Library, foundation, potato, potah-to

     The changes rattling Twitter affect me very little. Were it not for the endless examples of owner Elon Musk being a bully and a crybaby — not conflicting qualities; nobody cries like a bully — lapses he himself publicizes in a characteristic display of his own stunted self-awareness, I wouldn't even know that the company is being slashed to the bone and run by a self-obsessed, increasingly right wing maniac.    

      Despite the cuts and the drama, Twitter is still the most dynamic network in my social media palette. Facebook smells of mothballs, and is practically the day room in a senior center. Instagram an addictive chain of mesmerizing yet ultimately empty snippets of TV shows and car crashes. Email is clogged with spam and all but useless. Only Twitter can bring you both the news of the day and the doings of your friends.

     Twitter even has rare small moments of — dare I say it? — grace. Saturday night, Chicago TikTok  historian Shermann Dilla Thomas, whom we met in April taking his bus tour of Bronzeville, tossed out a question to Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

     Yes, wisenheimers fired off cracks like "Queen Victoria?" (okay, that was me. In my defense, it was a sly historical reference to the fact that, when Chicago burned in in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, sympathetic English literary lights, including Queen Victoria, donated books to replace the ones that weren't lost in the library we didn't have. The arrival of the donated British books shamed the city into finally establishing a public library. I hadn't realized that the Pritzkers went back that far in Chicago history).

     The question alone would have been charming, in "a cat can look at a king" fashion. Then the governor, unperturbed by being addressed as "big homie," actually chimed in, or at least some aide posing as him did, tweeting to Dilla:

     I had no idea what the governor was talking about. Cindy Pritzker had a hand in founding the Chicago Public Library? Since when? There is a Cindy Pritzker Auditorium in the Harold Washington Library. But that doesn't reach the level of helping to create the library system, not in the usual sense of the term. It's a room.

Shermann Dilla Thomas

      After conducting seconds of research online, I realize the true situation. Cindy Pritzker "and a core group of civic leaders" created the Chicago Public Library Foundation, which puts the squeeze on private donors to help fund the Chicago Public Library system. 

     It's like asking the identity of Spider Man, and someone volunteers the name of their 2-year-old because he's wearing Spider Man underpants.

     Now had Dilla asked if the governor — who, I should say, is generally doing a bang-up job keeping Illinois running and preserving it as a human rights sanctuary, secure from the right wing repression deepening in states around us — if he has a relative who helped support the library, I'd have no qualm. But "helped create"? No way. It might seem like a fine point. But details matter, particularly in history.  Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War, true, but the American Civil War. Not the one in England in the 1640s. There's a difference.

     To summarize what we've learned: Cindy Pritzker didn't help create the Chicago Public Library, not being alive at the time. She came along a century afterward, with nameless others, and set up a fundraising arm of the CPL. Her nephew giving her credit for starting the system is like me claiming to have begun Misericordia because I once bought a box of heart-shaped brownies. 

     And people say history isn't fun!
     Honestly, the governor's misunderstanding (or deception) makes this even more of an archetypical Twitter moment. A heart-warming exchange between a sincere ComEd worker turned history maven with the governor of Illinois that also happens to be factually incorrect. 

     Later, I asked Dilla — on Twitter, the easiest way to do these things — why he had asked the governor about the library in the first place. He replied, "I plan to do a 150th anniversary thing for CPL and was just checking facts I had heard." He'll do well to keep in mind that "facts" and "Twitter" are not natural bedfellows. Particularly when it comes to the claims of politicians — or, I imagine, the claims of their 28-year-old social media staffers who don't intuitively understand the difference between a system and a foundation.  Let's leave self-aggrandizing untruths to the Republicans.

 

Mailbag

  
   Yes, I look in the Spam filter. Occasionally. Okay, every day. Why? Boredom, I suppose. Curiosity. Amazement, really, that people — a good number of them, actually — read stuff they hate, regularly, just to top up their outrage tank, apparently. And then they write to the author, dutifully, informing him how much they hate his work. Expecting ... what? Not agreement, surely. To inflict the distress in others that makes them feel powerful, alive. Even though they never quite think through the writer's reception — well, mine anyway. "Oh no! The people I sincerely believe are imbeciles and traitors don't LIKE me! Boo hoo!"

    I never write them back. Okay, almost never. Rarely. I try not to answer the citizens of Spamland because, what would be the point? They're never chastised, only encouraged. "Aha! That response was just what I expected from YOU!" 

    Though sometimes I just can't help myself.  This, from Don Jones, or someone calling himself Don Jones:

     Are you seriously telling me that most Americans don't know anything about Black American History? Are you also saying we should know more about Black American History than our own and others? What are you trying to say? Shouldn't you guys be finding out why all our laws, rules etc. pertaining to equal treatment of all American citizens for all these years aren't being obeyed? Get to work, try doing something constructive.

    To which I answered:

     Yes, I am. I’m saying it IS your own history. And no, I don’t expect you to grasp that. Not when it’s so easy to be confused and aggrieved and pretend like somebody’s doing you wrong.
     As for “what are you trying to say?” please allow me to quote the great Samuel Johnson: “I have given you an argument, sir. I am not also obligated to give you an understanding.”
     And no, I won’t explain that to you either.
     Thanks for writing.

    See how much fun that is? I had almost forgotten one of my favorite Dr. Johnson quotes, which I used to send quite frequently to boggled readers. After all, why does something have to benefit the confused and blockheaded? I benefit. Isn't that enough? Writing to such readers is like wishing upon a star. It's not that the stars care. But you have a little moment, making the wish, and that's something.

 

Don’t be scared — it’s your history, too

     Earlier this year I found myself in Washington, D.C., with a free afternoon, so I beelined to the National Mall. There are found the various and wonderful Smithsonian museums: the National Air & Space Museum, worth going just to set eyes on the Grumman Gulfhawk; the Museum of American History, with its tattered Fort McHenry flag, the original star-spangled banner; the National Portrait Gallery, showing off a newly discovered painting of Lincoln.
     None of those were considered.
     Instead I headed to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I had to, because the place hadn’t been open for business last time I was in Washington, in the summer of 2016. I wanted to see what it was like.
     As I crossed the mall, a kinsman who happened to be in town phoned. He also had some free time. Wanna get together? I asked if he wanted to visit the Museum of African-American History and Culture with me.
     “No,” he said.
     Nothing more. Simply “No.”
     That “no” was disappointing, but not surprising. History can have an obligatory, eat-your-peas quality even when it’s not the history of a people other than your own. Many Americans say “no” to most history, but particularly Black History — an unfortunate impulse being cemented into law in states all over the country. Ron DeSantis raged against Black history in announcing his candidacy for president Wednesday.

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Tinkered with.

 

      My wife and I headed over to Glencoe a few Saturdays ago to meet a lovely young couple at the Guildhall for lunch. I wasn't particularly hungry — eggs for breakfast — so ordered a cup of black coffee and a $7 bruleed grapefruit. I do love my grapefruit. Made with mint, quite good. 
     Social dynamics required that I pay the bill — $138 with tip, our guests were hungry. A tidy sum, but I only smiled, gratefully. I'm lucky to be paying for this as opposed to, oh, bail.
     Next door is a toy store, Wild Child, and though none of us have young children, we all headed inside to coo over the wares. My nostalgic nature was pleased to see a Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone pull toy, basically unchanged since introduced in 1962 as a means to teach children how to dial a telephone. 

    Rather an anachronism, like a toy butter churn. In Fisher-Price's defense, they did try to change the toy over to a push button phone in 2000. But change-averse parents pushed back. I understand sentiment toward vanished times, but have to wonder exactly what they think this rotary phone is teaching their children. Maybe it's just fun, which is fine. Not everything must have a practical purpose. They still sell hobby horses, even though few kids later graduate to real ones.

     My attention was caught by this big can of Tinkertoys. Invented by an Evanston stone mason, by the way. I took down the handsome can, examining it more closely and noticed the price: $75.  Quite a lot, really.

     "Must be expensive to fabricate all those little spools out of wood," I thought, still generous of spirit. Then paused, a suspicion dawning. Ohhhh. I popped the can and peered inside. Plastic. All the pieces are plastic. Somehow the Lincoln Logs folks manage to still use wood — also a Chicago toy, invented by John Lloyd Wright, inspired by observing the interlocking beam construction of his father's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (in my recent book, I express that information in what struck me as a neat antithesis: "Frank Lloyd Wright learned architecture by playing with wooden blocks as a child. His son, John Lloyd Wright, learned wooden blocks by playing with architecture as an adult.")
    Back home, checking out Amazon, I learned a) you can still buy all sorts of real wood Tinkertoy clones, such as this Zanmai set, for a fraction of the cost; b) if you are so brand loyal that you just must get the retro Tinkertoys can, you can buy it online for $35.99, less than half the price of the Glencoe store.
    I know stores have rent. And the folks at Wild Child no doubt like to pop over to Guildhall for their $37 steak and eggs platter. People do order that, I can vouch from personal experience.  And I generally like to support bricks-and-mortar stores. Still. Half price online is a hard deal to pass up. When I needed a new speedbag recently — mine had been pounded to pieces — and stopped by Dick's Sporting Goods to admire a $60 black leather Everlast bag (punching bags MUST be Everlast, speaking of brand loyalty, in the same way that ketchup must be Heinz). I was about to go buy it at Dick's, when, on a hunch, I put the bag back and went home, castigating myself as I did. Jumped online, my hesitation was rewarded: the identical punching bag for $28.61, delivered for free. Less than half of what the store was charging. Works for me. Generosity has its limits.

Honor Jane Byrne on her 90th birthday by taking the train

 

Jane Byrne Interchange

   All honors have teeth. Reach out to accept a plaudit, and it bites you. That’s my experience, anyway. The boring dinner. The stumble to the podium. The plaque.
     But an infamous highway interchange? That has to be a league of dubious tribute all its own.
     I can’t be the only one who, unfortunate enough to be trapped in the tangle once called “The Spaghetti Bowl,” thinks that deciding to name the crawling knot of sclerotic cars upon concrete after Jane Byrne was some kind of grim joke. The mayoral ghost of Richie Daley, exacting his revenge.
     Even though it’s kind of my fault.
     It was nine years ago that I wrote an open letter to Byrne on what I thought was her 80th birthday. I didn’t realize she secretly shaved a year off her age, a reminder that she faced the strong headwind of a society that likes its women young, pretty and not in positions of power.
     That really hasn’t changed much. Donald Trump loved to say that the only reason Hillary Clinton was able to run against him in 2016 was because she was a woman, when the truth is 180 degrees opposite. The only reason a highly qualified, smart and savvy former secretary of state nevertheless lost to the most unfit individual to ever run for the presidency is because she is a woman. A mediocre man would have whupped him, as Joe Biden illustrated.
     The column got the wheels turning to eventually extend small public honors: a tiny park, a knot of congestion. She died in 2014, but her 90th birthday would have been Wednesday, May 24, and reason to consider her anew. The Byrne legacy lives on, and not just in the looping connections between I-90, I-94, I-290 and Ida B. Wells Drive.
     Wells Drive. Another odd distinction. Only in Chicago could the powers-that-be create a situation where there would be a corner of Wells and Wells. Fitting in a city where a major thoroughfare, Wacker Drive, goes north, south, east and west.

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"Some magic, mysterious thing"

Christie Hefner, right, talks to Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner.

     They considered calling it New Times or The Electric Newspaper, in keeping with the fad for odd, non-sequitur names, with bands calling themselves things like "Jefferson Airplane." But in the end Jann Wenner settled for the original idea, "Rolling Stone" when titling his groundbreaking magazine in 1967.
     And yes, lawyers from the band that already was going by the plural, Rolling Stones, did send a cease-and-desist letter. Wenner, speaking to a small gathering of about 40 people in downtown Chicago, said he replied, "prove to me that your clients want this." Otherwise he ignored the threat, and the subject didn't come up again until he partnered with Mick Jagger to put out a UK edition of the magazine.
     The gathering Monday evening, to celebrate Wenner's autobiography, "Like A Rolling Stone," was held at Christie Hefner's lovely 42nd floor apartment near the Water Tower. The former CEO of Playboy — daughter of founder Hugh Hefner — played her interlocutor role well, guiding Wenner through his reminiscence about his life at the intersection of music and politics.

      Hefner asked him about Hunter S. Thompson, the archetypal gonzo journalist.

     "Hunter was a brilliant, brilliant writer loved practical jokes, loved wickedness, loved taking drugs, loved having fun," he replied, describing "this incredible collaboration that we had ... We just kind of took to each other instantly, recognized some kind of insanity in each other, and a kind of mission we both shared, the same idea: that we could use Rolling Stone to galvanize the youth population to political action." 

     Wenner was born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom, and his magazine was directed at fellow Boomers, "a new generation of Americans, the wealthiest, biggest, best-educated generation in the history of the world." 

      I liked his succinct summation of various politicians: George W. Bush, "lazy"; Ronald Reagan, "ignorant"; Barack Obama, "very organized, careful, and just doesn't budge" and Joe Biden, "a terrific president."

       Of course he also spoke of music.

       "Music was the language which young people could express their frustration, their sense of alienation with society itself," Wenner said. "Some magic, mysterious thing." 

       And musicians — he was starstruck only by Jagger — Bruce Springsteen was too much of a regular guy to inspire awe, except in performance. Bob Dylan too. 

      Wenner is a star in his own right, a fact he tacitly admitted. 

      "A great magazine really is its editor," he said. "It's a totally collaborative effort, everyone brings ideas, but finally it's the editor who galvanizes it. The editor has a mission."

     The mission of Rolling Stone was to draw together the world of music and politics, to remind young readers "you could be a rock and roll fan and be taken seriously, in the same company as the president of the United States."   

     It was a casual, friendly evening, though Hefner didn't flinch from asking tough questions. "You had conflicts about your homosexuality..." she ventured at one point.
     "Growing up in the 1950s, it wasn't spoken of, you didn't know of it," Wenner began — a world that certain Republican politicians seem eager to drag us all back to.
     Coming out, Wenner said, "was wonderful and liberating and didn't change my life at all."
      When it was time for the audience to ask questions, one was if there was a cover profile that got away from him.

     "I wanted to get Sinatra," he said. "But he wasn't available to us." No, I suppose he wouldn't be. No doubt the Chairman of the Board shrugged it off as a hippie rag. He'd have held out for Life magazine long after it went out of business.
     Someone mentioned how Rolling Stone highlighted Black musicians years before mainstream publications took up the practice.
     "Rock and roll is Black music sung by white people," Wenner said, adding that Rolling Stone covered Black musicians better than Ebony and Jet, prompting a caution from Hefner that Linda Johnson-Rice, daughter of John H. Johnson, founder of those publications, was here, and he recovered artfully. 

     I should probably mention some other notables in attendance. Rich Melman was there, with sons R.J. and Jerrod — we talked food, and Jerrod's new child, 10 weeks or so away. My old Sun-Times colleague Bill Zwecker was there, with partner Tom Gorman. He's doing some travel writing. Matt Moog, the CEO of Chicago Public Media, whom I introduced to my wife as my "boss's boss's boss's boss." Writer Alex Kotlowitz; the Tribune's Chris Jones, past publisher of the Reader, Tracy Baim, and the new young publisher, Solomon Lieberman, and I couldn't resist pitching myself to him. "Always be closing," I said to my wife as we walked away.
      I promised myself beforehand, if I spoke to Wenner at all, not to tell him about working for him 30 years ago, and doing a cover story on "Drugs in America." Of course that's the first thing I blurted out when we were introduced. But he instantly knew what I was referring to, and we talked about drug policy. I meant to tell him how proud I'd been, to be at a story and say, "Hi, I'm Neil Steinberg from Rolling Stone." Though I did thank him for the oral history of Hunter S. Thompson he wrote, "Gonzo," and how I admired that he said aloud what everyone else seemed to miss — that Thompson was an alcoholic and his affliction destroyed his ability to write. 
      It was a lovely night, and my wife and I walked to Union Station, glad to be out on the town glad to see Michigan Avenue so alive and crowded with strollers, the River Walk restaurants and bars filled to capacity. On the train home, I began reading Wenner's book: taut, candid, captivating. It's easy to be honest when you come from picaresque poverty like, oh, Frank McCourt. It's harder when your parents, like Wenner's, are successful California entrepreneurs and you were raised at private schools and summer camps. Fortune favors the brave, and Wenner lays it out without apology. It works.

     I shouldn't say any more, since I've just begun, but I've made it 25 pages in and plan to keep reading, which is not true for most books I open.

"The life they didn't lead"

Jay Tunney at home under a painting of his father, boxer Gene Tunney.

     Chicagoans endlessly parse their city’s best-known features: pizza and hot dogs, crime and weather, the blues and the Cubs. While other significant aspects of Chicago are too often simply ignored.
     Boxing, for instance. Chicago was a big boxing town. The top three heavyweight champions of the 20th century — Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali — all lived in Chicago.
     Johnson was locked in Cook County Jail for violating the Mann Act — the law passed by Congress attempting to stop him from having relations with white women. Louis won his first championship at Comiskey Park. Ali fought in the Golden Gloves in Chicago, would have fought here for a title, too, but local officials cancelled the bout to punish him for being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.
     And the boxing match that contained what many considered the greatest moment in professional boxing — if not in all athletics — the famous “Long Count” between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey took place at Soldier Field in 1927.
     Almost a century ago. Yet Tunney’s son, Jay, still lives downtown. He is a sharp and energetic 87, and the driving force behind a new play about the improbable friendship between his father and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, “Shaw vs. Tunney,” by Doug Post, making its world premiere at Theater Wit later this month.

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