More than just the Tumblers

     Jesse White argued with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., trying to push back against this nonviolence nonsense.
     In 1955, when King came to lead the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, White was a junior at Alabama State.
     “He wrapped his arms around me, I was special to him,” said White, Illinois secretary of state since 1999. He’ll be replaced by Alexi Giannoulias in January.
     Why was White special to Dr. King? Because White was such a good basketball player, the man who, it is said, brought the jump shot to the Southland when players still shot underhand.
     King was not beyond showing his favor in direct, tangible form.
     “After every basketball game he’d give me $20,” remembered White. “I was on public aid here in Chicago. Came from a family of seven; that was big money then. It was legal then, not legal now.”
     That was at Thursday night services, the same ones where King told the students dragooned to fill up the room about Rosa Parks.

     “ ‘I’ve been asked by the city fathers to desegregate the transit system and have agreed to do so,’ ” King said, in White’s recollection. “ ‘I’m going to use the nonviolent means approach.’”
     The tactics of Gandhi did not sit well with young White.
     “I raised my hand. He said, ‘Jesse White, what can I do for you?’” said White, with impressive specificity after 67 years. “I said, ‘Dr. King, you know me, you know me well. I’m from Chicago, and we don’t operate like that.’”
     That’s a good story, and to sit in White’s memento-, award- and photo-lined office in the Thompson Center, itself about to pass from government service, is to be plunged into a series of complicated tales about dramatic moments in his life — playing baseball for the Cubs organization, his 35 parachute jumps with the 101st Airborne Division — two realities that were interconnected. Fresh out of college, he was drafted four days before he was to start playing with the Cubs.
     “It killed me,” he said. “I did all I could to keep from going. Finally, I went.”

To continue reading, click here.

Eli's Cheesecake = home + love.

 

     Food and memory, comfort and happiness, are all bound up together. I can't eat a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup — not that I get much chance nowadays, alas — and not at some point think back to sitting on stools at the gold-flecked linoleum counter in our kitchen in Berea, home from kindergarten, confiding to my mother across the counter, eating my soup and sandwich. As to why that memory should linger for more than half a century, I would guess it is a combination of the gooey goodness of hot cheese, the tangy comfort of good soup, and the full attention of my adored mother enfolding me in a collective warm embrace.
     I don't know what you thought of when you saw the fabulous-looking slice of cheesecake atop today's blog, or featured in the Eli's Cheesecake ad that went up this week. But I was transported back to early October. My older son and his girlfriend had come into town for my book launch party — itself a great compliment, as the young people are loath to tear themselves away from the 24-hour-a-day celebration that is New York City, to visit what I know is, in their eyes, practically a flyspeck rural backwater where they roll up the sidewalks at 9 p.m.
     They were staying with us, roughing it, and at one point I passed through the kitchen, and there was Taylor, curled up comfortably in sweats and socks, enjoying a slice of Eli's Cheesecake — turtle cheesecake, to be precise.

     We have had an Eli's Cheesecake in our freezer for at least a decade. Sometimes two. Not the same cheesecake or two, mind you. They are purchased, a few slices eaten immediately, in joy, and then the rest returned to frozen slumber, where they wait until duty calls. Sometimes it's me, throwing caution to the wind. Sometimes a celebration erupts. Once, we had dinner guests coming and realized at the last moment, with horror, that we had not procured dessert. Bingo, four slices of hospitality, ready to defrost. Eli's Cheesecake is the fire axe behind glass for any host.
     I can't tell you how many times the boys have come home, dropped their bags (okay, more accurately, flung their possessions in a wide arc across the downstairs rooms. I'm not really sure how they do that. It's as if a dump truck backed up to the front door and tipped in a load of shoes and jackets and cables and socks and luggage). The freezer is yanked open, the big square brown cardboard boxes of Eli's Cheesecake pulled out, and set upon.
     That isn't the reason they come home. I hope. Not the only reason. I mean, it isn't the sort of question I could ever ask, or that, being asked, they would ever answer, at least not beyond the standard roll of the eyes followed by a beseeching look to their mother. Can't you do something about him? 

     It isn't as if I worry that, were they to come home and find the cheesecake not in the freezer, as always, as expected, they would slide the freezer door shut, wordlessly straighten up, shoot their mother a single, withering look, scrape together the enormous mound of shoes, jackets, cables, etc., splayed across our downstairs, jam the huge bundle under one arm, pull the front door open with their free hand while a sock tumbles to the floor, unnoticed, turn, regard us with mingled disappointment and contempt, utter a single disdainful syllable, sounding like "hoomf," then disappear into an Uber. 
     At least I don't worry about that much. But I sure don't want to find out.
     Anyway, seeing the young lady demurely poking at her Eli's Cheesecake with a dessert fork, engrossed in the New York Times, which we subscribe to so they'll feel at home, was vastly reassuring, that the canopy of familial hospitality had been properly extended, and the wordless lure of cheesecake, fusing it with home and welcome, properly communicated.
     So if you are a parent, and have ever had any kind of distressing encounter with your children, or find them not as quick to hurry to your side as would be ideal, the question, "Is there Eli's Cheesecake in my freezer?" should be foremost in your mind while assessing the situation. And if, God forbid, the answer is "No," well, there's your problem right there. The blame is yours alone. I'm not saying that it puts you in league with those negligent parents who let their kids play outdoors without coats, standing at the side of the road, peanut butter smeared on their faces, staring with bovine incomprehension at the passing traffic. Though it unquestionably does. I don't normally eat cheesecake for dessert, just as I don't put on my tuxedo to go to Sunset Foods. But like the tux, Eli's Cheesecake is always there, ready, the beating heart of hospitality, the lighthouse at the harbor, calling all ships safely home. Because my children know that in a world of confusion and disorder, where standards are abandoned and foundational beliefs crumble, Eli's Cheesecake will alway, always, always be there, ready to celebrate their return. My children, and now their significant others. They know that in their heart of hearts. Do yours?

It's not too late to repair the grievous neglect you have inflicted upon your family. You can decide which Eli's Cheesecake to order by clicking here.

      

Northshore Notes: Number Two On Her Love List

     You don't see Bukowski quoted much anymore. Well, I don't anyway. Maybe he's read aloud and recited, name-checked and referred to, all the time, in that loud, boisterous discussion about drink and writing and hotel rooms and failed dreams going on somewhere else, among people I never met, just out of earshot. Anyway, I was glad Caren brings him up today.

By Caren Jeskey

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
                                                        — Charles Bukowski

     Alternating, as I do, between experiencing life as a highly intellectualized (often paralyzingly so) artist (with debilitating anxiety at times, causing stage fright that didn't let me stay on any stages when I had the chance), a rigidly righteous intellectual, an unrealistically idealistic creative, and who knows what else, I wish Bukowski were here for a conversation on the topic. And not on Zoom. A face to face talk, with tone, inflection, and body language. The whole bit.
     I’m longing for dinner parties of yore. When we still carried flip phones, or no phones at all, and paid attention to each other for endless hours. Our brains grew, and we laughed. We kissed hello and goodbye on the lips.
     If I’d met Bukowski would he have been drunk? “My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.” Or sardonically spot-on? “People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.” Or perhaps a sage for these times? "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence."
     Doing a shallow dive into Bukowski this week was prompted by responses to my blog post last week. I wrote about some tough stuff, revealing dark corners of my inner landscape. Some readers and friends responded “I get it. Thanks for saying what I was feeling.” Others replied as though it was a cry for help. A family member even asked if I’ve talked to my therapist. 

     (I am doing okay. Better than okay, probably. But thanks dear readers, for reading at all).
     I found myself wondering if people would give me advice were I a man? I wondered who’d have had the chutzpah to tell Bukowski what to do? After spending way too much time thinking about gender inequity and starting to bristle and being mansplained about, I snapped out of it. I realized “Oh. I can just read some Bukowski.”
     His screenplay "Bar Fly" left one of the deepest impressions a movie has ever made in my life, and further solidified my cinephile ways. I saw the movie when I was 18. Formative years. It made me want more grit. More reality. By that time I had already spent too much time bellied up to dirty bars with sticky floors. (My friend had been dating a 44 year old bartender for years by then).
     I had planned to tell a story today about what a misogynistic, tragic fellow Bukowski was. But I can’t, since now that I’ve looked back at his words I realize I’ve been thinking about him all wrong. Or partly wrong. I attended an eye opening talk this week about implicit bias, led by Sterling Haukom Anderson. She helped us see our biases more clearly. She touched upon the “horns effect,” which occurs “when we see one bad thing about a person and let it cloud our opinions of their other attributes.” I do this more than I realized, now that I look at it. This may seem obvious, but I think it's good to remember that our unconscious biases are doing push-ups in our minds even if we don't know they're there. We learned that "automatic decision-making is an unconscious 'danger detector,'" from Joseph LeDoux's work, Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University. Not a dumb guy.
     I realize that there’s a lot going on in the world, and I do pay attention. But I also realize that the only path to contentment is to have less discord, not more, within ourselves and with others. To learn from others rather than categorizing them. (To be fair, it will be next to impossible for me to learn anything from this crackpot for example but I guess I’ll have to challenge myself to try).
     For today I’ll stay away from upsetting news — life is so damn short and I want to feel more joy dag gummit! — and hold onto a simple truth from a healthier part of my mind. Here it is. This week a child told me she thinks her mother loves her the most out of anyone in the world. She said, “then, I think it’s you.”

     “The hope is a touch of graceful humor, no matter what's occurring. The ability to laugh, the ability to see the ridiculous, the ability not to tense up too much, when things become impossible, just to face them anyhow.”                                                                                                               — Charles Bukowski

Freedom Center has a fan

Horace Nowell

     Honestly? I do not like anything about Freedom Center, the Chicago Tribune’s printing plant along the Chicago River. I do not like its expanse of blank brown brick walls. Nor its little lines of arched windows. I don’t even like its name, “Freedom Center,” dripping with the sham patriotism that the Tribune’s long-ago editor and publisher, Col. Robert McCormick, slathered over his particular brand of cornfed xenophobia.
     But then, I am not Horace Nowell.
     “I wish it could be saved,” said the 26-year-old.
     Don’t bet on that, though you might be able to place bets there someday. Last month, casino owner Bally’s bought the building and its 30-acre site near Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street, for $200 million, with plans to build a $1.7 billion casino complex there. Bally’s hasn’t decided whether to keep the plant, though to me, nothing suggests gambling quite like the newspaper business of today.
     “It has another 10-year lease extension option,” Nowell said. “I would love for them to be around for another 10 years.”
     For God’s sake, why?
     “It would be great for it to be around,” he said. “The Freedom Center is such an integral part to Chicago newspapers. The industrial landscape of the Near North Side is changing so fast. I have so many personal memories going over there and railfanning.”
     I’d never heard the term “railfanning” but could figure out its meaning easily enough. The internet is filled with low-tech railfan websites and railfan photos and railfan videos.
     “Gee, what can you say about Chicago?” exudes Railfan Guides of the U.S. “It IS the best place in the states to railfan, without a doubt (and perhaps the world!?). It literally is the crossroads of American rail service.”
     Certain that railfanning will be an alien concept to most readers, I asked Nowell to explain the practice.

To continue reading, click here.

Don't play Wordle today.

     Writing is my job. And because of the topics I tackle, and the way I go about addressing them, the emphasis is usually on the first part of that sentence, the writing. I'm proud of that. But today, I'd like to talk about the second part, the job. The Sun-Times has been my place of employment since March 23, 1987, and it's been a good job, thanks in large part to the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which won a decent salary and generous benefits and fought off all efforts to undermine them. Thanks to the union, I was able to buy a house, put two boys through college, travel. If I got sick, I had health insurance to offer me the best care, was paid while I recuperated. It shocked me to realize that rail workers, during the recent negotiations, were simply trying to get paid sick leave. It's bad enough to be sick. But to be lose your income as well....
     As you might know, the guild at the Sun-Times is negotiating a contract with our new owners, Chicago Public Media.  Probably the less I say about that, the better. The talks progress, and I'm not in a position to know whether they are going faster or slower than previously. Though from what I glean from union communications, the warm, humane velvet glove that WBEZ projects to the public seems to be concealing an iron fist, at least when it comes to negotiating with their employees. There's a big union meeting Friday, and I should know more then.    

     We're not alone here. The union for the New York Times, one of the most successful newspapers in the world, is staging a one-day walkout, and has asked its subscribers to make a little sacrifice today to show their support by avoiding the NYT platform. Don't check the news. Don't play the games. I usually play Wordle first thing, a five minute cracking of the mental knuckles before I get down to the business of doing my job, writing stuff. And I use the news app throughout the day.

     But not today.
     Not today, for reasons outlined in the tweet above. And my wife, who is even more of a word game junkie, tackling Wordle and Quordle, Spelling Bee and the Crossword Puzzle, has agreed to go cold turkey, for today, to remind the suits at the Times that their readers are not panjandrums, like the owners, but regular working folks, like the writers, who don't like to see other workers kicked around. 

     I hope you'll join us.

     It's a very small sacrifice to make for a very large and important principle: that there is no reason why working people can't enjoy the fruits of their labor, and have stable, rewarding jobs with good benefits that add up to satisfying lives. I think we've become so used to corporations squeezing profits out of their employees that we've forgotten there is another way. There is. I know that from first hand experience.

Do we all get to do that?

"Christ Destroying His Cross," by Jose Clemente Orozco (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil: Mexico City)

     Are you a Christian? Then I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to stop reading now and direct your attention elsewhere. The comics, maybe. Nothing personal, understand. It isn’t that I believe you and your children are damned to burn in hell for all eternity. It’s that my religion forbids addressing you, in my view. “These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel,” God tells Moses in Exodus, which obviously leaves Gentiles out.
     Wait a second! “Sons”? Maybe women readers should move on too. Let me pray on that and get back to you.
     “When did this happen?” you might ask. And I might ask, “What are you still doing here?” But OK, for argument’s sake, while you are moving yourself down the pike, I was reminded by the Supreme Court’s taking up another Colorado business unwilling to bow to the humiliation of providing services to people of whom they disapprove.
     Ten years ago it was a Colorado baker who didn’t want to create a cake for a gay wedding. Now it’s a graphic designer floating the argument that she is a creative artist whose First Amendment rights are being infringed upon by the government, and its pesky insistence on treating all citizens equally.
     Yes, there is an alternate view, that not only democracy, but also the basic capitalist system demands treating all paying customers the same — your cash is good, you buy a newspaper, you get to read every story in it.
     But that is a fallacy, in that it chafes against my sincere religious belief.
     Yes, some might argue sincere religious belief is not a justification for anything — sincere religious belief is also what prompts suicide bombers to detonate themselves in crowded markets.
     But faith is on the march, the Supreme Court crowded with ideologues who have shown themselves all too willing to tear up the social fabric to scratch their religious itch, forcing millions of women to drive across the country to manage their gynecological business. The next step is to make the freedom of every American subject to the whim of whatever employee says “Yes, may I help you?” when you walk into their shop.

To continue reading, click here.

Welcome yourself to Zenwich

 

    People are expensive and, increasingly, hard to find. Businesses that once might have been looked down upon for a scarcity of employees are now pitied, in that, in this odd post-COVID era, certain professions seem hard to staff. Though in my mind that's nothing paying them more won't fix. 

      I suppose it began with gas stations. Once Jack jogged out of the Clark station in Berea, pumped the gas, cleaned the windshield, joked with my mom and gave a stick of gum to us kids in the back. Now you hop out of your car, slide your credit card into a slot, take off the gas cap, jam the nozzle in, and pump the gas yourself, while a screen cheerily hectors you and some unseen person slouches in a bulletproof booth a dozen yards away.

      Then self-checkout at drug stores, and grocery stores. My wife and I resisted, for a while. Solidarity!  But during COVID, when the practice came to Sunset Foods, I yielded to what suddenly seemed like a strategy to address the staffing crisis. And I discovered there is an advantage to checking your own groceries — you pay closer attention to the prices ringing up, and have an easier time catching the chronic pricing errors, discrepancies that before tended to only be noticed once you were unbagging back home, necessitating a grumbling trip back to the store to recover that dollar or two.

     Last week I met a longtime reader for lunch in Elmhurst, at Zenwich, an intriguing "Asian fusion" sandwich shop.  Where I had a new experience at a fast food restaurant, one that seemed worth recounting as an augury of the future. We walked in at 12 noon to find an entirely empty restaurant. No customers. Nobody behind the counter. Only a screen. We worked our way through the various prompts, ordering a pair of sandwiches and a pair of sodas. I got a Thai BBQ pork belly sandwich and a Diet Coke. He paid, kindly, despite my protestations that the columnist is supposed to pay, we grabbed our beverages from a case and had a seat. Eventually a tray — a wooden board, idiosyncratically, perhaps supposed to be redolent of nature or some such thing — arrived up front, I heard his name called, and I jumped up — I was closer to the counter — turned, retrieved the board, noticed out of the corner of my eye a person of some sort, whose features, to be honest, were not arranged in a friendly greeting of warm hospitality and who soon fled back into the kitchen.  

     The sandwich was ... alright. Fresh bread, at least. Very wet with their "sweet and tangy" sauce which was more "meh and mayonnaise" in my view. I kept going for my napkin. And the meat ... well, take a look. It only covered half the sandwich, though they do say "thinly sliced" on the menu, so, points for candor. Still, human attention isn't the only thing in short supply at Zenwich.