Flashback 2004: Life in the village is great, even if it's not perfect

     A lot of Americans are wondering what we have to celebrate this 4th, between the delegation of women to second class citizen status and the continuing Republican war on democracy. Then again, wondering what we have to celebrate is a very American thing to think, as evidenced by this column from the relative Eden of 2004.

     Of course, life isn't worse in every way. Lorenz's garage, the 1851 business I was trying to save indeed was forced out ... and replaced by a Graeter's ice cream parlor. I have to admit, it was an improvement. Happy Fourth of July, stay safe around fireworks.

     Ready for a shock? This will be my fifth Fourth — the fifth 4th of July in Northbrook, the fifth time we all trooped to the Village Green for the pancake breakfast hosted by the VFW, lingering for a little bocce ball. It's a nice moment, settling in under the swaying trees, pouring the syrup, securing the napkins. The Village Green is the best part of town — a fountain, a little gazebo where they have bands, a playground and a ballfield. I sip my coffee, take a big mouthful of pancake, look approvingly around and let the waves of burgermeister satisfaction roll over me.
     And why not? A great country, this. A great suburb. Sure, the leafy suburban paradise has its problems. Across the street from the Village Green, the little strip of Shermer Road that Northbrook calls a downtown quivers on the brink of decay, with a vacant lot and a down-at-the-heels drug store and a thrift shop. Not exactly downtown Lake Forest.
     But I like that about Northbrook. Well-off, but not so well-off that a person like myself feels bad about his blown opportunities. One of the nicest buildings downtown is an auto repair shop — the Northbrook Garage, a quaint 1922 brick structure, the cleanest repair shop you will ever see in your life. It looks like something out of a train diorama. The Northbrook Garage has operated on that spot for 153 years, ever since it was founded as a wagon repair business by Frederick Lorenz in 1851.
     "There wasn't an awful lot going on here at the time," said his great-great grandson, Jay Lorenz, the garage's current owner.

     How about a nice BMW dealer?

     Lest we dwell too long on that quaint image, I should point out that the Village wants to seize Lorenz's property and force him out so they can put in a business more in keeping with their dreams of grandeur, such as the inevitable Williams-Sonoma found in every downtown on the North Shore.
     "I find it very disturbing that my building can stay but my 150-plus year old business must go," Lorenz said. "Something is very, very wrong in Northbrook."
     Not to single out Northbrook. People who run village boards are usually the type who think asphalting over cobblestones is progress. The town I grew up in, Berea, Ohio, demolished half its downtown to put up an outdoor mall of small, linked storefronts that seemed very retro chic in 1976. Ten years later, it was completely empty, and they ended up filling it with a senior citizen center. Nothing quite sparks up a downtown like an old-age home.
     That's why small towns shouldn't engage in social engineering. They screw it up, kicking out the 153-year-old repair shop and ending up stuck with an empty building.
     But I didn't want to carp today. Not with the fine July 4 weekend on tap. Did I say that the parade passes a block from our house? Let's save condemning those mini-Norman chateaus my fellow villagers insist on jamming between 1950s split-levels for another day.
     I'd rather tell you that next month's "Northbrook Days" holds a bachelor auction, and if that isn't something out of "Oklahoma," here is the small print from the sign-up form: "I agree to participate in the Northbrook Days Bachelor Auction by fulfilling my obligation to attend the agreed upon dinner date and represent the organization in an appropriate and gentlemanly manner."
'Take your hands off me!'
     Isn't that sweet? Or maybe my mind has been addled by too much time breathing the trackside air in Union Station. I suppose you could view the small print as evidence that Northbrook is concerned about being confronted by weeping, despoiled bachelorettes holding them legally culpable for their hellish evenings spent fending off the advances of some guy they bought at a charity auction.
     No, let's not think that way. People here can be truly nice. The teachers at my kids' school —they're incredible. It's like they're in a cult or something. I remember the teachers when I was growing up — a grim gang of sourpusses, their clawlike hands digging into my shoulder as they glared at me, mouths twisted into these sneers of gleeful, acid, contempt.
     "Your son . . ." Mrs. Southam, my fifth-grade teacher, told my mother, "will never amount to anything."
     I probably shouldn't go into detail about Northbrook's Greenbriar Elementary School, because Chicago parents, whose kids are bravely blowing the asbestos dust off their moldy 1950s science texts, will feel bad. And every aspect is so off the charts you'll think that I'm making it up. The classrooms have 20 kids, tops, and because no teacher can be expected to handle that mob on her own, they all have assistants. Every day the kids come home with their backpacks stuffed with memos and newsletters and updates. Teachers send home poems of welcome and reassurance to soften the beginning of the school year. They have the kids construct homemade gifts for all major holidays and prepare scrapbooks of each child's year in class. The books are bound. The school has more special days on its calendar than the Catholic Church — science fairs and carnivals and concerts and open houses.
     So life is good. And whatever the problems, from a zealous village board to the bog in Iraq, they shouldn't dampen the Fourth. Just because a place has issues doesn't mean you can't love it.

 

Flashback 2008: Robert Feder: "a slave to fairness and factuality"

     When I saw Robert Feder's announcement on Twitter Friday that he is stepping away from his daily media column after 42 years, my immediate response was "No no no no no no no no no..." I typed that as a tweet, then deleted it. Denial won't change anything. We've trusted him for this long; we can't stop now. If he's doing this, it must be the right thing to do.

     Although honestly, how will we know if anything happens in the media world? Robert was invariably the first to report every significant development. There is no second place, never mind a competitor or equal. He is unique, and now the Chicago media is left to thrash about in the dark, in Feder-less cave of ignorance and uncertainty. 

     Still, there is comfort: the Chicago media world has been through this before. Maybe, as before, he will re-emerge in some new form. Let's hope so.

     And after the initial moment of shock, I immediately began to smile, imagining various scenarios of heinous wrongdoing to explain Robert's abrupt departure. "First R. Kelly, now Robert Feder. It was a bad week for..."

     Which reminded me of this column from 2008:

     "For how does any man keep straight with himself," Nelson Algren asks, in The Man with the Golden Arm, "if he has no one with whom to be straight?"

Robert Feder

     For me, that person at the Sun-Times has long been Robert Feder, retiring after 28 years at the paper, his last column running today. Robert is the straightest of the straight arrows, a man so honest and upright that it borders on becoming a personal flaw. I've always thought the man could use a little ethical turpitude.
     But that's me, and as Robert would happily point out, I dwell in the shadows, in the compromised, egocentric, corrupted, skewed, slanted netherworld of pals and politics, logrolling and back-scratching. The difference between Robert Feder and myself is that he's never accepted a free lunch, and I've never turned one down. He's trying to cover the news; I'm trying to enjoy myself.
     I like to think that my column is zesty and interesting anyway — my central moral value is to be funny — yet I've always appreciated Rob, chained to probity though he is, a slave to fairness and factuality. We all have flaws, and Rob's are redeemed, in my eyes, by his willingness to condemn me to my face. I mean that. Most people are too scared to say what they think, and it's just as well, because they have nothing much to add anyway. But little gets by Robert's keen eye, and he has no reluctance to illuminate my flaws in great detail, like a sodium vapor lamp. It's an education.
     That said, what I'll miss most is all the laughter I've had at his expense. His seriousness, his formality — he'd no sooner show up to work in a flannel shirt than I would in a sarong — combine to make him a cat's paw of humor, the offended Margaret Dumont to my Marx Brothers, and I adored writing unhinged imaginary scenarios based on something Rob had written, guffawing in my office before gleefully sending them to him, under the pretense of getting his approval since I planned to run them.
     One of these items — to his lingering horror — actually got into print, about four years ago, on Christmas Eve. I had just lampooned a few other colleagues, placing them into alarming situations, and, reflecting on this curious habit, couldn't resist adding:
     "Of course, the most fun of all is calm, quiet, dignified, self-contained and highly respected radio critic Rob Feder. You can't imagine the hours I've spent entertaining myself by placing him into the foulest debauches I can conceive.
     "Just this morning, I was walking along, cackling aloud, for some reason picturing Rob in a loosely tied yellow silk robe, slumped in one of the smoky wooden bins at his corner opium den, touching the end of a glowing stick to the tarry chunk of pen-yan in the bowl of his long pipe."
     He was aghast — doubly so since, playing along, he had told me to go ahead and print it, never imagining that I actually would.
     This shouldn't end on a happy note. There is a serious, even grim, aspect to Robert leaving. Not only will everybody miss his nonpareil media coverage, but I will miss him in the office, and as he delights in telling me, "It's all about you, Neil, isn't it?"
     Why yes, Rob, it is, at the moment. I feel like an actor who auditioned for some big, rollicking musical — think "Oklahoma" — that in the third act abruptly and inexplicably changes into a grim minimalist drama. All the boisterous dancing cowboys and leaping senoritas vanish into the wings, and I find myself, still in my fringed jacket, slumped miserably with a couple of tramps under a bare tree on an empty stage.
     "Nothing to be done," says Estragon.
     Once I viewed leaving a newspaper as a minor form of suicide — you survive, but as an animate corpse stumbling through a life devoid of meaning or savor.
     But when it's someone who loves this business and whose judgment is so trustworthy? My gut tells me if Robert Feder is leaving then the show must be over and it's time to get to my feet, mustering what dignity I can, place my oversized cowboy hat upon my head, straddle my broomstick pony and gallop off into the sunset.

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 17, 2008

North Shore Notes: All The Single Ladies

     I was glad that Northshore correspondent Caren Jeskey picked up on my mention of Mary Todd Lincoln the other day — the widowed First Lady just isn't thought of as a Chicago figure, though she lived here for years. I've done some research on her myself, for my upcoming book, and while I'm not quite as willing as Caren is to characterize Lincoln merely a dynamic woman misunderstood — she certainly was plagued by depression and paranoia and compulsive buying jags — I do  agree that she's a compelling personality who merits more contemplation than she receives.

By Caren Jeskey

     Neil’s annual review of this blog made mention of Mary Todd Lincoln who lived in Chicago during the Great Fire. Hearing her name started the creaky wheels of my brain turning. Aha! It came back to me after a minute or ten. I was reminded that I’d like to pay a visit to a place my Thai massage therapist mentioned after a divine 90 minute pummel and stretch session last year.
     The Groesback Building at 1304 West Washington now houses a yoga studio where Thai yoga teacher trainings are held. Masseuse Extraordinaire Jenn Cooper informed me that on top of being a fantastic way to spend a couple hundred hours (namely getting stronger and healthier and learning to pass this gift of body work on to others), it would be held in this beautiful old building where the widow of Abraham had once lived.

     My interest in the building was sparked again, so I did a bit of digging and learned more about Mary Todd. You may know this, but I did not. I must not have been paying attention in history class those days. Or more likely we never really learned about her, except as a side note. Mary had a host of problems (which are nauseatingly well documented). We know what is likely the most traumatizing of her experiences. Legend has it that after her husband’s 1865 assassination, “at first, the crowd interpreted the unfolding drama as part of the production, but a scream from the first lady told them otherwise.”
     During her tenure in our fair city Mary bounced around Chicago quite a bit, perhaps having a hard time finding housing stability? Perhaps by choice?
     According to this historian, she initially arrived to the Tremont House Hotel, moved to the Hyde Park Hotel, then to a South Wabash address. From there she bought a home at what’s now 1238 West Washington, which she rented out a short time later, moving into the Clifton House Hotel. Then back to another West Washington address, back to the Clifton House, and then in 1868 (three short years after arriving in Chicago) she and her then 15 year old son Tad traveled abroad (where she also bounced around). They got back to Chicago in 1871. She stayed at her son Robert’s place for a bit, and as her fate would have it she was three blocks away from the O’Leary house (of cow infamy) when the Fire broke out. Then to the Grand Central Hotel. A year later in 1875, her son and the courts petitioned her to be committed to jail for the mentally ill 45 miles outside of town, in Batavia Illinois. "A jury of twelve men ruled her insane and appointed Robert as conservator of her estate. Mary — who did not know about the trial until that day — sat quietly through the proceedings.'
     I doth protest. Lock her up, drug her, and strip her of all of her rights and freedoms? No. Help her. Hug her. Someone please take care of this woman. If you have to lock her up, send her somewhere to heal from her horrible losses and grief. They traumatized her again. Twelve Angry Men, then Batavia? Prior to being shipped away, she accomplished amazing things. Mary had no source of income to speak of after her husband was gone, so she successfully petitioned the government for a pension. It took years, and she won her case five years after his death. Can you imagine that? A woman ahead of her times. She received $3000 per year, roughly $80,000 today.
     Prior to her husband’s murder mere feet away from her while out enjoying some laughs, she’d already lost an infant son and an 11 year old son. Son Tad, who’d accompanied her on travels abroad and during part of her stay in Chicago, died at the age of 18, probably of TB.
     Mary is described throughout history as insane, unconventional, bold, and odd. How about a smart, savvy and shrewd survivor? That seems more complimentary, and that’s who she was. A hero. Not a nutjob. A heavily traumatized woman trying to make a buck in the big city at a time when people born with her anatomy were not even allowed to vote.
     Chicago’s not the easiest place. In fact, most of it burned down during her tenure here. At one point she had to sell furniture to the Hyde Park Hotel. Mary was a true hustler.
     The silver lining of this tale? “On May 19, 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln was arrested and tried for lunacy before a jury of twelve men in the Cook County Court in Chicago.”
     Today, people with mental health conditions have the right to much more gentle, caring care. I won’t get into how unaffordable it is, nor how difficult it is for even the brightest among us to find. That’s for another day.
    I want to thank Neil for mentioning my contribution to Every Goddamn Day in the yearly review of his blog. I was touched by his description  of me— "caring, engaged, active and joyful." I see and experience myself as much more melancholic than the rest of the world sees me, and for that I am grateful. For what is a woman if she is not a strong survivor?

Why isn’t Darren Bailey ashamed?

     In my career, I’ve reported on many people sunk in a state of debasement. Emaciated crack addicts nestled in filthy nests of rags on Lower Wacker Drive. Diseased prostitutes selling their bodies to passing cars on Cicero Avenue. Impoverished street people huddling in Uptown doorways in sub-zero weather.
     I try to treat them with humanity, to convey their life stories honestly, without judgment.
     But state Sen. Darren Bailey, R-Xenia, the newly minted Republican nominee for governor, poses a challenge. There he was, last weekend at a downstate Trump rally, a proud supplicant before the disgraced and disgraceful former president, who should be in prison, not regally bestowing blessings on acolytes.
     “Darren is fearless supporter of the 2nd Amendment and a tireless champion of religious liberty,” Trump said.
     Given the source, a chronic liar, much of that statement has to be assumed to be untrue, and it is.
     “Fearless” and gun fetishization certainly don’t go together. Fear is what the whole secular religion built around guns is about. Me, I can go to the store to buy eggs without strapping on an arsenal. Others can’t, and should be viewed with pity. It must be awful to be so terribly afraid.
     Set that aside as a word choice quibble. Bailey is your guns guns guns guy, and if that’s the world you want to live in, or try to, vote for him.
     But “tireless champion of religious liberty”? Again, a bit of truth. For Bailey himself, sure. His notion of religion, his brand of rigid Christian white supremacy, is pushed relentlessly. Zeal never rests.

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"Woke" Democrats are about to destroy America — the State of the Blog, Year Nine

      My 10th year of writing Every Goddamn Day begins Friday, and this is my annual pause to review the blogical year now past. I've looked back at the form, and these annual reports seem to have become occasions for public whining about fatigue and carping about obscurity. The good news is that I'm not doing that this year. At least I'll try to keep it to a bare minimum. EGD is not a burden, it's a benefit, not a flaw, but a feature of my life, a valued feature. I'm glad for the chance to do it. It's an oar in the water, a dog in the race, albeit a very small, very slow dog loping along far behind the bounding pack.

     Whoops, it's so easy to slip. But that's just candor. I can't pretend this is rattling the windows. That isn't my brand. I honestly think existing under the radar is a good thing, as illustrated by the single post this year that achieved what I consider a hint of the social media shock waves enjoyed by the big dogs: June 8's constitutional analysis, and that got notice only because the headline mentions child porn, and that caught the attention of toxic screamers, who excited their groundlings. When I first noticed the tweet had 120 comments I reflexively cried out, "Oh no!" Within hours it reached 10,000 comments.  I was steely-eyed, determined, locked in; I didn't read one, which took resolve, but was smart strategy, as I will explain. Keep the poison out. Besides, certain plants grow best in the dark, and I'm one of them. Or so I tell myself.
     The big news of the past year is that in May I finally finished the book that this blog inspired, "Every Goddamn Day: A Highly Selective, Definitely Opinionated, and Alternatingly Humorous and Heartbreaking Historical Tour of Chicago" (yes, I know. I think it's a search engine optimization thing, or a Victorian exuberance which crops up now and then in publishing. The title originally was even longer, but I implored them to chop a little.)
     When I turned the manuscript in to the University of Chicago Press, I told my editor, sincerely, that the book was so much fun to research, so interesting to write, that I didn't care whether they publish it or not. That might sound strange, but it was sincere. I'm at a point in my career when whatever eyebrow twitch or stifled yawn my work extracts from the public can't be the reward. The reward has to be the doing. You rarely hear a writer say he likes to write, and it might be a sign of hackdom, but so be it. It's true. 
     Well, except for copyediting and proofreading the galleys, which was an exhausting grind. And terrifying, given the errors I managed to pluck out at the last moment. I hope that I don't spend its publication in October in a kind of miserable crouch, waiting for the assorted typos and factual errors to come pelting down on my back, like hot ash from Mount Vesuvius. I won't be surprised though.
     But that's ahead. In the past year, EGD has gone to some interesting places, and I appreciate you tagging along. The monthly highlights:

Edith Renfrow Smith

   In July, 2021, we met Edith Renfrow Smith in advance of her 107th birthday. A reminder of the importance of just going. I had no idea of her history, and was merely tagging along with a reader who invited me to meet a really old friend. Then she started talking about being the first Black graduate of Grinnell College and Herbie Hancock teaching her daughter to play "Chopsticks' (it also was a reminder to do your homework, which I hadn't).  I was pleased that Hancock not only gave me a quote, but called Smith on her birthday.
    In August we popped in on S. Rosen's to watch them make buns, and learned about how COVID affected even the production of bready hot dog wrappings.
    All year of course I kept pouring water on the Trump flare-ups still threatening to burn down democracy. In September, I reminded everyone that for all the grimness associated with "1984," from the perspective of today, George Orwell was an optimist. Nothing seemed to diminish the monstrosity, but that doesn't free any of us from the obligation of trying.

     In October, I challenged myself to find a fresh take on that hoary chestnut of Chicago history, the Great Chicago Fire, to mark its 150th anniversary, and believe I succeeded, starting with Mary Todd Lincoln, the president's widow, who was living in Chicago at the time of the fire.
    In November, we paused after a Trump stalking horse won in Virginia to savor the ululations of his minions in "A word from Scut Farkus and friends."
     In December, we looked to the past, as preview of the social disaster that was indeed coming when the Supreme Court would reverse Roe v. Wade half a year later in "Pro-Choice Priests and Suicide Girls."

Peanut butter

     January kicked off 2022 with photographer Ashlee Rezin and me in the COVID intensive care unit at Roseland Community Hospital, tracking the front line medical battle against the Omicron variant. While some commentators indulged in false hope, on Feb. 15, nine days before the tanks rolled across the border, we explained "Why Russia is about to invade Ukraine." In March, I accompanied Thresholds as they treated the mentally ill on the streets of Chicago. April saw a farewell to my friend Lee Flaherty, founder of the Chicago Marathon. May saw one of my patented attempts to praise a product, in this case, why Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter tastes so good, turn into a far funnier study of corporate incompetence. 
    Which leads us to the month now ending. I can't overlook my Neenah manhole cover story, which took years to set up, and got solid reaction and big front page treatment. Then there was the headline that blew up on Twitter, "Why restrict child porn but not guns?" If you read the piece, you see it's a sober legal juxtaposing the 1st and 2nd Amendments. But the Twitter mob doesn't read the actual articles, that would delay their simply melting into bubbling pools of indignant hysteria. But I refused to feed the trolls, and was rewarded by the entire kerfuffle utterly vanishing in about three days, a valuable lesson to others who find themselves being raked by a Twitter enfilade. Keep your head down and just wait. Nobody really thinks you're a pedophile. Nobody is actually going to come and kill you. You can also restrict who can comment on your tweets, and I've now been doing that routinely. The post became my second most popular, with over 23,000 hits. A good thing, I guess, though I'd trade that for 2,300 people reading the column and thinking about it. No? How about 230?
     Which leads us to the all-important numbers. The blog didn't seem to have the randomly generated spiderbot spikes of past years. So with 800,876 clicks for the year, that translates into an average of 66,739 readers a month, or almost 2,200 a day. Not the big leagues, but consistent. Seven months were in the 60s, two in the 50s, two in the 70s and one in the 80s. 

     Look, if a scoutmaster finds himself with an audience of six 7-year-olds around a campfire, he still tries to tell a good story, the best he can, and doesn't pause to shake his fist at the sky because he's not telling it to 100,000 scouts gathered at a jamboree in Soldier Field. I can do no less. 
     What else? The Chicago Sun-Times was purchased, for the traditional dollar, by WBEZ, the local National Public Radio outlet, and that was considered a good thing, both for the improbable lion-and-the-lamb union, and for the $60 million plus in charitable dollars doing so magically unlocked. We announced Wednesday that we're moving our downtown newsroom from Racine Avenue to the Old Post Office, which is exciting. I marked my 35th anniversary on staff in March, an astounding figure, and wrote myself onto the front page with sufficient consistency for me to entertain hopes that I won't be sacked in the coming year, the way most of the established columnists over at the Tribune have been. This was the year that writing a newspaper column felt as if it had sunk into the mock heroic, like wearing spats or being a professional luthier. It is still a job category — people write columns, just as they make violins — but not precisely a growth field. Nothing would be more encouraging than to spot a sharp young columnist making waves, but there isn't one that I can detect, either because no one wants to try, or because there are no jobs to be had if anyone did. No one seems to care, and I'm trying not to either. One day at a time.
     EGD's North Shore bureau chief, Caren Jeskey, hit her mark 52 weeks in a row, providing an alternate voice to mine, an amuse bouche of caring, engaged, active, joyful enthusiasm offering a valuable counterpoint to my more languid, inert, doleful contemplation. 
      Marc Schulman, of Eli's Cheesecake, ran his traditional series of holiday ads, nudging EGD from a pure hobby into the realm of commercial enterprises, and for that I am truly grateful. For the ads, and for the cheesecake, which is in my freezer right now, and should be in yours. You can and should purchase some Eli's cheesecake here. 
    Comments after the post seemed to have dwindled, and I'm not sure why. People just don't react as much as they did. Maybe I've lost some readers to senescence. I've considered just shutting down the comments, as not worth the bother. But between half a dozen and a dozen loyal readers seem to really like commenting regularly, and I see no reason to shut them out. Not yet anyway. Thank you for your thoughtful contributions to the blog, and for the corrections.
     The headline on today's post, by the way, is taken verbatim from the first line of a Charlie Kirk fundraising letter, the far right fountain of fascism suggesting that being sensitive to history and to the lives of others is somehow fatal to America — and I suppose, to his America, it is. Let's hope so. I have no illusion that the past year, or all nine years, of curious centrist exploration of Chicago and the world around us will ever resonate beyond we happy few. But you can't say I didn't try, and I appreciate you hanging around to read it. 

Why bother voting?

     The gym at Greenbriar School is large, cool, dim, new. And nearly empty Tuesday morning, Election Day for a midterm — known for low turnout — primary, which are historically even lower. Two election judges, one a teenager too young to vote but who wants to be involved. Hope for the future.
     Of course, I’m here, at the Northbrook elementary my kids attended. I never miss an election. Demographics help explain why.
     I’m in the sweet spot of people who benefit most from our system: white, older, in the top 10% of household income, barely. I fly the flag, stand for the pledge and believe in the promise of America no matter how many times that promise is revealed as a lie.
     So why bother voting?
     That was the traditional question long before Donald Trump spent years taking a pickax to public trust in elections. Millions of Americans — a block equal in size to voters in either party — vote by not voting, a silent shrug that says, “What does it matter, Democrat or Republican?”
     Voting sure mattered in 2016, when a few swing states sent us crashing into the abyss of Trumpism triumphant. Voting also mattered in 2020, maybe. Depending on whether our brush with autocracy was thwarted or merely delayed.
     Voting matters now in Illinois, a blue island in a sea of red states. A state where women enjoy safe reproductive freedom, while Indiana and Missouri and Iowa drag them kicking and screaming back to the dark ages.
     As important as the 2020 presidential election was, only 66.9% of those eligible cast ballots. With a plague raging and a sociopath in the White House, a third of America yawned, shrugged and couldn’t be bothered.

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Flashback 1987: Abortion counseling can differ

Barbara Kruger (Art Institute of Chicago)

     Last week, the New York Times ran a story on its front page about Christian zealots who disguise themselves as abortion counseling services to lure in unsuspecting women who fear they might be pregnant so they can harangue them about keeping their babies.

     This loathsome practice particularly resonated with me because I wrote about the exact situation more than 35 years ago. We've been fighting this battle so long ... 

      The odd thing about this story is, I was less than a month on the job, still worked for the features section, on the staff of the Adviser, the weekly insert giving readers tips on cleaning their garages and keeping Japanese beetles off their lawns.

     What I remember most, besides the shamefully anodyne headline my timid editor gave it, is that Scott Powers, then the features editor, hauled me in his office afterward and dressed me down — I had done some reporting by visiting the sham centers, accompanied by a staffer from the organization posing as my girlfriend. This is exactly the sort of thing that caused us to lose the Pulitzer over the Mirage Tavern, he said. Of course, doing the story is what made us even considered. I was unmoved and felt, then and now, it was not bad initiative for a 26-year-old a few weeks after being hired.  A short time later I moved to cityside.

     Late last July, Cathy Berndtson thought she was pregnant. She went to the Women's Center on Lawrence Avenue for a free pregnancy test.
     "I wanted to be pregnant," she said. "I wanted this free test because I was too impatient to wait two weeks for my next hospital appointment to find out."
     Berndtson gave a urine sample, and was told it would take a half hour for the results to be ready. While she waited, she was asked to see a film.
     "They didn't say what kind of film it was," she said. The film turned out to be about abortion, with graphic photos of bloody fetuses in white plastic pails. It stressed the physical danger and moral criminality of abortion, how it can lead to sterility and suicide.
     "I was appalled — it was pretty disgusting," Berndtson said. "I watched out of curiosity. They didn't have any facilities for children, so my daughter, who was 2 1/2 at the time, was with me. I tried to keep her from watching it."
     Berndtson had stumbled into one of eight bogus abortion counseling centers in the city, according to Women Organized for Reproductive Choice, a women's group that monitors abortion centers.
     The clinics are listed in the Yellow Pages alongside regular abortion counseling centers, but their purpose is to promote the pro-life philosophies of the Christian groups that run them, using the lure of free pregnancy tests to draw women in.their anti-abortion stance ("Someday your child will thank you for giving him (or her) the gift of life," a Birthright ad reads).
     "We don't oppose groups that are upfront about it," she said. "What we are opposed to are groups that advertise themselves as abortion counselors — that implies they will give you information about the full range of services, not coerce the woman into continuing her pregnancy."
     The eight centers — the Women's Centers at 5116 N. Cicero and 2334 W. Lawrence; Aid for Women centers at 8 S. Michigan and 730 Waukegan, Deerfield; Crisis Pregnancy Center, 6416 N. Western; Uptown Crisis Pregnancy, 939 W. Wilson; Loop Crisis Pregnancy Center, 185 N. Wabash; Southside Crisis Pregnancy Center, 7905 S. Cicero, and Crisis Pregnancy Services of DuPage County, 890 E. Roosevelt, Lombard — were all visited by WORC investigators.
     The WORC investigation found that all eight centers misrepresent the time it takes for the test, which can be purchased in any drugstore and costs $6 at Planned Parenthood. Results are usually provided in two to three minutes, but the clinics all claimed the test took up to an hour, to provide an excuse for showing women a film or slide show.
     All the clinics are listed in the phone book under "Birth Control Information" although none of them gives information about birth control. One center offered a WORC investigator the loan of baby clothes and a crib, while the Crisis Prevention Center in Berwyn presented a tiny baby jacket as a parting gift.
     When a couple asked about forms of contraception, a counselor at the Women's Center on Cicero displayed a chart that showed the medical risks of all forms of contraception, including condoms, as well as their cost projected over a 30-year period. She then asked them to think seriously about chastity.
     "It's basically emotional abuse," said Catherine Christeller of WORC. "They want women to feel pain, they want women to be upset. A very young woman who doesn't have a lot of information on abortion is upset enough about being pregnant. This could be very disturbing. Even if she isn't pregnant, none of these places provide birth control counseling, including prevention of AIDS, because these people feel the woman should not be having sex, period."
     Besides emotional stress, Christeller said, the clinics act to delay a decision that women already tend to put off, making the abortion process more dangerous and expensive.
     The ads for such clinics usually emphasize free pregnancy testing. Although phrases such as "low-cost plans" or "excellent safety record" might be included to throw people off, WORC said, the ads will not list specific medical practices, such as "gynecological services," or "tubal ligations."
     Both WORC and Planned Parenthood suggested the following strategy: When making an appointment on the phone, ask directly if the clinic provides contraceptives, or if it will refer you to an abortion clinic. If the answer is evasive — "We provide contraception information," or "We will give you information about abortion services" — then be wary. Finally, ask how long the test will take. If the answer is anything longer than five minutes, you should suspect it's a bogus clinic.
     "I felt I was led there under false pretenses," said Berndtson, who is about to have her second child. "I just wanted the free test — I could have been a teenager, already traumatized thinking I was pregnant, only to have someone show me this terrible film. I would have rather waited the two weeks and paid for it."
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times April 19, 1987