Happy Easter, etc.

             "Happy Easter" by Urban Janke 
               (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
   For many years my column ran on Sundays, which means I have plenty of old Easter columns I can share, and thus avoiding the necessity of thinking of something new.     

     The column below does more than indulge my double Seder-stuffed torpor. It is from when the column filled a page, and the opening nod to Easter leads to a reflection on gay marriage that could be ripped from the headlines, applied to transgender teens. A considerable cross-section of Christians just aren't happy unless they're kicking somebody weaker, a neat inversion of their supposed faith that would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Speaking of which, the last part is evidence I was mocking Donald Trump seven years before our nation decided to make him president. For all the good it did.


OPENING SHOT . . .

     Happy Easter! After I wrote the item below, it struck me, "Oh. Right. Sunday is Easter. People are going to think this a deliberate anti-religious rant penned intentionally to blaspheme the most important holiday in Christendom, and it's not."
     To be honest, I never thought of Easter. The holiday isn't on my radar because I don't celebrate Easter. No eggs. No bunnies. No fancy hats. Nothing. For me, and people like me, it's just another Sunday.
     That might be a simple point, but I think it's one worth making because so many act as if their religion is the only belief in the world. That's natural, I suppose — if you think you possess the universal truth as set down by the Lord God Almighty, it can seem insulting to suggest that your truth might somehow be comparable to these grubby belief systems and overgrown cults that have the nerve to also exist, and manifest themselves in that uncomfortable period before their believers all die and go to hell.
     Frankly, just that recognition — there are other people living here, inexplicably permitted by God to exist and cling to their heresies — is a start, and enough for a fine spring Sunday. We've made progress; maybe even a breakthrough, and we'll work on accepting those other people as equal human beings in future sessions.

WEDDING BELL BLUES

     Opposing gay marriage is Bible-based bigotry. There's no other way to justify denying homosexuals the basic human rights non-gays enjoy.
     The argument that gays somehow undermine the sanctity of marriage is unsupported by any actual evidence. The divorce rate doesn't climb in nations where gays are allowed to wed. There is no data that suggest that gays make unfit parents or are bad neighbors.
     The sole objection to gay marriage is that God doesn't approve, and because gays are a small enough part of the population, they can be stepped on (God doesn't like fornicators, either, supposedly, but they're allowed to wed because there are so many).
     The whole wrecking-marriage argument really falls apart when we ask what other groups also undermine marriage — do murderers? No, society allows murderers to marry — even marry each other, in prison, if they like — without ruining marriage in some ineffable fashion.
     The very old? We find marriage among the elderly sweet — nobody starts talking about the ability to reproduce when grandma remarries the way they raise "nature" as an objection against gay unions.
     Atheists? Fine. Liberals. Ditto. No, these arguments were especially concocted for use against gays, and realizing that, it's hard to understand how they were given credence for so long in a supposedly free society.
     Habit, I guess.
     This subject arises because last week Vermont became the first state in the union whose legislature legalized gay marriage, as opposed to the dodge of civil unions being considered in Illinois. Allowing gays to have civil unions but not marriage is a step in the right direction but also a sop to bigots.
     Hiding behind civil unions is as if, in 1965, the nation didn't pass the Voting Rights Act because too many Southern racists felt the sanctity of the ballot box is corrupted if blacks use it. So instead we passed the "Registering Elective Choice Act," which allowed African Americans to participate in elections though not technically "vote."
     The only thing that keeps this subject from being thoroughly depressing is the certainty that someday we will get beyond it, the way they have in places like Spain (Spain!) where gay marriage is legal. Someday this will be just another inexplicable historic American prejudice, like hatred of the Irish. As with Tipperary, it's a long way to go, but we'll get there someday.

SPEAK SOFTLY . . .

     It was before 6 a.m. Wednesday when the e-mails began to arrive regarding my item on the inadequacy of the Trump Tower spire.
     "Every single woman will have this same response," wrote a prominent female Chicagoan whose identity I will take to the grave. "That's because over the years we have learned that the most bombastic guys are always hiding a 'dinky!!' "
     Thus the day went, with women insisting that my item on the little stick atop Trump Tower was some kind of clever commentary on the Donald's anatomy, or lack of which.
     I can't say this aspect didn't occur to me, fleetingly — while I was mentioning Trump's "mustard seed of a soul" I considered speculating upon a different kind of diminution.
     But this is a family paper, and I figured, "Don't go there." That was it, truly — those detecting a subtle dig are reading too much into it. I've only met Donald Trump once, and though completely unimpressed, I don't hold him in greater contempt than does any other thinking American.
     I didn't expect readers — men and women — to revel in what one called "the Freudian implications" of the spire expose.
     "I'm not buying it," wrote David Schmittgens. "I think this is your transparent way of getting back at The Donald. Don't deny it. I think what you are really saying is, 'Trump has a . . .' "
     Well, enough of that. And probably enough of this subject. I'm sorry I raised, umm, I'm sorry I brought it up — whoops — let's just forget the whole thing. Freud never actually said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," but I'll say it: Sometimes a spire is just a spire.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 2009

Wilmette Notes: Curiosities

     When Caren Jeskey first started sharing her perspective with us from the wilds of Texas, I savored her blending of physical and inner worlds as she wandered Austin, the meshing of her own thoughts with the unusual people she encountered. I worried her return home to to the greater Chicago metroplex would dampen her spirit, but that didn't happen. Today's Saturday report finds her in top form:

By Caren Jeskey

     The Loch Ness of Lake Michigan emerged from the water on a secluded strip of the beach near Plaza del Lago. I’d been hiding out, collecting sea glass and smooth stones that the recent mini-icebergs had pushed into the sand for us to find. I decided Loch Ness man was weird, so I decided not to make eye contact. (Because I’m not weird at all). 

     He was covered from head to toe in waterproof rubber gear. He clutched a long handle attached to a circular, beeping robot that had been helping him find treasures in the bottom of the sea. I’m not sure why I thought he was so strange. My brother John was once obsessed with his metal detector and often went on excursions that unearthed jewelry, aged coins, and bottle caps. Before him, my Grandpa Carl did the same.
     That’s probably also where John got his love for structural engineering and tinkering — his Grandpa. Carl worked for the railroad. He could take a broken radio apart, fix it, and put it back together in perfectly working order. I did not inherit this gift.
     I know this because I once had a little TV with a built-in VHS player that I bought for 80 bucks at Sears on Lawrence, and carried home on the bus. A videotape I’d borrowed from the Harold Washington Library, Sky Above Mud Beneath — a 1961 movie that is a must watch — was thoroughly stuck in the machine. I decided, “well, I’m Carl’s granddaughter. I’ve got this.” A couple dozen tiny screws later, I’d gotten the tape out in one piece and I set off to put the contraption back together. This was the days of flip phones, and if I’d been smarter I’d have snapped photos along the way, but I was overly confident. There would be no getting it back together again. The poor TV, guts hanging out, was banished to the alley. I placed it on top of the cans, hoping someone who knew what to do might find it.
     As a teen, my brother John — 8 years my senior — had intricate maps of fast rail systems around the world taped to his bedroom wall. He’d mail off requests, and tubes from far away places like Japan would arrive on our Rogers Park doorstep. Since then, John has helped build an apartment building on Sheridan Road, a tunnel through a mountain for bikers in Northern California, and the Los Angeles subway system.
     On my recent beach day, I busied myself in finding my own treasures. When it was time to head back home, rocks weighing down my backpack, I climbed up a mountain of sand and giant chunks of concrete toward Sheridan Road. I could have trekked back to the legitimate exit point at Elmwood Dunes, but I am a fan of shortcuts.
     When I got back up to street level, I saw a place where someone had broken off the top of a wooden fence. I climbed over it to land in a very nice little park, kids and nannies and moms and dads enjoying the day. I spread my bounty out on the top of a recycling bin to admire it, take some photos, and decide what I’d keep and what I’d leave behind. As I was contemplating my rocks, Loch Ness appeared. He apparently knows the short cut too.
     He looked over and asked “‘did you find anything good?’ I commented, ‘just a little bit of glass, and some stones.’ ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘How about you?’ He smiled and said ‘I found a gold ring.’” I wondered if he’d post fliers around the neighborhood to try to return the ring to its rightful owner.
     The next night I was invited to a high school friend’s house for dinner. I have not seen this person since my 40th birthday, when he took me to Alinea as a last minute guest when a family member of his had to cancel.
     I was excited. Bruce was a sweetheart in high school. Cool, creative, warm, and funny. It turns out that we are practically neighbors now, and when he found out he invited me by. I packed up my backpack with a sturdy piece of rock I’d found at the beach. I thought that he and his husband could use it as a soap dish. I packed up other treats to share, and headed out on my bike.
      When I arrived we hugged, and the energy was great. With less than 200 students in our whole high school I feel close to almost everyone, even if we have not stayed in close touch. We were a part of a small tribe for a while in our formative years, and old North Shore Country Day School friends somehow feel like home to me.
     When I pulled out the rock and handed it to Bruce in his kitchen, he looked at it oddly. “This is concrete.” I said “Oh. I wasn’t sure. I thought it would be nice to add to your garden or to use as a soap dish.” He looked at it again, and I think he said “yeah, I’ll put it outside.” Suddenly we both started cracking up. My host gift was a piece of broken concrete. Thank goodness I’d also brought cheese.

Gasoline isn’t all that’s gone up

     Good news! The newsstand price of the Chicago Sun-Times went up a dollar on Monday, to $2.
     Good news?
     Yes, counterintuitively.
     First, because you’re reading about it here, in my column. I didn’t discuss addressing the increase with anyone. That’s the kind of place we are. Lean. Not a lot of meetings or hand-holding. Hit the beach, fan out, start digging.
     Second, while price increases are generally unremarked upon, the hope being that they’ll go unnoticed, news shouldn’t be ignored. Just say it. I should have done so Monday — sorry about the delay. Honestly, I had a price-increase column ready to go. (And this is the daily paper we’re talking about; Sunday is unchanged.) But it seemed ... I don’t know ... kinda inside-baseball. We went up a dollar, big whoop. So did cookies. Not the most complicated intellectual concept to challenge you with. I ran something else Monday.
     That afternoon, I received this email from a reader:

     I buy the Sun-Times every day from the neighborhood 7-11 store, and I don’t begrudge the 100% price increase, but I think it should be at least mentioned in the paper. Did I miss the announcement? Seems to me the last price increase was covered not only in the Sun-Times, but on local TV as well, no? Still a bargain, and glad to support, just seems odd if no one mentioned it.

     Not a deluge. Not two. One email from one reader. But you know what? He was right. And one person being right is enough or should be.
     We should mention the change because I happened to be in Ohio the day the Cleveland Plain Dealer cut home delivery to three days a week. “A reimagined Plain Dealer,” was the headline. “And a new digitally focused company to serve the changing needs of Northeast Ohio.” Oh please. Those changing needs apparently did not include receiving a newspaper four days out of seven.
     But then, more than halving home delivery was only one cut in the death of a thousand cuts. Reductions tend to aggregate. The dreaded death spiral. The Sun-Times is in whatever the opposite of a death spiral is. A life arc, maybe.

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Flashback 2001: Remembering Bill Newman

     The fate of the newspaperman is obscurity followed by oblivion. A vague and sporadic public awareness while he or she is alive, among a handful, maybe, then utter evaporation. As if we never were. The one or two who escape this doom—Mike Royko comes to mind—serve only as confirmation of the general truth, and a gentle sort of mockery. 

     Thus it was pleasing to see Sun-Times editorial board member and architecture columnist Lee Bey mention M.W. Newman in his Common/Edge interview. Newman was an exquisite writer tackling many important issues with a style that can only be described as beautiful, even poetic. 

     A style in marked contrast to the man himself, whom I remember as dour and unapproachable, hunched over his desk at a far corner of the newsroom. I don't know if we ever spoke, but he inspired me: I sometimes thought, "If Bill Newman could strip naked to write about a nudist colony in 1953, I can do..." whatever task I was girding my loins to do for a story. I also wrote his obit, below.

M.W. Newman

     Bill Newman noticed things.
     He noticed how the hands of the judge trembled as he read Richard Speck's death sentence. He detected a certain swagger in city rats, dubbing them "surly." He saw the agony in Lee Harvey Oswald's face as Jack Ruby shot him — Mr. Newman couldn't help it; he was standing 10 feet away.
     M.W. Newman, 84, who died Wednesday at his home in Chicago, didn't have the high profile enjoyed by many columnists and critics of his day. But he was the epitome of excellence in daily journalism for two generations of newspaper reporters, first at the Chicago Daily News, then at the Sun-Times, blending probing, in-depth reporting with a lyrical, lovely, heartfelt writing style. 

     Morton William Newman was born in New York. His father was Myron Newman; his younger brother, Edwin, was the well-known NBC News correspondent. Mr. Newman spent 33 years at the Daily News, joining the paper as a copyreader in 1945.

       He moved to the rewrite desk, then became a roving reporter, a job he never really left. He wrote the famous Daily News front page farewell headline, "So Long, Chicago," when it folded on March 4, 1978.  He continued at the Sun-Times from 1978 until 1994. At the Daily News, he wrote at least a dozen important series and exposes that had a significant impact on the city, state and nation, from chronicling the Chicago crime syndicate to detailing, with great sympathy, the problems of the elderly. In 1959, he ripped the lid off "The Panic Peddlers," real estate dealers who played upon racial fears, blockbusting neighborhoods so they could make money.

     In 1965, he was perhaps the first reporter to capture the poverty, violence and despair of the three-year-old Robert Taylor Homes with "Chicago's $70 Million Ghetto," a jarring piece that had national reverberations.
     "Their lives are wasted. — both by themselves and by society — as though it didn't matter," he wrote. "They're second-class citizens living in a second-class world, and they know it, and hate it."
     He wrote the main story of Chicago's response to the blizzard of 1967, noting how the Loop was left "amazingly washed and refreshed, free of its usual overload of gasoline exhaust and industrial fumes."
     Later that year, he introduced a killer tornado this way: "Death came dancing and skipping, whistling and screaming, strangely still one second and whooshing and bouncing the next."
     For a man at the top of his form and profession, he was notoriously dour--"gloomy" is how he was most often described.
     "He was an idealist," said former colleague Ray Coffey, "in a world that only rarely lived up to high ideals."
     Mr. Newman also enjoyed a lighter touch. Sent to an Indiana nudist colony in 1953, he surprised his bosses by stripping down to a discreetly held guitar and writing about it. In 1958, he wrote a story about the night air in Chicago.
     "There's a cidery stirring in the November air," it began. The piece wasn't just about the air, though. It was about poverty and wealth and happiness and despair. Tuxedoed swells skipped up the steps of fancy hotels while, "on N. Wells an old lady clings to a fence, crying feebly, 'Help, help.' She is lost in a daze and has forgotten her own name. A couple hurrying to a restaurant stop, find her name in her purse and take her gently home. She lives in a beaten-up boarding house, in a room smaller than their bedroom closet. 'Stay with me,' she cries in her loneliness."
     Bill Newman met his wife, Nancy, after the Daily News merged its business operations with the Sun-Times in 1958. They married in 1962.
     A single well-picked M.W. Newman adjective once evoked a storm of reaction in Downstate Robinson. Visiting the small town to report on actress Joan Crawford opening a Pepsi bottling plant there in 1962, Mr. Newman drew howls of protest when, in a generally flattering portrait, he called Robinson "drowsy."
     He became the Daily News' book editor in 1971; two years later, he headed up its prestigious Panorama magazine.
     He was a noted architecture critic with a national reputation and edited Inland Architect magazine from 1969 to 1980.
     In 1964, Mr. Newman won the Marshall Field Award for the outstanding editorial contribution to the Daily News, the honor noting that his "deceptively easygoing writing style masks the tenacious and thorough pursuit of fact that marks all his reporting."
     In 1994, he was the first journalist to receive the Community Media Workshop's Studs Terkel Award, in recognition of journalistic excellence.
     Survivors include his wife; sister, Evelyn Lee; brother, Edwin; nephew, David Lee, and a niece, Fran Lee Cadeky.
     A memorial will be announced at a later time.

                        —Originally published in Sun-Times, Oct. 26, 2001

Loop Flood dampens world’s view of Chicago

J.J. Madia in 2017

 
     Chicago is a city marked by disaster. Maybe even defined by it. Not only did the modern metropolis arise out of the ashes of the 1871 fire, but it then assembled a chain of terrible tragedies, such as the Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903 and the Eastland capsizing in 1915, the former the most lethal building fire in U.S. history (unless you consider 9/11 just a building fire, and I don’t), the latter among the deadliest maritime disasters ever.
     There’s more. The Our Lady of the Angels School Fire. The first major aviation disaster in U.S. history was in Chicago, the Wingfoot Express, a hydrogen-filled Goodyear blimp that exploded over the Loop in 1919, crashing through the skylight of a bank building, killing 13 people.
     Chicagoans tend to overlook them. To me, the 1992 Loop Flood, which occurred 30 years ago today, barely counts among the disasters mentioned above. A flood where not only nobody got hurt, but most people never saw floodwaters. How big of a deal could it be? 

     Yet it is of global interest. Four years back, a British film crew from Discovery Channel UK came to town to shoot a Loop Flood episode for the first season of their very Britishly titled program, “Massive Engineering Mistakes.” The producers had read my 25th-anniversary story online. Would I mind talking to their cameras about the flood? Maybe down in the very freight tunnels under downtown? Well ....
     On one hand, hours would be spent to benefit someone other than myself. Who’d ever know I was on British TV? Yet there is a siren allure to being on TV anywhere. Appearing on TV means something. It is significant, and British TV, double significant. They’re all so refined, the Brits.
     True, I’d have to be at City Hall at 8:30 a.m. But heck, why not? Change of pace.
     So I’m there, waiting by the bronze “CITY HALL” sign, bright-eyed, expectant. I get a text from the producer. Traffic. Running late. That happens! No worries! I slide over to Petra’s for a cup of coffee.

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Rare bird.

     Warm weather drew my wife and me to the Chicago Botanic Garden both Saturday and Sunday, and we were rewarded with an abundance of new flowers—irises, daffodils, dogwood and forsythia—and unexpected wildlife: two otters (or, just possibly, the same otter seen twice), a flitting flock of some kind of tiny blue starling and the capstone, the white, sinuous bird above. My first hunch was that it was a snowy egret, but given the season and the location, it might just be an immature blue heron, or a great egret, which would be less off the beaten track than its snowy brethren, rare north of the Missouri River. Whatever it was, I'd never seen anything like it at the Botanic Garden before.
     We lingered, hoping for a better look, until an angry goose hurried over and drove us off. I don't want to anthropomorphize anything, but it truly seemed like the goose was protecting the egret, or whatever it was.
     "The birds are uniting," I told my wife, as we fled. "Humanity is doomed."
     I spent a while with my bird books Monday, trying to ID the mystery white bird, then decided it was a futile pursuit. Why care about exact scientific classification of a glimpsed bird anyway? Why limit the range of speculation to that realm? Maybe it was not a snowy nor great egret, and not an immature blue heron, but the spirit of springtime in avian form. A lost soul, allowed to escape the underworld for one hour a year, appearing on earth as a white sylph. There are possibilities outside of the The Sibley.
     Okay, those really aren't possibilities. But fun to think about nonetheless.

Are Columbus statues a free speech issue?

     The First Amendment saved America. So far, anyway. In a totalitarian state like Russia, free speech is first to vanish in any crisis. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he immediately shut down independent media and banned the word “war.”
     That couldn’t happen in America. Yet.
     Free speech is studied and supported by legal scholars, now and in the past. Scholars like Harry Kalven Jr., a beloved University of Chicago Law professor who in a book published in 1965 called “The Negro and the First Amendment” offered up a very useful concept: the heckler’s veto. The heckler’s veto is when, Kalven explained, authorities interfere with free speech to protect the speaker, supposedly, in the face of public hostility.
     A textbook example of the heckler’s veto occurred in Chicago the year the book was published. Comedian Dick Gregory led a protest against the inferior education Black children were given at Chicago Public Schools.
     They marched to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s home in Bridgeport and were met by a howling mob, hurling eggs and rocks. The police asked the demonstrators to leave and, when they didn’t, arrested them, explaining that the mob was too big to arrest. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld their actions.
     The case went to the Supreme Court, where in Gregory v. City of Chicago, Justice Hugo Black evoked the heckler’s veto in ruling for Gregory. Our constitutional rights cannot be shouted down.

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