Time to explore all of Chicago

Shermann Dilla Thomas

      “This is example one of why everything dope about America comes from Chicago,” said Shermann Dilla Thomas, delivering his trademark buzz phrase to a busload of tourists on a recent Saturday at the west edge of the Midway Plaisance. “This is my main man, Lorado Taft’s ‘Fountain of Time.’”
     I’d been to the fountain before. Even written about it. But never grasped why it’s here. Thomas filled us in.
     “It was made in honor of the 100 years of peace between Great Britain and the United States,” he said. “Let’s see: Raise your hand if you know why the White House is painted white? I can help you with that.” 

     Maybe something to do with the British setting it on fire? I almost said that but kept my hand down. Shutting up is an art form, and I didn’t want to intrude. Smart, since I could never have explained it with half the panache that Thomas did:
     “In 1812, we tried to jack Canada from Great Britain,” he began. “It didn’t really work out in our favor. In fact, any time you sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ you are talking about when Great Britain was kicking our butts in Baltimore with the ‘rockets red glare.’ During the War of 1812, they also burned down the presidential residence. We didn’t call the place where the president lived ‘The White House’ in 1812.
     “After the redcoats burned it down — sadly, chattel slavery was still going on. So they went up to the enslaved Americans and said, ‘Hey yo, y’all gotta rebuild this crib.’ They were like, ‘Damn, OK.’ So they rebuilt it.
     “And then when someone walked around to do the inspection, they were like, ‘Hey man, there are still some char marks from the fire. You gotta clean that off.’ So they tried, they tried, they tried, they couldn’t get the char marks off.
     “Then finally, some dude was like, ‘Hey, just paint the whole thing white!’ It’s been painted white ever since. That’s why we call it the White House.”

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Mail bag

National Postal Museum

     The reaction after my column on not going to the Congo was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, there was only one negative email, this one, a prime example of what I think of as "You-suck-can-I-have-a-dollar?" letters from readers who simultaneously complain and request, which is not the most effective mix. Enjoy:

Mr Steinberg,

     I've just read your April 16 article.
     I suppose you mean well, but this piece will do nothing for the people of eastern DRC or to bring awareness to westerners who are unwittingly exploiting them.
     I am a Canadian.
     My son is a World Vision International senior director who leads their humanitarian efforts in the eastern DRC based in Goma. He has lived there with his wife and two small boys for two years and leads a team of over 300 employees and volunteers. They are trying to look after the needs of the vast community and 200,000 refugees in an environment with kidnappings, murders, guerrilla warfare, massive displacement, earthquakes and an active volcano. He has led similar projects in South Sudan, Zimbabwe, the CAR, and the Middle East. He doesn't have time to be afraid.
     If you want to continue to shine a light on this conflict zone (Heaven knows, it needs it), I could give you his email address. I'm sure you could get it through World Vision as well.
     Sincerely,
     Ron M.

     I try to be kind but firm in replying to such letters.

Dear Mr. M.:

     While I disagree with your belief that my column did nothing to alert people in Chicago to the situation in Congo — I have received dozens of emails that suggest otherwise — I'd be happy to correspond with your son and put his thoughts in the paper. Perhaps they will resonate more than my own meager efforts.
     I've worked for Canadians and am familiar with their weird blend of aggression and entreaty. So your mixed message — your column was pointless, maybe you'd like to write another about my son — was not as off-putting to me as perhaps it should have been. Please do send his email, if he's interested; it might make for a nice follow-up. Besides, I have two sons of my own; they're far better men than me, and one can hope yours is also a marked improvement on his sorta tactless dad. Thanks for writing.

NS

     I detected a distinct tone shift in his reply.

     My goodness. Thank you for the prompt response.
     I'll reach out to David to see if that works for him.
     He has done lots of media, but I didn't seek his permission.
     

      Ron M.

     I didn't have to respond to this, but did, bringing an end to the exchange. Of course I will never hear back, for reasons alluded to in my final comment.

      Thanks. My experience is that most people who are recommended for stories by third parties decline the opportunity. But perhaps he will be an exception.

     NS

Works in progress: Daniel Knowles

Library of Congress

     The Economist is a terrific magazine. "Reading it is like having an extra brain," as one wag said — okay, that was me. Of course I subscribe, and have attended several of the world-spanning, forward-straining seminars the magazine sponsored in Chicago — in 2019 I managed to chat with the magazine's editor, the delightfully-named Zanny Minton Beddoes, who invited me to sit in on an editorial meeting next time I'm in London, an offer I plan to accept at the first opportunity.

     I've make a point to get to know The Economist's Midwest correspondents — always sharp as tacks and good company.  Daniel Knowles is the fourth in the past 10 years — I imagine Chicago must be a hardship post for those used to London or Paris or, in his case, Mumbai, Nairobi and Washington, D.C. Daniel graduated from Oxford, covered the war in Afghanistan, and is as promising and energetic a young journalist as I've met. He took the train out to Northbrook for lunch— that should have been a tip-off to what was in store. I'm reading his anti-car manifesto now and plan to write a column about it in a few weeks. Until then, take it away, Daniel:

     When I first told people in London that I was moving back to America – and specifically to Chicago – several were surprised. “Won’t you have to get a car?” they said. An American colleague joked that all Europeans living in the States eventually crack and succumb to driving, however high their hopes were of sticking with their old habits of getting around by public transport, and on foot. It was going to be an especially difficult test for me – around the same time I accepted the job in Chicago, in late 2020, I signed a deal to write a book about why cars are dreadful and are ruining our cities. I was (and remain) perhaps one of the most militant cyclists on the staff of The Economist, an organisation full of people who bike to work.

     Wouldn’t I look silly if by the time the book came out, I had transformed into a petrolhead? A good friend joked about me turning up to the launch party in a Hummer and whining about parking it. The book, Carmageddon, is now out. And I can report that eighteen months since I got here, living without a car in Chicago has in fact never proven especially difficult. I have to rent them from time to time, but almost exclusively for work purposes, to go out of the city. I do not even use Uber much. Even though I whine a lot about the state of the CTA, and deeply miss the London Underground, where trains appear reliably every two minutes, it still seems a far better alternative to sitting in a traffic jam on the Kennedy Expressway, and then circling streets for half an hour looking for somewhere to park.
     In fact, a lot more Americans than I expected seem to agree with me that cars are not so great after all. I thought – hoped even – that the book would prove more controversial. After all, arguing that gasoline ought to cost lots more and that nobody should ever get free parking, seems to run against the grain of everything I know about American politics. And yet I seem to have a lot of allies. Even on a trip recently in rural western Illinois, I have had people tell me that they wish cars and parking lots didn’t so dominate everything. Perhaps small town America would be struggling less if you could walk to a shop on Main Street more easily than you can drive to a Walmart 20 miles away.
     I worry this is just Midwest Nice and I am being kindly indulged by people who secretly think I am a moron. But I think most of it is genuine. Most Americans wish that there were alternatives to needing quite so many cars. By reading the book, I hope lots more people will understand exactly how, unfortunately, it is exactly the number of cars getting in way of the alternatives working.

Armed teachers mean more tragedy

     My wife has a strategy I call “The Thinking Trick,” a last resort when we’re lost something. Like yesterday; I wanted my AirPods to make a phone call, but they weren’t in the usual places — desk, night table, dresser, various pockets. I was at the point where I start madly racing around, yanking open drawers, when I stopped cold, and remembered the trick.

     When did I last use them? I asked myself. Immediately the answer came: the night before. A call from my cousin. Sprawled on the sofa. I went into the living room. The sleek little white AirPods case lozenge was on the coffee table, right where I left it.
     The Thinking Trick is also useful in situations that involve, not lost objects, but lost reason. For instance, former president, Donald Trump spent a long time at the NRA Convention last weekend in Indianapolis airing the notion that a good way to stop school shootings is by arming teachers.
     “They’d go for special training and they would be there and you would no longer have a gun-free zone,” the former president said. “Gun-free zone to a maniac, because they’re all cowards, a gun-free zone is: ‘Let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us’.”
     So school shooting are the schools’ fault? For inviting shooters in, by not having a gun in every teacher’s drawer? O....kay.
     Trump went on, crediting guns in airplane cockpits as the reason hijackings faded away (me, I would suspect that the full body security scans of passengers to make sure they aren’t armed with so much as a nail clipper might have had something to do with it. Using his school logic, disarming airline passengers is just asking for trouble).
     But that’s the problem with thinking, as attempted by some. They keep tripping over their unexamined assumptions, like the former president’s theory that kids who shoot up schools first rationally weigh their options.

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Flashback 2013: "How do we react to Boston horror?

    There is a quotidian routine to social media. Something that you have to do, like brushing your teeth. I send out my daily letter to subscribers. Tweet it. Post my column on Facebook, sometimes checking the Memories section there to see what I was doing a year, three years, five years, 10 years ago. It's encouraging: look at me! I lived.

     Sunday, as I scrolled down memory lane, I saw readers 10 years ago were reacting to a column I wrote about the Boston marathon bombing the day before. "You wrote a wonderful column today," Kelly Adair wrote. "Thank you." 

     Underneath, in the comments, a decade ago I considerately posted a link to the column, titled, "How do we react to the Boston horror?" The link was dead — these platforms shift, and the Sun-Times stories online are like leaves on a tree: they're there for a time until they're gone. 

       But there are places where such things gather, journalistic leaf piles. I went into Newsbank. Nothing. Nor our paper's Chorus system, where we write our stories. I tried searching without my byline — sometimes things get lopped off. Nothing. I felt both ignored and singled out. As if some malign, personally antagonistic force had expelled my work even from the endless strata of journalistic sediment. Boo hoo. Poor me.

    At this point I should have just shrugged and moved on with my day. Lost. Everything washes away to nothing anyway, someday. But as I like to tell young writers, if you don't care about your writing, nobody does. I found this under "Chicago Sun-Times: Web edition articles" which was a thing from 1996 to 2014. I'm not sure if it is worth the trouble to find, but it does capture a moment. Though I wouldn't go with that opening sentence now, not after the eight years of the Carnival of Cruelty that is Trumpworld.

     Most people are kind. Most Americans live in comparative safety. We are lucky that way, generally.
     Not lucky Monday however. Not at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, where two crude bombs sprayed death and mayhem, killing three, including an 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard, and injuring more than 170, including that boy’s sister and mother.
     Among the many bad things that such an atrocity radiates is a sense of danger, of terror. This could happen anywhere. Which is what it’s intended to do, as much as the intention behind such malicious insanity can be understood. Which means, as I see it, that part of the pushback, part of what is required of the bystanders, wondering what to make of all this, is to force ourselves to not be terrorized. “Gather your courage,” Virgil writes, “dismiss your grief and fear.”
     What are our responsibilities in this situation? The standard attitude, if Facebook and Twitter are any judge, is solemn prayer and goodwill toward the wounded, a flurry of black ribbons and photos of candles and expressions of blanket support for Boston. I’m not sure how that helps, but it couldn’t hurt, and if it makes you feel better, go for it.
     Many thought of themselves, their kids, the marathons they’ve run. That’s OK too — I think it’s natural. You don’t have to gin up a false selflessness just because somebody set off a bomb. I certainly brooded over my own experience of the horror. Monday, having gone out on a story in the morning, I relaxed in the afternoon. About 2 p.m. the dog looked at me in that let’s-go fashion, so I took her for a stroll around Northbrook, which was extra pleasant and at last springlike. Pedestrians smiled at the cute dog, a little girl on a scooter cast a longing look. We paused to let Janet, the always-friendly crossing guard, pet her. If you gave the people kitten faces and piglet tails, it could have been a page from a Richard Scarry children’s book. There was one bit of foreshadowing — it would be trite in fiction — before the Landmark Inn: a bottle cap, on the sidewalk, prongs up, and I thought: “The callousness of people! A dog could hurt her paw on something like that!”
     Then we crossed the tracks, rounded the corner for home, and heard the terrible news. It seemed a rebuke, for being so happy.
     The immediate questions were: How many died — first reports of two seemed a low figure for bombs going off in such a crowd. And who did it? Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen summed up the reasoning in his graceful, anguished column immediately after the blast.
     “And we are left with this unnerving proposition,” he wrote. “If it was home-grown, it was probably an aberration, the work of a ­lunatic. If it was foreign ­inspired or sponsored, we will never feel safe again in our own town.”
     That’s the mind-set, though I’m not sure how valid it is — the logic is, if it’s some twisted American maniac acting out of pure evil and personal damage, you arrest him and the threat is gone, while if it were the product of foreign plotters, then their network will still be in place, planning their next strike.
     But the overseas terror threat is real, whether it committed this particular act or not. And if a homegrown terrorist perpetrated this deed, there is an endless supply where he came from. No, comfort must come from within. We have to find a balance where we are vigilant without terrorizing ourselves. The marathon was an easy mark, but locking down marathons does nothing to protect the countless soft targets in a free society: the parades and street fairs and kindergarten recesses, considered safe only because no one attacks them, generally.
     The shock came Monday, and will only deepen into even-greater horror as the injured are released, the faces of the dead become familiar to us and — inevitably — the perpetrator or perpetrators are known. Authorities and the media have learned their lesson and are reluctant to speculate, and there is no need. We’ll find out soon enough.
     In the meantime, it is important that we remind ourselves of our freedoms, of the open and generous society that most of us live in. Not all — there are the Englewoods and places where some may look up and say, “Bitter medicine, huh?” Twitter was alive with radical sorts drawing a false equivalence between what happened in Boston and the wars in Iraq and elsewhere.
     That’s their right. When tragedies occur, you are entitled to your reaction. The loons certainly are unimpeded — I never heard the term “false flag” until some conspiracy nut confronted the governor of Massachusetts, wondering, were this not a state-sponsored hoax, like Newtown. If he can think like that, you too can have your feelings. If your instinct is to post a ribbon, or say a prayer, or shrug, or shake your fist, that’s fine. You can be scared, but that won’t help any. Me, I watched the Bulls game with my kid, and tried not to think about what just happened.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 17, 2013

‘Chicago is still viable’

Ray Hartshorne

     You guys all know about the fire, right? The Great Chicago Fire? Of 1871? A long time ago, sure. But still remembered by many. Maybe most. The O’Leary cow kicking over a lantern — a myth, by the way. Not the cow. She was real. The lantern part. Just another slur. A reminder of how slurs endure because they reinforce what some people want to believe.
     Not to forget the city’s determined, never-say-die reaction. Also very real. The ruins were still smoldering and all Chicago could talk about was its bright future.
     So how come, once upon a time, the city could burn to the ground and Chicagoans lined up to declare their unshakable faith in their city.
     But now, some kids misbehave downtown and some are ready to give up?
     “The Loop was in chaos all weekend in Chicago, with insane woke riots,” began a typical tweet. “Big cities are dead.”
     Not close. A couple of incidents. But the videos pinballed around the world, gleefully traded by those who relish such things.
     Crime is not the main problem facing Chicago, which, like most cities, has more systemic woes, like people not going into offices to work.
     Monday morning found me in our blustery, semi-abandoned downtown, paying a long-scheduled visit with Ray Hartshorne, a partner at Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture, a firm that had a key role in changing Fulton Market from a ramshackle warren of loading docks and warehouses where retailers went to buy pickles by the barrel to a hip hot spot where diners fork over $16 for three artisanal pickles at Girl & the Goat.

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Patent #2,504,679

    Based on the number of enthusiastic "Hey, you exist!" emails I've gotten lately, I seem to be getting some new readers, between those who finally wandered off from the slowly disintegrating Tribune and those lured in by my new daily newsletter blast. They might not know about my book, "Every Goddamn Day," a calendar year's worth of historical vignettes about the multitudinous wonders of Chicago, published by the University of Chicago Press. What better way to spill the beans than by sharing the entry for April 18? Included is the excellent artwork by Lauren Nassef. 

April 18, 1950

   The US Patent Office issues Patent #2,504,679 to Chicago inventor Eddy Goldfarb. Glance at the paperwork and it might seem some kind of dental appliance—those are certainly teeth in the patent illustration, seen in profile, set in their gums. But what about those gears? And the wind-up key? The category is “Novelty and Amusement Device,” and the invention’s purpose, the patent explains, is “simulating the opening and closing of the teeth of the mouth in rapid succession and creating the amusing illusion of a person who is jabbering.”
      Chattering teeth are only one of many classic gag devices to come out of Chicago, a hub of toy design for more than a century. Fake rubber vomit is another, conjured up in 1959. Goldfarb will go on to invent 800 toys and games. He soon leaves for California, but his partner, Marvin Glass, establishes a company that turns out a series of 1960s classics: Mouse Trap, Rock ’Em–Sock ’Em Robots, and Operation, created in 1962 when University of Illinois industrial design student John Spinello is assigned to design a toy. He develops a game using electric probes, then shows it to his grandfather, who works for Glass.
     Earlier classic toys came from Chicago and environs. Tinker Toys were devised by a stonemason taking the train from Evanston The Flat Iron Laundry on Halsted Street attracted business by giving away small white zinc charms to children of customers—cars and ships for boys, Scotty dogs and thimbles for girls, who wear them on bracelets. The company that made them, Strombecker Toys, manufactured trinkets that go into Cracker Jack boxes, and repurposed laundry charms—that flat iron, a top hat, a shoe, a cannon—became tokens moved around Monopoly boards.