Averting his gaze from the wreckage

Robert Feder

     "Did you ever give interviews?" Eric Zorn asked our lunch guest. "Did you ever appear on panel shows?"
     No, of course not.
     "So this is an opportunity..."
     An opportunity, to the former Chicago Tribune columnist. Me, I thought we were going to lunch with our old friend, Robert Feder, to celebrate his retirement after 42 years as the unblinking eye chronicling Chicago media. After being the rare journalist to have worked, at various points in his career, for the Sun-Times, the Tribune, the Daily Herald, Crain's Chicago Business, and WBEZ. If anything significant happened in TV, radio or print, Feder typically had it first. “Hustle, tenacity and humility,” said the Daily Herald’s editor, summing him up well.

     But Zorn, a keener judge of news than I, suggested we should record it, as a kind of exit interview. That sounded like work, but okay. I turned on my digital recorder as we three settled in a booth at L. Woods Tap in Lincolnwood on Tuesday.
     Rob always avoided the spotlight, and it did make sense to shine it on him now that we had the chance. He certainly has a newsman's way of capturing a moment.
      "We are all working in isolation, we're all working at home," he began. "The newsroom is all a myth. It's an idea in the past. And so you decide how long can you keep your sanity and keep pretending you're part of a larger thing."
     Sounds right. Why retire now?
     "For every reason. Everything came together at once," he said. "Within the last five or six years, I lost both my parents and my wife, if that doesn't start you to think about how short life is, what happens when the last day comes, and there's no tomorrow."
     He has nothing lined up. No plans.

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"This is a case of gun-madness."

     Thanks to Grizz65, whose comment yesterday led to today's post.

     The current spate of mass shootings is traced back to Columbine, the 1999 massacre where 13 students were killed by a pair of students who then took their own lives.

     But collective memory is faulty — we say we'll never forget, but we do, and the American propensity toward amateur slaughter goes back much further. If you had asked me, I'd point to 1966 sniping off the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, when a former Marine, Charles Whitman, killed 14 people, at the time the greatest slaughter in United States history by a single gunman.
     This was being discussed on my blog, and one reader mentioned Howard Unruh, whose name meant nothing to me. But in 1949, the 28-year-old Army vet walked down River Road in Camden, New Jersey, calmly shooting people with a souvenir German Luger pistol. He killed 13: five men, five women and three children, aged 2, 6 and 9—the 6-year-old, Orris Smith, was slain at point blank range, the gun pressed against his chest as he sat in a barber shop, astride a white carousel horse, getting a haircut because he was starting school tomorrow. His mother sat watching nearby. The barber, J. Clark Hoover, was killed too.

     Frank Engel, a tavern owner, grabbed a .38 he owned and shot Unruh, wounding him, but failing to stop the rampage. Engel could have shot him a half dozen more times. "I don't know why I didn't do it," he said later.
     Friends described Unruh as a quiet kid who kept to himself. "A very quiet fellow" was the way his high school yearbook described him. Indeed, he was oddly polite during the shooting. "Excuse me, sir," he said to one man, shooting him twice. After the murders, as police closed in, Unruh returned to his room at his mother's apartment, where the assistant city editor of the Camden Evening Journal phoned and Unruh picked up. 

    "Why are you killing people?" the editor asked.

    "I don't know," Unruh replied. "I can't answer that yet. I'll have to talk to you later. I'm too busy now."

     By then police had thrown tear gas through the window. Uruh came out with his hands up. 

     "What the matter with you?" one policeman asked. "You a psycho?"

     "I'm no psycho," Unruh replied. "I have a good mind."

     Bystanders kept saying to reporters that they couldn't understand why it had happened. Prosecutors said the cause was "resentment against his neighbors." Unruh was judged insane and committed to the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital for 60 years, until his death in 2009.  He was never found competent to stand trial. 

     "I'd have killed a thousand if I had enough bullets," he later told a psychiatrist.
     Meyer Berger, of the New York Times, won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the killings, which were not, as commonly believed, the first such rampage in America. Nor, needless to say, the last. If you look at the front page story that ran in the Chicago Daily News, you will notice that its editors had no trouble running the photo of a body sprawled in the street, even identifying it as "Maurice Cohen, drug store proprietor." Cohen was Unruh's neighbor, and apparently had set him off by complaining about him cutting through his yard and playing his radio too loud at night.

     So perhaps showing graphic photos of bodies would not have the pacifying effect that some people suspect it might. At the end of October that year, a farmer in Michigan went berserk and shot 10 people with a 12 gauge shotgun. 

     A professor of psychology told the Daily News that he was disturbed that such incidents might inspire each other, and indicate a "social pattern."

     In an odd coincidence that we can expect to see more of as these massacres multiple, Charles Cohen, 12, son of the slain druggist, survived by hiding in a closet. ("Hide, Charlie, hide!" his mother Rose had said, pushing him into the closet before she was killed). The youngster, whose grandmother was killed too, later said, "You get through it, but you never get over it." Through an odd coincidence, he lived to become the grandfather of Carley Novell, who after he died, in 2018 survived the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida by also hiding in a closet, as her grandfather had. 

     Then as now, pundits struggled to find meaning, though gave up even more readily then than now.

     "This is a case of gun-madness," wrote syndicated columnist Robert Ruark, throwing up his hands, despairing at an explanation of why "meek, religion-ridden" Unruh went amok. "All you can do is count the corpses, bury the dead, shut up the wild man and thank God that you yourself were out of range at the time."

     Unruh's 2009 obituary noted, "He had a fascination with guns."

Guns reign over American parade

     The way I describe my mother lately is, “She has grit.” A month in the hospital, stoically accepting surgery that would leave me howling in a corner. Followed by two weeks in rehab. It was initially agony to shift her head on the pillow, but shift it she did. Now she’s walking. She’s 86.
     “We’ve got to get you out of this hellhole,” were my first words to her there. I saw my job as half goad, half cheerleader, providing encouragement and chocolate.
     My wife and I were on my way to visit her Monday about 11 a.m. when we stopped by Jewel for more Lindt bars. My sister-in-law called. A mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park.
     I thought of going straight there. Or back home. But the paper already had people on the scene, and my mother was expecting us. So we continued numbly to Arlington Heights. Their parade must have just let out. Arlington Heights Road crawled. A stray float decorated in red, white and blue. A dad pulling a red wagon containing a little girl wearing star deely bobbers. Hallmarks of American innocence, though how we could still be innocent at this point is beyond me. I’m as guilty as anybody.
     The parade in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, near Highland Park, was scheduled for 2:30 p.m.
     “We have to go to the parade,” I told my wife. I thought of how, when a terrorist bomb goes off at an Israeli cafe, they mop away the blood, put back the scattered chairs and tables, and order coffee.
     My wife disagreed. People in the neighboring town had just been killed. We can’t have a parade. She was right, of course. The shooter was still at large anyway, mooting the question. Northbrook and at least half a dozen nearby towns canceled their parades.
     “No reason to tell my mom about the shooting,” I said, as we arrived.

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Fourth of July, 2022

Augustus Saint Gaudens, "Adams Memorial" (Smithsonian Museum of American History)

     Early this morning, I thought, "Well, I'll just take a photo of something at the Fourth of July parade, and comment on that for Tuesday." There's always something fun or noteworthy at the parade. A politician doing cartwheels. A brass band. Some unexpected business float. I seldom miss it. Who doesn't love a parade?

    Of course there was no 4th of July parade in Northbrook, or Evanston, or many other area communities, out of respect for those slaughtered at the parade in Highland Park. Six dead, three dozen wounded. Plus a security concern, since the shooter was still at large until late in the day. 

    Besides, nobody was in the celebratory spirit. Except perhaps for GOP gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, who really did react to the shooting by saying "let's move on and let's celebrate the independence of this nation." After all, 90 whole minutes had gone by, and while the killer was still on the loose, no reason to let a detail like that get in the way of a good party. 
     Though to be fair, Bailey did later apologize for being a heartless asshat, though not in those words.  Maybe he'll gather the fortitude to also apologize for carrying water for a traitor whose policies encourage this and every other gun crime. But don't hold your breath. Guys like that don't change: guns first, people second.
     I have nothing else to add, at this moment. I began writing a column, but that'll run in the paper Wednesday, and I don't want to cannibalize it for this. When I got the news, my wife and I were on my way to visit my mother in her rehab facility in Arlington Heights, across from the hospital where she spent more than a month. We were stopping by a Jewel to pick up chocolate. My sister-in-law phoned my wife. 
     "Oh my God..." my wife said. "Oh. My. God!" I looked at her. "What? What?"
     I walked into the store, phoning my editor at the paper. "Henneni," I said, for some unfathomable reason. "Here I am." It's what Moses says when God calls to him on Mount Sinai. But they didn't need me to race up to Highland Park. Our veteran political columnist, Lynn Sweet, was already on the scene, and had turned in photographs of several bodies, draped in sheets, lying in pools of blood. I looked at the photos on our Slack channel and any desire to be part of the story drained away. They were ghastly. The paper was discussing whether they could be printed. 
     "Run them," I said. They didn't, which is probably the right call. If it were my mother, I would not want to see those in the paper, and it isn't as if they would move the deadlock of the issue an inch. There is enough horror in the world without the media making it worse by waving the bloody shirt. We are supposed to afflict the comfortable, yes, but we're also supposed to comfort the afflicted. And there were many, many afflicted, heartsick people on the North Shore Monday as it was, and very little in the way of real comfort to offer.

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?