins when the WALK signal is flashed and ends when the light changes (with four seconds of grace for daredevils) is a great success.
     "People notice them, they intuitively understand them and, generally, they like them."
     We don't have anything like that in Chicago, and given the system's lone drawback—at $ 550 a pop, it costs more than twice what the standard signals cost—we aren't likely to get one soon.
     But at least it's good to know that the problem is solved somewhere and that it's not our fault.
                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 25, 1999

Boulder Flashback 2000: "A big world hidden in small worlds"

NCAR

      Off to Boulder today on family business. I've been going there for almost half a century, and every now and then someone asks why I don't live there. It's sooooo beautiful.

      "Just lucky I guess," is one explanation. This is another. Reading it now, for the first time after 20 years, I'm surprised that I've turned into a pants-wetting liberal, because this sounds like a proto- crusty libertarian venting his disdain. Or even—horrors!—a conservative-in-the-making. Dodged that bullet.

     BOULDER, COL.—When the wind is calm, the mountains act as a bowl, trapping the smoky effluvia drifting up from the city in a stagnant brown haze.
     This haze dampens the finely tuned self-regard of people here by implying they live in a polluted place. So they are moved to action: They ban fires in fireplaces, communicating that fires are verboten that day by printing a red dot on the front page of the newspapers. If the coast is clear, the dot is blue.
     It is no empty threat. If a cop notices smoke coming out of your chimney on a red dot day, he'll give you a ticket.
     The ban is gospel. My mother, normally as cynical as myself, if not more so, eagerly chirped, "It's a blue dot day!" when I arrived and demanded the traditional Prodigal Son greeting of Manhattans, Scrabble and a fire in the fireplace.
     As an outsider, it is clear to me that the fireplace business is a sham, both overly intrusive and ineffectual. If they really want to cut down on the haze, they would somehow restrict those giant sport-utility vehicles even more popular here than in Lincoln Park, because mountains exist here in reality rather than in daydream.
     But to do that might inconvenience people, might keep them from blasting from Starbucks to soccer to Whole Foods.
     It's all part of what I've come to refer to as "The People's Republic of Boulder," a net of well-intended social programming that sounds progressive until you actually think about it.
     For instance: My mother showed off her new cellular phone, the service for which is provided free by the city. They do this because she teaches in the public schools. If you fail to make the connection, here's a hint: Columbine. Rather than entertain the notion that such tragedies are unique events that cannot be forestalled, it's easier, if not cheaper, to give away free cell phone service, so teachers are ready to call in SWAT teams next time.
     The town is peppered with progressive, Swedenlike socialist bells and whistles: crosswalks with flashing yellow strobe lights built into the street, to catch the attention of speeding SUV owners. Big signs that flash: "YOU ARE SPEEDING!" to shame drivers into slowing. Camera/radar devices at intersections check your speed, take a picture of your car and mail a ticket without diverting any of Boulder's finest from their chimney-checking duties.
     Every time I visit, my parents—oblivious to the Singaporelike police state in which they live—make the pitch that I should abandon my life in dynamic, frantic, forward-straining Chicago to join the cultlike sonambulism of life in Boulder.
     The notion always leaves me speechless. Why anybody would want to live in a town where the officials are sniffing at your chimney? Where all the women aspire to look like Spanish widows from a W. Eugene Smith photo essay—plain, coarse-spun clothes, severe hair pulled straight back and covered? I swear, there's more makeup in Sugar Rautbord's purse than in the whole town.
     There's no way to tell my parents this, of course. The smaller the place, the more certain its residents are that they live in the only spot on Earth.
     My visit reminded me of the time I went to the top of the Sears Tower with a trio of Yanomamo Indians from South America. They were the real thing—they checked their spears at the entrance to the observation deck. They stood for a long time, gazing out at the enormous vista of streets and buildings, running to the horizon.
     What, I asked one, through an interpreter, will he say about this to their fellow tribesman, back in the rain forest?
     He said: "I am going back to tell my people that though we call ourselves 'the fierce people,' and we think we are The People, there is a greater world out there than we realize."
     Isn't that how it always is?

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 10, 2000

Wordle: like winning a tiny lottery

     Maybe carjacking. The mayor said something judgy and tone-deaf, again. A reader phoned, Monday, offering a photo of his friend, killed for his Mercedes in the South Loop. That never happened before. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, flustered at how blase he was. I passed the photo on to the city desk.
     Maybe expressway shootings. My kid drives the Dan Ryan to work every day, and at each bulletin of the latest shooting, I check the age of the victim, if unnamed, to reassure myself that it isn’t him. Is that too personal to put in the paper? Probably.
     Or maybe Wordle. Yes, definitely Wordle. In a world gone completely bonkers, between our endless pandemic and World War III about to break out in the Ukraine, Wordle is a balm. With the news an endless grating atonal symphony performed by an orchestra of car alarms, train horns and fingernails raked across chalkboards, Wordle provides five minutes of calm, quiet, focus, and the expectation of success.
     Wordle is a word game, if you’re one of the few who haven’t played yet.
     Created last year by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle,CQ Wordle exploded in December when he fiddled with the algorithm so players could share their scores. Like any good virus, Wordle is highly contagious.
     “Guess the WORDLE in 6 tries,” the instructions explain. “Each guess must be a valid 5 letter word. Hit the enter button to submit. After each guess, the color of the tiles will change...”
     The game is simplicity itself. A grid with 30 square boxes, five across, six down. Underneath, a QWERTY keyboard. Nothing else. No advertisements, yet. My wife always starts with “ADIEU” as her first guess, because of the four vowels. If the word you guess contains a letter in today’s mystery word, that letter comes up green if in the right place, yellow if right but in a different position. And letters that aren’t in today’s word at all are gray.

To continue reading, click here.

      

How clean are your trees?

     One of my favorite spots at the Chicago Botanic Garden is this grove of whitespire birches.
     There are many things you can say about birches: their beautiful but resilient bark—I often find hollow bark cylinders washed up on the shore at Ontonagon, the interior wood entirely rotted away, but their surface bark pristine, and keep a particularly fine example in my office at home, as a token of the UP.

     This waterproof quality is why Native Americans made their canoes out of birch bark. If you've never read master nature writer John McPhee, his "The Survival of the Bark Canoe" is a great place to start, with Henri Vaillencourt, 24, making his canoes without a screw or rivet, just cedar ribs lashed together with white pine roots, covered with birch bark. When McPhee met him in 1975, he had made 33 such canoes over the previous nine years, attempting to perfect his art. 

     The trees'  springiness is the basis of a Robert Frost poem, "Birches," where country boys too isolated to learn baseball use them to spring toward the sky. "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
     Their chalky pallor made earlier writers mistake birches for being demure. James Russell Lowell calls the birch the "most shy and ladylike of trees." Perhaps long ago they were.
     Though what I really want to mention is the secret behind this particular stand of trees, because they are a perfect illustration of just how much work goes into running a place like the Botanic Garden, effort visitors seldom notice or, in this case I would guess, could possibly imagine.
     Question: why are these trees above so dazzlingly white? Accident? Quirk of gift of nature? Mere botany? Wrong. They're so sparkling white because the Chicago Botanic Garden washes them, sending half a dozen volunteers to scrub the trunks using buckets of soapy water and sponges. They admit to it here. Check it if you don't believe me. I wouldn't blame you because it is indeed incredible.

      I believe that's wonder aplenty for today.

Baseball and the word that must not be said

Yankee outfielder Jake Powell, left, is presented with a wallet as a token of esteem from fans of Laurel, Maryland, where he once played semi-pro ball, by Laurel mayor E.E. Hatch. (Library of Congress).

     Bob Elson is not the sort of person you’d expect to touch off one of the most notorious racist incidents in the history of Chicago sports.
     A former choir boy who sang with the famous Paulist Choir, his golden voice made him a natural for radio.
     But that’s the thing about racism. It’s a snake; you never know when it’s going to spring out of some hidden recess and bite you.
     In the 1930s, Elson broadcast both Cubs and Sox games. The Bears, too. On days when there were no home games, he would sit in a windowless studio and recreate out-of-town contests from telegraphed reports.
     Finding something to put on the air was a constant challenge. The “Man in the Dugout” interview was Elson’s idea: Fill time before the first pitch talking to players.
     On a lovely late July day in 1938. Elson was at Comiskey Park with his live microphone, chatting up players. He buttonholed Yankee slugger Jake Powell, who batted .455 in the 1936 World Series.
     “How do you keep in trim during the winter months in order to keep up your batting average?” Elson asked. A lazy pop up of a question. But Powell muffed it, big time.
     “Oh that’s easy,” he replied. “I’m a policeman. I beat ...”
     And here he used the plural of a word that I’m not even going to hint at. Not my choice — I would just lay it on you, full bore, and trust you would not shatter like glass.
     “... over the head with my blackjack.”
     Mary DeVoto, a veteran history teacher at Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School, more recently used the word, trying to contextualize offensive sports team names. Now she’s out of a job.

To continue reading, click here.

A kink in the flag

  

     Odd things happen. It's a shame that most people are so quick to lay them at the feet of ghosts, or aliens, or telekinesis, or whatever mass delusion or carny trick tickles our fancy, and so miss the genuine wonder of something unusual happening for ordinary though unexplained reasons.
     Look at our American flag as I saw it out our bay window last Tuesday. It somehow arrayed itself into that odd folded, kinked configuration and was just stuck there, suspended. I whipped out my phone and quickly snapped a photo, then stepped onto the porch. It was still like that. I took another another photo, and thought to shift to video. But by by then the flag had simply relaxed, drooping back into its usual draped shape. I took a third.
     What happened? I don't know. I imagine some intersection of the breeze, the dynamics of the fabric, the temperature. But I can't know for sure. Maybe you have theories. I suppose it could have been something supernatural—the flag itself cringing in utter patriotic revulsion away from the soil of the country it represents. I do know this: in 21 years of flying a flag off my front porch—I wrote about acquiring this particular flag from the venerable W.G.N. Flag & Banner Company at 79th and South Chicago Avenue—I've never seen anything like this, and I imagine should I live here another 21 years, I'll never see it again.

Flashback 2006: Release the polar bears

     Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey is under the weather—not COVID, she assures me—and so will not be writing her usual Saturday report for today. All of us in the extended EGD community direct our best wishes and focused laserlike healing karmic energy (see, I can get with the program) toward her speedy recovery.
     But with the Olympics dominating television (or so I'm told; I don't know, I haven't watched a second) I thought I would reach back into the vault of a previous take on the biennial blowout. A reminder: you don't need China to dislike the Olympics. This is from a time when the column filled a page, and I've left the original headings.

OLYMPIC MOMENTS

     Gosh I'm enjoying the Olympics. Which is odd, because typically I disdain them. The summer Olympics are a weird conglomeration of tedious activities you wouldn't consider paying attention to the previous 206 weeks. ("Not now, Honey, the high jump is on!") And the Winter Olympics—how many times can you watch guys skiing down mountain sides? It's worse than golf.
     But this year is different. I couldn't breathe a word against the Olympics; in fact, I'm finding the Olympics a pleasure, because the wife and boys are really enjoying them. By 7 p.m. they're parked on the sofa, rooting for the old red, white and blue. Which gives me about two hours alone to relax and read a book, uninterrupted, confident that the shouts filtering up from downstairs are mere enthusiasm, and not some inter-boy crisis crying out for Dad's immediate mediation.
     Oh, I'll slide down for a few minutes—don't want them to think I'm standoffish—and watch a bunch of spandex-clad loonies flying around a patch of ice. (They really should release some polar bears or something to give the race a bit of pizzazz). Then I excuse myself and return to my book. I'll miss the Olympics when it's over.

ON THE NIGHT TABLE

The book I've been reading is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The smoothest of writers, Bryson takes you by the hand and glides you through astrophysics and chemistry and biology and all that stuff you learned in high school and promptly forgot.
     In trying to humanize the science, Bryson tells the stories behind the various big discoveries, and here it becomes really interesting, because in every case—literally every case—the pursuit of light and knowledge is accompanied by a messy catfight of super-sized egos clawing each other's reputations to tatters. You'd almost think it was a history of backbiting and bumbling which only incidentally mentions stars and fossils.
     Deep in the book he quotes German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, in a line too delicious not to pass along: "He observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."
     More than one researcher at Fermilab or the University of Chicago will want to embroider that on a pillow.

SOME ARE DISAPPOINTED

     In checking into Alexander von Humboldt enough to call him "a German naturalist," I discovered that a variety of things are named after him—a penguin, a lily, a skunk, a shrub and Humboldt County, Iowa, plus the city of Humboldt, halfway between Des Moines and Sioux Falls, population 4,452. How did that happen?
     The Humboldt County Web site gives no clue, but begins with this charmingly self-effacing statement: "Humboldt creates a favorable impression on most every visitor to this scenic city . . ."
     Perhaps the few who are unfavorably impressed feel Humboldt has restrictive parking for such a small town. You can't park your car on the street at night between November and May— unless you are a physician making a house call, which is lovely. Otherwise you risk getting a ticket that will set you back $20.
     The cost of living is a heck of a lot less there. You can buy six—count 'em—six spaces in the Humboldt Union Cemetery for $750, though if you want to erect a headstone the city charges you a fee, and that fee is $2.   
     Humboldt is not without controversy—it recently asked San Francisco welfare authorities to stop sending homeless people to Humboldt County. The City by the Bay has a program where homeless people can receive a one-way bus ticket anywhere in the country, and of the thousand or so shipped eastward, 13 chose Humboldt.

HELP FOR THE HOMELESS

     San Francisco insists that its bus ticket program isn't just designed to get the homeless out of town, but to send them to their own former homes. Social workers—in theory—are supposed to ascertain that people using the program are actually going someplace where they'll be taken in and given help and support.
     That is the ideal solution to the homeless problem—help 'em find a home. Even the hardest heart—and it's all I can do to not snarl "scram!" as I hurry past panhandlers on some days—has to soften after the story about Raymond Power Jr., the disturbed New York lawyer and Vietnam vet who ended up on the streets in Chicago, living in a shelter with no memory of who he was or where he came from. You wouldn't want the city to have put Power on a bus and shipped him just anywhere. Would you?
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 22, 2006